Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca

  * * *

  Saddened by this brief distraction, he returns to his reading. In the shelter of the colored map of Latin America he’s hung on the wall beside his bunk, he rereads, in a bilingual translation, his father’s poet, Rubén Darío, until he tires of so much grandiloquence. He tosses the book aside, and from that day on he spends the mornings reading exclusively about photography. As he returns to his passion for reading, his practicality also comes back. Now he is seen in the luxurious salons hoisting his camera, his attentive eye always looking for just the right moment. Thus Toledano believes his dilemma resolved: photographing leisure is still a photographic act. To depict life as it’s lived is another way of living it. He hopes that this way he can escape distraction without denying himself the minimal pleasures that are slowly starting to tempt him. Perhaps unfortunately for him, the camera only serves to accentuate his allure. In his case, he quickly understands, being a photographer is a most potent aphrodisiac. Before the jealous eyes of the two aristocratic Italians, Toledano watches other girls approach him, curious about the camera’s workings. To them, weighed down by their parents’ conservative and aristocratic tradition, this ungainly but athletic boy, the camera over his shoulder and a devilish smile on his face, soon becomes a symbol of all things modern. And the modern, in those years leading up to the sixties, is synonymous with the sensual. Without expecting it, without seeking it out, the young man finds he is contemporary, sexual, attractive. Women fight over him, over a lens that is suddenly capable of touch, impulse, caress. Even more importantly, Toledano catches on, for better or worse, to a fact that will stay with him throughout a trip that’s only getting started: just like the very first Toledano, everywhere he goes, people seem to accept him as though he belongs. Wherever he is, his presence seems not just acceptable but necessary. Far from making him invisible, this chameleonic effect grants him a certain omnipresence. That’s the only way to account for the string of girls he shares his nights with during that voyage of only three weeks.

  And that’s how we could summarize the trip that ends by dropping him off in fearsome New York: Yoav Toledano’s second life began on an enormous cruise ship the moment he realized that fiction truly begins with the one who holds the camera. Years later, burdened by the consequences of this terrible intuition, he will seek total invisibility in a mining town—the dark underside of this story of lights.

  * * *

  There’s one girl, however, with whom he falls in love. Her name is Lucía Ferrer, she is Catalan, and she comes from an affluent family of bankers. Among all the women who try to get close to him during those three weeks of nautical travel, she, haughty and fierce, will be the one to make him feel something different. Lucía Ferrer is the bad girl, the faded aristocrat, the rebellious alcoholic, the ironist. And it’s precisely that aura of punk avant la lettre that attracts Yoav. He’s captivated by her way of dismissing everything with short phrases that pound like fists, by the graceful way she turns her back on that whole world of champagne and caviar. She is, as well, the only one who refuses to utter a single word in English. All the other girls have given in to the traps of understanding, they’ve searched through memories of school days until they found the English words by which to communicate with this young Israeli who can barely stammer out a few syllables of rough Spanish. She, however, refuses. Though she speaks English to perfection, she refuses to pronounce a word of it during that final week they spend together. In a gesture of combined hubris and defiance, she forces Toledano to move closer to a language he still doesn’t understand exactly but in which he’s starting to feel more agile. In a curt but perfect Spanish well suited to her personality, the girl tells lies that Yoav, still innocent, believes are the feats of a precocious adventurer. She tells him political stories, personal stories, school stories. Multiple stories that depict her most rebellious sides, stories that liken her to a contemporary Marie Antoinette. Suffice it to say, Lucía Ferrer is a modern diva. Anachronistically aristocratic, cavalierly modern, she’s the living body of a contradiction. It’s no wonder, then, that young Toledano listens to her with the attention of one unraveling a paradox. And then, among the many names that appear in those transversal stories, Yoav thinks he recognizes one: Josep Lluís Facerías. It takes him a bit to remember where he’s heard that name, but when he finally does, it dawns on him clearly, precise as the image that accompanies it: he remembers the very day of his departure, in a Toledo eatery, hearing some old men shout the name of that man who, Lucía says, has been her mentor. And his girl goes on to claim she has participated in anarchist coups, leftist conspiracies, in urban guerrilla forces. Indecisive, unable to figure out whether this strange aristocrat is pulling his leg or not, Toledano opts to move the question into the only possible tribunal: bed. There, after two hours of struggle and strain, the evidence is clear: only an anarchist, he thinks, could move like that, kiss that way, bite like her. Only a clandestine guerrilla would dare kiss him like that, crying out with such passion. Sore and exhausted, Toledano accepts the incontrovertible evidence of her singular sexual fury, only to find that, once the act is over, Lucía Ferrer bursts out laughing. She is laughing at him, though not, as Toledano thinks, at his abilities as a lover. She laughs, rather, at the ingenuity that lets him believe she could be part of the anarchist guerrilla groups of Josep Lluís Facerías and Quico Sabaté. Only an unfledged child, she says, would believe she would waste time on political games. Sitting at the table and sunk in shame, Yoav watches her laugh, naked and happy, until suddenly the ideal revenge dawns on him. He gets his camera, raises it, and without a care for her nudity, he takes her picture. The expected accusatory cry never comes. To the contrary, Lucía Ferrer laughs harder, breezily ironic, without losing an ounce of grace. In other words, no sooner does she feel the camera’s eye upon her than the girl decides to pose. Without realizing it, Yoav Toledano has taken a first step toward the fashion photography that soon will earn him his living. He has crossed a border that will mark an era. Years later, a British journalist will ask him at what point he decided on fashion photography as his genre. His reply will be brief and enigmatic: “The day I discovered that the camera could make an anarchist smile.” The nudes of Lucía Ferrer in the fullness of youth are the first sign of a curiosity that suddenly shifts away from the natural world and comes to rest on that convulsive and instinctive animal that is the human being. From that moment on, the agreement is mutual. They are only seen together, laughing, always with the camera close by. He has imagined his voyage as a long crossing to the end of the world, but only a month and a half later he seems to have found an ending in the laughter of a vivacious young woman. Lucía Ferrer, then, marks the complicated beginning, learning as laughter and detour, the brief intuition of a different horizon, full of biting and champagne. Lucía Ferrer is the harbinger of a truth that will become visible only years later, under the heat of a long tropical summer: Yoav Toledano’s political commitment began as the joke of a spoiled girl posing as an anarchist.

