by Paul Theroux
Body on body, naked, pairing—double exposure: two of everything. And how strange it was when they walked on their hands and showed their beaks and cracks as wrinkled fluidy faces in collars of hair between their kicking legs. But I was frightened by the roar of the men and their table-thumping; by the sight of the circus performers stripped naked, and the grunts that reached me in my cubicle; by the heat. What disturbed me most was seeing people I knew so changed—not just Papa hollering, but Harvey and Hornette belly to belly on the tramping horse.
Nakedness speaks in a way no voice can, saying fear and woe and age. But it wasn’t naked anymore, nor a show of muscle and damp hair. It was a thin bruised suit, pale enough for me to photograph the stitchings of veins, and luminous in the cigar smoke and dust and paint. Their defenseless skin! Flesh has a tremble that clothes hide: everything they did looked dangerous.
Typically, the nude is shown in repose or making love. But this was against all tradition—Hornette swiveling by her teeth, the tumblers becoming bizarre people with fuzzy shrunken heads, Hornette rejoining Harvey on the horse. It was unimaginable human motion, animated by a crowd of cheering men. I would not have believed it without my camera.
What Harvey and Hornette were doing at a gallop, the Faffners did on their high wire, without a net. I could barely keep my camera steady when I saw them get down on one knee and face each other, mimic a caress eighty feet in the air, denting the wire where their knees pressed it. They remained suspended, swaying slightly, in a risky balance. Their lips touched and their shoulders met: I expected them to be jerked to the ground and to end up in a broken pudding of arms and legs. This danger made its eroticism vividly blacker.
But they stayed on the wire and continued to simulate the sexual duet. The symmetry anchored them. The pair of them were saved by the electric field of their two bodies: the man and woman joined making them a perfect magnet, incapable of coming loose. She chased him; she sat on his face; she hung by her knees, hinged upside down on the wire and, crouching, he gratified her with his finger, while she rocked back and forth in the air, her arms outspread, like spiders at play.
Hornette was doing a headstand on Harvey’s own head, repeating his seated posture in a mirror image. The tumblers had gone off. They were replaced by a lion act, six growlers on red stools making mauling motions with their paws at the naked girl with the whip and chair. I could not bring myself to photograph them licking her, and I looked away when she pulled their tails. But I had six tries at them lunging through her legs and rubbing and lifting her as they passed sleekly under the arch of her thighs.
Flesh had never been mocked like this; bravery and invention and skill had never looked so futile. The laughter was a devilish whooping of encouragement. I looked through the lighted smoke in the noisy pit and saw degraded artists and their maniacal patrons burning with pain and pleasure.
I knew there could be nothing beyond this. My last picture showed a row of men, Papa among them, on their feet behind a table holding the remains of their pig dinner, jugs, and bones; and damnation on their faces and on the tent wall near their heads, like smoke, the crooked shadow of Harvey skewering Hornette. The picture was partly accidental: I was photographing a sorry cry.
Yet I was calm. Pictures are supposed to reflect the photographer’s mood, but nothing could have been further from my somber mood than this frenzy. Though I had caught my breath more than once, the only sound I made was the barely audible click of my Speed Graphic’s blink.
I had never felt more alone. I had found what I was looking for; and what Hornette had said was true—it was indescribable. The speaker heaves images around, his telling simplifies the truth until simplicity makes it a lie: words are toys. But my camera saw it all, and my photographs were memory. With equipment far clumsier than words, my trap for available light, I could portray what was unspeakable. And now I had the ultimate picture, a vision of hell.
I couldn’t face them after that—not Papa, not any of them. It only remained for me to develop and print the pictures and hang them over my name and await celebration. I left that night, before the circus folk got back to Mrs. Fritts’s: a taxi to St. Pete and the train to New York.
I spent five days and nights in my darkroom at the hotel, processing the stacks of negatives and printing them. They were even better than I expected: I had snapped a sturgeon and come out with pictures of caviar. I knew when I delivered that portfolio to the Camera Club that it would cause a sensation. Anger is a knowledge of failure; I was happy, calmer than I had ever been. My part as a photographer ended when the pictures were out of my hands—then they belonged to the world. I wanted that, but I wanted more.
