The Flying Aspidistra 2009 ©
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V ictorine Meurent, Manet, A Woman With No Clothes On, V R Main, VR Main, fiction, novel, art, history, romance, sex, Paris, France, amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, writer, writing Edouard Manet, Dejeuner sur L’herbe, Olympia, scandal, 19th century, nineteenth century, painting, obsession, Guardian, Socialist Worker, novelist
Love and Doubles//
From where I am sitting I can see a woman. She is slouching in a wicker chair. Yet her body does not appear relaxed. Her limbs and her shoulders are angular, formed by tension, as if she were on a lookout. I wonder if she is waiting for anyone. Alert, she raises her head: a countenance with no smile. Big eyes looking into the distance, past the obvious and the visible. She is young and there are no lines on her face. I mean of the kind I notice these days. Perhaps there are just two thin vertical shadows, barely discernible, on her forehead, right in the middle between her eyebrows. It is as if they are holding a place for the worry creases which, I can tell even now, will indent themselves in years to come. I feel I am like a prophet of her face, of the meanings that it is to receive in years to come.
The shoulder-
Later on in the day, or was it in a week, or perhaps a month, when I go to the office
to collect my students’ essays on the significance of Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum,
and see the professor leaning over the photocopier, I am reminded of the scene with
the woman and the emotions it conjured in me. I watch the professor as he, either
oblivious to the world or self-
Once alone, I place my face on the glass of the photocopier, listen for the sounds of any approaching steps, and then press the button. The machine heaves up and then stops. The LED sign indicates that it is jammed. The glass display instructs me to open sections four and five. I do. I pull the offending sheets out. The instructions keep on flashing. I repeat the action, wondering, as I usually do when poking the inside of photocopiers, whether my fingers may accidentally, inadvertently, touch a wire and whether I might electrocute myself. Sometimes I even feel tempted by this possibility, not because I am particularly suicidal, but because the notion of the unexpected tickles me. As usual, I picture my body sprawled in front of the machine and the next user having to push me away in order to do their photocopying. I think how I would be amused if they were also to find an image of my face in the tray of finished copies. The very last image of me, fixed by a photocopier. An image for which I was prepared to die, for which I risked everything. My very last message to the world. A posthumously released image, the only possible definitive image.
As usual, I ignore my fears, either because nothing extraordinary ever happens to me anyway, or thinking, perhaps foolishly, that since I have survived so many similar occasions, nothing should happen just this time. I repeat the action as instructed. As soon as the machine is back in order, I try again: my face firmly pressed against the glass. A sheet rolls out. It is black. Evenly black all over. I hold it against the light. I cannot see any signs of my face. Or indeed, any difference in the evenness of the sheet’s blackness. I place it in a recycling paper bin. The photocopier flashes a sign indicating that it is out of toner. I ignore it.
While walking away I remember B. We were brought together by a machine like this one. He gave me a photocopy of an article and seeing that I was pleased, asked me out. Later on, we read Borges on the abominations of mirrors, which, like fatherhood, procreate images of us, and wondered why the great Argentinean never mentioned photocopiers. When things were going well and we would be lying in bed in each other’s arms, B would say that he wanted to thank that photocopier. And how appropriate, we would think, that in our age of copies, of mass productions, of nothing original under the sun, xerox machines generated love affairs. However, when it all ended disastrously, I never blamed the photocopier. I don’t know about B. Sometimes I wonder, and the thought still amuses me, whether for years after we had parted he would have been approaching these ubiquitous office implements with fear and anxiety.
Once upon a time (and what a time it was) in a far away country (it had to be another
country) on a late afternoon, I enter an art gallery in the city centre. A group
show has just opened and the place is teeming with fashionably dressed men and women,
clinking their white wine glasses, talking loudly, bumping into each other and kissing,
the European way, on both cheeks. I am on my own, looking isolated in my simple navy
blue coat, a colour which is not in fashion that season, but is rather like a uniform,
a second skin to me, and jotting down a poem which I, a serious, bookish, seventeen-
Is this how some, the lucky ones, find their doubles? They know who they are as soon
as they see them, have a vision, an epiphany. They who do not need years of getting
to know each other, years of holding back and allowing the other to peel a layer
off a layer at decent intervals. Oh, those phoney, time-
But of course, no perhaps this time, doubles are no more nor less than projections of our own needs. They are our own creations. And the more we put into them, the more likely they are to become too independent and leave us.
