One afternoon, looking for a map, he enters a small store in the old Arriaza neighborhood. He’s greeted by an enormous man, fat and stinking. The whole place smells of old alcohol and fermented food. The scene is completed by a half-dozen cats that wander around the truly tiny space, whose walls are adorned with dozens of useless artifacts: broken record players, rusted rifles, a decrepit phonograph. Yoav considers leaving, but his politeness makes him stay. Winding his way through the cats, he picks up a map and tries to locate the Samuel Ha-Levi synagogue. The man asks what he is looking for. Yoav, shy and unable to express himself in that still-foreign language, shows him a photograph of the synagogue and merely pronounces the key word: Marrano. The man doesn’t understand. Then he switches languages. It’s the first and last time, in his entire trip through Spain, that someone will speak to him in English. And in perfect English, no less, in spite of the booze on his breath. The fat man tells him that years ago he’d studied architecture in England—Cambridge, specifically—among British aristocrats and buttoned-down ladies, until one day, sick of libraries, he opted instead for cats and alcohol. He talks to Yoav about the London afternoons that tended to encompass all four seasons, about the ever-lukewarm English beers, about the Natural History Museum, about girls he kissed in the rain. Then, between sips of liquor, prisoner of the nostalgia brought on by the English language, he shows Yoav an old folder. And there, among papers dotted with coffee stains, Yoav glimpses what seems to be a map of the entire city. Between grotesque peals of laughter, the fat man swears this map depicts the Toledan underground. It looks, rather, like two maps superimposed, one over the other, doing battle. He said the map had once been part of his doctoral thesis, which had promised to discover, through an archaeological study of the Toledo subsoil, the ruins of ancient cemeteries. According to him, right there beneath the living city, there was a subterranean history that included remains left by Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Muslims, and Arabs.
“Our own private Hades,” he repeats.
Yoav finds the story fascinating, loves to imagine that he’s walking on a secret world, the underground history that, according to this drunk archaeologist, at times emerges into the city’s surface. The fat man tells him there are some corners of the city where intact traces of the cemeteries remain: a half-erased gravestone can be found in Calle de la Plata, another one persists near the Santo Tomé bridge.
* * *
Toledano spends the following days sunk in his diary, sketching out diagrams, drawings, commentaries, aphorisms. In school he was precocious in math, and that skill is evident in his notebooks, which seem to adhere to a precarious order. An ordered chaos, that’s what stands out in the pages he devotes to the most insignificant occurrences: notes about the southern sunset, comments on photographic texture, sketches of cats and even a train ticket. More than a diary, it’s an almanac, a conceptual collage, a little like those magazines from the turn of the century that diffidently featured, side by side, short stories by Poe and the most frivolous fashion ads. In the afternoons, when the heat becomes unbearable, he takes shelter in some small, fanned café and reads, with a joy not free of restlessness, his little book on the history of photography. He returns over and over to the same stories: the camera obscura by Giovanni Battista della Porta, William Hyde Wollaston’s magic lantern, the complicated and treacherous story of Daguerre and Talbot. He likes the way the characters of this story bet everything on ideas that seemed crazy at first. He is fascinated by how, in the name of the purest science, they pursued projects that must have seemed like hallucinations. In that same book, between liters of beer that he’s slowly learned to drink without disgust, he reads of Niépce’s heliographic project. Heliography: he likes the word, distant and light, but he likes even more what it means. “Sun writing”—he repeats the definition in the middle of the tavern and the idea lights up the afternoon.
In the midst of the Enlightenment, two brothers, tired of listening to old Kant go on about the light of reason, say to each other that it would be better to invent an apparatus that could write with the light of the sun itself. Shrouded as it is in romantic frenzy, the project strikes Yoav as intensely poetic—to defy reason, in the full swing of the Enlightenment, by imagining an impossible artifact that could illuminate everything the old philosophers talk about. To add a pinch of luminous darkness to so much conceptual blather. Yoav soon discovers that there is indeed a lot of darkness in early photography. Paging through the book’s illustrations, he finds a blurry photo that looks more like an inky blotch than anything else. Below it is an explanation that declares this image the very first photograph, a reproduction of the landscape just as it looked from the window of Niépce’s studio one morning in 1826. Overcome, he thinks how photography is an art of pause and suspension, an art of static light that nevertheless contains a great deal of darkness. Surrounded as he is by drunk men, he says, “It’s something like that, slow and light like alcohol.”
