The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing

by Daniel Bergner

  “I would give anything in this world for my legs back, except for my son,” she wrote in her journal. The journal came with sketches and sayings on some of its pages. In one of the drawings, a nude goddess, whose body appeared to end at the knees, was borne aloft by a population of devoted, unclothed worshippers. One of the aphorisms went like this: “In truth we talk only to ourselves, but sometimes we talk loud enough that others may hear us.”

  She didn’t talk loudly, not when it came to the questions that whispered and screamed. She just held herself upright on the parallel bars. She just picked up a foot and put it down, repeated and repeated this, then did the same with the other. She took a step. She took two. She made it to the end of the bars. There possibility ended, as though she had come to the edge of a cliff. There life itself seemed to end. Capability, what meager ration she now had, was cut off.

  She managed to turn around. A step, another, a third, a fourth. To the end, the cliff, and back again, hands clinging on, hands for balance, hands to keep her from falling like a plank, hands like a baby’s on furniture as it learns to walk, but she without a baby’s future, she with this body—was this a body?—forever. Her son was sometimes there visiting, watching. Thinking back to that time, she couldn’t remember what was said between them. It seemed they hadn’t spoken at all. “Maybe there wasn’t a lot to say.”

  A doctor had complimented what existed of her thighs: the fitting of prosthetics wouldn’t be difficult. But the fabricated limbs cut agonizingly into her groin. They had to be reshaped. Then the swelling of her stumps went down. More fitting, followed by more pain, more rounds of adjustments. And all the while, despite the pain, she stepped back and forth, back and forth along the parallel bars, exhausting herself so completely that sleep came by six o’clock.

  She woke to the same truths that had dominated the day before, the same long void when she looked down, the same long void of years in front of her, woke eventually at home when she was discharged. A visiting nurse taught her to use a portable toilet until she could lever herself onto the regular one. Within two weeks she taught herself to pull and writhe her body into and out of the tub, so her husband no longer had to lift her in and out. Having mastered the dogged movements of a walker, she tried crutches in their driveway. To keep her upright, her husband walked behind her, bracing her with a strap.

  He wheeled her, one night, into a bar where a friend of theirs was performing. “The band was real good,” she recounted in her journal. “We ate tamales and drank beer. I was watching everyone dance to the country music Rusty sang, and I felt I would give anything to be up there on the dance floor. It hurt me to see everyone dancing. I cried the whole way home. It felt like someone tore my heart out.” On a later evening, for her husband’s birthday, when she could approximate a walk on her prosthetics, they went to another bar to hear another band. As they were leaving, making their drunken way across the parking lot, one of her legs fell off.

  “He never talks about my accident,” she wrote. “We seem to not be able to communicate. I think he is keeping it all bottled up inside. I guess it’s the military way or else he doesn’t have any feelings.”

  He had always liked to stay out with his friends, on his own and late; now he stayed out more often and later. And there were nights he didn’t keep things to himself at all. He blamed her for what had happened, for being careless, for letting the gas tank go empty, for stepping around to the side of the car. After a night of drinking at their house, with her mother visiting along with friends from his tour in England, he took a rifle from a closet. He declared that he was driving over to kill the woman who had done this to her. They had the police report, knew her name and address. The woman had never so much as called; she’d never even sent a card. Rifle in hand, he raged until their guests restrained him.

  There was sex. But it was she, as much as her husband, who avoided it, couldn’t bear it. She was a woman whose prosthetics sometimes farted out pockets of air as she stood up; a woman who rode to her sessions of physical therapy on a special bus filled with retarded children; a woman who was stared at constantly; a woman who was told in a kindly voice by her neighbor at the mailboxes, “I don’t know if I could deal with that”—with having Laura’s body, with being what Laura was.

  Laura asked to see her X-rays. “I want proof,” she confided in her journal, “that the doctors had to do what they had to do. I know it will really hurt, but I want to see it for myself. Maybe it will help me accept.”

