The sex-appeal of the inorganic
Nina, my name is Nina, the same as my mother. It comes from the Italian, from ‘Antonina’, but in Catalan ‘nina’ means ‘doll’. But it’s not only my name. I talk of small things because they have been a recurrent cipher at the centre of my life. Also, those years, the years I am writing about, toys had become ubiquitous, my friends kept giving me small toys as presents, kitsch gadgets, playful objects, I gave them similar trinkets and then I felt, I started to sense, that these trashy toys were relevant players in the hypnotic ritual of post-industrial life. That’s what I said to Chris one Sunday afternoon when we were caught up in a traffic jam observing passers-by sucking lollipops while building the free toy from a chocolate kinder egg, I said, these small polymer things, these trashy trinkets, there is a kind of spell in them. My father used to call them Hong Kong rubbish, Chris said. Then a fragile adolescent running on stilettos crossed the street majestically.
When we got back home with shopping bags full of libidinal dreams and unpacked them, I stared at the mess of packaging and multicoloured stripy g-strings and thought about my mother's black pair of boots. I thought that I would have never thought about toys if it wasn’t for Mary Jane. That I would have never linked them to my mother’s shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s high heel shoes, if it wasn’t for a chance encounter that forged my subjective dictionary collapsing them under the same concept. Then the words of a shoe fetishist telling me that for him high heels became alive, flashed through my mind. That made me realise that I still hadn’t told Chris about my parents’ weird little secret, about my adventures.
Surrounded by these thoughts, while Chris prepared a mandarin and dragonfruit smoothie with the new magic-mix, I looked at my father’s pocket size photo album stuffed with snap shots of my mother’s shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, and wondered whether some objects were capable of recapturing the initial intensity of things.
Then I looked at a faded colour picture from when I was a baby. It was a familiar picture. I had once immersed myself in it in order to crack the mystery of things and failed miserably. In this picture, I was surrounded by toys against a blue wall. Toys of all colours, pale colours, bright colours, manufactured toys, hand-made toys. Toys of all sorts of textures, fluffy beings, chewy beings, benevolent textures. I was in the realm of the sensuous rendered innocent. A domesticated, sanitised, unthreatening sensuousness. The whole fluffy animal kingdom rendered in a fantastic, simplified likeness that omitted danger, that omitted trouble, then the fantastic bestiary, equally devoid of genitalia, all soft, all cuddly, all belonging to the realm where everything was possible, where terror didn’t exist, where crocodiles were docile, sharks benign, where monsters could be explored through touch. Pastel colours, happy colours. Later on, I must have been introduced to blue toys, pink toys, dolls for the girls, cars for the boys. Perhaps it hadn’t always been like that, it wasn’t like that for everyone, I could only think about what I knew, about my past. My first toys were all fluffy, soft, without sex, without gender, with little class distinction inscribed upon them. They all belonged to the realm of absolute make-believe, welcoming me sweetly into a fabricated safe world, the world of disavowal, mythical innocence, a world fabricated by guilty adults.
The toys in the picture disappeared into the background as I focused on the baby I once was. I was assaulted by a sudden flurry of self-deprecating thoughts -who would have guessed that beautiful baby would develop indomitable, poodle hair, slightly horsy teeth, bulging eyes, a myriad of neurosis and keep on growing to an absurd height? I turned the picture quickly upside down as Chris came back into the living-room. He was dressed in a khaki outfit that I had rescued from a charity shop. It suited him, black hair, black eyes, brown skin, khaki attire over tall body. He always looked impeccably unkempt, it suited him, like it suited him to be into gadgets and come up with an ancient fable when you least expected it.
They can be quite uncomfortable, it depends on your mood, but they were so cheap, they must have been a remainder from a posh lingerie shop, I said, savouring the smoothie while pointing at the g-strings. You’re such a charity shop junkie, why don’t you put them on? said Chris slinging one of the g-strings on his head. Typical of Chris and typical of most men I had known. I had always admired Chris for not being afraid of ridicule. I didn’t follow him into the kitchen, it was such a war zone and Chris, a brave soldier, g-string on his head, offered to venture into the unspeakable and prepare a light carrot, onion, potato and cream soup so as to use the new magic-mix again. As usual, he dealt with the cooking, he is a good cook, Chris.
When he returned with a tray on his hands, I snatched the scanty piece of underwear from his head, dishevelled further his black hair and relished the orgasmic soup. He had added a tang of orange juice to it and served it with garlic bread, and we devoured it on the fraction of the table that wasn’t covered by paperwork, as the news delivered new barbarities. It’s difficult nowadays to separate work and leisure as living-rooms tend to be living-room offices. We had work to do. And after dinner and coffee, Chris swivelled his chair towards his mac and started working with photoshop on a new project. He worked so hard. We both did. I said I was going to do some thinking, please do not disturb, I said. Another dubious article for Vague Philosophy? he said. Yes, no, I said, I’m going to write about toys, about the sex-appeal of the inorganic, just thinking. Ok, he said, don’t think yourself out, and I went into my studio which also served as a storage room, put the new things away and found myself rescuing my pale blue silk kimono from the wardrobe. I put it on. I hadn't worn it for a long time, it looked better now, I was fuller, I was a bit corpse-like before, although it had never looked quite right. In any case, I felt the pale blue kimono would be conducive to philosophical thoughts on the supernatural power of some objects. I was a third-rate philosopher, but a philosopher nevertheless.
En route to my desk, I also found myself rescuing a large red threadbare notebook from the time I ghost-wrote about The Museum of Relevant Moments for the anonymous Collector. Shabby post-it notes in different colours and sizes bulged out from all its three sides and on opening it, you entered a zingy city of thoughts and moods made out of irregular patches of hand-written words that spoke about the unruly spontaneity of language. Written in black, blue or green ink, the writing was sometimes wild and chaotic, other times it was sharp and neat, other times it was slanted or unusually large, other times unusually small and ordered. I leafed through this tangle of ideas, perplexed at how many things I’d written I had entirely forgotten about. With a grin on my face, I recognized a piece about a small headless plastic elephant that I’d found in the street and raised my eyebrows at a free-floating fragment that I’d underlined: desire is a headless elephant … sometimes … sometimes. Other notes in the large red notebook spoke about shoes, amulets, objects, there was this long list that divided the kingdom of things into all sorts of subspecies and also a typed up cutting about my father that I instantly recognised:
Scrambled up chemical messengers. A wayward neurotransmitter. Boob in neurotransmission. Neurotransmission script error. Like being colour blind, confusing colours. Or like being smell blind, getting odours mixed up. Olfactory misreadings. A weird neural convergence.
