by Alicia Kopf
Employee X who, as the business owner had accurately sensed, wouldn’t make problems when she was let go. Because “you must have done something wrong if you’re being punished,” as Mother would say; and because “you aren’t a team player,” as Father would say in English, who being unemployed was dating the third English teacher … The Player, the Team, and the Punishment, the rules of this pre-established game … The game in which the best card she had been dealt was one she herself had drawn and cut out. It would be best for her to focus on something she could put her faith in, even if that led her to an unknown place, while holding down a part-time job. She felt safer there than she had working for the editor, who expected her to go out to dinner with him after the commercial fairs, dinners that went on long and after which they had to head back to the hotel together. All that for eight hundred euros a month. So, she kept her job and, in her downtime, she poured a good deal of her energy into that place where Beauty, Truth, Play and Inventiveness should converge … Feeding this Project didn’t help her pay the bills, which her family reproached her for, and later she would give in and start a full-time gig. While working full-time, the Project still called to her unceasingly; she would dedicate her nights, weekends, summers to it. Feeding it with the little time she had left meant renouncing other things in a feedback loop: in part she worked on the Project because she felt lonely, she felt lonely because she often shut herself in to work on the Project. It was the only complex way she had of expressing herself. She worked like a castaway on an iceberg island, without knowing where she was headed or how much longer she would be able to hold out. She had lost much of the determination needed to aspire to that uncomfortable word, somewhat ridiculous due to its extraordinarily wide range of meanings, from intellectual to starlet, meanings that often imply a life of partying and posturing, a life of improbable peaks and probable shipwrecks.
Shipwrecks where nobody, now that I’m an adult, is waiting to toss me a life vest.
The fourth figurine travels to the capital for her master’s, falls in love with a charismatic professor and, thanks to the sophistry of the disenchanted Marxist who, feeding this all-too curious figurine’s eagerness, manages to seduce her with the full consent of the adult she has now become, in a cyclical story like the Nietzschean eternal return that he himself teaches her. She falls deeply in love with the melancholic professor—or with his role, she’ll never be entirely sure—as he teaches her first the theory and then the practice of the world; after some erectile problems, he abruptly says goodbye. He’s suddenly forgotten the feminist rhetoric, and the eloquence and tact he employed to seduce her and others.
When you take hold of a drowning person’s hand you run the risk of being pulled down beneath the waves; the survival instinct’s movement is violent. Once under the water, with the cold, the electricity that lights up and connects the big, bright city that is the brain of a twenty-three-year-old begins to dim; the ideas that flowed, multiplying and interconnecting, freeze up. The refraction of that general blackout provokes a new opacity in the eyes, which had shone brightly up until then. Facial features grow heavy. Six times a day I repeat the same speech in front of different tourists. The same words, said over and over, lose their meaning. Reality dissolves. I can’t explain what has happened. I have gaps in my memory. The water surrounding me slowly makes its way inside. I start to swell. Where did the darkness that drew me to him come from? Is it a familiar darkness? I must have done something bad, otherwise this wouldn’t be happening to me.
The end of this sad, lonely period—the early twenties can be the loneliest time of your life—was when late-blooming acne and nearsightedness bad enough for glasses unscrewed to reveal a figurine marked by thicker outlines.
The fifth figurine believes that being invisible is the greatest power, not always getting what you want. Five extra kilos and short hair ward off complications; all that will save her problems during the four years she focuses on studying the art of telling lies in order to tell the truth. The poor girl whose story is always told by others, who liked to read Bolaño, Franzen and Zweig, who admired Duras, Némirovsky and Yourcenar, learns that an inexpressible story can kill the person who lived through it. Because those who cannot tell their own stories, or those who are silenced, are victims. This new voice will speak with authority, with full knowledge of what has been coming at her from all sides. Because really she’d been stupid, it was stupid not to have taken advantage of what she had, for not realizing earlier that this world is brutal, that evil exists in people out of weakness and the thirst for power. Along with manipulation and gossip—the weapons of the weak—she could have used the few advantages of her gender, resources she had been taught to believe were shameful and superficial. She’d been raised by a strict mother as if evil could only emerge from within her. So she had painstakingly focused on the deep cleansing of her soul, she had worked hard to become as naïve and stupid as her brother, whom you could stop on the street and effortlessly relieve of the contents of his wallet; there’s nothing like being dumb to allow you to observe others more clearly. That was how she tested out their principles, principles that are easy to forget when interacting with people like us, the simple, the wet behind the ears.
