Philosophical Toys, chapters 20-21 'Mortality sucks' & 'The cloning passion, a sort of footnote'
Philosophical Toys, chapters 20-21 'Mortality sucks' & 'The cloning passion, a sort of footnote'
Mortality sucks
In a way, my father’s longevity had already been dissolved by the Collector’s death. I had buried him at the Collector’s funeral. The inner pause, the endless sorrow I had experienced during the following weeks, was an anticipation of the sorrow I should have felt at my father’s death. And when my father died two months afterwards, I knew I had already mourned him, had already gone through all the inner motions, the implosion and liberation that comes with your parents’ death. And so I didn’t shed a tear at my father’s funeral. A pathetic melodrama could make me cry. My father’s funeral, couldn’t. Dead? He wasn’t dead. He was walking with me. All the rest was charade. Death says: And now what? And that was a question that had to be delayed. Infinitely.
Chris came with me to Spain, that was the first time he met my father, a corpse. He could only stay one week, but he helped me to focus on practical details, to choose my father's best suit, his best shoes for that most special of occasions. Sometimes tears are not shed at the right time. They are shed just before, often way afterwards. Mourning is often out of joint. It was severely so with me. My grief happened ahead of its time, to then resurface with a series of dreams which prefigured my collapse, perhaps my mourning was condensed in a single word: papá.
I muttered the word papá with a hapless voice, as if a voice was speaking through me. It was the voice I had as a kid. That voice re-emerged intact from the depths of time, that discarded voice re-emerged from the oldest memory path to conjure up a repeated syllable that condensed my helplessness.
But then I had done what I had promised myself to do. I had found his story, my mother’s story, a dignifying place, the Victoria and Albert museum. These shoes had been at the centre of their passion. These shoes contained endless stories. They had survived my mother. They would be in the world well after my father’s body had disintegrated, ninety-five pairs of shoes, ninety-five stories.
A dignifying place? Still have doubts about it. In any case, the loan is temporary. In any case, I also did something that I thought my father would have liked: I wore a splendid pair of red shoes for his funeral.
I didn’t shed a tear at my father’s funeral, but then something strange happened to my gaze: it went into filmic state. I saw the whole funeral as if I was making a film, I saw everything frame by frame, all with natural lighting, starting with a close-up of the visual attack from the vibrant flowers sold by gypsies, then a general shot of a gypsy flower stall, then a long shot of the long wall that separated the dead from the alive, then a cut, the camera was inside the hearse looking at a woman almost identical to me, a sort of double accompanied by a double of Chris, then another cut, an abstract shot at the strangely uniform architecture of the cemetery, at the people around me looking at my splendid red shoes, at Eva nodding at the coffin, at Dr Alvarez who had put weight on, at Antonio who was holding my hand, at neighbours saying your father was a saint, then back to the houses of the dead, all this in slow motion, as if to strange the gaze from consciousness. Then a series of soft focus flashbacks into my childhood gently fading into each other, my parents smiling at me, talking to me, me hiding underneath my parents’ bed, knocking on their bedroom door at weekends, my mother holding a book, her odd beauty, my mother teaching me to read and write, teaching me sweet words in Italian, ciccia, bambina, a minute girl raising her head in admiration, with huge wide eyes opened, clear olive skin, intensely red lips, the camera slowly following my eyes, travelling up to their monumental bodies as if they were awesome monuments, thinking my parents were the most extraordinary human beings in the world. Then, as their faces faded, I saw myself dropping a black pair of stilettos softly on their coffins, heard myself outside my body muttering to people, saying it was some of their belongings, they would protect them on the other side. Then a dramatically lit close-up of my dead mother with Jeanne Moreau’s boots on, that was the footwear she had borne for her own funeral, that’s why I had never found them, she had died in January, my mother, my memory of my father hugging these boots in his sleep after she had died had probably been an inaccurate memory, an error had entered my memory, it must have done, it must have done.
An error.
