But clearly it isn’t this hall or cathedral or museum that the photographer wants us to concentrate on. The setting is intense and completely effective. But it’s subliminal, it’s background, like a sound track used to evoke or underscore a mood. The photographer’s subject is the Madonna and child. The photographer’s whole world is the woman and the infant.
Sylvia is tempted to go farther for some reason. To focus in, hard and adamant. She’s tempted to say the photographer’s only concern is the woman and the child. Is the skin of the woman and the child. The woman’s bare shoulder, her flowing hair and exposed, succulent neck. Her nursing breast. And the baby’s bare skull, closed eyes and extended tiny hand.
In front of Sylvia are seven photographs, suspended by spring clothespins from an arcing silver wire. She’s spent the last dozen years of her life — since her mother gave her that first Instamatic — attempting, almost obsessively, to make her images do this.
She’s never succeeded. She’s taken shots that please her. And though she’d never said this to anyone, Perry included, she’s taken half a dozen that might possibly step beyond the competent and into that vague and personal definition of feeling and judgment called Art.
Possibly.
But she’s never come close to this. And until these photos, she’s never known exactly what she’s been looking for. Sylvia has spent over a decade trying to learn, spent countless hours in libraries looking over fat volumes of all the masters since Niepce and Daguerre invented the camera. She’s read technical manuals and dense texts full of theory. Then she’s always gone out into the world with her equipment and tried to apply what she’s learned. But she came to feel that no matter how much she learned, making image into art would always be a hit-or-miss proposition. At least for her. Technically, barring accidents, she can always nail down the image. She can reproduce anything on film. But technical consistency is never going to be enough. And after a time it can become even depressing.
Mastering the technical never showed Sylvia how to take shots like the ones hanging in front of her. And after she’d nailed the technical she didn’t know where else to go. The past few years have brought that kind of funk where she’s started to think you’re either born with that other kind of knowledge or you’re not. You either know how to make shots like these seven before her. Or you don’t.
And when that thought proved too depressing, she decided that maybe it isn’t the photographer at all. That maybe it’s always just the coincidence of image and time and lighting and motion and a hundred other things coming together at exactly the right moment. And it’s luck that determines who’s in the right place at the right time. Holding a camera.
So, she’s operated on a shaky faith, assumed that if she spent enough hours walking around with a loaded camera, waiting, prepared, maybe sooner or later she’d be on the scene when all the elements came together. She’d be the one to lock them up in the frozen instant. She’d be the receptacle for the image, the conductor between the image and every pair of eyes that it might ever grace.
Whoever this photographer is, he found his moment here. He stood focused at the correct place and instant. He opened his shutter seven times, let in the light, introduced the image to the film, to the play of chemicals.
Sylvia gets an almost tactile sense while looking at the shots. She can almost feel how smooth and cool the woman’s shoulder is. She can almost feel the grit of ash and stone under the woman’s feet. She can practically flinch at the shower of dust, barely visible in the cones of light rays, falling on the head of the infant.
She spends another two hours in the darkroom. She gets out her magnifying glass and peers over every inch of each photo. She rearranges the order in which they hang on the dry line. She sits on the step stool and attempts to imitate the woman’s posture, the arch of her back, the tilt of her shoulder and head. At one point she even takes off her sweatshirt, drapes it over her right shoulder and back, and cradles a jug of stop bath to her chest.
That’s when it occurs to her. Sitting there half-naked at three A.M., shivering with the touch of a cold glass bottle. She’ll go see the photographer. She’ll go back to Jack Derry’s and explain what she’s found. She’ll get the photographer’s address. She’ll go to his home. She’ll present the seven photos.
And she’ll ask him what it was like.
8
Mr. Quevedo is used to spending large amounts of time in silence. But the silence of the Hotel St.Vitus is unlike any other he has ever known. There’s a deeper meaning to this kind of quiet, a sense of something lurking in the absence of noise.
Still, anything to please a customer. So he sits in the dimness of the top floor chapel-cum-office, a room made even more dim by his advancing cataracts, until Hermann Kinsky enters carrying a serving tray filled with a teapot, cups, saucers, milk, sugar, a plate of Oreos and a bulging envelope. Kinsky places the tray on the altar and sits down next to Quevedo.
“The housekeeper’s day off,” he says. “I hope you’ll forgive the tea. I’m not very talented in the domestic arts.”
“I’m sure everything is just fine,” Quevedo says, though he’s neither hungry nor thirsty.
“There was a type of cookie,” Hermann says, “in the old country. During Hanukkah, the women of the hills would bring them to my orphanage. A very thin crust. It was said they were made with a touch of arsenic, but I never knew any of the children to die. I cannot find them here.”
Quevedo nods his sympathies. “I have the same problem. So many things from my youth, I can no longer locate.”
He looks to the tray, but Kinsky makes no move to pour the tea.
“This surprises me,” Hermann says. “I would have thought a man in your position could manage to locate anything he desired.”
Quevedo holds his palms out. “You tell me, my friend. Where am I to get the banana water? The dulce de leche? Where do I go for a true dish of Bikaner stew? We gain by coming here, but we lose also. You would agree?”
“Perhaps,” Kinsky says, a smile spreading, enjoying his contrariness, “some things are best left behind.”
“Change,” Quevedo says, “can be as kind as it is cruel.”
“Is this an Argentine saying?”
“I think,” Quevedo says, “it is a universal truth.”
Hermann shakes his head. “No such thing.”
Quevedo shrugs, nods, smiles.
“I’m moving to a new home,” Kinsky blurts, the sudden volume of his voice making his guest flinch.