And then, in that calm period without any upsets, the once again narrow waist of the sixth figurine emerged:
A continuity assistant on a national film. She carried a hidden camera. And the actors couldn’t pose at their best angle, the one they offered up to the Director: that new panoramic shot revealed the lifts in the shoes of the short hero, the monster’s zipper, and the gorgeous actress rewriting her script instead of being rescued. The only interest she might have had in filming that reverse angle wasn’t about settling scores with anyone, nor fame—these days only money can save you and art offers little of that—but because she knew that the “off-camera” perspective fascinated many people, who feared the monster, admired the hero and waited for a rescue that never came. She thought that it was precisely when things get uncomfortable or can’t be shown that something interesting comes to light. That is the point of no return, the point that must be reached, the point you reach after crossing the border of what has already been said, what has already been seen. It’s cold out there.
Persevering and forging ahead to the blind spot completely surrounded by whiteness, the point from which you can see nothing and you don’t know where to go, from that moment on, it is important to take measures, demarcate, and, even if just fumbling around in the dark, to correctly identify the origin and direction of the footprints.
It was by following that trail that I found, in the snow, much further on, the smallest figurine in the set, the one that isn’t hollow but solid, the matrix whose expansion had generated the rest of the figurines and situations.
Research Notes I
Penguins
The penguins of the Antarctic were a new discovery for the explorers, who began filming them in the early twentieth century. Everyone was soon taken with the sweet creatures; people wanted to see images of the playful penguins. But if you’ve seen Encounters at the End of the World, by Werner Herzog, you’ll know that sometimes a penguin will voluntarily separate from the group and head in the opposite direction, away from the sea, toward its death.
South Pole
There’s a store downstairs on the street level that sells frozen foods. The cashier is tall, blond, stocky. He reminds me of Amundsen, the explorer.
Peaks and Poles
The Sherpas and the Inuit have similarities. The former reach the summit every day, the latter helped everyone discover the North Pole.
News
The mountaineer Ferran Latorre gave up on his ascent of Everest in order to rescue a sick Sherpa.
The White Rabbit
When I was little, my mother worked in a small-town school. Its playground was the woods. Once I saw a bunny nestled among the roots of a tree. But it wasn’t one of the typical rabbits that camouflage th
emselves amid the brown tones of the Mediterranean landscape; it was a white rabbit. When I got closer I saw that it was quite big; stock-still, it stared at me with its red eyes. It let me pick it up and I realized it was panting. I decided to take it to the vet, but on the way there, in the car, it died.
White Death
Death by freezing is called sweet death, or white death. It is somehow linked to sleep, because of their apparent likeness, as opposed to the violence of a death by fire. Those who’ve seen it up close say that there’s nothing sweet about an icy grave; freezing is as terrible a death as burning.
Yet ice retains the body’s shape the way images do; it is like photographs. Photography is to its subject as ice is to the interred explorer: a thanatological process that presents us, abruptly, with a body from the past.
Honor and Recognition
The white backdrop to polar explorations magnifies the already highly abstract nature of attempting to reach a geographic goal as intangible as a few coordinates on a map. What was it that led so many men to endeavor to conquer these vast white spaces devoid of any apparent commercial or strategic interest? What does such a conquest represent and how is it, in turn, represented?
Photograph of Robert Peary’s arrival at the North Pole on April 21, 1909.
While the historical research that makes up part of this investigation seemed to be a straight line leading to crystal-clear regions crowned with stories of scientific aplomb, it actually turned out to be meandering, and plagued by paradox and murkiness. The conquest of these last uncharted regions is so fascinating precisely because of its ambiguity, and because of its fertile hold on the popular imagination. One example: the conquest of the North Pole was attributed to Robert Edwin Peary in 1909. After twenty-three years of unsuccessful attempts, Peary pulled it off on his eighth try. Frederick Cook claimed he had reached the pole a year earlier. With no scientific means to prove who was the first to conquer the region, a dispute arose that captured the public interest. Popular opinion eventually shifted in Peary’s favor, ruining Cook. When comparing the “conquest photographs” of each of the two explorers, there is no doubt as to who the winner would be. Peary’s is shot from a low angle, and shows five men in front of a flag lodged in a carefully prepared mound of snow on the arctic plain. The staging, perfectly composed in the vast whiteness, excluded his most loyal companion, the African-American Matthew Henson. Cook’s conquest was very different. With no one else to operate the camera, he photographed the pair of Inuits who traveled with him beside an igloo hoisting the inevitable flag over the arctic expanse. The resulting photograph is blurry.
Cook’s photograph of his arrival at the North Pole, 1908.
Exact date unknown.
