The money kindergarten
The orgasmic green, the sheer intensity of the green of the grass, perhaps it was money that made me aware of the orgasmic green, that made me see everything as more luminous on my return. Everything became sharper, more focused. And as I walked along the high streets with my new acquisitive power, I began to see the mesmerising power of fetishism everywhere. Fetishism was a social phenomenon so ubiquitous that it had become invisible. I began to see the energy that emanated from certain objects, from the names of certain labels. It was obvious that labels were fetishised names. But I realised for the first time the euphoria of objects, their glittering celebrity status, some objects, some labels, were known by millions and millions of people, inhabiting the same media as our most cherished or despised stars, appearing gracefully on television in well lit shots, in magazines, on billboards, photogenically looking at you, seducing through slick sophistication, through humour, even through a no-nonsense strategy that appealed to pragmatic minds. I realised that sometimes I wasn’t sure whether I was looking at a thing or at the image of a thing instilled in my head through the endless loop of glossy repetition. I looked at all these people carrying plastic bags full of redemptive objects, a collective ritualised excess that temporarily put them in direct contact with the supreme, dresses for the girls, gadgets for the boys, induced tangible reveries that catered to all sorts of palates. I looked at men with their bags full of prosthetic gadgets, their dull appearance sometimes cancelled out by their glamorous fast cars. I looked at the playful appearance of women with their bags full of libidinal dreams. Inorganic seduction concealed the mechanical beat of the factory, an inaudible song, a song beyond human hearing frequencies. I tried to listen to the factory beat, see the invisible hands that assembled these objects, the invisible movements and reveries that assembled everything in the world, it was possible to hear it, to see it, but it gravitated towards the imperceptible. I realised that there were no tramps or drunks in the streets anymore, or if there were, they were not all that eye-catching anymore, all the attention was absorbed by the sex-appeal of the inorganic, there were only so many things your brain could focus on at a time, perhaps whole continents had also been submerged by the emergence of this new gaze.
Money, such an abstraction. Money could become anything. It could become time, it could become space. My kind of money could become a present for Mary Jane, a visit to my father, a red leather jacket, music, books, lipsticks, a sumptuous dinner with a sumptuous tip, a beautiful dress, a cheap car, a short rest from worrying about money, I had to pulverize this money, materialise it, transform it into visible things.
Toys appealing to all ages were not as ubiquitous as now. Executives and old ladies playing with electronic pets while waiting at bus-stops hadn’t made their appearance yet. But the trend had already started. And a handful of nostalgia products, products that appealed to our partly regressive nature, were already making their appearance in the shop windows. You could see excited middle-aged men kidnapping remote control cars from their children’s hands, women with rucksacks in the shape of revoltingly cute bunny rabbits and bankers wearing looney tunes ties.
As I walked along the high streets, coming in and out of shops, with more and more bags (I bought a dusty pink dress, a Walkman, a pair of radiant trainers, a lovely second-hand pair of platform sandals, a large red hardback linen notebook), I felt that I had gained the right to enter heaven, to be part of an enchanting kindergarten. I thought about Mary Jane, the perpetually uninhabited kindergarten she had created. With time, I realised that sexual fetishism was just a small bit of the larger picture of fetishism. Executives didn’t lick their electronic pets or their power books, but they did treat them as controlling objects. Novelty was the name of the game. Goods were good objects. In horror films they sometimes returned as bad objects, but that was fiction. A secret collective skeleton in the cupboard was highlighted by the sexual fetishist’s mystification with the profane world of thought translated into matter. Perhaps the problem of the sexual fetishist was his private fixation on a rigidly specific object, his reluctance to flow with the ever changing fetishisation of goods.
Multitudes with shopping bags, re-enacting some ancient ritual of excess. I was part of it, I belonged. I bought Mary Jane a soft plastic toy, a pale blue chameleon that faded gradually into pink, then a book, Kafka’s collected short stories, may be she had it already, but this one had an interesting preface. Then I bought her some yum yum dark chocolates, as she called them, some red wine, left the shopping unpacked at home, put on my new radiant trainers and went to visit her.
