The Man with the White Eye.
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Guest author: Pedro Oriol.
Painter
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Once again I recall the words of Miltos: “If I leave it, it leaves me”
This morning, walking along Calle Mayor amid the crowd, my eye fell on an old man with a cerulean face and white hair combed back, baring a broad, luminous forehead. He was extremely thin, and his translucent skin barely covered the bones of his face. His vacant gaze had something disturbing about it, for one of his eyes was veiled by a cloud, and the pupil was a matte white throughout, as if it were a clouded pearl. He walked absent from everyone else, seeming to savour the last moments of a life, like a traveller bidding farewell. His other eye, blue, gazed enraptured upward, toward the yellow and grey rooftops of Madrid.
I should have stopped him! And gently told him that I would like to paint him.
But it is hard to approach people. It is hard to ask them to place themselves on a different plane. No one accompanies a stranger to an unfamiliar house to have their portrait painted.
Yes, I felt a kinship with the man with the white eye, but, what about him?
Though he seemed stricken in his gait, he would have taken me for a madman escaped from the asylum, or would simply have guarded himself against a possible danger.
Art, yes, is that other plane that frightens; it lies so close to madness and to crime and to transgression, so close to sanctity.
Yes, Miltos, yes. ” If I leave it, it leaves me”
I feel like a hunter who has not had the courage to follow his quarry, like a saint who has been unable to embrace his brother.
I return to grey life. I dissolve. I step into a pastry shop, I sweeten myself with a cake. I have been on the brink of fraternity. I return to the brink of mediocrity…
