‘Good for him,’ said
Van. ‘Really it has no importance. It’s our entire past that has been spoofed
and condemned. On second thoughts, I will not write that Family Chronicle. By
the way, where is my poor little Blanche now?’
‘Oh, she’s all right.
She’s still around. You know, she came back — after you abducted her. She
married our Russian coachman, the one who replaced Bengal Ben, as the servants
called him.’
‘Oh she did? That’s
delicious. Madame Trofim Fartukov. I would never have thought it.’
‘They have a blind
child,’ said Ada.
‘Love is blind,’ said Van.
‘She tells me you
made a pass at her on the first morning of your first arrival.’
‘Not documented by
Kim,’ said Van. ‘Will their child remain blind? I mean, did you get them a really first-rate
physician?’
‘Oh yes, hopelessly
blind. But speaking of love and its myths, do you realize — because I never did
before talking to her a couple of years ago — that the people around our affair
had very good eyes indeed? Forget Kim, he’s only the necessary clown — but do
you realize that a veritable legend was growing around you and me while we
played and made love?' (2.7)
One Spencer Muldoon,
born eyeless, aged forty, single, friendless, and the third blind character in
this chronicle, had been known to hallucinate during fits of violent paranoia,
calling out the names of such shapes and substances as he had learned to
identify by touch, or thought he recognized through the awfulness of stories
about them (falling trees, extinct saurians) and which now pressed on him from
all sides, alternating with periods of stupor, followed invariably by a return
to his normal self, when for a week or two he would finger his blind books or
listen, in red-lidded bliss, to records of music, bird songs, and Irish
poetry. (3.4)
In my previous post I forgot to mention that Dea, Ursus'
adopted daughter in Hugo's L'Homme qui rit, is blind.
Dea = eda
dea - Lat., goddess
eda - Russ., food
Kim Beauharnais is a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis.
Van puts out his eyes with an alpenstock. (2.11)
Alexey Sklyarenko