Seeing

　　On election day in the capital, it is raining so hard that noone has bothered to come out to vote. The politicians are growingjittery. Should they reschedule the elections for another day?Around three o'clock, the rain finally stops. Promptly at four,voters rush to the polling stations, as if they had been ordered toappear. But when the ballots are counted, more than 70 percent areblank. The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency isdeclared. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or evenblindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague ofblindness that hit the city four years before, and of the one womanwho kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? A policesuperintendent is put on the case. What begins as a satire ongovernments and the sometimes dubious efficacy of the democraticsystem turns into something far more sinister. A singular novelfrom the author of Blindness.