Fast-forward, rewind
Oh well, oh well, my father had never hid from me that my mother had been a strip tease girl, but he had never told me that she had been a shoe model as well. Wasn’t that telling? It was, wasn’t it? Shoe modelling. What a strange profession. My mother must have got most of her shoes from shoe modelling. All my odd ideas about them, mere reverie. London rainy days were conducive to consolidating fantasies seeded elsewhere. Weeds. Growing up. Becoming aware of fault lines and crevices in the way you interpret the world. Waiting. I was waiting. While waiting, I found myself writing a list about my own relevant moments. I tried to write as many as possible. There were moments from childhood and adulthood all jumbled up and only a couple from my adolescence. Love, death and the discovery of simple pleasures. And then, also the discovery of cruelty. That’s what my relevant moments spoke about. Since then, I have added other relevant moments to my life, but at the time this is what I came up with:
Making up white lies to a friend about an abandoned mansion in the street I lived in as a child.
A man slightly trembling in my arms
A young cat dying suddenly in my arms
An old cat taking to sleeping on my head during the months before he died
Seeing my mother’s boots in a film by Buñuel
Dusting books written in foreign languages when I was a child and wondering about their enigmatic content
Doing the homework from a French school book with my mother and going beyond several lessons ahead of homework
Discovering a litter of newly born mice in the sand dunes
Leaving a pair of shoes in a litter bin as a goodbye to a city and a man
Seeing seagulls dead by the seashore and being suffused by melancholia for the first time, aged fifteen.
Realising my father could also be a victim when his wallet was stolen in the market
Returning from school and being greeted by my father with sheer love
Witnessing as a child sheer cruelty when I saw some boys spattering some kittens against a wall and asked them what the hell they are doing and being baffled by their answer: the kittens won’t survive without their mothers, anyway
Hiding under the blankets and weeping when my father told me that my mother had gone to make films in heaven
Becoming conscious of the social status of my family
Looking at the stars with my father
Seeing my father crying when he came across a packet of rizzlas in my bedroom.
Smelling cardamom and smelling cinnamon
Relishing a myriad bubbles as a sea wave crushed against my body
Relishing the undulating effect on my body when diving under a wave
I was musing on this list, how a moment triggered another moment that contained the same word, when the phone rang. The call from the man whose name had two K’s in it was manna from heaven. The shipping crates, my mother’s shoes had finally been found. Drug-sniffing specialists at the airport had indicated to the inspectors that these innocuous crates full of female shoes needed a closer look. We are extremely sorry. There was this mistake, somebody ticked the wrong box and officially declared the crates as carriers of ‘illegal narcotics’. I had to answer lots of questions as well as writing several statements that declared they were narcotics-free, he said. Carriers of illegal narcotics? I said. The dogs were totally excited, he said. To err is canine too, I said with glee. Airport dogs are odour specialists, they must have found something narcotic in the smell the shoes gave off, he said in a factual manner. I started laughing, but said nothing. My theory is that an officer must have misread the alert the dogs gave, these dogs are infallible, he said. The Kyoto show is going proceed as planned, if that is your wish, we’re extremely sorry.
Relieved, I went for a long walk and relished the light drizzle. More often than not drizzle irritated me, but ‘the narcotic shoes event’ had made me dance on my feet as I walked. Thinking on my feet, my thoughts specialised in how unbelievable reality can be and then I also found myself thinking about Zacharie.
Knowing that he was arriving on Thursday, when Wednesday came, I found myself plucking my eyebrows, shaving my legs, choosing what to wear. The Buñuel tapes arrived in a parcel covered in ‘fragile’ stickers. When Zacharie rang, I swooned again as he asked me for my address and whispered I’ll be at your place three minutes past seven Saturday evening.
Saturday was still two days away but when Saturday came he rang to postpone the meeting to Sunday, same time. I waited for the bell to buzz on Sunday from three minutes past seven onwards, left several messages with the hotel receptionist, but the evening went by in slow motion with no sign of Zacharie. Maybe something’s happened to him, maybe he’s been abducted by aliens, I thought. Or else, he’s un homme fatal. I yowled. Un homme fatal, I didn’t need an homme fatal in my life. And yawning at the thought, I left the phone off the hook.
And yet I felt down.
And down.
And down.
And once in bed, I had the weirdest kitsch sexual fantasies featuring galloping horses emerging from the sea mixed in with Zacharie’s face. Was this a prelude to the Buñuel tapes? What kind of man could trigger such lurid fantasies? I started watching the Buñuel tapes sans Zacharie, three days after I received them. Became acquainted with most of his work, paying special attention to the sequences where an image would stand out with a trompe-l’oeil effect as an obvious fetish. Buñuel’s commercial films were a bit of a rarity. I relished them, realising that even in the commercial films an alibi had been created in order to smuggle in a small disturbing detail, an unsettling image that would afterwards float around in your consciousness like an after-image. Moreover, knowing that my mother, Nina Chiavelli, had been a foot extra, I was looking in particular at women’s feet in films, close-ups of feet, but also other close-ups of parts of the body, always wondering whether a beautiful hand belonged to the same body it purported to be part of, whether a neck, a pair of legs belonged to an anonymous extra rather than to the main star. I realised that this kind of intense cutting up of the body was also intrinsic to advertising, a couple of legs advertised tights, a hand, hand cream, a torso, a bustier. But that wasn’t all that new. Early advertising already fused consumerism, desire and female body parts in a bizarre montage. It was me who was new to the world: I was so naive.
The news about the genocide in Rwanda, which was about a different cutting up of the body, dominated the news at the time. At some point, I decided not to watch the news anymore. It was too gruesome. Human cruelty knew no bounds. I still didn’t know that life was an affair interspersed with wars, always wars. I decided not to watch the news until I had gone through all the tapes that I had to watch.
The TV screen became a sheer rectangle of fascination in the dark. I became a recluse for a while. Didn’t understand why they wanted me to ghost-write around a hundred pages when the whole thing could be summarised in a few. I sat on the fluffy white rug, with an improvised ghost-writer’s kit: remote control, pen and paper, cigarettes, beer, salted peanuts and cashew nuts which according to the warning on the packet happened to contain traces of nuts. I immersed myself in Buñuel’s films, in his world. His neurotically interesting characters kept me good company for quite a few days. That’s what I liked about film, the fact that characters didn’t look at you. You could see them but they couldn’t see you.
I watched the rare films to begin with. I first watched The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz and was shocked at how abysmal it was. Then I watched it again and thought it was a brilliant macabre comedy, a clever nod to magical thinking. The film was about a traumatised man who surrenders to the police when his powerful psycho-pathic killing fantasies against women start coinciding with the deaths of those very women. The protagonist reminded me of Zacharie in a vague, ungraspable way. As I was wondering whether they shared anything in common beyond looks and if I would ever see Zacharie again, I wrote about mental delinquencies and how they are part of the inner texture of everyone. Would Lecour have thought of that term?
But then pleasure, all that solitary pleasure came to a halt. It came to a sudden halt when I came across this minor film called El. It was in this film that I found the image of the shoes that I had sold to the Collector, the innocent high heels with a double strap. Had my mother been a foot extra in a Buñuel film? Wouldn’t my father have told me, wouldn’t the Collector have told me? I rewound the tape, looked at the innocent high heels, those were my mother’s shoes, the shoes next to the stilettos the main actress was wearing! There they were. The camera focused first on the innocent high heels with a double strap, then on a pair of stilettos, then on a pair of male shoes. The main scene was a stiletto and its beautiful shadow. It was a seamless scene travelling upwards to the main actress’ face.
