Pianist in the Dark (5 page)

Madame Mesmer listened to it carefully, detecting in it everything one woman knows intuitively about another when both are interested in the same man. She felt pity for this vulnerable young woman of extremes. Even if she had wanted to, which was not the case, she would have been powerless to protect her. One woman’s experience can never help another. In love, suffering is the only way to learn: to give in to passion body and soul, to get burnt by the flames of turmoil, incomprehension, jealousy, disappointment, bitterness—then to go off in a corner and lick your wounds, hoping to give less of yourself, and less naïvely, the next time around. Love is like Sisyphus’s boulder. You hope each time you’ll push it to the top of the mountain, but either it falls or it fissures. The reality of love matures young hearts. It can also destroy frail souls.

That evening he found her sitting by her bedroom window. The curtains had yet to be drawn on the moonless night, illuminated intermittently by carriage lanterns.

“You could be painted like this, wistful in the half-light. What are the street sounds telling you?”

He sat next to her on the couch. He felt drained. Between his voyage and his patients in the pavilion he had expended too much energy in too short a time.

“They speak to me of a Vienna that I do not know. A city where men dress in tailcoats, where women put on jewelry and perfume before kissing their children good night, where the theaters and opera houses are getting ready to open their doors—a city where people sing and dance, and drink up culture and wine.”

“I can supply you with music, wine, and conversation,” he joked as he started undoing the knots of her blindfold.

She stopped his hands with her own.

“Are you sure?”

“A doctor never stops doubting, but it is time to give it a try.”

She put her hands back on her dress. He gradually loosened the blindfold.

“I am going to set your eyelids free, but do not open your eyes until I tell you to.”

She smelled the rosewater that he had poured onto the compresses he used to cleanse her eyes, extremely gently, barely touching her face.

Then, nothing. Then, once again, that warm wave, a silk brush passing by her eyes without touching them.

“No pain? No burning? Turn toward me. Now open your eyelids.”

The shadows were back. Less dim, less opaque. She reached out her arms toward him.

“I see ... a shape ... It is moving ... I see you.”

She clasped her eyes in her hands.

“It itches! My eyes are tingling!”

Mesmer leaped up, triumphant.

“This is excellent!”

He was overtaken by excitement and pride. The fatigue seemed to disappear from his body.

“This is the sign I’ve been waiting for. You will no longer wear a blindfold at night. Your eyes will start to breathe again and begin to be able to bear the light. Follow me with your eyes.”

He moved about the room and she tried not to lose sight of him.

“It is very painful. When I move my eyes it is like having needles stuck into my skull.”

Mesmer’s shadow raised an arm.

“What do you see at the end of my arm?”

“I see a shadow that is less dark.”

He raised the other arm.

“Ah, that spot is darker.”

Mesmer laughed with delight. He shook his arms, first one, then the other. Each hand was holding a piece of cloth.

“White, black. White, black.”

“White is more painful than black.”

He walked back toward her and sat by her side.

“You will regain your sight. You want to. I can feel this energy in you, and thanks to it, I will be able to heal you.”

He called for Anna and Madame Mesmer. They both congratulated Maria Theresia. She was given a glass of wine, which she barely touched. Her head was spinning—too much noise, too many people.

She lay down, put her hands to her eyes and then to her ears, to isolate herself a bit.

She felt like laughing and crying. She knew what would cure her, even if he didn’t. It wasn’t her desire to see. It was her desire to please him. This energy he felt was the love he’d inspired in her.

T
HREE WEEKS LATER SHE HAD MADE NOTICEABLE
progress, slowly getting used to the variations of light. Daylight was still too violent, but late in the afternoon and in the evening she was able to do more and more exercises; she was learning to distinguish colors, if not yet retaining their names. Gradually the headaches and the itching diminished, and the shadows became less blurry.

The hardest thing those first few weeks was to learn to work the eye muscles. Moving her eyes up and down, left and right, required an enormous effort. Her vision was still cloudy but, as she was wont to say, “I can make out more and more what’s moving around in my fog.”

