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‘But my mind, it will not let me see. I am what is called hysterically blind, aveugle hystérique. I have tried everything, but since I was fourteen years old I have been able to see nothing.’
‘You mean you don’t see me now, here in front of you? You don’t see this room? What do you see?’
‘I see only the visions which are in my mind. I have my own world of things I see, but they are all ancient images, visions of when I was a child. Many doctors have worked with me trying to make me see again. My sister took me to psychiatrists and others. I was hypnotized many times. But I cannot see. Sometimes I think I shall never see.
‘One of the things I was supposed to do, helping me see again, was to remember places of my childhood, places I loved, enjoyed, and then go to those places, close my eyes, try to remember everything that was there. After, I was to open my eyes and hope I would see these things of the real world, but they were never there for me.
‘I have twenty-two places, all here in the quartier, which I have in my mind. They are almost like personal picture postcards, postcards I can bring before my mind. For many years, I would go to those places and concentrate, trying to see, trying to see anything, even the slightest light, but it never happened. Place Furstenberg was one of those places.’
‘What happened? How did this come to be, Mirabelle? It’s terrible.’
‘It is terrible to you. But it is not terrible to me. The doctors tell me I do not see because deep inside I do not want to see. I am afraid.’
‘What are you afraid of, Mirabelle?’
‘I am afraid of what I will see. I have learned to enjoy this private world in which I live. Yes, it is inconvenient being blind, but it is also very comforting.’
‘My God, whatever happened? Why are you afraid?’
She sips again and holds the drink against her breast. I’ve never seen anyone do that before, until she did it yesterday. Maybe it’s a way to protect the glass from being knocked from her hand by accident.
‘Perhaps another time, Jacques. I should like to talk with you right now about something important, if I may.’
What could be more important than why she’s blind? I wait.
‘I should like you to paint my portrait. Since you have created me in the picture at the foot of Diderot it has given me much comfort. I feel I exist in the outside world, not just in the world of my imagination, inside my mind. Please, will you paint me?’
This I hadn’t expected. It’s so embarrassing. I sip some more of the Poire William, trying to figure what to say, how to refuse without hurting her feelings.
‘I am not really a portraitist, Mirabelle. Since I was a young man, a student, I’ve tried painting portraits of people. I couldn’t do it then and I don’t think I could do it now.’
‘Yes, however, with this painting, you have no one to please but yourself. I cannot be a critic. I do not even know how I do look. I only want to have you make a painting, an object, which says something about the way you see me, feel about me. It would mean much to have this happen.’
‘But, Mirabelle, it’s so expensive. I’d be happy to paint you for nothing, but then I’d want the painting myself. Also I am running out of francs.’
‘You may have the painting for yourself, in any case. I would prefer that. But you cannot paint it for no money. I want you to charge me a regular price. This is a commission.’
‘It would be my first commission, Mirabelle. But you have no idea of the cost. I must charge three hundred francs for each painting to have enough to live.’
‘I will not pay three hundred francs.’
She pauses. I’m off the hook. She just has no idea. I see her differently now, though. I see her as a painting. I would like to paint her if she would be willing to pose. I’d like to paint her inner calm, vitality, separateness, courage, if those things can be painted. It’d be more money down the tubes, more paint out of the tubes, but I still have a few francs left and then there’ll be the tourist money this summer. Maybe I’ll go up onto the hill at Montmartre, play animal with the others in the artists’ zoo; I’m sure I could sell something there.
‘Jacques, I must pay at least a thousand francs or you cannot paint my portrait. I would gladly pay more if you want it.’
Hell, I’m not off the hook! In fact I’m really hooked. Mirabelle gets up and glides in that special way she has, not dragging her feet but hardly lifting them, feeling forward with them, as if she’s sliding her feet into slippers with each step, moving quickly to the cupboard again. What other delicious goody will she pull out?
She takes down a metal box with pictures enameled on it. She pries the lid open, reaches inside, and feels around. She pulls out one, then two, five-hundred-franc bills. She closes the box and puts it up on the shelf again. She comes back to the table.
‘Now you know where the blind old lady hides all her money. She does not hide it from herself.’
She holds the bills out to me. I don’t want to take them.
‘Wait till I’m finished with the portrait, Mirabelle. This is crazy.’