My mother was just a pair of anonymous shoes, a pair of innocent shoes without a face. I felt humiliated to see that my mother’s shoes were the ones next to the main actress, perhaps the humiliation my mother must have felt at just being a pair of feet. Humiliation? It was a job. A job that must have allowed her to feed me and buy herself more treats, such as more high heels. She probably learned to enjoy that, the anonymity, the eventual lack of pressure in being an extra, the joyful indifference towards the tyrannical world of achievements. Perhaps not. Nina Chiavelli, an extra like so many other extras in the world. But perhaps there is never such a thing as an extra in the world.
Blood travelled to my head igniting the circuits of anger. I looked carefully at the credits for my mother’s name, so many names gathered under one name: Buñuel. My mother’s name wasn’t there. Had my father fallen in love when he first saw my mother’s high heels, like the guy in the film? I switched off the video, the TV, abandoned myself to my mind’s white noise. I rang the Collector straight away. Felt deceived by the whole thing. The Collector had mentioned when I first met him that the black pair of innocent high heels reminded him of another pair that had appeared in a Buñuel film, but the shoes were identical. He must have known all throughout that Nina Chiavelli had been a foot extra. He should have told me when we first met. A lot of things would have been clearer to me then. But then I thought that it was the shoes which were the same. That didn’t imply it was my mother’s feet, even if my mother had been a foot extra. Also, why would Kathy have sent me that particular tape?
Kathy answered the telephone. The Collector was indisposed. Said the doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him, he was feeling increasingly unwell. I spoke warm words. Reassured her. I said that I had received Buñuel’s tapes but not the images from The Museum of Relevant Moments, she had forgotten to include them in the parcel. I asked about Zacharie and she said she didn’t know he was in London, he travelled a lot, she said. Then I made enquiries about my mother’s shoes. I didn’t know how to put it, but I did. Nina Chiavelli? A foot-extra? Kathy laughed hoots of raucous laughter. And to my surprise, I found myself laughing with her. She then assured me that they had never heard about Nina Chiavelli. There had been a misunderstanding. Yes, the shoes I sold them were almost identical to the ones in the film, but they weren’t the original ones, they owned the original ones, they were slightly different, the original ones were completely new, the Collector had been so bemused to encounter an almost identical pair in pristine condition after almost fifty years. Hasn’t it occurred to you that at the time they must have manufactured thousands and thousands of shoes identical to your mother’s? And what if your mother had a knack of buying shoes inspired by the films she watched? I hesitated. I apologised. Kathy said it was just a misunderstanding, misunderstandings, they were interesting, they created new realities, they happened everyday.
I felt relieved. There was something about Kathy that always calmed me down, something soothing in her intonation. And yet I rewound the tape again. Attentively watched it sequence by sequence. Fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward, rewind. The film started with the protagonist helping in a cleansing ceremony where a priest washed a row of adolescent boys’ feet and then kissed them on the instep, a lingering kiss, a rite of passage into something unspoken, a strange ritual. I thought this rite of passage would make more sense if the adolescents had deposited a lingering kiss on the supreme’s foot, but then it would have been primarily about power, like kissing a king’s ring, a priest’s ring. A collective ceremony was followed by a private obsession, foregrounding how collective ritual sanctioned behaviour unacceptable when private: the protagonist’s gaze went through the row of adolescent male bare feet, looked quickly at the shoes of the congregation and froze with his gaze a high heel shoe, its distinct shadow a perfect high heel silhouette. His passion for the owner of the shoe, crystallised there, with the sight of her high heel shoe and its beautiful shadow. A passion that crystallises around a foot housed in a beautiful high heel shoe and its beautiful shadow might not be all that promising. But sometimes things turn out like that, not just the irrational but even the shadow of the irrational.
Ejecting the tape from the video-recorder, I reminded myself that thousands and thousands of identical shoes were manufactured at the time.
I continued working, writing, living on coffee, cigarettes and filmic matter.
As soon as I received the images from The Museum of Relevant Moments, I put them up on the living room walls and immersed myself in each one of them, one at a time. In my endeavours to be a good chameleon, I re-read several times bits of Lecour’s oeuvre. I got the mannerisms, the rhythm, the style. Tried to think the way he would think, tried to conjure up the angle he would have taken, utterly freed from any anxiety of influence. I enjoyed that, inhabiting a different way of seeing. It allowed me to be somebody else, it allowed me to consciously incorporate somebody else’s vision into my own consciousness, devour it while being devoured by it. I started taking notes about the Collector’s museum of relevant moments from Lecour’s point of view. Littered my writing with neologisms, mystifying sentences, sentences that went beyond sense, concepts coined with Latin words for the occasion, names of monolithic philosophers, fetish names. I had watched most of the Buñuel tapes. Buñuel’s desire was a desire for the knowledge of desire. Middle class men with established middle class professions, then, perversely bored wives, chambermaids, servants, nuns, part-time prostitutes, mannequin models. His eroticised women weren’t a mere mirage of male desire, though. Beyond their appearance, these women were caught up in their own inner tangles, erotic flights, discordant liaisons, just as his neurotic men, his often outmoded bearded men.
Beards. I had a phobia about beards, it was like there was hair where it shouldn’t be, but then, it shouldn’t be there according to the convention of cleanliness. I found it hard to sympathise with bearded characters. But was that Lecour’s point of view? Wasn’t it more my point of view? Could I escape my own subjectivity? Buñuel’s desire was a desire for the knowledge of desire? In Buñuel, fetishism remained an exclusively male game. Almost all the characters that pointed to it were men. I realised that in Buñuel’s world fetishism was an exclusively male affair, there weren’t any women fetishists in his films.
A denial? A blind-spot?
A memorable long sequence in L’Age d’or from 1930 came to my head as a delayed counterpoint to my nagging suspicions. Memorable and hilarious. How I laughed! In this film, there was this upper middle class woman vehemently sucking a statue’s foot for a bewildering long long time. Kathy hadn’t send me that film. Maybe the Collector didn’t own that statue. That was the first example of Buñuel’s foot fetishism, it was a woman who fetishised, it was related to the absence of her violent lover, her sucking was evocative of another kind of sucking but it only pointed to the absence of her lover, not to any inherent lack in her. Would Lecour have written about that?
Ghost-writing and film-watching, so perfectly spectral. I wasn’t looking forward to becoming Lecour but I started scribbling about Buñuel’s fascination with unspoken sexual fantasies, how the Collector’s collection of relevant moments spoke about this fascination, how some of the neurotic characters in his films actually worked like complex case studies, to what extent other characters were sexual dissidents trapped inside rancid marriages, whether he was stuttering about femininity as mere pretence, a perfect simulacrum, a copy of a copy of a copy going back ab aeternum to an original that had never existed. After his first two films, Buñuel had integrated this strange fascination as part of the everyday life of his characters, you could see it in small frozen details that might seem ordinary and yet, at the end of the film, these small frozen details stood out with the over insistent presence of a hallucinated trompe-l’oeil. These were the relevant moments that the Collector had chosen. In many of them, ritual was what invested them with meaning. Yet in others, the way the camera travelled around an object as if caressing it, entailed a compulsive logic. I scribbled about ritual, the ritual of sense, of bestowing sense upon things, about private rituals, about using things as safe conducts to transform the here and now.
