Sixty Lights (15 page)
Authors: Gail Jones
His second secret he thought he might one day tell Lucy. He would tell her about seeing a production of
The Flying Dutchman
, long ago, in the city of Frankfurt, as a young traveller on his very first visit to the Continent. He was twenty-two years old â and still an Englishman â yet he wept out loud in the auditorium when Senta and the Dutchman sunk together under the waves. The music rose, there was a dramatic red light pulsing, and his heart burst open. He had to bury his face in his hands so that no-one would see his hot tears. It was the first and last time Isaac Newton had ever shamed himself thus in public. And he had waited all his life to tell someone about it.
WHAT REMADE HER
world: the capture of light.
For Lucy the photography studio was a revelation. Mr Victor Browne, a man with a bleary vague manner and large clumsy hands, practised a focused, crisp and careful art. Isaac had decided that he and Lucy should have a portrait photograph taken, before â as he so indelicately put it â her shape betrayed her, an image, he said, that would help later on and might even serve as consolation to the future child. This reasoning defeated Lucy, but she acquiesced, keen to see what she looked like halted in a lens, and keen too to see the rooms in which such portraits were produced. Victor Browne ushered them into his little world of props and false objects. There were painted screens, one a scene of the Taj Mahal, one a
trompe l'oeil
drawing room, another a leafy park-scape with French lamps and a curved path, and pretend objects â a marble pillar that was in fact made of painted wood, and a stuffed monkey, looking animated, on an ornate perch. There was a furled parasol for ladies to hold and a teak chair for gentlemen to sit on. Lucy spotted a pile of albumen paper and smiled to herself. The tissue of times past. The shell cracked open.
Part of the ceiling had been removed so that the studio was open to the sky and bright. Victor fussed around, moving this or that object, shifting or settling, lowering or raising his camera
stand. He was particularly concerned, he said, with shadows which appeared every day at this time, for only half an hour or so, cast by trees outside the window onto the interior wall. The shadows were like blossoms; Lucy saw them as powdery blue against the white screen of the wall. Victor's intention was the eradication of the blossom and the production of a uniform unshadowed backdrop, against which the odd couple might be immaculately posed. He moved them to the far left of his viewing frame, just outside the reach of shadow, and there he arrested them: Isaac in the chair, stiffly serious, his hands on his knees, his knuckles polished-looking like large white beads, and Lucy standing behind and to the right, bemused and excited.
Bad timing, pronounced Victor, referring to the shadows, from under a dark cloth. He held up a device which exploded in a muffled puff. Light flashed across the room, filling to the brim Lucy's wide, newly photographic eyes.
The image Victor Browne created posed Isaac Newton and Lucy Strange as a legitimately married couple in an English park. The power of the flash had removed some of Isaac's years; he looked both younger and more solid than he appeared in real life; Lucy, on the other hand, appeared older and less substantial. Since she was superstitious it seemed plausible that the rumour was true: that the camera removed some human quotient or iota with each image it took. Later, indeed, Lucy will worry that her portraits, silver and gold and sometimes resembling icons, have filched spirit-stuff or soul-stuff in the instant of registration. Later, Lucy stared narcissistically at Victor Browne's photograph, but found no pool of portrait beauty over which to linger and transform. She saw herself, over all, as plain and severe. She wondered if others looked at her face and saw this plain severe woman, older than her years and in a state of paranormal fade and recession. All she could think of was this:
People will look at this image when I am dead; it will
stand in for me, for ever, just as my mother's austere paper cut-out â all stasis and reduction â now cruelly betokens her.
It was her destiny, this visit.
Lucy persuaded Isaac to let her learn the art of photography. Victor Browne would instruct her, and during the time of pregnancy she would be occupied in this not-too-unladylike fashion. Isaac was amused and interested and agreed to pay Mr Browne a small weekly sum to instruct Lucy in what he joked was a devilish art. Lucy watched the two shake hands. Isaac's handshake was uncharacteristically firm; it seemed to belong to another man.
