They had an entire house with three storeys, a basement and attic that they filled to bursting point. I have only one room. And no inherited items.
Narrator
The things she hoards are connected; one thing leads to another, like thoughts, that’s why she can’t discard this or that object. Because then the chain breaks.
Ellen
Miss Maier has now cautioned me several times against men. She says: ‘They put you on their lap, and then you feel something throbbing. Men are only out to hurt you.’ Then I reply something along the lines of: ‘Don’t worry. When I grow up, I am going to live way out in the country and keep sheep and be as fat as I want, without anyone nagging me.’
But when she regards men in that way, I can see why she reacted the way she did on Sunday. We were down by the lake, and she had positioned herself on a toppled tree trunk in order to better capture her subject. It had been raining and the tree trunk was slippery, and suddenly she lost her balance. An older man who came walking along the path right behind her jumped over to support her. It was perfectly clear what he wanted to do, I stood watching it. She screamed so loud that it echoed, and jumped down from the tree trunk and hit him on the head with clenched fists. Somehow or other he must also have been struck by the camera, it must have swung into his temple, because he was bleeding. He said some horribly ugly things to her, but I don’t know if she even grasped them, because she couldn’t calm down at all. She was no longer hitting him, and wasn’t crying, but she uttered a long shrill tone that just went on and on and rose and fell. ‘Miss Maier,’ I said, and put my hand on her shoulder, but that didn’t help – she just kept uttering that sound while she shook her head from side to side. The man said he was going to sue her for assault. ‘What is your name? You have to tell me your name,’ he kept saying to Vivian.
‘Then you have to tell me her name,’ he said to me.
‘I’ll only tell you my name,’ I said, ‘my name is Ellen Rice, she’s my nanny (I didn’t like saying nanny because I’m so old), we live right up there.’
Finally he left, and Miss Maier let me take her by the hand and lead her home. By the time we reached the house, she had fallen silent.
Sarah
Morning, on the sidewalk, in the slipstream of masculine fragrances – it makes me euphoric. But then I experienced something that nevertheless (at first) was a notch too far. I sat waiting for my psychologist in his consulting room and looked at the postcard of Freud’s examination couch, which was hanging on his notice-board; it looks straight out of an oriental dream, covered with an authentic rug and soft velvet cushions, a couple of velvet or velour blankets are slung over it, lying on that one would sink straight to the bottom (of one’s self), my psychologist’s leather sofa was a dismal failure compared to that specimen of furniture. I had plenty of time to breathe in the smell of the room. And it smelled, I would almost say stank, as though someone had been kissing in there for hours – it had the sweet smell of saliva, and skin that had been rubbing against skin for a prolonged period. The leather sofa. That must be where it happened. But this is a place for all of us wounded souls to speak: he should not use his consulting room for sex. I sent him a severe look when he came back, freshened the air around me by waving my handkerchief.
The next minute I thought: if he can kiss someone else here, then he can kiss me too. Now I was no longer a wounded soul but a smouldering volcano.
‘Well,’ he said, and sat down, ‘now let’s see if we can get a little closer to who the person you designated as “my round-cheeked companion” actually is.’
But I did not reply. I let my lips hang invitingly, knowingly, wordlessly in mid-air. He took the bait. I stood up and measured him up by placing my hands flat against him everywhere, then I pushed him down on the sofa, and mouth to mouth we journeyed into the other one, the soft, the gaudy, the wild furniture. ‘It’s just me as a child,’ I replied much later, when, completely dissolved and with skin stuck to the leather furniture, we untangled ourselves from one another.
‘I see, well then we have located him,’ he said.
‘Yes, but it’s a she,’ I said, ‘and I would like to be rid of her.’
‘It is of no use pushing her away. Just let her come,’ he said.
‘She does,’ I said.
‘What’s going on inside you now right now?’
‘I am attempting to suppress a strong urge to throw myself on the floor and scream “No.” I can’t stand it.’
‘Can you offer some examples of when the round-cheeked companion appears?’
‘At the thought of or the sight of suffering I can do nothing about, wars, famines, epidemics, massacres, animal cruelty, schoolyards, and most recently she poked her head up from a big patch of earth I was going to clear.’
Then the psychologist talked about the necessity of finding a point of anchor, something to cling to, something that offered a foothold. It was a bad metaphoric soup, but rising out of this soup was my mother’s infinitely dear face, and in future I would pound that into the head of my round-cheeked companion, almost like when you pound a tent peg into the ground.
