Black Mirror

by Gail Jones

  Tell me about the painting called Black Mirror.

  No, said Victoria.

  Why not?

  No.

  What is happening? Why is the reflected woman on fire?

  No, repeated Victoria. No, no, no.

  Picasso’s Crying Woman, Anna said, in annoyed retaliation, was inspired by his lover, Dora Maar, in 1937. It’s in all the books, it’s history, everyone knows this.

  Victoria sniffed.

  Just goes to show how ignorant you are. La Femme qui Pleure: the woman who fell upon him in the studio the first time Jules left. Dora Maar put her arms around me, and said, Don’t cry, don’t cry. Then she kissed me three times — X X X. Me, Anna, me. It was me he painted.

  Anna can imagine it: Victoria hysterical in Picasso’s studio, claiming for herself, egoistically, the possession of all feelings, the origin of all images. She is not even sure if Victoria ever met Pablo Picasso. Her subject is as self-aggrandising as she is wedded to modest detail. She is unresolved and imprecise, like a photograph not properly taken.

  6

  London at 3 a.m. is any city; it carries the same possibilities of desolation. Anna listens to the smothered sounds of traffic ballooning up into the night, hauling her out to the stretched space that sleeplessness resides in. It is a dumb, lightheaded elevation. The air is thin and deoxygenated, the city vague and glistening. Below, interspersed cars — too many, too early — slide smoothly along their head-lit canals.

  If she could see herself in the mirror she would be half-eaten by the dark. She would be negated and phantasmic.

  Light from a street lamp falls arrow-like across the room; Anna rises groggily to close the curtains against its pallid glow and sees the humped shape of an old man, lying contracted, dead-still, in the narrow doorway of the building opposite.

  Dead still.

  Anna has fallen into wakefulness and it is futile to stay in the dark, hoping to fall the other way. She switches on the bedlamp and blinks her room into existence: it is messy, predictable, mean and adequate. Beside her is the catalogue of Victoria’s retrospective show, and Anna opens it for the consolation of the wholly familiar. She knows its contents so well that if she were struck blind tomorrow, these are the images she would most indelibly retain.

  Her favourites:

  — A swan with the face of a woman, flying over the ocean. The creature bears a halo of spiky poppet-heads, and its eyes are turned to the heavens, in imitation of saintly or devotional gestures. The sky is pink as fairy-floss; the ocean milky pale blue.

  — A giraffe in the darkness, barely visible. It stands at a street corner, just beyond the range of the street lamp, like a detective in a movie. At its feet are a cluster of tiny comma-shaped objects; they resemble, but indistinctly, human tears. This painting has a border of human hands.

  — A drawing room with a black-and-white chequered floor, and ornate old-fashioned furniture, neatly arranged. In the centre of the room is a huge hourglass, slowly emptying. And lined along the wall stand six unidentifiable trees, both green and aflame. Outside the square window the sky is the colour of fire.

  — A woman naked on a bed — this painting is her best known, Luxe, Calme, Volupté. A darkish triangle is lodged on the woman’s belly, and concentric circles, in yellow and purple, spread outwards from her shape. In each band of ripples there are floating faces, creamy and vague, of little boys and girls; and they lean into the picture beneficently, like the cherubim that blow wind from the corners of old maps. Scattered among these faces are tiny emblems: hearts, stars, hands, Eiffel towers.

  Although Anna is a little obsessed with the painting called Black Mirror, it is this one, with its joyful wake, its sequence of ripples, that gives her most pleasure. She places the book, propped open, on the pillow beside her, leaves the bedlamp on, and studies the image carefully. By this fanciful method she will try to recapitulate it in her dreams. She will try to push back the nightmares and the night terrors with this splendid body, its fecundity, its play, its touristic joke.