  A doctor clipped up the images, clicked on the white light. “The knees were all broken in half,” she wrote. “The bones were all broken in half. There was a dark spot on the right one. He said the bone was missing when I arrived there. It must have been on the side of the road.

  “To look at those X-rays realizing that those were my legs brought a feeling of such great loss. He told me if they had been his they would have come off. He said a vascular surgeon was called to see if they could be saved, and there was no way. Not only were the bones broken up but all the tissue and muscle and cartilage was ruined. He told me he would show me the photos, but I refused. Do not look back but move ahead now. He said you’re young and pretty and have a complete and fulfilling life ahead of you.”

  Desolate, determined, exhilarated, she walked away from the X-rays. She walked away, clinging to his words. But they evaporated, turned fast to nothing. They were a trick, a lie. “I was disgusting. No man could ever want me,” she said. “My whole life I was told I was pretty. Now what do I have? Now that I don’t have that, now that I’m revolting, what do I have?”

  For resilience she relied not on the doctor’s words but on a patient she saw in physical therapy. The woman was paralyzed from the waist down. Legs in braces and body supported by a therapist, she was walking—in a sense. But it was only an exercise. It was nothing she would ever do on her own. Her legs, Laura thought with a piercing satisfaction, were utterly useless. They would be that way forever, while Laura was capable of walking by herself.

  For resilience this was what she had: “There are people worse off than me.”

  A year after losing her legs, she overdosed on Valium and nearly succeeded in killing herself.

  IN Berlin, in the years between world wars, there was an artist who began in advertising. Hans Bellmer designed campaigns for household products and then, as the Nazis took power, gave up all commercial work and concentrated on building two female dolls, almost life-sized, made from papier-mâché and plaster, metal and wood. The limbs could be bent and twisted. The heads could tilt and pivot. A second pair of legs could be attached to a central ball joint on one of the dolls. Extra breasts and buttocks and pelvises could be appended. Body parts could be removed.

  He photographed his dolls in poses of distortion and dismemberment, then gave the pictures, in the form of a tiny self-published book, to his beautiful seventeen-year-old cousin, whose arrival in his life, not as a lover he touched but as the embodiment of desire, had inspired the invention of the figures, the arrangement and rearrangement, the taking apart and putting back together of what he had made, the capturing with his camera. The cousin managed to give the photographs to the French surrealist poet André Breton. And Breton published them in his magazine, Minotaure.

  It was the start of a career that took Bellmer to live in Paris and put him in a circle with Man Ray, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp. His method was obsessive. His output was minuscule, his life impoverished. He drew, he made collages, but three decades later, approaching his own death, he was still working with one of his two dolls, finding new ways to transfigure the body he had formed. Next to the other artists in his group, he was unknown, invisible. But those who discovered him were haunted: he took them inside a more harrowing subconscious than the other surrealists seemed willing to confront.

  A nude girl, both childish and fully developed, lies sprawled near the bottom of a wooden staircase. It is one of Bellmer’s dolls with a pink bow in her hair and high, prominent breasts. She see
ms, in the photograph, to have been pushed down the stairs; one leg is missing at the hip. And it looks like violence has been done to her before, that her other knee has been broken in the past: rope, crudely knotted, seems to brace it. An arm, too, has been severed. Shadows mottle her skin, and the bottom banister of the stair rail obscures half of her face. The fingers of her remaining hand peek from behind the banister—the fingers are both trying to grab on, to stop her fall, and waving, beckoning the viewer of the photograph, who feels himself to be standing in the shadows that deepen at the foreground of the picture. Bangs cover her forehead: she is innocent. Her chin rests between her breasts, and her mouth is slightly open: she is seductive. She looks, at once, as though she has been knocked unconscious and as though she is sleeping, sated. And she looks aroused, wanting. Her belly protrudes, and the uptilted slit of her vagina occupies the center of the frame.

