“Painters—the true ones—are optimists,” I said to him, clapping him on the shoulder.
He had a boil; he roared in pain. I jollied him along more forcefully, recommending the inoculation of sulfamides in large doses—elephantine doses! In the face of my exaltation, he found nothing to say other than to repeat: “You’re making me anxious…”
“Oh no, old chap! Change the record—you’re behind the times!”
I didn’t want to depress myself, and I left him with a long face on the sidewalk. There are people who are never content. They either find you too miserable or too cheerful. For them, everything is always excessive. Personally, I’m very fond of excess—it’s the sign of a rich nature.
Calmly, I’m preparing my canvases in order to get back to work. I shan’t paint the “Fairground Burlesque” but a “Hymn to Joy,” to make a pictorial pendant to the symphony of the old. Painters are optimists, for God’s sake!
Obviously, one cannot expect to live in a perpetual euphoria. Minor snags are inseparable from existence. For example, this morning I opened the tap on the wash-basin; the water came out yellow and dirty. Accustomed to drinking it, I didn’t even dare wash my face in it. The City would do well to check the pipes.
I’ve written a careful letter to Armande. I’d made many mistakes—was totally wrong, if she wishes—but let’s leave reproaches to commonplace lovers. Then again, I need her. The kind of hymn that my heart sings to the recovered world awaits an echo, a response that she alone can bring me. Tenderness is the complement of happiness.
Never have I felt so tender, in spite of my frowns when the little snags I mentioned crop up: no matches with which to light my gas; the cupful of water that I warmed up to make coffee had nearly evaporated when I came back to it, because I had left it on the boil for too long; for my aperitif, the waiter brought me an ice-bucket whose pieces were almost all melted…
I’m ashamed to report such petty details, but everyone’s mood depends on trivia of that sort. A succession of minor hitches, and the equilibrium of happiness tilts…
Some malign genius seems to want to deflate the balloon of my new enthusiasm with pinpricks. I’ve come to wonder whether things are not expressly designed to repel anyone who shows too much interest in them. Love makes them afraid, as it does to humans, and they slip away…
To begin with, the water ran yellow and dirty all morning. There are certainly leaks in the pipes, and I’ll have to complain to the concierge. When I tried to shave, the mirror was so dirty that I couldn’t see the stubble on my cheeks, which felt fearfully rough to my hand. My shaving-soap refused to do its job, only spreading a sort of molten cream over my skin instead of the “ample and soapy” foam promised by the advertisement. I set to work and found the hairs of my new brushes agglutinated, as if they had just been used. I bought a newspaper and unfolded it; it was crumpled, as if I had already read it three times. The virginity of their appearance is, however, the only interest of these daily rags.
Yet another incident: I took out my watch on the boulevard and noticed that its glass is broken. Being superstitious, and finding myself directly outside a watchmaker’s shop, I went in to have the damage repaired. I held out the object, and heard someone say: “But, Monsieur, the glass isn’t broken.”
“The glass isn’t broken?”
The watchmaker caressed the face with his thumb. I leaned over in order to look. At that moment, a slight crack was audible.
“Oh yes—it’s just broken.”
Could I have had a presentiment?
At any rate, I didn’t foresee the arrival of Armande late that evening. She came into the studio like an apparition. My heart leapt. She fell into my arms, without a word…
Let us follow that example; bliss is mute…at least as mute as great anguish.
I am the victim of a “something” whose nature I don’t know—and as my thoughts turn incessantly, in spite of myself, around that problem, my good will and good mood are beginning to be painfully influenced.
I shall pass over the annoyances already cited, even though their persistence is troubling—the water that is still dirty; the soap that doesn’t foam even though I’ve changed the brand; the bad luck that dictates that a newspaper, picked up at hazard from a seller’s pile, is always one that has already been read—and come to an inexplicable scene.