Barely registering transitions of daylight, I spent ages and ages scribbling about all this, wondering whether all these films will leave a neural trace of filthy-wanton-lascivious-weird fantasies as side-effects. When I finished my scribbling, I realized that I wasn’t quite thinking about The Museum of Relevant Moments. The museum dealt mainly with the haunting power of inanimate things, I had been scribbling solely about Buñuel, rather than about the Collector’s museum and the voice wasn’t quite Lecour’s voice, but more like a zealous parody of his style. As a ghost-writing piece it just didn’t sound right. It was rubbish. It was crap. It sounded like me trying to sound like somebody else and failing miserably. The contents were more or less OK, but my chameleon abilities were limited. I put half of what I had written through the shredder as a symbolic act of sorts. I felt an immense elation as I saw the paper strips curled up in the bin and could see Buñuel’s ghost nodding at me with approval. I saw his face precariously projected on the ceiling. I winked at him with complicity, while warning him mentally that all my scribbling was saved on the laptop and on disquette. I had a cool beer while ignoring my neighbour Pearl knocking on my door: Nina, are you in? I hadn’t been out for a million years and maybe Pearl was worrying about me. I rang her and told her that I was alright, just working, fine. It was funny ringing your next door neighbour, hearing the immediate ringing from my own flat.
I was tired-unhappy. I was reluctant to go to the British Library. After the penis nightmare event, I had a developed a phobia towards the building. I improvised an office on the white rug: laptop, hand-written notes, ashtray and a gooseneck desk lamp. I just had to write another sixty-six pages. And yet I spent hours on end looking for split-ended hairs under the crisp clear halogen light. This bout of trichotillomania, the name given to hair-plucking, was interwoven with siestas and power-naps that left me exhausted.
The flat had become so quiet that I learnt to distinguish first each infra-noise made by each electrical appliance: the laptop charger definitely sounded like crickets. Then I tuned into the inner life of the block: the dizzy clanking produced by the lift going up or down, the doors opening with a slash, the hissing rubbish being dragged along the corridor, the arrhythmic breathing of the central heating, the block’s regular regurgitation of its inhabitants lives. I was becoming somewhat unhinged. I started thinking about Mary Jane’s toys, about the fact that children were convinced that inanimate things were alive. Would Lecour have written about that?
I didn’t care about Lecour anymore.
Childhood trance interlude
Surrounded by work and melancholia, no Zacharie, Zacharie-wherethehellareyou?, I spent ages and ages racking my brain about The Museum of Relevant Moments, thinking that maybe I should be using lateral thinking, whatever that was. Or maybe zigzag thinking. Spiked with vertical, horizontal, elliptical and paradoxical thinking, whatever. I had been experiencing linguistic interferences. I was supposed to be writing in Spanish, and English words or turns of phrases kept cropping up in my head. That was both the curse and blessing of speaking more than one language. At present, it was a curse. I had been locked in for too long. I hadn’t had a bath for a zillion years. One of those frustrating mornings, I ran the bath and stayed in the water until it became lukewarm. My hands and feet had shrivelled, the rest of my body dissolved, but I felt like a new born baby. It was sunny outside and I went out to absorb the luminous particles. There were mini-explosions of vibrant colour bursting from the trees, colourful dots sprouting unsuspected from the ground. I hadn’t even realized that it was spring already. I mooched about imbibing the luminosity and befriended a 70s station wagon with wood panelling on the side parked at the end of my street. Then I walked to the charity-shops zone in search of forlorn bargains. You could see last year’s fashion hanging on its rails, barely worn. A microcosm of unloved objects and nomadic objects. And also, the objects of the dead. The more you bought, the more you helped Africa, cancer research, the disabled and abandoned animals. And the more you bought, the more you saved and helped the recycling cause and the planet you lived in. I found a new pair of exquisite shoes for next to nothing, ten times less than their original price. Rescued from oblivion a beaded chocker that was fifty pence. And a snow-dome with Berlin’s bear inside. Such savings deserved a cappuccino and a carrot cake in an overpriced sandwich-shop, to compensate. The willowy waitress understood about such treats.
Lecour? I couldn’t become Lecour, but maybe I was becoming a philosopher. Maybe what I enjoyed was the process of becoming something else, being a dabbler, a perpetual student. It was like living so many lives. Like believing in suspension marks rather than full-stops. I shook the snow-dome and caught the waitress’ blank stare at the snowstorm. There were poetic objects, rebellious objects, practical objects and objects of greed. The snow-dome was a poetic object. The kaleidoscope of objects that I had just seen in the charity shops reconfigured my neural networks creating new unsuspected paths that led me to pen ‘Object Hyperballad’ there and then, the first of a series of Variations on the subject. I had the red notebook with me. Stimulated by the aroma of freshly ground coffee, I opened it and saw the writing slowly emerging from its pages:
‘Object Hyperballad’
Some objects are maps of moments and other objects are emotional maps that contain in intricate detail the whole memory of an experience, and then, there are things that trigger love at first sight, things that leave you in a lukewarm state of indifference, things that were desirable a decade ago and have now become ex-desirable things and things that you wouldn’t mind killing. There are also happy things full of disturbing potential that can always become things of horror such as a cheerful clown mask painted in creepy garish colours, and then, there are sickly sweet kitsch figurines that you befriend out of unconditional love towards their owner, like the porcelain little girls and puppies in your aunt’s living room.
Then there are all these trashy gifts that you hope to recycle at the earliest opportunity in the near future, objects from hell designed to fill you up with frustration and all the unexpected things that turn up after being in hiding for years in what was an unexplainable emotional exile. And sadly, there are the personal effects of the disappeared. And there are also vicious things of violence that speak about the darkness at the centre of the world such as a machine gun, a beautifully crafted revolver.
There are hilarious things designed by demented people that make you laugh out aloud like for instance a dressed up singing cow that suddenly flashes her udders, lost things that you hope will turn up one day and things that are lost forever: so many gloves, scarves and keys and gloves and umbrellas. There are also things that you just can’t throw away in case they are useful in a rather hypothetical future and stolen things that embody a thrilling moment. There are old things that are not old enough and just look old-fashioned, throwaway things that have absolutely nothing redeemable about them and then, there are all these things that will probably outlive you: the bastards.
And there are also dreamlike things, semiotically neutral things whose year of fabrication would be hard to trace and streamlined things of the future encoded in the here and now. Lacklustre things afflicted with a generally depressed aura that ask you for compassion knowing that sometimes they will get it and other times they won’t, and then, there are indestructible things that convey unbroken resilience, things of luck that ward off bad mojo and damaged things that remind you of the fragility of life.
A then there are things that can be extremely useful, but can also become things of danger, like a knife or an axe with perfectly sharp blades. And there are promiscuous things such as lighters, pens and paper clips, things that have only been used once and things of nostalgia that your grandmother gave you. There are things that mimic an expensive material in a cheaper material underscoring power and social relations and old damaged things that you can’t bring yourself together to throw away. Playful things of lust and transformation such as wigs, handcuffs, feathers and stilettos, and then, there are all these cast-off things on the streets that look back at you longing to be acknowledged.
And then there are things that scream with status.
And things that scream with muteness.
And things that belong to plastic fantastic culture whose fragments end up bursting out of the guts of albatross chicks.
And then … and then … and then.