* * *
Of all the information in his book, one story quickly becomes his favorite: the invention of the photographic negative by the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot. He is so interested in the anecdote that, so as not to forget it, he copies it out word for word like a primary school child. It’s the story of an invention that, like all inventions, is more of a stroke of luck. One afternoon when he’s vacationing near Lake Como, Talbot decides to put a few leaves out in the sun on paper that has been immersed in silver nitrate. After a few hours he finds that the light has traced an inverse image of the outline of the leaves. All that’s needed is a little salt, and those inverse shadows are fixed to the paper. Years later, the Englishman would be able to transfer his technique to the camera obscura. It’s the true birth of modern photography, of mechanical reproduction, the visual universe that sometime later Toledano himself will try to escape. Young Yoav, however, is interested not so much in the invention itself but in its conceptual implications, the metaphorical flight of the anecdote. He likes the idea of photography as an art of inversion, like a mirror in which reality finds its subterranean opposite. The anecdote brings him immediately back to the fat man’s story, the image of that sepulchral city that exists below Toledo’s surface. He pastes Talbot’s first photograph in his notebook beside the anecdote he’s just copied, and then he writes a reflection that he titles, not without irony, “Toledan Sunset.” It’s a small reflection on inversions, shadows, and invisibilities. Here he notes that he has read little in his life, really very little. He spent his school years on equations and soccer games. Now, when he sits down for the first time to write something he considers legitimately literary, the words arise freely, if orphaned. They have no tradition, no base, no territory. Yoav, however, likes that state of absolute contingency, the innocent power of one’s first writing, the tabula rasa that belies an errant reflection on his own lineage. “Toledan Sunset” is a text of conceptual contretemps that hides something more: for the first time, the young photographer is imagining photography as the possibility of escape. More than the visible, he tells himself, photography pursues the invisible. More than light, darkness. More than the ground, the underground. He writes everything like that, couched in somewhat pathetic reflections. He is ignorant of tradition and a long way from satire, and pathos doesn’t strike him as a problem. He reads over what he’s written and his prose convinces him. He feels for the first time the pleasure of a voice of his own, even when it’s precisely that voice he wants to escape. Toledan is, at the end of the day, not just an adjective but also pretty much his own last name; his writing is ultimately a veiled reflection on the secrets of his name. Among the terms he writes down, there is one he finds particularly suggestive, one he will return to many times: negative history. Behind every event, behind every story, Yoav says to himself, there is something more, a kind of photographic negative of meaning, a historical shadow of what has been.
* * *
That night he dreams. He dreams he is back in the archaeologist’s shop, searching thro
ugh papers in a file that grows along with his confusion. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he keeps looking, as if the meaning of the task lay in absurd repetition. In his dream he hears something. An echoing laugh that he quickly recognizes as the fat man’s. Then he notices that at the back of the store there’s a small staircase that leads to a basement. When he goes down, he finds himself in a much larger underground space. It seems to be an art studio. And it is: there, among dozens of identical paintings, the fat man is ambling around and applying the final touches to one of the mountainous landscapes. To one side, an old man completes crossword puzzles while the room starts to fill with cats. Then Yoav wakes up, terrified, swearing it’s time for him to depart.