Placing the red notebook on my empty desk, I lit a cigarette and started thinking that it was the year that I met Mary Jane, fifteen years ago or so, that my mother returned through a film sequence, the first encounter that transformed some of my certainties into indelible question marks. My mother’s spectre first appeared through a pair of boots in a black and white film, then through her stilettos and then through work. Perhaps Mary Jane prepared me for it, she became absorbed with certain objects until she entered a different reality, she believed some objects had magical properties, she ended up inhabiting a disturbed playland tailor-made to her needs.
I was so young, so naïve, fifteen years ago or so. And yet I was back there at the blink of an eye.
Mona Lisa’s demonic laughter
Twenty-one, that’s how old I was fifteen years ago, a baby that had landed in London in search of adventure and the flux of history. At that time, my deceased mother had somehow been erased from my life. I rarely thought about my father. They had always felt as if from a different geological era, so ancient, so remote, my parents, so much older than my friends’ parents. I was blasé about everything, as if I knew everything, when in reality it was all façade and intractable delusion. I just didn't look back when I left home, I was looking for stories, I travelled the world looking for stories, unaware that the strangest of stories awaited me at my father's loft in Almería, southern Spain.
I ended up going back to Almería all the time, backwards and forwards, grey skies, blue skies. I was brought up there, in a small house surrounded by tall buildings, a few scattered palm trees, an arid landscape exactly the opposite of the ever-green here. I had these ideas about intensity, living life to the full, living as many lives as possible. That is what I considered my purpose in life. Having strange experiences, reading books, going to the cinema, observing interesting details in everyday life, enriching my subjectivity through delirious adventures, doing anything that would enhance my perception, that is what I regarded as my work. I had strange ideas, musings of immortality, I was always interested in that which was beside the point, fascinated by the marginal, the rare, the peripheral, the inexplicable, not out of exquisiteness or justice but out of something that with time I have recognised as having the uncanny flavour of fate.
I became an artist, I became a drifter.
It was then that I came to this country, to London, Europe’s largest megamall, as Chris calls it. I was in time to witness the last vestiges of the punk civilization and saw for the first time Indian women dressed in vibrant saris and Sikhs with turbans as long as their beards. Above all, I felt sexually curious about the porcelain white British boys that came from all over the country to gather in one point in space. I was relieved to find that I wasn’t as tall here as I was in my own country, although I was still too tall, my body a bit lanky, weak, fictitious. I had always been too tall, the tallest in my class, the tallest in the playground, too tall for most boys, most boys wanted girls shorter than them, perhaps felt intimidated by my height, I had to learn not to feel uneasy in my own body, persuade myself it wasn’t that I was too tall, it was that other people were so short.
That’s when my adult life started, in this multicultural town. Adult life? I was three hundred and sixty degrees open to the world. Or so I wanted to believe. I wanted to absorb everything. Died my hair strange colours, took most substances, met strange people, people I would have never met in my own country, gangsters, tramps and guys who were masters at screwing everything up with the impeccable alibi of being punks. I was addicted to sensations, forever new sensations, I was drawn to strangers who became intimate strangers, I was drawn to disaster men, sweet men. Had not realised yet life was not a spectacle, it was the time when I believed life was an experiment, your head an immense laboratory to play with, the time when everybody wore black as a sign of individuality. Black, a uniform, it was a colour that defied for quite a while the supposed volatility and ephemerality of fashions, what changed was the design, slightly longer lapels, whatever design on forever black, swarms of people dressed in black signalling unbearable dystopia.
At that time, time didn’t quite exist, it was exhilarating, the abolition of time. It was running time, reflective thoughts prevented you from running, they weighed too much, something deadening about reflection, I wanted to run. I ran in all directions, relishing the fact that wherever I did, no matter how inconsequential, I was learning a new language. I relished arguments with boyfriends, where I learned new ways of expressing anger, dark insults, absurd expressions like ‘don’t get your knickers in a twist’, and sometimes even visited my bank manager with complicated transactions for free tuition in financial English. I soon noticed that most people in this town, including me, spoke weird English. Everybody was from somewhere else. During my teenage years, I had learnt some English by listening to pop lyrics which I translated contentiously and sang to the top of my voice aware that singing wasn’t my forte. Also, I had learnt a patois version at school for three years with a sunny, beautiful woman who had managed to turn the English language into such a perfectly Spanish-sounding dialect that it made me suspect that she was audaciously practising a novel form of satire. Her English words had an angular quality to them, her intonation was perfectly Andalusian and she had transferred quite a few sounds from Spanish into English, making it sound like a sophisticated catastrophe, a stylish accident awaiting a linguistic study of rare English mutations.
The English I spoke when I came here entitled me to the most basic of exchanges. I took evening classes with young and unwitting missionaries who were travelling around the world spreading the language of an empire that had moved to the other side of the Atlantic. I did the homework, wrote new words in a small red notebook. I learnt English with an authentic English punk, John K. He sported a green Mohican. He was a full-time disaster, but he was a real punk, to me the equivalent of English royalty, a rare species that temporarily fulfilled my need for the unclassifiable. He was a full-time disaster, because he couldn’t be otherwise. His upbringing was a series of events spelling out the word DISASTER. He was from Mile End. He taught me how to ask for cigarettes: ‘got a fag, mate?’, to say: ‘innit’, ‘blimey’, ‘wa’er’ and not to say ‘my’ but ’me’: ‘me brother’, ‘me grub’. He unpygmalionised me his own way. I quickly developed an accent and a vocabulary which astounded my English teachers. I didn’t even know I had acquired a Cockney accent. When I Ieft him, he stalked me for a while. He stalked me and stalked and stalked me. Left a message on my answer-phone whispering: sorry you could never get a word in edgeways … please talk to me. Then another one saying: rot in hell. The another one: I loved the way you … … while humming. Then another one: did you ever love me? Then I changed my number. I suppose I got tired of gritty realism. It was then that I met Mary Jane.
