by João Almino
– We look like a perfect couple with a beautiful son, I said.
Mauricio didn’t appreciate the compliment. He was still serious and didn’t want to talk to me. A group of Koreans came over to try to sell us junk, watches, mechanical stuffed animals, alarm clocks, radios, and pens. I spent some of my paltry change on a toy for him: a bright yellow fluffy chick that ran around when you pressed a button.
Aida made me a sudden invitation. She wanted me to go with her to church on Sunday. She proved to be a Catholic with sympathies for the evangelicals and who believed in miracles.
– The closest I’ve come to religion was taking photographs of Iris in the Garden of Salvation, I replied.
Aida showed genuine interest in the Garden and was surprised that I knew the famous prophetess personally.
– She had disappeared for a few years. This only heightened the faith of her followers. She’s very old now, I explained.
The efficiency of the waiters was measured by the speed with which they brought another draft beer as soon as the glass was empty. Mine emptied five or six times, and Mauricio began to play with the cork coasters printed in red with the beer logo that came with every glass.
I prepared my camera, on the lookout for a spontaneous gesture from Aida or Mauricio. I’d like to appear in the photograph but I couldn’t, because at the same time I wanted to be behind the camera, to be the eye catching the flicker of happiness making itself visible in that misshapen environment. I tried to find an angle that would show the trees in the background. The manacá blossoms were beginning to change color from pink to purple, alongside the violet hues stamped on the purple glory trees. The uniform light of the already-set sun lit Aida’s and Mauricio’s faces to perfection. I bent down to snap the picture. Mauricio sat up straight posing. No, better to leave the shot for later. I waited for a moment of distraction and bent down again. That time Aida was turning to the side, calling the waiter, and the light already wasn’t the same, it having gotten dark. A lost photo, an almost-photo, that missed capturing the harmony of the afternoon by a hair and that, by mistake, I kept in my files. It’s # 14, which can be seen above.
[July 20, after midnight]
15. Mauricio at eight years of age
I taught Mauricio a trick: with a fast slap on the edge of the cork coasters, I flipped them and caught them in the air. Mauricio learned the game quickly and was soon doing it better than I could. I asked him about school, teachers, friends, about Brasília . . . I asked him about his block too, what he liked best and what he was going to be when he grew up. I let him pose and collected several happy expressions. One of them can be seen in photograph # 15. Tall for his age, Mauricio raises both arms as if stretching, his right hand holding the left. The dark background of the photo contrasts with the yellow of his T-shirt where the number ten is visible. His gaze is confident and naughty. He’s totally comfortable in front of the camera.
– You’re going to be my friend, right? I asked.
– I already am.
July 21, pre-dawn
I keep this simple phrase more present than ever because Mauricio today is my best friend and even my confidant. Days ago I showed him the pictures of Laura. He praised them and, from everything he said, I concluded that I had been right on target: she’s attractive, although of a beauty not grasped at first sight. I drew a picture of Laura in my head. Blindness has the advantage of composing beauty with more elements than mere physical appearance—whose outlines are traced by touch, which feels the object more closely than sight.
– I don’t know if it’s true, but physically she reminds me of Joana; and in spirit she has something of your mother, I told him.
I immediately regretted giving the impression that I was interested in a twenty-five-year old. He wouldn’t understand if I explained that I like to hear her voice and imagine her figure. Just stopping by, saying good morning, for me that’s a lot. She fills my days with life, and that can’t be dismissed by someone who already smells the stench of death. I mentioned her intelligence and sensitivity. He doesn’t know her yet but seemed to agree with me. I asked him to open a file of very old photographs of Joana, to compare them to the ones of Laura and confirm for me if the two women look alike.
– Not at all. They’re different types of beauty. To start with, one is blonde and the other dark.
– The blonde hair is dyed, I explained.
Laura has been coming here every week but she’d never given me a hug as affectionate as today’s. Maybe she was happy to see me almost recovered. I felt her body, her breasts touching my torso. Could it be that after a certain age you lose the right to feel the physical presence of a beautiful woman? If the Creator exists, he had a sadistic impulse when he inoculated an old man with desire for a young girl.
And me, what do I arouse in Laura? I have to be realistic. Reality is reality: she has the same affection for me that she has for a grandfather. I’m lucky to be blind so I don’t have to see my wrinkled face every day in the mirror. But women are surprising. There are some who don’t dwell on physical details . . . In my grandparents’ generation it wasn’t absurd for a thirty-five-year-old man to marry a girl of thirteen. If we multiply both numbers by two and, keeping things in proportion, maybe it wouldn’t be totally absurd if Laura and I . . . I need to put these thoughts out of my mind. I’ll be satisfied to capture her perfume with my nose and the delicacy of her voice with my ears. Who am I to have the right to love her? But dream of her embraces, why not?
We barely worked. I felt an unexpected pleasure in showing her some photographs of clothes on a bed, photographs of Joana’s absent body, which she had the courtesy not to ask questions about. I didn’t identify Joana. She thought the photographs were “fabulous!” That was the word she used, with an exclamation and everything else. She saw fetishes in them, praised the framing, the angles, and what she considers my style: the geometric, almost abstract placement of the photographed objects. I set aside the best of those photographs for my Book of Emotions.
