The Colour of Heaven (19 page)

Chen held a candle up against Paolo’s eyes, asking him to follow it as he moved it from left to right. His breath smelled of rice wine, and he breathed heavily, as if already exhausted by the process.

‘Close your left eye.’ He held up an almond-shaped piece of quartz. ‘Now look through this.’

‘It is misty. Dark.’

‘Can you see the distance more clearly, even through this stone?’

‘No.’

‘If the lens has not been completely ground then the view is distorted. Try this.’

‘Better.’

‘And the other eye?’

‘No. Another.’

Chen held a piece of beryl to the left eye. ‘I need to check the shape of the stone and the way it curves. Can you see more clearly with these?’

‘I’m not sure. I do not know if my sight will ever improve as yours has done.’

‘You see the clear stone that is used to magnify things close. Look at it. Turn it over in your hand. Hold it up between your eye and my eye.’

Paolo experimented once again with distance, seeing how Chen’s eyes grew and diminished.

‘It is convex. It curves outwards. Like your eyes. They see close objects too clearly, while the distance is dim. The mountains are large, perhaps grander than they are in life, but they are also faint. Everything is far away. That perhaps is why your travels have been so long. You want to arrive on the summit of the mountain but you are always reaching for the unreachable, as if you were running towards a rainbow before it fades. It is always a blur. You live in a landscape where nothing can be seen in context. As soon as you realise where you are, you are too close to see what such a place might mean.’

‘And the world bends …’

‘The world curves around you because your eyes themselves have too much curvature. Now we must make a lens that compensates for this distortion.’

‘But when I put quartz in front of my eyes everything is as milk.’

‘We must polish this quartz and make a lens that is doubly concave, thicker at the edges than in the middle. But we must take care not to crack or split the delicate centre which bends the light in your favour.’

He took two rough quartz pebbles. Then he began to grind away at each pebble in a circular motion, hollowing the centre, smoothing the surface into a curvature to match the grinding stone. He kept turning the lenses over, checking each side, polishing them into shape with a mixture of powder and emery, holding the quartz up to the light between each stage, verifying the translucency, proceeding silently with utter concentration lest the quartz cracked or shattered.

‘Come outside so that we can see into the distance more clearly.’

The air was crisp; the sky cobalt blue. Chen held a lens up to the right eye, and the distant mountain immediately sharpened into focus. Paolo thought that he could see a group of women dyeing cloth by the river; but, close to, objects were blurred, as if his sight had been reversed.

‘Wait. I need to adjust the curvature of the right lens, and polish the front of the left.’

Paolo felt as if his new-found sight had been snatched away from him. ‘How long will this take?’

‘Not long.’

Chen went back inside and re-worked the lens surfaces. He ground them down, adjusting their curvature, which he then checked against a series of curved wooden templates on his workbench.

‘Why is it so hard?’ asked Paolo.

‘Convex shapes are everywhere in nature, like the drop of water on a leaf, a teardrop, or weather-worn pebbles shaped by wind, water, and rain. They are solid, strong, and natural. Here we are working against nature. This is unstable, thin in the middle, easily broken. The rock crystal can shatter. We must hope for luck that we find the right curve for you, a lens that bends the light to correct your sight.’

He continued to polish each lens in circling movements, and at last the crystal began to emerge, glittering with reflected light.

Chen held each lens and checked its clarity. Then Paolo took both carefully between his fingers and raised them to his eyes. The previous world lurched into focus. He could see into Chen’s eye, watching him, smiling hopefully.

‘Yes, these.’

‘Let me finish them.’

Chen took a piece of iron with a fine point and bored holes into each side of the almond-shaped lenses. Then he threaded a piece of leather in a metal clasp through the two inner holes to form a supporting bridge. He reached for a pair of calipers and measured the circumference of Paolo’s head before cutting a second piece of leather to length, finally tying the glasses in a knot at the back.

Paolo began to test and adjust the lenses in front of his eyes, trying to find the most comfortable place for them to sit, seeing the whorls of his fingers up close against him. He blinked and began to readjust his vision, looking out into the distance, as if he lived in two different worlds: one close to, the other far off.

They walked into the streets and Paolo could see lanterns receding far ahead, green, red, and white, hanging in the doorways of every shop front. They swayed gently in the breeze against embroidered beads or jade curtains, but now, instead of witnessing the scene through frosted glass, he saw each lantern whole, clearly defined, one from another. There were lanterns that turned under a trickle of water; others were shaped as boats and dragons, with horses and horsemen, or as gods and goddesses decorated in gold and silver, pearls and jade.

He looked back at Chen, who now appeared too close, too large, before him, the lines on his forehead as distinct as if they were inches rather than feet apart. He took the glasses away from his eyes, and then raised them once more, testing the sudden shock of sight.

For the first time Paolo could see the thickness of clouds, their depth, detail, and texture. He felt a rush of vision, and almost stumbled at the new world around him. His gaze became so highly focused that everything he saw had acquired a concentrated clarity.

He tried to walk, but felt disorientated, as if he had just disembarked from a ship in a foreign country. Objects appeared to hurtle towards him. They came so close and so quickly that his head began to ache, pained by the clarity of the world. Scribes and acrobats, fortune-tellers, astrologers, palm-readers, prophets, and seers crowded past. They walked more quickly, came into vision more swiftly, and departed too soon. The world had suddenly become fast.

Was this how Aisha saw?

He walked away, out through the tanneries, and saw the rich saffron, scarlet, mint, and antimony dyes of the women, their arms coloured, bright cloths curtaining their homes to shade against sun and brightness. A bare-chested, muscular man with stained arms pulled stretches of indigo-dyed cotton out of a vat that had been hollowed from the earth. He rinsed it clear so that the water turned a dark and violent blue. The stain followed the veins of his arms. Paolo had never noticed the blood beneath another man’s skin before.

