Double Negative

by Ivan Vladislavic

  Photography-wise, Saul Auerbach’s show at the Pollak was the high point of the post-apartheid period, according to the press release. It was not exactly a retrospective, because the selection favoured the contemporary, but it was certainly an overview, and a more reliable record of the past than any history book. Claudia Fischhoff had curated the exhibition along with the artist himself, tracing the development of various themes through his work. The reviewers liked it, although some of them thought there were too many buildings. ‘Where are the people?’ they asked.

  What caught my eye was a notice in the Mail & Guardian to say that Auerbach would be doing a walkabout one Saturday afternoon. The man was known to be publicity-shy, which made this a rare opportunity for his audience to hear about the circumstances in which the photos had been taken and engage him about the issues they raised.

  I got to the gallery early, so that I could look at the work myself before the guided tour. There were a great many photographs but arranged so sparely on the white walls that the gallery looked like a disassembled book. The detailed captions that were a feature of Auerbach’s books had been stacked unobtrusively in the corners of the rooms where one was free to overlook them.

  I scouted through the three rooms. Sixty prints or more, I guessed, arranged chronologically. In the middle room, a man was hunched like a dunce in a classroom corner, reading dutifully. To be honest, I was looking for the photos to which I felt a particular connection. The reviews had made me wonder whether the portraits would be represented at all, but I was not disappointed. Both Veronica and Mrs Ditton were there, along with some other images I always went back to in the books.

  At the appointed time, I went to the foyer where Claudia Fischhoff stood with a sheaf of papers clasped to her chest. I gathered that her glasses, which disfigured her lovely face like one of those black bars for concealing someone’s identity in a photograph, were a kind of disguise. She wanted to be taken more seriously than she supposed her looks allowed.

  Auerbach sloped in through the emergency exit. A dozen heads turned in his direction. I was expecting an old soldier in boots and beret, but his baggy trousers and ill-fitting jacket made him look like an immigrant. If you’d passed him in the street, you might have thought he was a shopkeeper, the better sort of greengrocer. The art lovers, the fans were mainly women, I noticed. The men must be watching the Currie Cup on TV or making potjies. It was all the rage.

  ‘Good afternoon people,’ Claudia said. ‘Please stand a bit closer. If you can take one of these and pass the rest on …’ The stack of papers listing titles and prices went round the circle.

  ‘Saul Auerbach needs no introduction,’ she said. The man in question stood beside her, head down, shifting from one scuffed shoe to the other, like a schoolboy summoned before the class to recite some Tennyson. His face was flushed and his hair, which had thinned since our last meeting, stuck out at weird angles. He looked as if he’d been playing football with the security guards in the car park a minute ago.

  Despite her opening line, Claudia proceeded to give an overview of Auerbach’s career. While she was speaking, he fiddled with the fringes of his scarf and shrugged his arms inside the jacket, and glanced up from time to time to see whether we were still there. Claudia said that Auerbach was a great photographer, more than a photographer, an artist, a great artist, a colossus bestriding the frontier between photography and art, which had been portrayed as hostile territories too often in the past. After the facts and figures of his life – including his captaincy of the high-school cricket team – she swept through his early career, from his apprenticeship as a wedding photographer to his first documentary essays, which were notable for their gritty realism, she said, before turning to the major periods represented on the current exhibition in more detail. The thread that joined all these works, disparate as they might appear, she thought, was their honesty. The hand may have trembled, but the eye had never flinched.

  And with that she thanked us for coming and gave the artist the floor.

  Through all of this, Auerbach had been shrinking until the jacket appeared to fit him. At our applause, he started back into his ordinary size, thanked Claudia for her kind words and declared that he was not an artist. He was barely a photographer, he was still learning the craft. One of these days he hoped to take a really good photograph. He could feel that moment drawing closer. Then he thanked us for coming and suggested that we start where he had started, at the beginning. We trooped after him towards the 1950s.

  Like many reluctant public speakers, Auerbach was articulate and engaging. Although he started out mumbling into his shirtfront, he grew more at ease with his audience photo by photo, and began to address us more directly. He had much to say about his work and its meaning, recalling places and people in great detail. Some of it smacked of the stage: you could tell that he had said it before. Disarmingly, though, the photos still surprised him, and despite having lived with them for decades, he seemed to discover new aspects of them even as he spoke. Once or twice, he stood staring at an image as if it had been made by someone else and smuggled in without his knowledge.

  In every classroom, even one as informal as this, a few people dominate. We had an architect (I assumed) who spoke about the buildings in the photos as if the buildings themselves could speak – this one was glibly articulate, that one made a vertical statement, another declared its intentions in stone. Her language was so familiar to me – the world is speaking, things are mouthing off, they won’t shut up for love or money – that for a moment she looked like someone I knew. Besides this person, we had an earnest young woman who asked questions about the light and wrote the answers in a notebook. The only other man in the group, a pensioner with a startling pelt of ginger and white hair on his head and face and chest, hung back whenever we shuffled after Auerbach, leaned in close to some corner of the work we had finished discussing, until his horned eyebrows were nearly crumpled against the glass, and examined the surface minutely. The gesture reminded me of my optician zooming in with her penlight to shine a beam at my retina.

