I looked at the photograph. It had been taken in Bogense during a harbour festival and used by the local newspaper, which must have lent it on to a bureau. I had sold the paper a series from the festival, one of my first successful attempts at selling press photos. Lola was 20 years old and lived in the same commune as me. She wanted to be a folk singer, a female equivalent to Bob Dylan. We had slept together a couple of times. She had come into my room at night, but then she went to lots of rooms. The commune had been trying to cast off bourgeois jealousy. They couldn’t of course, but Lola didn’t seem troubled by it. On the other hand, she created problems because she was desirable and provoked a feeling of possessiveness in love-struck men. The man in the photograph wasn’t called Wolfgang. His name had been Ernst. He was just 18 years old and came from Hamburg. Like everyone else, he wanted to be an artist. He wanted to write novels. He was left-wing, but I couldn’t remember him flirting with bombs. He had taken part in discussions about the necessity of violence in the struggle against the bourgeois state, but others had been writing about that in magazines and newspapers. He had been madly in love with Lola and she had dallied with him, made love to him and moved on to my – or someone else’s – bed. He had gazed at her with forlorn eyes and followed her around like a puppy.
I couldn’t remember anything else. I don’t think I’d given Lola a second thought in the intervening time, getting on for 30 years now. But on the terrace, in the darkness of night, I suddenly remembered that she had cried the last time we had been together. I think it was the last time. I thought she was lovely and sexy, but I wasn’t in love with her. I knew I wanted to move on. I wanted out. It was as if, when she realised I was going to leave her, I took some of her power away.
I couldn’t remember our lovemaking, but in night-time Madrid I suddenly heard her frail voice.
“Peter. My only talent is for seducing men. I have the talent to make men do what I want. Why don’t you do what I want?”
I didn’t know why I remembered that so clearly. I didn’t even know if it had any significance. Memory can play the strangest tricks on you. I left the commune shortly afterwards. That’s how it was. People moved in and out during that strange period when everything seemed possible, when the pain of life was suppressed and the world was changing. I tried to recall other faces from the period, but they were a blur of long hair and beards, flared jeans, mixed bathing, naked breasts in the sun, children left to their own devices, discussions about society and politics, parkas, identical t-shirts, unfiltered cigarettes and women wearing headscarves that looked like mauve nappies. As if we had been a bunch of clones who had been thrown together under the same roof.
I got up and went down to my studio to develop and copy the photographs from Catalonia, so that Oscar wouldn’t be disappointed when he turned up, as he was bound to, first thing in the morning to admire my new scoop. It was something I could do better than anyone else: steal up on the prey and reveal it in all its nakedness.
3
Oscar came round at about 10 a.m.
As usual, I had prepared breakfast for Maria Luisa and Amelia at just after seven o’clock. Like most Madrileños we went to bed late, but we got up early. This was the rhythm of the city. We tried to take an afternoon nap. We led a very Spanish lifestyle, so we didn’t eat much in the morning – a croissant and a big glass of strong coffee with milk for Amelia and me, and a glass of milk with a piece of white bread with mild cheese for Maria Luisa. She was in a bow-phase, her dark hair done up with pink or gaily coloured ribbons which contrasted with her sober, blue school uniform. From down on the plaza, we could hear the morning symphony – cars, the clanging of metal security grilles as they were rolled up, the roar of motorbikes and shouting and clattering from heavy lorries delivering supplies to the bars and shops.
Amelia drank her coffee in cautious sips. Each morning was new for me. Each morning it seemed like a small miracle that she was still there. She was wearing jeans and a shirt, a touch of make-up, her work outfit. She looked like what she was, an attractive, modern woman. Our eyes met and we recalled our lovemaking. We didn’t speak much in the mornings, we didn’t need to. We ate breakfast in the kitchen, in pleasant, sleepy silence with the radio’s over-zealous traffic bulletins, sport and news in the background, and then my loved-ones set off into the world. I often experienced an irrational feeling of loss when they left me in the morning. I dreaded losing them. They gave my life meaning.
Oscar thought it rather amusing and slightly incomprehensible that I had turned into this bourgeois family man, but he was probably a little envious too. He feared boredom, and needed stronger and stronger stimulants to combat it. I don’t mean vast quantities of alcohol or drugs, although from time to time he stopped trying to avoid them, usually with catastrophic consequences, after which he’d dry out for a while. Speed and cocaine had both had Oscar in their clutches, but he got his biggest fix from challenges. He saw boundaries as lines to be breached, like a general always looking for the weak point in an enemy’s defences. He constantly had to prove to himself that he was still young. Oscar had always been a Don Juan, and when he was younger I suppose this had its charm because he was so successful, but now that we were nearly 50 there was something desperate about his mania for conquests. He did admit that he no longer made such a big deal out of it, but that it was important for him to try his luck. He had been brought up short when he turned 40 and realised that many young women saw him as an old man. Yes, a dirty old man at that. Gloria had ridiculed him for weeks, until they had made their peace yet again. They couldn’t do without one other. And also, of course, they had their joint businesses. Somehow or other they were joined at the hip. Without the one, the other would be useless.