‘No, but it is crazy waiting until the painting is finished before I pay you. What is the difference. This way you can have the money now and I would only keep it in that box doing nothing. You can buy paints with it so the painting can be better. That makes much more sense.’
She leans the money closer to me, looking into my eyes the entire time. I take the money. She’s right.
‘If I come over to where you are painting now, on La Place Furstenberg, may I stay beside you? I will not be a bother, I want to feel you painting, know you are seeing, really seeing, that which I can only remember. Would that be all right?’
It’s okay with me, but how’s she going to get over? It means crossing boulevard Saint-Germain and that’s a fast-moving, wide street, not exactly the kind of street a blind old lady should try to cross.
‘You can come with me if you want. I’ll help you across boulevard Saint-Germain.’
‘No, I shall clean up here first. You would be surprised how I can find my way. I go anywhere in Paris I want. At the boulevard, I listen to the feet. When they start moving across the street I go with the others. Also, there is always someone to give an arm to an old lady in a red costume with a white cane. I can sometimes almost see myself in my mind. Of course, the boulevard was completely different when I last saw it, but I can tell much from the sounds and smells.’
So I take off. The light should be just right now. I’m realizing that, in the end, I’ll be running two paintings at the same time if it’s going to take me several days to paint each one. I’ll need one canvas for morning light and one for afternoon. I’ll really have good use for that thousand francs, just keeping myself in paint and canvas.
I’ve been painting about an hour when I look beside me and there’s Mirabelle sitting in a little collapsible chair. She smiles.
‘Oh, now you see me. I have been here awhile and you have been so busy looking, you didn’t know I was here. Sometimes looking so hard can make one blind. Is that not interesting?’
I’m just getting into painting the globes of the light stand in the center of the Place. I swear each one is a slightly different color. If you didn’t look closely, you’d think they were only white, but one’s slightly bluish white, one’s greenish, one yellowish, and the other has a violet tinge. I never would have guessed it until I tried painting them. I try explaining this to Mirabelle. Again she closes her eyes as I talk as if she’s trying to cast up the images in her mind. We’re quiet for a while.
‘Jacques, do you mind if I talk about what I am seeing here, myself, in my mind, listening to the wind against the trees, smelling the street, the paint, you; remembering from when I was a little girl?’
‘No, I’d like that very much, Mirabelle.’
‘Well, first I remember it was like a giant room, as if it were not outside at all. The trees make a great cover like an umbrella. There were benches on each side of the lamp and I would sit and stare at each of the globes, moving my head back and forth to watch my reflection move in each of them. The walls then were gray, blue-gray, violet, brown-gray, and when the sun would shine on them, they seemed to glow with a white luminescence not much different from the white in the sky between the leaves.
‘Now I understand the walls have all been painted white and yellow and light colors of brown. It must be beautiful, but it is not what I have in my mind.
‘It seemed then, as a child, that the street down to the rue Jacob was very long. We would roller-skate down that street, our skates strapped to our shoes, and we would roll hoops. There were very few automobiles and many horses. Only part of the street was smooth, the rest was stones. The rue Cardinale was only dirt. The windows were mostly open and will always be open in my mind, with flowers at the windows and clothing hanging on little lines, like butterflies against the green of the trees.
‘Also, at certain times, the trees would have purple flowers, the flowers would then fall, and we would gather them in our skirts and throw the petals at each other. It was a wonderful time.’
She stops. She still has her eyes closed. She’s brought such a freshness, a dreamlike vision to what I’m seeing, I find I’m integrating some of her feelings into my painting. I have alternatives for almost any decision I make in the painting now. There’s what my eyes see, there’s what my mind is seeing, the selective vision of the painter; and then there’s the vision of Mirabelle’s mind. It’s the same as it was with the pigeons against the sky over Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I’m flying in her dream, painting her desires.
She keeps on talking, resurrecting the memories she’s stored, cherished, all these years, speaking of the way it was, and it seems so much more real than what I’m seeing before me.
I begin to think I’m going blind myself, then realize it’s only getting dark. I have no idea what time it is, but the painting is almost finished. I never believed I could get so far along on a painting in a single day. And what I’ve done is good, it holds together; more than that, it sings out the feelings I have, about Paris, about Mirabelle, and in many ways her feelings about Paris as a young girl, and now as a blind old woman.