  “Fit joint to joint, testing the ball-joints by turning them to their maximum position in a childish pose,” he wrote in an essay that accompanied his first book of photographs, his words sometimes taking the form of instructions to himself—a howto for fabricating and disfiguring a doll. “Gingerly follow the hollows, sampling the pleasures of curves, losing oneself in the clamshell of the ear, creating beauty and also distributing the salt of deformation a bit vengefully.” His work was driven by the wish to explore his own—and the viewer’s—longing, but also by the ambition to expose the yearnings of the girl. “Don’t stop short of the interior,” he instructed himself. “Lay bare suppressed girlish thoughts.” His images should reveal, inside the figure, the violent battle “between desire and its interdiction.”

  Another photograph is taken from behind. A sleeveless and flimsy undergarment, held up by a single shoulder strap, covers part of the girl’s back. Her head is turned; her chin lies hidden against her right shoulder; her lips nearly brush the strap; she gazes at the camera. The back half of her head is gone, cut away. Luxuriant curls of hair grow from her open skull and fall profligately past her neck and down her spine. Her body is bare except for the undergarment, which reaches only to her waist. But there isn’t much body left. She has no arms. The socket of one shoulder is ragged. The flesh of one leg has been stripped from the limb itself. The other leg has been replaced by a twig-thin mechanism with a joint at the knee that looks like a minimalist prosthetic. The round buttocks sit atop these legs, voluptuous. A bit of their paper skin is cracked and eroding, making them look somehow all the more sensual and obscene, all the more provocative. The surface of her face is cracked and scratched as well. A bruise adorns the corner of one eye, and she gazes back out of that corner, fearful, inviting, anticipating that the viewer will approach her, assault her, take her from behind. Her shadow blackens one wall. The walls around her are tight. She is wedged into one corner of the room. Even if she wanted to escape, there would be no way.

  There are those who have seen Bellmer’s art as a reaction against Nazism, who have decided that his portraits of the female body were meant as a protest against Nazism’s reverence for physical perfection. Yet he scorned all political and moral aims. “Pulp writers, magicians, and confectioners used to have that secret something, that beautiful sweet which was called nonsense and that brings joy,” he wrote, aligning his aesthetic with theirs. “They dispensed with that unhappiness normally associated in my experience with useful intentions, and revealed the mysteries of roads less traveled by.” For Bellmer, the sweet and the harrowing—inseparable—were the path to revelation.

  The doll, doe-eyed, leans back against a wall, oblivious to the fact that the skin of her stomach has been torn off, uncovering the hollow within, as though she has been disemboweled. Both arms are gone from their sockets. A leg has been lost. The doe eyes gaze slightly upward, unalarmed, receptive. The nose has a cute curve.

  The doll, in another image, is reduced to the head and chest, nothing below that, and rests on the edge of a decrepit washbasin. Doe eyes have been replaced by wide, blank eyeballs. Her bangs are a pair of wispy spikes. The scalp is balding. Four perfectly spherical breasts protrude from the upper torso: two from the shoulders, one from the center of the chest, one from the side of the ribcage. The invitation, the terror, the innocence that animate the faces in the other photographs are absent. All expression is absent. Not only the eyes but the entire face is vacant. The girl is ravaged, dead, resilient only in the sexuality that is so aggressively present in the four breasts. The way her half-torso sits balanced on the rim of the chipped basin makes her look all the more assaulted, abandoned.

  Yet beauty infuses the picture, just as it does all the others: the beauty of starkness, of the interplay between the texture of walls and the texture of flesh, the beauty of things seen in all their mute strangeness, the beauty of the bewildering, never explained but always illuminated. A doll, headless, with two sets of legs and groins, sprawled on a mattress in what seems to be the aftermath of making love to itself; a doll, headless, with two sets of legs and groins, sprawled on a field of dry grass in what seems to be the aftermath of rape; a doll without arms and only half of one leg suspended high in a tree, the photograph taken from below so that she floats, ethereal, in a blanched sky; a doll diminished to several distorted buttocks, nothing more, and cast in gold—all are suffused by the light of Bellmer’s ardent focus, his thrall, his love.

