Anima blandula days
Networks, pathways of objects, flows of objects. Words, sentences I had written glided through my head with the ghostly presence of an afterglow making me smirk, making me anticipate the reactions of their reader, the laughter, the counter-arguments, the bewilderment, the harsh frowns, my words were probably still in the post, but they were already out there, in the world, looking forward to being consumed, waiting for an interpretation, taking up volume in mid air, exhilarated at the prospect of entering somebody’s forehead, at the prospect of creating reverberations in their inner ear.
That is what usually danced around my head for a few days whenever I sent writing through the post. My own words, my song. Except that this time it was somebody else’s song, Lecour’s song: if writing is a directed daydream, I had been daydreaming somebody else’s dream. Even so, mission accomplished. I relaxed. I went through a kind of mild jet-lag phase, a phase where I drifted around the house in a trance, overslept, browsed through books, immersed myself in the TV flow, saw Pearl and Snow, saw friends, did my human things, idled away deliberately, as if I had to squander all the time I had spent purposefully, escape from any useful activity, catch up with all the time I hadn’t wasted while I was busy, catch up with all the useless daydreaming I had neglected, as if daydreaming was something I needed in order to survive, my own daydreaming.
Days immersed in reveries, killing time, a necessity.
Days devoted to doing unnecessary things.
During those days, I was surprised to get a box of Gauloises blonde légère through the post with a note from Zacharie: so sorry to have missed you. I also got a small note from Lecour saying that he liked the new Lecour, that I had written an almost veritable forgery, full of talented falsifications, he would have incurred in exactly the same misreadings I had incurred in, he liked the way I treated rationality as just another tradition, the way I ended the piece talking about cyborgs, maybe I could send him some of my own writing, what I had written was so poetic, exactly the same poetic angle he would have taken. Exactly the same misreadings? And poetic? What did he mean by poetic? Words charged with mysterious power and significance, fetishised words? Was he taking the piss? I also got a cheque from Kathy, a note thanking me so much for the favour, saying the Collector was in good health now, I should go and visit them in Mexico. Well, perhaps I had written a veritable forgery, but after all my searches I felt that I had discovered nothing. There were a few slithers of meaning here and there, but nothing illuminating, I couldn’t think beyond the concepts of my own time, I couldn’t unthink my thoughts. But that’s probably all you could hope for, slithers. I will never fully understand objects, I didn’t understand objects at all, perhaps mysteries were better left alone.
The opacity of objects.
The placebo effect of objects: good for the temporary relief of mild pain.
Then the void, then trying to avoid the void.
Blue skies, lost dogs, citrus and petrol fragrance, I went to visit my father for a month. This time he only recognised me now and again, this time the situation exasperated me. His bewildering intermittent memory made me see El Refugio in all its sadness, even if Dr Alvarez was still his usual enthusiastic self, even if Eva was friends with him again, even if its wild surroundings were an unusual break from a world aggressively branded with advertising. Incontinence, denial of incontinence and its villainous smell, several missing teeth, memory working on and off. I didn’t know my father anymore, he didn’t know me either. Whenever he recognised me, he wasn’t aware that a while ago he had confused me with his sister, a complete stranger, one of the female nurses or a new visiting doctor. When he first saw me he said, so glad to see you, you’re everybody’s favourite nurse, and touched my long hair, maybe because it was long and there wasn’t anybody around with long hair. I just went to the toilet and stood squatted on top of the toilet seat, arms wrapped around my knees, curled up in a ball. The toilet became my retreat. He evaded my questions, he didn’t know his name, he didn’t speak, he gave me taps on the hand. He read the newspaper with a serious demeanour, don’t know how he understood it. There was one day when he walked around the table endlessly, in an automatic ritual whose meaning escaped me. Sometimes he seemed happy, no doubt. When he confused me with somebody else, did he know somewhere in his head that it was me, his dear daughter? That’s the question that hovered over my head to begin with. Then after a few days, I started hiding my grief, it affected him, I just went to the toilet and stood squatted on top of the toilet seat. I started smiling at his confusions, they were often funny, what could I do but smile?
Grief, fear, acceptance and non-acceptance, in the evenings we sat together on the terrace and looked at the stars in silence.
The stars.
He gazed at the immensity of the starry night with reverential wonder.
He already felt part of the stellar dust.