I paused the black boots’ image, dazzled by their shine. But didn’t my father just hug one boot? Could it be that she was buried with just one boot? It could very well be. I’ll never know. It had never occurred to me that the boots would be in her coffin, it had never occurred to me that she was one with them. The black ankle boots dissolved into a close up of my shaky hand with a handful of soil throwing it on their coffins, the soil in mid air, the soil landing softly on the wood. Then a shot of their joint grave. Then another flash back to my filmic childhood reverie: running, running, running.
Then the end. But is there ever a clear cut end? The promising pleasure of a new beginning, a clean slate? Isn’t the possibility of a clean slate forever foreclosed? I was ringing Chris everyday, he was my lifeline. My cousin Antonio was a lifeline as well, but he was now living in Madrid, he was going to open up a high class hat shop, he definitely surprised me when he told me that he had moved in with a man.
It was good that Chris had come with me. He was amazed at verifying with his own eyes that the landscape of Almería indeed doubled for the American West. It was like Arizona, he said. You just expected a blue-eyed cowboy to turn up any minute, strike a match on his bearded cheek and light a cigarette. I had never seen Almería solely in terms of westerns and that’s how tourists saw it. Chris took pictures of the arid hinterland, the hazy mountains, ladder-snakes. We drove around the Tabernas desert, a cross between Arizona and a lunar landscape that spoke of barren beauty. We stopped at the immense solar energy plant, a subservient assembly of hundreds of shimmering mirrors looking up to the central tower, reflecting the sun’s rays into it, working relentlessly to supply sustainable, clean, world, energy. The solar plant was like a shorthand for the future, Chris said. He was awestruck. He took pictures of the heliostats, the parabolic dishes and troughs, undoubtedly pictures from the future. I insisted that we visited the remnants of studio sets at Mini-Hollywood and Texas-Hollywood near the town of Tabernas, but the mood dictated otherwise and we had left it too late. We also walked around the old parts of Almería. And Chris went inside a religious shop that I had seen many times but never gone into. It was a religious shop that had diversified into a joke shop. So, there were statues of virgins, saints, liturgical candles and bibles on one side of the premises, and on the other side plaster turds, huge curvaceous plastic cocks, aprons with sculpted pink tits and fake ice-cubes with flies inside. The shop-keeper, a balding middle-aged woman, was imperviously reading one of the Pope’s biographies for sale. It was the first time that I laughed out aloud since my father’s passing away. And I was shocked to discover that you could laugh so truly while being under death’s sway.
I got a meagre amount for my father’s house. It was in a complete state of disrepair. And after dealing with the car fines, the bailiffs fees, the inland revenue and the water charges he had forgotten about for the last ten years, there was just enough to pay for the funeral, buy a second-hand car for Chris and to keep me going a few months while I half-heartedly looked for work. I discovered that the main provision my father made was to hide from me that he was ill while he was still alive. When I went to El Refugio to collect my father’s things and visited Dr. Alvarez in his office for the last time, he told me in the softest of voices, that my father had made him promise not to say anything about his condition. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when he agreed to go to El Refugio. He didn’t want me to know anything. Immersed in the mist of disbelief, I looked at a filing cabinet for a long time and said nothing. So all the time you reassured me he was fine, you were lying? I said at last. Just white lies, he said. It was a grand gesture on your father’s part. He wanted his illness to be invisible to you, and also, to himself, when he heard of his diagnosis, he actually asked me to remind him as well every so often that he wasn’t ill, he just didn’t want you to worry, he said with a balsamic smile.
White lies. I felt I had been protected from the truth, it made a difference, even if my father’s death was a fact foretold by his age. I whispered: thank you, dad. The pain was still there, though. Then the insistence of things came back to muffle the pain, to silence the possible crisis. It came back as I was collecting the things my father had left and found inside the breast-pocket of his jacket a pocket size photo album stuffed with snap shots of my mother’s shoes. I felt tired, resigned, touched. I had never seen it before. I browsed through the plastic sleeves going from black and white to Technicolor to the orangey ageing chemicals from the seventies. My mother’s shoes hadn’t been forgotten after all. Maybe he had put them in the loft and buried their memory with her, but couldn’t help but keep the snap shots as souvenirs of his foible? Was that the only memory Alzheimer’s had not disintegrated? Did that survive further than the memories from the war and Durruti’s memorable words? I didn’t dare ask Dr Alvarez, although it would have been an interesting point to raise. I had no way of knowing. Perhaps he had kept the photo album out of habit, maybe the last thing that Alzheimer’s deleted was a privileged part of the unconscious.