Mary Jane had moved to the outskirts, to the end of the world, her telephone line had now been disconnected. The journey was tortuous, jumpy, endless. It was impossible to read, so I looked at people, wondering about their hopes, their worries, imagining their all too human lives, imagining their sex lives. Then I indulged in another underground pastime. Sometimes I played this game when I didn’t have anything to read, to think about, it was better played with dark sunglasses so the commuters couldn’t see your curious gaze, it was a game of detachment, of estrangement. Sometimes I focused on their ears, wondering whether it was true you could guess the size of a penis by looking at men’s ears, sometimes I focused on their noses. To isolate a nose and look at it in its noseness was always an inspiring experience, it allowed you to look at the world anew, to perceive a nose as if you had never seen one before. Noses were the strangest of extremities, irregular pyramids with more or less hairy holes at the base, black pores, little red veins, varying sizes, thin noses, fat noses, bird noses. On platforms, I would focus on rears, dissimulated rears, some rears were covered up, misguiding, others stood out with the force of an assertion. Other times I looked at commuter’s watches, deducing from their design the wearer‘s dreams and fears, stealing from them their visible secrets, then loving the people who just didn’t wear a watch. Now my gaze looked at the world on a level with that point of encounter with the earth, the floor. The world became a continuous strip of shoes on an uneven and dirty surface made out of cement and chewing-gum.
It was a year or so, since Mary Jane had decided to abandon the world. Sam and her counted the days as a jubilant sign of achievement, it was possible to abandon the world with the help of an assistant, it was possible to wave the world goodbye. The first few months she was visited by quite a few friends, artists who found her experiment interesting, who were as fascinated by her experiment as I was. I had been to Spain a few times visiting my father, then involved in ‘Leather-bound Stories’, I had visited Mary Jane a few times, I admired her in her zeal, in her integrity, failed to realise that a dark force was kidnapping her. Sam had always been encouraging. He was determined in helping her abandon the world. I liked Sam, he was intense, he was mad. It was only later, much later, that I wondered whether by helping Mary Jane to cut all links with the world, he had become part of this dark force kidnapping her, what’s worse, kidnapping her with her full co-operation.
Sam opened the door, fine, fine, they were both fine, working, working on themselves, so much work. Then Mary Jane came out of her room, the main protagonist of her own disappearance, proud of her action. We kissed. We sat in the kitchen, around the small table with small lit candles, warm biscuits. We are baking our own bread, our own biscuits, she said. She opened the bottle of wine, flicked through the Kafka book, said she loved ‘The Great Wall of China’, it must be strange out there in the outside world, when I think about supermarkets, about buildings and signs, when I think about the outside world I see a shattered picture, as if space was sliced up, something about it scares me, something imposing, deadening. I said her area was a bit drab, like mine, but then she said it wasn’t just her area, when she remembered the outside world there was something that scared her, she was going to go out for the first time at Christmas, but then she thought about all these paedophiles dressed up as Father Christmas, she just couldn’t stand it.
She opened the chocolate box I had brought, savoured one slowly, placed one in Sam’s mouth and told him to let it melt slowly into his mouth. Then she smiled. Good boy, you don’t believe in unfair trade, but some of the things you like do, she said playing with the soft chameleon. Then putting on an authoritarian, headmistress voice, she said to me: Are you a good girl, Nina? And then to an invisible audience: Are we good children? Do we deserve the toys? Oh, yes we are good children, quiet, obedient, responsive to fear and chocolate bribes.
Then she laughed and took another chocolate. She said she was just being. She said she was learning how to be good, everybody should learn how to be good, how to become a person, she was writing lists about it, it was difficult, you lost sovereignty over yourself. But the only way to repair the world was to start repairing ourselves. Easily said. But if everybody started working on themselves …. But was that possible? Didn’t violence constitute our world? Was violence an energising force without which we couldn’t live? Was she too emotional, too vulnerable for the world? They were working on that, that’s why she wasn’t ready to come out, not yet, even if everybody had forgotten about her, the more she thought about things, the more she saw coincidences everywhere, it was weeeeeeeeird, she said like in the old days, but she knew she was doing the right thing, abandoning the world was the only way of remaining alive, it was kind of written.
Learning how to be good? I believed Mary Jane and I didn’t. I realised that nobody cared about her anymore, realised that she didn’t care either. If she hadn’t lived so far, if more people had known about it, if her telephone hadn’t been cut off. But she was so obstinate, Mary Jane. She didn’t want anything to do with the world of appearances, or at least, not directly. But how could you live outside this sweet nightmare? I offered to pay the telephone bill, but she said she didn’t want a telephone anymore, she didn’t need a telephone, nobody ever rang anyway. Electrical appliances were going kaput, she said, but many of them weren’t necessary, the kettle wasn’t necessary, the toaster wasn’t necessary. The television wasn’t working any more either. And of course, it had been absurd to abandon the world and carry on watching television. But it was seven months now that they had lived without television, without newspapers, without magazines, completely cut off from the abominable world.
