People say I’m bad-tempered, but I think this is hasty. It’s true that I’m easily annoyed, because I find people slow and often uninteresting. For example, when they’re banging on about something I couldn’t give a crap about, my face involuntarily takes on an impatient expression which I find hard to hide, and that upsets them. So, they think I’m unfriendly. It’s the reason I don’t really have any friends, just acquaintances.
There is also this: I suffer from a slight neurological peculiarity. My brain conflates several of my senses, meaning I experience a different reality to other people. For me, colours and shapes are linked to taste and feelings of well-being or satiety. It’s a strange sensory experience, difficult to explain. The word is ineffable.
Some people see colours when they hear sounds, others associate numbers with shapes. Others again have a physical sense of time passing. My thing is that I taste and feel colours. It doesn’t make any difference that I know they’re just a quantum conversation between matter and light; I can’t help feeling that they form part of the very body of things. Where others see a pink dress, I see pink matter, composed of little pink atoms, and when I’m looking at it, I lose myself in its infinite pinkness. This gives rise to a sensation of both well-being and warmth, but also to an uncontrollable desire to bring the dress in question to my mouth, because for me, the colour pink is also a taste. Like “the little patch of yellow wall” in Proust’s The Prisoner, which so absorbs the character as he looks at Vermeer’s View of Delft. I’m convinced Proust must have caught the man who inspired his character of Bergotte in the act of licking the painting, but then left it out of his novel on the grounds that it was just too crazy and gross.
As a child I was always swallowing bits of paint from walls as well as monochrome plastic toys. On several occasions I narrowly escaped death, until one doctor, more imaginative than the rest, went beyond the banal diagnosis of autism to discover I had bimodal synaesthesia. This condition finally explained why, when served a dish of mixed-up colours, I would spend the meal sorting the contents, my face ravaged by nervous tics.
The doctor recommended to my parents that they should let me eat what I wanted, provided I found the food on offer aesthetically pleasing and it wasn’t going to poison me — pastel-coloured candy, Sicilian cassata, profiteroles filled with pink and white cream, ice cream stuffed with little pieces of rainbow-coloured candied fruit. It was he, too, who came up with the ruse of giving me paint colour charts to leaf through and rings set with big, colourful stones that I could gaze at for hours, chewing my cheek, my mind a total blank.