The Pastoral Symphony Read Online

But soon she became confused about the difference between color and clarity, and I realized that her imagination did not allow her to make any distinction between the quality of the nuance and what painters call, I believe, “value.” She had the greatest difficulty to understand that each color could be more or less dark, and that they can be infinitely mixed. Nothing intrigued her more, and she returned to the subject often.

However, it was given to me to take her to Neuchâtel where we listened to a concert. The role of each instrument in the symphony permitted me to come back to this question of colors. I remarked to Gertrude about the different sounds of the brass, the stringed instruments, and the woodwinds, and that each one of them was able to offer in its own manner, and with more or less intensity, the entire scale of sounds from the lowest to the highest. I invited her to represent nature in the same way, the colors of red and orange analogous to the different sounds of horns and trombones, the yellows and the greens to those of violins, cellos, and basses, and the violets and blues recalling the differences between flutes, clarinets, and oboes. A sort of interior delight then came to replace her doubts.

“Oh how that must be beautiful!” She said.

Then, all of a sudden,

“But what about white? I do not understand what white would resemble.”

It then suddenly appeared to me how precarious my comparison was.

“White,” I tried to tell her in any case, “is the high limit where all the tones mixed together, like black is the low limit.”

But this did not satisfy me any more than it did her, since she quickly remarked that the woodwinds, the brass, and the violins kept distinct sounds from each other in the lowest as well as the highest notes. As it happened in the past, I remained silent at first, perplexed, looking for some other comparison that I could appeal to.

“Oh good!” I finally said to her, “Represent white as something that is completely pure, something that has no color but only light. Think about black, to the contrary, as being loaded with color until all of it has become obscured.”

I only recall this dialogue to point out an example of the difficulties that I bumped up against too often. Gertrude had some things that she never seemed to understand like people often do who fill their minds with imprecise or false facts and because of which any subsequent reasoning becomes flawed. Until an idea was clear in her mind, each notion remained a cause of worry and bother for her.

With regard to what I said above, the difficulty was increased by the fact that in her mind the notion of light and heat were at first tightly linked, such that I had great difficulty to dissociate them later.

And thusly I continued to try and deal with how the visual world and the world of sounds differed from each other and at what point all comparisons between the two for her become lame.

29 February

Having been completely wrapped up with my comparisons, I did not yet point out the immense pleasure that Gertrude took from this concert at Neuchâtel. It was precisely The Pastoral Symphony that was played there. I say, “precisely” because there was not, one can easily understand, another work that I would have more preferred for her to hear. For a long time after we left the concert hall, Gertrude remained silent as if drowning in ecstasy.

“Is what you see really as beautiful as that?” she finally said.

“As beautiful as what, my dear?”

“As this ‘Scene on the Bank of the River.’”

I did not respond to her immediately, for I was thinking that these indescribable harmonies painted not the world such that it is but what it could be if it were without evil and without sin. Never before had I dared to speak to Gertrude of evil, sin, or of death.

“Those who have eyes,” I finally said, “are not aware of their happiness.”

“But I who do not have them,” she said suddenly, “I know the happiness of hearing.”

She held herself close to me while we walked, and she weighed on my arm like little children do.

“Pastor, can you feel how happy I am? No, no, I do not say that just to make you feel good. Look at me. When someone says something that is not true, is it not possible to see that in the face? I can recognize it so well in the voice. Do you remember the day when you told me that you were not crying after my aunt (that is how she refers to my wife) reproached you for not doing anything for her? I wanted to cry out, ‘Pastor, you are lying!’ Oh! I sensed it right away in your voice that you were not telling me the truth. I did not need to touch your cheeks to know that you were crying.” And she repeated in a high voice, “No, I did not need to touch your cheeks.” This made me blush because we were still in the town and the passersby were turning around.

However, she continued. “There is no sense in trying to delude me, you see. First of all, because it would be very cowardly to try and fool a blind person. And then because you could not get away with it,” she added while laughing. “Tell me, Pastor, you are not unhappy, are you?”

I held her hand to my lips, as if to make her feel without confessing it to her that part of my happiness came from her. Then I responded, “No, Gertrude, no, I am not unhappy. Why would I be unhappy?”

“Do you cry sometimes, however?”

“I have cried sometimes.”

“Not since the time that I spoke of?”

“No, I have not cried again since then.”

“And you don’t feel like crying anymore?”

“No, Gertrude.”

“And tell me, since then, have you ever wanted to lie?”

“No, dear child.”

“Will you promise me to never try to fool me?”

“I promise.”

“Good! Then tell me right away, am I pretty?”

I was taken aback by this brusque question even more because up until this day, I did not want to pay attention to the undeniable beauty of Gertrude, and on top of that, I felt that it was perfectly useless to tell her about it.

“Why is that important for you to know?” I said to her right away.

“That is my worry,” she said. “I would like to know if I am not… how would you say it?… a sour note in the symphony. Who else could I ask about this, Pastor?”

“A pastor does not need to bother about the beauty of faces,” I said, trying to defend myself as best I could.

“Why?”

“Because it is the beauty of souls that is important.”

“So you prefer to let me believe that I am ugly,” she said with a charming pout, which made me cry out,

“Gertrude, you know very well that you are pretty.”

She then became silent and her face took on a serious expression that she held until we reached home.

Shortly after we returned, Amélie found the means to make me feel that she disapproved of how I spent the day. She could have told me this earlier, but as was her habit, she let us leave together, Gertrude and I, without saying a word. She then reserved for herself the right to criticize after the fact. She did not reproach me specifically, but her silence was like an accusation. Would it not have been natural for her to ask what we had listened to, since she knew that I was taking Gertrude to a concert? Would the joy of this child not have been increased by the slightest interest in knowing what caused her such pleasure? Amélie did not remain silent after that, but she seemed to assume an attitude where she only spoke about the most inconsequential things.