  In middle age, Bellmer began an affair with an artist and writer fourteen years younger, Unica Zurn. She became his model and muse, a living doll. In a double-sided drawing, done in thread-thin white lines on black paper, Zurn stands, wearing a suit whose modest skirt reaches below her knees, with her hands folded demurely in front of her pelvis. That is the image on one side of the paper. On the reverse side, she is down on all fours, her skirt short and pleated. She wears striped socks and Mary Janes—the girlish shoes he often put on his dolls as he posed them. The drawing holds a single element of collage, a pink hair bow. Her face, turned to the side, almost grazes the floor as she peers at a child’s glass marble, her fingers poised to touch it. The marble was symbolic to him: “a view of its interior allowed one to observe the frozen ecstasy of its spirals.” On hands and knees, both animal and child, Zurn gazes into the spirals of her own erotic being, transfixed and tempted to go further.

  For a photograph, he bound her torso and buttocks tightly, asymmetrically, over and over and over with twine. She curls on a bed so that, from the back, her head, arms, legs are all out of view. What’s left for the camera are uncanny, anarchic risings of flesh extruding around the string, a crazed flowering of flesh, an abstract sculpture made from the most figurative of objects, the human body, an attempt to reach beneath the conscious to the unnamable.

  But while she was model and muse, Zurn had her own voice. Her novella Dark Spring was, she said, “the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood.” Ten and eleven and twelve years old as the story unfolds, the girl fantasizes about kidnappers binding her fiercely and raping her with a knife, penetrating her with the blade. She is “honored” by all they do.

  “Scenes of madness, of torture, of ecstasy were drawn by Bellmer with the sensitivity of a musician, the precision of an engineer, the brusqueness of a surgeon,” Zurn declared. “If we watch him at work, his hand seems weightless. One wants to know if it is tense against the paper, or if this pleasing line is a piece of sorcery from the void…. Whoever is sketched by him shares with him the abhorrence of self. It is impossible for me to render him greater praise.”

  The girl and her violent fantasies, the adult and her urge to be annihilated through her lover’s art—Zurn was the proof, in blood and muscle and brain, of Bellmer’s vision of eros. But neither character nor author, it seemed, could survive the desire they had opened up in themselves. At the novella’s end, the girl kills herself, and soon after the book was published, Zurn committed suicide exactly as her character does: jumping from a window, destroying her body on the ground below, leaving herself broken like one of Bellmer’s dolls.

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p; ON his lunch hour, between sketching scenes to sell liquor and hiring conventionally pretty women to inhabit them, Ron walked the city with his camera. Manhattan seemed a dreamscape dominated by the vertical: not only the buildings but the crowds of pedestrians formed a world that was relentlessly straight up and down. “A disabled person,” he said, “is a break in that strict verticality, a diagonal in that mass.”

  He sought out the diagonals to photograph, taking the images, at first, covertly, aiming his lens swiftly on the streets. In one picture, a woman propels herself along the sidewalk amid a stream of shoppers, propels herself partly on legs with braces, partly on crutches. Her bare muscled arms in a sleeveless dress, her in-twisting feet in elegant shoes, her slender hips thrust outward by her skewed stride, her chest leaning, almost lunging far forward of her legs, the angles of body parts accentuated by the straightness of the crutches—the entire effect is of a mime or a dancer expressively bent, except that this figure is more bent and expressive than a healthy body could ever manage. She is sculptural: contorted, animated, allusive, mesmerizing.

  Another photograph captures a crippled woman through eyes other than his own. His quick focusing and clicking was meant simply to record the woman as she maneuvered herself off a curb on crutches. But without intending to, he included in the frame an onlooker standing behind his subject. Ron’s lens focuses in one direction, reverently, on the woman making her way off the sidewalk, while the bystander stares in the opposite direction, her eyes angling downward at the subject’s lower legs, at the deformation or absence that is cut out of the frame, that the photograph does not reveal. The bystander’s gaze is far from reverent. Her fingers touch her lips in horror.