During those days, I stayed with my cousin Antonio, his flat full of glittering fabrics now, latex, wires, hat moulds, solid wooden blocks. He didn’t have time for cartoon animation anymore, he had a job making theatre props for a small company in Madrid, he designed hats, made them out of papier-mâché, he designed accessories for the costumes, for the sets, he loved working with his hands, being an artisan, the patience, the love. He had inherited this from his mother, the ingenuity of knowing how to make things. Many things he didn’t buy, he usually made them, it saved him money, but above all, making things by hand equalled pleasure. All the hats, all the accessories were tailor made for a few performances, he had to meet the actors, the actresses, but some of them were so fussy, he detested them, found them unbearable, could only bear them on stage, when they were playing a different role, when they weren’t playing the stars. He had a motorbike now, we went out everywhere with it, bars, the beach, flea-markets with their chaotic promise of reveries conjured up by a provisional map of sacrificed objects. One evening I rode his bike, feeling the physical exhilaration of speed against my face, the fusion of my lower torso with the seat, the fusion of my hands with the handlebars, my temporary status as a hybrid, part human, part machine. Cyborgs? I was sleeping on it, I had started to think about it when I was ghost-writing for Lecour.
During those days, I told Antonio endless tales about my mother’s shoes, their comings and goings, their weird disappearance, about the Collector. Antonio, dirty suede shoes. I did desire Antonio, it was a mild desire, it found no echo, it disappeared the day that he decided to get rid off his long black hair and have his head shaved, thus going from gypsy king to Buddhist monk.
He was going out a lot, coming back at dawn, and when I wasn’t with my father, I wrote aphorisms about chaos and about forgetfulness and death. This time I hadn’t taken my laptop. I wanted to explore life without it. I took a liking to writing by hand, watching the ink slowly dry out, holding the pen between my thumb and my index, writing with just one hand rather than six fingers, writing in silence rather than listening to the mechanical sound of the keyboard, savouring my variable handwriting, the rustling of paper. I also savoured the language. Listening to my native language, listening to certain expressions, stimulated me, it energised me, like foreign languages do, but it had to do with remembering forgotten expressions, forgotten words that activated my intimate neural paths, not with the jouissance of the unknown, of learning.
Foreign words, forgotten words, the pleasure of sounds reconfigured in a previously unknown way, the sudden pleasure of a cluster of sounds unearthed from the remote land of oblivion resonated within me on a physical level. Shopkeepers, people in the street, bus conductors brought me by chance this complex pleasure. I also relished that, the spontaneity, the kindness of strangers. The fact that they talked to you, made friendly, conflicting, wearied, flattering remarks, told you personal stories, shared with you part of their consciousness. I missed that feeling of spontaneity. But I realised at the same time that after a while I would want privacy, as if I could only endure the spontaneity in small doses, as if I felt that small chat in public spaces wasn’t conducive to introspection, to living in your own head, to hiding inside your own train of thought. I had become used to living at the centre of my consciousness while in London, even in public spaces, perhaps that’s why I always ended up in the land of non-eye contact, I had become accustomed to that, to invisibility, to a different notion of personal space, where personal space wasn’t pushed to the edge of mind when in public.
Perhaps that was why during those days I relished talking to strangers so much: I had been starved. It also distracted me from El Refugio, from my father, from myself. I discovered new ways of communicating with my father. Whenever he strode around the table compulsively, I waited at one of the corners and tapped his hand. He liked that. He also liked it when I manically pulled my tongue out. He just laughed. I said quack, quack, moo, moo. I didn’t know whether he remembered that he had initiated that joke himself, but he laughed. Dr Alvarez said that my father seemed happier when I treated him as an infant, that he had lost his mental abilities in exactly the opposite order that children gain them. Nobody wanted to treat old patients as children, but that was when they were the happiest. He plays hide and seek with Eva, I just let them enjoy themselves, he said.
Antonio came with me to visit him sometimes. On one visit, he wore my father’s navy blue stripy suit. The one I had stripped from his body with my own hands. I didn’t say anything, behaved as if that suit didn’t mean anything, perhaps I blushed. Definitely blushed the day he told me an unpalatable story about my mother, my mother the hysteric. I couldn’t believe him. He was probably tired of my stories about my mother’s shoes, perhaps it was an unconscious revenge, maybe working with actors and actresses created a negative neural circuit that connected to similar memories from an earlier time. My mother sang the blues so well, he said. She was such a star my mother, he said. My father was completely dominated by her, she needed a lackey, his mother used to say, my father was her lackey, she always had to be the centre of attention, she would sing, she would tell endless stories, but then they had a gagging effect on you these stories, she talked too much. Then now and again she would spark off a scandal, she had to get all the attention, even if it was negative attention, whatever the means. One day she shook the whole street out of its torpor. That was one of his strangest childhood memories. A memory about my mother. Seeing my mother in the middle of the street, with no clothes on, hysterical naked, with a folded gown hanging on her arm, wearing just a pair of yellow stilettos, definitely drunk, she used to say wine was good for the blood, she was so pale. That was one of the things he remembered about my mother, my mother asking passers-by to look at her yellow stilettos, shouting that her husband didn’t like yellow stilettos, that’s what she was shouting. Until my father came out, put the gown on her and took her back inside the house. The whole street knew about it. Didn’t I know this? I was there, I was two or so. He was also there. My mother slapped my father on the face, like in the films. Your father had been asking for a long time for an amicable separation, but your mother wouldn’t have it and then really he really didn’t want it, at least that’s what my mother told me. That’s what my cousin Antonio said. He told me all this in the mist of sincere exchanges on family burdens. Yellow stilettos, my forgotten childhood, I knew the yellow stilettos he was talking about.