As promised, Laura brought her guitar. To say that she doesn’t sing well would be a euphemism. She sings off-key. Off-key with the soft voice of someone who has a soul of crystal. Or could it be cotton?
July 22
Today I dreamed a strange dream about Joana in which she said, “Don’t die before I arrive,” but she had already arrived, she was standing in front of me dressed entirely in white. I awoke wanting to add a few pages to my Book of Emotions.
[July 22]
16. How simple matter seeks its form
I would put off the work Eduardo had commissioned for another few days. Let him wait. My priority would be to show my current production. On a wall, I would install three gigantic panels of geometric photos, recalling multicolored Volpis, a forest of pubic hair in several shapes: triangular, rectangular, diamond-shaped, elliptical, Gothic, baroque, with short mustaches or luxuriant hairs. My search for the absolute. I had snapped the camera thousands of times like someone who takes possession of the photographed object. I collected those shapes like someone who files and catalogs experiences; like someone who wants to keep a piece of the world for himself. To simplify things, I would call all those shapes, even the rectangles and ellipses, simply triangles.
I poured myself a shot from the last bottle of whiskey and spread some slides on the table. I began studying the triangles one at a time through the viewer. Some were happy, others sad. Some of them had the luxuriance of a tropical forest, others looked like savannas or deserts. One of them consisted of very pale skin, the part the bikini had protected from the sun, profiled against a suntanned body. From the center of the triangle curly hairs also descended in a triangular shape. The hairs darkened the closer they came to the vertical slash at the lower vertex. On the edges of the black triangle in another photograph the hairs seemed like delicate little pencil strokes and they allowed a glimpse of dark skin. The closer they came to the center of the triangle the more dense they became, like the vegetation gro
wing along the banks of a river. In another slide, sparse hairs were crowned by a tattoo above the top portion of the triangle. Below, an acute angle was sliced in the middle, and little round lips appeared on either side of the vertex. In another photograph, lace climbed like vines in the shape of an isosceles triangle.
I liked geometry and didn’t limit myself to those shy, reserved triangles. In contrast, more than half the photos belonged to an uninhibited, wide-open series in which the legs spread for my camera, as in the painting The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet. It was a series of inverted trapezoids or vertical rectangles, within which were set ellipses of closed or open labia, flaccid or engorged, opaque or shiny, framed by fair or black hairs, in small or large quantities. One of the photographs recalled a dry leaf, the central line well drawn, from which lateral fluff emerged. It looked liked Joana’s, but wasn’t; Joana had never exposed herself this way for my camera; the nudes I’d taken of her were stolen images, while she was sleeping or bathing, and they wouldn’t work for those panels. One more photograph, long bearded labia funneling downwards, a protuberance in between them, like an atrophied tongue or penis. That other image didn’t show labia exactly, just little wrinkled mounds that rose from the central valley. I chose a minimalist photograph of transparent fluff sliced by a clear straight black slash.
With the women photographed from the rear, the triangles were inverted and cut through the middle, from top to bottom. One of them looked like a plump shiny fruit with two rounded segments. In another photograph, an ellipse sliced down the middle in perfect symmetry was bordered by an external ellipse. Still another showed the internal ellipse frightened and agape, revealing crimson flesh inside. I recalled each woman and I hadn’t forgotten their names.
I asked Guga’s opinion of my choices. Smoking a joint, he said:
– They’re photos of unfulfilled desires. Of suffering.
– How do you know?
– I don’t mean to say in the physical sense. I mean, as an idea of the search for happiness.
– I’m not looking for happiness.
– You don’t understand what I mean. We desire what we don’t have. Unfulfilled desire causes suffering, and every fulfilled desire is replaced by another. But there’s no escape, my friend. Life fluctuates between suffering and boredom. You’ve chosen suffering. If you manage to free yourself from your desires, it will be boredom. Unless you can learn to see the world like a Buddhist monk, in a disinterested way.
– Enough philosophy, Guga. What do you think of the photos?
– If you want me to be honest, they’re monothematic and, for that very reason, soporifically boring.
– Every photograph is unique. No image is ever the same as any other and it’s for one very simple reason: because no moment in life is ever repeated. Do you agree?
– In the case of your series here, that dimension of photography is lost.
– Guga, look at the huge variety of shapes! The photographs aren’t homogeneous, dear fellow. No way! And then, there’s interest in what’s behind each one. Also in their textures, outlines and volumes, not to mention the subtle dialog among the triangles.
– Do any of them belong to your girlfriend? I realized he was referring to Aida.
– She hates these kinds of photographs.
– You told me she’s very religious.
– That’s not why. She prefers me to show something she defines as “realistic,” a photo-essay about the poor or criminals.
– Good idea, but it depends on how you do it. Photo-realism has no reason to hide the photographer’s presence. I like photos in which you feel the collaboration between the photographer and the subject, understand? They can reveal more of the subjects’ personality than if the photographer made himself invisible in order to capture spontaneous natural images. Not only should the photographer show himself to the subject. He should also use the camera as a brush, to focus and unfocus planes, blur scenes and show the trail of movement. This way, he can create an expressiveness that reveals the characters’ interior state of being. A good example is Stepladder’s work. It has merit. He took photographs of several convicts at Papuda, I don’t know if you’ve seen them.
