A photographic tale

Artef Fierel and the

Forms of Time

A JOURNEY THROUGH PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE AND THE ART OF PHOTOGRAPHY

The following morning, Artef opened his notebook again. The blade of grass was still where he had placed it, beside the little door. He looked at it for a moment, then picked up his camera and went out.

He returned to the botanical garden and looked around for the old man. This time he was sitting on the bench, his hands resting on his walking stick. Artef approached him.

— May I sit down?

The man moved the hat he had placed beside him.

They remained silent for a few moments. Light filtered through the branches, illuminating one side of the old man’s face. Artef noticed the creases around his eyes, the thin skin at his temples, a small scar on his chin. During their earlier encounters, he had been so intent on following his words that he had scarcely looked at him.

The old man pointed to the camera.

— What are you looking for today?

Artef hesitated.

— I’d like to take your portrait.

The man ran a hand over his cheek.

— With all these wrinkles?

— Those too.

The old man smiled, and the folds around his mouth changed shape. Artef lowered his eyes to the camera, but did not raise it straight away.

— First, though, I’ve realised something — he said. — I haven’t asked you your name yet.

— You know — the old man replied — I don’t always remember my name. I remember my studies, my past, mathematics, but not my name. We can make one up, if you like.

He hesitated for a moment, then added:

— Yes, call me Gino. Perhaps that really is my name.

— Hello, Gino. You have a very expressive face. I’d like to take a close-up, and perhaps turn the photograph into black and white afterwards, to bring out your gaze and the marks of time.

— We could do that, but now I have to go to my wife. You see, she’s in a wheelchair, and she needs my help to eat and get changed. She can no longer manage even the simplest things on her own. But she’s still beautiful, and I always see her as she was on the day I met her.

— I’d like to meet her. If you like, I can walk you home, so you can introduce me and perhaps I can help you with something.

— Yes, I’d like that, but I don’t quite remember where home is. You have to give me a little time to do the calculations. Now, one turn to the right, two to the left, three to the right, five straight ahead, eight turns to the left…

Gino retraced the journey backwards in his mind, trying to remember where he had come from. Artef listened, puzzled, but sensed that this was his way of finding his bearings in space.

Gino noticed his hesitation and smiled at him.

— Don’t worry, I’m not mad. It’s just that sometimes I no longer recognise myself in who I used to be, and I don’t even know who I was. So I rely on my clearest memories and create a world I don’t know, but which is the only one I remember.

Artef nodded, trying to show him that he was following. In truth, he had not fully understood those words: they seemed like fragments of a thought whose connections escaped him.

The man sighed and returned to following the directions in his mind.

— There, the leaves always fall in the same place, and that gives me a sense of time. Each leaf takes a certain amount of time to slip down from the tree, and the sum of the times of all the leaves tells me when I have to go back to Teresa. Now it’s time.

Artef thought that this reasoning must mean something, and nodded. They stood up and set off. Gino’s pace was slow, but at times he quickened it, as though his body were following a rhythm unknown even to himself.

Then Gino stopped in front of a death notice.

— Look, he has the same name as me. And he was born on the same day.

Artef read it, puzzled. The name did not match the one Gino had given him. He did not know Gino’s date of birth, but the one on the notice seemed too recent for a man of his age.

Perhaps, inside himself, Gino had remained at another age. After all, time was relative in some way, and for him it seemed even more so.

Artef raised his camera and photographed the old man from behind, absorbed in reading. He wanted to preserve that moment in which time and space seemed suspended in an unreal world, yet one no less true than any other instant.

More leaves fell near the old man. Autumn was beginning to make its voice heard.

— There, you see? More leaves are falling. It means I have to wait a little longer.

But how can that be, Artef thought, if they’re falling it means time is passing, not standing still…

He went along with him and sat beside him on a wooden bench, worn in the middle and slightly damp.

— Do you see those clouds, Artef, gently covering the sun? They’re like me. They have no particular destination. They go where they like, obeying the laws of mathematics and physics. But no one tells them what they have to do or where they have to go. They just go.

The old man raised a hand towards the sky.

— Look now. That would make a beautiful photograph! The sun is right in the centre, just veiled by that cloud. If you stop down the aperture, lower the ISO and use a fast shutter speed, you can capture the outlines of the clouds too. But you have to take it now, not later.

