by Paul Theroux
I remained shut in. I was in the ultimate darkroom, my body. It is every desperate soul’s best refuge, and its darkness gave it a startling size, the dimensions of a cathedral, and the iron and stone echoes of an oubliette. So my body seemed a camera obscura conceived on a vast scale—not the hot little chamber I had sometimes dwelled in, but a great thing, with space for the most complete pictures, memory’s cyclorama towering at the back of my mind. But this one had no pinhole, no meniscus lens. It was in utter darkness, a total absence of light, the original darkroom, before the slightest puncture of violation.
Sealed by this virginity I ought to have been wrapped in silence, entombed and mummified by my thwarted sensuality, and remorsefully lonesome. But I wasn’t. I had remained motionless in my chair; I had heard the distant whispers saying shock and breakdown. I knew the words—they went with “nerves,” they made you cry, they embarrassed your family. You were pitiful. You couldn’t cope. You apologized. You said, “I don’t know what’s got into me.” You were drowning: everything had gone black.
I shed many tears before I realized that I had been turned inside out. I was restored. This darkness revealed like light. The victim of a breakdown is speechless. The vocabulary of despair is so limited; indeed, despair is the end of language, merely sobs and babytalk. And here visions begin. The pictorial faculty, the mind’s picture palace, has nothing to do with language, and in an inward way the images came so fast I could barely get a fix on them. I had been deceived by my eye; I was not deceived by my blindness. All my senses but one informed the pictures. There was in my vision a purity and sharpness found only in the symphonies of deaf composers and the eloquent monologues in the minds of dumb statesmen.
Blindness is not simply a loss of sight, a shade drawn on the world. It is a void. It makes you vanish. You are invisible to yourself. Its onset is darkness, within and without, like the start of the long swim from the womb where one’s suffocated soul bawls out of terror. Much worse than the outer darkness is this inner state of gloom which seems deaf and mute and everlasting and lifeless. I couldn’t reason. I had turned into a bat, and if—as I imagined—I killed myself, I would bleed spurts of ink. Blind things were blind inside and out: the clam a muscle of sand and sinew, the worm crammed with dirt.
I was sludge.
“What happened?” Orlando had said that morning. “Why are you looking like that?”
I had no reply. I lay shut and sealed on the floor like an ugly box without an opening. For that was how they found me—in my room, with rain on my face, stiff and sightless. I had just banged down and didn’t care.
Then, with the first phone call from New York, I began to stir, like a bean-shaped fetus in a sac. I kicked timidly to discover I was buoyant. I rummaged in the darkness and gasped. I could make out shapes—shades of black—inviting passages, praises carrying from unexpected quarters. I risked the journey over nearly familiar paths made wonderfully dangerous and exciting by their new feel. A great river ran through me and I followed its fury to a landscape of crystalline voices raised in sweet song. It was a world of the permissible, a kingdom without demons or monsters, better than the one I had known. Children played here, the boy and girl in their nakedness; there were lambs; it was the world before the fall. It was dark, but the darkness did not threaten. I absorbed it and found it kind. I had tunneled serenely beyond fear to be reborn and to recover my innocence. My blindness had taught me to see.
It wasn’t a miracle. It was another game in which, like the game of Hide and Seek that taught me to use a camera, Orlando was the principal player.
Blindman’s Buff started in the simplest way, after I had sat desperately in my darkness for a sorry week or more. Then the phone rang—the Camera Club ecstatic about my Florida pictures, Orlando crying, “You’ve done it, cookie!” From an ounce of warm ash black light was kindled in me, enough of a clue to give me hope. By degrees I tested my space, and what I perceived mattered more to me than anything I had ever seen, because it had none of the evasions of conventional light. It was a lesson in seeing, the teaching that light misleads: light is fickle, unreliable, and lying. I came to know that I was inhabiting in my blindness a camera obscura of palatial proportions. I had not lost the visible world; I contained it.
