Besides, my parents had immediately ordered a portable Braille typewriter from Switzerland, to spare me the disillusioning and almost always futile labor of writing on a tablet. Later they taught me to use one, but I used it very rarely. I was embarrassed by this grooved steel slate to which one attaches a sheet of paper with a metal grid of its own. I disliked handling the thick punch, and the business of slowly and laboriously perforating the dots which made each letter inside the rectangles on the grill. This was the kind of groping which reminded me that I was blind, and my ideas always outran my movements.
But my typewriter was a toy. It had the smell of newness, and I liked its tapping sound and the six round keys which controlled six punches that made letters, words and sentences rise up like pictures in a film. With the typewriter it was like going out exploring. I was writing and, being mechanized, had the playful satisfaction of writing faster than my friends who could see.
By the first of October I was ready, but the school was not ready for me. Later on, the laws and institutions of society played me a number of bad tricks, and even at this time they were resisting me. Actually this was not surprising, for it was not long since blind people had been relegated to the fringes of society, pitied, reduced to playing the harmonium in small chapels, recaning chairs, even to becoming beggars.
In 1932 in France there were no laws which forbade public schools to admit blind children to their classes — no laws, but many entrenched prejudices. In other words, it took all my family’s confidence, all their conviction that I could overcome every difficulty, added to the kindness and generosity of the good man who headed the school, to get me admitted. I was admitted on probation.
What disturbed people was their belief that a blind person must be in other people’s way, that he must understand, read and write less quickly, see neither the sums nor the drawings on the blackboard, nor the maps on the walls. In short he would be like dirt in the machinery. They had reason to be uneasy, but it was up to me not to be that grain of dirt — up to me, my family and especially my mother.
What a mother can do for a blind child can be explained in a few words: give him birth a second time. That is what my mother did for me, and it was her courage, not mine, that was called out. My only job was to turn myself over to her, believe what she believed and use her eyes every time I missed my own.
She learned Braille with me, and watched over my homework for several years. In other words, she did all the work of a private and highly specialized tutor. But to competence she added love, and it is well known that that kind of love removes obstacles more effectively than all the sciences.
At the end of the first school year I was awarded the first prize in my class, a small honor, of course, but one which counted for her and for me as the modest sign of victory over material things. The rest was going to be easy.
You will excuse me for thinking my mother exceptional. But I don’t believe it will weaken my tribute to her to say that there are a thousand other women with the capacity for the same gift and the same intelligence toward a blind child. To achieve it they only need to know that adjustment is possible for the child and, more than adjustment, keeping in step with the lives of other people. To gain confidence, they only need to hear people speak often of the riches of blindness.
And that is why I am willing to tell my story, by fortune a happy one. There is nothing I want more than not being an exception.
MY MEMORIES OF THAT FIRST YEAR of school are of a ship with myself on the forecastle. I must explain that since the accident imagination had become a passion with me. I was really living twice over: once in contact with the small objects and the small events of my everyday life, and then a second time in the world of fantasy. The second life was made of the same stuff, but bigger, brightly colored, turned into pictures and in harmony with the whole universe. There there was a stream of light and joy. I had found where it flowed and stayed close to it, walking beside its banks. Doors had opened inside me leading into a place of refuge, a cave, and everything that happened to me entered there, echoed and was reflected a thousand times over before it was extinguished.
As to my vision of the ship, it came to me quite simply from a table and chair. To do the same work as my classmates in school I needed more room. My typewriter was bigger than a pencil, and the Braille books I used took up nearly ten times as much space as ordinary books. The standard classroom desks were not big enough for me, so my parents had brought to school a large table of unfinished wood with ample pigeonholes. This table stood beside the platform where the teacher’s desk was, and as a result it was slightly in front of the first row of pupils’ desks. That is where I got the happy illusion of the ship. All year I heard the crew behind me working, giving the password, swearing, shuffling along the deck with their feet, and obeying the captain’s orders as well as they could.
Our teacher that year was a slow-moving, gentle man who had an even temper except for rare outbursts of anger at the stupid ones. From these outbursts I felt secure, and set to work systematically to learn the foundations of arithmetic. It was impossible or very difficult with a Braille typewriter to arrange figures on the paper in the order they needed for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. So they gave me a vulcanite slate with cube-shaped holes and a set of steel cubes. Braille characters were written in relief on the six faces of the cubes. Because the graphics of writing in Braille, made up of dots, are simpler than the writing of sighted people, no more than six faces were needed to make the ten basic figures. The six, rotated at a ninety-degree angle, became the four, and the four in its turn the zero, the zero eight and so back to the six. With the help of this device I learned to count as fast as the others, and they soon got used to the soft metallic click — like the sound of marbles — which they heard me making.
But within a few months I found I could dispense with the cubes and the holes. To make the mind work, only the mind is needed. I began to visualize all the processes in my head, except, of course, the ones which extended to an embarrassing number of data. Having a good memory, I became extremely adept at mental arithmetic, and that in turn helped develop my memory.