3
He tells me everything—his story, the trip, that youthful picaresque—with a devilish neutrality, as if he were talking about someone else. I let him talk, while the dogs wander around us like leisurely witnesses. From time to time one of them approaches in search of a caress, but the old man smacks it away. Then he continues the story, seeming to punctuate it with chess movements: he tells an anecdote and then moves a rook, tells another and moves a queen, remembers an afternoon in Montichel and moves a pawn. This, I tell myself, is more than a simple game. I let him talk, let him go on with this long, thin story, while my mind starts to associate images of that remote past with others of this smoke-filled town. I think of his reflections on the Marrano sunsets, I think of the story I’ve just heard about the sepulchral underground of Toledo, I think of his theory on negative history, and I think about how it all leads to this town. I think of his desire to reach the end of the world and I say to myself that perhaps, after decades, Yoav Toledano understood that the true end was not at the world’s southern tip but rather in a small mining town two hours from home. I look back at old Marlowe’s empty house, where the chickens flap incessantly, and I say to myself, every dog will have his day.
* * *
John, the youngest of the remaining nine, the one who was barely four years old when the fires became inevitable, has shown me around with the pained elegance of a man tracing an invisible history. He pointed to a barren lot and said, “That’s where the church was.” He pointed to some trees and said, “That’s where the school was.” We walked on a muddy plot and at the midpoint he murmured, “My uncle’s house was here.”
He shows me things in the mornings, taking advantage of the fact that during the early hours the old man is caught up with his models, the purpose of which John doesn’t know either, though he’s heard theories. “My uncle said that the models depict the town as it would look from the sky,” he told me. But then he added, “That old guy is crazy. I don’t know why you’re interested in him.” And I thought how that’s precisely why I’m interested, because he’s the one who stayed, though neither family nor history tied him to the town. He arrived a year before the fires took control—he says he came to photograph the mines—and two years later he was still there, even after the news spread through the town and the main highway filled up with fleeing cars. He had no wife or family, or at least he made no reference to any. He spent his days with the camera slung over his shoulder, making notes in a little notebook with a red leather cover. It was clear he had been someone more, a city slicker, elegant and sophisticated, but now he seemed to have closed himself off behind a hermetic seal. Still, there was no tragedy about him, no alcoholism. He just took his pictures and then went home. And no one knew what he did there. He locked himself in the house he’d bought with who knows what money, and he wasn’t seen coming back out until the next morning, again hoisting his camera with the conviction that nothing had changed. And that’s how it was, day after day, while around him the town slowly emptied. Until one day he emerged without the camera, and those who saw him thought he would finally leave, that he’d finally realized there wasn’t much for him to do there. They were wrong: he’d never been more resolved to stay. As if he had come here specifically to watch the town burn.
John tells the old man’s story just as he heard it. Then he gets tired and returns to what must be to him the only story, the story of the mining town that woke up one day to learn that its underground is an inferno. Together we walk around the town that now, twenty-five years later, seems more like a scattered village: a house here, another there, but everywhere a feeling of imminent vertigo, an intuition that there was once something more. We cross the emptiness of what used to be—the church, the school, the bookstore, the old mining company headquarters—until beyond all the grassy fields I see an enormous mountain rise up. Here, says my new friend, is where it all started. Here, at the dump, a fire that was meant to burn garbage came into contact with the coal of the underground mines. He makes the sound of an explosion, and his hands imitate the force of an expansive wave. At the edge of the dump I catch sight of some plumes of smoke that sigh slowly, as if responding to an ancestral voice, ancient and slow. John repeats the town’s story, but I get distracted. Two sparrows swoop down above us, while in the distance I can make out the main highway. I imagine that initial spark, like a camera flash.
