Known and Strange Things

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by Teju Cole


  Paula said, “We are excited for America. We love Obama. But we don’t believe we can change things here. It’s not possible, so we don’t try. It’s a great shame for us, though people don’t talk much about it.” Later, on television I watch Berlusconi speak rapidly and smugly, his hands gesturing at speed. The impunity that he and the Camorristi share is met with shrugs. He’s made of money; he can outbid anyone.

  —

  Father Rafael said, “Italians are too interested in enjoying life to do anything about politics. Wine, fashion, that’s what they care about. So people like Berlusconi face no opposition.” Father Rafael was a Jesuit I had met through another priest in New York last summer. He now lived in Rome. He was easygoing, in his mid-forties, not at all ascetic. We’d first met over drinks and football matches. I was drawn to him then for his matter-of-fact style. “Most priests dislike this pope,” he’d said to me, “he’s old, his ideas are old. The sooner he dies off, the better. This is something we priests talk about openly. We loved John Paul, because he did a lot to move the church forward in the right ways. Now Benedict, among his other mistakes, has given a free pass to those who want to drop the vernacular and return to a Latin mass. What’s the point?” Like many priests of his generation, he’s not from Europe or America, not white. He’s from Angola, though for many years he worked in Burundi, and considers it his home now. We met in a trattoria not far from the Colosseum. I ordered the pizza with prosciutto and fungi; he ordered the same, but without the ham; it was Lent.

  “You won’t have too much problem with racism here,” he said, “especially if you speak the language. Italians love that, when someone from outside masters their language.” He was doing advanced studies in biblical scholarship at the Society of Jesus. Italian, being only a half step away from Portuguese, had been easy for him to learn. “And you have to remember, there are racists everywhere.”

  But, I wanted to know, wasn’t the situation of the Roma, the gypsies, especially bad? “That’s true,” he said, “people here have little patience with them. There is a belief that they are generally criminals and, well, they are. They raise their children up to be thieves.” I had raised an eyebrow, so he softened his stance. “Out of every two crimes reported in the newspaper, one is committed by Roma. Is that the reality? Who knows? But that is what is reported. So, Romans don’t view them as human beings, really. There is a big effort in the comune to push them out once and for all. There have been rapes and murders recently that they are blamed for. And that is why you haven’t seen many of them: they’re afraid! I think there’s a real possibility of Roma men being lynched in this city now. The feeling about them is that hostile.”

  On the metro lines, there was a small set of videos that recycled endlessly on TV screens. One, a jaunty little cartoon, warned you against pickpockets. Another was a television blooper reel, most memorably featuring a fat man in a hurdle race who stumbled at every hurdle but kept going. And then there was the slickly produced spot that implored those who had been victims of racism to call the number provided. The “anti-razzismo” push was a serious public project. But privately? In many restaurants and museums, I was stared at, aggressively and repeatedly. In public interactions, I was treated either to the famous Mediterranean warmth (usually by the young) or to an almost shocking disdain. I had at least four incidents of speaking to people (in my few phrases of Italian) and being met with resolute silence, some transactions taking place entirely in that silence.

  There were in any case many people of color in the city: Africans, Bangladeshis, Latin Americans. Around them was the inescapable air of being on the margins—the clergy seemed to be visitors, and the workers (newsagents, street florists, sellers of knockoff luxury goods) appeared to have scarcely more secure a hold. They were here only because Romans, for now, tolerated their presence. The comune was Roman, nativist. Not black, not brown, not Albanian, and definitely not Roma.

  After Berlusconi’s frothing performance, the RAI picture cut to a newscast. The newscaster was a middle-aged African man, much darker than I am, distinguished-looking, graying at the temples. He delivered the day’s headlines in rapid Italian, and in the cloying, ingratiating style common to newscasters everywhere.

  —

  I used to hate angels. But even to put it that way gives them too much credence. It would be more accurate to say I don’t believe in angels but I dislike the idea of angels, finding them silly, seeing none of the beauty, grace, or comfort that people seem to project on them. When I was more active in church life, I found angels actively embarrassing, as though comic book or fantasy novel characters had somehow lodged themselves into the center of the world’s most serious narrative. Fairy tales should have no role in theology.