I pack up the box. Mirabelle has some grains with her for the pigeons. Many from the flock at Saint-Germain-des-Prés come here to this Place and pick up bits of food tourists or others leave on the ground. When my box is packed, I lean against the wall beside where Mirabelle is sitting. It’s a great little folding stool she has, I wish I had one for myself, sometimes my back gets tired standing. She turns to me.
‘I feel it growing cooler. Is it really becoming dark? Is that why you have packed up your paints?’
‘That’s right, Mirabelle. It was getting so dark I was beginning to think I might be going blind myself.’
‘No, Jacques, that is not the way one goes blind.’
She still sits there. The pigeons are all around her. It is evening and I guess that’s when pigeon mating instincts come to the fore, because two or three cocks are doing the old courtship routine, puffed out, head bobbing, flight feathers dragging, rattling, on the ground, going round in tight circles.
‘Are they dancing their love dance, Jacques?’
‘That’s right, Mirabelle. I guess pigeons spend more time courting than any other creature I know.’
‘But you know pigeons are mated for life. They do their dance around almost any hen, but they are mated for life.’
‘Somebody told me that once, but it’s hard to believe. It certainly would be nice if it were true. I like the idea.’
‘Honestly. Have you ever seen pigeons mating in the streets, in public, as cats, dogs, even other birds do?’
‘No, now you mention it, I never have. Maybe you’ve got something there, Mirabelle, about pigeons teaching humans how to live.’
‘They are only flirting with the hens, showing how they care for, admire, value them. I think it is most beautiful. I thrill to hear their cooing song, hear their feet pounding on the ground, listen to their feathers bristle. It is such a dance of meaningful, purposeless passion.’
She looks up at me in the blueing dusk.
‘You know, Jacques, there is not enough love in this world. Sometimes I think the pigeons are the last lovers in Paris. There seems to be much of sex in these times, but very little of true love, of love that makes all creatures come closer together, that allows one creature to express an inner feeling toward another creature so they know they are important and valuable to them.’
She stands and I help fold her chair. I throw it over the top of my box. I offer her my arm and she takes it.
‘Jacques, would you be my guest at La Palette on the rue de Seine? We can have a cup of coffee or something there. It is a place where artists have long gone. I have not been there for more than ten years, since before Rolande’s death. Please, take me there. It would be such a pleasure for me to hear and feel the excitement of that place.’
I’ve passed the café tens of times but never gone in. Café sitting just doesn’t fit into my budget. I hope I’m not spending Mirabelle’s savings. It doesn’t seem fair or right.
‘If that’s what you want, Mirabelle, let’s go. But I must pay. I’m a rich man. I have a thousand francs in my pocket right now.’
I smile down at her, knowing the smile means nothing, is invisible, she cannot see it, but it makes me feel good. I’m smiling for myself.
She holds tighter on to my arm, not clutching, only tucking herself in closer. It’s a lovely evening and we must make quite a pair walking into La Palette. We find a table in the back and both order a Cointreau. It seems the perfect thing to finish off a good day’s work. It’s going to cost more than a week’s living but it’ll be worth it.
Mirabelle has all her antennae out. I can tell by the almost ecstatic look on her face, the smile, the inner concentration. She’s probably ‘perceiving’ more of this ambience than I am, by far. I close my eyes and try to experience the way she does. While I have my eyes closed, the Cointreau arrives. I can tell it’s there even without opening them. The smell of oranges surrounds us. I wonder if I would have smelled it if I’d been sitting there with my eyes open.
‘Is it not wonderful, Jacques?’
She is fingering the round ballon of Cointreau, spinning it around in her small, pointed, thin-skinned, dainty fingers.
‘I feel everything so strongly it’s almost like seeing.’
We clink glasses, she makes the first move, of course. It’s been a long time since I’ve had Cointreau, and this isn’t the best but it tastes good, not as good as that Poire William, but good on an early spring evening.
We sit sipping and listening. I’m also watching the coming and going, the flirting, the general horsing around of the young people. Why do artists always feel they need to make such a scene all the time? Probably it’s what makes them artists, or makes them want to be artists in the first place. They want, need, to be seen. For some reason, they aren’t sure they are. I wonder how much of that is in me. Probably anyone who has all the love, acceptance they need would never actually create, do, anything. They’d be complete within themselves. That would be the end of writers, poets, painters, singers, musicians, politicians, most of the people who help make the world go around, at least who strive for human communication.
