And There Was Light Read online

  I no longer saw faces, and knew in all probability I should go through life without seeing them. Sometimes I should have liked to touch them when they seemed to me beautiful. But society is careful to ban such gestures. As a rule it forbids any move which might bring human beings closer to each other. In doing so, society believes it is acting for the best, defending us against the assaults of immodesty and violence. Perhaps with good reason for men are often beasts. But how could a blind child recognize the danger? For him such bans were impossible to explain.

  Nevertheless, I made the most of voices, in a domain which society has never intruded upon. It is strange that when laws men make are so ticklish in matters concerning the body, they never set limits to nakedness or contact by voice. Evidently they leave out of account the fact that the voice can go further than hands or eyes in licit or illicit touch.

  Furthermore, a man who speaks does not realize that he is betraying himself. When people addressed me, a blind child, they were not on guard. They were persuaded that I heard the words they were saying, and understood what they meant. They never suspected that I could read their voices like a book. For example, the teacher of mathematics came into the classroom, clapped his hands and boldly began his lecture. He was lucid that day, as he usually was, perhaps more interesting than ever, a little too interesting. His voice, instead of falling into place at the end of the sentence, as it should have, going a tone or two down the scale, hung in the air, a bit sharp. It was as though the teacher wanted to hide something that day, put a good face on it before an unknown audience, prove that he was not giving in, that he would carry on to the end because he had to. Meanwhile, accustomed to the cadence of his sentences falling as regularly as the beat of a metronome, I listened attentively, and was distressed on his account. I wanted to help, but that seemed foolish for I had no reason for thinking him unhappy. All the same he was unhappy, bitterly unhappy. The terrible “intelligence” of gossip told us a week later that his wife had just left him.

  I ended by reading so many things into voices without wanting to, without even thinking about it, that voices concerned me more than the words they spoke. Sometimes, for minutes at a time in class, I heard nothing, neither the teacher’s questions nor the answers of my comrades. I was too much absorbed by the images that their voices were parading through my head. All the more since these images half the time contradicted, and flagrantly, the appearance of things. For instance, the student named Pacot had just been given 100 by the teacher of history. I was astonished, because Pacot’s voice had informed me, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he had understood nothing. He had recited the lesson, but only with his lips. His voice sounded like an empty rattle, with no substance in the sound.

  What voices taught me they taught me almost at once. There were some physical factors which threw me off — boys who breathed badly, who should have been operated on for tonsils or adenoids, and whose voices remained blanketed in cloud. Some could never muster anything but a ridiculous falsetto which made you think at first they were cowards. Then there were the nervous ones, the timid, who only used their voices at the wrong moment, and made themselves as small as possible under the mumbling. But if I was deceived by them, it was never for long.

  A beautiful voice (and beautiful means a great deal in this context, for it means that the man who has such a voice is beautiful himself) remains so through coughing and stammering. An ugly voice, on the contrary, can become soft, scented, humming, singing like the flute. But to no purpose. It stays ugly just the same.

  How should I explain to other people that all my feelings toward them, feelings of sympathy or antipathy, came to me from their voices? I tried to tell a few people it was so, that they could do nothing about it and neither could I. But soon I had to stop because it was clear that the idea was frightening to them.

  So there was a moral music. Our appetites, our humors, our secret vices, even our best-guarded thoughts were translated into the sounds of our voices, into tones, inflections or rhythms. Three or four notes too close to each other in a sentence announced anger, even if nothing made it visible to the eye. As for hypocrites, they were recognizable immediately. Their voices were tense, with small abrupt intervals between sounds, as though the speaker were determined never to let his voice go its own way.

  Later people spoke to me of a new science, the science of voices or phonology, stimulated by developments in radio and methods of indirect persuasion used in advertising. Would such a science be possible? Surely. But desirable? I am afraid not, for if the time should ever come when greedy and unscrupulous men mastered the art of the human voice, knew how to decipher it and modulate it at will, all that is left of liberty would be lost. Such men would have their hand on the hidden tiller. They would be like a latter-day Orpheus, charming the beasts and making the stones come to life. But remember that Orpheus had the right to his secret only as long as he refrained from abusing it.

  [ 5 ]

  MY FRIEND JEAN

  FOR SOME TIME since I have been talking to you, I have not been alone for Jean has joined us. You could not have known it, but he is there in everything I do and say. If I were not afraid of being needlessly obscure, for the nine years of my life which lie ahead I should never say “I” but “we.”

  In my first year at the lycée, in almost all my classes Jean sat at the table behind me. He chose this place himself. He didn’t want to leave me, but he had not told me so. For my part, I always wanted to turn around and hear his voice closer by — it was a wise voice, brighter than all the others, and it made me happy.

  We were not yet intimates, and didn’t dare suggest it to each other. Toward the end of the school year, his mother came to ask mine if he could come home with me every evening, to read me the books I needed and work with me. To our delight it came about right away. But who could have guessed then that this growing friendship would end in tragedy? Neither he nor I, I assure you. We were children and knew only that we loved each other.

