Leather-bound Stories
Guilt has always accompanied me through customs, as if in the contents of my travelling bags, undeclarable dreams could be detected. But this time I had the boxes. There was nothing illegal about my mother’s shoes. Perhaps the quantity was unusual. I waited at the pick-up point. The immense truncated zero made out of rubber was still, as if waiting for the last passengers to arrive. Then the slow motion movement. The parade of almost identical-looking baggage. I watched the dark coloured bags circulating on the conveyor belt, like so many burdens people carry through life. I looked at expensive looking luggage being picked up by relieved travellers, my eyes fixed on the luggage flap, the stark fluorescent atmosphere adhering to my person like an offensive aura. I watched a dark green suitcase going round and round, unclaimed, suspicious, redundant. The last one. My travelling bag and boxes hadn’t turn up. I still waited for a bit. I waited till the carousel stopped. Then complained to an airport worker who then disappeared behind a rubber door. When he finally reappeared he was carrying all my boxes on a trolley. But then at customs I was stopped. A couple of customs officials invited me to a small room, their neutral faces betraying self-congratulatory restrain. My mother’s shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes had been intercepted. I saw a trained dog sniffing the boxes, somebody touching them, probably laughing at them. I loathed the thought. I knew that crawling would be my only way out. I crawled. I explained, restraining my blood from rushing to my face. I did not belong to the second-hand trade, or any trade at all for that matter. They were vintage shoes, they had belonged to my deceased mother, they were a token to remember her by. I scanned their faces for invisible laughter. They asked for credentials. Were they looking for sweat as an indicator of lying? I said they were just shoes. I smiled. Credentials? What credentials? Then I followed them to an aside where the shoes were being searched. The custom officials went away, talked to each other. I waited. When they came back, they asked me to pack the shoes and go away. They had left everything in a mess. As I was packing, unable to release my anger lest they decided to carry on with their game of self-righteousness, I realised that a generous amount of sublimated sadism was in-built in so many professions, a therapeutic bonus just as valuable as a company car.
I took a trolley, the cardboard boxes completely blocking my view. I went through the car rental companies, the exchange bureaux that led you into the totalitarian paradise of ubiquitous high street shops. I had to leave the trolley at the escalators that led to the train’s platform, didn’t see any lifts, wondered how disabled people managed, perhaps they just didn’t travel. A gentleman helped me with the boxes on the escalators, probably wondering what this foolish young lady was doing with such cumbersome luggage. He helped me put the boxes into the train, then ran to a different carriage, as if weary of further human contact. He had been kind, but I was now in the land of non-eye contact, where strangers had more or less forgotten to smile, where people unwittingly exhibited their misery in public spaces, so much anger and frustration, so much worry spelt out in those exhausted faces.
Battersea Power Station has always filled me with a strange joy. A feeling of being home. A feeling slightly polluted now by the knowledge that it once poisoned the city with lethal fumes, that these fumes killed people. But I didn’t know this at the time. I celebrated the building. Then the joy subsided, I started regretting all these boxes, my mother’s shoes, when an unusually stout taxi driver told me that they would cover the back window, it’s dangerous, he said. A mini cab came to my rescue. As usual, I gave precise instructions as to my address. He helped to take the boxes out of the cab onto the pavement, then I had to leave everything on the drive and carry one box at a time down an alleyway to the side front door, worrying someone would steal the boxes I had left unattended for a few seconds. Mary Jane opened the door, the cordless telephone adhering to her ear, tipsy.
I left the boxes on the landing, waiting for Mary Jane to finish her intoxicated call, surprised that she didn’t hang up straight away, she was talking to Sam. The flat looked so different. It had just been painted, it looked so bare, I hadn’t seen Mary Jane for so long. We sat around the kitchen table, an unrelated and unopened Chinese pot noodle soup presiding over our conversation. The boxes? My parents’ inheritance, I said. My father? Fine, fine. I didn’t want to contaminate the air with bleak thoughts. So many things have happened, she said. She said that she had done a lot of work to the flat, and now we have to bloody move out, she said. She had already found another flat. The notes of anger in her voice changed to notes of pleasure as she spoke about Sam. She wanted me to meet him. He’s so beautiful, he’s ten years younger than me, rum-coloured hair, brandy-coloured eyes, caffè latte skin, espresso heart, macchiato mind, she said. He had been disturbed as a child, his mind revealed the traces of the disturbance, he was strange, he was weeeird, these were the kind of things that inspired her, to be shocked into a different reality, his skin was silk. She tumbled against the cardboard boxes, then against her room’s door. This guy, Sam, he was a hypnotherapist and a sculptor, more of a hypnotherapist of late. Then she talked about her work, her work which was her life.
Mary Jane had converted her bedroom, which was quite big, into a studio. She had started to collect blue and pink baby objects and arrange them in a way that refreshed the gaze. She was fascinated by the soft shapes, the gentle colours. Seduced by the utopian lie they represented. In the way she had arranged some rattles, you could see a methodical mind, a ritualist. The sense of ritual was somehow encoded in her work. Baby toys are so important, they’re the first objects we have a binding relationship to, the first objects of intensity, she said. I pointed my index at a pristine bib on the wall, said it was dead, it was too clean, it lacked the milky smell babies ooze out. That’s precisely what I like about it, she said.
Looking at a pale blue rattle that she had placed in one corner of her room, I thought about the traumatic experience she had had recently. She had blamed the large quantities of vodka she was drinking for the consistently negative pregnancy tests. I wondered whether her new work was a way of mastering trauma, dissolving it. She had abandoned the Pennsylvanian guy after discovering that he was a married man. He had just forgotten to tell her that he was married, with four children from four different marriages in three different continents. He couldn’t possibly tell her that he was on a mission to fertilize as many eggs as possible from as many countries as possible. Out. She had deleted him from her life. Never told him about the pregnancy, about the way it had gone undetected for months, about the sudden miscarriage. Her new work, all these baby toys, had probably emerged to conceal the confusing nightmare the miscarriage had entailed. She never talked about it those days, about the miscarriage. She was immersed in her work. I walked around her studio, around her obsession. Some of the cute bunnies were in pristine condition. Others were dirty, brutalised, battered victims of a pathetic violence. I loved these things. After so many years, I still have a fond memory of them.