  * * *

  Every voyage, however, ends with a port. And this one is no exception: on May 27, 1957, the Almanzora sees the silhouette of the city of New York rise up in the distance. It’s time to go ashore.

  * * *

  What does he know about New York? Nothing, or very little. The image movies have given him of a greedy and gluttonous city, the winding image of a city where reason is pushed to its limits. He’d seen All About Eve at the Armón theater in Haifa. New York, then, is tied to a story of betrayal, the decadent image of the always beautiful Bette Davis, the triumph of the bad girl. What he knows of New York, or thinks he knows, is the strident image of a skyscraper in mid-construction, the lists of Broadway shows, news about the stock market, the New York Yankees’ uniforms. Of the city he knows this: its iconic face, its kitsch facade, its most hackneyed side. He’s heard of Babe Ruth, of Mickey Mantle, the slums of the Bowery, the lights of Madison Avenue, and the famous hot dogs. As soon as he moves farther into the city, he
understands that none of that will help him. The city is something else: a constant background noise that forces the masses to move, a great dumping ground of sound with no possible escape, a great upswelling without sky. Alone and adrift, he lets himself be carried along on that vital impulse that pushes and displaces, until he understands that this city is unlike any other. He’s left behind the amiable strolls of his native Haifa, the pleasant bike rides through Tel Aviv. New York is something else: an anxious body that shakes and contorts and never asks permission. On edge, with no shelter, and faced with the portents of nightfall, he realizes he’ll have to seek help. He remembers having stashed in his backpack the number, name, and address of the gallery that belongs to his parents’ friend, the one who’d hired him to photograph some paintings months before. He thinks about calling, but he’s ashamed. He can’t give in to cowardice. He has to taste New York, he tells himself, at least for one night, with the brave and sudden patience of a person trying an unknown liquor. Lucía Ferrer’s anarchic smile is already far behind.

  * * *

  That day he doesn’t go far from the port. He’ll have plenty of time, he knows, to explore the north. He’ll have time to attend the great theaters of Broadway and visit the glorious and decadent New York of Bette Davis. Today, though, he is interested in another kind of decadence, the kind that’s found in the dark alleyways of the Bowery, that zone of prostitution and parties he’s seen depicted in the social photographs of Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee. Nadar, he tells himself, depicted the Parisian catacombs. He will depict the New York underground. He’s seduced by the idea of photography as an art of the flip side, an art of opposites and negatives. He is seduced, from that first day, by the thought that photographing the bums of the Bowery is another way of depicting the paradoxical megalomania of the metropolis. That day, though, he doesn’t take pictures. He merely walks the streets of Lower Manhattan: from the Greenwich Village of Allen Ginsberg, a poet he has barely read in English, passing through a deserted SoHo, until he reaches the infamous Bowery he’s heard so much about. In each place he sits, drinks a beer, and goes on, until the night finds him seated in a small tavern on the Lower East Side, with no hotel or place to stay. When he hears the echo of some congas across from the tavern, he understands that, without realizing, he’s arrived right where he wanted to be. The murmur of that Spanish he still doesn’t know how to distinguish as Caribbean lifts his spirits. It’s not long before he joins in song with the group of Puerto Ricans who adorn the sidewalk. Three hours later, with the last sip of rum, he realizes it’s time to look for a roof, and he asks one of his new Latino friends if they know of a place where he can sleep. Fifteen minutes later, a woman opens the door of what will be his first lodging in the new world: a small room without a bathroom that he will share for three months with three Puerto Ricans newly arrived at what they, with their usual impudence, refer to as “Loisaida.”

