The Ground Beneath Her Feet (73 page)

We have been here before. It’s two hours later and a helicopter is flying over blue agave. My brief exile is at an end; her feelings dictated by her needs, Vina again sees me as an essential ally, at present her onliest help and stay. I am a rock, like Lichas hurled into the sea. And a rock feels no pain.

We pass her retinue on the road below.
Of all you bastards he’s the only one I can trust
. Vina, who thinks of trust as a prison, has declared her trust in me.

She’s badly jolted by the Raúl Páramo business. In my headphones I hear the nostalgic sound of Hug-me, the argot of our youth. It’s been a long time. Afterwards, remembering, I will be powerfully moved by the thought that Vina near her end circled back to our beginning. Of course the private language was useful, to shield our talk from the headphoned ears of the pilot and co-pilot, but for that purpose even English would probably have sufficed. She went further than she needed, resurrecting old Bombay in the hot dry Mexican air. Remembering, I can’t help thinking of her decision as an earnest of our intimacy; as a promise of things to come.

We have been here before. We know that this promise won’t, can’t, be kept.

She is a worried woman: the police, Páramo, the drugs. She is even—astonishingly—concerned about me. Can I ever forgive her awful behavior et cetera, sometimes she just lashes out and hurts the people she cares for most, and how strong I was to still be there for her?, not to walk away?, to give her another chance. But can she please please take a rain check in the matter of love, because right now she
can’t think straight?, the tour, everything?, she owes it to me to wait until her head is clear. Rai, you’ve waited this long, honey, you can wait
do-teen
more days.

In the language of love’s childhood I hear the words that thrill my still-besotted adult heart. Okay, I’ll wait, I say. I’ll hang on, Vina, but not for long.

Hug me honey honey hug me. Hang on Sloopy, come on come on.

The fierce heat of the day, the cheering crowd in the football field, the two silver Bentleys of Don Ángel Cruz, the frightened animals, the mariachis, and Vina singing:
Trionfi Amore
, the last song anyone ever heard her sing.

 … il cor tormenta
Al fin diventa
Felicità
.

Then the earthquake. I take up my cameras and shoot, and for me there are no more sounds, only the silence of event, the silence of the photographic image.

Tequila! We
have been here before.

In the time of Voltaire it was believed that underground seams of sulfur connected the sites of earthquakes. Sulfur, with its stench of Hell.

Faced with the blazing magnificence of the everyday, the artist is both humbled and provoked. There are photographs now of events on an unimaginable scale: the death of stars, the birth of galaxies, soup-stirrings near the dawn of Time. Bright crowds of suns gather in the wildernesses of the sky. Magellanic clouds of glory, heavenly Pisan towers set in a celestial Campo dei Miracoli, lean across the frame. When we look at these images, there is, yes, legitimate wonderment at our own lengthening reach and grasp. But it would be vain indeed to praise our puny handiwork—the mastery of the Hubble wielders, the computer enhancers, the colorizers, all the true-life-fantasist counterparts of Hollywood’s techno-wizards and imagineers—when the universe is putting on so utterly unanswerable a show. Before the majesty of being, what is there to do but hang our heads?

This is irksome. This, naturally, pisses us off.

There is that within us which believes us worthy of the stars. Turn right on this forking path and you find god; turn left and there is art, its uncowed ambition, its glorious irreverent over-reach. In our hearts we believe—we
know
—that our images are capable of being the equals of their subjects. Our creations can go the distance with Creation; more than that, our imagining—our imagemaking—is an indispensable part of the great work
of making
real. Yes, I will even assert as much as that. (Usually I make such assertions when I’m alone in the sealed privacy of the bathroom, but today all bathroom truths must come out to play.)

For example: nobody has yet successfully photographed the gashes in the cosmos which, if Ormus Cama is to be believed, are responsible for the present rash of catastrophes. To get such a picture would be to effect a profound reality shift, a first-magnitude change in our understanding of what is.