  Would he recognize me? I had been wondering about this ever since I read the notice in the paper. It was half the reason I was here. I found myself pressing forward when the circle formed, foregrounding my face, dangling it there to be snapped. Of course, he had no reason to remember me; we had met just once and I had done nothing since then to distinguish myself. I had changed too, the long hair and the beard were gone, I was ten kilos heavier. But then the man was a photographer with a famously observant eye. I dangled my face hopefully, but there was no flicker of recognition.

  We entered the second exhibition room. Another questioner joined the discussion. This particular image, she said, reminded her of Dorothea Lange’s photographs of American workers in the Depression. What did he think of Lange’s work? Was she an influence? Or should one rather look to the usual suspects like Walker Evans?

  At last we got to the third room, where the accidental portraits hung. Veronica and Mrs Ditton were side by side on the far wall. We began to circulate in an anticlockwise direction. It was only now that I realized we had been going clockwise in the other rooms. Although the change was almost certainly insignificant, once it had struck me I couldn’t put it out of my mind. It made some subtle difference to my orientation. I tried to figure out what it was, half-remembering something about the circulation of consumers in supermarkets and the optimal disposition of shelves, gondolas and fridges, but the discussion between Auerbach and the art lovers kept disrupting my thoughts. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the ginger man, the one who reminded me of a raccoon although I have never actually seen such an animal, smelling a corner of one of the photos.

  People were always complaining that he was overly concerned with buildings, Auerbach said, and insufficiently concerned with the people who lived in them. But in truth he had always been photographing both. If all his negatives were to be classified into those with people and those without, he was prepared to w
ager it would be an equal split. In any event, the distinction was immaterial, because people made the buildings and buildings shaped the people.

  The architect said it was a classic chicken-and-egg situation, absolutely.

  It seemed to me that this might be related to the distinction between clockwise and anticlockwise, but I couldn’t think it through because the light specialist was asking another question. On the light, she said, and how he approached it: did he regard the light that struck a human cheekbone in the same way as the light that struck the side of a barn? Say.

  The portrait of Veronica loomed. When we got there, I would introduce myself. ‘You don’t remember me, but I was there when you took this photograph …’

  The furry ginger man slumped into a corner to examine the brickwork on a Dutch Reformed church.

  We stopped at the portrait of a young girl playing the organ. Before Auerbach could say anything about it, a woman who had been quiet until then raised her hand, like a shy schoolgirl, and said, ‘Mr Auerbach, I wonder if you remember me …?’

  ‘You should have spoken to him anyway,’ my mother said.

  ‘I couldn’t, the organist beat me to it. After that, I could only look like an imitator. Everyone made such a fuss – “I thought I knew the face!” “You haven’t changed a bit!” – and she stood next to the photo so we could compare. Before and After.’

  ‘You could have taken him aside,’ she insisted, ‘he’d have remembered you, especially if you’d mentioned Douglas. Your uncle was one of the first people to recognize his genius.’

  We were sitting on the balcony at opposite ends of the overstuffed sofa. Her eyrie, she called it with a laugh, no self-respecting widow has a den. In the wintry light of late afternoon, with the branches of the planes etched against the glass and the distant rush of traffic on the motorway, it was like a tree house.

  I told her about my last visit to Mrs Pinheiro and the Doctor’s dead letters. The idea dismayed her. ‘Dead letters,’ she said. ‘What usually happens to them, I wonder. Where do they go when they die?’

  ‘Back to their Maker – if there’s a return address.’

  ‘And if not? There must be some that can’t be deciphered.’

  ‘They go round and round in the sorting room, it’s a kind of purgatory for lost mail, according to Mrs Pinheiro. But eventually, with the authorization of the Chief Sorter, they’re sent to the basement and they stay there in canvas bins for a year or so.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘The incinerator.’

  ‘Sounds terribly final.’

  ‘That’s what she said. That’s why the hopeless cases, the ones they couldn’t figure out between them, were never taken back.’

  ‘He decided to save them! Pinheiro’s ark.’

  ‘Something like that. It wasn’t legal, of course, but they didn’t see it that way. The letters weren’t stolen so much as borrowed, held in trust, she said. Apparently the Doctor always hoped someone would come for them one day.’

  ‘And she showed you some of the survivors?’

  ‘Yes, she went into Dr Pinheiro’s room, which is closed to visitors, and came back with a bundle secured by two rubber bands.’ Most of the letters were creased and soiled as if they’d been carried in a bra or a sweaty pocket, or dropped on a dusty pavement and stepped on, and the addresses reeled across the envelopes, sloping this way and that, or squashed together against one edge in an impatient queue. ‘You could see these letters were sent by people who could barely write or afford the cost of the stamp. Half a person, half a place, bits of farms and villages, the name of a hill or a railway siding known only to the person who wrote it down. Names you’ll never find on a map or in a directory.’

  ‘It sounds sad.’