Viv
Wouldn’t it almost be strange if someone wasn’t secretly photographing me? The man in the house across the road maybe? On good days I think he resembles Eisenhower, whom I had a certain confidence in and could never get myself to call Ike, as people were in the habit of doing. I thought it seemed clingy, wanting to be familiar with the president, or like he was a silly little dog.
What has always been difficult is more difficult now, like a kind of rheumatism of the mind, and I am afraid to think about how it will develop when I get old. I know I ought to visit Mother. I’ve started to keep the curtains drawn, so that the man across the road can’t see my stacks, and I get changed in the bathroom. I have never seen anyone take a picture of me unless I’ve personally asked them to, yes, when I was a child and Mother did and Jeanne too. When I have asked someone to photograph me, for example Caroline, that day on the beach – then it’s because I want to see how others see me. I have the beach picture on display at the moment, and there is something strangely vulgar to my face, like I’ve tempted somebody else out into the depths on purpose. But Caroline is the closest I’ve got to having a friend, and I almost exclusively buy film from her shop now. She is the only one who understands when I say that this community is an artificial world, a pinprick of grace and dignity. But I can breathe easier in the resentment and the filth that this pin is affixed to.
Ellen
Dad has taken care of it. She won’t be sued for assault, even though the man got a concussion. Dad met with him, and I think he also wrote a cheque. For pain and suffering. The day after the ‘assault’ Miss Maier told me that what I could learn from this was that I should not put up with anything, that attack is the best form of defence. I felt like reminding her of the time she held me by the nose and stuffed food in me like I was a French goose.
Viv
Are bulldogs in fashion? Are bulldogs the only breed a man can be seen with this year? It seems like I see men with bulldogs everywhere at the moment. I suppose by now you can call me a specialist in reflections – today I took an unbelievable picture of a black man with a white bulldog. He stood with his back against a windowpane at the station begging with a paper cup in his hand, and his masculine four-legged follower also sat with its back to the glass. Francis Bacon would have been delighted at the reflection: inside the glass the dog was completely warped, in fact in outright disintegration, and looked like a piece of falling paper. It was understood that the mirror is another world that does what suits it with us, drowns us and shakes us. That’s also why I often make use of reflections in my self-portraits. I am fond of creating rows of reflections so the subject sinks into one world after the other.
The self-portraits are also a way of keeping a bit of an eye on myself, now that there is no one else to do it; well Vivian Dorothea, you have slept poorly again last night, the bags unde
r your eyes speak their unmistakable languages. Isn’t that coat getting too shabby, you’ll have to see if you can afford another second-hand one.
And there I stand in miniature, far up in the surveillance mirror at the supermarket, tempted by all the products, the devil whispering in my ear: Cast thyself down and it will all be yours.
Narrator
You are not well versed in the Scriptures, Vivian. The second temptation of Christ is not about material gain, but about not smashing into the ground. The Devil has led Jesus up to the pinnacle of the Temple and says: ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here. Then your father will command his angels to come and lift you up in their hands.’
Viv
Rarely do I manage to capture myself smiling, but today I managed it: A man came walking along with a plate of glass, and I photographed him from behind so that I was reflected in the plate, and it looked as though he was carrying me.
Now I happen to recall the ice crystals on the church windows in Saint-Bonnet in February 1950, when I was waiting for the coming of spring, which meant soft earth, so that Aunt Maria Florentine’s earthly remains could be moved. The others tugged at me because mass was about to start, but I couldn’t tear myself away. I took as many as ten pictures, it was the shapes the ice made that admittedly unsurprisingly meant that from then on, my gaze was directed at buildings – yes, structures as such.
Sarah
Today Viv came by and showed me a photograph of Ellen from three or four years ago – I thought she wanted to give it to me, and I managed to say thanks before I realized that she wanted to sell it to me. By letting me pay for it she would ensure that I valued it.
‘You decide how much you want to give. But you have to pay for it.’
As she said that, she held on to one corner, as though I might be tempted to run off with it.
‘It’s an intense picture, Viv,’ I said, and it was. Ellen was on her way up a tall practically vertical staircase that led to a slide that was as winding as a serpent. She looked so very little by herself on the stairs, clinging to the railing. There were other parents there with their children, either on the way up the stairs with them or ready to catch them at the foot of the slide. But Ellen was alone on the precarious stairs. And why? Because Vivian Maier was busy photographing the scene. I had entrusted her with Ellen. And why wasn’t I there like the other parents? There were fathers in the picture, it must have been a Sunday.
‘You can tell how steep it is, can’t you,’ she said enthusiastically, ‘how high it is!’
I dug into my purse for some money, and when I looked at the picture again, it seemed even worse to me. I looked at Viv.