And then, as I spooned out the last bit of cappuccino froth, I closed the red notebook and saw a little girl take out everything from her mother’s handbag. She then touched, licked and rubbed against her body every single item, while her mother smiled approvingly, after checking the suitability of each item to be abused orally: a measuring tape, a set of keys, a mirror, a brush, a book that gave away her mother’s interest in things Zen, The Tao Te Ching. I wouldn’t have found the little girl’s actions remarkable if it wasn’t for my train of thought. Why had Kathy chosen such an implausible person to ghost-write Lecour? And why did Buñuel’s name keep cropping up in my parents’ life?
The little girl came towards me, with amazing resolve, a sturdy mini-presence, tubby, chubby, dumpy, chunky, unflinching hand stretched towards the snow-dome. She had subtle Chinese features and luminous hazelnut brunette hair. She watched it bewitched. Then licked it and yelled in ecstasy: Memema! I considered giving her the magical object. It was smeared with saliva. I cleaned it with a napkin. Felt a bit nasty about not giving it to her, as her apologetic mother took her away. But then her mother said to me with a grin: she loves smashing things, the cathartic power of smash.
Nodding to Memema’s mother with an amused smile, I decided that I couldn’t let Kathy down, I couldn’t afford to anyway. I went back home as if I was returning from a short-holiday. I was determined to finish the ghost-writing. I decided that it would be best to begin with my first encounters with things, to recreate my infancy, putting aside Lecour for the time being.
Memema!
Like a big child trying to solve a five thousand year old puzzle, I sat legs akimbo on the fluffy white rug besieged by pictures from my photo-album scattered all over and looked at a picture from when I was a baby, feeling against my skin the sensuality of the things that caressed me from the second I was born. I focused my gaze on the soft blanket, the soft baby suit, the dummy, the nappies, rounded organic surfaces that fitted my body, submissive matter. It must have been amazing to touch these things for the very first time, to smell them, to suck them, to explore the world anew, to come across the first tactile sensations, the first smells, the first flavours, to walk on all fours on the cold fake marble floor. Surgical gloves flashed through my mind. That was probably the first tactile sensation most people born during the last sixty years would have experienced as they came out from the womb. Rubber. Green rubber gloves.
Gently closing my eyelids, I tried to effect a regression back to my first years: Mary Jane and her baby toys crossed my mind, then my mother’s stilettos, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, ninety-five stories which were still in Kyoto. I then sucked my thumb as if that was the fastest route to a nursery rhyme that my mother used to sing. I barely remembered it. I only remembered the refrain. I sang it in a low voice, a whisper:
Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
bibbidi-bobbidi bibbidi-bobbidi bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
I immersed myself in my childhood as if a revelation awaited me there.
I entered it.
Trying to see it as if for the very first time, I looked at a piece of string that was lying on the floor wondering whether when you are a toddler you can fall intensely in love with a mere piece of string. I imagined touching its rough texture in a perpetual trance, sucking it compulsively, then abandoning it for a rubber ball, then abandoning the rubber ball for the logic of endless novelty, the logic of kids.
In childhood, things were undoubtedly connected by secret undercurrents, they could simultaneously be what they were and something else. Anything could become anything. A warm blanket became an absent mother, a broken thermometer invaded the house when my mother told that the mercury inside reproduced itself, a porcelain figure cannibalised me incorporating me into its tiny body, a slipper whose sole became slightly loose turned into a source of terror: it was going to eat me up, it looked like a devouring mouth, perhaps similar to what my mouth looked like when I devoured my mother’s nipple with destructive might. A flat sheet of paper became an aeroplane with the aid of my mother, but a hairbrush could become menacing with no further transformation, there was something lurking in its insistent presence, something about its erect bristles became suddenly unsettling, maybe their tense silence. The hairbrush was alive, it could attack me at any time, but when I crashed it violently against the wall nothing happened, like nothing happened when I smashed my walking, talking, crying, sleeping, living doll, dismembered it and searched for its soul. I smashed it and smashed it and smashed it. Where was its soul? Splattered against the fake marble tiles? I soon learnt about guilt though. I learnt that even when there was nobody around, there was somebody watching me, an internal censor.
Memema!
I smoked another cigarette, while shaking the snow-dome with Berlin’s bear inside, a contained universe that was magical, although after the initial flurry of chaos the snow flakes seemed to fall in a somewhat pathetic way. My childhood reverie had been punctuated by clusters of random thoughts: I should call Kathy and tell her to look for somebody else … I really have to get on with it … my back is killing me, I should go swimming … there hasn’t been anybody in my life for ages now … nobody, you can’t count Zacharie as somebody.
Lighting another cigarette with the lit dead-end of the previous one, I placed on the dining table a string of objects in a long, minimal line that cut the table into two: the snow-dome, the beaded choker that I had just bought, the small, pink helicopter that Mary Jane had given me, a hot-water bottle, a bottle-opener that didn’t open hot-water bottles, the headless plastic elephant and a golden platform shoe. Each object branched out into different stories and unsuspected realms. That was what was at the centre of things: their stories.
Looking at the line of things on the table as a child would, I thought that at some point in my childhood, I must have learnt that not everything could become anything. Things were classified into all sorts of systems, all sorts of hierarchies, that’s what Nina Chiavelli, my mother, a foot extra, must have taught me. Things had a meaning, a function, a value, things were gendered in my language, some colours had gender too.
To begin with though, there were no categories. Things were simply thrilling matters, you could get lost in them, explore them, abuse them, lick them, suck them, they just lived a different life from us, maybe a thing life, the sub-atomic life of things. The first lesson from things must have taught me to have magical thoughts, the world was an animistic world, if I touched a forbidden key there might be an explosion, if I tread on a door mat the world will disappear, if I was nice to the inanimate world it would soften my fate. Even if a toy didn’t break when I crashed it against the fake marble floor, I must have enjoyed that sublime violence, perhaps I even enjoyed the ensuing fear, then feared its revenge. I must have sensed that when something broke, something broke in you, something made you aware that you were also vulnerable, that you were already broken, fractured, that repairing was a solution, but that a repair always carried with it the memory of its fracture, its suture.
The pictures from my childhood spoke about things to sleep with, things not to sleep with, anthropomorphic toys and those with hard edges that belong to the realm of unfriendly things. There was less of a soul in those with no eyes, no mouth, but they also must have had some kind of soul, maybe a more complicated one. A car was on the verge of a table, poor car, it was shaking before the abyss, it had become an anxious car. I couldn’t rescue it, couldn’t reach the table. And as I leaned on the table leg, the car fell down and I felt the accident, for I already knew what it was to fall down. That was when things were strangely alive. In dreams, in nightmares, the inanimate was also strangely meaningful, everything was strangely possible in dreams.
At some point, my mother, Nina Chiavelli, a secret foot-extra and a drunk, must have told me that things were neither dead nor alive, they were inert matter, earthlings were higher entities, if I wanted to become an adult, I had to leave those fraudulent thoughts behind. Fraudulent thoughts? I encountered again and again the persuasive existence of animated things, an existence forever growing with multiple meanings that created tangled associations that entwined with my most intimate neural paths. I had to abandon my vision of the world, it was primitive, uncultivated, superstitious, credulous, childish. Then when alone at home I would experience the uncanny presence of things, things were so quiet, but sometimes things creaked. I suspended disbelief, I knew they weren’t alive but they were, I knew that the gun a schoolboy with a cowboy hat carried wasn’t real but I covered my face with my hands. Things were not alive, but they had this endless potential to become vanishing points where secret reveries converged and evaporated in a flash.