However, there is a new picture of an earthquake on the sun. It made all the world’s front pages in full, enhanced color. The earthquake looks like a heat bubble exploding through the surface of a hot thick golden porridge. But the seismic solar porridge ripples we see are apparently more than seven Everests high—over forty miles.

If we didn’t have the photograph the news of the earthquake would lack felt reality. As it is, every newspaper reader on the planet is now asking the same tremulous question.

Is the sun in trouble too?

Thus, a photograph can create the meaning of an event.

Sometimes even when it’s a fake.

In my last photograph of Vina the ground beneath her feet is cracked like crazy paving and there’s liquid everywhere. She’s standing on a slab of street that’s tilting to the right; she’s bending left to compensate. Her arms are spread wide, her hair’s flying, the expression on her face is halfway between anger and fear. Behind her the world is out of focus. There is a sense of eruptions all around her lurching body: great releases of water, terror, fire, tequila, dust. This last Vina is calamity incarnate, a woman
in extremis
, who is also by chance one of the most famous women in the world.

After the disappearance of Vina Apsara at the Villa Huracán, my
earthquake picture will join that small stock of photographic images—Monroe’s flying skirt, the burning girl in Indochina, Earthrise—which actually
become experiences
, part of the collective memory of the human race. Like every photographer, I have hoped to end my days with my name attached to a few powerful images, but the Vina picture will outstrip even my most ambitious, self-glorifying aspirations.
The Lady Vanishes
, as it will come to be known, will surely be my bitter posterity. If I am remembered at all, it can only be for this. So in one sense at least, Vina and I will be joined together for ever, in spite of everything, a consummation for which I’ve wished, all my life, even more devoutly than I’ve wished for professional success. Yes, we’re linked for all time, beyond hope, beyond life: metamorphosed by the Immense into the Eternal. But I was wrong about the nature of the metamorphic force working its marvels upon us. In our case, it was not love but death.

Be careful what you wish for.

At the beginning of my life in photography I was guilty of an inglorious fraud: a dead man’s pictures were passed off as my own. Ever since then—as I have sometimes admitted to myself, though at other points I have temporarily managed to suppress the memory of that twisted boot heel, of the other hanged man in my life—I have needed whatever is the godless equivalent of redemption; call it self-respect. Here’s an irony: when at last I do create one of the iconic images of the age, I can only wish I hadn’t, I at once and for ever concede that she, the subject, was of a worth far greater than any photo I could take of her; I cannot bear to be left with this single mute reflection of her infinite variety.

You can have the fucking photo. I want her back.

Also, because the picture will first appear alongside news reports of what I keep calling her disappearance because I’m finding it hard to use the other word, it will be permanently associated in the public mind with that final moment of terror. This is how people are. Even though we all know there could not have been a photographer present at Vina’s end, we accept the authenticity of the image without much trouble. My picture of Vina in a heaving Tequila street mutates under the pressure of the world’s need for last things, under the pressure of this global manifestation of the Immense, into a portrait of the star at the moment of her, say it, death.

So it’s a sort of unintentional fake. Another fraud. And though I will try to set the record straight, telling the story of the photograph over and over again, nobody will really be listening. They will already know all they need to know.
The Lady Vanishes
. The world has made up its mind.

We have been here before.

This is a helicopter, hovering just above the broken ground. This is the woman I love, calling to me through the open door. I’
m going, then
. And I’m shouting back, I can’t go.
What?
Go.
Fuck you
. What?
Goodbye, Hope
.

And this is what people are saying when they aren’t saying what they mean.

I’m going, then. (Come with me, please, I need you, I can’t believe you won’t come with me.
) I can’t go. (My darling, I want never to let you out of my sight again, but goddamn it, you kick me around, you know that?, do you want to see the bruises?, and just this once I’m not putting you first. I’ll be there soon enough, this time you can wait for me. If you want me, you’ll wait. That’s right, a test. Yeah. Maybe it really is.)
What? (You bastard?, you think you can hold out on me? Oh Jesus, Rai, don’t play games, not now, not today.
) Go. (Okay, no games. I love you forever and beyond. But this is my work. I’ll be there sooner than blinking. Go. I’m right behind you. I love you. Go.)