I recognised many of the shoes, I saw again the black pair of boots that looked like Jeanne Moreau’s, the ones that I saw my mother wearing at her own funeral during my reverie, the ones that with time made me realise that I wasn’t the protagonist in my childhood, my parents were, I was their audience. I watched Diary of a Chambermaid again, compared the album’s photograph with a paused still, then with a close-up sequence where those boots walked up and down. In this close-up sequence you could only see the boots and a bit of leg. There was no reason to think Jeanne Moreau would need a foot extra, an extra that would pace up and down on her behalf. There was no reason to think those were Jeanne Moreau’s feet. There was no reason to think they were not my mother’s. During the following days I looked at the photograph and that bit of film countless times. I oscillated. That bit of film, those legs and feet housed in a black pair of boots could be anybody’s. To me, the way of walking pointed towards my mother, Nina Chiavelli, oscillating between my mother and the unknown.
The small photo album, old pyjamas and old-fashioned clothes, an old shoe box, the insistence of things also came back under the guise of an old postcard. This old postcard became a proof. I relished the find with infinite pleasure. It was a trace from the real, a piece of evidence that confirmed my buried suspicions. The postcard was in an old shoe box with old family pictures. It was there that I found this postcard that my mother had sent to my father. It was there that I found a proof. It had a colourful sugar skull printed on it. The postmark was from Mexico City, you could just about make it out, the year 1952, exactly the same year as the film El was made, one year before my parents married. My mother had written: My beloved Jordi, love from the Aztec gods, travelling to Chihuahua next week. And she had drawn a small slanted heart . My mother, Nina Chiavelli, must have appeared in that film, a film by Buñuel. The innocent high heels that I had sold to the Collector must have been the ones that had appeared in that film. That was what that postcard meant. That was what it pointed to. No doubt about it now.
But why hide it? Why hide from everybody the fact that my mother had been a foot extra, that she had appeared in that film by Buñuel, possibly also in Diary of a Chambermaid? The only reason I could think of was fear, my parents living in fear of being discovered. Undoubtedly, Franco’s Spain was a country suffused by fear. Anybody who had links with the wrong side could suffer an incident. And Buñuel was an unorthodox film-maker, he had been a communist sympathiser for a while. Maybe at the time she appeared in the film, it was necessary to hide that link. But my parents had been clandestine anarchists themselves and by the late 60s made no effort to hide it. My mother’s occasional job as a foot extra was the secret of secrets, a secret now partly dissolved by the traces from the real, a secret that must have been known by the Collector. For a while, I tried to unravel it further, the secret, but found a resistance made out of solid silence, a dead letter, there were no records of my mother having been a foot extra, the actors on the Buñuel’s film credits that I contacted didn’t remember any of the extras, I found nothing but a perfect circle of irresolvable suspense.
Nothing.
I heard this nothing coming from my mother's grave, from my father's grave.
I wrote a letter to my aunt in Italy, zia Carla, saying my father had died and did she know whether my mother had ever appeared in a film by Buñuel?
I was alone in the world.
I wasn’t alone.
I was with Chris.
After so many incomplete revelations, so many losses, my life continued in an essentially meaningless sequence of random occurrences. Chris, the seasons, appearing and disappearing friends, disappointments, failures, contradictions, waiting endlessly for things to happen, trying to learn not to wait, not to expect, trying to dissolve the intoxicating power of expectations, learning the purpose of these expectations was to dissolve the present. In short: living.
