One Saturday morning in October 2017, journalist and bestselling author Frank Bruni woke up unable to see clearly. During the night, he had suffered a stroke that irreparably damaged an optic nerve, leaving him blind in one eye and at risk of losing sight in the other. In his new memoir, The Beauty of Dusk, Bruni grapples with the changes to his vision, finding solace — and wisdom — in reaching out to others who had suffered physical losses.
I met and got to know Juan José not because he's blind but because he's a close friend of two close friends of mine, Joel and Nicole. We all had dinner together in a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Juan José — who was then Mexico's permanent representative to the United Nations — came with his romantic partner, Mariangela, an Italian diplomat who also worked at the U.N. They're a great-looking, globetrotting, multilingual couple, and that's probably what most people's first and most lasting impression of them is. But what intrigued me that night were the whispered directions that he was getting from Nicole.
“Asparagus at two o'clock,” she would say, a reference that had nothing to do with the hour. “Beef at six o'clock.” This was information that recast the plate in front of him as a giant timepiece. Nicole was telling him where