My father slapped, insulted, as my mother had probably felt insulted. From love to insult. And perhaps back to love again? And now all that existed were words, the words my cousin Antonio had uttered.
My father now existed as he had existed way before I was born, slapped, insulted, my mother, hysterical, naked. I changed my flight, felt useless being there. I realised I would not be part of my father’s landscape anymore, he inhabited a landscape from a different era, the present had become a discontinuous landscape, the past a map full of gaps. On my last visit to El Refugio, he was wearing two shirts, one on top of the other, he was absent. I waved goodbye to my father, to my cousin Antonio, to Dr Alvarez, waved goodbye to blue skies, went back to unpredictable skies, white, grey, black, rain, white, knowing that on my return I would have to find a storage place for Nina Chiavelli’s shoes.
This time I couldn’t keep all these shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, they took up too much space, I couldn’t live with them forever, I wanted to live my own life. Their touring was about to end, they had been little stars, these shoes. They were also still useful these shoes, women could wear them, but I couldn’t exactly give them away. I could hide them in a loft, like my father had done, forget about them. I could then occasionally show them to friends, they would become my ambivalent treasure, these shoes, but I didn’t have a loft. Maybe I could even lose them. But where could I lose ninety-five pairs of shoes, when they were so conspicuous, so obviously from a different time, maybe in a second hand market amongst forlorn and radiant trash? I wasn’t interested in a private collector, I called the Collector for advice, talked to Kathy, they weren’t interested in buying them either, perhaps I should push the gallery that first showed them, make them work harder, suggest a sale for the permanent collection of a museum. I myself could write letters to fashion museums, back them up with reviews from their touring, go solo if the gallery proved useless. It was a good idea, then they would be outside of my life, but I could still visit them. I plunged into letter writing, burned my ears on the phone, almost persuaded the unpersuadable.
‘Leather-bound Stories’ came back from their tour before I had found a place to store them. I looked for the yellow stilettos my cousin Antonio had mentioned. They were completely worn out, both of them had substantial holes on the soles. My mother had worn to death my father’s least favourite shoes. I could feel my mother’s scorn on the cracked soles. Her anger.
I welcomed the ninety-five pairs of shoes, they had brought me luck, but I knew their time had come, they had become my impossible friends. Mary Jane had a huge loft, perhaps she could keep them there while I sorted out their fate. I had completely lost touch with her, with Sam. Their telephone line had never been reconnected, the only way to see them was to visit them, travel all those miles, knock on their door.
One drizzling afternoon I ended up there, knocked on the door, but there was no answer. The lights were on. I knew that Mary Jane was in, Mary Jane and Sam were in. I saw through the blinds a silhouette moving fast. I knocked and knocked, waited in vain, there was only silence. In the silence I whispered:
Mary Jane? Mary Jane?
Sam?
May Jane?
During those elongated anima blandula days, I wrote a letter to Mary Jane asking her how she was, how everything was, whether she was fine, apologizing I had not been in touch, then I wrote aphorisms about loss and impossible friends. Then wrote about cyborgs, got immersed in a piece about cyborgs I had envisaged when I was ghost-writing for Lecour. I tried to shed Lecour, wrote about all the things that had been trapped on my mind, sealed in my tongue. I wrote what Lecour would have written if he could have gone beyond his world. I became aware of my own hubris, tried to go beyond it and tried my best to bypass my pathetic self. Then as I was immersed in this strange world of cyborgs, I was contacted by the Victoria and Albert Museum with an enquiry to hire Nina Chiavelli’s shoes as part of the extension to the loan collection.
It was there, that I met Chris, Chris Hamlyn, their occasional archive photographer, an olive skin male with dishevelled hair and small holes in his shrunken jumpers. I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum everyday. It wasn’t necessary, but I wanted to make sure they put a face to my mother’s shoes. I met Chris at one of the back EXITS, while having a cigarette. He was having a rummage through some old objects in a skip, he was looking at a large tin box. He had a tiny freckle on his right ear, wore interesting trousers such as jodhpurs and V-neck jumpers that emphasised the line of his neck. He touched my thoughts, something to do with the small holes in his jumpers, something in his voice, in the depth of his gaze. I developed an instantaneous addiction to Chris’s smell. We started following each other’s scent. Was your mother a model? Well, yes, no, I mean. I told him snatches of what I knew. Intriguing mother, he said. Excuses, excuses and excuses to bump into Chris and share nicotine time.