Being back in London always created a two-day time-warp resembling some kind of dizzy objectivity. The post, bills, bureaucratic nightmares, that was also part of being back. Sam stayed in a few nights, rum-coloured hair, brandy-coloured eyes, caffè latte skin. He was beautiful, he was crazy, there was a strange violence in his eyes. He would flirt with me, I would smile, and Mary Jane would pretend to be jealous. Mary Jane was going out a lot. With Sam. And when she was in, instead of packing up, sorting things out, she would sit in the maze she had created for herself drawing simplified cute bunnies while listening to the obsessional compositions of Michael Nyman. Sam must have reinforced in her mind these ideas that she was already toying with, ideas about regression, finding inspiration through regression and play. Surrounded by all these baby toys, playing with them in ceremonial manner, Mary Jane had also started using baby talk. She had always been a big kid, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, she would say. It was during those days that I realised the extent to which she had been absorbed by Sam while I was away. It was also during those days that a thought kept going through my head: whether Sam had hypnotised her and left her semi-stuck in some amorphous childhood zone.
I had already cleared my father’s flat, clearing my own flat was much simpler. Still, no matter how detached my attitude, it was hard not to stop, reread some old letters, browse through old art books I had forgotten, wonder at something I didn’t quite recognise, reflect on why I kept some broken things of no use whatsoever, whether I was attached to their interesting texture, their hidden meaning. Like my father, I had this tendency to hoard, to keep scraps of paper, newspaper articles, old leaflets. I suppose I kept these things just in case, then on a regular basis threw some of them away.
In a way, Mary Jane was the opposite, she had become a minimalist with things, with space. The space she had created was clinical. The few objects that she now possessed shone with all the energy of the empty space. It was the empty space that gave them an aura. In my absence, she had turned the flat into a secret gallery for nobody to see. The baby toys, manufactured and anonymous, with no trace of the hand but with their aura of a fabricating mind, had acquired a talismanic presence due to their display as sacred objects displaced from playland.
I was fascinated by the strange power that emanated from these baby toys. Mary Jane became fascinated by my mother’s shoes. Swell. Mighty swell. Weird. The following days, I removed the cardboard boxes from the entrance, as they were almost blocking the front door. There was no question of putting them in Mary Jane’s room, even if it was almost empty. That’s the way she was with her space. It was a shrine. So I took the boxes upstairs and piled them up in a corner of my room. It was then that I showed her all of them.
Maybe we won’t have to move out … Did you know that medieval people used to hide old ugly shoes in their house to ward evil off? she said. No, I didn’t know. I was aware that some of my mother’s shoes were quite vulgar. And I liked that. I felt drawn to this vulgarity that made me uneasy, made me muse on matters of taste. I persuaded myself I liked them. Vulgarity was the great outsider, ornament was considered vulgar, at least in the circles I moved in where the in-look was restrained and minimal. And yet there was something truthful in vulgarity, a loss of restraint, an histrionic irony, a nightmare of manic excess. Mary Jane quite liked them in that way too. Like me, she had barely ever worn high heels, we wore trainers, flat shoes, platforms, doctor martins, but not stylised stilettos, those belonged to a different generation, the ladies, our mothers. Like everything, they were bound to come back, but at the time high heels were a no-no, hard time for shoe fetishists, they were considered cheesy, tacky, vulgar. Vulgar? What was vulgarity? Wasn’t it a prejudice conjured up by a given tribe, at a given time, in a given place, so as to belittle others, like so many other prejudices?
The flat Mary Jane had found was in Old Street, ordinary rented accommodation, practical and lacklustre. It was smaller than the previous place, specially my room. I didn’t know that I was going to wind up living in a room even smaller than the previous one. As new buildings weren’t built, living space had become a real problem in this city, most people we knew living in ridiculously small places, matchboxes, spacious toilets. We had been looking for a flat with storage space, with a loft, but the price went up with every square millimetre, with every inch. There was something obscene about the prices. They were unreal. Sanctioned theft. It was the mystery of value, something that I was about to discover. We lived a couple of months without unpacking, surrounded by travelling bags, suitcases and cardboard boxes. I had put my mother’s shoes, the cardboard boxes, in my bedroom. They took up a lot most of the space, so I decided to build a continuous shelf near the ceiling and display some of the new ones there as if they were books, leather-bound stories.
Mary Jane occasionally bought baby toys, placed them on the wall, stared at them for hours on end. She said that she was trying to find the mental point where things ceased to be perceived as contradictions. She was trying to get an exhibition with no luck. She was suffering. She would overwhelm my ear, Sam’s ear. How can you approach gallery directors if they create a no-go area around them when in public, if they never answer letters or proposals, if they never answer the telephone or return calls? How can you approach them if they’re unapproachable? A few young artists were emerging as big names, media events that had been orchestrated for maximum impact by almighty agents and their entourage, money, money, money. But didn’t we know that, hadn’t it been like that all through, wasn’t art always, at least the art that was promoted, no matter how interesting, intimately related to the smell of money? If we knew it, we had forgotten it.
Sam’s right, any good artist can be picked up and promoted into an omnipresent star. It’s all about money, money shouts, money seduces all the media, it’s all a question of money. And power, it’s also all about power. I listened to Mary Jane. It was shocking for her, for Sam, for me, to realise that it wasn’t about the work, it was about a combination of the right circumstances, who you knew, where you were, who your friends were. That’s it, Sam would say, it’s about a handful of BLEEP, a BLEEP handful of ambitious lepers deciding what’s BLEEP in, what’s BLEEP out. It’s about BLEEP knowing how to BLEEP say BLEEP ‘dahling-dahling’. It’s about BLEEP being at the BLEEP right place at the BLEEP right time with the BLEEP right people with the BLEEP right attitude, it’s about BLEEEP BLEEEEP BLEEEEEP psychopaths … BLEEEEEEEEP, Sam would say.
Mary Jane revelled in Sam’s sense of fair play. He had had hideous experiences with a few gallerists. They owed him money. They treated him like a nobody. And one of them stole his ideas. Therefore he wanted to at least shoot down a couple of them. Put the trigger against their temple, look menacingly into their eyes and shout: You enjoy being a psychopath, don’t you?
Sam regularly fuelled Mary Jane’s anger. I understood the anger. But at the time, I didn’t understand that so much anger had pain as its source. It was Sam and Mary Jane against everything, Mary Jane and Sam caught up in an antediluvian duel against institutionalised injustice. That’s when I knew Mary Jane, at the centre of a painful rite of passage. Her life was dominated by a series of near misses. Being at the right place at the wrong time, meeting the right person at the wrong time, meeting the wrong people at the right place, being at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. In the rule of variables, everything happened out of joint, bad timing predominated. Perhaps that was the norm, for so many people, general bad timing. Was art about that, about timing? The right people? The wrong people? Seeing other artist’s work being elevated into stardom, had an unexpected violent effect on Mary Jane’s psyche. Anger, furious anger. And envy. But envy isn’t the right word, it was more like a sense of wrong. It was wrong. She believed in a system based on merit, on originality. She became suspicious of successful artists who were the same age as her, angry. She was devoured by this anger. She would talk about it incessantly. She would see her energy deflating a bit more with each new rejection, each new rejection took at least two to three weeks to absorb, her calls were never returned, her proposals met with silence, these people had no manners, indifference was their deadly weapon, deadening aloofness their claim to supremacy. Magazines and newspapers regularly featured glamorous articles about a handful of artists purely made visible by money’s magic wand, thus creating and shooting up in turn the value of the work. That triggered her fury every time, the media ubiquity of these artists. All these art articles were mere advertising for wealthy clients. She was mad. She knew that she wasn’t alone. Thousands of artists were thrown into the same abysmal pit every year, thousands of artists suffered the sheer irregularity of the endless fall.
