The Blind Man
Why is the first sunshine so delightful? Why does the light falling upon the earth fill us so with the happiness of living? The sky is all blue, the country all green, the houses all white; and our charmed eyes drink in these living colours, wherewith they fashion joy for our souls. And we feel impulsive desires to dance, to run, to sing, a happy lightness of the spirit, a kind of broadened, liberated tenderness; we feel as if we would like to embrace the sun.
The blind men in the doorways, impassive in their eternal darkness, remain calm as ever in the midst of this new gaiety of life and, incomprehending, they keep on quieting their dogs who long to gambol.
When they go home, at the end of the day, on the arm of a young brother or little sister, if the child says: “It has been a lovely day!” they will reply: “Yes, I knew very well it was a fine day, Loulou would not keep still.”
I knew one of these men, whose life was one of the most cruel martyrdoms that can be dreamt of.
He was a peasant, the son of a Norman farmer. As long as his father and mother were alive, fairly good care was taken of him; he hardly suffered except from his horrible infirmity; but as soon as the old people were gone, his appalling existence began. Taken in by a sister, he was treated by everyone on the farm as a beggar who ate the bread of others. At every meal his food was grudged him; he was called sluggard and booby; and although his brother-in-law had got possession of his share of the inheritance, his broth was given him with reluctance, and only in just sufficient quantity to keep him from death.
His face was very pale, and his two eyes were large and white like sealing-wafers; he remained impassive under all insults, so walled up in himself that no one knew whether he felt them. And he had never known any affection, his mother having always been a trifle harsh with him, loving him very little; for in the country the useless are nuisances, and peasants would gladly copy the fowls, that kill off the weakly among themselves.
As soon as his soup was swallowed, he would go and sit before the door in summer, beside the fire in winter, and would not move till evening. He made no gesture, no movement; only his eyelids, shaken by a kind of nervous affliction, would occasionally fall over the white spots of his eyes. Had he a spirit, a mind, a clear consciousness of his life? No one wondered.
For a few years things went on like this. But his inability to do anything, as much as his imperturbability, ended by exasperating his relations, and he became a scapegoat, a sort of buffoon-martyr, a kind of prey sacrificed to the natural ferocity and savage merriment of the brutes around him.
They thought of all the cruel jests which his blindness inspired. And, in order to pay themselves for what he ate, they turned his meals into hours of pleasure for the neighbours and of torture for the helpless wretch.
The peasants of the neighbouring houses came to this entertainment; stories of it ran from door to door, and the farm kitchen was full every day. Sometimes a cat or a dog was put on the table, in front of the plate from which he was beginning to take his soup. Instinctively the animal would realise the man’s infirmity and would very softly draw near, eating without a sound, lapping it up delicately; and when a rather noisy splashing of the tongue had aroused the poor wretch’s attention, it would prudently draw away to avoid the random blow from the spoon that followed.
Then there was much laughter, nudging, and stamping from the spectators crowded along the walls. And without saying a word he would begin to eat again, with his right hand, while, with his outstretched left arm, he protected and defended his plate.
Sometimes they made him eat corks, wood, leaves, or even filth, which he could not distinguish.
Then they even wearied of their pleasantries; and the brother-in-law, growing angry at always having to feed him, struck him, and constantly boxed his ears, laughing at his victim’s futile efforts to ward off the blows or return them. This became a new game: the slap game. The ploughboys, the labourer, and the maids were constantly thrusting their hands at his face, and this produced a hurried twitching in his eyelids. He did not know where to hide, and kept his arms constantly extended to avoid their assaults.
At last they forced him to beg. They placed him on the roads on market days, and, as soon as he heard a sound of footsteps or the rattle of a carriage, he would hold out his hat, faltering: “Charity, if you please.”
But the peasant is not free with his money, and, during entire weeks, he did not bring home a halfpenny.
Then their real hatred was unchained, pitiless. And this is how he died:
One winter, the earth was covered with snow, and it froze appallingly hard. His brother-in-law, one morning, led him a long way off to a high road to make him beg for alms. He left him there all day, and when night was come, he told his household that he had not been able to find him. “But there!” he added, “we mustn’t bother, someone will have taken him off because he was cold. Of course he isn’t lost. He’ll come back tomorrow to eat his broth all right.”
The next day he did not come back.
After long hours of waiting, gripped by the cold, feeling that he was dying, the blind man had begun to walk. Unable to make out the road, which was buried under this froth of ice, he had wandered at random, falling into ditches and rising again, always silent, searching for a house.
But the numbness of the snows had gradually taken hold on him, and, his weak limbs unable to carry him farther, he had sat down in the middle of a field. He never got up again.
The white flakes fell steadily and buried him. His stiffened body disappeared under the ceaseless accumulation of the infinite multitude of them; and nothing indicated the spot where the corpse lay.
His relatives made a show of inquiring and searching for him for eight days. They even cried.
The winter was a hard one, and the thaw did not come soon. But one Sunday, on their way to Mass, the farmers noticed a great flock of crows hovering continually over the field, then swooping down like a black shower of rain, in troops, to the same spot, constantly rising from it again and returning to it.
The following week the dark birds were still there. The sky bore a cloud of them, as though they had assembled from every corner of the horizon; and they dropped down with a great clamour to the dazzling snow, making a strange-looking pattern of spots upon it, and obstinately searching in it.
A boy went to see what they were doing, and found the body of the blind man, already half-eaten, torn to shreds. His pale eyes had vanished, pricked out by the long, ravenous beaks.
And I can never feel the vivid gaiety of days of sunshine without a sad remembrance and a melancholy thought of the poor wretch, so robbed of all things in life that his horrible death was a relief to all who had known him.