* * *
One might say, then, that the project dissolved as spontaneously as it was conceived. It could also be said that, to this day, I don’t know what the project really was. My life was interrupted by an early-morning phone call, and after two years I still wasn’t clear on where the thing was going. I liked to think that one day we’d see the subcomandante in some more fashionable ski mask, something colorful and flashy. And beside him, Giovanna would laugh into the camera as if she were looking at me. I smiled at the thought of how it would irrevocably interrupt the war, just as a simple call at five in the morning had disturbed my life. But my hallucinatory comedies were never acted out. The war went on being a war, in a far-off country and a new century. And, just like that, the project vanished like a dream.
* * *
The last time I saw her she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Or she was, but only half-done, as if she’d tried to remove it quickly but had stopped halfway through, maybe when she heard me knock at the door. She was dressed in black as always, but it was a tired black that now extended to the roots of her hair, which, neglected, seemed determined to return to its true color. I felt that her disguises were fading away, and perhaps very soon I’d have the real Giovanna in front of me. She, however, seemed resolved to remain unchanged. She told me something about her travels, and went to sit down in one of the many chairs. On the table there was a pile of puzzle pieces whose box was propped beside the fish tank. The fish floated above the box as if they belonged to its world. The puzzle depicted one of Monet’s luminous scenes: a garden of little flowers with petals where the purple seemed to flirt with turning white. Breaking the painting into a thousand pieces made it clear: most of them just suggested a touch of purple. That was when she made her move: in a very light voice, she suggested that the project was coming to an end, and said she wouldn’t need my help in the coming months, as she planned to spend some time abroad. She used that word, abroad, and it struck me as a strange expression, an old-fashioned word. Then, smiling, she picked up a greenish piece—a leaf, I thought distractedly—and fit it into a small fragment that was starting to take shape. I imitated her, not thinking it necessary to even reply, understanding that she was not asking a question but only offering information, a sentence she tossed into the air for it to hang just so. That’s how we spent the rest of that night, reconstructing a painting of weightless flowers, wrapped in a tense silence that insinuated a slight dispute. It would have been more appropriate, I thought, for us to play a game of chess that night, or, better yet, one of those board games I’d liked so much as a boy: a game of war, with the world map drawn in colors and little soldiers jumping borders. Something, I repeated to myself, that would have made it clear that what we were playing was a final game. But that wasn’t Giovanna’s style. Hers was a lighter and more subtle approach, like that of the Monet painting we were reassembling, which seemed to be drawn by the delicate hand of a terribly bored god: here a stroke of purple, there a touch of white. One of those terrible exercises in patience that she liked so much. We kept it up until the early morning, when Giovanna fell asleep. I stayed half an hour longer, trying to finish the puzzle, but then I thought the appropriate thing was to leave it just like that, half-finished. I looked at her sleeping like a little girl while I tried to convince myself that endings never happen just like that. Something is always left behind. On my way out I noticed it was already dawn.
16
Five years later, a mess of pages lies on my bed like a jigsaw puzzle. Outside, a man closes a door and starts a car engine. I become aware that seven hours have passed since a different man handed me this package that now lies scattered in pieces. I look at the clock as though seeking confirmation. It’s five in the morning, and again I think of the original call that came right at five. I’m pleased at the thought that my theory remains intact: every beginning is only a copy. Then I start to sort the documents, in an attempt to understand the story Giovanna wants to tell me.