What are the most relevant moments you’ve ever lived, like seeing a bit of fluff and having an epiphany? I said. Some of the pictures I take … I take them to grasp the inner beauty of a moment, climbing, reaching the summit of Mont Blanc, I bought a Leika recently, that was quite a special moment, he said. I’m writing about cyborgs, how some gadgets become extensions of people’s bodies, it’s weird, we’re becoming a new species, part human, part technology, I said. Do you know Maplins? he said. Maplins? The world of electronics and beyond, he said, they sell all these interesting gadgets, I had this strange experience the other day, I was looking at Maplins’s shop-window, and then I experienced a slight erection, he said. You did? You didn’t, I said. It just happened, honestly, he said. I told him about my father being so old, I said I was ringing him everyday, it was difficult, sometimes I just said to him moo moo, it was the only way to get a response out of him. Chris put his hand on my shoulder, left it there for a long time, the first time he touched me. But then he said after a while: did you know that cows in Bengali don’t go moo? Honestly, in Bengali cows don’t say moo, they go: hamba!
I didn’t believe anything he said. He surprised me in his passion for gadgets, he was forever buying them, claimed his interest was purely historical. I thought that my new interest in cyborgs was partly what drew me to him at first, when really the meeting point was at the level of everything.
Oh, the holes in his jumpers, his dazzling tattered shoes, the recurrent halo around his head and then he was such a cunnilingus virtuoso.
Chris was also a great skipologist. His flat was a skip-museum extravaganza where the most amazing archaeological remains from the 1940s to the mid 1990s could be found. Aviation goggles from the Second World War, an inflatable hair-dryer, a transparent Perspex chair, a collectible foldable bicycle, a round trampoline. Whenever we went for a walk, we would come back with something or other: a ridiculous Ascot hat, an L.C. Smith & Corona typewriter.
Time changed. It became feverish. It became Chris. A free floating desire originally activated by the clubs I went to, still enveloped me. It attached itself to Chris. He picked it up. Pondered it. Teased me. Surrendered. Chris and I. My life became Chris. Nothing existed but Chris. I became we. Time became idyllic time. Chris took pictures of everything. He clicked away all the time. He took a series of pictures of odd warning signs, deserted motorways, apocalyptic industrial horizons. He called them pictures from the future. Blew them up to gigantic sizes, life size. They were splendid, majestic in their own unpredictable way, like him. He took astounding portraits of me. He somehow managed to capture my inner beauty through my unappealing face, as if the blindness of love could be captured in film. ‘Leather-bound Stories’, my mother’s shoes, were documented by him, I shared them with him, with him I narrated my own story as if for the first time, although somehow I didn’t tell him about my father being shoe-fetishist of sorts, about my strange findings.
Sex
Sex
Sex
Sex
Sex
Sex
Sex
Sex
Sex
Relentlessly
All over the universe, excluding black holes
We danced to its music, we had vanilla sex, mint sex, chocolate orange sex, smoothie sex, vindaloo sex, Thai curry sex, sushi sex, mango ice-cream sex. We danced to exhaustion until we abolished time. Then we danced around my mother's shoes. The Victoria and Albert loaned Nina Chiavelli’s shoes. Their offer wasn’t brilliant. But Chris and I celebrated. Had dinner out a lot, bought rare second-hand trash and gadgets, new technologies. Visited a few times the new extension of the loan collection at the Victoria and Albert museum. The shoes were arranged chronologically through the help of a Canadian footwear historian who analysed their shape, colour and material according to the socio-economics of the day. The analysis was interesting. It had been placed underneath each pair. Chris and I found something sad about these labels and the chronological arrangement, though. Would shoe lovers still look at them in awe, would they still blush like they might do in front of some shoe shop windows? Would anybody ever suspect their stories?
I had written my mother’s story as a shoe extra for the big explanatory placard placed next to the right of her shoes. I had written about the lack of records, was proud to see her name printed in big letters:
I couldn’t vindicate my father’s story, the story of a shoe fetishist. Not for the Victoria and Albert museum. But my mother’s story had been vindicated. And with her story, the story of so many extras in the world. Or so, I wanted to believe.
A double full stop
I had wanted to go to Mexico for a long time. But then, things happened, got in the way, I ended up in other places, places I had never thought of visiting and then I was visiting my father all the time. Whenever I thought of Mexico I could never afford it and now that I could, Mexico had become remote in my mind. In any case, where were Jeanne Moreau’s ankle boots? I could picture the Collector yet again set against a new background, this time a protecting blue sky with a fierce white sun, the Collector introducing me to a burnt mannequin, showing me a shiny black high heel shoe, saying this is a classical example from Buñuel’s famous shoe fetishism, it comes from a minor commercial film, El, Buñuel told me that of all his films, this is the one he felt closer to.