  * * *

  Wherever he goes, Toledano fits in. Chameleonic, cheerful, easy, Toledano lands on his feet anywhere, among Puerto Ricans, among Italians, Irish, Jews. The next day, he visits his parents’ friend’s small art gallery, and a week later he meets a Romanian Jew who will give him his first job, at a small Brooklyn newspaper. Every morning from then on, he will write small, lurid stories to accompany news images. Every morning, he’ll concentrate all the English he knows in order to synthesize, in ten words, the meaning of an image. Unworried about sounding pretentious, he’ll describe his work with its elegant French name: “I write faits divers,” he’ll tell anyone who asks. The afternoons, on the other hand, will be spent wandering, south or north, always carrying his camera, convinced that at any moment the perfect photographic framing could arise, the decisive photo that will make all others pale in comparison. Nights he will spend in groups. With the Puerto Rican friends he’s made at his lodgings, or in the various bars where they take him once evening falls. Chameleonic, cheerful, easy, Toledano gets to know the big city at the same runaway speed with which he consumes alcohol and women, with the happy lightness of a man who knows how to capture an entire story in three phrases. He has learned that in Bette Davis’s New York, the only important thing is to adapt.

  * * *

  They are days of readings and obsessions. In the afternoons, when he goes out to walk, he always brings a book, and he devours one after another: from the books of the beat generation so prevalent in those days, Kerouac’s famous On the Road and Ginsberg’s Howl, to modern American classics, Manhattan Transfer by Dos Passos, the poetry of Hart Crane, the great Southern tragedies of William Faulkner. He likes the beatniks’ experimental aspect, their eagerness to see it all, the hallucinatory trips to a Mexico that he still conceives of in epic terms. He swears to himself that, very soon, he will travel south. In Faulkner, he likes the strength of the writing, the bravery of setting everything else aside to delve into the ruins of the South. One subject, though, continues to fascinate him: the history of photography. Once he finishes the book he’s brought with him from Israel, he wastes no time buying others. Multiple histories of photography that end up nurturing the projects he patiently sketches out in the little red leather notebook that he buys with his first paycheck to replace the travel diary, and that from then on goes with him everywhere. Of all the anecdotes of photography’s history, two continue to pursue him: the idea of photography as an art of negatives coexists in his mind with the image of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon—also known as Nadar—moving deeper into the Parisian catacombs, ready to shoot the Parisian underground from inside. Nights, over drinks, his Puerto Rican friends talk to him of beaches and islands; meanwhile, Yoav Toledano dreams up projects as grandiose as Nadar’s: he imagines an enormous photographic atlas of the New York underground, a catalog where New York’s misery coincides with its greatness. He even imagines himself finding a perspective from which the city would appear identical to itself, reduced to the scale of ambition and bewilderment.

  * * *

  Those are years of unexpected, at times silent, coincidences. Often without knowing it, Toledano coincides, in bars and parties of south-side bohemia, with many artists and writers who would set the standard for the rest of the century. He will drink, unbeknownst to him, two tables away from Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whom he will not recognize even though he began his photography career only months earlier by shooting de Kooning’s paintings. He will sing a bolero by Daniel Santos six elbows away from a very drunk Ken Kesey. He will charm women in the same SoHo bars through which a still-unknown Andy Warhol moves. But he will know little about those people. Always accompanied by his Caribbean friends, he will feel that his heritage lies elsewhere. He’ll imagine, like the beatniks, that his tradition is a line fleeing southward, the epic voyage that he is sure will end in Tierra del Fuego. New York, he tells himself, is just a detour. And though he doesn’t know it, New York is indeed just a stop on an odyssey that will ultimately lead him to a ghost town occupied by dogs and canaries, where he’ll play chess as evening falls. But he can’t know that yet. Yoav Toledano cannot yet know that he will never reach the absolute south, just as he cannot know—as he drinks rum among his island friends—that 1,001 detours from his southward voyage still await him. Ignorant of his destiny, he merely drinks, aware that there are two things in this life that do him good: women and alcohol. He doesn’t understand yet, young as he is, that the two of them conspire to avoid straight lines.

  * * *

  And so, it’s no surprise that a second detour interrupts young Toledano’s southern pilgrimage. On May 16, 1959, while he is packing his suitcases to finally set off for Tierra del Fuego, he is invited to a party in the house of his father’s well-to-do friend. That night, lost amid champagne and canapés, he meets a girl as young as she is beautiful, in whose name he thinks he can already recognize her future triumphs: her name is Virginia McCallister, she is seventeen years old, and, word has it, she is the most sought-after model on the entire East Coast. He has only to see her to know t
hat she is his great detour.