Man in Ice
My brother is a man trapped in ice. He looks at us through it; he is there and he is not there. Or more precisely, there is a fissure inside him that periodically freezes over. When he is present, his outline is more clearly defined; other times he’s submerged for a while. His focus is at times ten thousand meters high (he likes to watch planes cross the sky) or, when the ice is thicker, ten thousand meters inward. In addition to planes, he’s interested in trains, cars, dogs, cats, and birds. In his day-to-day life, the fissure within him leaves him stranded between one action and the next. But because his body is fully there, we have to make every decision for him. There is no outward indication of what’s going on inside him. Disability is basically what hinders someone from being self-sufficient and having skills society is willing to pay for (if we take this less literally, it could include many of us); therefore, you could say that he is simply different, that he has other abilities: freelance air traffic controller, attentive observer of the local fauna, silent but present companion. The lack of external signs is somewhat disconcerting to strangers when they approach him and he responds in a stutter. Luckily he lives in a small city, he’s known around the neighborhood and people generally take care of him if they come across him blocked, hesitating over crossing the street to drop the trash in the bin, one of his day’s few moments, if not the only one, when he is by himself.
“How’s it going?” I ask.
“Goodrealgood.” It comes out all in a rush, his typical answer to that question.
M has a catalogue of responses that help him confront social situations. That is how he’s learned to integrate into the world of others, a world where he has adapted over time, like a stranger in a distant land with an unfamiliar language. He knows that if everyone is laughing, he must laugh, and if everyone is serious he has to be serious. He only interrupts conversations in order to ask urgent and basic things, which he repeats in the same way each day at the same time:
“Should I go to the bathroom?” Right after meals.
“Should I drink water?” Once he’s sat down at the table.
Having a son like this, let’s be frank, is hard on my mother. I think sometimes she feels guilty, even though the origin of his problem is unclear. My mother and my brother, who is now grown-up and hairy (yet maintains a childlike innocence), have developed a certain interdependence. She hasn’t had a serious relationship since splitting up with my father more than twenty years ago. So she is a polar conqueror and pulls my brother along on a sled.
As a boy it wasn’t yet clear what was going on with him; at school he was just a bit behind in some aspects. Later the problem became more and more apparent. We don’t know what caused it, whether it was due to a complication at birth—he was delivered via vacuum extraction, was it a question of not getting enough oxygen?—or if it’s genetic, a thought that makes the idea of my having children fraught, even though there isn’t another case in our family. Some research suggests that it has to do with the fertilizers that were used in the sixties and seventies, because there was an uptick in cases, but the increase could simply be due to the fact that they’d begun to diagnose it. The studies on autistic spectrum disorders don’t clarify anything, and the doctors know very little. There are cases of genetically identical twins raised in the same home where one is autistic and the other isn’t. The importance of the various environmental and genetic factors is still unknown, and there are no biological indicators that can detect the presence of autism after birth. That has weakened my trust in science: for years doctors have given my brother different names, depending on the pathological trend at the time: first he was borderline, from borderline he became Asperger, from Asperger to autistic, and now, since the classification encompasses so many different cases, it’s called autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To me, this vague label seems like a path back toward uncertainty; the differences in behavior and appearance between the different cases are so vast that they often have very little in common.
When I came into the world, he was already there, and for many years his condition was an enigma, something unnamed. My older brother was diagnosed at the age of thirty. I was grateful to have a name for it, even one that isn’t entirely apt. And I believe that I’ve been able to talk about it more since then. It is very important that things have a name, otherwise they don’t exist.
The idea that the name often makes the thing is completely true.
Cook
Frederick Cook’s polar obsession started when his first wife and their baby son died during the birth. It was as a surgeon on one of Robert Peary’s expeditions that the doctor began his explorations. The so-called “polar controversy” took place when, years later and on different expeditions, in 1909 Peary and Cook returned at the same time from the Arctic claiming to have been the first to reach the North Pole. One of the documents that Cook brought back from the expedition was the photograph of his companion reaching the summit of Mount McKinley, the highest peak in Alaska, which is actually still quite far from the North Pole. Peary was convinced that the photograph had been retouched, and thus began the first argument questioning his adversary’s honesty, as a
means to call into question his having made it to the North Pole. In the photograph the shape of the peak had been modified by cropping both sides of the mountain to accentuate the steepness of the slope. Even though several expeditions of the period sought to confirm its veracity, the weather conditions made it impossible to recreate a photograph from the same angle to determine the facts.
“The Conquest of Mount McKinley” by Frederick Cook is the most controversial photograph in the history of polar exploration.
Later, Cook gave conferences depicting himself as a misunderstood man who had been robbed of his glory by Peary’s influential circle of friends. He even went so far as to make a film, The Truth About the Pole (1912), that shows, above all, the scant means needed to represent life at the poles: a wood cabin on a white background tells his version of the events. The dispute continued until the United States entered World War I and public curiosity in the polar question waned and Cook turned his eye to oil speculation, for which he was accused of fraud and ended up in prison. After his release in 1930, he tried to again stake his claim as the first conqueror of the pole, but the scientific committees no longer took him seriously.