I had just met Chris, Chris was to become my other half, don’t know how long the spell will last for, but this is another story, a story I am still finding out about, a story about finding bliss in domestic happiness. I was with Chris the day the Collector died. Still remember the ominous sounding words: cardio-respiratory failure due to probable pulmonary embolism. That day, I had had an idyllic time on the heath with Chris, we had open-air sex hidden by the long grass. When we got home, there was this phone call. It was Zacharie, telling me the news with his lovely French accent perfectly at odds with what he was saying, saying that the Collector would have liked me to be at his funeral, Kathy and him had become so fond of me, if I could take the first flight to Mexico, he would book and organise everything for me.
The flight was eternally uneventful, except I could hear bits of Spanglish around me. I love Spanglish, its humour, its subversiveness. And in a way, it distracted me from mournful thoughts. Mournful thoughts are difficult to utter. When Kathy opened the house’s gate dressed in navy blue, I didn’t know what to say. I hugged her. Said my father was ill. Then kept silent. The house was smaller than I thought it would be, as if in their last years they had decided to build a simplified, intimate world. There were lots of cats running around in the courtyard. I counted twelve. Some of them, the young ones, must have been from the same litter, the others were all different ages, there were two angoras sitting on top of a small shelf of books on the Tibetans, Ainu, the Maori, the Cree, the Yup’ik. She offered me toasted grasshoppers, they’re like chips, she said. They were crunchy and I smiled at her and spat them on a serviette with an I’m-sorry- this-is-truly-disgusting-gesture.
Kathy, her long silver fringe. Her long silver fringe concealed her red eyes this time. To begin with, she didn’t talk about the Collector’s death. She talked about the cats, beautiful creatures, about their elegance, about their fur, their different personalities, their perfection over non-feline friends, the fact that a relationship was established purely through touch. Then she remained in silence for a long time. Then said her husband saw himself as the saviour of objects that might otherwise be lost, she talked about the museum of relevant moments, the convent the Collector had bought to reunite his Buñuel memorabilia, his endless search for Jeanne Moreau’s little boots, the last item that would have completed the collection. During the last months of his life, he was changing his mind all the time. Kathy had thought that he would end up destroying the collection, like many collectors do. Burn it in a ritualised fire. But he didn’t do that. At first, he had gone off the idea of gathering The Museum of Relevant Moments under the convent walls. Had said it didn’t make any sense. A convent didn’t make any sense. And gathering everything in one place didn’t make any sense either. It was more interesting like that, dispersed throughout the world, preserved moments scattered through space. It was lighter like that. These things derived their power from being part of a secret everyday life, rather than being subjected to the rigid taxonomy of a single point in space. Besides, one of the interesting things about Buñuel was that his life was nomadic, there were traces of that in his work, of not quite belonging to a single place. Then the Collector had the idea about the auction she said, he wanted to auction everything, to donate the proceeds to different social causes. But he didn’t want the collection to be acquired by a single collector, he had put down the condition that only one piece could be acquired and kept by a single individual. In the end, he had gone back to the idea of the convent, the museum. He couldn’t help gathering everything in one point in space. The building was already there. He had already created a fund for it. He died before he changed his mind again. So that had been his last wish, the original one.
There were quite a few people at the funeral. Kathy was dressed in radiant white. Except for her, I didn’t know any of the mourners. They all looked elegant, a distinguished breed dressed in dark tones that complicated the vibrant life of the flowers. Then I saw a man wearing dark glasses that looked like Lecour. It was Lecour. He had grown a beard. I glanced at him awkwardly, wondering whether I had been thinking the thoughts of a bearded man. He hadn’t seen me before, he nodded, acknowledging me as his ghost-writer, not knowing that for me he had become a skin that I had shed. Then I saw Zacharie. We looked at each other for a long time, kissed hello, touched hands, then looked at each other for a long time again.