She could increasingly discern outlines, then, still somewhat roughly, features. It was as if someone had placed thick pieces of distorting glass over her eyes.

She had a few surprises, some of them pleasant, like the sight of Mesmer’s dog, a brown spaniel with long ears and sad eyes. She took a liking to it. She also loved pigeons, ducks, and all animals, generally speaking.

She had a harder time getting used to humans. It was the nose that bothered her most. It disrupted the harmony of the face. She saw it as a visible sign of a person’s personality. Madame Mesmer had a small nose? “A short nose for an arid heart.” Anna’s was flat? Fitting for a young woman whom Maria Theresia considered “even-tempered.” As for Mesmer’s, straight with perfectly rounded nostrils, she decided that it was “masterful.”

Maria Theresia had ambivalent feelings concerning her cure. There was the thrill of novelty, the daily discovery of a more clear-cut horizon, even if she could never fully grasp the distance separating herself from what was within her view: She could not tell the difference in distance, for example, between Mesmer’s face and the hill in the window frame, and she thought them both within reach of her hand.

Nevertheless, despite the thrill of waking up every day and being able to focus more and more on the objects and landscapes in her midst, she was again thrust into a state of anxiety that she couldn’t shake off. She tried to reason with herself, to account it to fatigue, because, in addition to learning to see, she had to learn the names of everything she saw. She had a hard time keeping track of this divvying up of words that seemed to her perfectly subjective and, quite honestly, nonsensical. Why a “chest of drawers” and a “wardrobe”? Why give a different word to each since both of them served the same purpose in her room? What made some words masculine and others feminine?

What discouraged her most was this newly acquired awkwardness of hers. Blind, she had always been admired for the ease with which she moved from one place to another. Now she was a clumsy creature, banging into furniture that she used to skirt around gracefully. Anna insisted that it was a matter of time, that she was too impatient, that the patients in the pavilion encountered similar difficulties getting over similar hurdles. Regardless, Maria Theresia felt diminished. Trying to assimilate all these new aspects of everyday life seemed beyond her.

Franz Anton Mesmer was infinitely patient, alternating strictness and gentleness, authority and humor. If he had an idea of the feelings she bore him, he never let it show. However, she felt that the bond uniting them was different from the usual one between doctor and patient. The results obtained and the efforts required would have justified that he allow a certain familiarity to develop. This was not the case. On the contrary. Mesmer forced upon himself a formality that betrayed an ambivalence he wanted to hide from her.

O
NE EVENING ON HIS WAY BACK FROM SUPPER, HE
heard her crying from the entrance hall. He called Anna, who told him that Mademoiselle Paradis had blocked her door with the armchair. It was after midnight. The spaniel was whimpering in unison with her, running back and forth between the legs of his master and the rooms of his new friend.

It took a lot of persuading on Mesmer’s part, but after a few long minutes he heard a piece of furniture being moved. He pushed open the door, only to come across a red face still moist with tears. Her eyes were so swollen that her gaze was inscrutable, but her demeanor left no doubt as to her utter distress.

He carried her almost all the way to her bed and sat down beside her. Her body was writhing in spasms as she wrenched her hands and dug her nails into her palms, unaware of the pain. He took her hands in his.

“What has broken your heart?”

She turned away from him without answering.

“Is it solitude that is making your suffer?”

She let out a bitter sigh but did not utter a word.

“Is the sorrow so great that even the piano in the library is of no consolation?”

She fell to his feet and started sobbing with renewed vigor. He leaned down to her, lifted her and held her in his arms as if she were a frightened child.

“What is this look of horror? What is terrifying you so much?”

She huddled against him, burying her head in his chest, shaking it left and right. He rocked her in his arms, stroking her hair. He stopped questioning her, waiting for her to calm down.

He took out a handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her.

“There, there ... Come now ... Maria Theresia, you have me worried ... Talk to me. Your sorrow is suffocating you. That’s why your body is quivering. It needs oxygen. You need to say what is making you suffer. I won’t tell anyone. You have my word.”

This almost made her smile, but it was a hint of a smile so disillusioned that his heart sank.