Of course, I never wanted to acknowledge that, the randomness, the meaninglessness, couldn’t look at it for long time in the face, told myself that randomness is only a form of temporary ignorance, while meaning is something that emerges with time. Meaningful things did happen, stories that proliferated in other directions, stories that have not come visible yet, but they are stories unrelated to this story, mainly stories about finding meaning in small pleasures, stories about the small publication of my book on cyborgs which was ignored by the entire planet, stories about Chris and I having a small tiger tattooed on our buttocks, about struggling with daily life, always struggling, about Chris becoming a centre of meaning for me.
I probably also found meaning in Mary Jane’s radical disappearance. An oscillating meaning where sometimes an abominable world didn’t deserve but to be abandoned and other times, the futility of such a radical act could only lead to a majestic private gesture of self-destruction. The increasing presence of toys everywhere I went made me think about her. I saw toy-like things leisurely sneaking in everywhere, like a sweet lullaby slowly taking over the world. I kept telling Chris about Mary Jane, about what she had done, about her wilful disappearance, he was as mystified as I was, although he came up with this fable of Aesop about a Miss True which ran more or less like this:
A wayfaring man travelling in the desert met a woman standing alone and terribly dejected. He inquired of her, ‘Who art thou?’
‘My name is Truth,’ she replied.
‘And for what cause,’ he asked, ‘have you left the city, to dwell alone here in the wilderness?’
She made answer, ‘Because in former times, falsehood was with the few, but is now with all men, whether you would hear or speak.’
There are lies and lies, Chris said. Not everybody lies. Some people lie to survive, but for some people lying becomes a habit, he said. It’s vital to have integrity, but you also have to survive, survival makes people lie, self-interest that doesn’t give a fuck about anybody, that’s a problem, why don’t you visit her? he said. That fable is spot-on, Mary Jane is indeed Miss True, though her disappearance doesn’t solve anything, except for signalling the strongest of dissent, I said. A world cut up by wars, by manifold violence and greed, and daily petty deeds carried out by innocent people who practised innocent violence, was indeed a hard pill to swallow. I knew that I could always visit Mary Jane, but her place had become a no-go area. I just hoped that at some point there would be a sign telling me that she was well. I am still waiting for that sign, I know she is working away in the dark, she never replied to my letter. I’ve learnt that things develop over years and years. Films, fictions, technology, concentrate time distorting it. An interminable war, the events of a century, become a thirty minute documentary. A long book, a quotation. A life’s time, an epitaph. We are surrounded by things that happen instantaneously. More and more, we expect things to happen that way. But life is made out of time, understanding takes time, absorbing understanding takes time too, our mental beat is still too slow for the world.
Or at least mine is. I was slow to weep the way I felt I should have wept. I could only cry in my dreams. In waking life, it was a gradual thing. It took a few months for me to weep the way I felt I should have wept. One day I wept a clumsy tear, the next week a few more, the next month, a flood. I thought that I had slowly assimilated that my father was going to die, but with death there is no such thing, it leaves a dent that keeps changing shape. I had been dreaming about him, day in and day out, about my mother’s shoes. I thought about him everyday. I started weeping everyday. Sadness becomes you, Chris said on a few occasions to make me feel at ease with myself. I started staying at his flat more and more. I lost touch with Pearl who really got into S&M clubs and told me dark things that made me squeamish and made her laugh at me. Chris wanted me to move in with him, but I wasn’t ready to leave my little den. Are you afraid we won’t get on? he would say. No, it’s not that, I would say. I’ll wait 1001 nights, but not a single one more, he would say. My relationships don’t last, I would say. You’re hard work, he would say. But you enjoy it, don’t you, I would say.