* * *
The first envelope is filled entirely with photographs. There are maybe fifty undated photos that, after a while, I manage to organize into three basic categories. In the first group, perhaps the most noteworthy, I place the fashion photos: women wearing bathing suits from the fifties, voluptuous young women made up à la Marilyn Monroe, à la Jayne Mansfield, à la Grace Kelly. Young women with false, nearly white dyed hair, perfect curls, and accentuated cleavage. Photographs of models who slowly become less imposing and more delicate, less like Marilyn Monroe and more like a tender Audrey Hepburn. Until I reach a series of photographs taken not on set, but in the middle of what seems to be the nocturnal frenzy of the Caribbean, with its palm trees and the baroque Tropicana-style suits. Then, in a second group of photos that seem to have been taken later, natural, full-color landscapes start to emerge: photographs of rocky mountains in the style of Ansel Adams, photos of a lusher, more tropical jungle where, when I look again, the face of one of the models from the previous images appears. A blond girl, very young, who playfully covers her face with a broad green leaf. Her eyes, though, give her away: she is recognizable in her hidden laugh, in her expression as she lightheartedly refuses the camera. Then there are more landscapes: the jungle seen from the air as though taken from a helium balloon, some photos of a swollen river, and, to finish off, a series of birds in flight. The third group of photographs is the most disconcerting. It’s composed of a series of images of what seems to be a mining town: the blackened men, the carts, the underground tunnels. These photographs are black-and-white again, but they do not seek to move the viewer. They seem to be after another effect: a kind of absolute objectivity. Here there are no faces, and the images are merely outlines of laborers in poses of work. Among them, a bit out of place, I find an image of a little blackened canary. A canary in the coal mine, I say to myself, as I remember the story my father told me about a bird that changed world history: one humble bird’s suffocated silence saved Churchill’s grandfather, and thus Churchill. My father laughed and then took the inevitable leap: that canary had saved us all. I separate the image of the canary and start to look over the photos again. I search for some letter from Giovanna explaining all this, but there’s nothing.
I think for a second that it’s all a mistake. Giovanna must have gotten something wrong when she stipulated that I be sent these files after her death. She must have drawn the quincunx and then gotten mixed up as to the recipient. I go back through the photographs until I return to the one showing the blond girl playfully covering her face with a tropical leaf. Something in her eyes reminds me of Giovanna’s habit of turning away when she laughed, a certain pendular movement in which I thought I intuited a game of absences. The similarity, however, soon vanishes. I go over the other photos of the model, those where she appears a little younger and more voluptuous, a little more Marilyn and less Audrey, in what must have been the fifties. I again find a similarity, the same gaze of wide, round eyes playing hide-and-seek. Then I tell myself: here’s the trick, Tancredo, just as we expected it. The puzzle pieces vaguely set out for the obsessive to start tracing. As though refusing my intuition, I try to distract my gaze. I put the photos of the woman aside and focus on those of the mining town. The real discovery, I think, is there, in those images that refuse to fit into the overall pattern. I look at the canary and tell myself that if there’s a story here, it would have to start with the canary’s song in a distant town. Outside, the day starts to show itself.
* * *
The second envelope is made up of five essays. They all focus on photography. The first, dated 1966, is a kind of reconciliation with the artistic nature of fashion photography. The second, dated eight years later in 1974, is an investigation into the relationship between photography and history. So far, so normal. The essays are written in elegant but severe prose, as if the author sincerely believed in the parameters imposed by the academic world to which they’re apparently addressed. It’s in the third article that things change. “The Silhouett
es of Clouds,” published in 1975, has eleven epigraphs and a hallucinatory prose behind which you can sense a certain poetic vocation. Its subject: photography as meteorology, or photography and the future. The fourth article, titled “From a Bird’s-Eye View,” is made up of seven aerial photographs of a mining town around which winds a small epic on distance. The text is dated at the end, location included: “San José, Costa Rica, 1977.” Finally, there’s an article from 1983 about photography and reproduction, about photography and having children. I think about Giovanna, the ten-year-old girl sick in a Caribbean hospital. I think of the parents’ absence and I find myself touched by an unexpected sentimentalism. I stop. I page through the texts and notice that they are all signed with the same name: Yoav Toledano. I repeat the name three times, but nothing happens. Then I stop at a small poem that appears in the last article, set in the form of a kind of cosmic spiral that makes me a little dizzy. I think that the figure isn’t so much like a galaxy as a small tropical hurricane. I think of the black holes Tancredo likes so much, and I remember that Bowery bar where I dug in for two years. I think that some secrets are barely visible, and behind them lies nothing but a great void. I start to read the verses in search of some pattern, but after a while I get bored. Something in me says that perhaps that’s the story: a great epic of boredom that Giovanna wove to fill the empty hours, a kind of vain voyage after an invented white whale that will vanish as soon as I start to chase it. I return to the article called “The Silhouettes of Clouds” and underline some phrases with a red marker: “A photograph, like a cloud, is never a thing in itself, but rather the sign that something will happen.” I think the sentence is wrong: the photograph doesn’t point toward the future, but the past. Still, I like the idea: to take a photo of the future. I look back at the texts and tell myself it’s too much reading. Careful to maintain the initial order, I put the articles back into their envelope.