The Museum of Relevant Moments? My beloved parents? Buñuel? Perhaps for some people the intensity of the very first objects they encountered was the only thing that mattered, maybe each one of us learns a different lesson from the language of things. I didn’t want to be judgemental but then I thought that the intensity of my first toys was replaced by other objects, my life was re-written with each new object in a long game of substitutions, but then I never utterly confused flesh and thing.
Confuse flesh and thing? Don’t we confuse flesh with mere flesh, people with previous souls, the qualities of objects with their owner’s qualities, isn’t everything confused to perfection? I looked at another faded colour picture from when I was a baby wondering about all the pictures that weren’t taken, all those possible pictures that could have told a different story about my childhood and that instead reinstated the circuit of oblivion. Then my mother’s black pair of boots with intricate lacing that looked identical to some boots Jeanne Moreau wore in Diary of a Chambermaid flashed through my mind.
When I tried to think about my childhood, that was what appeared mainly on the screen of memory, a black pair of high heel boots. And then questions and questions and questions and questions and questions skidded inside me and some of them were undoubtedly the wrong questions, illicit questions: As a child, did my father play with his mother’s shoes? Did a shoe fetishist fixation start when as a toddler he followed on all fours the scent of his mother’s shoes? What was the difference between being fixated on a single object and unfocused rampant consumerism? Weren’t we accessories to the moods things conjured up? Didn’t we chase after them in a vain attempt to recapture the thrill of our first encounters with the inanimate world? Didn’t we seek like babies the comfort of things, a new watch, a new car, a new dress, a new whatever, as if they were a warm blanket that sheltered us from the nightmares of the world?
Undoubtedly, the belief in the soul of things was an outlandish belief that was forever kept alive. It was updated with each generation, rekindled in order to be complicit with our own children while disowning it as a silly belief from our own forgotten past, dinosaur beliefs, organic memories made forever present through the double movement of their repetition and subsequent denial. I thought that so many of us were engaged in this double vision, in this oscillation, I know this thing is not what I really want it to be but ... it is. That it was a sleight of hand that belonged to the logic of the unconscious where there were no contradictions, where things existed in a fluid continuum making the persistence of earlier beliefs in the adult mind a fact. Animism was probably the most significant residue of the unconscious that has survived in history, a residue that perpetually returned in fairy tales, cartoons, advertising, films, all sorts of fictions where belief and disbelief in the soul of the inanimate happened in equal measure but were not simultaneous, they occupied different times, different ways of perceiving the world, with all probability different regions of the brain, older regions.
Dazed, I shook the snow-dome with Berlin’s bear inside and watched the floating snow flakes. The snow-dome was an object both from the past and the future. It didn’t dawn on me at the time. It took a few years for me to realize that if that snow-dome had captured my imagination and then my pocket, it was because of Berlin. Berlin was the keyword, the one that made fleeting contact with a forgotten corner of my memory that stored a story about a woman who had married the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall, a monument to crushed humanity. I had forgotten everything about this woman. Maybe it was just a coincidence, getting this snow-ball. But possibly a remote neural cluster knew that the snow-dome was simply Berlin and Berlin was both the Berlin Wall and the woman who married it and thus the snow-dome symbolized an extreme form of animism.
Memema! I could have met a child sucking objects before and would have found nothing remarkable about it.
I mentally thank Memema for this long reverie. I felt closer to the secret code of things, even if I knew there wasn’t such thing. I went to bed feeling dizzy that night. I couldn’t sleep for a while. I kept turning and turning, got up and took a couple of sleeping pills. I heard the phone in the distance and then the answerphone and then what sounded like Zacharie’s voice. Broken toys, dysfunctional bits of colour inhabited my dreams. Then my mother, my father, Mary Jane and Lecour all merged into an improbable being that woke me up in the middle of the night.
It was a moonless night, so the living room was completely dark, except for the green glow emanating from the answerphone. A new message was glowing on the message counter. I played the play button. You have one new message. Message received today at 2.17 am: It’s me, Zacharie … Listen, I could say that I had to urgently return to Tijuana on an undercover operation to prevent narco-traffickers from blowing up a primary school for blind children, but the truth is that my briefcase was nicked by a gang of Southend racketeers and my address book was inside it, so I couldn’t contact anybody … and then I found the ultimate movie collectable … My flight back to Paris is the day after tomorrow, in the evening, we could meet up tomorrow, same time at your place ... I’m staying in a new hotel, the number is …
The herbal sleeping tablets I had taken were rubbish.
Half-sleep and half-sleepwalking, I looked at the answerphone and mumbled to it: you must be bleemin crazy, man. I could detect a slight hiccup in his French accent which in the middle of the night sounded as if inflected by Ukrainian intonation. In any case, even if I hadn’t detected the hiccup and his patently unbelievable excuses, only a conceited insect like Zacharie could think that it was OK to vanish for aeons and then ring at 2.17 am. I pressed the delete button. I looked at the clock on the wall: 5.11 am.
Message deleted.
Zacharie deleted.
A wave of well-being flooded my half-sleep consciousness.
The wave of well-being continued the following day.
My flight was that day. Playing the good daughter, the ghost-writing was put on simmering mode. A detour might make something click. I was waiting for that click. I only needed to ghost another thirty pages. And then embrace life again.
Life.
I expected my father to be energized by the mini-jazz festival he was organising, but ‘organising’ was an exaggeration on Dr. Alvarez’s part. The habitual spring heat sapped everybody’s energy, including Dr. Alvarez who looked more and more spectral as the months run towards full-blown summer. My father was doing jazz related activities, repairing an old piano, teaching another old guy how to play the sax, but most of the time he just slept and slept and slept and slept and slept and slept, as if preparing himself for the last sleep, and when he woke up, he would say he had had strange dreams about being suspended in space and seeing the slow movements of the planets.
On a couple of occasions, we went to the beach together, though. We invited Eva but she wouldn’t come. My father looked perturbed, but then he said she never wanted to go anywhere, not with him, she’s just a spoilt cow, he said. We took a taxi to Cabo de Gata, a natural park of volcanic origin and unspoilt beaches. Walking barefoot by the shore, I challenged him to a swim race, come on, I said, but although he had won a few swimming medals, he wouldn’t swim this time. No way, no way, he kept on saying. I could see the fear in his eyes, in his nervous laughter. And for the first time, I saw the child in him, a child frightened by the immensity of the sea. I don’t want to get wet, he said, and there is marine life and all that damned jellyfish, he said.
The saltpetre smell.
And the crystal clear water.
We avoided going down The Beach of the Dead. You had to go down a steep hill and then climbed up again. My father joked that its name was probably due to that bloody hill. That hill can kill you, he said. Plus it’s a nudist beach and the sight of all those naked bodies can probably kill you too, he said. He chuckled at his own joke and I laughed with him. He said he used to dive there looking on the sandy sea floors for flying gurnards. They are like fish-butterflies with wings of incredibly beautiful iridescent colours, they eat crustaceans. they’re extraordinary, he said.
We drank iced coffee with brandy, iced carajillo.
Make the most of life on earth, he said. And don’t let the bastards get you down.