My linguistic ignorance was so pliable that I developed a la-di-da accent when I became friends with Mary Jane. Mary Jane Prendergast. I met her at the Slade School of Art, at a strawberry cream party in the quad. She came up to me, put a strawberry in my mouth, extended her hand and said: Mary Jane Whatever, pleased to meet you.
Mary Jane was older than me, a mature student, beautiful straight long red hair, on her cheek a large velvety mole which was an unsuspected entry into another dimension. She had been a dentist assistant, talked with great fondness about shiny implements, about prosthetics, she wore colour when everybody wore black. We rented a flat together, a bit expensive. We weren’t interested in paintings. We were more into creating sculptures out of found objects, bizarre encounters of things, entities that were disruptive in some sort of way, unsettling objects. Mary Jane made a monstrous all seeing female eye with extra thick curled eye-lashes. I made Pinocchio’s glazed noses that twisted into capricious shapes.
It’s so weeeeiiiiiiiird, Mary Jane would say, raising her eyebrows, opening her eyes to their widest excess, stretching the word to its limit, deforming it until the word decomposed leaving a spectral trace hovering around her. She liked that, transforming the perfectly normal into the weird. Weird. We were into anything that was weird. Of course, normality was definitely weird, sometimes we were interested in that kind of weirdness, but most of the time we cultivated rarefied situations. Cultivated anything that would shock us into a different reality. We were both fascinated by traumas, pathologies, compulsions, the blurring of boundaries, negative pleasures. We explored these in our lives, in our work. Repetition, desire, destruction, that’s what we were into, disagreeable objects, the beauty of the abject, transmuting shit into gold and gold into feathers.
The invigorating effect of neon. Brightly lit colour against black nights. We used to hang around Soho. Soho, a neon back-drop promising a cinematic paradise where superficiality is finally redeemed, celebrated. Neon always complicated the senses, a visual attack that changed the chemical landscape of the mind. But then also Soho in the afternoon. We used to spend many Sunday afternoons in this Soho café, having late breakfast, looking at a Mona Lisa that hung on its nicotine infused wall. Mary Jane used to say Mona Lisa's face was my most frequent expression. Sometimes she would call me Moaner Lisa, as if my enigmatic glance concealed a complaint at the world.
It was a good reproduction, this Mona Lisa with her enigmatic smile. Mary Jane would fantasise it was the real Mona Lisa, the real Mona Lisa unframed. The first time to do so she was messing about with a sausage, a fork, and a sugar pot. Art, especially contemporary art, becomes Art with a capital ‘A’ primarily due to the space where it's displayed, she said slowly and repeatedly piercing the sausage with the fork. If you remove an artwork from a museum, from a collection and place it anonymously in a bar, in an average household, many people would probably cease to see as great art. A celebrated art piece draws its aura from the status of the building where it’s housed, the more empty space around an artwork and the more powerful the building smells, the more intense the presence of the work becomes. It’s the collectors who decide what’s great art and what isn’t. Art has become a question of power relations, make it bigger and bigger, money, monumentality, wow-factor, she said lifting the fork and half-sausage towards her mouth and leaving it suspended in front of her nose. If you saw the real Mona Lisa with her enigmatic smile, unframed, in a cheap cafe like this one, it’d still be a good painting, but its aura would vanish, it wouldn’t be the aura it has at the Louvre. Some aura, a celebrity aura, would adhere to it due to the fact that it was so well known, such a celebrity, but nobody would mistake it for the real one, nobody would ever wonder whether it was the real one, it’s the consecrated building that lends it its hypnotic reality, place is the message, she said. In any case, the real Mona Lisa would mean little to somebody who had never left the Amazonian jungle, to an Eskimo in a remote polar land in the Artic Circle or to a traveller from outer space. It’d be an image of a woman bearing an enigmatic smile and that would be about it. Don’t you agree? she said taking the aluminium sugar pot that was resting next to the salt and pepper and sprinkling it maliciously with a bit of pepper.
The Mona Lisa didn’t have any aura at The Louvre, aura isn’t the right word, I said. You know what I mean, kudos, prestige, status, she said placing the half-sausage inside the sugar pot and burying it with a roguish smile which meant: yes, this is my idea of fun, a hidden sugar-coated piece of sausage lurking in a sugar pot, ready to freak out and repulse whoever finds it. She then searched into my eyes for complicity and found it. Then she said: what if? And then: can you hear, can you hear Mona Lisa’s demonic laughter sniggering about the ultimate undecidability of things?
Look at that flower, it’s so weeeeeeiiiiiiiird.
Mary Jane taught me to recognise strangely libidinous flowers, to look at involuntary sculptures, to look at the shape, colour and texture of natural and fabricated things. I didn't realise it until I started ghost-writing about Buñuel, but in a way, we were working within a tradition, the surrealist tradition. We must have unconsciously felt that this tradition wasn’t exhausted, especially the tradition of uncanny objects, of perversely sexualised objects. We would have never linked our work to surrealism, for we saw it as a prehistoric and remote movement that had become entirely absorbed by advertising. But like Mary Jane and me, the surrealists had been interested in placing the visible at the service of the invisible, they had explored the sex-appeal of the inorganic, like us they saw insanity as a site for artistic exploration. As the surrealists, we wanted to create an atmosphere of psychic ambivalence. We wanted to provoke through ambiguity, beautiful terror, abject beauty. We plunged into the depths of abjection in order to produce interesting work. Undoubtedly, some of the surrealists had hang-ups about women. We had hang-ups about men, but more so, about our identities as women. We realised that in many ways we were playing a game of reversal. We didn’t quite understand at the time that sometimes the object of desire is feared, sometimes desire with its boundless force is to be feared. It became increasingly impossible to ignore that we were turning fear into sarcasm.
We spent that whole year, the year we met, working these things out. Mary Jane slept on things. I broke writing down to its bare minimum. I used to write stories before I met Mary Jane. Stories about sweet disaster men, my whole life was about looking for stories. Then I got tired of stories. Had read so many. Written so many. Decided what I loved about reading, about writing was the way a sentence embodied an unsuspected truth, a perfect constellation of words, the rhythm, the complex pleasure of language. Stories became suspect, their illusion of meaning behind all this chaos a lie. I wanted to follow the logic of sounds, wanted to unlock the secret affinities of words, didn’t want to sacrifice the life of words for the sake of a story. I broke down the stories into fragments. And then the fragments into further fragments. Wanted something different. Fragments were so resistant.
