by Lauren Elkin
Why do we persist in making this mistake? Why do we want the city to be something we have to struggle with, or against?
We want to make choices and have some agency in getting lost and getting found. We want to challenge the city, and decipher it, and flourish within its parameters.
And if we should have to confront the Minotaur, we want to be able to get back out again.
* * *
Calle worries that she’s wasting time, and becomes impatient. ‘I must stop pondering possible outcomes, wondering where this story is leading me. I will follow it to the end.’8
* * *
I feel guilty chasing imaginary synagogues in Venice. I try to budget my time strictly: attend Italian class in the morning, walk around Venice in the afternoon, do my homework in the evening and read Virginia Woolf at night. In a tight schedule, there’s no room for surprises, and there’s no time to get lost.9
But Venice is not a city you approach with an itinerary: you are certain to get lost, and to be late almost before you’ve set out. Even those blessed with a superior sense of direction are not spared; as you walk through the city the streets rearrange themselves dexterously, like a dealer shuffling cards. If you see a shop or restaurant you’d like to try, do it then and there because the chances of finding it again are slim. There are some places in Venice that, like Brigadoon, emerge from the mist only once in a hundred years. Unless you’re having one of those days where you can’t get off the same trajectory, back and forth along the same bridges, until you’re sick to death of seeing that shop and you can’t remember why you ever wanted to stop there and all you want is to see a different shop. That happens too.
Some years ago they posted yellow signs here and there pointing to the Piazza San Marco, to Rialto, to the Accademia Bridge, to the train station. Some mischievous Venetians have ‘helped’ in their own way, tagging unmarked corners and archways ‘Per Rialto!’, but obey them at your own risk: you’re more likely to wind up at the other end of town.
Those yellow signs turn what is actually a maze into a labyrinth. To and from, to and from, Rialto, San Marco, Accademia. Time slows down as we weave the same path, over the same bridges, again and again. This path is so well trodden, we think. I want to get off of it. We want to disobey.
* * *
One day, en route to an appointment to interview someone for the novel up in Cannaregio, the site of the old Jewish ghetto, I lose my way. With time slipping away and the hot sun beating down, I turn from calle to calle, can’t recall if I’ve seen that Internet café or that fruit seller five minutes or five days before. I refuse to retrace my steps, believing with the naivety of someone from a grid city like New York or a wheel city like Paris that if I just keep going I’ll right the wrong turn and make it to my destination eventually. Maybe it is to avoid the boredom of coming back the way I’d come. Or a prideful inability to admit topographical defeat.
Then I turn into a long, narrow street that I have a good feeling about. Yes, I tell myself, this is the way, it must surely run north-northwest and then I should come out on that street near that bridge and then I’ll be nearly there … I follow along for a few solid minutes, until the road abruptly ends in water. No way forward without a boat or a wetsuit.
It feels like it Means Something: like for every bit of progress I make in one area of my life, I have to waste time retracing my steps in another, to catch up and reorient myself, and forge forward again. Nothing goes in a straight line. There is much doubling back.
Ignore the signs. Put down the map. You’re going to hit dead ends. But don’t worry: you won’t end up in the water.
You don’t want to be too dutiful, in Venice.