It is true that blindness considerably increases the ability to memorize, and it has to since the eyes are no longer there to reinsure and verify — an activity, by the way, to which they are too often limited and which consumes a large part of their energy. I remembered well, but above all I visualized. It was an enchantment to watch the appearance of all the names and figures on the screen inside me, and then to see the screen unfolding like an endless roll of film.
This screen was not like a blackboard, rectangular or square, which so quickly reaches the edge of its frame and has to give way to a useless piece of wall or a door which loses its meaning as soon as it is closed. My screen was always as big as I needed it to be. Because it was nowhere in space it was everywhere at the same time, and to manage it I only had to call out “Attention.” The chalk on the inner screen did not turn to powder like other chalk. It was stronger and more supple, being made of the substance called “spirit.” Let us not quibble over words. Call it matter or essence. In any case it is a reality closer to us than words can tell, a reality to be touched, manipulated and shaped. And when such treasures are unveiled how can a child fail to be consoled for the loss of his sight?
Of course I recognized that my sighted companions were quick and precise in many gestures over which I hesitated. But as soon as it was a question of intangibles, it was their turn to hesitate longer than I. They had to turn the switch to darken the outside world and light up the world of the mind. This was one move I almost never had to make.
Names, figures and objects in general did not appear on my screen without shape, nor just in black and white, but in all the colors of the rainbow. Still, I never remember consciously encouraging this phenomenon. Nothing entered my mind without being bathed in a certain amount of light. To be more precise, everything from living creatures to ideas appeared t
o be carved out of the primordial light. In a few months my personal world had turned into a painter’s studio.
I was not the master of these apparitions. The number five was always black, the letter L light green, and kindly feeling a soft blue. There was nothing I could do about it, and when I tried to change the color of a sign, the sign at once clouded over and then disappeared. A strange power, imagination! It certainly functioned in me but also in spite of me.
That same year, geography was revealed to me through relief maps of the five continents and the principal countries — maps magnificently published at the end of the nineteenth century near Mulhouse, in what then was German Alsace.
Naturally, the broad outlines of the world became fixed at once on the inner screen, and I only needed to correct them and complete them as I learned. I got my bearings without trouble. A picture of the physical world, its courses and its barriers, settled in, and that is why, from childhood, my sighted companions preferred turning to me when we were walking around Paris and had lost our way. Then I referred to the inner screen and almost always found the solution. Today, when I am riding in a car, I am often first to tell the driver what route to take. I hardly need say that the feats of carrier pigeons far outdistance my own capacity, but still, what they do seems to me quite natural.
I know many blind people who are able to reopen within themselves avenues which have been closed to them in the world outside. Otherwise how can one account for the fact that they can travel alone around a city they don’t know well, and more often without losing their way than people who see?
After all, isn’t it true that the realities of the inner life seem like marvels only because we live so far away from them?
BEFORE LONG I SHALL BE WRITING about the friends who inhabited my childhood, telling how I lived with them and what miseries they spared me. But this is not yet the place for friendship. It is the place for the particular distress called “waiting.” Whether deliberately or not, blindness is not well received in the world of people who see. It is so little known and often so dreaded. For that reason blindness always starts out with isolation. I have known solitude, known it with all its demons. But it is only fair to say that along with its evil spirits it has some that are good.
In the summer of 1933, a year after my accident, my parents took me to Juvardeil for the holidays as usual. Juvardeil was then and still is, despite the invasion of the automobile, one of those small French villages off the main road, as melancholy and meditative as the Angelus, hidden in the midst of hawthorn hedges and shrubs as high as walls, and all spread out along the river.
The river is the Sarthe, slow and deep and silent, in the middle of wide meadows which it covers with water at the flood season, bounded all along its course by a never-ending sheath of bristling poplars. The stream is like an old lady who has grown smiling and discreet with age, who tolerates life around her without taking part in it.
Juvardeil is a very old village, already mentioned in the ninth-century chronicles under the name of Gavardolium, which was undoubtedly the name of the inhabitants of that small province. Another etymology, suspect perhaps, but so poetic that I prefer it to all the others, attributes the name to the Latin words juvare oculis, joy of the eyes. Of all the places in the world, Juvardeil is still the one I love best.
At the age of nine I had a freedom there which Paris could not give me. Nothing in Juvardeil was unfriendly. The boat-builder’s saw announced that I had left the river behind me. The blacksmith’s hammer cut the straight line between the river and the church in half. The sound of lowing told me I had arrived at the gate of the great meadow where the cows gathered to watch the people passing by. I could go from my grandmother’s house to my great-aunt’s by myself, with a cane in my hand, without meeting anything more formidable than the snails.