  Insomnia: how dull it is, how truly debilitating. There is in each of us, Anna thinks, a self that is nocturnal; mine is taking over. She has learnt to acquiesce to the claims the deep night has on her. No longer anxious or frustrated, she simply waits like a prisoner in isolation for her time-release. She knows the minute calibrations of night — creaks in furniture, the sigh of buildings, the obscure shapes in corners that melt into imaginary faces. Her bedlamp looks like a pineapple ring forked shining from a can; her books all have a limpid and oily sheen. Outside the day-hidden street-lives appear: a dead still man, deposited like waste, abandoned like an accident, there, just opposite, in a narrow doorway. Anna Griffin realises that she misses the moonlight. She misses Prussian-blue night-sky and clouds foaming above distant poppet heads. Here the city dark is brown and artificial.

  At last they are getting to know each other.

  Anna asks: Tell me, Victoria, what do you remember of your mother?

  Nothing, she replies. Nothing at all.

  Anna takes another sip of the cocktail Victoria has prepared for her. She is becoming tipsy and feels emboldened.

  I don’t believe you. You must remember something.

  Victoria also looks tipsy.

  She brushed my hair. I don’t remember her face at all, but I remember that it was my mother who brushed my hair. After each long stroke she ran the open palm of her hand fully down the length of my hair, as though its flyaway strands needed constant smoothing. I remember that gesture. It was rhythmic and ritualistic. I remember the sensation of her hand upon my hair. And the brush. It was of bone with an inlay of emerald green stone, in a design of ivy … And so, what do you remember, my grand inquisitor, my sweet Anna-leptic?

  Everything, says Anna. Every little thing.

  What in particular?

  She had a saying, when I was little. She would tuck me in bed, lean right over me, and whisper: My what big eyes you have! At that point I would close my eyes, and she would kiss both eyelids. It was a kind of game she invented to get me to sleep. After she left I found it hard to close my eyes at night. The absence of her kisses was almost intolerable. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night believing I had felt her lips in the dark, softly touching against my eyelids. Brushing, just brushing.

  The two women stare silently into empty glasses. Victoria holds out her hand and Anna places her glass on it. Then, in an act of comic distraction, Victoria puts the glasses to her eyes and says in a rough and wolfish voice: All the better to see you with.

  Anna thinks her hurtful. But then she laughs.

  Anna is delighted to find that they are both entering a state of drunken hilarity. Victoria is a skilled concocter of cocktails and alcohol tips her backwards into cushiony space of tell-tale and recollection. She raves — that is the word for it — on all things French: French pastries, French letters, French tenses, French poetry; so Anna tells her the story of her adolescent introduction to the experience of French kisses:

  Moira Ahern and Beryl Ray were sitting on the bed with her, bragging.

  He was all over me like a rash, said Beryl Ray. Talk about a member of the Wandering Hands Society.

  Moira and Anna both wanted more juicy details, so Beryl Ray obliged. They hadn’t gone all the way, but had pashed on at the pictures. Pretty serious pashing. Nev had put his whole hand inside her bra and made her feel his crown jewels, hard as a rock. She said he mucked up her hairdo and only bought one drink, the mingy bloody prick.

  Her boldness was delicious. The girls exchanged excited glances.

  Anna was thoroughly impressed by the worldliness of her friends. They possessed an entirely different vocabulary, concerning objects and things she knew nothing about: beehive, fishnet, backless dress, Eau De Cologne Number Four-Seven-Eleven. When they spoke of gropings in the back stalls, in that muffled darkness, with the flickering of movie-light and the promise of damp and illicit proximities, she could barely contain her inexperi
enced interest. And then? she would ask. And then? Then?

  But she was not quite accepted. Other girls tittered in corners when Anna approached. Even Moira and Beryl performed gestures of exaggerated alarm when they discovered she had never used nail varnish and had no gossip or magazines or lovey-dovey contributions. It was from them that she learned that her mother had run off with some man — But absolutely everyone knows that! they cruelly chorused — and she was so engulfed by the knowledge that she feared she would faint, there in the schoolyard, in front of everybody.

  A real looker, said Beryl, by way of compensation; but Anna was contorted with misery and could not utter a word in response. This was her most private secret, her years of search for her mother. She could not bear these girl voices, the jollity ringing in their mouths. They were giggling at her ignorance and she felt stricken and ridiculous.