‘Art is not somewhere you feel comfortable,’ she said.
I no longer thought of how I had left Ellen in the lurch on the crude metal staircase, which in my mind had become a picture of her entire childhood that I had voluntarily left in the hands of someone else; instead, I thought again of the passage of time and I was overcome by melancholy at the sight of the small figures climbing up, only to swoosh back down straight away.
Ellen
Joseph is so popular that he hadn’t noticed me before the rehearsals for the nativity play started, even though our classrooms have been next door to one another these past four years. The lead parts had been given to those with really dark hair in order to make it authentic (even though you wouldn’t think it was important when the donkey was replaced by a straw Yule goat), at long last I was advantaged by my hair colour, because I was to be Mary. The choir of angels were fair-haired – who knows what all those blondes were doing in the Middle East around year 0? I had two entrances and one line; the purple scarf that was held in place with hairpins kept coming loose. The pews were packed, Miss Maier was there somewhere, her soul’s telegraph tapping pride and anticipation on her face. She doesn’t say it, but I know she loves me. It seems like Joseph and the Wise Men got drunk during my first entrance where the angel told of the coming pregnancy and I did as I was supposed to: looked around in wonder and said, ‘But no man has known me.’ Because when I came back after the annunciation, Joseph lay on the floor with communion wafers over his eyes and an open mouth which the Wise Men also tried to hit with wafers. ‘Hal-le-luja’ one of them said to me. In a flash I understood the following: life is funny. But I could not dwell on it, because the matches were not there.
‘I can’t find the matches,’ I repeated louder and louder, and at long last Joseph swept the wafers off his eyes and picked himself up and took the last swig of the Communion wine. I stood with the candle waiting for it to be lit, which was supposed to symbolize the birth of Jesus. Every one of them was looking. ‘Then we’ll just have to enter with it unlit,’ Joseph said. He took me by the arm, grabbed one of the shepherd’s staffs, ‘but then Jesus hasn’t been born,’ I whispered, because now we stepped inside the church, ‘I’ll think of something,’ he whispered, looking into my eyes – it was strange to have his marvellous face so close to my own. He thumped the staff on the stone floor and invented an intense gait as we moved up the aisle and I carried the candle forward with both hands.
Narrator
When a baby arrives in a novel it usually has the air of being posted; it’s delivered; one of the elder characters goes and picks it up and shows it to the reader, after which it is usually laid in cold storage until it can talk or otherwise assist in the action. Jesus isn’t encountered again until he is around twelve years old, teaching the scribes in the temple in Jerusalem.
Viv
The man at the photographic lab in Champsaur never replied to my letter, maybe it never arrived, maybe he put it aside to reply, but forgot it or just never got it done, maybe he’s dead. Maybe it’s best like that.
I don’t think Susan Sontag (who I wish I could get a glimpse of one day) is on the right track when she writes in On Photography, which I got hold of second-hand, that it’s only with the work of photographers like Todd Walker and Duane Michals that you can tell for certain they took the picture, because to a degree they specialized, the former with his solarized photos and the latter with his narrative photo series (I love the one of the child being abducted by a coat).
Caroline keeps pushing to see some of my work, it’s possible that at some point in the future I will start buying film in other places, perhaps from now on a new place every time, or almost every time. What I produce is so good that if I start showing it to professionals, I’ll never get any peace again. No one is going to see my room. No one is going to see my body. No one is going to see my family. No one knows where my brother is, twice he called me ‘Sis’. I am going to keep walking and looking and walking and looking. I hope my heart stops one day while I’m walking, but that I fall in such a way that my coat or dress – depending on the time of year – covers my forest feast region. It’s about time that foolish expression disappears.
Narrator
Dig your way through the tragedy and out the other side.
Viv
They had been drinking and grabbed me by the cheeks, which were chubby back then, and lifted me so that I hovered a few centimetres above the floor, and called me a white mouse and a young Mrs, but I was a Miss for always, because when they put me down on my brother’s lap, I thrust my elbows into his chest.
‘Such lovely trousers, Vivian.’
‘They’re forest feast trousers,’ I said.
‘But why are they called forest feast trousers?’ Carl asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘It’s because they have wide legs without elastic,’ Father answered.
‘But why are they like that?’ asked Julius Hauser, who was also there that day.
‘Then you don’t need to take them off when you’re rolling around out in the woods,’ Father replied.
I bit Father’s hand, so they called me reptile, and I crawled through the corridor and into the kitchen with Mother, but she didn’t pick me up from the floor, or else she would have picked up her own tra
gedy.
Vivian Page 8