* * *
Once Calle has found her man, his itinerary becomes hers; his Venice becomes her Venice. She takes note of all the streets they walk down (for he is with his wife, who wears a flowered shawl on her head), the shop windows they stop and look in, the photographs he takes. Calle imitates him, taking pictures where he does, stopping where he stops, and as she traces his path in her notebook she inscribes herself all over the city, and over his trajectory; what he thinks are choices, what are indeed choices, have her secret imprint on them: ‘calle de Camai, calle del Chiovere, campo San Rocco, calle Larga’.10 When she loses track of the couple, she goes to the old Jewish cemetery on the Lido. One of the things she knows about him is that he loves cemeteries. It is where he should have gone, she writes. ‘I have high expectations of him.’11
The labyrinth of the city is built to foster desire. Everything we want, disappearing around the next corner, always a few steps ahead. Although at the beginning Calle’s curiosity is born of coincidence, Henri B. becomes an obsession. She has to remind herself that she has no particular feelings for him, that what she’s feeling doesn’t come from inside her, but from the game. And yet she has all the signs of the lover spurned or ignored, stalking the object of her love, from passing ‘furtively’ by his hotel to waiting for him outside an antiques shop. There is something almost daughterly about the project, and incestuous, as she begins to think perhaps she is in love with him. This must be the reason she follows him, no? What other reason could there be? ‘Only love,’ she writes, ‘seems admissible.’12
* * *
When I was little, I nearly drowned in my friend’s pool. It was the above-ground kind, a not-very-big raised ring of chlorinated water resting on the soggy grass of her backyard. It was filled with toys and floats and a couple of rafts, and I was tadpoling around picking up plastic rings weighted with sand from the bottom of the pool when I tried to get to the surface, but was blocked by a flotilla of rafts with my friends sitting on them. My breath was running out and I couldn’t find a way above water that wasn’t blocked by plastic weighted with flesh. I did, just in time, but I’ve never forgotten the panic.
About a year after I moved to Paris, I remembered that day when I couldn’t get out from under my friend’s raft. The guy I loved had left me to go to law school in the south of France, and in the crush of it I turned to a therapist. I could barely get out of bed most days, the outside world had taken on a swampy aspect that made daily activities feel heavy, like every step I took I met with resistance. All I could talk about, in our sessions, was this guy, but I wasn’t making any progress getting over him. One afternoon I reported the dream I’d had the night before. I was in a shipwreck, and was out on the high seas, and desperately clinging to some kind of flotation device.
That’s the guy, she said. Or, well, whatever he represents to you. That’s why you can’t let go of him – he’s your raft. You’re just hanging on for dear life.
I was hanging on, I think; but the raft was also killing me.
* * *
So I’m trying to cling to something besides a person, who can leave. I’m in this floating city, walking the streets of Dorsoduro, trying to find what that thing is that holds me together, and above water. There’s something intensely religious about Venice, but I have tried religion and found it to be an impasse. As the child of a lapsed Catholic and a lapsed Jew, neither ever fit quite right, because there was always that other bit that didn’t belong. I give Catherine the same background and the same longing to belong; I give her the surname Parrish, and cast her into Venice, a city whose neighbourhoods are organised by parrocchia; a simple translation that perhaps neutralised religion from being a concept of inclusion or exclusion to one of assimilating to a place. But I think, on some level, that’s not true. We want to be accepted by the people, too.
I go to Santa Maria della Salute, following the advice of Philippe Sollers, who says he lights a candle in a church every time he arrives in a new place ‘to guide the hand that writes’. I need guidance for so many things, but if I can just have a little help with the writing, I think, I won’t worry so much about the rest of it.
I make it as far as the nave when a clean-shaven young man approaches me and shakes his head disapprovingly. ‘Troppo corto,’ he says, gesturing at my skirt. I
had worn a cardigan over my tank top, but hadn’t given a second thought to the skirt. A man walks past us wearing a tank top and shorts but nothing is said to him. Just as I give in to the beauty of Catholicism it raps me across the knuckles, like the nuns did to my mother when she was a child. ‘Can I just light a candle and then I’ll go?’ I ask. He frowns, but allows it. Sin may light a candle, so long as it drops a euro in the coffer.
On Shabbat, I visit an actual synagogue for Saturday-morning services. I have picked the Spanish Synagogue, since some of my characters’ ancestors were Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, stopping in Venice before leaving for Croatia when the Venetian Ghetto was created in 1516. I want to write about the Jews of Venice who refused to be contained in the ghetto, who pretended to be Christian to keep their freedom, but practised Judaism in private in their homes. I wake up early and set out from Dorsoduro on what I hope is the right track, but I get lost, and am late to shul.
