An Artist for the Blind

A drabble-type thing I wrote once after meeting someone visually impaired. I shared it with him, and he smiled.

The first time Richard saw Valerie and Alex together, she was pulling him by the hand along an uneven path, telling him where the rocks were.  They stumbled slowly through the trees, laughing together, until they reached the clearing where Richard was waiting with the others.  Valerie drew in an audible breath.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.  Regret flitted over Alex’s face as he turned his sightless eyes towards where he could hear the children playing.  ‘No, not there,’ Valerie murmured, taking his hand and guiding him forward.  ‘Careful now, we’re going to climb the rock,’ she cautioned, helping him slowly up the face of it.

  ‘The air is different,’ Alex noted.  ‘Are we standing on a cliff?’  Richard stared in astonishment: he could tell from the way the air moved?

  ‘Right on the edge,’ Valerie assured him.  ‘Don’t lean forward, or I’ll lose you!’  They both laughed.

  ‘What’s down there?’ Alex asked.

  ‘A river.  The water is a murky greenish-brown, and moves slowly.  There are rocks dotted through it, so that I’m sure when it rains, it becomes a rapid.  Both sides of the gorge are steep and messy, this side is worst, I think.  It’s just a tangle of half-dead thickets of trees, all grey and dusty green.  The other side has conifers on it, and I think the floor must be made of pine needles.  It’s got far fewer shrubs, and I think the soil is washing away, because there are sloppy canyons all over.’  Valerie frowned for a moment.  ‘Reach out your hand to the right.’

  Richard watched Alex stretch his hand out until it touched the coarse grey rock they were standing on.

  ‘It’s rough and gritty.  It feels like survival.’

  ‘That’s what it looks like,’ Valerie said, ‘but it’s all covered in a bluish-grey mist so that it looks like a watercolour painting.  It almost doesn’t look real.  Even the green of the grass beside the river is muted and distant.  It’s rugged and harsh, with the European conifers meeting Australian scrub, and the mist just makes it seem so impossible.’

  ‘I see it,’ Alex said quietly.  Then: ‘You’re smiling, aren’t you?’ Alex asked her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I see?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Alex lifted both hands, freeing one from Valerie’s grasp, and brought them to her face, fingers settling around her brow and over her eyes, thumbs brushing along her cheekbones, palms over her mouth.  A smile lifted his own lips as the two of them stood there like that for a long moment.  Richard knew he was being rude, staring at them, intruding on their private moment together, but he couldn’t drop his eyes.

  ‘Beautiful,’ Alex murmured.  Valerie’s face twisted into a bigger smile, her eyebrows lifting under Alex’s fingertips.

 

  Inevitably, it was then that one of the children broke the moment by loudly asking why his hands were on her face.  Alex and Valerie turned towards the child, both of them smiling, as they came over.

  ‘I can’t see with my eyes, so I need to use my hands to see,’ Alex explained.

  The little boy’s eyes rounded in amazement.  ‘You can see with your hands?’ he asked.

  ‘Not the same way you can see with your eyes,’ Alex chuckled.

  ‘Here,’ Valerie said, picking something off the ground.  ‘Close your eyes.’  She handed the child the object.  ‘Now, with your eyes closed, can you tell me what that is?’

  ‘It’s a gum leaf!’ the boy cried.

  ‘It is.  That’s what Alex does with his hands.  He can’t see me smile with his eyes, so he uses his hands.’

  The other children had crowded in at their explanation.  One of the girls put her hand up, like she was in school.

  ‘Does that mean you can’t see anything at all?’ she piped.

  ‘No, I can’t see anything.  That's why Valerie has to tell me about everything, and paint pictures in my head.  She’s an artist,’ he added.  ‘An artist for the blind.’

  Richard never saw them again, and he wasn’t sure Alex had ever even known he was there, but painted on the inside of his eyelids was the image of a kind young woman, face creased in happiness, and a young man using his hands for his eyes.