As the coffin went down, I sensed the world the Collector represented was coming to an end. I looked at Zacharie’s Doc Martens. I looked at Kathy wondering whether she would project the loss onto an object, perhaps the museum will become that object, perhaps one day she would bump into a person, that person would suddenly become a magnetic field for loss and she will start a new life. I thought about my mother, my father, about some of the characters in Buñuel’s films. I thought that for some people absence did make the heart, absence and disavowal, but disavowal of the supreme loss: death. Separation and the unspeakable loss were sometimes projected into an object, a blurring of the person in favour of the object. I thought that objects don’t usually go away, you can quietly carry them with you, that if you lose them, you’re the only one to blame. I thought about the Collector’s film fetishes, about the fetish. The fetish was in many cases a reassuring survival tool, an unstable object open to vertiginous interpretation as well as to the possibility of a meaning so hidden in the personal circuits of a brain as to be the most incommunicable cipher. Loss was at the centre of the fetish. How could one deal with death? Perhaps the fetish was an interim object that in some cases remained transitional forever, perhaps it was a different way of mourning. As the coffin went down, I started crying, feeling a fundamental disconnection with the world. Slow tears, tears of loss, then a deluge. I wept incessantly, I took over the funeral, I was perplexed, I didn’t know what to do with my sudden discharge. My tears were tears for our finitude, they were abstract tears, but in essence they were mainly early tears for my father.
After the funeral, we went back to the house to have lunch. The seats around the table were toilet seats, replicating a scene from another of Buñuel’s films where a group of people go to restaurants and dinner parties but the food forever fails to materialise. I thought that Kathy wasn’t going to offer the elegant breed of mourners any food. But she did. Food, drink and the scent of death in the air. I ate and drunk as if death didn’t change the taste of things, but it did to begin with. To begin with something happened to time too, time passed in a strangely still way. But it did to begin with, after a few morsels and drinks, death retired to the background. It was there, but waiting for the wake to end. Lecour tried to bring it back to the centre. I was sitting opposite him. I talked to him. Or rather he talked at me. Or rather he talked at the whole table of mourners pretending he was talking to me, slowly raising his delicate voice above the rest, slowly sinking other voices into murmur, looking at me while looking at everybody else. He philosophised at length about death. He was the type of person who always needed an audience. He said that death was but a moment. Like when a pebble falls into a bottomless lake. The moment we were living was death’s ripple effect. It was a moment that would expand indefinitely, transforming life continuously, death was a limit that rearranged boundaries.
He was gradually silenced by a guitar. A man from Tijuana started to sing old songs, a mix of American and Mexican songs I didn’t know. Then Zacharie started singing as well, his husky French accent making the songs imperfect, perfectly human. A chorus was formed. Life had to be reaffirmed. As it was reaffirmed that night with Zacharie.
Zacharie’s blue eyes became black that night. There was this erotic encounter in the dark. Something to do with desire, life and death. Something to do with the purity of desire. I could barely see him. It’s the lateral night, when you have to strain your eyes to see what is happening, he said. I’m flying back first thing in the morning. My briefcase was really stolen that weekend we were supposed to meet up, I couldn’t contact you. Admittedly, I was a bit pissed when I rang you, but what I told you was roughly what happened, he said.
I turned away from him. I felt no desire towards him. My chemistry was only receptive to Chris’s. Or so I thought ... When I woke up Zacharie was gone. And the encounter took on the blurred consistency of a wet dream where we had suddenly become carnal creatures. Something to do with desire, life and death. I didn’t feel any guilt. It was something that was supposed to have happened before I met Chris. And it just happened to happen afterwards. It was a knee-jerk reaction to death, a blip in my consciousness.
During the day of the funeral we inhabited the time warp of death, pierced by alcohol, laughter and song. Kathy must have inhabited it quite a few days longer, probably countless days. A couple of days after the funeral, she showed me the Collector’s last acquisition. He had been restoring it during the last weeks before his death, he was going to get in touch with Lecour so that he would include it in the written piece for the museum. It had been her idea to get the scarecrow that appeared in the film Robinson Crusoe, but the Collector was really into it. Buñuel had told them at a dinner party that he himself was like Robinson Crusoe when he saw the scarecrow dressed with female clothes, if for him desire took the shape of a woman, female clothes were a woman. Buñuel, she said, had made all these films about desire, but kept his wife locked in a cage! He kept her apart from all his friends, completely irrational, he was a jealous man. He gave her beloved piano away just for a bet!
Kathy had placed the scarecrow in the garden. I walked around the dressed up scarecrow, overwhelmed by its presence against the violently pink strands in the sky. I haven’t seen that film, I said. She told me about it. She said that in the loneliness of his island, old Robinson Crusoe, with youthful Friday as his only companion, had made a scarecrow with female clothes he had found in a trunk. The wind blew the female clothes suggesting the presence of a woman. Robinson Crusoe looked at the scarecrow and then looked away. Friday, a savage man, had never seen western female clothes before and fascinated by them playfully tried them on. Robinson Crusoe blushed. Furiously asked Friday to take these clothes off, never to wear them again. Friday’s playful innocence revealed that he couldn’t read certain cultural signs. Diabolical sexual attraction for dressed up Friday, that’s what Robinson Crusoe experienced. Sexual attraction not as a welcome release but mixed with unspeakable shame, shame mixed in turn with the awareness that that was what he desired, coloured bits of fabric, colour, life.