Alone in a café, I was waiting for Armande, at the back of the room because of the cold. The clientele was sparse. Not far away, an old bachelor, who had nothing of the humorist about him, was drinking an aperitif with the placidity of an ox in the byre. Having nothing to do, I began observing him. At one point, he took out a packet of cigarettes—already half-empty, to tell the truth—and extracted, not a cigarette, but a butt. How far can the parsimonious sprit of the French extend? But I was even more surprised when I saw him take, from a nearly-new box of matches, a blackened stub, strike it gravely on the side of the box and put it to his butt as if to light it. To be distracted to that extent was implausible. The man had the appearance of someone smoking: the hollowing of the cheeks when he breathed in, the movement of the mouth to expel the smoke, but I saw no manifest puff of smoke escape his lips—a light mist at the most. Was he a clown miming a scene? A smoker trying to give up his tobacco habit?
I was sufficiently intrigued by the spectacle not to notice Armande right away when she came in. Her arrival naturally directed my attention elsewhere, but when I left her, preoccupied with the incident of the smoker, I remembered that a lack of matches had obliged me to light my gas with a cigarette-lighter. I went into a tobacconist’s shop. In front of me, a customer was choosing a cigar, and I swear that I saw him take a cigar-stub from the box, which terminated mid-band in a cylinder of ash, as if someone had already begun smoking it.
What does it mean? Should I already be seeing the repetition of these strange scenes as a mysterious warning?
A hard day.
As soon as I woke up, the alarming details began to multiply: my hand-towel was wet through when I picked it up to make use of it; in a new packet of Gillette razor-blades, the first one was covered in rust—although it didn’t shave any worse than any other. But let’s pass on…after what happened later, those annoyances no longer count for anything.
Having worked quite well during the morning, I decided to go and eat at Ballard’s, the restaurant on the corner of the boulevard, a place where one was once able to eat quite well at affordable prices. The soup was a funny color, but I drank it down. I’d ordered a Chateaubriand steak. The waiter brought it, swimming in an unidentifiable sauce, a kind of magma resembling in color and texture the vile pulp that badly brought-up children spit out on the edge of their plate.
“What’s this?”
“Chateaubriand, Monsieur.”
“I didn’t know they serve minced Chateaubriand here. Take that horror away!”
“Would Monsieur like a cutlet?”
The cutlet is approved. I wait. He brings me the same magma, in which he has merely disposed a bone—a cutlet indeed—but a bone already gnawed, to which nothing is appended but the debris of muscle. What a way to make mock of people! I looked at him. He met my gaze with an astonished insolence. There were people around; I dared not kick up a fuss. I had ordered—in advance, unhappily—a half-bottle of red burgundy. It was uncorked in front of me. In order not to suffer a total loss, I poured myself a glass; out of the bottle came a yellowish liquid resembling cat’s-piss. Immediately, I summoned the sommelier, who struck a pose in his black apron.
“Look!” I said, with concentrated fury.
“Is it corked?”
“I ordered red burgundy, and you’re serving me cocoa.”
He looked at the label and the glass, poured out a few drops, drank them, and looked at me in bewilderment. “But Monsieur, it’s an excellent burgundy…”
Anger took hold of me. I threw my napkin on the table and went out, regretting that I couldn’t slam the door, which was glazed. I marched along the boulevard like a mad
man, talking to myself in a loud voice, in search of a possible vengeance. Indignation had prevented me from seeing anything, when I came to a halt in front of a florist’s window near the Coupole.
Instead of the sparkling array of fresh flowers that was normally offered behind the curtain of streaming water, I saw nothing but dilapidated azaleas, blackened mimosas and withered carnations, giving the impression that the contents of a waste-sack had been exposed. Was this a new kind of advertisement?
An old woman, like those who sweep churches, stopped beside me and murmured delightedly; “How beautiful they are!”
In a flash, the truth struck me: I was afflicted by a visual disorder.
The window-display of a fruit merchant furnished me, alas, with irrefutable proof. On their bed of wadding, I could no longer see anything but the stones of cherries; the grapes had shriveled like raisins in the bosom of an old pudding, and the pineapples resembled the charred heads of Indians!