Artef raised the camera and followed his advice. The result was a surreal image, the sun in the centre and the clouds arranged around it in an almost perfect symmetry.

Gino wanted to see it on the camera’s little screen. He studied it for a few moments, then said:

— I like that sun, so blurred. It looks as though it’s about to disappear.

Artef looked at the photograph again. The sun, veiled by the cloud, had a more clearly defined outline than Gino’s words suggested. Perhaps his macular disease made the very centre of the image indistinct, blurring details that Artef could see clearly. He could not know exactly what appeared before Gino’s eyes, but he was happy that he had liked the photograph.

Time now seemed still, suspended between two minds finding an unexpected way to communicate. Senses and perceptions intertwined, giving things a new appearance. The sun had climbed higher, and the shadows had shortened until they looked like little dark patches beneath their feet.

They resumed walking at the same uneven pace as before, now hurrying, now slowing down. A bus sounded its horn, and Gino turned, mistaking it for a police car.

— Do you see how they rush about? They haven’t understood that time is standing still. But they’ll understand when they get where they’re going and have to turn back, to reclaim the space they’ve lost.

Artef helped him cross the road. The pedestrian crossing, lit from behind, caught his eye just as a pigeon flew into the right-hand edge of the frame he was composing in his mind.

— Did you see that seagull over the crossing? It would have made a beautiful photograph — the man said to him.

Artef knew it was a pigeon, but it hardly mattered: they had seen the same photograph. Without needing to take it, they carried it with them, crossing the junction slowly, side by side, towards the next right turn.

A little further on, after they had rounded the corner, Gino saw a bench and decided to sit down. Artef went along with him. They stayed there for a while, as the clouds above them grew darker and darker.

— It’s going to start raining soon — the old man said.

We need to hurry, Artef thought. But Gino was still looking out at the city.

— With this leaden sky and the sun peeping through the clouds, look how everything changes. The light before a storm makes everything unreal. If we found an interesting subject, we could take a beautiful photograph. What do you think?

— Yes, of course. But if it starts raining, what will we do?

— We’ll stop on this bench. After all, we only have another four left turns and two right turns before it comes down.

Artef looked at him, unsure whether Gino had lost the thread of the conversation or was following a thought of his own, in which even the rain could wait until they had finished their walk.

Then he picked up the camera. The subject they were looking for was sitting beside him. He began photographing Gino from different angles, moving closer little by little, until it was mostly his eyes that filled the frame. There was a quiet strength in that gaze, which his frailty seemed to make all the more intense.

He looked back at one of the close-ups on the screen. Autumn was reflected in Gino’s eyes, bathed in the warm light of a final break in the clouds. In the depths of that little landscape, he could make out a fork in the road.

— That’s where we have to go — Gino murmured in Artef’s ear. — That’s where Teresa is waiting for me, in that building at the end, where the eucalyptus bends to embrace a mimosa branch.

Artef lifted his eyes from the photograph and searched for that spot in the street, as though Gino’s gaze had just shown him a place he would not have known how to see on his own.

More leaves broke away from the branches and lingered in the air before settling on the ground. Time flowed inexorably and seemed to draw the space around them back into itself: the garden, the bench, the trees, the sun once more veiled by clouds. Everything slowly lost its outlines and blurred into everything else. Light gathered in Gino’s eyes, shadows in his wrinkles; even the leaves on the pavement seemed to belong to a memory that Artef was beginning to share without ever having lived it.

They resumed walking. For a while, Artef heard only the rustle of their footsteps and the breathing of the man beside him. Gino leaned on his arm, but moved with a new assurance, as though he recognised the way by small, invisible signs: a crack in a wall, the smell of damp earth, a branch reaching beyond a gate. Artef let him lead. Teresa’s name had stayed in his mind and accompanied their silence.

Around them, thoughts and images seemed to gather into a slow whirl, rising towards a hidden point in memory. The bench was already far away, yet it seemed that they only had to turn around to find it again. The fork glimpsed in Gino’s eyes lay before them, then behind them. Artef could not have said at what moment they had stopped following the road and begun following the old man’s memory.