  No feature of angels annoyed me more than their wings: impractical, unlikely, entirely incredible from a biological point of view. I always reasoned that for a man to fly with wings on his back, he would need back muscles as enormous as a bison’s. Angels, in most depictions through the ages, looked like men with white toy wings tacked on. They were an infantile fantasy, made to bear a spiritual burden that they were, to my eyes at least, remarkably ill suited for. Angels were just about as relevant to my life as the preprocessed sentiment of Hallmark cards or Top 40 love songs: in other words, irrelevant.

  Toward the end of my week in Rome, standing in the long gallery of the Museo Pio-Clementino in the Vatican, I saw another fine statue of Hermes. Nearby were two herms. I did not look at the herms for long, but—as is fitting to their function—they flashed through me memorably. You know I have been thinking about porous boundaries, shadow regions, ambiguities, and, lately, about the idea of embodied intermediaries. This is why I have become more interested in how these intermediaries have been narrated: Hermes, Mercury, Esu, and, in the case of the Christian religions, angels. But no, to say “interested” is insufficient. Better to call it “invested”—an investment in what, it now occurs to me, I might call a parenthetical mode of life.

  —

  I visited Rome in the waning of winter. The senses implicated me. The senses were key: in addition to the classical statuary, my most intense artistic experiences of Rome were the troubled architect Borromini and the troubled painter Caravaggio. Both freed my senses, caught my heart off guard, blew it open. Borromini’s buildings—the small church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in particular—seemed to be taking wing right before one’s eyes. Caravaggio’s paintings, meanwhile, were full of musicians, peasants, saints, and angels. His St. John the Baptist (at the Borghese Gallery), the young prophet with an inscrutable expression on his face, his body nestled next to a wild ram’s, was a sensuous catalogue of subtle conflicts, as smoky and disturbing as anything by Leonardo da Vinci.

  People, too, stood in as angels. Paula, the owner of the bed-and-breakfast, who declared that she did not believe in doing anything if she could not do it with amore, was one such. Another was Annie, a new friend, whose wisdom and intelligence steeped me in worlds entirely mine and entirely unknown to me. In stories of her friends and acquaintances, I caught glimpses of creativity and flexibility (hers, as well as theirs). Through her, I understood De Sica better, and Rossellini, and Visconti. I especially enjoyed her story about driving Fellini around—of his insatiable curiosity about everything around him. And through her, I met Judit, a Hungarian photographer, who, in the long low Roman light of a Sunday evening, showed me a quarter century of her work, pictures taken in Budapest and Rome. Our photographs—I shot a great deal in my brief time in the city—had uncanny areas of resonance. We were drawn to the same moments: reflections, ruins, motion, wings. I wondered if perhaps immigrants and visitors had certain insights into the heart of a place, insights denied the natives. My life and Judit’s had been so different, she growing up in Communist Hungary, wrestling over a lifetime of creativity with the legacy of great Hungarian photographers—Kertész, Munkácsi, Capa, Brassaï—then moving to Italy, and raising a son in what still felt, to her, like a foreign c
ountry. I was grateful for the connection, of which Annie had been the intermediary. And for the connection with Annie, too, which had been brokered by her sister, Natalie. These avatars of Hermes who guided me from where I had been to where I was to be. And you also, Beth, through whom these words and images now enter the world in a new way.

  At the Spanish Steps, where, even in winter, tourists swarm, there were lithe African men doing a brisk trade in Prada and Gucci bags. The men were young, personable as was required for sales, but at other moments full of melancholy. The bags were arranged on white cloths, not at all far from the luxury shops that sold the same goods for ten or twenty times more. It was late afternoon. Beautiful yellow light enfolded the city, and, from the top of the steps, the dome of St. Peter’s was visible, as was the Janiculum Hill, on the other side of the Tiber. In that light, the city had an eternal aspect, an illumination seemed to come from the earth and glow up into the sky, not the other way around. Did I sense in myself, just then, a shift? A participation, however momentary, in what Rome was?