Everything’s going to be fine, I know it, Mary Jane used to say.
Mary Jane was becoming desperate, bitter, dejected, insecure, slowly, progressively, increasingly. But then you weren’t supposed to show desperation. You were supposed to pretend everything was fine, you were on top of things, you were in control. Control. Mary Jane began to lose control. She couldn’t hide desperation, bitterness, anger. She couldn’t hide her contempt towards the decision-makers, those who decided what to push, what to ignore, basing their judgements on their arbitrary likes or dislikes, like spoilt brats ruling a small model of the world with the manipulating vision of a tyrant that has learnt the necessity of being soft-spoken, amiable, courteous. All these cannibalised Mary Jane’s energy. She was convinced that they survived through the cannibalisation of other people’s energy, that they revelled in provoking dejection through indifference. This is what Mary Jane was repeatedly saying these days. These thoughts had colonised a part of her head, at the expense of other neural networks. She was obsessed, her anger and bitterness were taking the lead. And it was a lead to nowhere. She was becoming more and more resentful, the unwilling host of a neurosis made out of layers of enthusiastic rejections, mounting problems, the ensuing frustration, impotence, the realisation that certain things were perfectly beyond her.
I wasn’t aware at the time, but there was a level of sinkage around me that was going to leave its mark. Mary Jane hovered between her baby toys, Sam’s devotion and the screeching cry of being encroached upon by the social. The social infiltrated everything, indifferent to its demolishing force, mimicking the indifference of the demonic forces of nature, she said. I felt more and more distant from art. But somehow I didn’t know how to tell Mary Jane. I wrote. These stories I had broken into fragments and then into further fragments became aphorisms. I kept writing contradictory aphorisms in an orgiastic celebration of chaos, that was what I was going to show for my final year at the Slade. If an aphorism was a point of sense, taken together, my aphorisms were always a counterpoint where I didn’t dream of gathering the whole world at one point in space but of escaping its immensity through tiny gestures that cancelled each other out. Yet Mary Jane insisted on me being an artist, she didn’t want to be alone, she said that I should show Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, my mother’s shoes, for my final year show. After all they were an amazing objet trouvé, a ready made that spoke about defying the gravity of the earth, an amazing riot of colours. Where these shoes secret entrances to another realm? What if the sexual world they promised really transcended the obsolete body? She said things like that to persuade me, to draw me back into the orbit of art, her orbit.
My mother’s shoes had after all become my companions, instilling in me a riddle by proxy. In the past, I had thought of writing the story of my life through all the memorable shoes I had worn. I knew that every pair of shoes I had worn represented a phase of my life, that I could retrieve my life through them. I never followed the idea, not even wrote a line about it. It was one of those slivers of thought that don’t leave enough of an imprint on you. Perhaps it was related to forgotten memories. And now, all these leather-bound stories on top of the continuous shelf, my mother’s new shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, scrutinised me with tacit expectations. But I couldn’t reconstruct my mother’s life through her shoes. Those stories were buried with her, with the demolition of my father’s memory paths where every pair had probably conjured up an after-image of my mother’s face in his mind. If one thing was certain was that while Franco’s new order paralysed the country’s air, my parents had inhabited their secret passion in the privacy of their home.
I can hear music now.
The countless steps, the long long strides.
Cha cha cha.
Tap tap tap.
Steps, steps, steps, twist and shout, rock and then the pop ballads.
Some of these shoes must have crossed countless bridges in Venice, become lost in writhing mazes, rushed down the narrow steps of Piazza Spagna, rested by a cinematic fountain in a forgotten city, all of them traced my mother’s private map. I could see some of them had been worn for a special occasion and never again. I could picture an elegant party full of effervescence and postponed private dramas. My mother’s feet had been inside these shoes, with their sweat, their varnished or unvarnished nails, she had probably had bunions, her ankles had probably bled grazed by new shoes, almost certainly the blisters, the plasters, the calluses. These shoes had enveloped my mother’s feet, housing a forbidden impulse. Perhaps their spiky heels had been used in painful rituals, perhaps my mother had walked on my father’s stomach, inserted them in body holes, my mother an absolute dominatrix subjugating my father with her patent high heel boots. Or was it the other way round? My mother having to endure my father’s compulsion, fed up of having to wear them in bed, feeling slightly ambivalent about my father’s obsession, sometimes feeling that he was immutable in his disposition, then resigned to boredom until one day she threw a spiky shoe at him with all the violence of the world. I could picture these scenarios. I wondered whether they were blurred intimations of forgotten memories. Ninety five pairs of shoes, ninety five stories, all these stories put together probably didn’t make any sense, they probably ran in all directions, contradicting each other, cancelling each other out, like all the voices of the world, telling opposing tales of simplicity, baroqueness, elegance, vulgarity, intensity, humour, restraint, eccentricity, blandness, softness, status, playfulness, boredom, fragility, plainness, naturalness, sensuousness, desire, function, rebellion, perverse pleasure in conformity, but perhaps we had to learn to live with that, with the ultimate lack of sense, with all the voices.
I liked my mother’s shoes placed on the continuous shelf so close to the bedroom’s ceiling, all these colours and textures, all these shapes, I liked the fact that they were disturbing. But at some point their presence became onerous. It was somebody else’s story, my mother’s story encroaching upon my life. Encroaching. All these shoes watching me from far-above, becoming blurred at night, guarding my sleep like potential incubi, witnessing my love-making to strangers that I was picking up in my dreams, judging me. In addition, there were all these nights when the light bulb in my bedroom started flickering in presage of horror movie stuff. It flickered while making an unnerving insect low-level noise. I hadn’t bothered to put up a lampshade, so there was just this bare light bulb, sad, minimal. And whenever I switched the light off at night the light bulb flickered now and again for half an hour or so projecting gleams of light on my mother’s shoes that turned them into unsettling manifestations of something grotesque. Dodgy electrics, this place is going to explode one of these days, Mary Jane said. Have you tried tightening the light bulb? I tightened the light bulb, but the flickering continued. I decided to act. I took some pictures of the shoes, then got a ladder, took all the shoes down, put all the shoes back into the shoeboxes, rather had them there, muted, inside the shoeboxes, than looking at me every night of my life. The flickering subdued, probably a coincidence. In any case, I soon had to pack up all of my mother’s shoes, for two months afterwards we were on the move again.
