by Lauren Elkin
I was high on my project, but trepidatious. As a graduate student in English, writing a novel wasn’t exactly kosher. It’s understood, at least in America, that in the course of completing a PhD, a process which may take up to eight years, sometimes longer, you will invariably work on other projects. But inventing a fictional PhD for a fictional character and spending all your time researching it instead of your own isn’t the best way to build your CV.
But as any researcher knows, you have to follow the thread where it leads you.
* * *
I arrive on a Saturday on the 9.40 from Orly, and it’s noon by the time the bus from the airport drops us at Piazzale Roma. I catch a vaporetto sloshing southward and lean out one side, opening my face to the city. A myriad references slide out of the water. The sun sparks off the canal, which curves with more hauteur than I remember; the palazzi are splendidly garish in their decay, like Quentin Crisp in Sally Potter’s Orlando, but with Turkish windows. Stately strings play in my mind. Now I can tell late Gothic from early Renaissance, and recognise the round bas-relief sculptures shaped like dinner plates on the brick walls as paterae; I recall details of buildings from Ruskin’s sketches in The Stones of Venice. My library is transformed into a living city: so much of what I read about has its corollary before me. I think of Mary McCarthy’s wry notes on tourism in Venice Observed. ‘One accepts the fact,’ she writes, ‘that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or de Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin.’ Ever dutiful, I have brought along a little orange Claire Fontaine notebook and labelled it ‘Venice, June 2007’, which I will use to catch the things that weren’t in those books, and put them in my own. Because yes, I believe it is possible, pace Mary McCarthy, to say something different about Venice. No one has seen it as I have; as my heroine has. We do not share a world view with Goethe or with the lady in furs from Iowa.
After getting off at San Stae, I have a few hours’ wait before Laura, the woman I’m staying with, will meet me; she is coming in that afternoon from Turin, where she has been tending to her sick father. I walk around Santa Croce, looking first for a place to have lunch, then for a place to have coffee, then for a place, just a place, to sit and pass the time. Someplace, preferably, where it is not too hot.
I try to enjoy the freedom of having nothing to do and nowhere to be, but I am encumbered by my suitcase. It is on wheels, but it is still heavy, and there are many bridges to cross, the Venetian kind with at least seven stone steps on each side. Instead of lifting the bag up and down the bridges, I resolve the problem in what I am later told is true Venetian style: I drag it up and then I drag it down. This is not a perfect solution. The crowd of tourists is thick, and I try not to trip anyone with my bag, but there are a few people who aren’t looking down, and, well. I finally make my way back to the vaporetto stop at San Stae having caused minimal damage to the city, its inhabitants and its visitors, sit down on the steps of Sant’Eustacio, and wait for four o’clock, the breeze from the Grand Canal drying the sweat on my scalp.
* * *
I’m a tourist but I like to think I’m the good kind. I’m here to observe the city, instead of buying bits and pieces of it. As a ‘good tourist’ I hope the city will open itself up to me, if only a little. I hope to find places to be in, to eat in and drink in, that will feel unique and worthwhile. I hope the food will taste good, and the drinks.
I make mistakes. I try to avoid it, I hunt for something better, but I end up having lunch in a tourist trap under the Accademia Bridge. It’s called a ‘snack bar’. In the desert of Dorsoduro I have collapsed here, condemned to eat the sand. I’m so hungry I don’t even care. The menu outside promises a pizza Margherita for seven euros. It arrives and the crust is so stale it’s impossible to cut without making the entire table shake. The waiters eye me suspiciously. Am I bad for business?
The location does provide a good view on the tourists at rest. Some have as many as three camera bags around their legs or strapped around their waists, like weapons. It’s such a cliché to call tourists an ‘army’, but like most clichés, it’s true. They come in an organised group, wear a uniform (the same shorts and sneakers, or the same baseball cap reading ‘Mt Laurel Soccer in ITALY!!!’), advance at the same pace, and are spurred on by someone shouting orders and toting an umbrella-bayonet.
