Black Mirror (8 page)

You speak in slogans.

Very well, I speak in slogans.

Silence. The silence of memorialising recall. She knew then there were things he would never tell her.

Mrs Dooley's small room was becoming flooded
with silences. Anna wished, as lovers do, to build a rescuing raft, to grasp at his hands and pull him over.

Did you, Anna began again, did you own a bike as a child?

Winston turned to face her.

I did not even imagine owning a bicycle. On the sugar plantation, on the Allfrey Estate, few had bicycles. Mr Allfrey had a car, a Cadillac from America, which kept breaking down. Red. A movie car. You could see your own face in it.

You wanted a car?

A lorry, replied Winston. The estate was a kind of ghost town for seven months while the cane was growing, then the workers would come for the cutting, setting up their lives in the tenements near the factory, and it was the possibility of lorry driving that always impressed me. Every year I wanted to drive away when the workers left, I wanted to leave the estate, forever.

Forever?

I did not want — never wanted — to become a cane cutter. I was afraid of the sadness in my mother's eyes, I was afraid of Mr Allfrey and his pink-coloured sons; I was afraid of the poor working men who had limbs cut by machetes, wounds, missing fingers.

— What get inna yuh? me mama say. Dis yo place, chile. Dy will be done, papa Jesas. Amen, amen —

I remember her crying as she smoked her pipe because she knew I would leave. I was ten, perhaps eleven, and would jump on a lorry at the end of that
season. She called me to her and put my head in her lap, then sang:

Nuh cry, nuh cry, nuh cry me poo chile,

you is mine an me is yours.

As if I were the one who needed comforting. I adored the acrid dense smell of her pipe smoke, the whispery sound of the sugar cane moving at night. The lush private warmth of my mother's lap.

Winston was silent in the falling dark. Then, in a beautiful bass, he began again to sing:

Nuh cry, nuh cry, nuh cry me poo chile,

me gwan be here all day till nite.

 

Anna, lying quietly, ensorcelled by his voice. Which floats to her,
soul distress
, across his particular darkness.

And then?

Then I got a job, almost immediately, at a beach resort. The tourists liked boy waiters, cute and compliant. I had a white uniform, with epaulettes, a white cap with gold braid, and a pair of neat white gloves. I held the tray up high, like a waiter in a movie. I smiled and winked, brought them lizards and pineapples. The tourists lay on long chairs under the palm trees and wasted time. There were little bells, just like breasts, stuck up on the tree trunks, and they rang me for drinks. I trudged across the sand with martinis and fruit juices, drinks of all sorts decorated with tiny umbrellas. My life was entirely governed by bells. I spent all my time, every minute, listening for the ring.

Did you hate them, those people?

No, not really. I was much too busy trying to please. But every night I cried for my mother and sisters. And I had a dream, a repeated dream, that Mr Allfrey held them captive in his shiny red car.

 

He is so silent now that he might have stopped breathing altogether. Anna tries to miniaturise Winston and imagine him as a boy. She sees him slight and gangly; he would have been boyishly angular in his cap and uniform. She sees him holding up a golden pineapple, high on a tray, and then her imagining fans out, opening semi-circular, and summons instantly and from who-knows-where a series of post-carded and sun-bleached visions of tourist-Jamaica: conga lines, steel bands, curved and perfect beaches drenched in lurid tropical light. The inauthenticity of this fantasy dishonours the life of her lover. It is memory, not vision, Anna wishes to know him by. The fluency of her brochure-like invention appals her.

Winston whispers: I've never told anyone these things before. You're the first one.

Yes, said Anna. I know. Don't regret it, afterwards.

Their space together is now joint, hermetic. Outside city sounds crash in an arbitrary disorchestration and sleepiness sweeps over Anna like a sudden fog.

Why is it, she asks, dropping off, that you mimic your mother's voice?

It's my voice too, answers Winston. Don't you understand?

She dreams her lover Winston is piggy-backing her over sand. The sun is blistering and the sky is hard and remote. Abstracted palm trees lean and bend gently towards them. The sea in the far distance sounds exactly like rain; but it has none of its thunder and seems merely to sprinkle on the shore. In the middle of nowhere, like a prophecy, Victoria materialises. She waves to them both. Her breasts are exposed and she is ringing a bell. We should go to her, says Anna; we mustn't be late. Her arms link tightly, in a kind of strangle-hold, around Winston's neck.

Within just a month,
Victoria has weakened. It is as if giving up her own stories depletes her of something vital. Yet she is an avid narrator, and looks forward to Anna's coming as though her life depended on it; this contradiction is somehow at the basis of their relationship. How is it possible, Anna asks herself, that Victoria wills her own fading, just as she comes so amply into being?

Sometimes she watches the old woman sleeping and sees the delicate blue flicker of the process of her dreams. She persuades herself that biography is futile. Beneath closed eyes lies this woman's
inaccessible
complexity.