I went down to the bar on the corner and read El Pais while I drank another coffee. The Basques were still at war with one another and the Spanish state. The previous evening ETA had killed a Spanish policeman in Bilbao. A young woman had been found murdered, shot through the mouth. The message was clear, she had grassed. A few weeks earlier they had murdered a young Basque local politician, a moderate nationalist, because the government had refused to release imprisoned members of ETA. The fury and frustration in the Basque provinces had been overwhelming. More than a million people had demonstrated on the streets of Bilbao. A couple of days later 30,000 ETA sympathisers had taken part in a counter-demonstration in San Sebastián. It was as if a civil war was raging. It seemed as if the killing would never end. At regular intervals a car bomb would explode on the streets of Madrid, causing a blanket of anger and fear to settle over the city. In my youth, during General Franco’s dictatorship, I had regarded ETA as freedom fighters. Now they were only benighted youngsters who, at a time when Europe’s borders were blurring and becoming lines in outdated atlases, were an anachronism. A hangover from the barbaric ideologies of the 20th century.
I took the newspaper home with me, to wait for Oscar who I knew would be anxious to see the photographs. I wasn’t feeling too happy about them. Part of the secret of my profession was that officially no one knew that I was the photographer. The images were sold by the agency. But the Minister’s bodyguards had seen me and the number plate on my rented car. I ran the risk of suddenly being thrust in the media spotlight myself, and even though I made my living from the public’s ferocious thirst for knowledge of other people’s lives and misfortunes, I guarded my private life more zealously than if it were a royal household.
Oscar rang the intercom. I knew it was him from the insistent way he pressed the buzzer. Money had become just as powerful an aphrodisiac for Oscar as a shapely behind had once been. Money could turn him on.
I lifted the receiver.
“Yes, Oscar,” I said, and pressed the button that released the lock so that my old friend could come up.
Oscar and I went way back, to that extraordinary spring of 1977, when Spain had changed so dramatically. The changes in Spain that year were just as radical as those that swept the whole of Europe
in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. In 1977 there were only two countries in Europe that didn’t participate in some form of European collaboration – Albania and Spain. That spring, barely two years after General Franco died in his sick bed, Oscar and I had met in the middle of the night in a bar on Calle Echégaray, where I was living in a little boarding house. It was one of Madrid’s really old bars and Oscar seemed to fill the little room. The walls were covered with yellow decorative tiles and the tables and chairs were small and made of hard wood, so you sat very awkwardly, but they served fantastic wines and stayed open till dawn. Three down-at-heel Andalusian gypsies were attempting to sing flamenco songs. The lead singer had two front teeth missing, the rest were gold. They sang No te vayas todavia with hoarse smoker’s voices, while clapping out the arrhythmic, seductive beat. I noticed Oscar straight away. He was huge and cut an oddly clumsy figure as he sat, holding a large glass of beer, on one of the low seats that resembled a milking stool. Like most people at that time, he had a long, pageboy haircut and a bushy beard. I was with a colleague from Reuters who introduced us.
Oscar was a West-German freelance journalist. I was a Danish freelance photographer who had been hired by a Swedish journalist to take photographs for his articles on the democratisation of Spain, and to translate for him. The communist leader Santiago Carrillo had just returned home and was going to hold his first public rally in Valladolid, and we invited Oscar to join us in our rented car so he could get a story for his German newspapers and journals. He worked hard, but the small left-wing publications he wrote for paid small fees for very long articles.
That’s how it began – by chance – but most of life is made up of a series of chance occurrences which only afterwards, when they’re looked back on, make sense and form a pattern. This is how we try to create a whole out of the fragments of our lives, just as historians try to create an overall picture from the pieces that are left. Age brings with it a desire to see the whole, a desire to believe that there was a pattern, that it wasn’t all just a matter of chance. That life is actually like a big jigsaw in which all the pieces fit together perfectly.
I let Oscar in and we gave each other a hug, as we always did when we hadn’t seen one another for a while. We were real friends. I was extraordinarily fond of Oscar and the feeling was reciprocated, even though we were so different. Back then Oscar and Gloria had probably leaned more to the left. I was more inclined to go with the Zeitgeist, whereas they genuinely believed in the new social order, in the revolution. Today we tend to laugh at the revolutionary fervour of the 1970s. Call it romantic, belittle it. It’s as if we don’t want to acknowledge that lots of people actually believed that the revolution and socialism were just around the corner. In words, at least, Oscar and Gloria, like so many others, flirted with the potential of violence, but I’m sure they didn’t follow up words with action. They looked up to the heroes of the time, such as Mao and Ho Chi Minh. When the atrocities of the Chinese Cultural Revolution began to become apparent, Gloria was disappointed and genuinely shocked, but Oscar was less troubled. Their more radical political beliefs gradually disappeared, replaced by concern for things closer to them. But once they had been as devout as Jesuit priests. We didn’t talk about the past much. In a way that was the most remarkable thing about our youthful conviction. Now it was as if it and the Berlin Wall had never existed. That Marx, Engels, the Soviet Union and the GDR had become mirages in the twilight of the 20th century.