It’s dark when I escort Mirabelle home. She invites me up but I don’t feel like sitting in a dark room while she wouldn’t even know it. I’ll have to buy a few light bulbs and slip them in around her place if I’m ever going to spend any time there.
I have a great walk home, I use the gate code number I learned by watching others punch it in, sneak up the stairs quietly, and settle in. I watch my painting for a long time in the candlelight as I eat a light supper. With all the lunches, I’m not eating up my stew for this week.
Blind Reverie
I feel so brazen. I wonder if he feels it, too, but he means so much to me. He must have some idea of my feelings. even if he can see.
I am confused. Knowing how my pigeons look has taken so much away. I thought my love for them would be more, but it is somehow less. I should have known. I think he is convinced I am childish, calling them by name, but they have been my only companions for so long. I hope he doesn’t mind my calling him Jacques. He cannot know it was the name of my father.
I felt something negative when he came into the apartment. Can it be so dirty, unkempt? I must ask him. But I must go slowly. It was much, asking him to paint me. Now I am glad I did it. I wanted something we could share, a way to keep him near.
I think he likes my food. I could tell by the sounds as he ate. I am so happy to have found him. It is wonderful to have someone with whom I can share my pear in the bottle.
3
The next morning I’m finishing the painting of the Place Furstenberg. I feel in control. The strong movements I established yesterday are holding up as I move into the more descriptive elements. The light is coming through the trees and I’m using a tremendous variety of color to capture the sense of light on the paving of the Place. The painting is somewhere between Impressionism and something different, a new kind of vision for me, a highly personal vision such as Vincent van Gogh had, a conviction that the way I see is valid.
I work all morning and then I feel Mirabelle beside and behind me.
‘I can tell you are happy with your work, Jacques. The bells are ringing, will you déjeuner with me, and then perhaps we can start the portrait.’
How can she possibly know I’m just about finished? Do I give off some kind of ‘satisfaction vibrations’? I scratch my signature in the lower right-hand corner. I pull the canvas off the easel and print in the title, Place Furstenberg, date and sign it on the back. I’m almost tempted to sign it ‘Jacques.’
‘Yes, I’m very happy with the painting. But I don’t think I can start with your portrait because I have no other canvas here with me. I didn’t realize I’d finish this one so quickly. I wish you could see it. It’s the best painting I’ve done and you helped very much.’
‘Thank you. It means much to me to feel I could help. Can you understand what this must mean to someone blind such as I?’
Her face is very serious, then it breaks into a smile and she ‘looks’ down at her feet briefly. She finds my eyes again.
‘Could you not buy a canvas near here? I do not think the shops are closed as yet.’
‘It is very expensive to buy a canvas, Mirabelle. A canvas stretched, of the size I would need, could cost over a hundred and fifty francs.’
She reaches into her purse. She pulls out two hundred francs.
‘Here, please, Jacques, buy it. We do not know how long I shall be around to be painted and every day I am getting older. I should like to be painted as soon as possible, while I am still young.’
‘Okay. I’ll give it back to you this afternoon from the thousand francs when I have it changed. That’s only fair. All right?’
‘Yes, if that is what you want. But you must hurry now to find a shop open before they close. I shall go home and prepare our food. It is mostly ready, but there are some last little things to do. I shall meet you there.’
She turns away. The art store is just around the corner, not far from La Palette, where we had our Cointreau. I decide to leave the box standing in the Place. I put the painting back on the easel. I take off right away. Nobody will steal it in the few minutes I’ll be gone. I start running, holding the two hundred francs bunched in my hand.
The bells are still ringing when I get there and they’re open. The canvas, real linen on a good stretcher, 20F, with portrait linen, is a hundred and ninety francs. I feel like a rich man. But at this rate I’d be a candidate for the poorhouse in no time.
I dash back to my box and everything is fine. There are two people looking at the painting, a well-dressed French couple. The man asks me if I want to sell the painting.
I do and I don’t. He’s pretty insistent and I’m busy cracking down the box, putting things away. At the sound of my crappy French, he switches into good-quality, heavily accented English-English.
‘But you must be in business, monsieur. Do you have a gallery where I may see your work?’
‘No, I have no gallery.’