His studio is on a hill, above the city, an excellent place to take refuge from the bustle and trivia of ordinary lives down below. We talk. We look at his art. We read together. On my own I read the books he recommends. He recites his poetry and I listen.
One day he tells me off for wearing the fashionable platforms. In his eyes, I am becoming like the rest of the crowd. I know I am not. But I don’t tell him that I need to try some things out so that I can find out for myself who I want to be. He guesses my thoughts and says that there is no time to waste like that. He takes me to see Andrei Rublev, a film about the great icon painter. A master of images. ‘He was serious’, my friend says as we walk home. ‘He was a monk’, I retort.
When the sun is out, we sunbathe. And think. He is a Diogenes, he tells me. But,
like Apollo, he is serious about his art. I must be serious about my work, he tells
me. I am fascinated by him, perhaps in my teenage ardour I even think that I adore
him, but he is not a god. He is a sculptor, but not a Pygmalion. Or, even if, like
many other men I meet later, he fancies himself as the man from the myth, I won’t
let him be that. I have always disliked that myth. So male-
So I stop seeing him for a while, for two years actually, and only go back when I know for sure what kind of shoes I want to wear. And when I can defend my choice, whatever it is. And when I learn to criticise Picasso, without reciting what I am told to think.
We are lovers for a year when one day I go up to his studio and tell him that I am leaving the country. I say that I need to find my own space outside the rules of my family, my nationality and class. (Thinking about this now, it sounds rather like a poem, learned by heart. Was I still reciting somebody else’s words? Not my sculptor’s that time but it could have been someone like Stephen Dedalus. Whoever it was, I believed the words, I appropriated them as my own.) He thinks that all of this is empty rhetoric of youth and that it is irrelevant where we live. The important thing is to be serious about one’s work. I am too excited about my decision to react in any other way but laugh. In many ways, I have already left.
A year later I revisit the country and the sculptor. He is glad to see me, but not
overwhelmed. We talk about the year we have spent apart. Suddenly, he stands up and
says that he has to show me something. He comes back with a box. He places it on
his lap, gently lifts the lid and takes out a sheet of photographic paper. He passes
it on to me. I am looking at thirty-
We sit silently next to each other, he, with the box on his lap, is handing me one sheet after another. I take them one by one and peer closely at the small images. Perhaps I dare not ask any questions. Perhaps there are no questions to be asked, no answers to be given. We think our separate thoughts.
Who took the pictures? When? Where? How come that on some of them I am looking straight into the camera and yet I have no recollection of the event? Of the surroundings? Of the clothes that I am wearing? Perhaps all of this is irrelevant. What bothers me, and amuses me, however, is the sheer quantity of these images. It suggests an obsession on his part. In my language, then and now, obsession is the same as passion. I both fear and desire obsessions and passions.
After a while, he speaks. Of course, he knows what I am thinking. I may not believe it, but the pictures are not of me. I learn that she is someone whom he had met at the seaside last summer. Yes, of course, the resemblance is uncanny, that is precisely what has drawn him towards her. Moreover, her voice was like mine. Her pitch was usually too loud. Was her mind like mine? I wonder. He does not know. He cannot tell. He had talked to her about me, all the time, she listened and for a fortnight that they had spent together, days and nights, she might have begun to live me, he says.
Since parting with her, he has written but received no answers to his letters. He
has made a trip to her part of the country, but the address was non-
I walk back to my hotel room not sure that I believe him. The pictures could have been of me. Over the years he had photographed me several times. Is it reasonable to assume that I cannot recall each single one of those occasions? Or perhaps, she could only exist as my double and now that I am back, and he is not overwhelmed at the prospect, he does not need either of us. After all, he has all those images. And he is a sculptor. He could breathe a breath of life into them. He could. Perhaps. That is all I can be sure of.
Today, thinking of that box with those sheets of photos I only wish that I had made photocopies of them. At my age I find it reassuring to look at old pictures and remember my past. It helps me to assuage the anxiety, the growing fear that one morning I may look in my bathroom mirror and see nothing but the tiles covering the wall opposite.
If this were ever to happen, all would not be lost. I would still have this story to rely upon. A proof that I existed. With or without a double?
All stories © V R Main