Mary Jane and Sam had written down the precise dates and times on which they had been visited, as if these visits were the most memorable of events. They remembered these dates. I was the first visit they had had in quite a few months. I stayed the night, had breakfast there, they killed me with kindness, perhaps they had decided I would be their last visitor. Mary Jane was keeping a record of her seclusion from the world, a sort of diary, she talked about a damage unforgettably nebulous. When I left it was all lovely words and I had this strange sensation of floating back home, as if I had been outside the earth, in a different planet. Mary Jane’s house had become that to me, a place outside the orbit of the earth.
It was within this mindset that I answered the telephone to hear Kathy, the Collector’s wife, at the other end. She talked about Amsterdam, about my mutable writing, then she said that she had a little problem, she said that Lecour was too busy to write the piece for The Museum of Relevant Moments, she didn’t know how to tell the Collector, how to break it to him, he would be so upset, his health was so fragile already. Then she said that she had this idea, a confidential idea, if she might share it with me. She knew that I was fascinated by Lecour. Lecour was fascinated by The Museum of Relevant Moments. But he already had so many commitments. He was supposed to attend all these conferences, all these interviews and simultaneously be writing away masterpieces at his desk, in his solitary room. The only way to do this was to have multiple bodies, to be able to be in so many places at once. The only way to do it was to have various writing assistants, while he himself attended interviews, supervised the final drafts. Multiple bodies, if only we had multiple bodies to be in so many places of the world at once. But while we had multiple minds, they were all located in a single body. It complicated our lives. It condemned us physically to one point in space, that was one of the limitations of waking reality. Our mind could inhabit a completely different time, even different times, even the time of simultaneity, our body always returned us to a wretched single point in time and space. Tragic. Lecour had eventually suggested that they use an assistant. He already had his own assistant, but his own assistant was already busy writing his latest assignment. I was a good chameleon, she said. Would I like to write under Lecour’s name, to do her this secret favour, to absolutely mirror Lecour’s style? Had I heard about ghost-writers? All these prolific writers and philosophers couldn’t live without them, it had always been like that, throughout history, a single name comprehended a whole workshop of artists working quietly away, not to mention servants, mothers, wives, girlfriends, husbands, partners, friends, of course, it would be well remunerated, she said. Just write about things, objects, material things, the secret code of things. You write it in Spanish, and then we’ll have it translated into French, she said. I didn’t have to answer straight away, but they wanted around hundred pages, that was what Lecour was going to write originally.
Ghost-writing. The idea excited me, it was fraudulent, it was intriguing, a mysterious assignment, a top secret operation. Enveloped by the prospect of paid misdemeanour, the following days I went out and blew the last money I had on libidinal dreams, infected by a spending fever that I couldn’t shake off, feeling good, feeling guilty, trying to forget about the shoes, about Mary Jane, about my father, about myself, already undergoing my future spectrality.
A headless, small plastic elephant
There were no such things as coincidences. I had bought a fluffy white rug to celebrate ghost-writing. I had caressed it. The image of a white cat copulating with a black fluffy slipper had come to my mind in a flash. As with humans, there were cats and dogs whose brains were wired up to become aroused by the powerful scent of worn shoes. It was probably a well-known fact that slippers fuelled feline passion. I myself had witnessed a few felines passionately mate with slippers, undoubtedly unneutered cats from the time when cats were left to their own devices.
Becoming Lecour meant thinking about my parents secret again. It meant becoming a philosopher. It meant a remunerated alibi to dive head first into the mystery of things. I liked the idea of becoming a female philosopher, there weren’t that many of them, I could only think about twentieth century ones, de Beauvoir, Luxemburg, Zambrano, Kristeva, Cixous … Mae West?
I had to think thing-thoughts, watch my free falling ideas and make sense of it all. I had to ask questions and questions and questions and questions and questions: philosophy is a geyser that intermittently throws up answers in the air. The questions are mulled over in the question reservoir. Then steam rises from it. Philosophy is both steam and gush. And I hadn’t reached the steam phase yet.