Orlando and Phoebe’s footfalls, their voices, their touches. How much more telling they were than their vagrant images in the pictures I had taken. Their voices buffeted me, but their footfalls were explanatory, passionate, apologetic; attempting to conceal, they were thorough, and the completeness of this sneaking gave them away. I listened; my senses were wide open; and so, in play, I rehearsed my body for seeing.
I had been fooled before, handicapped by my eyes and made into a vegetable—a great deluded root. But now I gloried in my rebirth, in the roaring of timbers in the house, the warping of joists which caused the woodwork to yelp. My ears were returned to other sounds: the restless grass, the passions of air, the wind’s fingers at the wall, the grieving of pine needles, the sweet paradoxes of time too subtle for photography—the future kissing the past. And all around me the footfalls of Orlando and Phoebe. They had no idea of how receptive I had become, how I had heard an uncomplaining fly dying at the window, or the damp piano twisting a fraction to give his death a dirge—like the plangent chord of a plucked harp; or the folding of gulls’ wings as they settled on the roof to mourn, or—at that same moment - the whisper of snowflakes sifting like crumbs into the yard. Nothing was hidden from me. Sound was movement; sound bruised the air.
The game had begun.
“Going shopping, Maude!” Phoebe said.
Harumph, went the front door.
“I’ll see to the car while she’s gone,” Orlando said.
Pshaw went the back door.
To a sighted person this might have been the end of it. They had said they were going: they were gone. Previously, I would have hurried to my darkroom to potter with my enlarger.
But in this darkroom there was much more. There were tramplings, the speaking feet of two people, not far away.
Seated—not moving—I followed them.
The muffled footfalls reached me as narration and I was able to recreate a picture of the breathless pair rounding the house, squelching down the muddy path, scuffing the windmill’s steps. Their movements exposed not only them, but the house, the path, the garden, the sky, the sea behind them, the watchful windmill I vowed never to enter. They were the necessary figures in a landscape that made it at once complete and visible.
The bolt was shot in the door. Thuds. The scrape of clothes being removed; the sighs of discarded garments being crushed. There came a steady chafing of skin that was at first dim and scarcely audible until, like gold burnished with a velvet pad, it brightened to a spangle of sound, a chime that rang in a glittering echo. And it started murmurs, the discovery of pleasure in pain, the slow enjoying grunts of an ancient dance with a smothered drum.
Then the house trembled from the movement in the windmill, and the heat was more than I could bear. A sob of effort coaxed a cry of relief, and such a flash of light it was impossible for me to believe they had survived it.
A wing-shaped shadow passed over me and left me in a thunderous chill.
“It’s only me,” said Phoebe, a half hour later, pretending she had returned.
That was one instance of the game. There were others. In the house one day, hearing Orlando go upstairs, I gave him time and then followed him to his room. I knocked. He let me in, and there I felt the vibration of a third presence.
“Maude,” he said.
He was in an old jacket. She was naked, lying on his bed, her knees drawn up, her breasts gathered between her arms, her hands over her face.
“Is that you, Ollie?”
“I was just reading.” He reached for a book.
He was standing in a screening position between me and the bed. He let me bump him to show me I could go no further.
“Read to me.” But I was stalling. I had begu
n to doubt that she was there. That was the game: I had to find her—to establish that they were together. After that first clear impression my vision clouded and now I was not sure.
He said, “I’ll be down in a minute.”
His lungs were choked with apprehension. He straightened, took a step and gave her away: her fragrance tumbled past him to me.
“Mind if I sit down?”
“I’m way behind in my reading, cookie.”
He was gallantly protecting her. She was lying on a thick blanket. I could sense its roughness against her skin, and more: I could feel the heat from the places his lips had reddened on her.
“Where’s Phoebe?”
“Out,” he said, too quickly. “I don’t know.”
Curled there, she was the shape of a fallen leaf.
I had won. I did not feel victorious.