They found themselves in the building’s entrance hall almost without realising it. The air was cool and still, carrying a faint smell of plaster and old wood. Behind them, the noise of the city faded. Before them, a steep staircase rose into the half-light, its steps worn in the middle by years of footsteps. It seemed to have been waiting for them for a long time, and Artef had the strange impression that their walk too, from the very beginning, had been a period of waiting before that ascent.

A slanting light fell from above. It came through a window that, seen from below, seemed suspended in empty space, so pale was the wall around it. Only a few fragments of glass remained along the frame; through the opening came a breath of air carrying the smell of approaching rain. The light brushed the steps one by one, revealing dust in the corners, veins in the stone, the handrail polished by hands.

Gino stopped at the foot of the staircase and lifted his face. Artef felt the old man’s hand tighten slightly around his arm.

They remained like that for a few moments, listening to a silence that seemed to come from the rooms on the upper floors.

Three piano notes drifted down from above, followed by a woman’s voice. Gino raised his head.

— So that’s where it went.

— What?

— The music. I couldn’t find it this morning.

They began to climb. At each landing, the melody grew clearer, mingling with the clatter of crockery and a voice recounting something with unusual precision, as though even a person’s small pleasures deserved to be listed one by one.

The apartment door stood ajar. The woman who had stayed with Teresa welcomed them with a finger to her lips.

— She’s watching her film.

Gino nodded, took off his hat and held it against his chest.

Teresa sat in her wheelchair in front of the television, turned slightly towards the window. On the screen, a dark-eyed young woman plunged her hand into a sack of pulses. Teresa moved her fingers on the blanket, slowly opening them, as though there were something cool and smooth on her lap too, something she could sink her hand into.

Artef stopped in the doorway.

The room had green curtains, a lamp with a honey-coloured shade and a sideboard on which the objects seemed to have arranged themselves over time without finding a permanent place. A little ceramic bird faced the wall. Beside the clock stood a tin box, and on top of the box a pair of glasses.

Teresa noticed Gino.

— You’re late.

— We waited for a few leaves to fall.

She received the explanation with a small nod.

— This girl, on the other hand, is always running.

She pointed at the screen. The young woman was now crossing a street in Paris.

Gino bent down to kiss her temple.

— Where is she going?

— To put something right.

— What?

— I don’t know yet. Sit down.

Then she saw Artef.

She studied him carefully, looking from his face to the camera.

— Are you the one with the photographs?

— I take them, yes.

Teresa turned back to the television. Small photographs of faces had appeared on the screen, some torn up and pieced together again.

— There’s a man there who collects them — she said. — The others throw them away.

Artef took a step closer.

— Perhaps they don’t like the way they look.

She frowned.

— So does that mean you have to throw them away?

— They throw away the photographs, Teresa — Gino said.

— I understand.

She said it quietly, without turning around.

Gino stood with his hat in his hands. Then he placed it on the sideboard, in front of the little ceramic bird.

For a while, all three of them watched the film.

Artef watched the television’s light pass across Teresa’s face: the green of a room, the red of a wall, the yellow of a brightly lit street. Each colour stayed on her skin only for the length of a shot. From the window came a pale, almost motionless light, illuminating her hair and the back of one hand.

— Could we turn it down a little? — Gino asked, looking for the remote control.

Teresa held his wrist.

— Gently. There’s the music.

He lowered the volume by just two notches.

The melody remained in the room like a person who, noticing that guests had arrived, had begun to speak in a softer voice.

— Teresa, Artef would like to take your portrait.

She looked at him again.

— To put me where?

— Nowhere, for the moment — Artef replied. — So we can look together at how it turns out.

Teresa settled her hand on the blanket.

— Then yes.

Artef took a chair and sat down at her level. Up close, he noticed a small stain on her sleeve, the worn edge of her cardigan, a hairpin that no longer held anything in place. Teresa noticed his gaze and raised her hand to her hair.

— Is my hair untidy?

— A little — Gino said.

She held out her hand to him.

— Then come here.

Gino tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. He did it with slow care, using two fingers, and Teresa remained still until he had finished.

Artef raised the camera, then lowered it again. He had been too late to catch that gesture.

A box of little objects appeared on the television. Teresa leaned forward slightly.

— Mine.

Gino followed her gaze, then moved the glasses and took the tin box from the sideboard.

— This one?