Chris became my sentinel between job assignment and job assignment. He was a freelance. Maybe freelance was another name for precariousness. London is like that, fifty thousand people for one lousy job. All the people we knew were doing juggling acts. Chris was by my side. He would say he was going to collect my tears in small bottles, he found sexy the wet zigzags on my eyelashes. He would come round with small toys, a tiny pc guardian angel, a small hot water bottle with a heart on it. It was funny seeing such a tall man offering such small things. He cooked me original meals that I barely touched, with the exception of what he called skrumptious carrot cake and gorgasmic cheese cake. With these irresistible cakes, I couldn’t help having a break from my loss of appetite and lick clean the plate, the spoon, the cake-tin, my fingers, my nails and even the cake crumbs on the table. The halo around Chris’s head became a permanent feature. He was like a mountain. Solid. Huge. He was there, he was always there. He was the man who had turned me into a sexual animal, who called me nonsensical, silly names and treated me as if he was reading my mind. My father was gone.
Gone.
A swirl of white dust.
A persistent memory and a handful of photographs.
The death of others creates a hole in time, a no-place. In this no-place, I received a condolence card from my aunt zia Carla. It had a large daisy printed on it and didn’t say anything about my mother.
I tore up the card and wept.
I was happy with Chris and yet I couldn’t quite shake out of mourning and melancholia. He kept asking me to move in with him and I kept saying that I wasn’t ready to move from the no-place that I found myself in.
The cloning passion, a sort of footnote
In this no-place where there were no certain answers, where possible realities hovered suspended in opposition to brutal certainties, life continued. Chris got less and less work as time went by contradicting the idea of the future as progress, while I wrote less and less as crippling forces gulped my energy. Time is a bastard, we have to face up to it, we have to annihilate it, he said. We looked at time intensely in the face until it withdrew into the background. It was the only thing we could do. Time made impossible contortions in self-defence. We blanked it. We turned our backs to it until it vanished. We put our feet on its gnarly torso claiming an illusory victory designed to keep our minds at rest. We obliterated time until we became time. We built a cocoon against time. We had sex day and night, we worked day and night, Chris took dazzling pictures of shadows and related phenomena and I wound up rescuing the red notebook and started scribbling some of these pages. Time whizzed by in a flash. We just killed time before it killed us. Then time came back as it does to add a footnote to a scrap from my past. It happened as Chris and I were planning to move in together. And it happened by chance, as it does. I had been a dupe in a convoluted game, an involuntary accomplice in an ingenious swindle that now shook me out from the sweet cocoon we had built back into the real world.
Time delivers footnotes to stories, amendments that jolt foundations unearthing dirt and wonder. Something happened recently that altered the Collector’s story, a sort of footnote, a postscript, an unbelievable twist if you want. This footnote appeared in a newspaper, in El Mundo. I was browsing through it, suffering the traces from the real, accidents, natural catastrophes, but mostly man-made barbarities attesting to the will to destroy which hadn’t changed in the least with the new millennium. I always shivered when I read the newspapers. I was browsing through the culture section when I recognised a small picture of The Museum of Relevant Moments, with an intriguing headline: F for Fraudulent? There was a small article about it. The article said that this new Mecca for cinephiles was under investigation for claims of forgery. It wasn’t exactly forgery that was at stake though, it was more a case of ‘inauthenticity’. A prop manager who had worked in a couple of Buñuel’s films claimed to own the original orthopaedic leg that had appeared in the film Tristana, the orthopaedic leg that Catherine Deneuve was supposed to have worn, he claimed that a replica of the orthopaedic leg was shown at the Buñuel museum, not the original one.
I raised my eyebrows and scratched my head.
I frowned.
I read the article again.
I raised my eyebrows again and carefully folded the newspaper.
Eventually, I rang Kathy not knowing whether it would be the same number. Left a message on an answering machine that had an anonymous message on it. And when she didn’t return my messages, I sent her an email mentioning the orthopaedic leg story, asking her whether it was true. I also rang Zacharie a few times. But he wasn’t in either. Zacharie! Felt a tingly high while listening to his French accent on the answer-phone, a chemical turbulence, an urgent desire to have sex with him again. This sudden heat wave transformed my day, filling it with erotic reveries, erotic encounters outside time and space that fuelled my passion with Chris that night. The message that I left didn’t mention anything about the orthopaedic leg story. Did it matter if one of the exhibits was a copy? Didn’t copies usually glow with the power of the original? Was there a difference? I recalled the discussions with Mary Jane about the Mona Lisa that we used to have lunch in front of. It was the place where it was, a cheap café, that precluded it from being an original. The Louvre could house a copy of the Mona Lisa. But it could never be perceived as a copy. The Louvre was supposed to be a site of authenticity. Nobody wanted to believe otherwise.