20
Love’s Mirror
I WAS innocent for the last time, and shivering with cold. The weather contradicted my dream: was there significance in this chilly reality? I had seen myself arriving on a hot evening in dry moonlight; a whisper of wind; a landscape banked like a room. But in my hurry to reach my brother I had boarded a night train in New York after delivering my Florida pictures to the Camera Club. The canal crossing from Onset to Bourne, a mile of metaphor, confounded me by plunging me into dark early-morning mist. The Cape was imprisoned in freezing sea-fog, and dawn was far off. The spikes of mist continued until we were halfway to Yarmouth-port—Sandwich or thereabouts—where it began to lift on the crewcut marshes and revealed in flecks of escaping light nature’s frostbitten eyesores.
The Cape was bare and looked assaulted. It was that naked spell in late autumn between the last fall of leaves and the first fall of snow. Damp fields in Barnstable, an exposed farm house in Cummaquid, a frail soaked landscape of harmed hills and squashed grass and sunken meadows. In this stalled season, without muffling foliage or insulating snow, the brooks were louder, the rasp of crows noisier, and the sea-moan a despairing lament some distance inland through the dripping fingers of naked trees. That amplified racket, and the excluding cold, made me a stranger.
In those years, Hyannis was one street—a white church, a post office, a filling station, ten shops. That wet morning its off-season look was gooseflesh and senility, and it wore its shreds of fog like a mad old bride in a torn veil. It jeered at my homesickness and reminded me that home is such a tragic consolation of familiar dullness—that tree, this fence, that shrinking road.
Yet I was as happy as a clam. The photographer’s habitual impulse is to go on shooting, despite her incredulity. The camera—her most private room—must be used for memory. But I had taken care of that. On my Florida sojourn I had found the limits of the eye and I believed there was no more to see on earth. I had done air, earth, fire, water, and flesh, and now I could dispose of the world as I had disposed of photography and Blanche and Papa—my obsession, my rival, my patron. What I saw of Hyannis looked ridiculous and insubstantial, but with Orlando all things were possible. I was determined to begin again. It only remained for him to embrace me, for a return home was a return to childhood: a beginning.
I sat in Mr. Wampler’s old taxi—a beach wagon with wood paneling on the outside—my camera in my lap, my hands over its eye. We passed CLOSED FOR SEASON and SEE YOU NEXT YEAR signs. I was lucky. I knew this: we are offered not one life but many, and if we are alert we can seize a second or third. Sorrow is for those who expect too much from one; who, having exhausted all the possibilities of a single life, turn inward and refuse to see that schizophrenia is merely a mistake in arithmetic. When I heard someone described as a split personality I thought, Only a schizo? Why choose two lives when so many are available in us? My life as a photographer was over—there were no more pictures to take—but I had other lives in me, and there would always be others as long as I was in love. Wasn’t love the chance to lead another’s life and to multiply his by your own?
With Orlando I could be anyone I wished. It was the feeling I had known as a child, a longing buttressed by hope, and during that brief ride out to Grand Island from the railway station I felt a tide of blood batter my heart and a
t last a great warmth—though the day was bleak; and a blossoming of optimism—though the mist at the windows had turned to pissing rain. I was drenched in a freshet of joy as we bumped over the sand sludge that rutted the road.
There was the letterbox stenciled PRATT and the house snug on its own stretch of coast and surrounded by pines. Behind it, where the bare orchard began, was the looming windmill with its sails anchored, and some straggly dead geraniums blowing in the window boxes. And a maroon car parked near the house: Orlando’s Hudson.
“This is far enough.”
“Can’t stop here,” said Mr. Wampler. Mr. Wampler had a froggy voice; a tobacco-chewer, he spat often and inaccurately; he was known as “peculiar.” He jerked his thumb at my peepshow in the back of the beach wagon. “Can’t carry it all that way—not with my back.”
“Stop the car,” I said. “I want to walk.”
“Too damned much to carry—”
“Leave it here by the letter-box.”
“The rain’ll raise hell with it.” He put on his “peculiar” face: puzzlement, glee, incomprehension.
“I don’t give a hoot about the rain. I don’t need this stuff anymore.”