A nurse visits, once a day, to check medication: she draws the curtains, fluffs the pillows, takes her patient's temperature. Nothing serious, apparently. The women joke in French. The nurse, Cécilia, is from Quebec; she has four children, all sons, and a good-for-nothing husband who drives a lorry.

In six weeks, says Victoria, I'll be dead as a door-nail, and I want no ceremony at all. A cremation, impersonal, and no blubbering from anyone. Surrealists only believe in the future tense.

Liar, thinks Anna: this woman who inhabits remembrances with trance-like conviction.

I'll be cinders.
Cendre.
Madame Cinderella.
Madame Cendrillon
. Victoria chuckles.

Cécilia leans across to Anna, brushing her face.

Don't worry, she says softly, she'll go on forever.

Anna catches her gaze.

I mean it. There's nothing wrong with her. She's just old and stubborn.

I can hear you, calls Victoria. Plotting my demise. The sooner the better, thanks-very-much.

Anna looks across at Victoria lying on the bed, and knows that each evocation she offers, each story she tells, implicates their two separate lives in a bond.

What was that? she calls again. What did you say?

We said your place here is pretty kooky, answers Cécilia, gesturing at the Surrealist decorations around the room. Damn kooky, I say.
Fou, Madame. Fou.

Foo, foo, fee, foo, sings Victoria, delighted.

 

Jules, abstemious, was out of place. He had never wanted to come to the party and stood there soberly, judging us all.

I was flirting with Ernst, who wanted a triangle.

I was wilful, cruel. Leonora, Ernst and I danced together.

Do you want to know what I wore? I wore a chiffon dress of lemon and a string of jet beads. I wore lemon stockings and lemon shoes with buckles of fake diamonds, and long gloves in creme with buttons of fake pearls. And my feathers, of course. I wore my feathers.

Ernst removed a glove with his teeth, peering down at me, commanding, blue-eyed and carnivorous; then Leonora smiled all the way to her incisors and removed the second glove. They draped them like scarves around their necks. I saw the shapes of my fingers dangling loosely at their throats; I was intoxicated and expectant, hoping for obscenities. The sound of rain, pure and black, rose above music from the gramophone, and the room revolved around me, with Jules' face in it, blurred.

I can no longer remember the sequence of events. Jules and Man Ray had been quietly discussing photography, and Salvador Dali had at some point intervened. I heard words spin out in a tone of accusation; then Dali seized — rather cinematically, as though purposeful and rehearsed — a bulbous orange vase and smashed it against Jules' temple. Water, tulips and shards flew out everywhere, and Jules fell heavily, hitting his head on a sideboard as he went. He was broken and bloodied. Dali was nauseated by the sight of blood and fled from the room with Gala alarmed and in hot pursuit. Man Ray bent above Jules, examining the wound.

Victoria pauses; she seems upset. Here her party-night jump-cuts and falls into edits and distortions.

And then? says Anna. And what happened then?

It was raining, I remember. It rained light Paris rain.

Since it was too late for the Metro we made our way to the Boulevard to find a cab. The streets shone brilliantly with rainwater and the lamps reduplicated. He leant on me, my Jules. Blood streaking from his face soaked my lemon chiffon.

In bed, later on, we lay close together. Our hair was still wet.

Your friend Dali doesn't like to be contradicted, he said in English. Nor does he like Jews, he added in French.

Juif, Jules … jewels, bijoux …

I put my hand to his face. I had patched his wound with white gauze and an incompetent bandage so that he looked like a soldier, fresh from battle. The skin at his eyes was already beginning to stretch and darken; in the morning they would be purple (
Two pansies,
he said) and his face brutally swollen.

Juif, Jules?

There were things he hadn't told me. Like his brides, knowing nothing.

My stained chiffon dress was there on the floor, quiet and formless. I thought of Baudelaire:

After his disappearance Jules persisted supernaturally; he was ineradicable. When she was alone Victoria thought often of Jules; over the span of absence his phantom arm still lay warmly across her breast, cupping at her heart. She knew that on her deathbed, in her very last moment, in the tiny wind of life that was her very last feeble gasp, she would still be remembering him. Sometimes she resented this everyday haunting he had bequeathed her. The stories he left behind — an entreating outline — with no body to attach them to.

 

When he was a child of about nine or ten years old, Jules Levy went with his mother to buy some new shoes. In the shoe shop, the best and newest in the city, was an astounding contraption; it was an X-ray for feet. Jules inserted his feet into a small dark box, and looked down from above into a narrow viewing chamber that revealed the skeleton. He saw his own rather anaemic, knobbly, misshapen feet transformed to the most delicate pattern of bones; it was a glimpse, he said, of the inner beauty of things; it was like a vision. There they were, not ordinary and everyday, but gleaming, almost glassy, designs in white marble. This machine had little to do with the sale of shoes — and it was removed from stores not long after, when the dangers of recreational X-rays became apparent — but they were for a time immensely popular. Jules lined up again and again, to peer inside his own feet. To marvel. To be astonished. To see the hidden made visible in a wand of weird light.