* * *
The third envelope contains a series of newspaper articles. They report on a growing underground fire in a small mining town. The first one, from 1962, relates the initial event without yet grasping its repercussions: according to official information, as stated in the police reports, the fire was ignited by an error in the process of burning garbage in the municipal dump. Some part of the initial fire was left burning, and as it grew it moved into the labyrinth of abandoned coal mines in the vicinity. That’s as far as the article goes. It mentions that the town is being monitored, and that the authorities will soon be able to put the fire out entirely. The second article, dated seventeen years later, in 1979, traces the outcome of that first event. Apparently, the owner of a local gas station had been trying to measure gasoline levels when he noticed that his measuring needle emerged unexpectedly hot. He decided to check the temperature of the gasoline and was surprised to find it was 172 degrees Fahrenheit. Only then did he realize the fire was all around him. The third article dates from 1981 and relates a frightening event that happened in a nearby town: a twelve-year-old boy was plunged 150 feet deep into a sinkhole that opened suddenly in his front yard. The article tells of his heroic fourteen-year-old cousin, who was able to pull him out of the hole and save his life. The column of smoke exhaled by the sinkhole was analyzed and found to contain lethal amounts of carbon monoxide. The fire was silent, frenzied, as it ran through a town where children still played. I stop reading the article and think that Giovanna would have been around fourteen, too, at the time. I think of the story of Giovanna in the tropical hospital, and something returns me to her strange way of smoking. I think of the photos of the model whose eyes recalled Giovanna’s evasive gaze. The fourth article is from 1987 and tells of a reporter’s trip to the town after it has already begun to empty. What starts to emerge is the reporter’s fascination with those who decide to stay, though the article is mostly dedicated to describing the incentives the government offered citizens to encourage them to abandon the town. Ten years later, in 1997, the same journalist pens an article in which his curiosity is made manifest: he returns to the town to interview the few people who’ve decided to stay on. He manages to talk to almost all of them—only three refuse to participate. The article, however, mentions the names of these three: a married couple, Richard and Roselyn Cena, absent from the town at the time of the interview because of a sick daughter, and a foreign photographer who gives his name as Yoav Toledano, in spite of the fact that everyone else in town knows him as Roberto Rotelli. I recognize the name with tired happiness, like someone spotting a church after driving around lost for hours in search of it. I close the envelope knowing that there is still a long way to go. Outside, two men shout as daylight grows.
* * *
So, at the end of this story there is only a name: Yoav Toledano. I repeat it to myself until it loses all meaning, and only then, when the syllables separate and become anonymous, do I turn on the computer and enter the name in a search engine. There are photographs of a handsome man, sometimes impeccably neat—clean-shaven with his hair slicked back fifties-style—and others where he appears bearded and more playful, photographed alongside figures from the bohemian sixties and seventies. Farther down I find other photographs whose style I recognize immediately: fashion photos like the ones in the first envelope. I stop on a fascinating image in which the photographer appears, bearded and with one leg in a cast, alongside a model who is lying on her back, with the look of a dancer, her back arched. Toledano is wearing swim trunks, and he’s roguishly brandishing a shotgun that seems to have been turned into a fishing pole. Behind him is a map of the world. I recognize the woman’s eyes, the same gaze in which, half an hour before, I thought I found Giovanna. It’s the same model, but now she looks darker and more tropical. I close the image search and look for any information about this character named Yoav Toledano whose importance now grows by leaps and bounds. After a few minutes I find a detail that links the threads discovered so far: “In 1976, the Israeli photographer Yoav Toledano, famous for having captured many of the most notable faces of New York counterculture, vanished without a trace.” Every story, I tell myself, begins far from home.
