The Government announces a long list of draconian rules that the internees must follow to protect the rest of the population from “the white sickness.” The concerned patients choose the doctor as their leader, but he refuses, worrying that future arrivals will reject his authority. The doctor and his wife arrive first, followed by the first man who went blind, the man who stole his car, the girl with dark glasses, and a young boy with a squint who saw the eye doctor the previous day. The Ministry of Health’s quarantine zone is set up in an abandoned psychiatric hospital guarded by armed soldiers. His wife insists on joining him-although she can still see, after boarding her husband’s ambulance, she pretends that she has just gone blind as well. The doctor then calls the Ministry of Health, which sets up a quarantine and sends an ambulance for the doctor. Meanwhile, the doctor realizes that the blindness is highly contagious and he tells the doctor’s wife about his condition. Two different police officers escort the car-thief and the girl with the dark glasses back to their respective homes. One of the doctor’s patients, a young woman wearing dark glasses for an eye infection, works as a prostitute and goes blind while having sex with a man at a hotel. The only option, the doctor admits, is to “wait and see.”Īfter the blind man’s appointment, the car-thief also suddenly goes blind, as does the doctor later that night. The doctor is baffled: there’s seemingly nothing wrong with the blind man’s eyes, and his condition is unprecedented. It turns out that the person who drove the blind man home was a thief-he stole their car, so the blind man and his wife take a taxi to the eye doctor. After another driver helps the blind man back to his apartment, the blind man knocks over a vase and cuts himself trying to pick up the pieces, then passes out on the couch until the blind man’s wife comes home and helps him clean up. The man yells out that he has suddenly gone blind: his entire field of vision is a sea of whiteness. At an intersection in front of a traffic light, a driver remains stopped after the light turns green, which annoys the other drivers.

Blindness by josé saramago