Words. I loved them as much for their meaning as for their music. Loved the way they flowed together into unpredictable melodies, their pulse, their sound as matter, their texture. I loved words in all languages, but above all I loved Spanish words. I didn’t want to sacrifice my own native language in order to adopt a new one, like some foreigners do when they slowly strip themselves of their mother’s tongue so as to fit into the new culture only to find they won’t fit in either. It was a way of clinging to my identity, at least my linguistic one. I read avidly in my own language to keep it perfect. I wrote in my own language while learning English, even if I couldn’t quite share with anybody what I had written: in general, the English tend to be resolutely monolingual, an embarrassing eccentricity, a scandal that has at its root a government that doesn’t believe in investing in foreign languages educashun. Or at least, that’s what stranger who spoke fourteen languages told me at a party.
I became a dictionary addict. There was something disconcerting about looking up the translation of Spanish words into English and vice-versa. There were always slippery gaps in the translations. Chasms. There was something missing and something extra. One word meant five different words in one language, but it didn’t mean half those words in the other, it meant a set of other words instead. Words strayed into other words, forming ever changing constellations. Then I couldn’t quite smell English words, I couldn’t quite taste their flavour, their emotional environment. To me, Spanish ones always sounded better. My relationship to English was different. It was learnt, it didn’t belong to me, it lacked the texture of years of experience, the texture of a highly subjective dictionary, although I did love listening to Mary Jane.
Mary Jane.
The importance of clothes. Clothes are so important. Clothes are sites of intensity, like lipstick is a site of intensity.
Mary Jane started and left unfinished many projects, but the one I remember best from that time was an anthropological diary about clothes and desirability. Why do men wear such dull clothes? Are they scared of fancying each other? she would ask. She wrote down her observations when wearing discreet clothes, repelling clothes, kinderwhore clothes. How men behaved. How women behaved. How she behaved. She reflected on becoming a skirt. A jumper. A pair of trainers. She took notes on indifference, false indifference, jealousy and admiration from women, even fear from men. She became narcissistically absorbed in herself as an experiment, derived a tingling pleasure from tracking people’s gaze, consumed their attention with different degrees of detachment, explored the power of a certain combination of colours she was wearing, certain textures like white velvet, the way a top was cut to create discontinuities of flesh and fabric to emphasise certain parts of her body, the way a green top and red lipstick created an after-image of her lips.
Clothes became part of her libidinal everyday. It was a disguise, it was play. It’s so so so in-te-res-ting, she would say emphasising every syllable. Some people look so serious! She relished disrupting that seriousness, the disruptive effect of desire, disrupting all that rational pretence, it was like a card castle, you just had to blow a bit and down it came. We all like to be desired, that is the conclusion she came to. Desire is an update on your desirability. Only disgust makes the other’s gaze a foul caress. She couldn’t wait for summer to finish her diary, when more and more flesh is exposed, when eyes that never ever look jump out of their sockets even when looking out of their corners. Summer! The weather had been indescribable that year. At the end of that year, I mean towards the middle of July, I started noticing the indescribable weather in this country, the fact that the word ‘summer’ did not mean the same to me as to Mary Jane. It was at the end of that summer that my mother returned through a film sequence that started slowing down my pace, transforming fast time into slow time, gradually, a lethargic initiation into the fact that I wasn’t who I thought I was, perhaps nothing was what it seemed to be and what was exactly the way it seemed, I couldn’t quite digest.
My mother’s resurrection
Luminous days forever, the desert dunes, crystal clear beaches, my old father, school friends and a quietness that I couldn’t cope with for too long: that’s what going home meant to me. I would go to Spain during the summer and Christmas holidays to visit my father, my friends, my past. I would always get this feeling of still time. It felt strange being at the house I’d been brought up in, the same ominous wall-paper with its dizzying geometrical pattern, the same new-looking old sofa, the same transparent plates, encountering again the same two cracked tiles in the corridor, the chipped one in the bathroom, things used to feel so close, yet so far, like a superimposed vision of the same space. I would see my cousin Antonio, some of my school mates, feel strange that so little had changed, that year after year people worked in the same shops, lived in the same places, as if nothing had really moved while I was away. I know it was deceptive, but I would get this feeling of time standing still, as if I had only turned my back for a second and on turning it again I could see the same faces in the same places. Other times, going home to Almería would be like opening a door here in my flat, rather than going from one country to another, it was more like going from one room to another through a special door. I opened that special door, and there it was, my past, a whole country, a handful of familiar faces rendered slightly different through a distortion in perspective.
I would always go there towards the beginning of September, to avoid the deathly caress of July, August, when the sun becomes a perpetual crushing embrace. My father, Jordi Joan, was Catalan, from Barcelona, but my mother and him and then his brother had gone to the south of Spain at the time when the whole of the south of Spain was immigrating to Barcelona. Almería had become a huge film set, the new American Southwest where Westerns could be shot with ludicrous budgets. My mother had vainly been lured by the prospect of acting in the Spaghetti Westerns that were being shot there, only to find out that it was a brutal and macho genre where actresses were mostly incidental. It was obvious, but they were in love and blind to everything they didn’t want to see and when they got there, they witnessed the Spaghetti Western industry, which was supposed to flourish with the success of Sergio Leone’s films, dry up after a few flops. They stayed there, though. They were both in awe of the lunar landscape, the desert, its rugged beauty, even if my father only had seasonal work playing the sax in a band at weddings and fairs, mostly during the summer. That must have ensnared my mother, the drawn out soulful notes my father played. He had a sweet perfect control of the sax, as though the sax was an extention of his heart, aorta, arteries, his solar plexus. He played mainly jazzy, improvised songs, had this masterly way with a melody. He didn’t play the sax for years. Then he started playing it again for a local charity to raise money for a shelter for abandoned dogs.
I went back at the end of that summer. I was welcomed by a violently orange sky. I like your teddy boy shoes! Where did you get them from? That was the first thing my father said to me. I hadn’t worn these teddy boys blue suede shoes for years. I’d gone to a Japanese retro party the previous evening and was wearing them in order to discard them and get a new pair of shoes in Almería, so as to minimize on luggage on my way back. It astounded me that he should like them. He had always slagged me off for not being feminine enough, for being a tomboy of sorts. I used to have a pair like that, back in the fifties! he added after a pause. Your mum bought them for me. I smiled with complicity while seeing him for a few seconds as he must have been way before I was born, wearing teddy boy shoes, a young man whose gentle features echoed his serene approach to life.