There is a well-known rule in London where you have to move at least five times before you find a place you can call home. But at the time, we didn’t know that. We were working hard for our degree shows. While Mary Jane made a model of her show in a shoebox, I found myself stacking some of my mother’s shoeboxes upright, so they made an abstract geometrical pattern made out of colourful rectangles of different sizes and depth. I stacked them into three layers and tied them all up with rope. Then ended up making some straps, so the new creature could easily be carried like a rucksack. I put it outside in the landing, as there was no room in the flat, a portable sculpture made out of colourful shoeboxes. Mary Jane lifted it on to her back and walked around the flat, looking like a chic tramp stranded on the wrong film-set. Why don’t you show this? This or your mother’s shoes, she said. That’s a good idea, it’s like recycling modernism, a colourful cardboard grill, I said. And yet, when our final year show came, Mary Jane showed her battered toys, whilst I stencilled a series of floating aphorisms on the staircase of the Slade School of Fine Art:
Never try to organise an orgy when you have the hiccups: it doesn’t work.
It’s better to live life like a thriller
than like a theorem.
It’s difficult to see what’s inside one.
You need an endoscope, an outside
screen and an expert.
Mary Jane got a well-deserved first and I got a 2.1. But the relief of finishing our art degrees was short-lived. Capitalism’s violence was besieging our lives. It was an initiation into the adult world, a violently red bill telling us to forget about our dreams. Again, with property prices on the rise, the new landlord, who happen to live on the floor below us, tried to put up the rent an amount beyond reason, then decided to terminate the contract, to seize the moment, it was a good time to sell, the lords of the land were going insane. Needless to say, we didn’t have any rights, any anything. That’s what we found out. That’s what the contract meant. And when we even didn’t get our deposit back under the unbelievable accusation that we had been urinating in one corner of the room, ruining the ceiling underneath, we couldn’t believe there was nothing we could do.
Nothing.
We spent days dreaming of burning the landlord’s house down, of throwing a brick through one of its windows. But with cameras increasingly everywhere, we knew we could end up much worse off. The landlord, an old gambling bastard, had simply gambled away our deposit while waiting for the big shot. He knew the law was with him. We didn’t know that, the way things are. We started flat-hunting again. Looked at all these indescribably sad places, black rain filling the hours. We even found a family who wanted to rent us their pent shiplap shed as a double room. And even considered it for a second.
Urinating in one corner of the room? Before we move out, Mary Jane had an idea, her idea of fun. She went out and came back with an extra large fish. What the hell is that? I said looking at its haunting eye. Don’t know, it was the cheapest at the fishmongers, she said. We bid our time. And when we saw the landlord leaving for his habitual trip to the betting shop, we removed one of the wood planks from the floor, buried in the dirt the large fish and carefully nailed back the plank back again. That’ll show Mr. Bloodsucker II, urine smell, but of the fishy type, Mary Jane manically said raising her hand for a high-five.
We closed the door quietly.
We left the fish to work its voodoo.
We went separate ways.
Mary Jane went to live with Sam, to the outskirts. She said that she preferred that, the proximity to the motorway, to the car parks, to a gigantic shopping centre where you could walk for a whole day without running into the same shops. Eventually, I found a hole in a wall in a startlingly drab area called Cricklewood, a place in a council block, sub-letting from a guy who had fled to the Sahara desert to walk its dunes naked. I was lured by the cheap rent, by the fact that it was on the seventeenth floor. I knew the way concrete blocks were perceived in this country, I didn’t have a problem with concrete, although it was strange that ethnic minorities, ex-convicts, single mothers, the disabled and the intellectual underclass had all been put together in one concrete point in space.
I had to do two trips to move all my stuff, as the portable pile I had made with some of my mother’s colourful shoeboxes didn’t fit in the taxi. On the second trip, I put my mother’s strange inheritance on my back and walked across London guided by the Telecom Tower. It was good that it could be carried like a rucksack. I walked through Regent’s Park, then Primrose Hill, looking at the grass, smelling the ground, relishing the fresh air, thinking about my unusual baggage, unaware that my mother’s shoes were bidding their time to spring into action. Strollers looked at me in amazement, probably wondering whether I was a new urban species. The colourful cardboard pile on my back was like a rectangular upright carapace, an outlandish portable home, I probably looked like mutant tramp. I looked ahead, thinking of refugees with their bundles moving to another country, to another possible hell. I knew it couldn’t be compared. Ultimately, once you got over the compassion, that’s what these documentaries infinitely paraded on TV remind you of, that things could be infinitely worse, that you should consider yourself privileged, after all you had been given a free ticket to an immense shopping centre. But being uprooted by the property war, was a fate that had all the signs of ruthless displacement. I pressed ahead, that’s the only thing you could do: press ahead.
Hole sweet hole. I tried to convert the hole into an inert box in order to transform it. A new coat of paint seems to erase the presence of previous occupants, but the wallpaper had to be removed, the walls sanded a bit, work, time, like everything. The place was unfurnished except for a double bed. And except for the sad wallpaper and a picture of a child in a cheap golden frame, there was no other traces of the previous occupants. It was strange that my landlord should leave a picture of a child behind. This time, I took forever to unpack, as if ready for the next move, reluctant to do what seemed fated to be soon undone, just eager to disinfect the walls, to remove the previous occupant’s dead cells, their invasive presence. In a way, I only needed a small room to work in, a sort of spacious toilet. But my possessions, together with my mother’s shoes, barely fitted in this self-contained flat. It was like sleeping in a storage room, entrapped by the muted existence of packed things.
I welcomed frugality. Not unpacking made me resourceful, I was better off with this new frugality. Except that I often bumped into the portable sculpture made out of my mother’s colourful shoeboxes, the other cardboard boxes full of shoes were in the way, the door didn’t open fully, there were things behind it, I couldn’t jump into the bed by the sides, as one side was cluttered with my things, the other side, just a few centimetres from the wall. A self-contained flat, that was a luxury for a young person. But the room was a tiny low ceilinged room. These low ceilings weren’t designed for tall people like me, I couldn’t quite stretch my arms, my head was far too close to the ceilings, I had to shrink a bit to go through doors. And then I had to jump into bed from the end of the bed. Sometimes it was just plain difficult to just to get into bed, its base being one of those drab fabric covered rectangles that prevent you from putting anything underneath. In order to save space, I bought a laptop. It became an extension of myself. It was one of the first laptops, the latest novelty, the green liquid crystal screen, a killer to the eyes, the first generation of portable pcs to only weight five kilos! I learned to balance it on my legs, on my knees. Occasionally, I used it on the kitchen table, which was usually covered by dirty plates. In the previous place it had been worse in terms of the landlord’s ominous furniture, but then, there was more space.