Mr. Wampler was still protesting as I paid him. I heard the thud of my trunks hitting the roadside as I made my way up the long drive toward Orlando. Instead of using the knocker, I let myself in with my key, and I saw my hand trembling to turn it. I pushed the door open and waited for some responsive sound of welcome. But there was only the grumble of the taxi dying on the road, and the regular slap of the sea, waves emptying on our length of beach.
My dream had been flawed. I knew even then I had been deceived by its moony romance. I was cold. It was a weakly lighted morning, with a storm pushing at the house. My moonlit windmill was fanciful. I corrected my dream: I would find him here, in the house. And he was here—there was his car, parked under the leafless birch.
I stepped in and slammed the door, walked from the parlor to the kitchen. Dishes in the sink and a smell of coffee: hope. I went up the backstairs and groped down the dark hall trying the doors, opening them left and right. Then I was at the front of the house again and looking back at the hall brightened with all the doors open. Not a sign of him. The rain simpered monotonously on the windowpanes, the wind sniffed at the eaves.
Of course! He had gone out. He had risen, made his bed, had a coffee, and gone for a walk in the hope that I would be here when he returned. Orlando loved rough weather. I made my way to the parlor and laughed out loud—a great hollow yuck—when I noticed that I was still wearing my huge camera. I had grown so used to its weight and the strain of its strap I hadn’t felt it. I did not unharness myself, but rather relished its tender and useless weight.
The parlor mirror showed me this businesslike person which, even as I gazed, I ceased to believe in. And it was then—my image fading almost to transparency—that I saw its reflection.
It was movement, it was white, and it appeared as a little flash in the windmill at the depths of the mirror. A swatch of hair, a hand, a face; I could not tell. But the sudden warmth of this tiny signal stirred a creature in me, and it stretched and shook itself and blinked as I brought my face close to the glass for more. My dream had made me cautious, but this was as I had imagined it: the beckoning stroke of light—he was there, he was waiting, through the looking glass, in the windmill.
I woke from this pause and ran through the house, out the back door and squelched across the grass of the sodden lawn. But even as I ran I was holding back. I had waited so long for this—contained my innocence for so many years—I kept myself from rushing to the windmill’s narrow porch and bursting in. My habit of innocence was its own restraint, and the stinging rain from the low cloud slowed me. I was terrified by what I knew was about to happen, as if I were seeing a fuse sparking toward the cylinder of a bomb and anticipating the boom in willful deafness.
And for the first time in my life I knew real fear, a corrosion in my brain that had eaten to a core of panic, shrieking No! Give up! Go back! Frightening me with images of insane joy, drooling thunderclouds, the flooded beach, and showing me risk in the great high sails of the windmill—the blades shuddering and the spit of raindrops sizzling on the windows of the black tower. All the trees pulled at my hair and light was bleeding from my eyes as I fought my way to the wall.
So I did not go in, and I was weeping before I raised myself to the spattered window and saw him. He was on his knees, the veins standing out on his forehead, marble and blood, in a posture of furious pagan prayer, his mouth fixed in demand. There were clawmarks on his shoulders. He might have been swooning, dying in a fit, he looked so tormented.
His reflection blazed on the floor, a white shadow struggling under him, his double heaving at him. This was my dream exactly: the two bodies creased, light on light. I raised my knees and clasped my ankles at the small of his back and thrust and we were almost there, in a spasm of completion, one body. I twined my hands on his neck and lifted to press myself against him and print my body on his. It was better, wilder than I had imagined, and it refuted the conceit I had carried home about nothing more to see, for there was more and more, a limitless vision that mocked my certainty. The eye was a palace and the world inexhaustibly lovely. I was humbled—terrified—and then by an old reflex I was seeing it all through the intense light of my Third Eye; and at last I understood that it was not me panting against him and raising my throat for him to kiss—not me, but Phoebe.
She called out and the next instant passed into him with a sob and was lost: they were one. Throughout, a clicking had sustained me. But each click was a subtraction of light and finally my feeble effort to see caused a last click and I was blind.