  There was a sudden commotion: with a great whoosh the African brothers raced up the steps, their white cloths now caught at the corners and converted into bulging sacks on their backs. One after the other, then in pairs, they fled upward, fleet of foot, past where I stood. Tourists shrank out of their way. I spun around and pressed the shutter. Far below, cars carrying carabinieri, the military police, arrived, but by then (all this was the action of less than half a minute) the brothers had gone.

  Later, I looked at the image on my camera: the last of the angels vanishing up the long flight of steps, a hurry through which known and strange things pass, their white wings flashing in the setting sun.

  Shadows in São Paulo

  ARE THEY GANGSTERS? Are they bankers? There are certain photographs that seem to have been pulled out of the world of dreams. Men on a Rooftop, by the Swiss photographer René Burri (1933–2014), is one such picture. The photograph, taken in São Paulo in 1960, shows four men on a rooftop, seen from the vantage point of an even higher building. Far below them, stark in black and white, are tramlines and cars, and tiny pedestrians so perfectly matched with their long shadows that they look like miniaturized sculptures by Giacometti.

  I’m not sure when my interest in Men on a Rooftop became an obsession. Through the years it gained a hold on my imagination until it came to stand as one of the handful of pictures that truly convey the oneiric possibilities of street photography. The celebrated Iranian photojournalist Abbas, who knew Burri well (they were both members of Magnum Photos), described Men on a Rooftop to me as “vintage René: superb form, no political or social dimension.” Abbas zeros in on the formal perfection of the image, but I’m not sure I agree that it lacks a social dimension. To me, it literally portrays the levels of social stratification and the enormous gap between those above and those below.

  A great photo comes about through a combination of readiness, chance, and mystery. Gabriel García Márquez, once asked whom the best reader of One Hundred Years of Solitude was, responded with a story: “A Russian friend met a lady, a very old lady, who was copying the whole book out by hand, right to the last line. My friend asked her why she was doing it, and the lady replied, ‘Because I want to find out who is really mad, the author or me, and the only way to find out is to rewrite the book.’ I find it hard to imagine a better reader than that lady.” Like the lady in García Márquez’s story, I thought some act of repetition would clarify things. And so I went to São Paulo in March 2015, looking for René Burri.

  I was there once before, three years earlier, and I had been impressed by the city’s thrumming energy, especially along the stateliest of its avenues, the Avenida Paulista. This was not the clichéd Brazil of soccer, sand, and samba. From a height in any central district of São Paulo, what you see is an incessancy of high-rises, as though someone had invented the high-rise and then forgotten to stop. This city of work and hard edges, I found, was the Brazil I preferred, and I somehow convinced myself that Burri’s photograph, so keen in its evocation of capital, must have been taken on Avenida Paulista.

  Shortly after arriving in the city, I went to visit a friend, the curator Thyago Nogueira, in his beautiful corner office on the fourteenth floor of a building on Paulista. There were great views of the avenue, but in neither direction could I see a correspondence with any aspect of Burri’s picture. Where were the four silvery tram tracks glinting in the slanting sun? What about the steep canyon created by the tall buildings facing one another? And I couldn’t find any building that matched the one on which the men were walking. Thyago began to mention other major roads in the city. Perhaps I wanted Rua da Consolação or Avenida da Liberdade? Or was Burri’s view from the Martinelli Building? As he threw out names, it dawned on me that I was lost: I’d come all this way, and all I had was a city, a year, a photographer’s name.

  In Magnum’s New York office, there’s a library print of Men on a Rooftop. On the reverse of the picture are stamps and scribbles: Burri’s name, the words “Brazil” and “businessmen,” and several five-digit numbers in different hands. It was a lovely artifact, but it told me nothing about exactly where in the city the picture had been made. Nor did an interview Burri gave late in life, in which he simply said, “Whenever there was a high-rise building, I was climbing up and knocked at the door and said, ‘Can I take a picture?’ ” São Paulo is full of high-rises, and they all have doors. I tried a few. The view from the roof of the sinuous thirty-eight-floor Oscar Niemeyer–designed Copan building yielded no clues. The restaurant near the top of the forty-six-floor Edifício Itália offered a thrilling panorama, but I saw nothing that related to Burri’s photograph.