At some point, it dawned on me that I was living in a shoebox.
I was surrounded by all these shoeboxes which in turn were in a larger shoebox which in turn was inside a behemoth vertical shoebox made out of five shoeboxes per floor, each floor being in turn a huge shoebox. The splendid aerial view of the city was the only redeeming thing about the shoebox where I lived. I spent hours on end looking out of the window, experiencing the variable light, admiring the evening, hypnotised by the shimmering spectacle of darkness and lit windows, puzzled by the simplified ground perspective offered by dizzying height, mesmerised by a couple of slow-moving red cranes that presided over the whole view as if they were gigantic flamingos from the future.
Mary Jane’s molecules had become enmeshed with Sam’s. She rarely rang me. And when I rang her, Sam always answered the telephone. She is unavailable, he would say. Unavailable? It was a sign of Mary Jane’s new strangeness. She was paling away. She once came to see me, stared at me in a strange way, took out her sketch book, drew cute animals, then looked forever out of the window into the immensity of the sky, all this in silence. I didn’t mind that, the silence, but this time there was tension in this silence, a tension that I chose to ignore. I was busy ruminating aphorisms, pondering what to do with my life, writing letters to my father in which I pretended that everything was fine. Mary Jane and I had always allowed each other to be lost in thought, to inhabit our respective worlds. I admired her for her zeal. It motivated me. But I failed to see that she didn’t look at things anymore, she stared, her gaze had become a point of disturbed intensity. It was only afterwards that I realised the craziness of her look. I initially interpreted it as a sign of creative frenzy, her stare was intense because she was producing intense work.
I was producing intense work too, writing aphorisms on my diary, then typing them up on my new laptop. I realised one thing was ‘work’ and another thing ‘getting a job’. After finishing my art degree and moving into the new shoebox, there was this void where I realised I had never thought about getting a job. A job? What kind of job? I needed a break. Visit friends in California, Berlin, wherever. I had to visit my father first, though. I went to visit him. I knew that I could stay at Antonio’s flat, even if he wouldn’t be there, and that the heat would be sweltering. But I didn’t expect my whole being to be suddenly pushed back into first gear. I had forgotten about the somnolence, the lethargy, the solid block of unforgiving heat. Sunstroke particles invaded everything. Everything was liquid and dry at once. The streets were melting, the land, cracked beyond deliverance. Fortunately, El Refugio had air-conditioning, and I spent the days holed up there, watching inane TV programmes with my father. He didn’t talk about the war or anarchism anymore. He had been such a feisty man and now I smelled fear in him, but it was a fear coming from within rather than without. They say with old age you become like a child, he said. Sometimes I just feel like skipping, he said. Well, skip, I said. I’m becoming touched in the head, tururú, he said. Tururú was a word that I hadn’t heard for ages and it just made me laugh. Quack, quack, quack, he started quacking, to make me laugh. Moo moo. We exploded into chuckle. He just couldn’t stop laughing and I couldn’t stop laughing at his laughter and he couldn’t stop laughing at mine.
Never take yourself too seriously, he said, knowing that I didn’t. He said it in such a serious way, though, that something cracked up within me. I was too young to understand, I didn’t want to understand, I understood. Promise? he said. And I didn’t say anything.
Then, there was this time when he talked about a girlfriend from before he married, a secretary. And when I asked him what she looked like, he just replied that she wore the most extraordinary pink pumps he had ever seen. I felt as if I had heard something that I shouldn’t have heard and then wondered whether all his memories of affects were consistently displaced into footwear. And then, a few weeks later, I saw something that I shouldn’t have seen: I saw him looking at Eva sitting on the armchair opposite him. He was looking at her green velvet slippers. They were a sensuous Christmas green. I would have sworn that I had seen those green velvet slippers amongst my mother’s shoes. Eva had one leg crossed over the other, she was dangling her slipper, slipping her heel from it and letting it dangle from her toes. He was happy, my father, watching Eva swing her foot, so that the green slipper also swung. I caught a glimpse of his mesmerised gaze connected to the slipper by an invisible lasso. I closed my eyes, I blushed, but the image had already entered my head.
El Refugio was an unsettling space. It made me hear things I didn’t want to hear, see things I didn’t want to see, it made me feel too vulnerable, too close to mortality and I welcomed Mary Jane’s unexpected call, even if it seemed that she only missed me when I was away. Sam’s gone to Dublin for a few weeks, something to do with an inheritance, she said. This gallery, Solo gallery, had shown interest in her work, suggested that maybe she could do an exhibition, maybe she knew another artist whose work would complement hers. Maybe I could show with her? I said that I was looking after my dad, I couldn’t be further away from ‘art’. You know that only art can rescue you from yourself, she said.
Mary Jane was ringing me from a free-phone in a squat. She started ringing me every other day. She was just enjoying the free-phone ride and of course the only thing that made sense was to make long long calls abroad. She also started talking to my father, absurd conversations made out of single words and laughter that had a salutary effect upon him and eased the numbing hours, days and weeks at El Refugio.
We met up a few days after my return. She seemed back to normal. She came round with a bottle of wine and gave me a small pink helicopter wrapped in cellophane that I still keep. Welcome back to the loop, she said. I made some popcorn. We watched the corn exploding into whiteness against the saucepan’s transparent lid, first slowly, then manically, like a private spectacle of contained fireworks. That’s my idea of beauty, she said. Something domestic and ordinary and yet quite special.
She then tried to persuade me to show my mother’s shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, with her. I didn’t know how to tell her that I was losing interest in art, I wasn’t an artist anymore, I had grown weary of my mother’s shoes. But does that matter? Aren’t you supposed to flow with things? We visited the gallery, a white cube run by an opaque, cropped-hair blonde whose laconic manner echoed the minimalist space. They were interesting, my mother’s shoes, they wanted to show them, the laconic gallerist asked me to write a statement on my work, two pages or so, no rush, the show would be in seven months or so.
I retreated.
I mused.
I finally got a few books on shoes, on fetishism. I read. I was assaulted by the penis nightmare, a lurid incursion into psychoanalytical fetishism that would eventually pay off in the form of ghost-writing.
The penis nightmare
Most people inherit a nebulous jumble of experiences from their parents. Exquisite skills, useful traits, then a considerable viscose amount of unwanted stuff. Some people inherit fear from their parents, an erratic insecurity follows them like a curse. Some people inherit carelessness, others are their blind spot. I inherited the riddle of a word, fetish, a paradox, fetishism.