  Jean was the son of an architect, a happy man and a good one who was to die of a heart attack four years later. His mother had been a painter. She was imaginative and gentle and unbelievably respectful of other people.

  At the age of eleven Jean was more innocent than any of my companions. He knew nothing about life, and at the time didn’t want me to teach him about it. With him it was partly modesty and partly the sense that things come about in their own time. He kept telling me that he could wait.

  In everything he was slower than I was. Sometimes his movements were a little heavy; he either bore down or fondled. When he shook your hand, he shook it too hard and too long. It almost hurt. He had the voice of an angelic countertenor. Till he was fourteen, it made him very anxious, for he wondered whether he was ever going to speak like a man. Then in two weeks in the spring of 1938 his voice fell three octaves, and turned into a noble and protective bass.

  To protect: the word expresses all the desires of which Jean was capable. Later on, when we had both learned about introspection, he told me how glad he was to be weak, since that would always keep him from abusing other people. But was he really weak? As far as the teachers were concerned, he was. Although he was very intelligent, the rhythm of his mind was slow and his speech grave. They accused him of being too phlegmatic. His face always wore a slightly surprised expression which stupid people mistook for irony.

  Jean entered life by all doors at the same time: through studies, imagination, affection and a sort of communion which can only be compared to the spiritual intimacy of marriage — such marriage as one rarely sees. He was serious, he was grave. Other words are really needed to express it, words like nobility and majesty, if only you could strip them of their stiffness and solemnity. He was more serious than I, less open to all the follies of instinct, and in these things, toward me, he acted as a brake.

  We were both hard-working boys, for books had caught us in their trap. The best present I ever gave Jean (or so he said) was a copy of Pelleas and
Melisande by Maeterlinck. We worked and we dreamed. For our two bodies we had only one head.

  His body grew much faster than mine, so that every year his hand had to drop farther to my shoulder. He held me by the shoulder only, and heaven is my witness that he held me tight! At sixteen, he was eight inches taller than I, a great strapping fellow, but thin and more and more serious.

  We had been together at the lycée from the beginning. That was the first of the seven years when we were never separated for more than forty-eight hours. And after the seven came two more, two stormy years. But it is too soon to talk about that. For nine years there was not an idea or an emotion which we did not share. And yet we were as different as could be.

  We listened to the same teachers, read the same books, had the same friends, made the same trips, awaited the same pleasures at the same hour, walked at the same pace, and, believe me, as he grew taller, that was hard for me. We were crazy together, sad at the same moment. When one of us didn’t know something it was because the other also was unaware of it. We were one to the point where we could communicate by telepathy. Yet for all that, we were still two, joyfully and freely two, so much so that each of us lived twice every day.

  What bound us together was not just friendship, it was a religion. The apartment house where I lived was halfway between the lycée and Jean’s house. Twice a day Jean made the trip on foot, picked me up and dropped me off on his way. I waited for him downstairs in the vestibule of the building. I loved waiting for him. When he was a little late, I could feel the ends of my fingers tingle, my throat tighten, not with uneasiness — but with joy. All of a sudden he was there in front of me, straight as a die, dependable as your word of honor. For a second or two he never said anything. Neither did I. We needed silence to find each other once more.

  When we were sixteen we solemnly decided that we would never exchange any of those trite phrases, none of those horrible expressions like “How are you?” “Pretty well. And yourself?” which make the noise of friendship and then collapse like bubbles a minute later. We had sworn to tell each other the truth, nothing but the truth, and if we couldn’t, to be silent. Just imagine two boys, one tall, the other of medium height, striding along paths in one of the forests in the Ile-de-France (Rambouillet, St-Germain, Chantilly), smiling at each other now and then but not talking for hours on end. There you have Jean and me, at fifteen, one day when we were not sure of ourselves, not sure we should not hurt each other if we spoke.

  How demanding we were in those days! Both of us were so certain that being honorable and respectful gives greater delight than all the pleasures in the world. Jean was born knowing it and had taught it to me. And I was not a bad pupil.

  We also knew how to chatter. In September 1940, one Sunday, I remember fourteen hours of talk, without interruption and with no witness. But when we talked on that way it was to search out and find each other. This was not just making sentences, it was exploring. Hours before our heads had stopped recording words and we had been speaking through intentions and movements of the spirit, communicating through lives open as a book.

  Jean picked me up every day to go to the lycée, whether it was raining, blowing or snowing. When we were together I don’t remember feeling that we were hot or cold, at least not enough for us to notice it. Physically I was never ill, but Jean sometimes was. For reasons which medicine never explained, he had terrible and frequent headaches. Then he got dizzy and had to lie down all day. Or, if he ventured out, his hands shook and his voice sounded smothered. I always knew he was unwell before he told me so, but I never talked to him about it. He had made me promise not to. As soon as the attack was over, his voice sang again. The first thing he did was to ask me to tell him what had happened in the world while he was out of it.

  In the end, people became so accustomed to seeing us together that they could hardly distinguish between us. Sometimes Jean said to me and I said to him that that was a pity and we should someday have to separate. But for us this idea was like thinking about death, and we rejected it immediately.

