Every wall of this box is covered with big pointy teeth of black foam. It reminds me of a chamber I once examined in the deep, dark basement of a Spanish Inquisition museum in Ronda, Andalucía, which was lined with steel spikes and equipped with a rear wall that could be inched slowly inwards.
'You okay in there?' Sergio calls cheerily in Spanish, through my headphones. I nod, clear my throat and speak carefully into the little microphone sprouting like a celery stick from just below the window: 'Todo bien, everything's fine.' He nods. Contact established. The palms of my hands are growing clammy already, which is completely ridiculous. I try to imagine that I'm in the Orgasmotron machine from the film Barbarella, which starred a young and mostly naked Jane Fonda, but this doesn't help much.
'We'll start with the beeps,' Sergio tells me. Beep in Spanish is spelled bip but pronounced beep, a nice thought to focus on. Sergio delivers a series of bips into my headphones, at different frequencies and diminishing volumes, and I just have to raise my hand every time I hear one. From this the computerised magic arrayed around him will produce a graphical representation of my auditory deficiencies.The test doesn't take long and is not at all stressful. Sergio opens the door of the Inquisition chamber. 'All okay?'
'All okay.' I look up at him hopefully - is that it?
'Now we must do the pain tests,' Sergio announces.
'The what?'
'The pain tests. We need to see what level of sound you find painful,' he explains, clasping his hands to his ears with an anguished expression. Okay, got that.
The pain tests go fairly smoothly, a series of increasingly strident bips until I clasp my hands to my ears with an anguished expression.
Sergio opens the door. 'Está bien, that's good.' I prepare to leave the chamber but he gently pushes me back onto the chair. 'Now,' he says, 'the word test.'
'The what?'
'Words.' Sergio had already mentioned the word test, at a preliminary interview, but I'd pretended to myself that it wasn't going to happen. 'This test,' he now explains again, 'is the most important of all. With your new audífonos, hearing aids, we could amplify the sound as much as we like but you still wouldn't be able to understand speech any better without this test. You wouldn't hear, for example, the difference between perros and berros.'
Dogs and watercress. Well, that's no good then is it, with the money these things are going to cost me. Clearly I have to submit to the word test. I experience a slight sinking within, as though my innards know something that I don't about word tests.
'So what do I have to do?'
Easy peasy, Sergio assures me. The computer will speak a series of words into my headphones, and I just have to repeat them into the microphone. Whatever I hear, just say it.
He shuts the chamber door. There is a large latch that goes clunk when he closes it, I can hear that perfectly. Then we do a trial run with Sergio playing the role of computer. 'Mesa,' his voice recites in my headphones.
'Mesa,' I repeat. Table.
Sergio nods. 'Silla.' Yup, got that too, silla, chair. Perhaps this is going to be all right.
Now, Sergio tells me, the words will come from the computer. Righto. A noise starts up in the headphones, the noise that is euphemistically called white noise in the world of audiology but unlike the pleasant nothingness that is white light, white noise is an obtrusive, hissy crackling that sounds threateningly electric.
Dimly through this audio sandstorm I hear a brief wiffle-waffle, a snippet of something that may or may not be speech. Nothing I can possibly identify as mesa or silla or perros or berros. I shake my head at Sergio, who is watching me through the glass pane. He nods, signals 'we'll try again' with his hands - the Spanish have an endless supply of useful hand signals - and I hear a subtly different wiffle-waffle in the headphones. Nope, sorry.
Sergio opens the chamber door. 'Is the problem your hearing, do you think,' he asks me in Spanish, 'or is it the language?'
'I believe it's a little of both,' I admit. An English brain is attuned to identifying English words even when they're little more than a wiffle-waffle. A second language can never get built in quite so completely, it hasn't lived with you from babyhood.
Sergio releases me from the chamber and I emerge feeling a bit of a failure. Sergio is very kind and sympathetic. 'A German lady had the same trouble last week,' he assured me. My experience confirms what he and his colleagues already suspected - they will have to ask the system supplier to provide them with word lists in English and German.
After two or three weeks the supplier still hadn't come up with the new word lists. 'If we ordered a completely new system they'd be quick enough to send it!' Sergio observed cynically. This is the cruel world as it is exists outside La Gomera.
However, rather than wait any longer, Sergio and the team invented their own solution.
I entered the Inquisition chamber once more to try this new approach. Sergio had printed out the Spanish word list and spoke it himself, through the computer and my headphones but enunciated nice and clearly, with no hissing or other obfuscations, just me and Sergio. A few clever adjustments of the sound envelope on his screen and suddenly I was hearing perros not as berros but as perros. Thumbs up, big smiles all round.
The hearing aids followed soon afterwards. Sergio told us the story of an elderly farmer who had been dragged into the shop by his grandchildren, protesting all the way - he didn't need audífonos, he was fine as he was, and for that kind of money he could buy a car! They held him down long enough to do the tests and when they eventually fitted him with his new hearing aids, he wept. 'He wept,' Sergio repeated, indicating grandfatherly tears pouring down cheeks.
And in case you ask - no, I didn't weep when he fitted my audífonos, but I did feel that somebody had opened a window on to a new and brighter soundscape.
Epilogue
'How much did they cost you?' asked Arturo, proprietor of a favourite café, in his down-to-earth way - if you want to know something, you ask. When I told him he staggered backwards with hand to mouth in gobsmacked astonishment. I'd never seen anyone do that in real life.
'Tanto?' So much?
'Tanto. But that's for the whole system with remote control and all, special telephone and things. And all the consultations and adjustments.'
'Yes, but, but...tanto...' When he'd recovered a little I helped him to put this into perspective, as I had already done for myself. You can easily spend this kind of money and more on a good holiday. Or a rubbish secondhand car. What we're talking about here is quality of life, worth having at any price.
'La calidad de vida,' Arturo agreed. Of course. Without quality of life, where are you? Definitely. Then he shot back indoors to astonish his wife Marta.
Notes for the serious student
Why are hearing aids so appallingly expensive? I mean, ridiculously. A new pair of reading glasses costs no more than a few euros from the Chinese bazaar, a couple of hundred if you want fancy ones from an optician. If you've got faulty hearing instead of faulty eyesight you're in for ten or twenty times more.
A brief search on the internet produced a variety of excuses.
1 They're a medical device and anything medical is expensive.
2 They're very tiny and anything tiny and electronic is expensive.
3 They're customised to each patient and need a lot of preparatory tests and ongoing support from trained professionals, preferably with guts and initiative like Sergio.
4 There are only a handful of manufacturers and they all invest huge amounts in research to produce the latest technological miracle. A new and more effective anti-whistle system puts you ahead of the competition, especially for clients who do a lot of close hugging.
5 The manufacturers also have to spend money on advertisements featuring handsome grey-haired models who are now able to laugh joyfully with their grandchildren, provided they haven't just chucked grandad's hearing aid into the sea.
6 They're really not so expensive, you know, if you consider the whole-life cost. Twelve hours a day, 365 days a year, five years (let's say) lifetime before you upgrade to the latest anti-whistle technology - why, that's no more than a few cents per hour!
7 Look, do you want one or not?