  In the mines, said Ernie, men feared the creeps. The earth shifted and a rain of gravel fell, the timber cracked and strained and splintered at the stope, and for each miner there was blood-hurtling and an urgent wish to flee just as his knees buckled in pure terror and gave way under him. Once he saw a mate sucked backwards into a shaft by a sudden rush of air. For each miner this understanding: they worked in graves.

  She remembered this now. The forms of collapse and burial.

  She had wagged school for three weeks before she could face them again.

  But now Moira Ahern has offered to teach Anna the art of French-kissing, and it is an irresistible offer — so sexy, so French.

  I’ll be Nev, said Moira, and you be Beryl.

  They are sitting on the bed together, with Beryl instructing. Moira slides her hand to Anna’s breast and places Anna’s hand inside her panties, and when she kisses she makes a melancholy and moaning sound, so that Anna wonders if this is part of the act of French-kissing or some merely eccentric and cinematic addition; she wonders too at the pleasure of this hand upon her breast, which is so much more than the kiss itself, so compelling, somehow, and so sweetly furtive; and at Beryl there, watching her play-acting a second Beryl, engrossed by her own double re-performing with a simulated Nev.

  Closer, said Beryl. You have to be closer.

  So they wedged themselves further into the entanglement of their Australian French-kiss, found that particular curvilinear of film-star epiphany, and kissed, and kissed. When Moira at last disengaged her face was beaming.

  I think you need more practice, she instantly announced.

  Later they lay sideways on the bed, six-legged, thinking of England. Anna had never in her life imagined leaving her own town, but both Beryl and Moira had identical futures constructed elsewhere. First they would go to the city, where they have TV and big shops and dripping boys on the beach, and then they would go to England and become secretaries with piled hair and lethal high-heels.

  London is where it all happens, Beryl declared. No more deadshits. Or gutless wonders. Or mingy bloody dickheads.

  It snows all winter, added Moira, and men open car doors and have really clean fingernails because they all work in offices. Or drive red buses.

  Lovely, said Beryl.

  Lovely, echoed Moira.

  Anna tried to triplicate, but simply could not. Instead she wondered what France was like, with kisses like that.

  Kisses like that.

  Victoria exploded. Kisses like that!

  She was hugely entertained by Anna’s story. Later, when she calmed down, she asked Anna again about her mother. But the young woman, suddenly sad, would say no more. She had surrendered to alcoholic declension; she was sliding towards sorrow.

  Victoria said: Let me tell you about 1936, my alchemi cal year. Transubstantiation! L’Age d’Or! She laughed.

  Reichsführer Hitler was already trampling over Europe, Spain was about to homicidally ignite, but Victoria had just met Jules and was blithely self-obsessed, and politically unaware. In June of 1936 the International Surrealist Exhibition was held in London, at the New Burlington Galleries. It was an unusually hot summer and Victoria described it mischievously, as if it were a series of scenes designed by Magritte. All across the city men in black bowlers and dark suits were crumpling, concertina-like; women were removing snow-white gloves and fanning them fingerless at crimson faces; children were entirely hectic and out-of-control. Ices were everywhere licked, drinks everywhere guzzled, and the insides of stores and public houses buzzed thick with the mosquito whine of endless complaining. Oh the heat, they would whine, the heat, the heat: Victoria mimicked an upper-class English accent with diabolical precision.

  Yet her body recovered a kind of girlish mobility, and she strode through melting London, hot-housed and sizzling, intoxicated with the sweet remembrance of sweat. She thought of deserts, distances, entropic mirages. Of glimmering horizons, mirrors in the sky. She remembered salmon-coloured salt lakes and inverted trees, cradled in a precarious and unrealistic suspension. It was perhaps her only true adult moment of radical nostalgia.

  And then, astonishingly, in Trafalgar Square — and she can no longer remember why she was in the centre of the city — but in Trafalgar Square, among the giant and sombre statues of lions, the imperial columns, the wandering pigeons, appeared a woman whose head was a bunch of flowers. She wore a pale satin dress, elbow-length black gloves, and had a many-coloured bouquet upon her shoulders. A bunch of roses. Photographers were darting around her, mad for a picture. Click! Click! In the summertime square, bright with acrid sunshine, she was dazzlingly visible, a surplus, a monster. Victoria felt she had produced this spectacle from her own imagination. She moved towards the flower-woman, and a young man, tuxedoed, moustachioed and with the manners of a salesman, intercepted her rather rudely and offered her a handbill. The arcane word Surrealist rose up into vision.