I have no army. I am a poor scribe, foreign to these parts. I have no buffer and I mean no harm. But I am no different. I have come to take what I can from this place, and I am willing to pay what I must to do so.
Sometimes I get lucky. In a café on the Campo Santa Margherita the waitress is brusque but friendly: ‘’tenzione, ragazzi! Un altro martini bianco?’ Bright blue judo pants, red T-shirt and updo, with a bottle of Windex hooked onto her bumbag. She gives me potato chips with my Spritz.
I’m in the southern part of the city, because I’ve set my novel here. I didn’t want my synagogue to be located in the Jewish ghetto; it had to be somewhere surprising. Somewhere no one would look for it. I liked the sound of Dorsoduro, and the meaning – hard back. The only part of Venice built on anything resembling terra firma. It’s where the university is, so it makes sense for Catherine. I scan the buildings on the square, and think about housing her in one of them.
I am getting drunk.
I have to get to work. I have to pay attention. It is 6.15 p.m. The bells never stop around here, they ring every fifteen minutes for fifteen minutes. People move chairs around, and tables, drain drinks and read newspapers. Kiss on both cheeks, inhale their cigarettes, gesture heights and sizes, give directions, shake their knees under tables and explain things, exclaim ‘ahh!’ when they understand. The style seems to be flowing garments and interesting jewellery. A bearded man’s newspaper is open to a story whose headline begins ‘Quando Tintoretto’ and I can’t make out the rest. From where I am sitting I can see two pizzerias and a ‘biostore’ called Planet Earth. Dogs bark, babies cry, a radio is playing nearby. More bells. The ground is made of paving stones, not cobblestones as I would have thought; they’re each about a foot long and six inches wide. Grey and full of pockmarks, filled with little puddles that seem to have seeped through the stones. It has not recently rained, but it looks like a giant flooded pizzeria. I make a note of it all.
* * *
One night Laura takes me to meet some people for drinks at Bancogiro, a bar and restaurant on the quay near Rialto, and we stand outside in the late-evening light and drink bright orange Spritzes. ‘That’s Toni Negri over there,’ one of her friends says, this being the sort of place where Marxist philosophers come to mingle. The following night I strike out on my own, and find an outdoor pizzeria called Il Refolo. They pull out a table for me; I am the only person dining alone. I read The Wings of the Dove for company. A large party seated to my left is full of people speaking English and Italian, and I smile at them, feeling less lonely by proximity. Then a deeply tanned man wearing glasses with blue plastic frames pulls up in a gondola and steps out into the patio of the restaurant, prompting a round of applause from the table beside me. It is Peter Weller. ‘You only turn sixty once!’ RoboCop says as he takes his seat at the head of the table.
* * *
Another day, Laura and I visit the Biennale. Laura’s friend Ricardo is working in the French pavilion, and he has said he could get us in for free if we get there before two, when his shift ends. Hung-over and overheated, somehow we make it there on time, and are let into the Sophie Calle exhibit, Prenez soin de vous.
A cacophony of video, photography and documents under glass is laid out over something like four rooms. In each one, a different woman talks, sings, whispers, chants, dances, jumps, and clowns fragments of sentences, bits and pieces of what seem to be the same text: ‘I wanted to tell you this in person but couldn’t so here it is.’ ‘I thought it would be enough that your love…’ ‘You told me you didn’t want t
o be “number 4” … but you continued to see B and R.’ They all end with the sign-off Prenez soin de vous – Take care of yourself.
The text turns out to be a break-up email – an email! the bastard – Calle received from her boyfriend, identified only as X. Written in flowery, nay, haughty French (do lovers really still call each other vous?), the letter reads as recriminatory, alienating and cowardly. Its author, I learn later, was the writer Grégoire Bouillier, who had already made Calle a character in his novel The Mystery Guest. Calle, then, seems to have felt free to use him in one of her own works. The women who have responded include a sexologist, who writes her interpretation on a prescription pad, the singer Feist, the actress Arielle Dombasle, a Kabuki doll, an Italian actress chopping onions, a literature student who provides textual analysis, and a parrot who tears the letter to bits with its beak and squawks ‘Take care of yourself!’