This assignment was about ghost-writing, though. Female philosophers? My gaze came across this disturbing dictionary I used to have, a royal blue hardback book compiled by devious creatures from hell. I had acquired it because of its Technicolor pages and its dated feel. It was an Hispano-American Larousse dictionary from the 80s and it had a History, Science and Arts section where with the exception of a few bejewelled queens, barely any women featured. The Technicolor illustrations were mostly of bearded men, no female thinkers thank you. It was a weird object, a reprint from the 70s that hadn’t been redesigned during the 80s, so recent and yet there it was: the old tedious misogyny.
The mystery of things?
The secret code of things?
There was no milk in the almost entirely empty fridge. And no coffee in the coffee jar. And no biscuits in the cupboard. And barely any toilet paper in the toilet. As I was hazily getting ready to go to the supermarket, the wail from the phone finally rooted me firmly to this side of the mirror. I salivated and swooned when I recognised Zacharie’s voice announcing with his we-can-have-sex-any-time-you-want French accent that he was coming to London in two weeks time to buy some film memorabilia and wouldn’t it be great to meet up or would I be too busy ghost-writing Lecour? Kathy has told me all about your new assignment. It’d be fantastique to see you, he said. I didn’t know what to say. I became the shyest person alive. I actually stuttered: Ka-ka-ka-ka. Then a ventriloquist took over my persona, as my voice speeded up and went up a few decibels and said in an extra-bold move conceived to conceal my sudden bashfulness: You can stay here if you want, I mean, you can sleep on the sofa.
I’m staying in a B&B in Central London, thank you, but I’ll bear it in mind, he said laughing. I found myself saying, ok, I have to dash to le supermarché, I’ll expect your call then, and quickly hanging up. I was amazed at my ridiculous reaction. Was I afraid of my own desire? I had quickly hung up to delimit his exciting presence. I had quickly hung up with a strange inner giggle that was also a wall against the libidinal chaos that already inhabited me.
Zacharie?
Zacharie, the Collector’s assistant, an emissary of sensuality whose rubbery mouth was an unaware conduit for unusual unconscious ticks, the very weird-tongue-twister Zacharie.
His voice left me in a state of heightened awareness. I looked in the mirror and caressed my hips. I was dying for some caffeine, though. I thought I’d better go to a café first, have some coffee, ham and eggs, better take a notebook so I can write to my father. I took my new red notebook. En route to my destination, I found propped up against a porch a small, headless plastic animal, which on close inspection was a headless elephant. I was fascinated by this find and treated it as a coincidence, another sign in the right direction, whatever that direction was. It was a perfectly mysterious object, almost the size of my hand. It was dark grey and really wrinkled. Had it been designed like that? Without a head? It looked as it had been conceived headless, but this oddity was probably due to some kind of accident or else a sadist child had neatly beheaded it as part of some kind of macabre game. Poor elephant. I looked at it as if it was a mirror, conscious of the fact that seeing is tangled up with our own stories, an encounter, sometimes a collusion, of our own stories with the moods that ricochet off things. The headless elephant seemed to insistently return my gaze. It had been cast in movement, marching in a self-assured way. Its poise was magnificent. It showed determination. This mirroring I felt was strange. It was as if the elephant was speaking to me, but I couldn’t hear it because its head had been chopped off. I didn’t know whether it was mirroring something I didn’t want to know about. I was more than aware of my own limitations. Or so I thought. Was my resolve to take on the ghost-writing assignment foolish, stupid, dim-witted, obtuse? Or was it my own reptile brain whispering into my ear a worrying note to self:
Desire is a headless elephant ... sometimes … sometimes.
I befriended the headless elephant. I liked it. It was cool in its absurd dignity.
The headless elephant became an impromptu muse, my acephale elephant muse as I placed it on the table and immersed myself in its oddity. I had two coffees, devoured some ham and eggs, tried to mimic Lecour’s voice, but soon gave up in favour of ‘whatever comes out, comes out’ and scribbled on my red notebook some preliminary notes addressed to an imaginary reader:
You know very well that there are things out there looking sweetly into your ego as they whisper to you: if you buy me, you’ll be both unique and like everyone else.
You scratch your head, shrug your shoulders and blink.