  Exhibition. Surrealist. New Burlington Galleries.

  The bunch of roses walked away, trailing photographers. Pigeons uplifted. Overheated Englishmen glared and mumbled.

  Almost immediately Victoria found Jules and took him to the exhibition. It was the opening day, and the traffic was held up in Bond Street and Piccadilly because of the crowds. Large groups had gathered to gawk and sneer: she had never before seen so many people attend an art gallery.

  She remembers this morning as a kind of physical sensation; it was as though, entering the gallery, a parachute — whoomph! — jerked open inside her chest. She felt both fallen and upheld, strung in the aerial logic of movement in the sky, tense and excited with something straining to stay open inside her. Max Ernst’s Two Children Menaced by A Nightingale. Meret Oppenheim’s cup and saucer covered with fur. Dali’s deliquescent clocks. Tanguy’s weird plasma shapes. Collages. Frottages. Impossibilities.

  Victoria recognised something: they had painted dreams.

  Jules bent to inquire: Are you all right?

  But she could not reply for all that was inside her. She was overwhelmed with a sense of providential culmination and the effect of the exhibition was less like a spectacle than a kind of syntax arranging itself, a new intelligibility.

  Jules tugged at Victoria like a child, begging to leave.

  It’s so hot in here, he whispered.

  He ran this index finger around the inside of his shirt collar, waved his neat hat and dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief.

  And this … he gestured around him, is all so … stupid!

  Bête! She still hears it, spat in her direction.

  When finally they left, Jules was in a state of peevish annoyance Victoria had always, perhaps meanly, associated with the French. They stood outside the New Burlington Galleries and for the first time fought. Jules’ face was flushed. Blown news paper spun around him, exemplifying his agitation.

  Incroyable! he said. Incroyable!

  Exactly! Victoria responded. Believing is seeing.

  She tried to seduce him with the deep sincerity of her impressions, but Jules was unmoved, exasperated, and turned on his heel to walk away up the street. He did not turn back
, nor did he entreat. Victoria strode again into the gallery, back into the supernatural atmosphere of an entire counter-world.

  Representations of women seemed everywhere to confront her. There was Dali’s sketch, like a rape, of the faceless woman whose whole upper half was a chest of drawers. There was Roland Penrose’s objet, called Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, which consisted of a mannequin torso held fast in a globe-shaped cage. And most hauntingly there was Magritte’s La Femme Introuvable. This was a painting of an innocent-looking naked woman, who stood with one hand resting upon her right breast, and stared dreamily, impassive and in a kind of trance, straight out of the picture. Behind her was an irregular pattern of paving stones, which took up most of the painted background; but scattered on the stones were four very large hands, remnants of giants who did not appear. The hands gestured around the woman as though feeling for her presence. Yet this was not at all erotic; rather it was simply an intrigue, a cherchez la femme. Victoria stood before this image bearing a crown of question marks.

  It is still a painting, she says to Anna, that returns to her at odd moments — in the bath, waking at night, cutting a slice of bread.

  The gallery was loud with outraged discussion. Women in tilted hats tilted their bodies forward, all the better to see. They sniffed. Adjusted eyeglasses. Men leant backwards, holding their hats over their buttocks and fingering the rims in consternation. Thrilled art patrons everywhere frowned and giggled. Victoria was at last unable to bear her internal sensation and walked out into the light. She took her own hat from her head and looked upwards at the sun. The light was blinding. Mirage suns in black spotted every part of the city.

  It was like a vision, says Victoria. Just like a vision.

  Victoria takes a book from the bookshelf and opens it at René Magritte’s image.

  There. You see?

  Anna is disappointed. The woman is crudely rendered. It is a plain photograph, black-and-white. A stilted looking ghost. Grey space. Clumsy hands. Hardly a revelation.