17
After that last meeting, I went on taking the train to Manhattan as if Giovanna still summoned me. I’d arrive in the city and head southward, happy to be able to walk, notebook in hand, through those same streets I’d spent two years wandering. I walked the way tired birds walk, with a certain happy sorrow, until I reached the Bowery bar. I recognized the woman with the newspapers and the waiters. Then I’d open the little notebook with the red leather cover and start to work on the exhibition. I toiled under the shelter of the lamps of routine. Night after night I went back to that place that I believed was the origin of fiction, the origin of delirium, until one night she didn’t come. I spent hours staring at the empty table where there had always been newspapers, and after two glasses of wine I told myself it was time to leave. I remember that when I left, I felt the night was opening up. I walked without pause or direction, randomly yet searching for something, though not a location or even a surprise. I walked in search of a feeling only to realize I already had it, and that it was enough to keep walking until it was all spent, until I reached the end of the night and realized there was nothing to do but use up my happiness.
Three Questions for Giovanna Luxembourg
(Unpublished Interview, December 2005)
How and when did you decide to work in fashion design?
I was sixteen years old, and I felt an intense desire to escape from myself—my voice, my body, the fixity of those mirrors that seemed to chase me everywhere. That was when I started sneaking out at night. I ran away from the house where I was living then with an old retired couple who’d adopted me. It was then, as well, that I decided to dye my hair black for the first time. But it wasn’t just the hair. Some part of me wanted to become the color black: a void that would escape all mirrors. I dressed in black, I wore black lipstick and nail polish, I looked for a vacuum in the color black. My adopted family g
ot worried, and they decided to send me off to Europe with a distant aunt. To this day I don’t know why I agreed to go, but I did, and a month later I was across the pond. It was while I was there, in one of those little white villages that overlook the Mediterranean and always seem to want to empty of themselves, that I decided to run away. I took my chance when my aunt had gone to the bathroom and I ran, not knowing that the village was so small they’d find me without even looking. I ran like never before, until after a few minutes I saw a small chapel at the end of a narrow street. I went in and hid. My plan was to stay there until night fell, and then disappear into the town. Flee on foot to another village, cross even more daring borders. But I was afraid, and in my fear I screamed. I let out a prodigious, thundering scream, my fear now imbued with fury. I screamed loud, and to my surprise my voice disappeared in the nooks and crannies of that chapel, to the point where I thought I’d lost it. I almost thought I was dreaming when finally I heard the scream come back to me, now converted into something else: it was my voice, but different. It was an echo in which my voice played at camouflaging itself among other voices, past and future. Something told me this was what I’d been looking for: a hiding place within my own voice. And then a forgotten childhood memory came back to me: I recalled a lush jungle, and in it the figure of an insect disguising itself in the branches. I remembered that playful animal, dressing and cross-dressing in the middle of the rain forest, and somehow I understood that the only escape from the fear and fury I felt was there: in the tricks of that little creature and the echo of my voice that was now coming back to me, the same and yet transformed. Hidden within itself. When the sun came up the next morning, I finally came out of hiding and told my aunt I would never run away again under two conditions: I wanted to change my name, and I wanted to study fashion design. A week later I told all my friends that my new name was Giovanna Luxembourg. They all laughed, but I just heard the echo of that fantastical chapel.
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