The entrance is guarded by two armed men. One speaks English with me. He asks to look in my bag, and when he finds my camera and cell phone, he refuses me entry. ‘This is an Orthodox synagogue, signorina.’ The thing about Shabbat, you see, is that you’re not meant to light a flame or do any work. Using electronic equipment is considered lighting a flame, so even the presence of potential flame-lighters is verboten. I try reasoning with him (‘But if they’re not on then it’s not breaking any rules!’), then I try tears (‘But I’ve come so far from Dorsoduro, and got lost…’) and then I try God: ‘But it’s Shabbat! I have to observe the Sabbath!’
He isn’t fooled, but he offers me a deal. ‘Tell you what. If you can find a place to leave these things, I’ll let you in. Otherwise, you can come back tonight for Havdalah. But I’m telling you,’ he says (condescendingly I thought), ‘most shopkeepers around here are closed for Shabbat.’ There’s no way I’m going to traipse all the way home and back, so I meet his challenge. Around the corner, towards the train station, I noticed an open antiques store, and head back there. I’m in luck: the genteel middle-aged owner speaks enough French to understand why I am holding out my digital camera and cell phone to him.
I return to the synagogue and triumphantly open my bag to the man, when I spot my iPod peeping out from underneath my wallet. Luckily, he doesn’t, or he pretends not to, and he lets me in.
* * *
The word ‘ghetto’ originates with the Jews in Venice; the Venetian Ghetto was built on the old iron foundry in Cannaregio, which was called the ghèto.
Still, here’s me trying to get into the ghetto of religious identification. Why am I so anxious to be bound to someone else’s rules?
* * *
Sophie Calle is crouching in an alleyway, waiting for the man she’s following to come out of the antiques shop he and his wife entered hours ago. It’s decidedly stalker-like behaviour and she’s feeling pretty foolish. It’s freezing cold. He is testing her, she thinks, staying inside for an ‘absurd’ amount of time just to show her ‘You can wait for me, I won’t come.’13
What is she doing? What kind of flâneuse-ing is this? If a flâneuse is a liberated woman, determined to go where she isn’t supposed to, what would it mean for her to follow someone around? I think of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840), about an anonymous man, just another face in the crowd, but a particular kind of man, watching the world go by: the classic flâneur. Poe’s man has his interest piqued by a strange type, whom he follows all throughout the city, only to lose sight of him. You could argue the flâneur is the man doing the following or the one being followed, the one making the choices in the city or the one making the choice to relinquish choices in pursuit of something he can’t put a name to, only a face.
Calle doesn’t take shortcuts; Calle doesn’t follow the yellow signs, unless the man she’s following does. But her progress through the city is anything but passive. She thought of it as play, not art. So she didn’t take enough pictures. She had to go back and fill in the missing ones. The man we presume is Henri B. in those photographs, the ones we see in the book she published, isn’t him. From follower she has become tracker, artist, photographer. She would call the project Suite Vénitienne, with all that word, suite, implies. From the Latin secutus, the past participle of the verb sequoir, which becomes suivre, in French, and to follow in English. La suite is what’s next, what follows, a sequel. It is a series of events, or a series of movements. Classical music comes in suites. Hotel rooms, if you’re lucky, come in suites.14
Above the antiques shop Calle notices a sign on which it is written ‘Show me your home, and I’ll show you who you are’.15 It’s got to be a reference to André Breton: ‘Tell me who you follow and I’ll tell you who you are,’ Breton writes in the opening of his novel Nadja (1928), as he proceeds to stalk, seduce and abandon a mentally unstable young artist he names Nadja for her exotic Russian beauty. Breton also turns following into a subversive act, in which love is amplified by flight, and contoured by the surrounding city. Literature is full of men who stalk and women who are stalked. It takes an artist like Sophie Calle to turn the tables.16
She’s not the first or the only artist to follow people in the streets. Vito Acconci made a similar piece in New York City in 1969, following people around the city, sometimes for hours, until they entered a private place. He carried a camera down the street and every time he blinked, he took a photograph. It was a way, he said in his notes, of getting out of the house, of getting around, of being taken out of himself into something larger. These projects make us aware of the publicness of being in public, of the vulnerability of it, of the charged atmosphere, as we avoid confrontation and all it might involve: invasiveness, danger, erotic encounters.