  There had been a terrible drought at the beginning of the year, but it was finally raining in São Paulo. I sat in my hotel room, brooding. During a brief lull in the downpour, a woman dressed in black and wearing high heels walked across the roof of the building on the other side of the street, smoking a cigarette.

  Four days into my trip, Thyago emailed with news. A friend of his thought that Burri’s picture was made from the top of a building that once belonged to the Bank of the State of São Paulo. That building, still informally called the Banespão, was completed in 1947, and was for a while the tallest in Brazil. I went up with a small group of tourists. It was mid-morning, the rain had stopped; we were limited to five minutes. From the viewing platform, thirty-six floors above the sprawling city, the vista was bright. I took photos in all directions and realized, with a sinking feeling, that I was again in the wrong place. Then the five minutes were up, and our small group had to descend.

  A dead end. I wrote to thank Thyago anyway, and I asked other friends in the city about Burri’s picture, but few of them knew it. The search had begun to take on some of the dream logic of the photograph itself. I was frustrated but also vaguely amused, as though I were suspended in the first half of an uncompleted joke. I asked the concierge. I asked the taxi drivers who took me around. None of them could recognize the photograph. It seemed that I would leave São Paulo empty-handed. In any case, the city had grown so fast and so hectically: perhaps the building the men walked on, or the one from which Burri took his picture, had been altered or demolished.

  Then Thyago wrote back. His friend, he said, insisted that it had to be the Banespão. It could be no other. But I’d seen the view with my own eyes. What had I missed? It was a Friday, the day before the end of my vacation. And that was when I remembered a curious story that Burri told about the photograph. In those days, according to Burri, Henri Cartier-Bresson limited his fellow photographers to lenses from 35 millimeters to 90 millimeters. Burri had surreptitiously gone longer while shooting in São Paulo, to 180 millimeters. “I never told him!” he said. “At that point, I broke loose from my mentor.” When you shoot at such an extended focal length, there’s a great deal more compression between the middle and far distances. The canyons created by São Paulo’s high-rises seem even more vertiginous. The angl
e of view is also severely narrowed, cutting out much of what the eye sees on the periphery of vision. Perhaps using the wrong lens was getting in my way? I’d taken a 50-millimeter lens with me. I now borrowed a longer lens from Thyago; it was only 85 millimeters, not ideal, but closer. Then I got in a taxi and went to the Banespão.

  It was late afternoon, and by now the rains were torrential. The city was a gray blur. The buildings shone with wet. The time limit at the top of the building was the same as before, five minutes, and, in the open-air viewing platform, I got drenched. I set my eye to the camera’s viewfinder and looked northwest. Suddenly, everything clicked into place, as in the final moves of a jigsaw. I saw Burri’s view. To the right was the building the men had walked on. How could I have missed it before? It was (I later discovered) the Edifício do Banco do Brasil. What I hadn’t seen in Burri’s photo was that the “roof” the men were walking on was not the building’s summit: the building had a stacked design, and a further set of floors rose just out of the shot. To my left and far below, meanwhile, was Avenida São João, slightly changed from 1960—the tramlines were gone—but certainly recognizable in its rain-slicked state. The avenue was full of cars, buses, and pedestrians. The rain kept coming down, and my five minutes were up. But the mission had been accomplished.

  “The photograph isn’t what was photographed, it’s something else,” Garry Winogrand once said. “It’s about transformation.” The photographic image is a fiction created by a combination of lenses, cameras, film, pixels, color (or its absence), time of day, season. When I’m moved by something, I want to literally put myself in its place, the better to understand what was transformed. This interests me as a writer and as a photographer: How do raw materials become something else, something worth keeping? “Those four guys just came from nowhere, and went to nowhere,” Burri said of the men in his photograph. The photograph he made of them came from nowhere and went everywhere. My seeing his point of view and taking a picture from the same spot fifty-five years later did not solve the mystery. But in discovering all that can be known about a work of art, what cannot be known is honored even more. We come right up to the edge, and can go no farther.

 

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