But the next few seconds the vision vanished, he suddenly looked older than ever, a robust old man with sad dog eyes that probably mirrored those of the abandoned dogs he was looking after, something moving about my father that was almost tangible, yet sometimes I mistook for emotional blackmail, as if he was trying to strike within me an inconvenient chord, like when he said: I miss you.
He said the house wasn’t the same without me around, the whole house missed me, he said. He then slightly turned his head to one side half-placing his hand on his mouth and when he turned towards me again, he showed me a toothless smile. He did it again and then his smile suddenly bore perfect gleaming teeth, a magic trick he must have practiced as soon as he got his new three tooth denture. He was his usual playful self, but he seemed increasingly forgetful this time. I worried seeing him like that. And he worried about me being far away, living in another country. What did I bear a daughter for, to have her bugger off to another country? And what are you doing in England? Look at what they’re doing to Northern Ireland! They’re pirates, the English, they’ve always been. They’ve always been so English. They feel superior to us! To everybody! I shook my head, said it was because they had this vision of Spain as a vast holiday resort, they were deluded about their own country, not everybody, that strange feeling of superiority is dwindling away, dad, it’s a stereotype, I said.
For years and years and years, my father had been a night porter in a four star hotel, had witnessed English hooligans practicing the healing power of smash by smashing bars up, he had been frightened, shocked. He had retired two years ago. He knew not all the English were like that, he spoke some English and had friends from Albion himself, he was an anglophile, but he just wanted me to go back home. It was ridiculous to compare London to Almería, but my father did that, he said Almería was better, the weather was incomparably better, 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, the best place in the world, the people were nicer, more civilised. Yes, dad! Almería was an utterly forsaken town at the time, but anyway. I had to say something, though. England is an outlandish island marooned in the Atlantic, I said. Islanders are like that, they keep themselves to themselves, like the Japanese, I like it there, you can go down the streets on your pyjamas and nobody batters an eyelid, it’s a nation of introverts and eccentrics, yes, there are pirates and hooligans, but there are also people so gentle.
Yes, so gentle that they’ve re-elected Thatcher, come on let’s eat, my father said. He was being unfair and he knew it. He had cooked a special seafood platter that day, but he had boiled the shelled king prawns instead of grilling them with sea salt, and the squid was burnt. The seafood platter was a sorry affair, most unusual for him to ruin a meal, let alone serve it nonchalantly. Like Chris, my father was a good cook. He liked cooking exotic dishes. He would cook special recipes for me, dishes he knew I hadn’t eaten for a long time, grilled squid with garlic, parsley and lemon sauce, Hungarian goulash, Singapore noodles. Then he would vanish in front of the TV and I would vanish into nocturnal life. Everybody escaped into nocturnal life. The unbearable heat did that, postpone life until the evening. Nocturnal life. This time I didn’t go out that much during my stay. I drew my thoughts instead, read delirious philosophers translated from the French, watched late night TV accompanied by the breeze from a portable ultra-modern fan which made the curtains swell up fitfully, gazed mesmerised at the animated curtains as if they were pregnant with hypnotic power.
Except for meal times, my father and I gently ignored each other, a loving indifference that had taken years to cultivate. He watched chronic soaps, went to men’s bars and played the sax at a few charity concerts. I had endless showers and read voraciously by the ultra-modern fan. Time went by in a flash. It was the evening before I was leaving, while my father snored away in his bedroom, that I watched a video that resurrected my mother and sparked off the strangest of memories. I found it on one of the living-room shelves, it had a beautiful scratched quality, it was a bad recording. It was a film by Buñuel, the surrealist film-maker, Diary of a Chambermaid, set in the 1920s, in black and white, long panning shots. That film was the first incident in a series of coincidences. It brought about a wayward neural storm. I have seen it many times since, I don’t watch it anymore, although at the time, I almost switched it off. I suppose I was in that intermediary area between vigil and slumber. Curiosity won over slumber: Buñuel, Jeanne Moreau, a chambermaid in black and white, beautiful long shots.
The film was about a Parisian woman who found a job in the countryside as a chambermaid. Country-side people were hostile. They were hostile because she was from Paris, they thought she was sophisticated because she was from Paris, the world’s fetishised capital at the time. The opening sequence focused on her shoes. She wore dainty high heel shoes. She was wearing the wrong type of shoes to begin with. Countryside working women didn’t wear dainty high-heel shoes. They were impractical. Moreover, they were exclusive footwear belonging to the beautiful people, the idle Madams.
A pretty chambermaid, uniforms, subdom games, such come-ons to male desire. The colourful tacky sex-shops that now sell traditional black and white maid costumes and updated rubber ones, came to my mind. Spanking the maid, the maid spanking the master, that’s what also crossed my mind when I saw the chambermaid, a personal neural connection, a book by Robert Coover I’d read. This chambermaid, the chambermaid in the film, was sexually knowing. She playfully kept the house master at bay, mindful that some jobs required a certain type of flexibility. She wore perfume, black stockings, high heels, goods unavailable to rural servants. Her presence in the house spoke about the city, not just any city, but Paris, Paris and its emerging mass-produced market of goods accessible to a wider range of customers, even to a mere chambermaid.
A little girl was murdered in the film and when a little girl is murdered, rape is invariably the name of the game. The chambermaid had felt tenderness towards this little girl, offered her an apple, offered her her own bed. The chambermaid stayed to solve the murder, she slept with the murderer in order to solve the murder, she was going to destroy him so as to avenge the brutal act. She was called Célestine, was played by Jeanne Moureau. There was this old man, a gentle eccentric old man, a bit of a lecher. He was gentle but capable of contempt. He was supposed to be a man of refinement. His daughter, a rigid woman obsessed with expensive brick-a-brack and exotic English vases who referred to everything in terms of its financial value, thought his age justified him in having certain little whims, that’s what she said. The old man called all his chambermaids ‘Marie’, regardless of their names, as if all the chambermaids were interchangeable, all the same. He called Célestine, Marie. He called for her, made her read a bit from Against Nature by Huysmans, a bit where the whole of society is condemned. She read. He enjoyed her voice. She read beautifully. He enjoyed that. The beauty of a voice, as if her voice was detached from her body.