It was this machine, he said, that gave him an interest in photography. He loved the body on a screen, its aesthetic reproduction. He loved the world in tonalities of black and white: a face becoming mica, the negative space of any shadow. His first images, unsurprisingly, were of his mother, Hélène. He photographed her standing in front of a bright window, so that she was the mere shape of a mother, with no details at all; then he photographed her standing with the window to one side, so that she was a bright half-face, exemplified in each line and each specifically personal mark. Then, standing outside, Jules photographed Hélène through the kitchen window: she was here complete, and wholly visible, her face glowing like a lamp in its shady frame. This triptych seemed to the child an entire understanding. He recognised prematurely his own lifelong metaphysic.

Nearly done, he called out, crouching behind the lens.

Her face broke into a simple smile.
His mother's face
.

During his teenage years Jules photographed every single thing around him: the apartment in Lyon he shared with his mother was exposed hundreds of times, caught in prints whose lunar shine he kept stored, with fastidious care, inserted between layers of dark-coloured tissue paper. The almond tree in the square was also endlessly photographed; it was a tree proliferated and divided and remade like no other, captured in every angle, every light, every state of bloom or non-bloom. The old man who slept each day
by the Tabac, at a perfect angle to the open doorway. Bicycles leaning against the wall at school. Garbage. Flowers. Girls eating ices. The large toothless woman who cheerlessly served them. For Jules the photograph retrieved something from death, something unidentifiable but nevertheless essential. He felt an elation, a quickening, with every click of the shutter.

At night he polished his camera as if it were Aladdin's lamp. Then he kissed it, wrapped it, and placed it carefully under his bed.

 

Jules was lying beneath the piano, photographing his mother's feet as they worked the brass pedals, when he had his first attack of an ailment he would describe as his shiver of mortality. He felt a sensation of constriction in the chest; his pulse began to beat at double its rate, and his pounding heart was so forceful that his whole body began wildly to tilt and sway. The attack lasted almost thirty minutes, during which time both Hélène and Jules were convinced he would die.

The doctor diagnosed tachycardia — unusual speeding of the heart — and said that he should learn to live with it, that nothing much could be done. It was an ailment that would assail him, like a seizure, at unexpected moments, and each time his heart accelerated Jules wondered what secret parallel life he might elsewhere be leading. He wished too that there was a viewing device, something like the foot X-ray, by which he might examine from above his convulsing heart. This way, he felt sure, he would be less afraid.

On the day of his first attack Hélène had been practising a Ravel piano concerto written for the left hand. She sat on her right hand, so that she could master this difficult piece without acceding to the organic temptation to play with both. Jules remembers seizing the wrist of her right hand to signal his distress, because he felt he was dying, because his whole body was pulsing, and because his mother, undistracted, was blithely preoccupied with playing the piano. The music halted abruptly and Hélène bent down; she saw her son open-mouthed, quaking, his whole face distressed.

Single-handed
, Jules Levy would joke to Victoria; I learnt about mortality with an accompaniment, single-handed.

 

In the darkroom Victoria watched images of herself emerging. In a chemical revelation she floated into being, silver and shiny. Jules swayed her face and her body in the developing emulsion, and then hung her, dripping, among the rows of brides. She saw herself reversed, whitened, immobilised, etherealised, shrun ken and wholly contained within rectangles. She was almost unrecognisable to herself. That moonstone flesh. That objectivity.

In the dark-room light his skin was varnished bright red: her ruby jewels.

Kiss me, she said.

She stood on tiptoe to reach him and Jules bent obediently for a kiss.

Victoria slid her hands into his trousers and asked him to undress her. He fumbled at the fake pearl buttons of her blouse, and one pearl pinged off, rolling somewhere into the darkness. She placed his slender hand directly on her breast:
This is my heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat, uncontained in any rectangle.
She slid her two hands around to his belly, and peeled away his trousers, slowly releasing him, then rubbed against his thighs and fondled his penis. With the force of her whole body she willed him to develop.

Above them lustrous images swung. Beyond his shoulders she could see herself naked in miniatures. Upside-down and downside-up. He had made print after print, so that she was a multiplication.

Drops of fluid fell, and she wiped them from his body with her blouse.

It was only afterwards that Victoria noticed that they were both partially dressed: Jules still had his shirt on and she still had her skirt on.

They were like the two fitting halves of some mythical unphotographed creature.

And it was only afterwards she pondered his casual remark: ‘over-exposure and under-exposure are both forms of invisibility.'