You look at a headless small plastic elephant and instantly know that the makers of things can’t help but translate the invisible into the tangible. You can’t help it if things trigger off the logic of your unconscious. You know that some things are tangible simulacra of states of mind that you seek and other things would like to tell you something that you’re on the verge of grasping. Things seduce you because thought is translated into matter. You spend a substantial amount of your life dreaming, in outlandish landscapes where there are no contradictions, where intensities latch on to images in a more or less explicit way. Every night, when you dream, you return to a landscape of private signs. A subliminal landscape of signs incessantly worms its way into your unconscious everyday as you watch TV, browse through magazines and walk past myriads of billboard, reminding you of all the things you should own in order to belong to the tribe you’d like to belong to.
Even your dreams feature advertising now. Your dreams have begun to feature Pot Noodles and vivid literature from miraculous shampoos. Pot Noodles induce erotic longings. Shampoo ads are so blissfully obscene that they become comical, shampoos promise unforgettable sex, cars promise sublime horizons and sophisticated young ladies, a mobile phone will give you all the energy of the world. Any meaning can be attached to anything, advertising is a Pavlovian system of sorts, it recreates a submerged way of seeing where things scintillate with the magic of wishful-thinking, it mimics the logic of dreams in order to create an algebra of need.
My enquiry into the mystery of things didn’t sound anything like Lecour, but at least it was a start. I ordered another coffee, thinking about my mother’s stilettos, about my father and the inexplicable allure of shoe fetishism. I wrote him a letter. Just sweet soothing words. I had written letters to my father from this café before. I had started writing letters to him everyday. I didn’t expect an answer. And I didn’t get it. Back home, I phoned him to tell him that I had a job of sorts, a ghost-writing assignment. If your name isn’t mentioned, don’t do it, but what is it exactly that you have to do? he said. I have to write about some memorabilia from Buñuel’s films, I said. Memorabilia? he said. High heels mostly, I said. God forbid us, he said. What do you mean? I said. Your mother really liked Buñuel. He was so groovy in the 60s, he said. And you? Did you like his films? I said. Oh yes, everybody liked his films, when are you coming back? he said. Did you like any film in particular? I said. I can’t remember the titles, he said. I’ll come as soon as I finish this unexpected job. It’s well paid, I said. Work, bloody work, he said, it always gets in the way.
I phoned him a few times afterwards, whispered easeful words into his ear to make him feel better. I asked him questions and he answered … yes … no … I can’t remember.
Did you have a good day?
Yes … no … well … I can’t remember.
Have you been with Eva today?
Was I? … I can’t remember
Dad, are you OK?
I’m as fine as health can be.
I’ll book a ticket as soon as I can. Are you feeling OK, dad?
I’m perennial.
Perennial?
He laughed and said: What does it mean? Perennial?
Anguish and guilt, I tried to shake them off. I could only take the messy reality of life in small doses. I could be there, at El Refugio, I wasn’t doing much those days. I was just waiting for Zacharie’s visit and the images and video tapes which Kathy said she would send me, while thinking how ill-equipped I was to become Lecour. Lecour smoked a pipe. I couldn’t just smoke a pipe to become Lecour. I had to re-read him. I had agreed to the ghost-writing assignment, but in order to write like him I would have had to share the same aspirations and yearnings, dream the same dreams, eat the same food and drink the same drink, have sex or not have sex with the same people, read exactly the same books. I didn’t know about the intimate details, but he had grown up with his father’s immense library, he wrote his first philosophical treatise when he was three years old, he came from an affluent background, he probably never worried about paying the rent. His life was completely at odds with mine.
Death: a skull asking you to look at its face without blinking.
For the first time ever, I was afraid of death, my father’s death. And I knew my father was even more afraid himself. For a long time now, I had been sensing in all my bones his fear of death. I was afraid he would die while I was here doing nothing, nothing relevant or important or essential or unavoidable. Whatever I was doing, this fear was there as a counterpoint punctuating the liquid days. This fear was both inside me and outside of me. Wherever I was, the fear was either there as intimate as an internal shadow or running parallel to my life, ready to flood it with disquiet at any point. A disquiet inflected by unadulterated sadness. Most people my father was surrounded by were probably touched by this fear. Now and again someone would fade away at El Refugio. El Refugio was like the waiting area at an airport, a limbo zone with a confidential priority queue and personalized last calls for the ultimate one-way flight to that legendary destination: Heaven.