Under the nocturnal shadow of the velvet drape, through the frame, and the lens, and the aperture, and the glass, that together directed her vision into this specialised seeing, Lucy discovered the machine that is a gift-boxed tribute to the eye. She looked as she never had, imagining a picture frame or a box that isolated the continuous and unceasing flux of things into clear aesthetic units, into achieved moments of observation. Where Victor sedated and mortified all that he saw â his box, thought Lucy, functioned as a seeing-eye coffin â she imagined a mobile apparatus, one that travelled everywhere with her and that discerned the capability of all things, all ordinary things, to be seen singly and remarkably. Chemicals, glass, mechanical reproduction â these combined to make Lucy feel entirely modern, a woman of the future. She loved even the sharp acidic smell of the fixing agent, that permeated the studio, omnipresently, like industrial perfume.
Lucy's understanding made sense of her book of
Special Things Seen
: somehow â was it possible? â she had always been a photographer. Lucy tried to discuss this supposition with Victor Browne, but he looked sceptical and wry.
“This is science,” said Victor, “not prettified seeing. It is pure calculation.”
Victor had wiry red hair and a kind tone to his voice. He was not like William, and not like Isaac, who carried their authority in forms of knowledge; instead he believed himself the fallible end of a system of strictly estimable decisions. He was the humble hand that covered the lens and sank the paper into its bath of glistening silver nitrate.
“Do you think”, persisted Lucy, “that we shall one day, far in the future, have the means to capture in a photograph the exact colour of your hair?”
Victor turned to Lucy, looking embarrassed.
“Certainly not,” he said. “Colour is God's business.”
For Victor photography was purely fake â vain posturings; the stiff fictions of a happy marriage, placement in other, more remote and more comfortable worlds. For Lucy it was a shift in time itself, and a celebration of the lit-up gaze. The imposture of studio work did not really trouble her: she knew it was one mode among many of the concentrated image. There were still moments in time, moments arcane, seductive, trivial, breathtaking, that waited for the sidelong glance, the split-second of notice, the opening up of an irrefutable and auratic presence. She had always known this. She had always believed this to be so. She had always been, after all, a photographer.
The holy man:
At the door of a temple sat a holy man, a sadhu, with his foot tied to his neck. His forced-up leg was withered and odd-angled â it looked no longer human â and his body was thin and appeared like walnut wood. He had long hair and a matted beard and a single shred of rag around his waist. Lucy bent before the holy man and filled his bowl with money. The man smiled. His eyes shone. His eyes were the only part of him that seemed still to have the capacity to be fully flexible and alive.
Lucy caught his gaze directly: Yes, she thought, just as my eyes make this man a spectacle, his return to me a refusal, and a claim of humanity.
Arre!
he called out.
The elephant:
It was in the
Bombay Gazette
: Mayhem at Chowpatty. An elephant had run amok, killing five people including his mahout, and trampling numerous small dwellings and market stalls. Members of the local constabulary had tracked and shot it, blasting the crazed elephant brains to spattered mush. After the initial sensational story, there were letters to the paper about the non-removal of the carcass: it stank, it was unsightly, it was publicly decaying. Lucy set off with Bashanti to see the dead elephant.
Who could have thought so much flesh was contained in one being? The massive creature lay on its side, its head thrown back. The tusks had been hacked off, and so had the feet, so that there were bloody exposed areas swarming with insects. The stench was foul. A poor fellow in a ragged turban stood guard over the elephant; he scratched unselfconsciously at his genitals and exchanged a few words with Bashanti, clearly curious that she had brought her memsahib to this dreadful site. Lucy picked out the word
farangi
, foreigner, one of the few she knew well. Bashanti lowered her voice and turned away and Lucy tried to imagine what explanation she might be inventing.
Lucy had come to witness bioluminescence. If there is light visible in posthumous flesh, she reasoned, then it will be visible on this scale, with this mountainous beast. She moved foward to the creature, holding her nose to
suppress nausea, and saw all of a sudden the flesh disturbed, as though the animal still pulsed and was still, despite its disfiguring mutilation, alive. Lucy's heart bucked and shuddered and she instinctively stepped back, then saw two rats leaving the carcass through one of the open legs. There was no shine but that of viscera; there was nothing lovely or bright. There was no redeeming conversion of death into luminescent surface. It was only a mass of putrescence, a butchered mess.
That night Lucy dreamed that she set up a camera in front of the elephant. When she looked through the viewfinder she saw right into its body, right into the red heart, which still beat feebly and bore a glazed and delicate shine. As she took the photograph, the elephant rose on its bloody stumps and shuffled away. This was not a nightmare; it was the artful conversion Lucy had hoped in waking life to see.