He sounded so lucid sometimes, but then he slept and slept and slept and slept. When I asked him about my mother, he went silent. And when I asked him whether my mother had been a shoe-extra in films, he just said she did a bit of footwear fashion photography, but on the whole, she only worked occasionally, her ankles were extraordinary, so delicate, he said. El Refugio had become a sleep-inducing building. While he slept and slept and slept and slept, I did bits of ghost-writing sheltered by the shadows on the patio and gazed at a crack inhabited by an intrepid red-tailed lizard.
Pearl, Snow and the insistence of the fetish
I rang Lecour as soon as I got back to London. I couldn’t believe I was talking to Lecour! It was the first time I talked to him. I was surprised by his coldness, his robot-like telephone manner at odds with his fragile voice. I said that I loved his work but I couldn’t become Lecour, I could only become Lecour my way, a new Lecour. I was surprised to hear a dog barking at the other end. The barking was palpable, sharp-edged, incongruent. I said that I had tried, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t quite become somebody else. Lecour was quiet. It’s high time for a new Lecour, he then said. I said that I couldn’t write about Sigmund F’s perverse theory of fetishism, about the penis virus he had inoculated into so much writing through the best selling marriage of two unhappy words, castration anxiety. That I knew that to touch that name was to leap into the dark, that it hardly clarified the cases of fetishism I had come across. The Collector’s museum of relevant moments mainly related to shoe fetishism. I didn’t want to use whatshisname’s theory. And most of the information I found was somehow infected by the penis virus he had generated. I found myself talking manically because Lecour didn’t talk. I heard the dog again, barking in the background, distinct, solitary, filling my ear with something strangely remote, dogged on transmitting a message from outer space, a canine Morse-code that tuned in with my brain alpha waves. Find a new angle, but you’d be better off doing the ghost-writing, than not doing it, noblesse oblige, I was going to plunder Pietz, Lecour finally said. You’ve left things a bit late, haven’t you? he added. Then he said he was busy and hung up. I listened to the dead line for a few minutes, trying to work out the fine line between efficiency and rudeness, thinking that I would have liked to continue listening to the disembodied dog, thinking that Lecour wasn’t the most friendly of animals.
Plundering Pietz? Better off? It didn’t take long to figure it out. He was right, it was a good deal, it was a privilege, and besides, I had already been squandering, squandering, squandering the little money I had.
That day I read in the paper that a nine year old boy had killed an eight year old boy to get hold of his Nike trainers. He must have felt the pressure to be like everybody else. To belong. To be part of a clique. To feel excluded no more. He had strangled the younger boy, stoned him, removed the Nike trainers from the dead body and walked off wearing them. It had all been caught on CCTV.
I sat on my armchair with a cup of coffee and quivered internally for a few minutes.
To kill for an object? Well, that happened a lot of the time. Objects bind us and objects separate us. Maybe what surprised me was the age: nine. The news filled me up with a chilled fluid that lingered in my body for a while. In shock, I stuck my nose against the window and looked at the straight lines made out of slow-moving cars. From the seventeenth floor, the traffic looked like a highly organised colony of automaton ants. Sipping lukewarm coffee, I thought about violence and the different types of violence that shatter the world and then about the strange affair we have with objects in general, the dismal fact that sometimes we preferred them to people, that sometimes we brandished them against people, even as a sign of our contempt towards some people, an unsettling sign, an envy-producing sign, that sometimes they occupied a space identical to people, that in any case we objectified each other, sometimes we didn’t care about others, we just didn’t, we needed a break from others, that lost objects of desire secretly survived in other objects, that sometimes we needed the quietness of objects, we needed objects to daydream, objects fulfilled our lust for unlimited variety, they temporarily enveloped us in a fiction where nothing could go wrong, objects told the stories we couldn’t utter to ourselves …
… But to kill for their sake?
To kill, to abuse, to exploit, to damage, to lie, to accept bribes, all for the sake of the personal prestige encoded in status things.
To maim, to belittle, to bully, to ignore calls for help and all the other petty acts.
I felt a surge of deep disgust towards everything in humanity that makes it inhuman.
I watched the hours go by, my gaze lost in the slow-moving red cranes, then took my red notebook out and began dabbling with the letters of the alphabet.
Maybe it wouldn’t sound like Lecour at all, but in the evening I decided that I just had to ramble in my own way for another forty pages or so and then apply the scalpel. I wrote, I wrote, I wrote. I started scribbling about our intricate rapport with things. Sometimes we needed the solace of things, sometimes we needed a break from them. There were austere, thrifty, sober people who abhorred things, as if things were guilty in themselves. Minimalist people in awe of emptiness who refused to use things as tokens of self in a Zen move. And then there were people whose dream was a dream of simplicity, they kept things in check, they gently ignored them. And then, people who could only communicate through gifts, people who enjoyed l’élan vital of things and their company, and people who would do anything for their sake.
Things seemed so complex. There was a social life of things. A psychological life of things. A spiritual life of things. A sentimental life of things. A secret life of things. A tyrannical life of things. There were things that were made immortal by being put in museums. Things that became sacred by being used by a priest or by a celebrity. Things that were invested with a power that made me think of the realm of magic. Things that drew their power from ritual, from context, good luck rituals such as wearing a special tie, a special ring, holding a special pen for special occasions. And then, some people preferred books to people, monuments, ancient buildings to people. Cultural tourism was partly articulated around this fact, as if when visiting a country, the country was ideally uninhabited, devoid of people, the country being a space only inhabited by monuments, old buildings, classical paintings, sensual sculptures, souvenirs, things.
The string of everyday objects I had placed on the dining table in a long, minimal line was still there: the snow-dome, the beaded choker, the small, pink helicopter that Mary Jane had given me, a hot-water bottle, a bottle-opener, the headless plastic elephant and a golden platform shoe. There was also a mug stained with coffee tears, no handle and a crack on the rim, a damaged thing that had miraculously survived throughout the years. I found myself re-arranging the things on the table into a semi-circle. I rested my head on the table and listened to the mystery of everyday things. As soon as the word ‘everyday’ entered the scene, I started cudding in the present tense, as if the everyday inhabited a perpetual present. My present wasn’t my present anymore. In order to ghost-write, I had to retreat, live life at one remove. I put my life on stand-by.
Find a new angle! Lecour had said.
A new angle, improved with a triple action effect.
Solitude. But also loneliness. I was failing at love like many philosophers do. I didn’t care. I wasn’t interested in love. I was now living the life of a philosopher at one remove, as I was merely a ghost-philosopher. To push Kathy as to the absurdity of my ghost-writing assignment, was to acknowledge my insecurities and forego money. I wasn’t sure how to connect the genealogy of the word fetish by William Pietz with the museum of relevant moments, but then I have always been interested in words, Lecour was interested in words and the word ‘fetish’ was quite interesting in itself. Yet again, I was led to Mary Jane and her toys. And Mary Jane loved everything to do with witchcraft. As a child, other children would call her ‘witch’. It was to do with her beautiful red straight long hair, with her slightly corroded teeth by endless grinding at night. Mary Jane had appropriated the word ‘witch’ and made it shine with all the power of subversion. Mary Jane called herself a witch and the word ‘fetish’ had first emerged in Portugal to hunt the untamed, to delineate the uncivilised ways of that legendary female monster: the witch. The witch, always old and ugly, a prosecuted outsider within Christianity, transferred her demonic power to her amulets, to her fetishes. In witches’ hands, charms became fetishes. The fetish stunk of diabolical magic, of heresy, of that most abject of figures, the witch, whose possessed spirit could even infect matter around her. Witchcraft wasn’t a burning issue in sixteenth century Portugal, but the Catholic Church still decreed which cult objects were legitimate, which demonically inspired.