Kathy eventually returned my call. Rumours, somebody had been spreading rumours. And rumours sometimes found their way into newspapers, into the perpetual disinformation machine that the media is. It was now solved. But she had to talk to solicitors. Pay through the nose. Avoid the poison. The Buñuel family had issued a statement disengaging themselves from the whole issue, saying that film props were always returned, they knew nothing about what happened to them afterwards. But the rumour had generated a lot of free publicity for the museum. Notoriousness is always good. There were then local rumours that the museum itself had been responsible for the first rumour in an attempt to generate free publicity. In short, visitors had increased tenfold. The museum had found new audiences. Audiences seduced by the appeal of the counterfeit, accomplices. The rumour had created an air of ambiguity that appealed to these new audiences. It seemed nobody wanted to resolve this ambiguity. It was preferred. And that’s how the Collector would have wanted it. Dissimulation. Complicity. From others. But then the ambiguity dissolved. Everything went back to normal. Kathy sighed, then coughed.
Zacharie returned my call two weeks afterwards, that’s to say, about a month ago. He had been away in Vietnam, talked about the incredible people there, the incredible food, the political changes. Then he went silly. He flirted, laughed, explored my limits. He reminded me that the Collector’s funeral had ended up as a reaffirmation of life. But wasn’t that what you did when somebody died? He suggested that there was no reason not to duplicate the experience. To duplicate? I brought up the orthopaedic leg story, the fake prop I had read about. We talked for a long time. I thought that he was joking at first. Still think sometimes he made it all up. Zacharie’s sense of humour, we haven’t talked since. The Museum of Relevant Moments was the Collector’s labour of love, his wayward baby, he said. The Collector devoted all his time to it, he had all the time in the world, nothing else mattered. He loved Buñuel’s films. He was sure that Buñuel would have loved The Museum of Relevant Moments. Didn’t Dalí just sign empty pieces of paper, of canvas, to be filled in at leisure by anybody with the guarantee they were signed by the master? You see, he said, the Collector felt there was something false in authentic objects. He liked that and he didn’t, he was intrigued by it. By the fact that throughout history we had immortalised objects by giving them ludicrous properties, through the magical aura of their illustrious owners, fabricating impossible stories about them, stories that miraculously defied all evidence. He thought that something perverse lurked there. Became obsessed with confusing the signs. He was interested in the Turin shroud, the crop circles, that kind of thing. When he discovered that in most films they have to have replicas of the main props and costumes, in case they get damaged or they need the same item but worn out, he became excited. He knew his collection of fake memorabilia would survive him. He wanted it to survive him, thus the convent, the museum. Do we need authentic things to assure us that all this is not a fiction? That the past did actually exist? Doesn’t the physical presence of things add a realistic touch to the blurred nature of our lives? As if things were more real? Sometimes more definite than us? Real? Didn’t the world consist of a cacophony of multiple realities?