– Look here, if I took pictures of convicts, you can be sure that I’d do a better job than Stepladder. Even he acknowledges knowing nothing about photography. And one thing is certain: I would never imitate him. Through my photographs, I want to take possession of something just for myself. Like planting a flag in virgin territory. I’m not interested in entering territory that’s already occupied.
Unless I met Bigfoot, and he let himself be photographed, I thought. But even in that case, unlike Stepladder, I wouldn’t just take photographs of a convict. My photos would mirror a concealed emotion; they’d have a distinctive quality because they’d contain my secret. Why not visit him? Why not photograph him?
– I wouldn’t be able to live with someone who’s deluded by saints and miracles, Guga said, referring to Aida.
– Well, for me it doesn’t much matter if a woman I love believes in an evangelical Christ or a Catholic one, in a macumba priest or even in Santa Claus.
I believed in the physical world, in what I could touch, in other words, in Aida’s body and not in her beliefs. Thinking about this after Guga left and about our plans to visit the Garden of Salvation, I poured myself a brimming glass of whiskey. The sunlight traversing the windowpane passed through my glass. That’s how photo # 16, which I set aside for my photo diary, came about. At that moment, contemplating the rays that stretched across the mahogany table from the glass and sensing how simple matter seeks its form, I had the idea to create a chromatic movement in each one of the panels of triangles, from top to bottom and left to right, including dense dark pubic hairs, dense fair hairs, sparse dark ones and sparse fair ones. I’d finish at the bottom right with the absence of hairs, showing the genitals in clear vertical strokes. Someone seeing the panels from a distance would say they were compositions of flowers or fruits, in shades of yellow, black, and red. Despite showing body parts that are usually hidden beneath layers of clothing, each of the photographs—and also the assemblage—would take on something subtle and mysterious, as if I’d manipulated their colors and added a filmy veil over their surfaces, as if coarse desire had been given a careful polish.
[July 23, almost midnight]
17. April flowers
There would be an intimate wall in my exhibition, dedicated to a single person, only hinted at by the detail of a piece of underwear, a lock of hair or a fragment of a profile. They’d be photographs of Joana or about her, a tribute that I’d secretly made to her over many years. Photographs that Joana didn’t know about. And what if she came to my exhibition? How would she react when she recognized a detail of her body or her clothes?
All the women of the world combined weren’t worth one Joana. I’d send her a postcard. I’d simply say: “You are unique.” If she allowed me to smell her scent, caress her skin, spoon in bed as we had until recently, she didn’t even have to say she loved me.
I called her. To my surprise, this time she answered. A good sign. I begged her to let us try one more time to live together and I left her with the impression that I’d be grateful for a few crumbs of her good will.
– Just one week together, that’s all I ask. Come to Brasília or let me come to Rio.
– What’s the point?
– Don’t you miss me even a tiny bit?
She didn’t answer.
– I miss you a lot, I said.
– You just want a woman, any woman, beside you.
– Joana, come to Brasília, even if it’s only for a weekend (I reduced my request still more).
– I’ll think about your case.
Hearing those words, I felt like the victor of a great battle.
If I had many photographs of Joana and too many triangles, flowers were in short supply. With them, I would add still a third wall—and even a fourth—to my exhibition, p
rovided I managed to collect a sufficient number of them. I found them right there in the block. I took photographs of the April flowers, the silk cotton trees, with their pink edges and tufted white centers. Those photographs made my day. I chose the one that seemed most vibrant, joyful and delicate. It’s the one seen above.
[July 24]
18. Two or three incomprehensible things
I finally found a pretext for calling Ana Kaufman: to invite her to accompany me to the tribute to Paulo Antonio organized by the prophetess Iris Quelemém.
– I found out from Joana that you were in Brasília, she said.
Cold and laconic, she declined my invitation. But soon afterward I got a phone call from Carlos, her husband. I was surprised by how well he treated me. So he didn’t know what had transpired between Ana and me? I wanted to see Ana, not him. Now I was obligated to go to the couple’s home in South Lake for lunch on Saturday.
– It’s in your honor, to welcome you, Carlos told me.
I would surely see Berenice and maybe I’d have news of my son. On the appointed day, as soon as I arrived, Ana said:
– We have a surprise for you.
She didn’t want to tell me what it was. I should wait. I instantly thought of Bigfoot. Could Berenice have mentioned something to Ana? Would they bring him to meet me?
There were no noticeable marks from the burns Ana had suffered less than a year before. No scars, nothing. Only to someone who knew, some marks camouflaged by clothes and makeup. She looked quite rejuvenated, perhaps from the plastic surgery.
Filling the trays of the CD player, Carlos read the titles of the songs through his Coke-bottle glasses and made comments on the interpretations under the attentive gaze of Josafá, Ana’s cat.
– Beautiful poster, I said, pointing at the wall.
– It’s a reproduction of a Barnett Newman from 1965 when he was in the São Paulo Bienal, she explained.