Words travel. Across land, by air, by sea. Portuguese merchants took the word ‘fetish’ to the West African Coast during the sixteenth century, where for two centuries it was used, drenched with witchcraft notions, to make sense of a religion, a social order based on the worship of religious objects worn on the body, which bore no resemblance to any gods. The word started to appear in travelogues, where Africans were seen as deluded beasts, ignorant of the true faith. Some travelogues were ‘sympathetic’ accounts where the travellers stated that although misguided, the Africans were harmless. Other travelogues condemned the worship of the fetish as diabolical magic.
I could picture the first encounter. Africans and Portuguese merchants speaking with gestures, with their hands, pointing at things, miming, spontaneously attempting to create a common language beyond speech. I could imagine the nebulous understandings, the humorous misunderstandings, the frustration, the laughter, the mistrust. I could see Africans being suspicious and intrigued at once, seduced by the marvellous novelty of the alien articles white merchants carried, playfully adopting Catholic sacramental objects as fetishes in an inside out game that made the Catholics blush; the Portuguese smug grin when exchanging what they considered trinkets and trifles for real African gold, their fangs growing at the sight of mountains of gold, then the anger at being told they couldn’t have everything, some objects were sacred, fetishes. And then the arrival of the Protestants. I could see Africans, Catholics and Protestants repressing their hatred, fear and fascination in the name of trade.
I got immersed in this world of witches, savages, idolaters, Catholics, deluded others lacking in reason that Mary Jane would have loved so much. The West African Coast had become a meeting point for radically different social systems, an encounter of the disparate, the mutually incomprehensible, the irreconcilable: Catholics, Africans and Merchant Capitalists. The Protestants related the African fetish to the Catholic worshipping of sacramental objects, relics, figures, medals of saints, inanimate objects. Both Africans and Catholics were caught up in a primitive and irrational way of thinking that hindered commercial affairs, market activity, the birth of a new god. That was the story the Protestants told.
Fetish, a word that comes about through an intellectual perversion of facts. The job of words. The task of words. How meanings can be created and recreated. Sometimes a word is needed urgently to express a thought begging to be named. At the time, there was a thought begging to be named, the mystery of value. The word ‘fetish’ came to name that mystery. The fetish was made to embody the riddle of the social and personal value of material objects: the mystery of value.
I got immersed in Willem Bosman’s travelogue. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Dutch trader had published the most influential travelogue of its time, a derisory, scornful account of Guinea presented under the guise of objectivity. Therein the fetish was already posed as a theoretical problem, his ideas on fetishes being the primary source for the Enlightenment intellectuals’ development of a general theory of primitive religion: all the alibis to enslave the dark continent were already under elaboration.
Thus, the fetish, from being a word became a sentence. Some words preserve the scandal of history. A fetish, a beneficial or accursed object, depending on who is telling the story. And it was usually the case that the one who told the story spoke from a position of authority, privilege, class, money. For a voice to be heard it has to go through certain networks. For certain networks to open up, the voice must speak in their own language. This was one of the truths of the fetish. A disembodied eye which observed and judged was forever condemning the fetish as a fraudulent object, a false belief, forever endowing it with an abhorrent force that was to last a few centuries.
Then the genealogy inevitably came to nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century a similar charge was made against commodities. Marx thought of commodities in female terms, he coined the term ‘commodity fetishism’. Commodities concealed real social relations among human beings. The ghost of religious fetishism came to inhabit the commodity. Certain beliefs never seem to disappear, they just migrate somewhere else, transmigrate. The symbolic trafficking between thing and spirit had to become sensual. God was dying. A new god had been born: Capital. Metaphysics was diseased. The worship of the spiritual was replaced by the worship of the sensuous as manufactured in the material world. By then capitalism was beginning to learn a precious lesson: an irrational relation to objects didn’t hinder it, on the contrary, much was to be gained from the irrational allure of moulded matter. In any case, if there were any survivors throughout these changes, it was objects, the alluring power of objects, objects made or designed by humans onto which we projected our innermost needs. Needs changed. Our capacity to project them onto objects didn’t. Needs? Perhaps we should speak of a passion for the object, a soft spot for the human made.
As I was immersed in this virtual world of printed matter, Pearl popped round and went on about this fetish ball that would take place at the end of the week, Pearl playing at being a bad girl, me playing with her. You’re into that kind of thing, you’re writing about kinky shoes, she said. We had to buy the appropriate gear, we had to buy it way before, it wasn't the kind of thing you could buy just like that. You have to look the part, there is a strict dress code, she said. I felt lazy. I didn't like to strictly adhere to anything, even if it was just a dress code, I wasn't into dungeons and all that, I was somewhere else, I was busy with The Museum of Relevant Moments, I was a knowledge fetishist, I liked its texture.
I’m really really busy, I said.
Oh shaddap, it'll be fun, we'll be out from dusk till dawn.
Money, time, sex-shops, Pearl and I went shopping. Pearl couldn't get inside the rubber dresses, she was furious she couldn't get a rubber dress size 16, she bought a reduced price inflatable husband hoping it wasn’t punctured, she ended up having a tailor-made red rubber dress, expensive but beautiful, perfect for her prodigious hourglass shape. It was fun doing girlish things. I tried on several fetish wear, I didn't want to spend much money, there was this short black shiny pvc dress that had a zip front bustier that looked good, it was cheap. But I was seduced by a red pvc catsuit that left me in the red but hugged you like a dream. My spindly body ceased to feel spindly, my body felt less insubstantial, I felt fictitious in this gear, it felt good, like a second skin, it looked great, a promising encounter, a filmic caress.
Tiger beer, vodka, the noisy vitality of bars and Pearl’s lament about men. When I got back home I couldn't wait to wear the red catsuit. I slipped it on with talcum powder, put lipstick on and played the soundtrack from The Avengers. Then laid on my bed like a pvc diva, I was excited about the ball, I wore the catsuit everyday during the following days. The catsuit helped me with The Museum of Relevant Moments, although I realised that I was dying to be seen in it. I had to wait five days, I hadn't been out from dusk till dawn for a long time, I thought that I could go to the supermarket just to be seen in it, but I had to get on with my ghost-writing. Kathy had rung to see how things were going. Was it possible to wear a figure hugging catsuit and still be Lecour? I was looking forward to the ball, I wasn’t sure how to connect the genealogy of the fetish with the Collector’s museum of relevant moments, with my mother, with my father, I wasn’t sure what the irrational was. Worshipping the sensuous in the material world had its borders. The borders of sense. These borders had changed since my parent’s time, which was more or less Buñuel’s time. But then at their time the deforming mirror of normality ruled everything. The problem was who defined normality against whom and to what ends. The problem was that certain experiences were defined as deviant instead of being defined as different, even radically different. Black and white, good and bad, even Marx had coined the term ‘commodity fetishism’ judging Africans unenlightened, savage, low, he had likened it to the feminine, as if femininity was counterfeit, he had judged the sex-appeal of things from a puritanical standpoint, as if sex-appeal equalled depravity. The problem was that the word abnormality was an ugly word, it was tinged with a violently excluding force, whereas other words like ‘different’ or ‘exceptional’, while being more accurate, didn’t perform the task of excluding others. If shoe fetishism had been ubiquitous, then my father’s behaviour would have been normal.
