While we kept Robinson’s eyes bandaged, he told me about his beginnings in life. When he was eleven, his parents had apprenticed him to a high-class shoemaker. One day he delivered a pair of shoes to a lady customer, and she invited him to share a pleasure which up until then he had known only in his imagination. He was so horrified by what he had done that he never went back to his boss. In those days fucking a customer was still an unforgivable crime. Especially the lady’s chemise, all of chiffon, had had a phenomenal effect on him. Thirty years later he remembered that chemise in every detail. The lady swishing through her apartment full of cushions and fringed portieres, her pink and perfumed flesh, had given young Robinson food for interminable and despairing comparisons to last him the rest of his life.
Yet a good many things had happened since. He’d seen continents and been through whole wars, but he’d never recovered from that revelation. It gave him pleasure to think about it, to tell me about the minute of youth he had enjoyed with the lady customer. “Having my eyes closed like this makes me think,” he observed. “It’s like a parade … Like having a movie show in my bean …” 1 didn’t dare tell him that he’d have time to get awfully sick of his little movie show. Since all thought leads to death, a day would come when he’d see nothing else in his movie show.
Not far from the Henrouilles’ house there was a little factory with a big engine in it. It shook their house from morning to night. And there were other factories a little further away that thumped and pounded the whole time, even at night. “We’ll be gone when the roof caves in,” Henrouille would joke, but he was kind of worried all the same. “It’ll happen sooner or later!” It was true that bits of plaster were falling from the ceiling. An architect tried to reassure them, but whenever you stopped in that house to listen to what was going on, you felt as if you were on a ship, sailing from one fear to another. Passengers, shut up between decks, making plans even sadder than life, economizing and dreading the darkness as well as the light.
Henrouille would go up to the bedrooom after lunch to read a while to Robinson, as I’d asked him to. The days passed. He treated Henrouille, too, to the story about that marvelous lady customer he had laid in the days of his apprenticeship. After a while the story became a kind of collective joke for everyone in the house. That’s what happens to our secrets when we spread them abroad. There’s nothing terrible inside us or on earth or possibly in heaven itself except what hasn’t been said yet. We won’t be easy in our minds until everything has been said once and for all, then we’ll fall silent and we’ll no longer be afraid of keeping still. That will be the day.
In the weeks while his eyelids were suppurating, I was able to entertain him with fairy tales about his eyes and the future. Sometimes I’d pretend the window was closed when it was wide open and sometimes that it was very dark outside.
But one day when my back was turned he went to the window himself to see what was what, and before I could stop him he had slipped the bandage off his eyes. He hesitated for quite a while. He touched the window frame first on the right, then on the left. He couldn’t believe it, but in the end he had to. There was no getting around it.
“Bardamu!” he shouted. “Bardamu! It’s open! The window’s open, I tell you!” I didn’t know what to say. I stood there like an idiot. He was holding both arms out of the window, in the fresh air. Naturally he couldn’t see a thing, but he felt the air. He stretched his arms out in his darkness as far as he could, as if he were trying to touch the end of it.