That was the Collector’s last sigh, a dressed up scarecrow, dressed up in colourful female clothes, a preserved moment about the outlandish importance of female masquerade, Kathy said. I walked around the dressed up scarecrow again, thinking about the impossibility of returning to a pure natural state, a pure natural body, about cultural signs having taken complete precedence over nature, about the exacerbated confusion of flesh and thing. Was it a scandal, this confusion? We were all complicit with it, then there were degrees, degrees, degrees.
We drove to the museum the following day, Kathy, Lecour and I. I knew all the contents inside out. I knew them as images, not as tangible objects. I had written about them. But then I had written about them as Lecour. I caught a glimpse of his nose evenly patterned with blackheads on the rear-view mirror. There was something shifty about him, he had been asking me in the car about my writing on cyborgs, gave me a micro-lecture on the reshaping of the human body by modern technology, talked about military cyborgs and invisible blood while I looked from the car window at the discontinuous strip of resplendent buildings. Then he went silent, barely talked again. I realised that he was either silent or talked in lengthy monologues limiting himself to a reassuring professional script, keeping chitchat at bay, talking mainly about intellectual work. Work. I kept quiet, so quiet, but Kathy never commissioned any further ghost-writing again. I took some snapshots of the museum, I hadn’t taken snapshots of Mexico City, felt the circumstances weren’t appropriate, must say I was amazed by some mountains made out of fridges on the way from the airport and the sheer carnival of colour on entering Mexico City itself.
The Museum of Relevant Moments spoke about the Collector’s life long obsession with Buñuel. I recognised the music box with the ballerina, the wedding dress, the orthopaedic leg, the numerous high heels. High heels, with their emphasis on gravity and minimal contact with the earth, were multiply charged objects that in Buñuel’s world were fused to beautiful legs to refer to a sexuality that transcended nature through culture. But in the museum these high heels were fused to nothing.
It was strange seeing these things in their three-dimensionality for the first time, isolated from their context. Strange to see the black pair of innocent high heels that looked like the ones that I had sold them. I gazed at them for a long time, couldn’t tell any difference at all, they were identical to my mother’s. I took a picture. I thought of stealing them, so easy to just slip them into my handbag. Then Kathy came. We walked together towards the ballerina music box. She wound it up. The ballerina spun monotonously around to the haunting melody. I gyrated around the space, listening to the melody, listening to the Collector’s museum of relevant moments. I listened to the cross with female heads of hair, the wedding dress, the orthopaedic leg.
Kathy was immersed in silence, she was smiling, as if with her smile she could dispel the smell of death. The sheer silence became audible. We listened to the silence. Only banality could break that pure substance. Lecour spoke. Black holes, that’s what you ghost-wrote about, he said looking into my eyes. You ghost-wrote that the Collector’s relevant moments were fugues of meaning, black holes that devoured all meaning, opening into vertiginous interpretation, into the possibility of things meaning nothing, into the sheer materiality of things. But as Kathy says these objects are entities dancing on the edge of the abyss. The Collector’s stolen relevant moments are borderline objects that speak of more or less about untameable objects, a resistance on the part of certain objects, certain fragments, the history of a permanent insurrection led by dissident objects.
Dissident objects? Perhaps they are dissident objects, I replied, but then they also have a signature: Buñuel’s. In the Collector’s world these objects were exiled from their filmic habitat, isolated as Buñuel-embodiments, sheer moulded matter imbued with the fascination for a name. The Collector’s obsession was with the acquisition of the Buñuel object, as if with this acquisition he acquired the mystery of a name. A mystery often intensified by the allure of a film-still where sexual fetishism was highly codified, deeply urban, inextricably linked to culture, to consumerism as an image of refinement, of sophistication, historically different from contemporary rubber as a collective sign of dissent or an ironic comment reducing fetishism to one of the many life styles you can buy. The Collector’s relevant moments weren’t his moments. They were mediated. They were fictional moments that he had made his. The Museum of Relevant Moments is a nice concept, but this, this is just Buñuel.
As I was saying all this, Kathy rested her head on Lecour’s shoulder, then kissed him on the neck, an act that radically altered the moment, an intimate light kiss that presupposed years of intimacy. I blushed. The ballerina stopped spinning. The melody stopped abruptly. When the melody stopped Kathy sighed. At last he’s at rest, she said, thousands of light years away, he always was anyway. Then she held Lecour’s hand, leaving a long silence before she confessed that she didn’t want to become a slave to her husband’s collection, she didn’t want anything to do with it anymore, she didn’t want to be a saviour of objects, she was going to sell it, she was going to give the proceeds to the forgotten little ones, the prosecuted, autistic children, los Zapatistas, her husband would have liked that, she had been persuading him for years, he would have liked her to get her own way in the end, she always did. She looked at Lecour. Lecour assented. She then wound up the ballerina music box again, left me wondering, her display of intimacy with Lecour had brought me close to her, but her voice had sounded remote, as if she was talking to me from the other side of things.