  Jean loved my being blind, because he thought that if I weren’t our friendship would never have been so complete. Besides, we were constantly lending each other our eyes. One day it was he who saw, the next it was I. Of that too we made an adventure.

  So as you see, Jean is here with us. So far I have not been able to show him very clearly and I am not sure I can do better. But I shall carry him along with me up to the time when he and I were both nineteen. In the end you will surely know him well.

  HAVE I TOLD YOU — I probably haven’t yet — that Jean and I made a pact from the start, declaring that both of us had the right to make friends as we liked, independently? This was not done to conserve our liberty (since for us liberty only seemed to begin with sharing all we had), but to protect the freedom of others. Anyone could confide in Jean and not in me, or vice versa. Sometimes people are so queer.

  The measure was a wise one as it turned out. Till 1938 most of my friends would not have tolerated Jean. They would have mistaken his innocence for silliness, and made life miserable for him. I knew there was no doubt about this, and kept these people at a distance. Now and then I felt ashamed of it, but it takes time for shame to affect our actions.

  I was still at the mercy of my passion for violent games. I still needed to run, either on the Champ de Mars or at Juvardeil. After school every afternoon I had to run around the Luxembourg hugging the fences — it came to about two and a half breathless miles. I had to cut across the grass in spite of the signs which said not to, or rather because of them. Running and shouting we spread panic among the baby carriages and the young mothers, who seemed very old to us in those days and deserving of such treatment. We made the dust fly up in clouds, sniffing the acetylene of the merry-go-round, tearing through the crowds, alarming the people passing by, raiding a record shop on the Boul Mich to hear the latest songs of Maurice Chevalier and Tino Rossi — all these experiments we regarded as the height of boldness. And for these exploits you can understand that Jean was not the man I needed.

  I needed boys ready for anything, ready if need be even to fake innocence to their families or in school.

  In all this, I was far away from Jean, in a no-man’s-land, an uneasy terrain suspended between childhood and adolescence. Like all the rest of my companions, I was full of clownish ignorance and precocious knowledge.

  I began to suspect that man has a body, and that it is sometimes a nuisance. He wants to enjoy it, but is not always allowed to. In the world of pleasure one comes upon innumerable rites, most of which are hidden. My pals in the Luxembourg were not like the ones at Juvardeil. When they looked at girls it was always on the sly. They thought about them but never touched them and in the long run this was a bad thing. In this respect they seemed to be living under the eye of some nameless police. Picture magazines, the movies and the radio turned their heads, and their heads turned in a vacuum.

  That’s why we made those frequent visits to the part of the Luxembourg where lovers were in the habit of meeting at night. We wanted to surprise them in the midst of the mystery, but we were disappointed every time, for there was no mystery. Here and there we saw an arm around a waist, a kiss that lasted a little longer than was sensible. But it was just like the movies and no more. We came home unsatisfied, and discussed feverishly the bits of life that we had picked up.

  I wasn’t happy away from Jean, especially away from that purity of his. But how was I to resist, especially when all these boys, who were trying so hard to forget their childhood, needed me? They told me so. Several of them had the idea that, being blind, I must be an expert in matters of feelings (that’s what they called the movements of their bodies, and it would be ungracious to reproach them, since most adults do exactly the same thing). Besides, a blind person was a witness beyond their dreams! Since he could not see the girls, it was necessary to explain them to him. Then too, there was no danger of his contradicting what he was told.

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sp; I took part in all these games, though not content with them, until the time when Jean set me free. When he was there the good side of me blossomed. Soon, I couldn’t even understand how only a few hours earlier I could have been interested in things that held so little of the ideal, so little hope. The boys in the Luxembourg became ugly to me, no longer children but not yet men. Already there was something unhealthy in them. I don’t know what it was, but Jean, for his part, kept his pride.

  He also talked to me about girls, but in the same manner as he would have talked about the stars: they were made to stay far away and to shine with a small flickering light for a long time. They never touched ground, and must neither be knocked against nor taken hold of, since they were the essence of gentleness. One should not even think about them all the way, since they were as important as the future.

  This kind of talk did me good. It held so much promise, and I knew that Jean, in himself alone, was more right than all the others put together.

  I knew this because even if all my escapades at the Luxembourg never carried me to the point of speaking to a girl, still I did meet some at home, the sisters of my companions or childhood friends. Jean, who in his innocence could foresee everything, kept telling me I should take advantage of their being there, for soon this would no longer be possible. He was quite right, for these were the last hours of that wonderful ease.

  I felt comfortable with girls. They were better listeners than boys. If only they didn’t pretend! But at the time the suspicion never occurred to me. Whenever I told a story, invented a make-believe scenario, or changed a book to fit my dreams (and when the girls were there I was inexhaustible) they were always willing to follow. Unlike boys, they never quibbled over ridiculous points of accuracy. They felt so much at home in the imagination that with them I could dream twice as hard. They always gave back an echo, and the more unreal my inventions, the happier the girls. They managed to dramatize the impossible.