Calle often uses her life as a springboard to her art. I first heard of her when I read Paul Auster’s novel Leviathan, which features an artist called Maria who is based on Calle. Maria sets herself certain thematic constraints which require her to organise her days or weeks by colour or letter; some weeks, Auster writes, Maria set herself a ‘chromatic diet’, eating only foods that were a certain colour, while others were alphabet-themed, ‘spent under the spell of b, or c, or w’.1 Delighted, Calle responded by playing out these games in real life, photographing and eating modified versions of Maria’s chromatic diet, adopting her own letter days. The cover of her book Double Game, a collection of her projects, depicts Calle enacting Maria Turner’s b day, dressed as a blonde 1960s pin-up girl, perched on a bed, looking coyly into the camera, surrounded by a menagerie of animals, over the caption ‘B for Beauty and the Bestiary, for Bat, Bantam, Boar, Bull, for Bug, Badger, Bray, Bellow, Bleat, Bark, for Beastly Birdbrain, for BB’.2
These projects were collected in a book called, in French, De l’obéissance: On Obedience. I liked the subtle irony of the title, as if Calle were not only making a game of her fictional double, but lightly ribbing Auster with her subservience. We know it’s an act; Calle is in control of how she wants to appear. And yet the title activates the paradox of Calle’s work, in which she sets up a scenario in which she, or her collaborators, must obey a set of rules in order for the work (and the game) to begin; once the rules are established, Calle no longer has total control over the work that results.
Obedience and disobedience are central motifs in Calle’s life as well as her art. In 1970, Calle dropped out of Nanterre University, where one of her professors was the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who would theorise that contemporary life is a simulacrum of itself. Two years earlier, in Nanterre – located in a working-class suburb west of Paris – the ‘events’ of May 1968 had broken out, in a controversy over co-ed sleeping arrangements in the dormitories. In order to allow Calle to graduate, although she hadn’t completed all of her coursework, Baudrillard allegedly submitted another student’s paper in place of Calle’s. After that, Calle went off travelling for seven years: the Cévennes, in the south of France, then to Crete, then – after showing up at a travel agency with all the money she had, asking where such a sum could get her – she found herself in Mexico, then the US, then finally in Canada, where she worked in a circus. All of these travels, she has said in interviews, were to flee someone or join someone.
Back in Paris, Calle moved in with her father. He liked to hang out at the Closerie des Lilas, with a bunch of young people who, she says, were always perfectly coiffed and laughed too loudly. He tried to get Calle to come with him, but the people there made her feel like the little match girl.3 She had no job, no friends of her own; she didn’t know what to do with herself. She felt lost. This is why she began following people: to have something to do.
* * *
When you’re young, when you have so many choices, how can you decide among them? Each one is a narrowing. You want someone to tell you where to go, what to do. Please take from me this responsibility for my own life, that I didn’t ask for and don’t know what to do with. Put me somewhere. I once followed a man – we’ll call him X, like Calle – all the way to Tokyo, just to avoid choosing not to.
* * *
One day Calle followed a woman down the rue Froidevaux ‘because her hairdo astonished me’. Two men she followed took the rue Claudel, then the rue de l’Odéon, walking in the middle of the street. But even following people around seemed to require something beyond her capabilities. ‘I lack perseverance,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘I start following someone but the pursuit fatigues me or escapes me…’ 2.25 p.m.: she’s back at the Jardin de Luxembourg. ‘The day is bad and I feel a bit glum. I decide to make do with a pigeon.’4 She can’t slip easily into the passive role of follower. One evening at a gallery opening, Calle encounters a man she had been following earlier that day, someone she had lost sight of. The coincidence seems like a sign. When he mentions he is travelling to Venice the next day, she decides to follow him there, too. It’s a more active choice. A more interesting choice anyway, in its total boundary-thrashing weirdness.