The video tape had been recorded from TV, it was interlaced with advertising breaks in colour, it was strange seeing old ads, their lack of sophistication, old faces and products engraved in the mind through repetition that now triggered the soft spot of nostalgia, of a time when everything seemed right. Then the main bit in the film came. The main bit for me. The bit where the eccentric old man makes the chambermaid wear a black pair of old boots and slowly fondles them.
A remote memory hit my neural circuitry as I looked attentively at the black pair of ankle boots, astounded by their overwhelming presence. These old boots were exactly like a pair of ankle boots my mother used to wear, a replay of lost moments, there was an identical match in my memory, a mirror image. They were the same, as far as I could recall. They had moderate high heels. Buttons on the side. The leather wrinkled a bit round the ankle, the way my mother’s boots wrinkled. My past lurked in those boots, a black pair of ankle boots with intricate tight-lacing. The old man in the film made the chambermaid walk. And then, my mother, Nina Chiavelli, came back in full. I remembered that way of walking, it was identical to the way my mother walked, she walked slowly, majestically. And then those boots, they sparked off flashbacks of my mother from her knees downwards, flashbacks of the leather from her boots slowly creaking, as if to create a counterpoint to the heel’s tapping. For my mother, walking must have been a way of speaking, if some people cultivated a beautiful voice, my mother must have cultivated the way she walked.
I paused the film.
My nostrils detected for a fraction of a second an unmistakable smell: the wet sand of the desert.
I carried on watching the film, but my head was flooded by my mother, images of my mother, real images jumbled up with old photographs. It was the photographs in the old album that became all pervasive in my mind, the black and white snapshots, the hand-coloured pictures, and at some point the irruption of Technicolor.
When the film finished, I got my parents’ photo album out, browsed through its rancid rice paper pages, wondered at these pictures that had been taken way before I came into existence, became immersed in them. My mother dressed up as an Indian, my father as a cowboy, my mother dressed up as a sheriff, my father as a saloon girl, my mother dressed up as a bride, my father as a groom, my father with an impeccable barman uniform. Then my mother with beehive hairdos holding me in her arms. Then a picture of her as a dead prostitute in a western she had featured in. And then, my mother mounting a cardboard horse in a fairground: a black and white snapshot that featured my mother wearing the black ankle boots I’d just seen in the film.
The memory of my mother’s boots became in turn a magnetic field for other memories. Memories crystallised around them like in a speeded-up nature film. I was dizzy with memories. Memories, such beautifully unreliable stuff. I rewound the tape. Watched the frontal sequence again, with the boots walking towards you. The boots carried on walking towards me, they came out of the screen, walked towards the sofa where I was crouched down staring at them wide-eyed, and then they became larger and larger and larger until they filled the whole living room.
It was as if my head was working as a 16 mm film-projector. I fetched the remote control as if it gave me the power to be in charge of my own visions and pressed the ‘off’ button: the gigantic boot suddenly trailed off.
I wasn’t scared. Just dazzled at the power of my head to conjure up a dream-like event while I was awake. It was like a gust of weird weather, a neural storm configured into an image that had made itself visible for a few seconds to then vanish back into obscurity.
I laughed nervously, hoping for something weird to catapult me into a fully bodied revelation. I rewound the tape again to compare my mother’s boots in the fairground photograph where she was mounting a cardboard horse with the boots in the film. It was difficult to tell, perhaps they weren’t quite the same. It was difficult to tell whether they really were identical. The snapshot was the size of a cigarette packet, the boots tiny in comparison to the close-up I’d just seen on the screen. I realised that didn’t matter, if there was an object that condensed the odd flavour of my childhood, it was those ankle boots, a black pair of boots somewhere between the snapshot of my mother on a cardboard horse and Jeanne Moreau’s boots walking in Diary of a Chambermaid.
My mother, who was she?
My mother died when I was six.
My mother, Nina Chiavelli, was now resurrecting before my eyes. I barely knew anything about her except that when she left us, my father said she was doing films in heaven, that it was much better than to act in films on planet earth. He said it in a whisper, as if it was a secret and something to be secretly proud of. He said it with such warmth and conviction that I believed him for years. It was a strange thing for my father to say: he was an atheist. It was a great thing to do, to do films in heaven, he would say. My mother died the day after my sixth birthday. She died of breast cancer. Perhaps her striptease career had consumed her. All those looks had consumed her, intensified a genetic curse that ran through generations striking more or less at midlife. She was Italian, my mother. Stylish. She was forty-one when I was born, my father thirty-seven. We made puzzles together. She taught me sweet Italian words. She took me to the zoo, to the circus, shopping and to strange bars where men wolf-whistled and paid lewd compliments to her arse that utterly baffled me as in my small world the word ‘arse’ solely designated the place where shit comes from. She had been trained as an accountant, the family profession. But then, a decade before I was born, she made a U-turn, she went into acting, it became her passion, pretending to be different people, visiting different subjectivities, erasing herself to become the host of others.
I went into perhaps-mode.
Perhaps her career was thwarted when I was born and she became quietly disappointed? She was a foreigner in Almería, an unknown actress from an unknown town in Italy married to a stranger from Catalonia. Perhaps the locals saw her as a failed actress and a failed mother, with a cruelty that made my mother drink even more? That must have been tough for her, for who can say what is failure, when most lives are spoken by so many different voices, so many different insurmountable constraints, so many situations forever happening out of time, timing forever elusive, forever playing hide and seek in a game of chance, even biological chance, where willpower might be a mere pawn in a senseless game played by random forces. The fact is that she tried hard, she worked hard and perhaps that’s what did it, all the struggle, the trying, the erosion. The only roles available for women in Spaghetti Westerns were as prostitutes or widows and she once got a role as a female corpse. We had a picture of her as a dead prostitute. For that role, she had to dye her hair red, wear a red velvet nineteenth century dress with a scandalous décolleté and huddle in the corner of a saloon set, her head lolling on her naked shoulder, eyes closed, immobile. I later found out from my cousin Antonio that most acting she did was unpaid or poorly paid and the only well-paid ‘acting’ she could get was when they needed somebody in the nude, as if that was all she could be good for. She wasn’t required to perform in a narrative, she was required to take her clothes off slowly, to reveal her well lit body in well lit shots. That must have angered her. She was a talented woman, delicate body, talented head. She must have thought if that was what was required in order to forward her career, she had to comply with it. But it didn’t. That was her career: revealing bits of flesh.