Fetish: a word loaded with unconscious radiance?
There was a time when the word ‘amulet’, the word ‘charm’, the word ‘talisman’ were invested with a similar aura. Words age and lose in luminosity. The word ‘fetish’ still has a raw quality to it, it still speaks of the untamed, perhaps of the untameable, at a time when domestication can be seen as a curse, perhaps a necessary curse sometimes, but a necessity that speaks of loss, of compromise. An untamed, an untameable re-packaged now through consumerism. But … hadn’t that connection been there for quite a while now? Untamed? Untameable? It was probably the other way round. A real fetish tamed people into compulsion. A real fetish was simply another kind of compromise, a rare compromise. Or at least, that’s what I found out when I tried to spawn some writing for the gallery on my mother’s exquisite shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes. To begin with though, I gazed entranced for a few days at a white sheet of paper, a strenuous exercise that required long breaks every twenty minutes and put me in touch with my unlimited capacity for procrastination.
During that intense white sheet staring phase, my neighbour, Pearl, a big girly woman who I had nodded to in the lift, knocked on my door. She invited me round to her place for a cuppa tea. She was big at the top, but her legs were quite long and thin, as her tartan miniskirt revealed. Her hands were covered by gigantic rings, like gold finger asteroids: Pearl was undoubtedly a precursor of bling. I went to her place, just ten minutes, I told myself. It was impeccable. It was always impeccable, which lead me to diagnose some kind of intractable neurosis. She had a collection of pigs, pigs everywhere, reclining pigs, a pig doing a headstand, a dancing pig, a sleeping pig, a pig in the Buddha position and another one doing a somersault. Also, a few exotic plants which she confided to me her ex-husband had nicked from Kenwood House, in Hampstead Heath. She was epileptic, that’s how she got her council flat, the epilepsy had disappeared now, just like that, out of the blue, maybe it was the divorce, no comments, it was so difficult to find somebody at her age, it was like becoming a virgin again, thirty-five, she was. Thirty-five wasn’t that old!, I said. She was into clubbing, maybe we could go clubbing together? I wasn’t into clubbing, definitely I wasn’t. She started rolling a joint. I said maybe another day, maybe later, I had to get on with some work.
I went back to my flat and stared at my mother’s high heels, focusing on her absurd deep-throated shoes with a 7-inch heel. I thought about Pearl’s collection of pigs and then, about her gigantic rings. I couldn’t concentrate. I ended up the following day at the local library, walls of knowledge, enthusiastic students, the unemployed and angelic souls. Then I went to Queen Mary’s library, made photocopies and borrowed a few books. My world became a world of printed matter rather than a world of atoms. I started reading about fetishism. I soon became acquainted with Sigmund F.’s theory and soon dismissed it as nonsense, a peculiar delirium from what must have been a troubled mind. But it was the main point of departure for writers talking about this subject. Sigmund F. claimed that initially all male infants believed their mother had a penis exactly like them. They all desired their mother, saw their father as a rival. One day they saw their mother naked and were shocked at discovering that she had an inverted triangle of hair but no penis. They panicked, they were terrified by the sight. It must have been cut off, their father must have done it, they were next on the list for desiring their mother so much. Their father was going to cripple them. Then, when the fear subsided, those who couldn’t give up their belief in the female penis found a solution: the fetish, a high heel shoe. The high heel endowed the woman with the penis she didn’t have. It became a substitute for something that didn’t exist: the maternal penis. It became a memorial to castration anxiety as well as a magical protection against such fate. And the girls? Women fetishists? Well, according to Sigmund F., girls, simply didn’t have genitals. Puzzled, I stared at a white sheet of paper for a few hours.
Pearl knocked on my door the following evening or the one after and I answered it hoping that it wouldn’t become a habit on her part. My flat was a pigsty. Paperwork everywhere. I tried to vanish the mess by saying that it was the rightful place for her collection of pigs. I said that I was working, that’s why the flat was in such a mess. Fancy a smoke? she said. She sat on the sofa covered by photocopies. Hadn’t she heard me? I was working!
Ok, I said.
It was pretty strong, the stuff she smoked. What are you working on? Never mind, I said. I said that I was going to have a show, that she was invited, but she replied that art wasn’t her kind of thing. Then I said that I was working on fetishism. Oh, kinky stuff, she said, while rolling another joint, I’ve done a lot of that, not for a while now though. Are you into kinky stuff? she asked. I said that I had this boyfriend with a fetish for minimalist pubic hair and I loved shaving it, just leaving a minimal line. I know what you mean, she giggled. Then I said that I was just reading about a hushed cabinet at the British Museum replete with penises from public statues, quite a few knocked off by scandalised Victorian puritans. There were a lot of missing cocks in the world, so many neutered statues. Perhaps there were hushed cabinets replete with penises from statues hidden in the back rooms of museums all over the world! She giggled again and while she giggled I thought that perhaps there was one in sickly sweet Vienna, that perhaps Sigmund F. saw this cabinet, that that one was his internal cabinet. What’s this stuff, I said, it’s pretty strong. I don’t know, skunk, my dealer gives me the strongest. Shall I get you some? I said that I didn’t smoke usually, that I was going to bed. Pearl left a chunk of skunk on the table, even though I repeatedly told her to take it with her, then giggled again and left.
A palpable state of altered consciousness floated around the flat, lingering on the chaos of clothes, photocopies and ashtrays. I cleared the living room hoping that that would de-clutter my own neural networks. I went back to the photocopies and flicked through them, wondering whether my father felt somewhere in his head that my mother’s stilettos were a memorial for the penis that she didn’t have. I tried to imagine him in such scenario, but my father had no father to be afraid of, he was illegitimate, that was his mother’s scandal. The sighting of his mother’s inverted triangle of hair was also hypothetical …
I rang Mary Jane. She hadn’t started on the writing for the gallery, that was aeons away and she didn’t know what to say anyway, she was going to get Sam to do it for her. Maybe you can talk about post-modern puerility? That will go down well, I said. We talked about this and that, about my new neighbour. Then I told her about Sigmund F.’s theory. She could perfectly understand castration anxiety in guilty adults, she said. With the Pennsylvanian guy, she had definitely felt like chopping off his balls. And she was sure that her voodoo intonation when she last talked to him had fully conveyed her curse. Wolves deserved that. Guilty men deserved that. But castration anxiety in children? As a universal experience? She then talked about baby toys, fluffy toys, teddy bears, the realm of the sexually muted. First toys introduced children to this kind of realm, a completely sexually muted world, then later, we were introduced to gendered toys, toys where difference was inscribed anywhere but in the pudenda, she said. Children then became all too aware of differences, as embodied by saying mum and dad, as embodied by women’s breasts, long hair, signs of femininity the father lacked, she said. Wouldn’t a boy wonder at his father’s lack of breasts? Wouldn’t a boy wonder at his mother’s lack of beard stubs, her smooth cheeks? What about gay fetishists? How could their fetish substitute a penis if their object of desire was already furnished with one? And how did humankind manage to reproduce itself for thousands of years if the sight of pussy was so traumatic for men? That’s a good question, it’s usually the opposite, isn’t it? I said. Definitely, she said.