It’s her first time in Venice, and it’s the trip and the project that will launch her career, and make possible her return, almost thirty years later, this time as an International Art Superstar. It seems fated that she would be so tied to the city; her surname, after all, is the Venetian word for street.
* * *
The tense slips to the present. Calle arrives on Monday 11 February 1980.5 She has packed a notebook, and her entries provide most of the text of the project. She records what happens like a gonzo journalist, or like a private investigator, every day a set of notes. Henri B., she calls him. He is a photographer, so she decides to photograph him, everywhere he goes in Venice. In her suitcase (which is not on wheels) she has packed a blonde wig, several hats and veils, sunglasses, gloves – everything she’ll need to disguise herself. She has also brought along her Leica camera and a Squintar lens, which is constructed with a set of mirrors so you can photograph people without pointing the camera directly at them. Calle is too shy to photograph people head-on in the street; she only feels comfortable shooting sideways.
Oh, and it happens to be Carnevale, that traditional time of masked debauchery and anonymous encounters, before the self-denial of Lent.
* * *
For centuries, civic power in Venice was maintained through a system of surveillance. People find this fascinating; Donna Leon has made a whole career out of it, writing mystery novels about a present-day Venetian police commissioner. The Council of Ten had their bocche di leone installed so that Venetians could anonymously inform on their fellow citizens (there was not, at that time, an efficient police system). Then, too, these were the accepted conduits by which the average citizen could get in touch with his government. Because of the nature of Venice’s government – a republic and not a monarchy – decisions were taken by up to 250 senators, each of whom had his own entourage. In such a fragmented setting, power became a game of amassing the most information. Secrets were traded. Your barber might be a spy. Or your gondolier. Information about the way the republic was run was carefully guarded, unless a senator slipped up; your apothecary could know more about what was being discussed in the government than you did. Writers thrived: the Venetian version of a journalist was called a novellisti, and they would exchange information with other novellisti in different sectors of the city, spinning the stories that would pass for news.
Calle’s first stop in the city, after her hotel, is the Questura, the main police station. She has been told that they keep the hotel registration forms on file. But the clerk will not tell her where her ‘friend’ is staying; it’s ‘against policy’. He recommends she ask at the train station. ‘Why don’t I have the audacity to bribe him?’ she wonders.6 At the train station they refer her to the Questura. It’s the administrative equivalent of walking in circles.
* * *
The man is hard to track down. She half remembers him mentio
ning a pensione called the San Bernardino, but there is no hotel in Venice by that name. She calls all the hotels with saints’ names, but no one has an Henri B. staying there. At 2 p.m. on Friday 15 February she sits down with a list of all the hotels in Venice, organised by class, and begins calling each of them: Bauer Grunwald, Cipriani, Gritti, Carlton Executive, Europa & Britannia, Gabrielli, Londra, Luna, Metropole, Monaco & Grand Canal, Park Hotel, into Serenissima, Spagna, Stella-Alpina, San Maurizio, and so forth. There are 181 of them, an entire world of hotels inspired by countries and cities and constellations and saints and Venetian families. At 6.45 p.m. she calls the Casa de Stefani and is informed that Henri B. has gone out for the day.
‘I see myself at the labyrinth’s gate,’ she writes in her journal, ‘ready to get lost in this city and this story. Submissive.’7
The labyrinth is one of the city’s power metaphors: we need a word for the way it twists out of our reach just as we think we’ve understood it, for the way it seems to have an agency all its own, the way it thwarts us, confuses us, loses it, the way it takes all our savvy to find ways to defeat it. Theseus goes into the labyrinth to fight the Minotaur, leaving a trail of thread given him by his love, Ariadne, to find his way back to her. But a labyrinth is actually an arrangement of paths that lead you, in time, to their centre. You can’t get lost in them; they are comprised of only one winding corridor. It slows you down, that’s all. A maze, on the other hand, is a structure built to confuse, that gives you the feeling you might never arrive. A maze gives you choices: this way or that? And if this, what of that? Where the Minotaur was kept would have had to have been a maze.