Initially, the Collector had wanted the Buñuel museum to be in Amsterdam, Zacharie said. But Amsterdam had so many other museums full of fakes already. Then the Collector decided on Mexico City. He had spent the last twenty years of his life looking for exact copies of what he considered to be the most revealing moments in Buñuel’s films, forging them when necessary as with the case of the cross of female heads of hair that had appeared in L’Age d’or, the wedding dress in Viridiana, looking for the exact cloth from the exact time, coming across the exact paper and typewriter used at the time, preparing a catalogue with pertinent explanations, certificates of authenticity, documenting everything elegantly, rummaging endlessly through second hand markets, old factories, finding the most perfect of replicas, creating the perfect crime passionelle. The museum was the Collector’s oeuvre. A meticulous forgery to which he had devoted endless days, year after year. Was it a revenge against the tyranny of the real? The real? Did it exist in an unadulterated state? Wasn’t the real a confused space made out of all these unspeakable dimensions? Was the Collector seeking justice? Building a desperate affirmation which emphasised that ultimately all these fragments of reality upon which we build our precarious certainties, might be second hand, fraudulent, seductive shams? Aren’t museums brimming with quiet forgeries, quietly complicit with that most ancient of urges, the urge to forge, to copy, to pass as truthful that which only came afterwards, haunted by a morphic resonance, where a successful entity screams persuasively for reproduction? Wasn’t there a cloning passion at the heart of our endeavours? An obsession with origins or rather with faking origins if necessary? All these Rembrandts, Picassos, all these Van Goghs and Modiglianis, did anybody believe they were all authentic? And wasn’t authenticity a snobbish concept that art collectors had created to distinguish themselves?
The Collector had aspired to create genuine fakes. He knew that these replicas would soon be taken as the real thing. Our strange thirst for the real knew no boundaries. He knew that all throughout. Yes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes were the ones exhibited at the Buñuel museum. Nobody knew what had happened to the original ones. And if anybody did, they had kept quiet. Nobody had shared their secrets with anyone, the whole contents of the museum were copies. Nobody had uttered a word. Only that prop manager had come up with the orthopaedic leg story. But money alters people’s stories, people’s perception of events. The guy had retracted his story, the collection’s value had gone up. Kathy already had a couple of commercial propositions, she wanted to give the proceeds to children’s charities, she had always wanted to do that, that would also keep everybody quiet.
Zacharie sounded as if he wanted to convince me of something, when I didn’t need to be convinced. My mother’s shoes were real. All the other objects were real. It was only the circumstances around them that were different. I saw the convent in my head. In my memory, it was a tenuous image. An image that could have come from a dream. An image, not a tangible, three dimensional thing. And yet the museum was there, a figment of place on the edge of Mexico City, under Mexican clouds, surrounded by chaotic buildings, traffic, noise, pollution and occasional trees, visited by hundreds of people, like so many other museums full of fakes in so many other cities, treated with the reverence that only authentic things received, but also ignored by monumental crowds indifferent to what others called culture.
I felt conned, deceived.
I didn’t say anything.
I needed time to absorb everything.
I said: shit.
I said: I don’t believe you.
Nonsense, utter nonsense, I said.
And yet I understood the whole logic and was awestruck by the monumentality and absurdity of the Collector’s project. He wanted to be remembered, not for replicas, but for meticulous forgeries, which was where most art theories foundered. But why call it The Museum of Relevant Moments?
I asked Zacharie. That’s a good question, he said, I don’t know, you’ll have to get a ouija board and ask him. He was probably fixated on a few moments in Buñuel’s films and just expanded on that. He saw himself as a magician, a magus, he just wanted to posit the world as a question mark.
He then said that in any case I had been paid a lot of money out of the blue, that the Collector and Kathy liked the idea of giving money to a bum like me, a talented bum, they thought that it was money well-spent, that they wanted me to know, but they wanted me to know in my own time. In my own time? I couldn’t help feeling the naive victim of a kind of candid camera trick. But it wasn’t cruel or hilarious. It was a metaphysical trick that released a warmth through my head that exploded slowly, then imploded into a kind of inexplicable chaos.
I felt conned.
The image of the shoes I had sold them flashed through my mind.
Then I laughed. It was a sublime laughter. And with my laughter I heard Nina Chiavelli’s demonic laughter emerging from her coffin, then my father's joining in. They were convulsing, they were moving up and down splitting their sides, rolling on the soil of the neglected cemetery with an unlimited ha ha ha ha that reverberated across the universe. Could it be that the Collector really didn’t know who Nina Chiavelli had been, that he had bought these shoes unaware that they were the real ones, unaware that my mother had appeared as a foot extra in the film that Buñuel identified with the most and that something authentic had slipped in his secret museum of replicas, that the fake museum contained an original, my mother’s innocent high heels?