Blindman’s Buff: what images! But he should not have been playing—he was supposed to be at Harvard. I knew he was taking advantage of the folks’ absence. He did not know how I could see. I saw them most clearly when they were naked; I could hear them embrace three rooms away; even their glances jarred the air like a jewel-flash on the cut faces of turning gems. And sometimes, sitting alone and listening to the radio, I would be warmed, as if the clouds had parted and the sun splashed my soul: I would know they were in each other’s arms, the posture of rescue, the lover with his lost half.
To the stairs, softly; down the hall to the vibrant room—a winter evening, but only they were in darkness. I had moved through the house in my own daylight. Their darkness deceived them—they thought they were safe.
“Ollie?”
I stroked the silence.
“Phoebe?”
The silence purred like a cat.
I paused in the doorway. If I’d had eyes I would not have seen them. But there they were, hoping I would go away. He lay on top of her, his mouth open on her nipple, his tongue stiffening it. Rescue: I watched from the shore. I was buffeted by their love and I marveled at how perfect they were, sharing blood, bone, and hair.
“Is there anyone here?”
Nose between paws, the silence slumbered. Yet how clearly I could see them—her soft cheek, his ribs, the scratches on his shoulders, their mutual grip beneath the seam where their bodies were joined. They were frail, falling through their darkness. Perhaps I frightened them; perhaps they took pleasure in the game. I envied them too much to pity them.
Had I brought them together? It didn’t matter—they had delivered me from my own darkness. I was no longer tricked by sunsets, the lowings of pine woods, the ocean’s endless march to the shore, the beguiling drum-roll of the picturesque. I saw beyond the sunset to the cold zone of colorless sky, and beneath the trooping ocean to its vastness and old slime; and what astonished me was its wondrous terror, a glissade deepening into infinity. I was ashamed of myself for having believed there could be an end to art.
Once, when I’d had eyes, I thought there was no more to see. Now I was atomized by sensation. Not the pencilings of primitive sight, or the world in two-dimensional silhouette, or the mannered smoothness of the so-called photogram; but a hubbub of color moving like a torrent of quicksilver through me, the inwardness of things, the sap in trees rising toward the chirps in their branches, tides of air mounting the windows, the pulse fluttering in a speck of dust. At the center of everything was turmoil, the gas of chaos giving light.
The natural world was revealed to me and all its mysteries were as plain as day. What was most chastening was that I had thought I had done it all before: the orchard, the beach, the house, the road, Orlando and Phoebe. No—they were newly lit to their inmost fiber. I saw to their core, and what I had taken to be the most placid object—a chair or a plank—was a mass of lighted splinters in a moment of wholeness. I was a particle of this world and matched it exactly. I could see passion in a stone, hunger in a hose pipe, my own immortality in the feeblest moth.
Somewhere within me an angel knelt over a guttering candle and kissed it and gave it a flame with her lips; and in the darkroom of my body I was ravished by visions.
22
Firebug
MEANWHILE, I was a sensation. If there is anything more effective to celebrity than one’s public appearance it is one’s conspicuous absence. I was visible because I was missing. To know that was to know the essence of perception—photography’s deepest secret. And it was part of the paradox my blindness had taught me about Orlando and Phoebe: they had been behind a smokescreen when they were nearest to me, and I hadn’t had a real glimpse of their love—the fire I had set—until I was blind.
I had not shown my face in New York. On that brief stopover from Florida to the Cape, when I stayed in my hotel darkroom to process the plates, I had simply shoved my work through the Camera Club’s letterbox and boarded the train. I wanted more; I got it. And after my shock and subsequent blindness I had refused to speak on the telephone. It was Orlando who had authorized my one-man show at the club. The organizers had made repeated requests for me to be there, but it had opened without me. It had caught and blazed. The reviews were full of enthusiastic flapdoodle, the newspapers asked for my picture to print beside articles about me.