We began earning money and that has a way of changing people. We weren’t alike, but we liked the same music, the same films and the same books, and we were hardly puritans. We thought that life was there to be lived. I had lived too hard, but Amelia had helped me put that behind me, even though the craving would never disappear.
We no longer thought about revolution.
Oscar was a very big man, but he kept himself trim. He had a bit of a belly, but it wasn’t too pronounced, his broad shoulders were imposing and counterbalanced the bulk of his girth. He had a broad face, clean-shaven now, and peculiarly small, brown eyes. He was always elegantly and nonchalantly dressed in tailor-made suits with silk shirts, but no tie. He had a ready, loud and infectious laugh and a poised, confident gait, which announced that he was a successful man. He dominated a gathering and could charm most people. He was a born salesman and had the ability to sell in such a way that the customer felt honoured to be allowed to do business with him. He loved selling. He was essentially a manipulator of people. And, like all great seducers, his moral code was a little dubious. I was glad he was my friend and not my enemy.
We went up to the studio and I showed him the photographs. I had made ten colour and ten black and white prints. It was a nice short story in pictures. The speedboat appears in the cove, they bathe naked, maybe they make love in the water, they lie down together on the beach, the Minister sucks the girl’s toes. The last photograph was the best, but their faces were easiest to see in the shot of them on the speedboat. The Minister leans over his lover. His face is perfectly in focus and his eyes gaze down at her naked breasts. She’s moistening her lips with her tongue. I had managed to get so close that I hadn’t needed the big telephoto lens, which makes for grainy photographs. The details were clean and sharp, as if I had been invited along on their excursion. I had selected the ten prints knowing that most of the world’s celebrity magazines or newspapers would be able to use at least one of them, depending on where each nation and its press featured on the piety scale, what was acceptable practice. As he was a politician, even the broadsheets were bound to use a photograph in articles on the political implications. This would give them a pretext for showing naked breasts, but it would have to be one of the less erotic shots. Just for the hell of it, I had made a single print of their intercourse on the beach, but it was, as I had anticipated, far too pornographic and Oscar didn’t give it a second glance. He knew there wasn’t any money in it.
“Nice work, Peter,” was all he said as he slowly and carefully looked through the series again. I could almost hear his brain calculating which customers should have which photograph.
Oscar, Gloria and I were partners in the agency, which we had named OSPE NEWS. My name had never appeared under a single one of the exposés and other paparazzo photographs that I had taken over the years. I was unknown beyond my professional circle, but a photograph copyrighted to OSPE NEWS featured practically every day in a magazine or a newspaper somewhere in the world. And the money came rolling in. Even my famous photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy was still selling. We had branches in London and Paris and supplied many other photographs, not just of the famous. The agency represented conventional photojournalists, and one of our photographers had won awards for his coverage of the war in the former Yugoslavia, and we also had some excellent sports photographers on our books, but the really serious money came from photographs of famous people in private situations.
Oscar took the photographs and sat down at the white table in the middle of the spacious room where I drank coffee with business associates, or with the clients who sat for me when I was engaged on the other side of my trade. I took portraits of the famous, who paid me a fortune, or of faces which suddenly caught my interest on the street, in a café or a waiting room. I did those free of charge. My own name appeared on the portraits.
Oscar looked at me. “They’re worth even more than you think,” he said.
“He hasn’t been a Minister for long enough to be particularly well known outside Spain,” I said.
Oscar smiled his wolf’s smile. “Peter, old boy. It’s written all over your face. You don’t know who she is!”
I waited. Oscar read celebrity magazines in 17 languages. Not because he was an inveterate voyeur, but because it was part of his job. He studied the international jet set with the same sensitive barometer that a skilful speculator uses to study stocks and shares, balance sheets and foreign news. To be at the cutting edge, to keep one step ahead of the market, the new God of our times. To keep abr
east of who was hot right now, in the limelight and thus vulnerable and marketable.
“Italy,” was all he said.
I picked up one of the photographs. The attractive, smooth face was just like any other pretty young female face, but then again not quite, because it rang a bell. The pouting mouth and the large, slightly slanting eyes. I tried to imagine her wearing make-up. Make-up can change a face so radically that it’s almost unrecognisable, but before I could place her, Oscar told me who she was.
“It’s Arianna Fallacia. It has to be her.”
I looked at the photograph. It was true. She had just missed out on an award at the Cannes Festival. She was a hot newcomer in Italian film. That in itself wouldn’t be enough to make her a household name in Italy or anywhere else, but before she’d started in films she’d been a scantily-clad hostess on one of Italian television’s idiotic game shows – and that made her most definitely profitable.
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