In the thatched hut where I found her, no one took care of her other than giving her something to eat and helping her to avoid dying, for I don’t dare say living. Her obscure universe was bordered by the walls of this unique room that she never left. On summer days she had barely dared to go near the entryway, when the door remained opened on the great light universe. Later on she told me that when hearing the songs of birds, she imagined them to be a pure effect of the light and the warmth that she felt caressing her cheeks and hands. Without having thought about it precisely, it appeared to her completely natural that hot air would begin to sing like water does when it boils next to the fire. The truth is that she was never bothered by anything, that she paid attention to nothing and lived in a state of profound numbness up until the day that I started taking care of her. I remember her inexhaustible delight when I taught her that these small voices were emanated by living creatures whose only function was to feel and express the sparse joy of nature. (This is the day when she began the habit of saying, “I am as happy as a bird.”) However, the idea that these songs were telling the splendor of a spectacle that she could not contemplate had begun to make her melancholy.

 

“Is it really true,” she said, “that the earth is as beautiful as the birds say it is? Why don’t we talk about it more? Why don’t you tell me more about it? Is it for fear of hurting me because I cannot see it? You would be wrong. I hear the birds very well. I believe that I understand everything they are saying.”

 

“Those who can see do not hear them as well as you, my Gertrude,” I said to her while trying to console her.

 

“Why don’t other animals sing?” she asked again. Sometimes her questions surprised me and I remained perplexed for a minute, because she forced me to think about things that until then I accepted without question. It was thus that I considered, for the first time, that the more an animal is attached to the earth and the more weight it has, the more it is sad. This is what I tried to make her understand, and I told her of the squirrel and of its games.

 

She asked me then if the birds were the only animals that flew.

 

“There are also the butterflies,” I said to her.

 

“And do they sing?”

 

“They have another means of expressing their joy,” I said. “They have colors inscribed on their wings,” and I described the streaks of colors of the butterflies to her.

28 February

 

I will take a step back because yesterday I let myself wander.

 

In order to teach Gertrude I had to learn the alphabet of blind people for myself. But soon she became much more capable than me to read this writing that I had difficulty recognizing, and on top of that, I followed it more readily with my eyes than with my hands. In addition, I was not the only one to instruct her. And at first I was happy to have this help because I had much to do in the community where the houses are dispersed in such a way that my visits to the poor and sick obliged me to make journeys that were sometimes far away. Jacques had managed to break his arm while ice-skating during the Christmas vacation that he spent with us, for in the meantime he had returned to Lausanne where he had already begun his first studies, having entered into the Faculty of Theology. The fracture did not present any difficulties, and Martins, whom I had called right away, treated it easily without the need for a surgeon. But the precautions that he required Jacques to take meant he had to stay at the house for some time. He suddenly became quite interested in Gertrude who up until then he had barely even thought about, and he took up helping me teach her how to read. His collaboration only lasted for the time of his convalescence, about three weeks, but during that time Gertrude made exceptional progress. An extraordinary zeal stimulated her at present. It seemed that this intelligence, which yesterday was still numb, manifests itself brilliantly today. It was as if she started to run almost before she started walking. I admired with what little difficulty she could formulate her thoughts and how promptly she managed to express them in a proper manner, helping herself create an image of the idea or the object that we wanted to teach her. Sometimes we would discuss with her and describe for her something that we could not directly put in her hands. We would try to refer to things she did know in those cases until she got the idea, proceeding almost in the manner of a rangefinder.

 

But I don’t believe it is useful to note here all of the first echelons of this instruction which, without doubt, are used to teach all blind people. And I think that, for each one of those blind persons, the question of colors has plunged every teacher into the same kind of embarrassment. (And on this subject I am called to remark that nowhere in the gospel is the subject of colors discussed.) I do not know how the others proceeded, but I began by naming for her the colors of the prism in the order that the rainbow presents them to us.