Zia Carla’s letter
Morbid thoughts, my father, ghost-writing, Lecour. It wasn’t the best of combinations, worrying about my father, while trying to become Lecour. And then, a further bubble of tension shot up from my waist upwards and exploded at the top of my head flooding it with migraine molecules, when a Japanese curator assistant phoned to tell me that Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, my mother’s shoes, had trailed off somewhere along the Toronto-Kyoto route. The Japanese had changed the title of the exhibition from ‘Leather-bound Stories’ to ‘Vintage fantasies’. Ninety-five pairs of shoes, ninety-five stories (I still called them like that, even if the collection had gone down, since I figured the shoes I had destroyed and the ones I had sold to the Collector, were still there in phantom form) were supposed to fly over the Pacific Ocean and land in Kyoto, but ‘Vintage fantasies’ never made it to Kyoto. No amount of phone calls solved the riddle as to their whereabouts. Security was unavailable. Nobody knew anything. Nobody was bothered in the least. The main Japanese curator was on holidays and the assistant curator, whose name I forget except that it had two K’s in it, was extremely polite, but I found the coldness that inflected his staccato fast accent quietly exasperating. Sorry, we do not know where the shipping crates are, we are extremely sorry, he said. I’m unsuccessful in tracking. The shipping company says one thing, the airport staff says something completely different, we’re extremely sorry, he said. They’ve been stolen? I said. They can’t have been stolen from the storage area. It has 24 hour surveillance. But 3.3% of shipping crates go missing, we’re extremely sorry, he said. 3.3%? I said. A few years ago a ship containing our exhibits caught fire and sank, sorry, he said. Great, I said.
There was a long pause, almost infinitely subdivisible.
The man whose name had two K’s in it cleared his throat. And then there was a subtle suction sound that made me wonder whether he was smoking a cigarette.
I will ascertain the party responsible. The tour is insured for several thousand pounds, we’re extremely sorry, he said. I told him that I didn’t care about the fact that the tour was insured for thousands of pounds. They were my mother’s shoes. They were sentimental objects but they were also historical objects, they were irreplaceable. Some of them would have been considered subversive forty or fifty years ago, there had been a huge shift in sexual attitudes since then, that was why they were such a chunk of unusual history, fashion designers had found inspiration in fetish shoes like my mother’s, the fact that that kind of shoe had now been fully absorbed into mainstream fashion, didn’t make them less interesting, I said.
The man whose name had two K’s in it agreed with whatever I said with extreme swiftness and kept on saying it will be sorted out, not to worry, sorry. His friendly professional tone unnerved me. I was irritated by the fact that he kept on repeating ‘I totally agree with you, sorry, sorry’, when I hadn’t even finished what I was saying. Can you give me the name of the shipping company? Who did you hire to do the job? I said. Sorry, he said. I started feeling sorry for him, arrivederci, I said and hung up before my pity for him took full on full shape.
Fact: 3.3% of shipping crates go missing.
Where did he get that absurd figure from?
Fact: Ships catch fire and sink.
If their ship had sunk, they would know it by now.
Fact: Nothing goes missing in the universe, everything is transformed.
Transformed?
I shuddered at the thought of my mother’s shoes transformed into unrecognisable matter.
What to do? There was nothing I could do, except hoping for the best and keep ringing the man whose name had two K’s in it. And nothing I could do regarding my father except for visiting him as often as I could. Nothing except for being there as often as I could. In person, or else, on the phone and via sweet letters and postcards. Flights were more expensive back then. You couldn’t say, right, I’m off, unless you had deep pockets. A flight was something that had to be planned. If you bought a ticket to fly the following day or two, it was bound to cost a fortune. The shorter the duration of the journey, the more airline companies sucked you dry. A lightning visit was out of the question. Was it? Swallowing saliva, I phoned Dr Alvarez. Your father is strong, he said, he’s well, maybe he’s a bit at a low ebb these days, Eva has a new friend, she’s always going to walks with him, he feels abandoned, he’s jealous. Jealous?, that’s a good sign, I said, life, he’s alive, jealousy equals passion equals life. You needn’t worry, he said, he’s just started organising a mini-jazz festival, he’s busy, he’s well, he said.
And yet I started looking for a flight. I phoned the man whose name had two K’s in it and on hearing he hadn’t had any news about my mother’s shoes, gave him my contact number in Almería.
