The tic

Before turning 44, about six weeks beforehand, I developed a tic in my eye. At first I thought everyone could see it. I was obsessed, I started pulling faces, it was a tic that appeared in a sequence of three by four - in other words, three times every four minutes. I’ve just made up that measuring system, but I thought it would choreograph my face a bit, even though people kept telling me ‘no, nothing is visible’.

I ask myself: how can something so physical not be visible? Something that, if I place my finger on the very fine skin of my upper eyelid, I can feel the little kick of a micro-baby that I have positioned foetally beneath my left eyebrow. Some days, that micro-baby seemed to move more. Others, it slept. I learnt to live with it like someone carrying a temporary guest who never quite leaves. The strange thing began when I started telling people about it. I would sit with someone and say: “I’ve developed a tic.” And the following week, that person had one too.

First it was my friend Patri, then Ángelo. Later, Aless. The worst was when the baker told me. They looked at me, no longer with disbelief, but with a sort of respect: what do I do with this now?

One morning, in the park with Romulus, I noticed that almost all the dog owners were blinking asymmetrically, with that small, almost imperceptible tremor that I already knew so well. It wasn’t a coincidence. I knew it with uncomfortable certainty: I had spread the tic. Sometimes people ask me if it hurts. It doesn’t hurt. But you feel like there’s something behind your eye. As if a small, intimate floodgate were opening. As if the body were trying to say something it doesn’t yet know how to formulate. Like a language in the process of inventing itself.

That’s why I’ve started observing other people’s tics. They’re not all the same. Some people carry it with anger, as if something were escaping them. Others have it gently, like a permanent caress. A woman in the greengrocer’s confessed to me that since her eye started twitching she dreams of fish. My teenage nephew said his activates when someone lies to him. My neighbour on the first floor assured me that when her eyelid trembles she remembers her mother.

I think that perhaps it was never a tic. That perhaps it’s a signal. A minimal alteration in the fabric of reality that touched me first and then spread like a nervous spider’s web beneath other people’s skin.

I’ve now turned 44. I wonder when the micro-baby will emerge. Whether it will cry. Whether it will start to speak. Whether it will be mine or simply pass to someone else. I look at myself in the mirror. My left eye contracts three times every four minutes. There’s no pain. Just a vibration. A sentence yet to come. Something still on the way to being born.