“A man’s word no longer means anything to me. My father didn’t keep his word and here I am. I am lost, don’t you see? You’ve destroyed something and replaced it with nothing. I’m not blind, but I cannot see. I’m living in a muddled limbo where I can’t see much of anything and struggle to learn things that a three-year-old understands. I am no longer myself, but I haven’t become someone else.”

Her voice was getting louder, her anger more acute. She started shrieking:

“I can’t play any more, do you hear me? That’s what has happened, that’s what is suffocating me. Yes, I’m choking with anger! I don’t know how to play piano any more!”

She stood up, fueled by the rage burning inside her, out of control.

“When I sit at the keyboard, I see my hands and I freeze. My fingers have stopped obeying me. I stumble over notes. I’m off-key and imprecise! My playing is shoddy! I’ve lost my rhythm and my skill. Seeing has given me lead fingers! Do you hear? Lead! I didn’t ask anything of anyone but everyone wants to treat me. It’s the deal of the century! The stakes are high! Who wants to cure Mademoiselle Paradis? Step forward, mesdames et messieurs! Who wants a go? Does it make her ill? All the better! Cure her and you’ll have fame and glory! So why worry about one little lady when the world can be yours!”

Fists clenched, she leaned over him and started pummeling him. He did not try to dodge her blows or to protect himself.

“So that’s the way it is! You persuaded my father that you’d be the champion? I’m your trophy, right? You’ll pin my eyes to your vest. They’ll be your pride and glory! Take them! I don’t want these eyes any more. Make yourself a medal, a crown. I don’t want them, I don’t want anything, I just want to go home to some peace and quiet... .”

The flow of her tears seemed never-ending. Her words became incomprehensible, incoherent. Her punches grew weaker and weaker until she wore herself out against his body, as he bore the brunt of her anger with a certain sadness.

He was sure that she would eventually regain her musical skills and resume the course of her life with no damage other than the years wasted by her blindness. He was absolutely persuaded of this. But he could see the extent of her distress, and it left him shattered.

It was the first time he’d felt anything like this. Until now he had contented himself to cure his patients without taking heed of their emotional tumult. He had treated major hysterics and egocentric neurotics whose illnesses kept them company. His patients all displayed their pain as well as their healing in a highly theatrical fashion. Convulsions, screaming, physical violence—their mental suffering lived inside them like a wild beast. They were under its influence. They couldn’t fight. It drained them of their willpower.

Maria Theresia was nothing of the sort. First of all, she never played the role of victim. Being blind was part of her inherent makeup and she never seemed to question it. Some people are born with a clubfoot, protruding ears, or a hook nose. She was lacking in visual perception. But she was unaware of the ways in which she made up for it. Her perfectly oval face, her translucent complexion, her pale eyes, her silken hair, her graceful bearing in every circumstance. Then there was her elegant figure and her statuesque height. That was the first thing that had struck him the evening she came to hear him play the glass-harmonica.

Since then he had grown to appreciate her other qualities—her exceptional personality, her rare intelligence, and especially her natural poise, her frankness, a vivaciousness that distinguished her from all other girls of her background.

Maria Theresia was not trained in the game of coquetry. She knew nothing of the rules of seduction practiced in her social milieu. She never playacted, never simpered. Her mastery of her childhood misfortune made of her an old soul, lucid and intransigent, steadfast in her desire never to give in to pity or false sentiments. She was in a state of permanent alert, analyzing the intentions behind every intonation, refusing to be trapped in the role of the disabled, or even that of the patient. She put herself on the same level as whoever was speaking to her and expected that he or she do the same. Out of the question was it to inundate her with words, to make conversation—and heaven help the person who tried to cajole her with flattery. She was a responsible adult and expected to be treated as such.

For Mesmer, this kind of relationship was new. Although his other patients were older, none of them had this courage, this willpower, this hunger, this absolute need to be treated as a person. She had a very strong idea of what human relations should be. The other patients were interested only in their own mental states. Maria Theresia never indulged in any moments of elation that were in fact disguised forms of agitation. This was the other patients’ forte. Mesmer admired her mental grit. He found her extraordinary in every way.