It’s not often that I notice the color of someone’s eyes, at least not among my acquaintances, which seems at first somewhat odd because I am very sensitive to the colors of objects—paintings, birds, flowers, clouds—and because it stands to reason that eyes would interest me more than any flower could; similarly I can be captivated by a head of hair without noticing its color.

These objects may in fact fascinate me too much; I’m so attracted to them that I cannot separate the color from the overall effect, especially in memory. Yes, in the middle of a crowd, among strangers, I may be struck by a certain blondness, a certain redness, seduced by a certain blackness; a country, a city, a street, or a beach may arrest my attention by the yellow of its corneas, a certain hour may be notable for the sea green of its irises. But when it comes to people I know, I have to make a deliberate effort to “see” the color of their eyes, especially the eyes.

The reason is that I can look at a person’s hands, feet, or forehead without being in his gaze, but if I focus on the eyes, I’m not simply looking at the eyes but at him: I look at him through his eyes.

The eye blinds me to itself, and I fully understand why the ancients often compared the eye to the sun.

Only when I fail to look at someone properly, only when I don’t see him as a person, does his eye become a glass eye, one object among others, not the source illuminating the person’s depths, leading me to his secret.

Consequently, it doesn’t surprise me at all that the color of eyes is one of the most important parts of the description on identification papers; a policeman’s scrutiny, his way of studying a face, is exactly what allows him to isolate the color of an eye. But using this manner of perception to describe people in everyday conversation perturbs me. Some people seem to disengage themselves at the earliest opportunity from that haunting, questioning little pupil by blocking it out behind the tint that surrounds it, which one has noted and captured once and for all. They take cover behind that thin film, find refuge behind that ready-made means of identity; they know right away how to “identify” that other, that intruder, if something ever goes wrong, if something new and incriminating suddenly arises in their way of seeing things.

But for the person who knows and wants to look into the eyes, the color of the iris will always be a problem, a danger zone, because someone will ask him the color of his lover’s eyes, and that person will be surprised that he has never “noticed” what will lead to another surprise: really, am I as fascinated as that?

This color becomes his quest: he begins by overcoming somehow his usual way of seeing things, lunges into the waters of this gaze to go and pluck that flower from the islands of that other shore, closes his own in order to bring it back to his own island, there to display it in his public square or on his quay, so that he can study it in the absence of the other.

Here we should praise the old masters of portrait-painting. Surely no one would dream of accusing them of having neglected their models, of failing to look “into their eyes.” It is obvious that if they had contended themselves with applying the “identifying” color to the iris on the canvas, that which had been noted and used in conversation, their painting would not have had the least bit of life, because of all the face’s features the eye is the only one that can’t be painted “from nature,” especially with the intense expressivity that the greatest succeed in giving to it, in guarding intact.

For a quarter of an hour of posing, no model could continue to look at an artist in such a way, and it was only after the eye was averted that the artist took up the task of rediscovering it alive on the canvas.

First, he had to lose the color of the eyes, to blur it into the background of his focus, before he could reconstruct it, to use it to create the necessary liaison between the black of the pupil and all the easily verifiable coloration of the cheeks, cheekbones, eyebrows, even the eyelids, the only kind of liaison that permits us to “dwell” in that black double point in the same way one dwelled in the stare of that man during its moments of greatest intensity, which is to say, during those moments when it was impossible to pay attention to the color of the eyes.

It is from the other side of those eyes into which he so passionately plunged (lovingly, malevolently, devotedly, curiously) that he rediscovered it emerging in his work, like an alchemist bent over his athanor, surprised at its appearance, completely new, the unique solution to an equation whose terms consisted of his complete knowledge of humanity and what he had already painted.

I knew Doctor H—too well to be able to tell the color of his eyes; I had not studied him enough to be able to paint them.