That year the public school in the village, deserted during the holidays, was turned over to me. In other words, they left the doors open. The wide court, enclosed by walls as it is everywhere in France, and planted with linden trees, one of the classrooms and a storeroom belonged to me. When I think of it, I realize this storeroom must have been just a room that was no longer used, possibly an old laundry, at the far end of the court, but sheltered even from the people who came in by the main door, and raised above the court by three or four steps at most. But in those days my idea of this room with a sloping ceiling was quite different. It was precious, secret, high up, and altogether fantastic.
You can imagine what a big empty room would mean to a blind child, with walls which were dilapidated but flat and with no beams to strike against, no hooks to catch on, and open all across one side to the rustling of the wind in the leaves. A slight overhang gave every sound the resonance of an arch. There was fresh straw and sawdust on the floor, and a pile of small logs in one corner, some of them round, some forked and some triangular — fabulous for all kinds of building games.
I spent endless hours in the storeroom that summer. I was almost always alone there, but this solitude was densely populated with all kinds of shapes and with the inventions of a personage I had never known before: myself. I was on an island, and one at a time I relived the adventures of Robinson Crusoe before he met Friday. I arranged the logs all across the room like a forest, like rocks, and I went off on voyages. Sometimes, wrapped in the rags of history they had given me at school, I made the logs into armies. And in that case, obviously, I was Napoleon.
There is no use asking whether I believed in my imaginary personage. I had no thought of believing or not believing. I was in the state that all children reach sooner or later when, thank heaven, there is no more past or future, no dream or reality, but only themselves riding on life at a gallop. But in my storeroom, solitude was added to divine imagination, a place where, for once, I had no one and nothing to contend with, since the room was quite empty except for the logs.
Inside my body I had thousands of gestures which had been shut up there through the year in Paris, all the ones I had had to make with careful calculation since I was blind, the thousand indiscretions and adventures my body was bursting with. It was so long since I had wanted to whirl around, to paddle with my arms, throw my feet in front of me, fall down, get up again, make an ugly face or a beatific smile, take dangerous objects in my hand and not hear people saying I should handle them carefully; and finally to experiment with space in all directions. I wanted to try it out in height and depth, in zigzags, to walk through it straight, or stagger through it like a drunk. And after a few minutes I really felt drunk.
I wish a storeroom like mine could be given to all blind children, whether in the attic or in the bowels of the house. But anyway it should be a free field from which all the sharp corners, the bumps, the tables, chairs, stools, washtubs, nails and wires have been removed, especially those terrible wires; a place swept clean of danger, as clean as emptiness, where all one’s wishes can come true from one instant to the next.
With the logs I made plans for battles in the sawdust. I was doing it because of Napoleon and in his honor, and more for love of him than for love of battles, since I was not particularly aggressive. Besides, there was never any real battle except in words. The teacher I would one day become was already giving lectures.
How I made the storeroom resound with my voice! Instead of conquering my enemies, which was too quick and seemed too crude, I applied myself to convincing them. I explained in loud tones that they were wrong, or at least that I wanted them to be. And since games like this are better when they last, I managed it so that my enemies should not be persuaded by my first harangue.
What blindness had to do with my games in the storeroom is not easily explained. As a matter of fact, the games were quite ordinary, apart from the intoxication they made me feel, a feeling much more intense than pleasure. It was as if a rent had been torn in the fabric of my life, a rent through which I saw endless possibilities, all surprising and all crowding upon each other as I approached. I myself was intact, discovering it
was enough to think of things to bring them into being, enough to want them to lift the ban against them. Only, being blind, I had to want them more intensely than other people.
Life did not fall on my face as cool as rain or into my hands as round as fruit, but was a wave rising inside me. I could hold it there and calm it down or allow it to burst out into the world outside. And what if my storeroom as a nine-year-old means nothing to other people? For me it foretold the things I should do later on, and spoke a language I understood because it was neither its own nor entirely mine. What it brought me was happiness.
Blindness works like dope, a fact we have to reckon with. I don’t believe there is a blind man alive who has not felt the danger of intoxication. Like drugs, blindness heightens certain sensations, giving sudden and often disturbing sharpness to the senses of hearing and touch. But, most of all, like a drug, it develops inner as against outer experience, and sometimes to excess.
At such times the world unfolding before a blind person is perilous, because it is more consoling than words, and has the kind of beauty found only in the poems or pictures of artists with hallucinations — artists like Poe, Van Gogh and Rimbaud.
I have known this bewitched world, and have often withdrawn there and wrapped myself in its dreams. I have delighted in its luster, its maternal warmth, its license and its illusion of life. But, thank heaven, I did not remain there. For that is visceral life shut in upon itself, not truly the life of the spirit but its caricature. There is no real inner life for a man or a child unless his relation to real things inside and outside himself is a true one. Living entirely turned in on oneself is like trying to play on a violin with slackened strings.
Like almost all blind people I have had this temptation. But by good fortune the temptation was offset by another, that of contending with things, or rather loving them as they are, investigating the contours of objects and space, and mixing with people. The fact that there were men in the world was more vital to me than anything else.
And There Was Light Page 4