Excluding, excluding. If grey matter was shaped according to experience, if perception was moulded according to brain matter, if brains could be quite different due to genetics, if there were lesions that affected perception, disinhibition, behaviour, if our vision was distorted and articulated according to our expectations, if the fetish was an embodiment of a forgotten story, a forgotten neural connection or a neural misrecognition still to be mapped, if we all remembered different stories and forgot different stories, intensity and relevance shaping personal memory, then, wasn’t there something monumentally perverse about adhering to a norm? My mother, Nina Chiavelli, was different, my father was different, their desire was bound to a different kingdom, the kingdom of things and within it, the footwear species and within it the wildlife of high heels. I remember them being in love and then the suffering, the hospital visits, the sombre X-rays. I remember my mother’s song, her song increased with her illness, she sang the blues to keep death at bay, she sang with a beautiful voice. Then she stopped singing. That pause has always inhabited me.
I played the blues those days.
I knew normality didn’t mean anymore what it used to mean a few decades ago. Still some friends told me, it’s normal, to reassure me that I wasn’t deviant, no matter how bizarre the things that I told them were. And yet most of them went out of their way not to be considered normal. I realised that the meaning of the word ‘normal’ had expanded and a generalised naughtiness was now the norm. Yet at the end of the day, some people did kill themselves to be normal.
I watched TV those days focusing on the obscenification of everything and the endless parading of deviant behaviour as if they were new steps in our evolution. I noticed that on a new channel the news reader presented the news with a pornographic sparkle in her gaze. The week-end came, the day of the fetish ball came, it will be a night of kinky frenzy, Pearl had said. We went to Fantastique, Pearl, Snow and me. We were late, we just missed the catwalk, we didn't know there was going to be one, there were quite a few women who were wearing the same red catsuit as mine, making us look as mass-produced as the chrome ashtrays on the tables. The red catsuits created intermittent zones of red in the semi-darkness. Instead of witches, African savages and deluded Catholics, there was a pageant of black angels, wasted dogs, post-modern primitives, sharp boys, fetish divas, exotic beasts, corpses in corsets, bored lawyers and suburban blue collar workers totally disguised, people who wanted to inhabit some kind of interstice full-time or part-time, a human gap for urban angst in time and space.
We drank vodka and orange. Then the models from the catwalk made their appearance: rococo white wigs, baroque dresses that revealed unexpected bits of flesh, a nipple, a belly-button, a bare chest. It was suddenly like being on a film set, hypnotic music and dangerous liaisons with unexpected bits of pink flesh that introduced a soft suspense into the atmosphere. Perhaps it was the gentle music that initially introduced a soft ecstasy spellbinding the senses, making any hint of aggression impossible, letting people be mesmerised by ocular desire, watch from a cool distance dressed up people who had dressed up to be looked at.
We just watched, and watched and watched, we probably stared.
There was an old man dressed up as a fairy, virginal dolls, a veteran couple ritually whipping each other, sagging bodies made firm by rubber wear, men with black leather trousers exposing their bare buttocks, some to their benefit, others to their detriment, empty glasses and bear bottles, wasted women and new born ladies.
Pearl and I shared Snow as a slave. We borrowed from a generous mistress a riding crop. We whipped him softly by turns while he pleaded mercy, mercy, mercy, please. Then Pearl disappeared with a black guy, while Snow and I stayed in a room enraptured by a video projection of anal sex. I told Snow that anal sex touched within me a point that made blood rush to my head, a point that was a short circuit to my pleasure centre. I don’t like it, I find the rectum too narrow, he said. Shame, I said. We then continued watching the video in silence. It was an extreme close up of anal sex. Explicit, mechanical, brutal in its mysterious monotony. It went on and on forever. It was impossible. It was a loop.
As I watched mesmerised, thinking that I hadn't had sex for quite a while, wondering whether I was becoming a bit frigid, whether I was becoming peculiarly unresponsive, I realised that for quite a few months now I had become all eyes. I knew that Snow loved Pearl and that she couldn’t care less. I played with Snow's bare buttocks knowing that he wished it was Pearl’s hands while he played at being a dog. I played with a guy dressed up as a doctor, played doctors and nurses and patients, had my pulse checked with his stethoscope. I found hoods frightening but talked to a hooded naked guy who said he just wanted to become invisible.
A German blond boy started kissing one of my patent leather boots slowly, conscientiously. Could he detect pheromones emanating from my boots? I wanted to ask him questions. He gave me a gormless smile. Questions? What questions? I didn’t want to treat him like an interesting insect. He looked up at me as if I was a monument and saw question marks in my eyes. Then he said that for him high heel boots became alive, he was trembling when he said that and I wondered whether my father would have trembled as well before my mother's boots. Alive? Yeah, he said, like the dancing teapot in Alice in Wonderland. This German boy, he looked so unbelievably schmuck, it actually made me laugh, but then the innocence that lingered on his face confused me.
I went to other fetish clubs with Pearl and Snow, but they weren't like Fantastique, they were harder on the eyes, too much black rubber, perversions were a thing of the past. I got tired of this more or less homogenous world of black rubber wear and ready-made perversions. It wasn't my thing. It was Pearl’s thing, she loved it, she bought different rubber dresses and hair extensions, she bought a riding crop, fur hand-cuffs and black lace lingerie.
Role-playing, slaves, doctors and nurses, real boot fetishists, everything blended in my head with perfect confusion as I wondered where my blind spot was and unwanted suspicions danced around me creating lateral thoughts: beyond the playful games, the serious reduction of a person to a fragment, was it a question of fear? Of eroticized fear? Of sublimated hatred? What if a woman invested herself in splendour in a leather-bound revenge? What if a woman only allowed her high heel shoes to be touched as an expression of her contempt towards men as it might indeed happen in the case of a paid dominatrix where a double fantasy is fulfilled? What if certain objects were complex mediators where desire, hostility and fear were inextricably linked?
I knew things were different now, I knew we were now encouraged to attach our desires, anxieties and fears to the kingdom of things, I knew the borders of sense regarding fetishism had blurred. Ideas about plurality exploited by consumerism had changed these borders. Perhaps today, my parents would have gone to a fetish club. They would have been part of a peculiar urban tribe. They would have felt protected by belonging, by sharing their secret. They would have bought other normative accessories, besides shoes. It was a question of borders. At a given time in sexual history, borders were put to the acceptable. So, my parents’ dirty secret was a hush-hush subject because of borders. Sense was devised through borders, through limits, more or less strict borders, more or less flexible borders, but like any construction, like anything besieged by borders, it overflowed.
Sense was porous, borders were porous, nothing existed in a pure state of isolation, nothing could be quite contained, the violence of definite sense was counteracted by unexpected flows. I wrote about all of this, mimicking Lecour’s voice. I also became interested in neuroscience. Neuroscience was undoubtedly the new science fetish. If individuals with Tourette’s Syndrome exhibited high degrees of exhibitionism, it could be that, amongst other things, shoe fetishism was a question of scrambled up chemical messengers, a blip in neurotransmission, a script error created by a fatally deleted gene that shaped up a weird neural convergence whose secret song kept on repeating: I’ll do it myyyyyyyyy way.
It was an intensely luminous day when I finished scribbling about The Museum of Relevant Moments and queued up at the post office to send it by recorded delivery. And yet, when I came out of the post office, it was all rainy and dark, as if somebody had suddenly stolen the sun.