A visual disorder! In a painter! A cold sweat ran down my back. I needed an optician, an immediate eye test. Having never worn spectacles, I did not know where to go. I raced to the Optical Institute. The concierge snorted with laughter. “Get a telephone book—there’s no shortage of opticians…” From among the names, I chose the one inscribed in the largest letters. It was near the Place de l’Etoile. I hailed a cab; I was no longer alive…
At the optician’s, I read letters of all dimensions, I sat in all the armchairs, placed my head in the strangest apparatus, analyzed the threads of cloth of every color. After an hour, the practitioner told me: “I can’t find anything. The cornea, the lens and the retina are faultless…”
“Then, if my vision is intact, they’re hallucinations?”
He made no reply, but he gave me a funny look.
That’s how things stand.
As soon as I woke up, anguish took possession of my mind. Where are you, recent delights of the first contact with reality? The joys of living, working and placid meditation were out of the question. I paraded a fearful gaze around my room, not in order to see things, but to check the condition of my eyes. Everything had its usual appearance.
With the intention of obtaining a few books on visual hallucinations, I then set off for the bookshops in the vicinity of the School of Medicine. The sky was the slightly greyish blue of spring, but as I went through the Luxembourg gardens a fine rain began to fall on my hands, so surprising in that bright sunlight that I thought at first that I was within range of a sprinkler. The strollers were opening their umbrellas, however; it was a shower. In the shelter of a kiosk, I raised my eyes to the Heavens to see how long the rain would last; there was not a cloud in sight. I thought it very strange, but I would have thought no more of it had not a rather elegant lady, who had taken shelter alongside me, been holding a little dog on a leash, in a state of indescribable physical distress. It was not pitiful, it was atrocious, its flanks flattened, its jaw hanging down, its eyes almost out of their orbits, its legs twisted: an ambulant cadaver.
“Poor little beast,” I could not help sighing. “What happened to it?”
The dog’s owner shot me a suspicious glance, pulled on the leash to draw the animal closer to her and took that living wreck in her arms, without manifesting any disgust. I was feeling slightly sick when anxiety took hold of me. Was I seeing the dog as it really was?
Then the kind of panic that had gripped me the day before in the restaurant took hold of me again. I fled from the dog and the gardens to take refuge in the flowing crowd on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. I avoided looking at the passers-by for fear of finding opportunities for hallucination there, but my eyes encountered, involuntarily, a blackened façade, a curtain of twisted iron and a shop-window displaying charred shoes. Curiosity immobilized me on the sidewalk. People were entering and leaving the shop as if it were still open.
“When did that catch fire?” I wondered.
“Catch fire? What’s that?” someone nearby replied.
Prudence advised me not to reply. No doubt was any longer possible; I understood that I had to consult a psychiatrist.
Alas, I was all too familiar with torturers of that sort, from having seen them work on my poor father. Curious about your illness, but as far as caring for you is concerned, that’s another story: smooth talk that has no effect, or torture by electric shock…
Even if one detests firemen, though, one calls them when one’s house is on fire. Once, I had seen the name of Professor Adhésin at the clinic where my father was being cared for. He lived nearby, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
A nurse opened the door of the waiting-room. Scarcely had I entered than I jumped: there was a cadaver there, a cadaver sitting patiently, holding a copy of L’Illustration on his knees. Some old men can look like mummies, but this one was dead, I would have bet my right arm on it. His skull was yellow and striped with mold; his lowered eyelids left nothing visible of the eyes but white lines; his lips were bloodless, his features expressionless; his skeletal wrists were sticking out of his sleeves—the rounded sleeves of a corpse. My gaze searched for the wax candles and the crucifix…
The door opened slightly; the cadaver got up and disappeared into the consulting-room. I only got my breath back by slow degrees. I had scarcely recovered when my turn came to go in.
The white-coated professor was waiting behind his desk. He looked like a butcher in his Sunday best. With a condescending hand-gesture he waved me to a seat. He was trying to strike an imposing attitude, but one of the lenses in his spectacles was broken and starred, giving his globular eye the appearance of an exploded bull’s-eye. In a weary voice, he said: “Have I seen you before?”