Well lit shots, shots, as if the camera was a gun (… and as I write this, I realise that in English you might not think this thought, in English cameras shoot, whereas in Spanish, only weapons ‘shoot’: cameras ‘film’, cameras ‘take’, but never ‘shoot’.)
I don’t think my mother had ever set out to be a striptease girl, to slowly deduct her clothes by numbers. But even that was difficult to get. The fact is that they rarely called her. At least, that’s what Antonio told me. She wanted to act. She wanted to be able to choose her own roles. And she had a thing about red wine. And brandy. And cava. And she also liked martini with an olive skewered on a toothpick just before lunch time. L’apéritif. And then, after lunch, le digestive. Calvados. With time, I realised that she was too fond of elixirs of quietude, she even drank at breakfast time. It wasn’t just variety, but quantity. She just wanted to forget something I would never know about. She had an addictive nature, something within her that was beyond her. And then I thought that perhaps she was a wonderful mother and a terrible mother. Perhaps she was obsessed with herself, as some actresses are. Perhaps she would feed me, play with me, she would do this with love, but sometimes, she would do it as if it was a duty, an excruciating chore, something that stole her time from more important matters. Perhaps she would feed me in a rush, impatiently, waiting until I was in bed to fix herself another drink, watch films on the sofa, escape. I don’t remember any of this, I am always looking for reasons for my sense of inadequacy, I only remember mostly good times. But isn’t that what you are supposed to remember?
Undoubtedly, the brain spins and tweaks memories according to your needs. And undoubtedly. some of the photographs in the album were slightly at odds with my happy memories and confirmed what Antonio told me about. There were some faded colour pictures where she was holding me in her arms as if in bliss, but then, there were other pictures where she had this look as if she was truly far away, so far nobody could reach her, something akin to an irate desperation in her remote look. But was that my mother in the photograph album? The mother I remembered? I couldn’t see in those pictures the mother I remembered. The mother I remembered was a warm and sad sensation, sometimes aggressive, unphotographable, and then I mainly remember vividly the way she walked.
My neural circuitry replayed the sharp tap of her high heels against the fake marble tiles in the corridor. Perhaps that was the soundtrack to my childhood: tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. I looked forward to that rhythmic sound, there was mastery in that rhythmic sound. But also something cold and imposing, authoritative. Sometimes the tap tap tap tap tap tap tap was discontinued midway through the corridor. She swayed, she lurched, fell over on the corridor and my father took her to bed. She must have struggled with alcohol. She was my mother. She was wonderful. Had her dark moments. She would sit on the sofa, take her shoes off, play with me, then disappear into bed until late in the afternoon the following day. Blues would come from the bedroom. She would sing the blues, she was so pale my mother, she must have sung with an Italian accent. I suddenly remembered the blues coming from their bedroom, her voice, I couldn’t understand the lyrics, I remembered her singing Mississippi goddam. How old was I? Three, four, five. I would carry on playing with my dolls, my girlie toys.
And yet in another memory we were a happy trio: my father played the sax and my mother sang made-up songs while I jumped wildly on their bed.
Bits from my childhood came back with my mother’s black pair of ankle boots: accidents, mischievous deeds, petty-theft, wonder and an opaque sensation that took me a while to unravel. One of the things I remembered was repeatedly doing things that I knew I shouldn’t be doing. I would burst into their bedroom when they were not in and engage in activities that were related to knowledge, to exploring: I searched their wardrobe, the drawers, the bedside table. I tried my mother’s high heels on and awkwardly dragged myself to the mirror while that my feet were housed by immense ships. I returned to the mirror and clumsily smeared lipstick on my thin lips, not knowing at first how a lipstick worked.
But how could a black pair of ankle boots with intricate tight-lacing, a pair of boots that looked like another pair in a film condense the spirit of my childhood? Did I use to crawl around my mother’s little high heel boots? I now wonder whether in her absence, I would play with them. They were probably still warm, they had a special smell. Perhaps I touched the soft, shiny leather, cuddled them, licked them, kissed them good tonight. Perhaps, sometimes my mother would warn me to be careful with the heels and then snatch them and hide them away. All this is mere rhapsody. I don’t remember any of this, it all belongs to the realm of the perhaps, what was clear was that the memory of these boots was a back entrance to my childhood, that I must have learned an important lesson from this pair of black boots.
The photographs in the album stacked at the end, and ironically the belongings that my mother left me, the belongings I inherited from her when I was seven, were my own belongings. My first teeth, a lock from my hair, first baby congratulation cards, a baby suit, a silver spoon where the ladle was placed horizontally with my name engraved on it, my first drawings, school reports, a single cream woollen bootee. All this she had kept in a large shoe box. I suppose many mothers must feel that impulse, to treasure baby’s bodily things, to build maternal reliquaries.
Inside the shoe box though, there were also reminders of death. Apart from my first belongings, there were a couple of post-mortem photographs of her parents: they used to do that at that time, use photography’s death spell to take pictures of the dead, a double death to ensure they would never come back, as it’s happening now with video in the States, people recording their dead as a memento, a deathbed surrounded by mourning relatives.
When my mother died, my father kept everything as my mother used to keep it, everything except himself. He became a black sun. He mourned my mother’s death for years and years. I looked after him for years and years. He probably never survived it. He probably lived for quite a few years inside his own collapse. He stopped playing the sax, didn’t see his friends and became adhered to the TV screen. He became a single father. He became a ghost of his former self. He did strange things like hugging one of my mother’s boots in his sleep. That was one of the strange memories the wayward neural storm summoned to the surface: my father hugging one of my mother’s ankle boots in his sleep, the boot that was identical to the boots I had seen in the film, Jeanne Moreau’s boots. Unable to sleep the weekend siesta, sometimes I would stand by his bedroom door and see him hugging it in his sleep as if it was a teddy bear. At the time, I didn’t think anything of seeing him hugging the boot. And then, in one of the few dreams I remembered from my childhood that boot had become a book, a book my father was sleeping with, a book that was not really a book but a boot. This old dream was one of the things that I recalled vividly about my mother’s black pair of ankle boots.
