The story of Tiresias of Thebes
A young astronomical engineer named Tiresias was on his way home after a long day of work and an hour and a half of traffic jams on the Paris Périphérique. He was living alone in a studio in a building in a new neighborhood. The corridors still smelled of freshly finished work. He felt a deep happiness to have passed his studies brilliantly, to have immediately found an exciting job at a telescope manufacturer and to live in a new building, made of concrete and glass, with perfectly smooth walls, perfectly grey and clean.
He spent his evenings in a routine way, but very different from his neighbors. While they all watched Netflix, he had negotiated the purchase of an apartment telescope from his employer. And every evening, forgetting all the daily worries, he plunged his eyes into the eyepiece of his telescope. The sky of Paris did not allow him to see the stars, but he did not care. Tiresias was an obsessive voyeur. He scanned the windows of the neighboring buildings with passion, one after the other, noting in a notebook the precise coordinates of the most exciting windows, as if if they were newly-discovered planets.
As others project themselves in the universes of fiction, video games or metaverse, Tiresias projected himself into the banal intimacy of others. There was a couple that was tearing itself apart. There was another couple, in every way similar, who watched television every night, in each other's arms. There was a young man who studied late at night and got up early in the morning to do a job that paid for his education. There was a middle-class woman in her forties, who lived in an apartment with a broken window. There was an old man who cried on his balcony every night while smoking and drinking a glass of Lagavulin. The show was a kind of checkerboard made up of lives that were all different, all busy and withdrawn, but all playing the same game of chess. This gave Tiresias a feeling of power that excited him, gave him the impression of existing, of being distinct from the world. To justify himself, he thought "Why are you watching ? Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there*".
One day, Tiresias was exploring a new window. He saw a woman of great beauty. Her face, which he could examine very closely thanks to the power of his telescope, was of perfect symmetry, surrounded by thick golden-blond hair; her dark eyes were intense and deep, her nose straight, her almost severe mouth was softened by her matte, delicately hemmed lips. Her thin but advanced chin gave her a determined air. This face amazed him.
He surprised her naked, coming out of her shower, her hair flowing down her body to the bottom of her back, revealing her white, matte skin. Her breasts and her hips were generous like a young mother. Tiresias was fascinated by the sight of this age-less woman and the sap of desire rose in him, which flooded his sex, his belly, his thoughts. He would have desired to be a woman himself, to enjoy a pleasure multiplied by nine.
But this impulse was brutally interrupted when the woman, completely naked, stared out of the window. As impossible as it may seem, there was no doubt that she was looking in his direction. She was actually looking at Tiresias. She was staring at him shamelessly. Her face was distorted with anger. It was like a hurricane that tore the sky in a flash. Suddenly, a dazzling rain of light coming from nowhere fell on the voyeur who lost consciousness.
He woke up in the darkness and heard a soft, feminine voice telling him: "Tiresias, by dint of looking into the void you have seen what it is forbidden to see and to turn you away I have taken away your sight. But for the sentence to be just, if you can no longer see what is around you and beyond what the human eye can see, now look deep inside yourself, look deep inside and beyond your soul, describe to others what you see inside them and what they are unable to see. Your sorrow is the gift I offer you, and for you to purge it and share it with the world, you will live for seven generations, the time it takes humans to repair what they have broken in the past seven generations."
The very next day, Tiresias was taken care of by the nearest hospital. The French state gave him the best care, and ensured his income, since he could no longer practice his job. Tiresias never recovered his sight. He held in his memory the almost divine face of his executioner and undertook a journey into himself, and beyond. Some of his relatives say they never saw him again.