For about three weeks, I didn’t write anything, but the penis nightmare had began, the penis virus, the largest cabinet in the world replete with mutilated genitalia. I could never quite believe that Sigmund F.’s assertion that all men suffered from castration anxiety could be taken seriously by so many writers. And that’s what he related fetishism to. Sigmund F.’s strange theory was a seminal slip of the pen, an orgy of serial violence that had generated volumes and volumes on the subject. I browsed through the books that I had borrowed. How could a man born almost a hundred and fifty years ago be taken so seriously when so many things had happened since? I agreed that his theory was bizarre. But then I thought that I didn’t know about children, I wasn’t a psychoanalyst, if so many writers were taking it seriously, perhaps there was something that justified their endeavours. I became more and more disconcerted at not finding alternatives to it. I wanted to write something good about Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, my father’s sentimental museum. But Sigmund F.’s theory was what most writers writing about fetishism wrote about, especially those entertaining castration worries. Many of them referred to it unflinchingly as if it was a fact, others fiercely criticised it, altered it, extended it, but none of them came up with something radically different. Many took castration anxiety as a universal foundation of human subjectivity, others reversed it to say that it was the mother who was feared as a castrator. Undoubtedly, all of them were rehearsing their own psychodramas.
I read. And read. And read. I would turn a page carefully, and then there they would be, all these mutilated testicles and cocks and inexistent vaginas jumping out at me, all these vagina and penis snatchers brandishing their swords, all these blood and guts sanitised by the use of psychoanalytical jargon. After reading pages and pages of the same stuff, I realised what I already knew, what everybody already knew: there was little that could justify castration anxiety as universal. Only, Sigmund F.’s eagerness to fill in the gaps of his Oedipus complex, to put a Jewish father at the centre of the beginning of times, a circumcising father, to make of his trauma a myth of origins.
Of course the theory was of its time, everything is of its time. Of course it was a gem of bizarre misanthropy to claim that women’s genitals didn’t exist because they folded in on the inside rather than hang out on the outside. Sigmund F.’s theory was completely embedded in his time, the history of his time, the culture of his time. But not only that, he was consistently insulting, his words betrayed hatred, contempt, triumphant contempt towards women. In the name of what he wished to be science, in the name of what he wished to be fact, he repeatedly spat out insults to women in an orgy of ritualised violence. Where did this triumphant contempt come from? Had he won a war? After the deed, triumphant contempt. Sigmund F. did that, physically mutilated half the planet.
Sigmund F., a mad gynaecologist who used his rusty fountain pen in a symbolic scenario of triumphant mutilations.
An intellectual fiend bowed on the extermination of female genitalia!
An army of angry young women had retaliated. But there was a sixty year old delay. Female Assignment: counter-offensive. As if shooting at a dead adversary was a way of avenging half the planet from a hundred million years of male domination! But of course, how could that not be? When women had been completely absent from all the theories of the modern state, from the social contract to most cultural practices for millions of years? When a phantom history had rendered visible all the abominable debris? Women had been gagged for a long long time, the gag had begun to hurt. It was a monumental mutilation of history, of life, of personal stories, personal loss for centuries, for everybody. The absence of women from history gleamed with the ghostly energy of the return of the repressed, a spectre had attained a critical mass. It had created an immense female phantom limb, a phantom muzzle had appeared on the threshold of the twentieth century, ripe with time, so dense in its invisibility that it exuded all the shattering energy of a personal vendetta, a long gestated vendetta that extended to the end of the twentieth century.
I spent days and days trying to unravel those writings, strange days.
Thinking that all the articles that I was reading were part of this female vendetta, one of those strange days I smoked some of the skunk that Pearl had left on my table and then went to the British Library. I wondered whether it showed that I was out of orbit but everybody was immersed in an atmosphere of sheer concentration. I ordered a few of these vicious and arid books populated by the Sisters of the Feminist Liberation Army and savoured all these female wrestlers engaged in a duel that perpetuated on the page a spree of atrocities. In the mist of the battle, I noticed machetes lurking between the volumes that went on upwards to infinity. The female penis! I laughed out aloud, receiving a few sideways glances from other readers. The image of a dominatrix with a strap-on-penis flashed through my mind. I started giggling mentally at Sigmund F.’s universal concept of castration anxiety. I began to like the way it sounded. The way it compacted sex, violence and fear in a couple of words like a contemporary Hollywood blockbuster, a great horror movie title. The way it condensed feared brutality and implied vulnerability. I thought of the elation that he must have experienced when conceiving the term. It was the kind of term that would seduce speculative minds. The term stretched itself in so many directions. It pointed to the fear of mutilation, the fear of loss of body integrity, a fear experienced in a minute way by anyone while cutting a difficult vegetable with a beautifully sharp knife. I should think that that fear must be universal, the fear of your body being brutally cut. Except for those who are into self-mutilation. Or those cultures where mutilation is part of belonging to a group, like circumcision. And then, if he must have felt elated about the way castration anxiety sounded, the theory that he built around it allowed him to sublimate his own sadism. But it wasn’t supposed to be fiction, he was writing. He wasn’t Sade articulating dark games from a luxurious prison. He was a lucid and brilliant horror writer who wanted to sound like a scientist putting forward his mad vision as the founding principle of human subjectivity.
The British library became a dissection room while I conjured up former lovers, one-night stands, it was a large but finite number, I conjured them up in search for castration anxiety, but found no such thing. Au contraire, I found a surplus of eagerness and a sudden monomaniacal intensity in their dogged gaze, as if all their being was possessed by a single thought. I couldn’t remember some faces, the colour of some of my lovers’ eyes, but I remembered the zeal, the occasional trembling, the humour, the gentle, rough movements, the orgasmic brutality, the unalloyed sensuality, the vertiginous dance. I then vaguely remembered an impotent guy who was having Lacanian’s therapy, but that was an exception. Perhaps some individuals did experience castration anxiety, but you could hardly hold it as a founding principle of human subjectivity. Separation anxiety would have sounded so limp in comparison. The devil always gets the best tunes. To speak of a memorial to separation was to speak of the mother, the all powerful presence of the mother. But girls had been deleted from the equation, after all they didn’t have what it took. And that was what was at stake.