My father never talked about my mother. Or if he did, it couldn’t have added up to all that much, it was as if he inhabited a realm where life and death had lost their mutual exclusiveness. He must have thought that a gentle wall of silence protected me from his bleakness. All I remembered was his woe. How he didn’t comb his hair, how he looked moth-eaten, he had become a neat image of neglect, but then he looked after me, he drove me to school every morning, he came straight from work to be with me, he helped me every evening with my homework. He must have stopped hugging my mother’s little boot in his sleep when I was eight or so. I tried to remember when I last saw the boots. I had this vague memory of last seeing them inside a shoe box in the wardrobe in the corridor years and years ago, a remote memory that blurred the boundaries between dream and fact, like so many remote memories. They were shinny and soft, they had slightly worn out heels. I went to the wardrobe in the corridor, searched everything, but they weren’t there.
The eccentric old man in the film had survived through the cluster of memories enlivened by various chambermaids wearing old boots and shoes, the last memory perhaps proving too much: he died hugging the ankle boots. I think my father must have died when my mother died, one of the many deaths he survived. Like my father, the eccentric old man hugged the boots because they brought back memories, undoubtedly memories of affection, beautiful memories, irretrievable memories, the kind of memories that only come back in dreams. Like the old man, like my father, perhaps I also hugged my mother’s black ankle boots one day, but that was different, a little girl hugging her mother’s boots, that was perfectly acceptable.
Against nature, against the natural order of things, against death: those words rang rhythmically in my mind as if trying to tell me something. In a way, you didn’t know much about this old man, the old man in the film, like I didn’t know much about my father, nor about my mother. There was nothing that gave you a clue as to why the old man in the film cherished shoes so much, except for the title of Huysman’s book, Against Nature. It took me years to realise that the old man’s eccentricity was steeped in class distinction, if the chambermaid submitted to something, it was to that. At the beginning of the twentieth century high heels were a sign of privilege, wealth, prestige, status symbols worn only by the privileged classes. The working class, peasants, couldn’t afford to wear such impractical shoes. And this is what the opening image of the film referred to. A subservient maid who had all the signs of poverty inscribed upon her body and mind, could have never been chosen by the old man to wear such sophisticated footwear.
But, what did all this have to do with my father’s hugging my mother’s black ankle boot at night? Was my father a boot-fetishist? How could my father, an anarchist indifferent to the sensual properties of things, be a boot-fetishist? This film changed the way I viewed him, maybe he had a secret life, my father. Maybe he was more interesting than I thought he was. I wanted to find out more. And more I found. To begin with I didn’t like what I found out. I blushed for a second. I discovered my inner prude for a second. I realised that perhaps my rebellious streak was just a pose. I had always pursued anything that was different from the norm. But my parents? Parents are supposed to be proper. That’s what I found myself thinking. I was only twenty-one, though. Excuses. I shrugged my right shoulder and laughed, but there was a slight delay in the laughter. I had to swallow, digest, flush my own unexpected hypocrisy.
I got up late the following day. When I went into the kitchen to make some coffee, my father was already preparing lunch. His radiant white T-shirt, the pale yellow furnishings in the kitchen, it all gave off light, emphasising the day’s luminosity. I stood by the door watching him in a haze. I watched how he deftly chopped a red pepper into the finest of slices. How he then crushed some almonds into small triangles. As I sat at the table, I looked at him, and he looked back at me with a funny grimace that meant: good afternoon. Cod stew with red peppers, garlic, and almonds? I said. He nodded and said: And potatoes and a bay leaf.
While drinking my second coffee, other childhood memories came back. Things I knew I shouldn’t be doing, forbidden things. In these memories, I would silently go down the staircase that led to my parents bedroom, tiptoe towards the door, carefully turn the handle and peep in. I would go down barefoot so as not to make any noise. The tension. The fear. I would carefully open the door, both exhilarated at the prospect of being caught and not being caught. The door ajar, a fragment of the bed, the white bedspread, the strange whispers. While remembering this, my head started irradiating questions in all directions, questions that made me look at my father as a puzzling creature hiding behind a dejected face whose familiarity was a cipher of the unknown. Was my father a pervert? A pervert? Where did I get that filthy word from? I was a perfect adolescent, an adult’s nightmare. Was my tendency to inhabit a permanent limbo related to something I had forgotten? Was my father bewitched by the way my mother walked? Was I a little peeping-tom? A dirty little girl who liked spying on her mum and dad? I myself had doubts about my identity, but only afterwards, not before. What was a pervert? What was a fetishist? Was it a question of degree? Was his life dominated by boots, by shoes, underwear or whatever? I myself had struggled to be different, had done everything possible to be different, but this struggle for authenticity was probably only a pose. Or worse, not a personal decision but something imposed from without. I investigated a bit, found out that the perversions as we know them were named, classified, articulated in the late nineteenth century, that it was then that psychiatrists turned their gaze from madness to perversion. I found out that there were social reasons, reproductive anxieties that demanded a prescribed version of normal sexuality. Perversion was a nineteenth century medical concept, a juridical concept! Had my father been born two centuries before he wouldn’t have been considered a pervert! Perhaps it would cease to be a perversion in the future. My father had simply been born in the wrong century. What was a perversion? Etymologically, the word came from Latin, it meant a different version, nothing pathological about it. So, different from what? Different from the law, from unenjoyable straight genital sex with a view to reproduction. But was sex ever really like that? I found it difficult to believe, sex was sex was sex was sex. How could sex have ever been detached from pleasure?
Did I think these thoughts at the time or was it later? Probably later, maybe a year and half later, when I emptied my father’s loft. I tried to talk to my father the morning that he drove me to the airport, tell him about the film, about remembering the definite way my mother walked, about the boots. I couldn’t ask him whether he was a fetishist. I know you’re supposed to idealise your dead parents, but there was something definitely abrasive about my mother which she sometimes combined with her flare for the spectacular: she once pulled out a tablecloth and in an unforgettable crash all the crockery atop smashed against the floor into a myriad shards. As I was about to go through Departures, I asked my father whether he remembered that. He was startled, he said that my mother was a wonderful woman, she always kept me on my tiptoes, he said. On your tiptoes? I repeated. He didn’t say anything. I felt a fly in my ear. I’ve forgotten my sunglasses, I said. That’s the last thing I said. Then spent the whole trip back to London taking pictures of the clouds, trying to avoid the silver wing.
Philosophical Toys, chapters 1-3,
'The sex-appeal of the inorganic', 'Mona Lisa’s demonic laughter' & 'My mother’s resurrection'