Fuck you. (I never wanted you to come to Mexico in the first place fuck you but you came anyway fuck you I guess that proves something yeah but I hurt you anyway I was mad I was wrong fuck you and then you helped me fuck you that really churned me up fuck you so I trusted you I really trusted you fuck you then the earth moved and you abandoned me fuck you you took your photographs I could have been dying I could have been broken and dying but you had your work to do fuck you and now you won’t come with me fuck you now when I finally worked out that I need you fuck you I want you fuck you maybe I love you I do love you fuck you Rai I love you fuck you. I do.
)

What? (What???)

Goodbye, Hope. (Goodbye for a moment, you bastard, but after this I’m never letting you out of my sight. The next time I see you will be the beginning of the rest of our lives.
)

Every night for years, I replayed that shouted dialogue in my head,
and now I think this may be what it means. Maybe
Goodbye
really was the never-to-be-completed beginning of
Hello
. I hope so, I hope so. Even though it’s a meaning that makes the loss weigh more heavily and the pain harder to bear.

What the pilot says on Televisa: Señora, we took her over the mountains to the seacoast and everywhere below us was a destruction to break the heart. Our thoughts were urgent for our own families, it is true, but we discharged our duty to the end. Our calls ahead to the Villa Huracán were not fulfilled, the telephone was out of service, but the famous personage she insisted on going forward with the arrangement, always she was saying faster, can you not get there in a faster time. For her, to whom what man could say no, we have made our best effort, and when we come to El Huracán it appears she has been blessed with fortune, all is intact, in all our broken motherland this one corner has remained whole to receive herself. As was our pre-arranged plan we land on the sand at the foot of the cliff and she will climb up to Huracán. But on the beach is nobody to carry her baggages which you can easily imagine are plentiful for she is a fashionable one. Of course we can carry the bags, no problem, but understand sirs we are concerned for the machine and also, I confess it, there is a great desire to see once more my wife and sons in Acatlán. Also the personage she is insistent and is a personage of much force of expression, you comprehend, and so it is in compliance with her own desire that her baggages are reposed on the first step of the escalinata to the height and we say our farewells and that is the finish of it.—Excuse, please?—But naturally we were concerned for her safety. It is why we have made two circles over the establishment and have not departed until we have seen him, the other individual who was there.—No, regrettably, other than the distinguished lady personage on the sand we cannot identify any other person. However we have no way left her unattended. That is a scurrilous imputation. The situation at El Huracán at that point is still normal. By the time we leave no misadventure of any type is to be observed.

The Colchis boss Mo Mallick talks to Larry King on CNN. His shoulder-length blond hair, his earnest glasses, his fabulous profile. Excerpts: Sure, Larry, we were scared, I can admit that, who wouldn’t
be.… The house has, or I guess that should be had, that’s still so hard to say, it
had
its own generator, so we had some quantity of power, but the phones, the water, that stuff was all down, for the whole coastline as it transpired, I’m telling you these were major heaves.… And I had guests, Larry, Chile’s probably greatest living writer and his lovely American wife, these were responsibilities also, and what can I say, it simply never occurred to me that she’d make the trip, you know what I mean?, it wasn’t the moment for a few super days by the old Pacific sea. Listen, the staff were out of there, I mean like bats out of, not meaning any disrespect, I understand how they felt, I’d probably have done the same myself, but they were
gone
. And I’m like, how quickly can I get myself and my guests to a place of safety, wherever that is, you know? Like, we’ve been lucky so far but don’t push it.… It didn’t cross my mind for a minute that she would just set herself down, with no plan for an exit, no direction home, you know?, on the Weeping, excuse me, beach.—Excuse me?—Oh, the pilot said he saw …?—No, Larry, I can’t say who that would be. The staff are all accounted for, I believe, and my guests and myself, ditto. If there was somebody hanging around there, poor bastard, it’s news to me. Maybe a looter, I don’t want to be pejorative here, it would be the same way in California, no question, but uncertain times kind of bring forth thieves. I guess he paid a high price, huh.