She nodded.

Inside were buttons, a thimble, a brooch with no clasp and a little medal tied to a thread. Gino placed the box on her lap.

Teresa rummaged with her index finger, sliding the objects about. Their tinkling mingled with the piano notes.

She chose a mother-of-pearl button.

She held it in her palm, near the window. A small blue light crossed its surface.

— It still has a little sea inside it.

Artef moved closer.

— Was it from a dress?

Teresa kept looking at the button. The smile withdrew from her face.

— It was…

Gino shifted in his chair.

She closed her fingers around the button.

— It won’t come to me.

For a few moments, only the film could be heard. Someone was running up a staircase inside the television; in the room, no one moved.

— We can leave it here — Artef said.

Teresa opened her hand again. The button was still in the centre of her palm.

— Here is fine.

Gino reached out with one finger and turned it over. The blue reflection vanished, replaced by a shade of pink.

— Time has changed — he murmured.

Teresa looked at him.

— You’re the one who turned it over.

Gino smiled.

— That’s true.

Artef thought of the leaves, the turns, the calculations the old man had used to find his way. In Teresa’s room, a single finger was enough to change the light.

Rain began to beat against the glass.

On the television, the young woman was watching someone from a distance, half-hidden behind a wall. Teresa followed her with her eyes and smiled before anything happened, as though she had guessed what she intended to do.

— Now she’s going to leave something for him to find.

— For whom? — Gino asked.

She raised her hand slightly.

— Wait.

They waited.

Artef had the camera ready, but Teresa was looking elsewhere. In the viewfinder, her profile stood out clearly against the curtain; fine creases gathered around her eye, changing as the images followed one another. He wanted to call to her. The words rose to his lips and stopped there.

He took the photograph as she smiled at something he had not seen.

Teresa turned at the sound.

— Did you take it?

— Yes.

— But I was watching.

— That’s exactly what I photographed.

She seemed to consider this. Then she held out her hand to see.

Artef turned the screen towards her. Gino leaned in from the other side, narrowing his eyes.

In the photograph, Teresa held the button in her palm. The window illuminated her hair, while a warm reflection from the television touched her cheek. Her smile had only just begun.

Gino looked at her for a long time.

— You had that expression too when…

He broke off.

Teresa waited, her eyes on him.

Gino searched for a moment longer, then shook his head.

— I don’t remember where.

She touched his sleeve.

— Let me see it too, then.

Artef brought the screen closer. Teresa bent her head.

— I look happy.

— You were — Gino said.

She raised her eyes to the television.

— I like this girl.

Outside, the gutter began to drip onto the windowsill in regular beats. Gino listened, then looked at the clock on the sideboard.

— That one keeps going.

Teresa followed his gaze.

— Let it go.

— And us?

She beckoned him closer.

— We have to see how it ends.

Gino put the tin box back on the sideboard and moved his chair beside Teresa’s.

To make himself more comfortable, he rested his arm beside hers. She placed the button in his hand, then closed his fingers around it one by one. Artef followed the gesture with his camera, without asking them to repeat it.

On the little screen appeared two elderly hands, clasped around something that could not be seen.

Another line came from the television. Teresa smiled.

Gino, who was watching her, smiled a moment later.

When the film ended, a shadow passed across Teresa’s face, as though a piece of her life had gone away for ever. Gino smiled at her.

— We’ll watch it again tomorrow anyway, as soon as those eucalyptus leaves are on the road. Now let’s put on the nature documentary: you like that one so much too.

They changed the channel, and the screen filled with the rolling hills of a distant place, in all their splendour. Teresa reached a hand towards the television, as though to touch them.

— They’re just like the hills by the house in the country. Do you remember, Gino?

— Yes, I remember. The hazel trees… and my courgette patch.

Time remained suspended as a voice spoke of those hills, perhaps in Asia, or perhaps in any place in the world where the sun rose to illuminate them.

Artef wanted to write everything down in his notebook, but could not find the words. Or perhaps there were too many: they crowded together without managing to give shape to what he felt. Perhaps, at that moment, they were not needed.

The photographs remained.

He left in silence, as the smell of freshly cut grass drifted slowly up the stairs, mingling with the dampness the rain had left in the air. Outside, the asphalt was beginning to dry.