And yet, as if sighted, I went back to the house, to my room, and put my camera down. I hadn’t stumbled. I hardly knew what had happened. Everything was in order. I heard the rain, the waves breaking on the beach, my gasps. But my doubt would not leave me—something was undone. To the mirror, then. I took four steps to the far wall and gazed. And tried again. It was hopeless. I had no face.
PART FOUR
21
Blindman’s Buff
THE TELEPHONE was ringing again, a clanging that caused an itch in my finger joints, the tip of my nose, my tongue. My eyes were in mourning. Blindness, the black sparks of light in its infancy, had stimulated my other senses, given me a responsive circuit of naked nerve ends to compensate for my blindfold. My scalp told me the temperature; my ears were photosensitive; I followed my nose. My retina was a blur of glaucous shoes, and beyond it, in my eye socket’s depthless jelly, I swam and tried to surface. But I was slow, and though my being never ceased to throb with the slurred tatoo of time, I felt submerged and misunderstood. Imagine a lovely pellet of amber trapped in a dead fly. I was bashed with energy and suffered a continual buzz of sensation. Imagine a worm squeezed in its burrow, or a clam in a gale.
I was blind, but my body was alight.
“It’s another cable from the Camera Club,” said Orlando.
They had stopped delivering them; they were phoning them through. From across the room I could feel the receiver heating in Orlando’s hand.
“That makes twenty,” said Phoebe. “Aren’t you thrilled?”
“What’ll I tell them?” said Orlando.
“If it’s money, say yes. If it’s more congratulations, say thank you. If they haven’t paid for a reply, forget it.”
Phoebe said, “You’re a hit, Maude! Won’t Papa and Mama be pleased!”
They were still in Florida. What was keeping them? I said, “They’ll die when they see me like this.”
Phoebe was approaching me. I heard the crunch of her petticoat. I could practically taste her oncoming hair. She had started a warm draft that reached me when she was still ten feet away.
She said, “It’s just temporary—eyestrain or something. Think of all the pictures you’ve taken. You’ll see.”
Her tone was confident. But Phoebe had
bought me a pair of smoked glasses and urged me to wear them. I knew it was because she couldn’t stand my staring eyes.
“Sure I will.” They did not know why I was blind, what I had seen. My success had caused my breakdown: fame, overwork, exertion. It’s only natural, they said. They had no idea that I had had two lives, that the one I had valued most had failed me, that it had nothing to do with my career.
“Won’t she, Ollie?”
Now Orlando was approaching Phoebe. I heard his wink, like an aperture shutting; heard the skid of his cheek on hers, and their soft soap-bubble kiss, and his disguising heartiness: “You’re going to be all right, cookie.”
“I’m all right now,” I said. “It’s high tide. The gulls are sunning themselves on the roof. Scallops and mashed potatoes for lunch. And I love you in that green dress, Phoebe, with your new petticoat all stiff and crackly.”
Orlando said, “How does it feel to be famous?”
I wanted to say, Quit looking at me like that. But I didn’t want him to know that in our games of Blindman’s Buff I had learned to see.
I said, “Remarkable.”
Blindness was not oblivion—not here, at home. I knew every inch of the house, every chair and table, the position of the radio, the ashtrays, the clock, the nap of every carpet. Experience was the same as sight, and my blindness made the touch and smell of the house much keener. I could walk from room to room without faltering or sticking my hands out. And my blindness made me see what my pictures never had—that it was a creaking wreck of a place, with musty and moth-infested corners, a cupboard of family intimacies. Nothing had changed in the house, but I had not understood its secrets until now. In a way, I had been blind before. I ought to have seen, years ago, that Orlando and Phoebe were lovers. But, then, I’d had only my eyes.
All the pictures I had taken were diminished by what I discovered to be true. I hadn’t begun to be a photographer. I had once thought, when I had done blind old Mrs. Conklin and Slaughter the piano tuner, that blindness was serene, like sleep. But it was not that at all. It was ceaseless vision, a babble of voice: the floors spoke, the walls, the potted plants, the books on their shelves, every phase of daylight—nothing was more audible than dawn, or Orlando’s look of pity, or Phoebe’s skin. Shouts and whispers; and each sound was a vivid picture, reminding me that I had seen nothing.