Zacharie had always been an emissary of unreality.
He loved it, it was his game. I didn’t fantasize about him one bit this time, as if my fantasy switchboard was already clogged up with what he had told me. To return to reality, I rang Chris. We were planning to move in together, to his place, and I had already packed most of my things. I was laughing when I told him about the whole thing, although it was a laughter I hadn’t experienced before, an awkward laughter. The whole museum was a fake. Everything was bogus except for my mother’s shoes, but they didn’t know that, they thought they were bogus too! I didn’t say anything to Zacharie. In any case, maybe there was a time when copies were seen as monstrous, but that time had been left behind long ago.
Chance had the last word.
And if in a genuine collection fakes could sneak in, there was always the chance that in a collection of fakes, something genuine could slip in.
That’s crazy, write about it, Chris said, it’ll make a good story and it’s based on reality, he said. I feel a strange loyalty to Kathy and the Collector and the whole idea, I don’t want to stir things up, it’s perfect like that, I said. Like a perfect cake with a tiny fly on it, he said. I said the whole thing left me feeling as if I was in a no-place. Talking about the museum Zacharie had said, of course it’s real. And then, of course it isn’t. Whether it was or not, the possible fiasco had installed in my head an oscillation between different types of reality. Going through one to the other, there was this gap, this no-place, this no-place that had unwittingly been trespassed by the real, everything criss-crossed, everything intermingled, the Collector should have known.
Another no-place? Chris said. Well, it’s a different type of no-place, it’s a metaphysical no-place, I said. A metaphysical no-place? he said. He was going to kidnap me when I least expected it and hide me in his no-flat, tied up to a no-bed post, he said. I liked the idea, except that his bed didn’t have a no-bed post. You’ll have to buy a new no-bed, and a lot of no-rope, I said. I’ve just found a new four poster bed outside a house, just the frame, I’m going to disinfect it with Dettol Multi Action Trigger … but I was thinking about painful hand-cuffs and ankle-cuffs rather than rope, he said. Would you rather have rope? he asked. It’s up to you, whatever you want, you’re the master with the masterful hands, I said. We’ll go for a special dinner before the abduction, he said. Don’t forget the blindfold! And the gag! I said. Did Lecour know that it was all a sophisticated forgery? he said. I hadn’t thought about Lecour. He must have done, he’s Kathy’s lover, I said. Who’s Zacharie? he said. A guy who’s into playing games, I had a crush on him, I had a one-night stand with him, I said. Do you still fancy him? he said. Why? Are you jealous? I said. Of course, he said. I can’t believe it, I said. That I’m jealous? he said. No, the museum thing, have you ever heard anything like it? I said. You can be a bit of a fantasist sometimes. Are you really sure that your mother’s shoes really appeared in that film by Buñuel? he said. Pretty certain, I suppose I’d rather my mother was connected to Buñuel’s films, I said. And as I said that, I wasn’t sure about anything anymore. It all had the disconcerting logic of a long and convoluted dream.
After Chris hung up, I was in this no-place for a while, then I went for a walk. In general, the weather seemed to be getting warmer. The streets, always so real to me, took a while to acquire reality. Things became focused gradually. Toys proliferating everywhere, multiplying, like a varied vegetation gone out of control, things shouting: buy me, buy me, buy me, take me with you, rescue me, I will fulfil your deepest psychological needs, with me you will be more. I was enveloped by the euphoria of things. Apparently submissive things. I walked along ignoring them while my brain released a sensation of infinite gratitude. I was grateful to chance for slipping this footnote into my life. It was good that Kathy was going to sell the museum and give the proceeds to charities, but this footnote also gave me access to this no-place, an oscillating angle from which to look at life. Life, I suppose that’s the word, an increasing minefield for fictions of all kinds, we need these fictions, we cannot bear facts for long, but then who and what decides on fictions, on which fictions are allowed, which not, which realities, which not?
Questions and questions and questions and questions and questions.
I walked back home thinking that I should ring Kathy for a reality-check.
But I didn’t do it.