  ‘It is. I keep thinking about what the letters must say, the good news and the bad, and about the people who wrote them and the people who never received them. Lost souls, calling after one another in the dark.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to say that Dr Pinheiro was gone.

  The twilight deepened on the balcony.

  ‘You should make friends your own age,’ my mother said, ‘you’re spending too much time with old people. It’s depressing, believe me, and it will make you old before your time. Leave Mr Auerbach alone.’ After a moment she went on, and the lightly mocking tone darkened. ‘I think you’re looking for a mom and dad. The father part I can understand … but you’ve got a mother already. When you tell me about this old widow in her crumbling halls with her strange fancies, sitting around drinking tea and hearing voices, it’s as if you’re going off to an institution to visit some dilapidated version of me. It’s a horrible prophecy.’

  The door to the yard stood open. It was midwinter, but the garden was as lushly overgrown as ever, except that the grass had been cut to uncover a patch of brick paving on which stood a wire-mesh table and two chairs. A sickle lay on the table top like a gleaming question mark. I went into the garden and sat at the table with my coat collar turned up.

  Mrs Pinheiro brought the tea tray and sat beside me. In broad daylight, the cosy was more parrot than hen. The letterboxes leaned out of the shrubbery like savages, glaring at us with cyclops eyes, or hung down shamefaced and glum, with their long lips pursed. The air was full of the radio static of insects scraping their legs against their bodies.

  While the tea was drawing, Mrs Pinheiro slipped the rubber bands from a bundle of letters and fanned them out. In answer to the question posed by her enlarged eye, I tapped on one of the letters. She picked it up and tried to read the address. As she opened the flap the static broke off and a prison cell folded out of the silence, a small bare room with walls of the same pale green as the envelope. A man lay on his side in the far corner with his back turned to us. She folded him into an upright position against the wall and pressed a fingertip to his brow. He was shivering. With a sweep of her hand, she smoothed his damp, bloodied body out against the table and raised him to his feet. But as he held out his bound wrists and made to speak, she closed him between her palms like a paper lantern and slipped the letter back into the pack.

  ‘Tea?’ While she poured it for us, she asked, ‘Do you like our museum?’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘I thought you’d appreciate it. You should have seen it in its heyday, mind you. The Doctor used to cover the specimens with sacking in the winter, as if they were tropical plants, but I can’t be bothered.’

  We both laughed. To get the taste of leaf sap and fibre from my mouth, I reached for the biscuits on the tray. Eet-Sum-Mor shortbread in a box decorated with a plaid sash and a drawing of a baker in his apron. I noticed that he wore a collar and tie and had a pencil behind his ear, for taking orders or writing down recipes, I supposed. He reminded me of the Doctor in his passport photograph, trying to look blameless. Poor old Pinheiro. I imagined him lying in the sickroom with a postman’s leather satchel over the back of a chair and the sacraments of a grim departure on the bedside table: Oros, cream crackers, a portable radio. On the wall, a motto in needlepoint: Aluta continua! Perhaps this was the photograph Auerbach was destined not to take?

  ‘Let’s talk about the letters,’ I said, dipping a biscuit in my tea. ‘Why have you kept them?’

  ‘What else can I do?’

  ‘But they don’t belong to you.’

  ‘But they do.’

  Without another word, she unfolded a small girl into a shady corner of the garden. The poor scrap was barefoot and weeping. There was too much unhappiness in the world, I thought, in the world of letters, at least. Despite having resolved to stay out of it, I licked my finger and cleaned the corners of the child’s eyes, while Mrs Pinheiro straightened her skirt and tucked in her blouse. She put the child aside and reached for an air letter. A man and a woman slipped out together in a fug of cigarette smoke and perfume, their limbs folded loosely into one another at the joints.

  I tried to speak but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mou
th. My lips tasted of glue.

  Mrs Pinheiro chose a padded envelope covered with stamps and opened it on the tip of the sickle. A paper chain of men and women, hundreds of them joined hand and foot, clattered out like galleys from a printing press. Between us, we folded them at the perforations, running the creases between our fingernails, and tore them apart. Free at last, stretching their limbs and cracking their joints, they began to tell their stories. When this envelope was empty, there were others, from which sprang an unbroken line of creatures delighted to suck air into their lungs and born to speak. All afternoon their numbers grew, until the air was so thick with stories it couldn’t be breathed. Even then, Mrs Pinheiro went on opening envelopes in the fog and tossing the soft, damp forms into the crowd. I gathered the discarded pages, smoothed them flat and put them back in the envelopes. Mother’s little helper.

  Mrs Pinheiro walked me out. For some reason, I remembered that there had been a letterbox at the gate, a quaint maquette with a crooked chimney and windows of solder, and I asked after it.

  ‘It was a model of the house,’ she said. ‘The Doctor’s idea of a joke. It was made for him by one of his pals with a workshop. Pity it’s been swiped.’

  ‘Shall I take your picture now?’ I asked.

  ‘Why not? It’s as good a day as any.’

  I fetched my camera from the car. I think she was surprised that I really was a photographer after all. She wanted to pose in the garden, among the exhibits, but I’d had my fill of magic. I asked her to lean on the gate and that was that.