No portraits of me existed. I vowed not to allow myself to be photographed. I kept that vow, and later I rationalized it as: There is not one who can do me but me. The only person who understood this was, interestingly enough, not a photographer at all, but the American sportsman and storyteller, Ernest Hemingway. He said it was a goddamned noble vow and similar to the warrior’s—rather than be killed by his enemy he rushes on his own sword. Ernest blew his brains out because he said the Feds were after him. The biographers certainly were, and I think his suicide was a version of this mad, proud samurai impulse.
No one saw me, no one knew my face. That blank became an essential part of my fame. No one remembered—and I was glad—how I had wanted to set the world on fire. I had been working on that combustion for years, and now that it was nicely alight I did not go near to warm myself. I let my mystery precede me, while I stayed home and rubbed my hands. When the requests for my portrait stopped, I was asked to visit; they would hold a special ceremony for me. Where was I? Orlando relayed my answer: unobtainable.
For at that moment of fame, as my pictures were being admiringly scrutinized and I praised for my sight, I was stone blind and at my lowest point, deaf as a post and mute as well, in the first and blackest phase of my so-called breakdown.
Then I started to play, and when I emerged from this darkness by winning the games of Blindman’s Buff I saw that I was whole. Though I had caught sight of Orlando, I had lost him; and yet I had found the world. And I had, myself, been discovered. Waking, I realized I was in demand. Dealers, editors, auctioneers, jobbing patrons rang at all hours to ask me to work for them. Would I go to Europe, where a war was beginning? Would I walk up and down the earth, whacking away with my camera? They offered me permission, protection: I could do anything I damn well pleased as long as they had a claim on me.
But I didn’t need them. The exhibit itself was proof of that. They had only to look at my pictures to see my contempt for patrons, and how this whole Pig Dinner series constituted an attack on the pimping known as patronage. I hadn’t needed them when I was unknown—how could I possibly need them now that I was on top? The naked truth was that, like all pimps, they wanted to get into my act—not to enhance my work but to justify theirs. They persisted in their requests and tried to engage me.
Nor was this all. There was a bizarre aspect to my fame as well. Although my pictures quite clearly had the liquefaction, the “drowning quotient” that made them “Pratts,” I was now pestered by people who wanted me to do other things—crazy things, pointless, unworthy, demeaning, vulgar, or plain silly.
It made Jack Guggenheim seem like an angel. Every person of achievement gets these proposals: Madame Curie must have been asked a thousand times to open drugstores or lend her name to brands of aspirin, Dr. Schwei
tzer to endorse mosquito repellent, or William Faulkner to write the copy for bourbon ads. I know the whisky people were always after Ernest to pose with a bottle of their juice in his hand. Most people are now too young to remember how Eleanor Roosevelt promoted Blue Bonnet Margarine on television, but the Shakespearean actor who’s reduced to doing a number about the Polaroid instant-print camera—photography’s answer to frozen pizza—is a good example of what I mean. The worst wanted to involve me in the selling mechanism, making me a fund-raiser if not an outright accomplice in extortion: take pictures of cars, women wearing false eyelashes, men in expensive pajamas, people smoking cigarettes. With my first artistic success under my belt, my genius was complimented by a manufacturer of ladies’ underwear, who promised me five thousand dollars to photograph his latest range of bras and girdles.
“Never,” I said.
I was offered the anonymous hackwork of photojournalism, sports and news, travel features, fashions, family portraits—Junior in his sailor-suit, Sis and her hubby, Buddy in his khakis, Mom and Dad beaming. No, thank you. One Hyannisport millionaire demanded I do his daughter’s wedding pictures: he had the cash, I had the camera—what was wrong with me?
They assumed I was for hire. This intense recruitment, with its origins in patronage, is a feature of American cultural life; it is related to the grant, the fellowship, the endowment, and every other boondoggle associated with sugar-daddy creativity. It was the height of insolence, presuming on my imagination. I did not even reply to them. They didn’t know who they were dealing with. Anyway, I was blind!