Mexico City, a splendid and chaotic epic scripted by 20.000 million people against a multi-colour backdrop of palaces, slums and sky-scrapers swathed by smoky haze.
I developed an exotic cough after three days. I walked away from the museum, Mexico City, the Collector’s world, as if closing a chapter, unaware that the story hadn’t quite finished. Perhaps stories never quite finish, they are always there waiting for the right moment, to be taken up again, to be re-interpreted on details, to be rewritten, to show you their demonic laughter.
It was my mother’s shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, a foot extra, that had brought me to the steps of this Mexican convent. The convent had become a museum, a shrine to some of Buñuel’s relics, doubly consecrated by the shelter of its holy walls. The hope was that it would become a point of pilgrimage for cinephiles from all over the world, for stiletto lovers, definitely a place to visit for unsuspecting tourists. A pilgrimage is always plagued by unexplainable visions, small miracles of perception. A pilgrimage always enhances the senses as travelling does, making visible the previously invisible. I had done my job. I had put in context through somebody else’s voice all these fascinating objects that shone forth with the power of dreamt images. It’s always difficult to close a chapter, to start a new one. But in a way, the Collector’s death had done that. It had created a definite discontinuity, released me from the mesmerising power of a world, written a full stop from which to say before and after.
I thought that it was all over, and in a sense, it was. Mary Jane had disappeared. Buñuel’s museum was finished. The Collector had died. And I knew that it was my father’s turn.
I called Chris, said I would be going straight to Almería, once back at Heathrow.
I panicked, I changed my flight in order to be there ten days earlier, a farewell visit that allowed me to be with my father during his last weeks, to give him the last kiss. I knew that he had become a ghost of himself. He needed intensive, around-the-clock help, he was chair-bound and then by the time I arrived, bedridden. He just slept and slept and slept and slept for longer periods than ever enveloped in a tired sour smell. A male nurse changed his position every two hours to relieve the pressure of his body and dealt with the bed pads that he had to wear at night. Mealtimes lasted an eternity, as if by treating each morsel as an everlasting onus, his departure to everlasting peace was justifiably delayed. A couple of times I saw a toothless childlike smile that spoke about cheating death. I sat there for hours on end through his diet of cheese, chicken nuggets and mashes. He would just have a bite and slowly chew it forever. The room was kept in semi-darkness, except for meal times, when the sun particles invaded the room in a sudden apotheosis of light. It was painful to see him wincing, his insomnia, his wan thinness, his vacant presence in front of the small TV that the nurses had put in his room. He told me with his eyes that he was tired, that he wanted to die, but I saw something in him that didn’t want to die, something that struggled. He thought I was one of the nurses. And he confused Dr. Alvarez with his brother. He went on life-sustaining treatment while I was there, mainly artificial nutrition and hydration which mainly sustained the transition between life and death. Eva brought in a chair and sat next to him everyday. She kept repeating that the tangle of transparent tubes were a torture for him, that he was ready to enter the tunnel of light. And there was a time I thought of disconnecting the drips. I couldn’t disconnect my father’s life. It was his life. The only thing I could do was hold his hand, tell him about Eva, about how lucky he was to have met her, about Mexico, about Chris.
He was slowly forgetting to exist.
And then he forgot to exist.
He forgot to pump his heart.
He embraced the general collapse.
His head was turned towards the bedside table, his vacant eyes gazing blankly at an empty glass of water, his set of false teeth resting next to a pinewood knot. That was the last thing he saw: false teeth resting on a pinewood knot, a transparent glass.
Eva had heard that people sick with forgetfulness eventually forget to breathe and that’s what she kept muttering. He bloody forgot to breathe, she kept repeating. But he didn’t forget to breathe. It’s impossible to forget to breathe. It’s a legend about the destructive power of oblivion.
My dad forgot to exist.
His fragile heart forgot to beat.
His blood drained out making his skin pale. His flesh succumbed to gravity. His body cooled. His muscles relaxed and then stiffened. Then putrefaction began, endowing his skin with a greenish colour. That is what death is: the foul-smelling gas of active microbes, the devouring bacteria at their noisy feast, the breaking down of the cells, more foul-smelling gases which turn the body purple, then black. Then the body bloats. Then more advanced decay, putrid blisters, the swelling of selected body-parts, the bulging out of the eyes. Then the body liquefies until decomposition only leaves skeletal remains which eventually turn into dust.