It was impossible to get a flight during the Easter holidays, it was almost fully booked and the prices were truly astronomic. The earliest I could go was a few weeks later, so I ended up booking a flight for a month later, then rang my father and told him the date I was coming, stratospheric prices are keeping as away, I said. The gods of greed, the same old fuckers, he said. Yep, I said, same old story.
Pearl, my neighbour, tried to ease my anxiety with a plate of calamari and sweet and sour sauce. That’s how she ate calamari, the same way she ate tempura. Now and again she came round with bits of food, her delicious leftovers. She knew I wanted to visit my father as soon as possible. It’ll be OK, five big shipping crates full of shoes can’t just go poof, she said. Three, it’s three crates, I said.
I checked on the man whose name had two K’s in it every few hours the following days and then drifted into Lecour’s Selected Works, ghost-wrote as much I could, tidied up my den for Zacharie’s visit … in other words, I tried to be busy and pack in as much as possible before visiting my father.
When Zacharie rang, I was in such an edgy mood that my receptiveness to his sexy French accent had plummeted to zero. He was listening to French rock. He said he was arriving on Thursday, he was seeing some people that collected film memorabilia and wouldn’t it be great to watch the Buñuel tapes together over the weekend. Good films, sofa, wine, good company, that was his idea of a cool evening … he said. Not bad, I said, except for the fact that I haven’t received the tapes yet. You should get going with the ghost-writing, write about fetishism, you know about that kind of thing, you’re a sexpert, he said. A sexpert? The Collector has told me that his museum of relevant moments isn’t related to fetishism, but is he giving me the right directions to get lost? I said. Probably, he said.
The music he was listening to, died off.
The Collector’s into things that are worshipped, he’s into sacred things, he said, he’s interested in the way certain things become sacred, the ritual of giving meaning to things, the way the gift of sense borderlines with magic in so many cases, to what extent some materials and shapes inherently encourage certain associations ... You know … humankind has always bestowed a tremendous power on things. From totems, to magical objects, to crosses, to chalices, to relics, most mythologies and religions have projected an immense spiritual power into the inanimate ...
Deadly thoughts about death evaporated.
As he was speaking, my dormant desire became bit-by-bit active again. I could almost see his plump lips forming strings of words. Oddly emphasising the word ‘given’, he said that sacred things inhabited systems of sense that belonged to given cultures, to given ideologies, to given systems of belief. Outside those systems, the cookie of sense crumbles into dust … The voices of time and place decide which things make sense, which don't, he said. Well, I said, every tribe bonds around a knot of likes and prejudices. And it isn’t that certain fixations don’t make sense, it’s that they don’t make sense when measured against the fixations adopted by the largest tribe. What now appears as irrational is probably more a measure of our ignorance, dark areas still to be mapped, I said. Did you say fixations? he said. A lot of psychobabble about the irrational is undoubtedly a nonsensical testimony to the will to interpret, you should talk to Lecour. Is there anything you’d like from Paris? he said. Oh, a box of Gauloises blonde légère, I’ll pay for it, I said. You don’t have to pay for anything, he said.
Eddies of sensuality lingered around the white plastic telephone and then spun around the whole living room. I gyrated with the eddies, looked in the mirror, bit my ultra thin lips and jumped on my feet. An inner giggle reverberated through every nook and cranny in my body, a caress that went from toes to earlobes as I pulled out one of Lecour’s books from the bookcase. The anxious reality I had been inhabiting just before Zacharie’s call withdrew to some remote corner of reality atlas. When I opened the book, its pages seemed to come in and out of focus. I had to achieve an extremely porous state, not to desire, but to Lecour, I told myself.
After a light dinner, I finally started cannibalising Lecour’s words, trying to make them mine. As a nouveau philosopher, I was excited to realize that in many European languages the same word was used to refer to the sense organs and to refer to sense as meaning. Sense. Senso. Sentido. Sinn. Sense. If something had a shared meaning, it was because it made sense in terms of our senses. There was a template for how the senses should behave. Was it really true that we only had five senses? Hadn’t I heard on the radio some scientists claiming that we had somewhere in the region of twenty-one senses? Did the senses of a shoe fetishist behave in a way most people’s didn’t? Perhaps his olfactory sense, which is the sense most linked to memory retrieval, triggered forbidden associations that had been imprinted on his neural networks from an early age. Or else, a brain chemical messenger confused one part of the body with another one. Or maybe fear was at the centre of the shoe fetishist’s libidinal network, the presence of a woman so overpowering that he had to shrink her into a docile object? But what did I know?