He saw the women reeling silk, making looms, and rearing worms. He noticed, for the first time, the threads hanging from the mouths of the silkworm caterpillars, the white circles near the breast and head, the three-fold spur in their tails.

Now he could read the letters on the votive strips that hung from the trees above a potter glazing a set of bowls. He stood, waited, and watched the transformation as the cobalt glaze became a rich deep blue. He saw the pots cooling in sand, and looked through the peephole into the orange glow of the kiln as the potter waited for the glaze to become as golden as sunlight on snow.

The smoke and heat of the potteries reached up into his eyes, which now began to smart. A pedlar offered him hot water and Paolo took off his glasses. He scooped the water from the bowl and felt the warmth and the wetness cleanse and heal. He reached for a cloth and patted his eyes dry. When he opened them again, the water still clung to his eyelids and he felt his vision swim. He blinked against the light. And then, when he could see again without his spectacles, he saw that the earth had returned to its former mist.

All this time he had looked with soft eyes.

He put on the spectacles once more. His head ached with the excitement of the new possibilities before him. At the same time the world became threatening, as objects loomed into view, good and evil, without any differentiation, sharply defined before him, like a clear and sudden view of death.

And the town was louder now. The cries of children, the barking of dogs, and the shouting in the market came from every direction: ahead, behind, from the sides, above, and below. The sounds met each other in Paolo, travelled through him, and bounced back off the walls to hit him again with their reverberation, echo upon echo, so that he was no longer sure which way he was walking. The noise had become cacophonous. He had to get back to the firework maker, talk to him, and ask him to explain. Was the world meant to be so clear and so sharp; or did the lenses contain some dark magic within them?

‘What do you think?’ asked Chen.

‘It is too much,’ replied Paolo. ‘I feel like a blind man who has been granted sight …’

‘If they are too strong …’

‘Let me walk a while,’ replied Paolo. ‘Let me try to get used to them …’

‘You will need time …’

‘I am two people now: one who can see and one who cannot.’

‘Then you must decide which man you wish to be,’ said Chen. ‘Clear vision is painful as well as enlightening. The further we see into the distance, the more we understand its limitations.’

Salek and Jacopo were amused by Paolo’s new-found sight and celebrated by buying three kites which they flew from a hill on the edge of the town.

Paolo watched the paper stream across the sky, a great wave of red against blue, and felt hope at last. He longed to go home and show his parents that he could see. He wanted to tell Simone, not only to give him the stone with which he could paint eternal life, but also to explain what it meant. For he knew now, with each vista that opened up before him, with every sense of distance, what it might be like to paint space, to imagine infinity.

‘At least we won’t lose any more animals,’ said Salek. ‘You can see when they are camels and when they are rocks.’

‘I can see everything. Even when you are teasing me. Before I had to guess when you were being serious and when you were not. Now I can read your face.’

‘We never tease you. We are your friends,’ said Jacopo.

‘I am not so sure of that.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Salek, ‘I think you are ungrateful. We have shown you the world. Now you can see it clear.’

‘I do not know that I always want to do that. It is so sharp, so lustrous. Sometimes I want to close my eyes and let the brightness pass.’

‘There will be time enough to close your eyes,’ said Jacopo.

‘One day’ – Paolo smiled – ‘just for one day on this journey, it would be good not to be reminded of death. You have taught me, and taught me well. I have learned my lesson, and it does not need to be repeated. And so perhaps you could refrain from referring to the fact of our mortality each time we discuss our lives. Is that too much to ask? Do you think you could do this? Just for one day?’

‘I do not think so,’ said Salek.

‘Impossible,’ agreed Jacopo.

Over the next few days, Paolo’s earliest doubts and uncertainties began to take hold. Despite the sharpness and the brightness he also saw flaw and decay in everything around him. He could see how furrowed a brow could be and how swiftly a man aged. He saw disease, blisters, wounds, and unhappiness. He noticed, for the first time, that the bundles of rags lying in the road, and abandoned at regular intervals, contained people. He could see them clearly, arms outstretched, their faces wrought with pain. Perhaps God had given him short sight to protect him from such clarity; and the lenses were, after all, an aberration, a disavowal of the divine plan for his life. Paolo felt like a man who had been given all the riches of the world and only longed once more for his poverty.

He talked to Chen’s customers. People came who thought that they would never see again: a man who wanted to watch his son fly a kite in the sky before he died; an astronomer who wanted to help his brother to see what he saw, mapping the heavens, understanding the divinity of creation. There was a nobleman who wanted spectacles for his horse, and a lady who was convinced that such a device might help her cat kill more mice. Another man came because he wanted to spy on the courtesans of the city, asking Chen if he could make a lens that might let him see through their clothes without payment; while a wife brought her husband a pair of spectacles to make him aware of the flaws of women he had wanted to seduce.

One man came and complained that he saw too clearly. He asked for spectacles to cloud his vision so that he could not see long distances so sharply. He wanted to live in a narrower, shorter world: to live, as Paolo had done, with softer eyes.

Chen told Paolo that he should spend a day and a night looking at the sky to soothe his eyes and calm his thoughts. If he wanted to see beauty he should always look upwards.

‘Imagine the sky is the eyeball of our creator,’ said Chen, ‘curved in its socket, looking down upon us.’

Paolo should study the clouds, and trace the colour of the heavens as they changed from dawn to day and from dusk into the night, taking his thoughts away from the frailty and vanity of mankind. To look up at the sky was to know one’s place in the universe: the light of the setting sun over the mountains was the halo of Buddha.