It’s different, though, a man following or a woman. There are all sorts of other implications. A woman following a man is subservient. Isn’t she? But a man following a woman is passionate pursuit. Throughout Suite Vénitienne Calle is herself followed by men; some speak to her, some don’t; some are threatening, some aren’t. Mostly she likes the attention. (We are so complicit, with our vanity, our need to be noticed, seen. ‘Today, for the first time in my life,’ Calle writes, ‘someone called me a good-looking blonde.’)17 And, as Calle herself has pointed out, Acconci wasn’t working in the realm of affect, of the sentiments. Where Acconci’s was about performance and being in public, Calle’s is much more about privacy and interiority. She records not only where Henri B. goes and what he does there, but her personal responses to the act of following him.
When they finally leave the antiques shop, and walk to a vaporetto stop, she stays close by, looking in shop windows, boarding their boat just as it’s about to leave. She stands outside as they sit in the cabin, feeling encircled by the same water, the same Venice, he is.
His Venice is her Venice.
Put me somewhere.
Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.
The creed of the convert.
* * *
Following is devalued in our culture; there’s something suspect about being a follower – it denotes weakness, or even perversion. We’re encouraged to be leaders. To take the incentive, to forge our own paths. But there is something subversive about submission. Calle’s work reflects this: it opens up the opportunity for chance within a set of controls. And she does have control. She’s relying on another person, but she’s still making the calls. He’s just sparing her the feeling of being ‘lost’ in the labyrinth: as long as she’s got her eye on him, she’s exactly where she needs to be.
This is not the case ten years later, when she goes travelling with a man, ostensibly on equal terms. Her 1992 film, made with her ex-husband Greg Shepherd, No Sex Last Night, may or may not recount the unravelling of their relationship. It is unclear how much of the film is staged and how much is spontaneous. The premise is that they have agreed to drive cross-country together and make a film of it. But when she arrives in New York he
hasn’t done anything to prepare – the car hasn’t been serviced, he’s lost his driver’s licence, hasn’t rented or bought a camera, he forgot to pick her up at the airport. ‘I knew he didn’t want to leave any more,’ Calle says in voice-over, ‘but to protect my trip, I organised everything. Even if it’s going to be a disaster, we’ll go.’
They film only when they are in the car; when they get out of the car we just see still photographs of the hotels, the diners, each other. She speaks English to him and French in voice-over, in a kind of proto-reality-show confessional narrative, except the voice-overs are often layered over a shot of the two of them together, giving us access to what each of them is thinking and what they don’t say to each other. ‘Why am I here?’ he asks himself. ‘I’m getting tired of her French in that camera. Just say what you’re thinking, just say what you want to say.’ Her French a place he can’t travel. Her mind as well. Every night they stay in a hotel, and every morning Calle takes a picture of their room, and announces, in voice-over, ‘No sex last night.’
Greg was drawn to Sophie, he relates in voice-over, after seeing a show of hers in Boston. Inspired by her off-beat approach to art and human relationships, he resolved that one day he would find her and follow her. But before he could seek her out, she walked up to him one day on the street in New York: ‘She had found me first.’ But now her games make him feel alienated and mistrustful. He accuses her of constantly ‘turning up things’ to find evidence against him, of ‘invasion of privacy … Which you and I know you specialise in.’ They are two people thrown together in the pressure cooker of a shitty car driving cross-country. The car keeps breaking down, costing more and more time and money. Their tenuous bond frays. They both know Greg is the problem – he is immature and non-committal, the classic neurotic tortured and torturing creative male – but Sophie contributes to his insecurity by being ‘ironic’ about everything; he finds her ‘judgemental’ and shrinks in anticipation whenever she says anything. They both can’t wait to get where they’re going.