If I didn’t understand any of these, how was I going to write about The Museum of Relevant Moments, Buñuel’s memorabilia? I began talking to female friends about it. It was a shame that I couldn’t talk to Mary Jane unless I went to her place, which was on the outskirts of the end of the world. I talked to my neighbour Pearl first, who seemed to solely attract underwear fetishists, you know what I mean, black lace and all that she said. Then she said she’d tell me about a rubber ball that she had been invited to, it was going to be in a club called Fantastique, she wanted to check out that scene, she liked the look, she wanted to have fun, let's be tourists, she said.
Except for Pearl, most of my friends agreed that most men were fascinated by a part of their bodies rather than a part attached to their body. Thus there were men fascinated by breasts, men fascinated by legs, men fascinated by arses. My female friends also privileged with passion a part of the male body, a bare chest, buttocks, shoulders, veins, especially the main penis’s vein. I myself loved Adam’s apple. Sheer object fetishism was indeed rare. I found a few stories though. I heard stories about women idealised and dehumanised at once; stories about women who felt humiliated, desecrated, shattered into a garment; stories of seduced cooperation, theatricality and supreme boredom; stories about people so damaged by other people they could only literally fall for objects; I heard a story about a shoe historian so obsessed about footnotes that his lengthy articles consisted of a single paragraph with infinite footnotes; a story about an old woman who ritually wore a fur coat inside out with nothing underneath to check out the black cashier at her local supermarket.
There was no such thing as fetishism, there were only fetishisms, then degrees, degrees, degrees, it was all a question of degree, that's what I was finding out.
While immersed in all this, I had been waiting for a call from the man whose name had two K’s in it. I had also been waiting for Kathy’s parcel to arrive. While waiting to be released from waiting, I received a long letter from my mother’s sister in Italy, zia Carla. In the letter, she apologised about the delay in writing back, she told me that my mother had always loved nice shoes, that as a child she used to throw herself on the floor in a tantrum if she didn’t get the shoes she wanted, that she would rather starve to death than make do without a pair of Ferragamo platforms, that with all the money she spent on shoes, she could have sent me to a public school, but of course, my father didn’t believe in public schools, that my father, Jordi Joan, was my mother’s butler, that she clicked her fingers once and he brought her a cappuccino, she clicked her fingers twice and immediately, there he was, with a packet of cigarettes, a lighter and an ashtray, that my mother had ended up living in a shack, but my father was a good butler, so professional …
It was perfectly ludicrous. I could see in the neatness of her handwriting her spite. I was suffused with an odd mixture of anger, incredulity and something akin to laughter. The bitch. Zia Carla. So full of jaundice. She went on to say that my father had always been perfectly useless at providing a proper income, he had always been as if in a dream, maybe a subservient one, that therefore Nina Chiavelli, her sister, my mother, the black sheep of the family, had had to feature in a few films as a foot extra. A foot extra? Didn’t I know? I don’t know which world I lived in but I didn’t know such thing existed. But yes. Some actresses had huge ears, huge feet. And film directors used to prefer actresses with broad facial features but small dainty ears, really tall actresses with small dainty feet. That was the case with Marlene Dietrich. She had huge feet, my aunt informed me, she had always used foot extras. Nina Chiavelli! My mother! My mother’s feet must have appeared in a few well-known films, standing in for a few well-known actresses’ feet. I wonder now whether I knew all along that my mother had been a foot extra, whether when I received my aunt’s letter, it was more a confirmation of something which I somehow already intuited, a piece of evidence that I had chosen to ignore, as one usually ignores so much one knows.
Bodies made out of organs from different owners, different extremities, exquisite Frankensteins, exquisite corpses, dismembered workers. Films were never going to be the same. I started looking at films wondering whether all these bits of body belonged to the same person, whether these bodies were assemblages of so many other bodies, whether some bits could be my mother’s. Film is a collection of multiple fragments, twenty truths and lies per second. Photography and film did that, zoomed in on a fragment of reality the way our conscious vision only occasionally zoomed in, our conscious vision often encompassed blurred surroundings, film, with its close-ups, mirrored the intensity-spot of our gaze, got rid off all those inconsequential blurred bits. My mother inhabited the logic of cinema. Cuts, specific frames, a body made out of multiple bodies, my mother, Nina Chiavelli, a foot extra.