“No…I’m not mad…” I began.
He smiled. I immediately understood the classic ineptness of my opening, and promptly added: “I’ve come about visual hallucinations.”
He affected to scribble on his notepad. In a tone of voice intended to signify a provocative superiority, he said: “What sort of visual hallucinations?”
Desirous of explaining things methodically and giving recent examples, I began with the first symptom that had struck me earlier that morning: “I can no longer see clouds…”
In an acid voice, with the incredulous condescension of a superior person talking to a poor specimen, he said: “You can no longer see clouds?”—giving the question an irony so stinging that my blood ran cold. Facing that chattering head, with the accompaniment of a blow of my fist on the table, I roared: “No, but I can still see cretins!”
With which I went out of the door without looking back.
My opinion is confirmed: a quack will always find that you have the illness in which he specializes; if you haven’t, he lashes out at you. It’s necessary to make one’s own diagnosis, to care for oneself by oneself.
All the same, what a disaster!
First of all, I must try to understand what has happened to me. Thus, I have carried out various sorts of experiments all day long.
The illness is real; I am the victim of visual disturbances.
All nourishment appears to me in a rotten form. For example, at the stall of a wholesale butcher near Les Halles, for some time I watched the delivery of sheep arriving straight from the abattoir, having been freshly slaughtered. I saw nothing but collections of bones, like the carcasses of camels in the desert. For me, the croissants on all the counters of the bars take on a viscous, grey appearance; one would think that they had already been eaten and half-digested. Wine, beer, lemonade and everything else has the same color of piss. To the touch, even to the taste—I had the courage to eat a croissant—nothing is changed. Thus, fortunately, only sight is affected.
The hallucination does not stop at foodstuffs, but extends to anything perishable. In spite of numerous attempts—I went to the Madeleine market especially—I have not been able to find a single intact flower in all Paris. There are also the newspapers—more perishable matter. Those that I picked up today were almost unreadable, so crumpled and creased w
ere they. One might have thought that they had served to wrap up God knows how many parcels.
For the rest—people, houses, carriages—nothing is altered in appearance except for the cadaver seen in the professor’s waiting-room and the dog in the Luxembourg gardens, which I had forgotten. They were perishable too, evidently, but no more than the others—unless their deaths were closer at hand? Might I be having presentiments of the future? If I interrogate myself, that’s not the impression I get. I see what I see, without any suggestion of the future being added to it.
The proof of that is that Armande came to surprise me in the midst of these reflections, without my having the slightest presentiment of her approach. She could easily see that I was preoccupied. I talked about my work…
(My poor work! Can I continue to paint? For the moment, the mental effort that seeks to understand occupies me fully, but in time…)
In any case, I refrained from telling Armande about my condition—but I have to be careful. For instance, Armande’s dress was frayed, and I remarked upon it unthinkingly.
“What?” she replied, mechanically smoothing the fabric over her thighs. “It’s fresh from the dry-cleaner’s.”
I blushed, and changed the subject. I’m going to have to keep watch on myself constantly, in order not to give myself away.
I don’t believe that it’s a question of hallucination, strictly speaking. Hallucinations have an episodic, fortuitous, vaporous character. They appear and disappear, rather like ghosts. Now, I see things distorted, or rather modified, in a constant fashion, as regularly as if it were a matter of an ordinary phenomenon. My vision is naturally altered, if I might put it thus, and it seems to me to be difficult to incriminate my mind, which has never before furnished such loyal and seemingly-sincere efforts.
To say that I have become accustomed to my condition would be an exaggeration—at noon, again, I recoiled before the sight of the rabbit casserole that I was brought—but, in sum, I’m getting on with things. I empty my plate, looking elsewhere so far as is possible. My mind is sufficiently occupied in reflection not to linger on the repulsion that the new aspect of things inspires. I must first succeed in defining clearly what had happened to me. A little while ago, there was an instructive incident.
The Eye of Purgatory Page 16