I noticed that bleeding penises and vaginas were appearing on the British library walls, hanging from the blue and golden dome like stalactites as in a macabre film-set. I decided to ignore it but then I noticed for the first time the blue-eyed librarian’s plaster on his index finger, an indelible proof that he had been bitten by a vagina dentata. I stared at the books on my desk realising for the first time the profound ugliness to all this writing splattered with maimed genitalia. Real hatred, real violence coming from all sides, lavishly bespattered on the bookshelves. So much anger, I couldn’t tune in with this type of anger. And yet, somewhere, I needed to solve this riddle, somewhere I‘d become infected by this highly contagious virus. Penis. Penis. Penis. Phallocentric order. Phallicised women. Phallic envy. Penis envy. Phallic economy of fetishism. Phallic accessories. Phallic men. Phallic women. Women as castrators. Women as castrated. Fathers as castrators. Mothers as castrated. Castrating mothers. Castrating castration theories where everybody became part of a monstrous chain that resulted in an abominable world of crushed sexualities. I entered the casualties unit of psychoanalytical fetishism. I wanted to find ideas that didn’t depart from a fundamental violence. I read. And read. And read. Every page contained the word ‘penis’ innumerable times, the word ‘phallo’ innumerable times. I started coughing, I became choked. Suffocated with so many penises. Undoubtedly, Sigmund F. had inoculated a virus into history, the penis virus. Undoubtedly, he had generated the longest deep throat in history. Subjugated sons and sisters to a seminal fellatio in the name of the lost father, the murdered father, a Jewish father who circumcised his sons. Sigmund F. had created a penis epidemic. I could see female snipers carrying sub-machine guns shooting from all angles, reaching climatic levels of apocalyptic heinousness. I read. And read. And read. There was only hatred in those sabre-cut pages, it was contagious this hatred. It was implacable. The problem wasn’t so much the reality of castration anxiety and whether it was symbolic, whether the phallus was an emblem of a desire that could never be attained. The problem was that power was forever aligned with the almighty penis. The problem was with the words, the associations, those words to describe reality partly created it, perpetuated it.
But what did all this have to do with my mother’s shoes? I had become infected by the whole thing, the whole choking thing. If every experience transforms us, I abandoned all this reading with a fractured smile and a damaged head. In creating this laboratory virus, Sigmund F. was probably attempting to suffocate the emergence of a different immunological system, for he had always been interested in illness, not in health. Time, I had wasted so much. I crumpled all the sheets of paper with notes I had taken, left them on an empty desk and looked at them. There they were, all these useless jottings, crumpled into shapes that had no names as yet, shapes that were creased, folded, full of crevices and grooves coming from the hidden core. I looked at the play of light and shadow, looked at the crumpled sheets of paper realising that they embodied not only my anger and my ignorance, but also the end of a nightmare. I threw all the paper into the bin. It was difficult to move. The floor was covered with fallen penises and inexistent vaginas, blood spilling out of every gash. I left the library’s angelic souls, its blue-eyed librarian with a plaster on his index finger and the smell of warm human blood. As I went down, I noticed a few unburied penises rotting in the monumental staircase, flies buzzing over them. I went to Queen Mary’s library and placed all the books I had been reading in the Horror section next to Lovecraft and the biography of Nilsen. I woke up from the nightmare at home and had an eternal shower while having lurid fantasies about the blue-eyed librarian. Then, once cleansed from all the bollocks I’d just read, I sat down nibbling at a chocolate bar and finally wrote a piece for the gallery.
Pearl knocked on my door that evening: fancy a smoke? Yeah, ok, I said. You looked so tired, she said. I’m knackered, today it’s been a complete cock-up, I said. What was the cock-up about? Never mind, I said. I fetched two cans of beer that I had in the fridge and we drunk them while Pearl told me about her epilepsy, how it had been so bad, how she had so many seizures during college, she had to give it up. Then she giggled, went into her flat and came back with some cocaine. That’s what she liked, to get really stoned out of her head, she said. I hadn’t taken cocaine for years. I dreaded the prospect of her coming round every so often with an arsenal of drugs. I said that I didn’t take anything, this was an exception, I had always liked cocaine, I said. Oh, I’m seeing my dealer tomorrow, I’m going to Paris this week, she said. Shall we go to the pub? she asked. I said I had been out and about all day, no way, I said. I’m a pig, she said, showing me one of her gold rings which was in the shape of a recumbent piglet: hardworking, gullible and obstinate.
Pearl left around 1:00 am. I stayed up all night. It was oh so quiet. As if I was the only human being awake in the whole world. Enveloped by an alien lucidity, I wrote a short story while the darkness outside acquired density. I wrote in English, in one go. It was strange writing in English. Maybe it was a sign that I was reconciling myself with the English language:
A tale about an extraordinary mind whose face is printed on Austrian bank notes
Sigmund F., a nineteenth century Jewish man shell-shocked by circumcision. Perhaps he witnessed the terror in his sons' eyes when they had that little snip, when his relatives had it, he had forgotten the messiness of that little snip he himself had had, was rehearsing endlessly that trauma through writing, through transference, the female body a site for that traumatic transference.
Or Sigmund F., a dysmorphic, perhaps an inverted dysmorphic by proxy. Dysmorphics, a problem related to body perception.
Or Sigmund F., a sublimated part-time butcher.
One morning, Sigmund F. opened a newspaper and saw the haunting picture of Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato. It was 1922. The last castrato had died. He vividly recalled the headlines from when castration was banned back in 1903. Castration before puberty preserved a treble voice in men. The headlines had generated a general outrage at such practice, a sudden fear of loss of body integrity. And he had been strangely affected by this most brutal of acts. Apparently, the castrating practice had originated at the Vatican in the sixteenth century to compensate from the absence of women’s voices from the choirs. Thus castration and the absence of women from history was from the onset tragically linked. Sigmund F. had a record by Alessandro Moreschi. He played the record that morning. Disturbed by the castrato’s voice, he stopped it half way through. An angel passed. The female angel of history. But he was blinkered to certain angels. A few years later, in 1927, he wrote his theory about fetishism. Enveloped by the bliss of closure, the week Sigmund F. finished his perverse theory, he sat as usual at his desk covered with Egyptian and Greek figurines, his hands between his legs. Puzzled, he scribbled down: Why does woman resent man so deeply? Confused he repeated it out aloud: Why does woman resent man so deeply? That very same week Sigmund F. had that recurrent nightmare that he would forget as soon as he opened his eyes: he had become a foetus again, a gigantic breast was loose on the streets threatening to invade the planet and a stuffed bird on the wall strangely reminded him his mother was not feeling quite right that day.