Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Lucy, 1625–1630; Francesco del Cossa, Saint Lucy, 1473. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Maybe you know this, if you’re Catholic or hang around in churches: in paintings of Saint Lucy, she’s usually holding a pair of eyes. In most cases they’re on a plate, like some sort of local delicacy she’s about to serve up to a tourist. These are her old eyes, the ones she plucked out when a man wanted to marry her, because she wanted to marry only God. She looks down at them with her new eyes, the ones God gave her to say thanks. The version I like best is Francesco del Cossa’s, from 1473. In it, Lucy’s eyes hang drooping from a delicate stem, a horrible blooming flower. She pinches them gingerly, pinkie out like the queen. To me they look like the corsage I vaguely remember wearing at prom; later, who knows, she might put them in the man’s lapel, a consolation prize.
I have been drawn to this painting for nearly a decade, though my feelings toward it, toward Lucy and her two sets of eyes, have changed over the years. The first feeling was a slightly delusional but sharp sense of envy. I was seventeen or eighteen, seeing the painting for the first time in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and for as long as I could remember I’d wanted what Lucy had: to pluck out my eyes and get new ones. I believe this is the sort of fantasy often held by people with certain ailments, a childish notion that makes no sense but is still somehow grippingly tantalizing—like how the chronically congested dream of one triumphant nose-blow that clears them out for good, or those with bad backs imagine some kindly giant pulling them apart until every vertebrae gives a magical crack and their pain is banished at last.
I wanted new eyes because for almost as long as I could remember I had gotten frequent migraines, which were, I believed, caused by light. I won’t pretend that this is particularly remarkable or interesting to anyone but myself. (A memory: A doctor listens blankly as I describe the particular contours of my pain, how my head feels like a balloon and all I need is the prick of a needle. A small part of me hopes he will be fascinated, be spurred to action, and recommend a lobotomy on the spot. Instead he says, “Well, some people get migraines, yes,” and sends me home with a large co-pay.) But I will say this: the pain and ritual of these migraines, and the many futile measures I have taken daily to avoid them and consequently to avoid light, have been since childhood the unfailing constant of my life. I’ve worn sunglasses every day, sometimes inside. An unexpected flash is all it takes. The sun’s sudden gleam off an ocean wave, headlights passing on a dark country road; these are the things that have left me crumpled in bed, a damp towel over my face, writhing. It begins with a spell of blindness, my world tunneling down to black. The pain comes soon after. In old family vacation photos my face is always hidden. There we are on the beach in Maine: my brother and sister, my mom and dad, their faces shining, smiling, thrown open to the brilliant light of the world—and me, under a hood and a headscarf and Maui Jim wraparounds, some sort of NASCAR babushka.
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