* * *
In the afternoons, when John heads off to work, I go back to the house without making much noise. I see the old man in his hallucinatory task, deep in the creation of those strange models, and something makes me remember the old reader at the Bowery: the same blind and stubborn obsession, the same empty gaze. Facing the dogs as they sleep away the afternoon heat, with the canaries providing background music, I stretch out on the cot and finally pause to observe the old man’s house. It gradually dawns on me that the space is punctuated, very subtly, with Latin American elements: in one corner, on two old shelves, I see some novels by Latin American authors among the books. The big names: García Márquez, Cortázar, Cabrera Infante, a weathered copy of Rubén Darío’s complete works. Farther down, lost among anthropological treatises, I find a copy in Spanish of Los sertones, by Euclides da Cunha. Then, two names I don’t recognize but whose books bear titles in Spanish: Salvador Elizondo and José Revueltas. And it doesn’t stop there. On the same wall, a sign in primary colors commemorates the first years of the Sandinista struggle. Even more hidden, in a corner that I hadn’t noticed until then, I see a small shrine, the colored candles half burned down, some with images of saints, others of virgins. Beside an old radio, a plastic bust of Simón Bolívar, the Liberator, completes the unexpected scene. Never, I think to myself, could old Simón have imagined he’d end up in plastic. The canaries flutter around the little Bolívar without the slightest respect. I turn back to the saint candles, and my mind flashes onto the long afternoons of darkness and heat that followed the hurricanes of my childhood. Then I think of Giovanna, the way Latin America had slowly begun to arise from her story, too, subtle as the reptiles that so fascinated her. I picture Giovanna sick in the tropics, and my mind turns to the photo of Yoav Toledano that has him in shorts with his leg in a cast, beside that woman whose gaze so reminds me of Giovanna’s, but who still refuses to appear in this story. I think of the world map behind him, and I wonder again what this old Israeli has to do with a plastic Bolívar. After a while the whole thing starts to take on elements of kitsch. Then, to battle the distaste and boredom, I lie down on the cot again and start to read the book I brought with me: a novel by Malcolm Lowry about an alcoholic consul who tries to get back together with his wife. I read sporadically, in fragments, until boredom wins out. Then, thinking of the story I’ve just heard from John, I take out my backpack and go through the papers from Giovanna’s file. Carefully, afraid the old man will catch me, I take out the newspaper clippings. There is the story in pieces, fragmented: from that first clipping dated 1962, which relates the origin of a disaster that doesn’t yet seem fatal, to the last article, from 1997, with interviews of all the people who decided to stay.
4
Crossing the Atlantic turns out to be more pleasant than he’d imagined. A far cry from the epic, torturous crossings of Magellan and Columbus, Earhart and Da
rwin. His is something else, a simple postwar voyage, a mere tourist trip that he, nevertheless, views with Homeric eyes. Yoav Toledano demands disruptions in a time of peace. Years later, wrapped in a messianic whirlwind that again he won’t know how to relate, he will understand the resonance of unresolved desire.
Still, that will come later. On May 6, 1957, on boarding the immense Almanzora, Toledano meets a muffled reality. Not that his trip is to be short or even comfortable. On the contrary: he is separated from New York by three weeks and a third-class bunk where every breath taken seems like a miracle. The true enemy of his heroic epic, however, turns out to be something simpler and unexpected—as soon as he boards, his youth and vigor win the attention of two moneyed girls. The trip hasn’t even started, but Toledano instinctively understands something that many people take lifetimes to comprehend: there’s nothing keeping us in the place we’re born into, especially if genetics have granted us an agile body and a pair of striking eyes. Two Italian cousins, heiresses of a textile empire, take the youth by the hand and introduce him to the first-class bunks and luxurious parlors. He drinks champagne in salons denied to his third-class companions and surprises himself trying exotic foods: lobster, shrimp, octopus, caviar. Long gone is the kosher regimen of his childhood. He discovers, along with the cousins’ nocturnal company, that while all bunks may seem the same in the dark, some lend themselves better to six-handed games. His inhibitions loosened by alcohol, he realizes that being handsome is another way of being rich. It’s not long before he glimpses the unhappy corollary of this pleasing intuition—that wealth can bring the worst deprivation. One day, in the middle of a luxurious dinner, he realizes his betrayal: he’s gone a full week without taking a photograph, a full week without reading from his father’s book of poems, a full week lost amid the tantalizing laughter of two insatiable cousins. Years later, deep in a game of chess, he will remember that mistake with the following words: “That’s how life passes, in those detours that rob you of a decade.” His story, it could be said, is not only the story of his obsession, but also of its detours.
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