The pan-wallah:
He sat cross-legged on the ground before a wood plank platform upon which rested, neatly stacked, his bundles of pan leaves bound around mixtures of tobacco, spices and herbs. For a few paise clients bought this unusual confection and headed off, chewing vigorously, filling their cheeks with complicated, explosive tastes. The pan-wallah advertised his wares by his own perpetual chewing. He favoured betel nut, and every minute or so spat a gob of bright crimson fluid onto the ground around him. It was a forest of peonies. Lucy noticed the floral composition of betel stains that circled the pan-wallah. He was at the centre of a kind of artwork. He was in a pattern of spat fluid.
“Disgusting, isn't it,” Isaac had whispered at her side.
“Sometimes,” he added, ever the teacher, “there are special pan mixtures that include gold dust or silver paste. For the wealthy, you understand.
Lucy loved this idea: chewing on gold and treating it as mere food or condiment. “I want to try some,” she whispered back to Isaac, and felt him immediately recoil.
Later, when in secret Lucy had persuaded Bashanti to bring her a sample of pan, she sat chewing the tough leaves and attending to the pan-effects. Her mouth burnt, tingled, was becoming numb, and began to fill up with curious liquids. She spat onto the floor and saw before her a small mound of gleaming brownish muck.
The widows:
A sanitary detachment from the army was spraying tenements with limewash to protect against bubonic plague. The air was filled with caustic stink and people rushed past, and ducked into doorways, complaining. Lucy saw a group of widows, four women â only one grey-haired â hurry past the sanitary operation in their white mourning saris, and she decided, since Bashanti was buying cloth, to slip away and follow. The four women turned into a side street and visited a stall that sold puja items, items for worship, then moved in single file into a hidden-away temple.
The temple space was dim and filled with incense. It took a minute or so for Lucy's eyes to adjust to the darkness, but there they were, the four women, just a few steps in front of her. Each sounded a hanging bell as they entered the temple and moved forward without speaking. They placed their items â a few old apples, rice, jasmine and bilwa flowers â at the foot of a statue of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god. Ganesha was luridly
plump and jolly, with a sweetmeat in his hand and a single rat beneath his foot: he appeared to be dancing. Saffron powder and sandal paste smeared his face and he bore supernumerous garlands of bright yellow marigolds. The women prayed, waving smoke over their faces with slow fluent gestures. Lucy felt again oversized in her stiff-domed skirt, which caught and snagged against the rough stone walls of the temple. Her pregnant body was too full for these narrow spaces. There was chanting, more prayers, and more dense threads of incense. A holy man in a corner saw Lucy and gestured, but she had no idea what he was communicating. She was not sure why she had come, or if her presence was sacrilegious. She watched the widows â who throughout their ceremony had not noticed her at all â they appeared as lineaments of female shape in the claustrophobic dark. The single woman with grey hair seemed to be the only completed stripe: Lucy was tethered to her image. She was a completed pillar of white in the dark, dark temple.
“I've been thinking”, said Lucy, “about Victor Browne's photograph.”
Isaac looked up from the book he was reading.
“The shadows,” she continued. “I think it would have been more interesting with the blossom-looking shadows.”
Isaac now enjoyed their quirky conversations.
“You want the maculate, not the immaculate,” he responded. “
Maculare
: spotted, stained, blemished. Not
immaculate
, like the holy virgin.”
“Yes,” said Lucy. “The world is like this, don't you think? Marked, and shadowed, and flecked with time.”
Isaac sat back in his chair.
Flecked with time.
He still could see only a slight indication of Lucy's pregnancy and wondered
vaguely if she was mistaken, if they could start again. She reminded him in some ways of her uncle, Neville Brady. Families contain peculiar routes of similitude and dissimilitude. He remembered Neville in Calcutta, all those years ago, stuffing his mouth with sugared fennel seeds then leaning forward â with a most alarming presumption and intimacy â so that Isaac could smell the crushed seeds and his sweet aniseed breath. Isaac had looked into the mouth of Neville Brady and glimpsed there a rare physical confidence that he thought at the time was specifically Australian. And he had experienced at that moment a sexual shudder.
