I’ve since lost it, but I can still remember every detail
from when I first saw it. They are
grouped together like DaVinci’s ‘Last Supper,’ which is to say that they are
all posing and looking forward, grouped together on one side of the table so
that every face can be seen, even the face of the one playing this group’s
Judas. Every group has one. It’s a
cheap Polaroid, the left corner of the bottom white strip creased and yellowing,
a photo taken in the summer of 1992 outside of a café in Barcelona. I’m not sure if it is taken during or
after the Olympics, because I cannot see any of the waiters in this shot. Once the Olympics had departed that
summer, leaving the city with a hangover of success, overworked prostitutes, and
vastly improved infrastructure, I remember the stone shoulders of all of the
waiters, at least all of the waiters serving in restaurants along the Ramblas,
softening and gradually sloping down, like an armada of sails dipping over a
horizon illuminated with the summer sun. Let us imagine that the Olympics are
over when this picture is taken so as not to get sidetracked with the actions
of that one titanic son of a bitch who ruined a few lives forever. We will assume this is taken after the
initial actions of the titanic son of a bitch, but not before everyone fully
realizes the consequences of those actions. The scribbles on the back of the photo overlap in a frenetic
mess, though a few words of French are legible. Identifying the people in the Polaroid is
straightforward. They are, from
left to right, B. Thomas, Javier Marías, R. Shea, Maria Iniesta, E.N. Swildon,
and Lord Rymer.
B. Thomas is Blake Thomas, an American jazz trumpeter and
occasional philanderer more well known for the fictional biography of him
written by one of his friends than for any of his music, or any of his
philandering, for that matter. He
is sitting on the edge of his bistro chair, all legs and nose and elbows,
leaning in and angling his inside ear toward the ground. That is the ear he will go deaf in a
short time later, and he has developed the habit by this time (I’m sure it is
after the Olympics now) of leaning toward his friends during conversations and
gatherings. His brown hair is cut
short, and his cheeks are red with the hint of razor burn. He’s the most casually dressed of the
group, in blue jeans and a plain white tee shirt that reminds one of James
Dean, had James Dean lived a few more years. The photograph cuts off his feet, but he only brought a pair
of gray running shoes to Europe that summer. He’s not looking at the camera, but across at Maria Iniesta,
a woman he knows through friends, and not very well. Then why is he looking at her? He’s looking at her cleavage, or at her tits, as he would
say if forced to give an answer.
His usual smile is absent.
Javier Marías is the famous Spanish writer, of course,
though he has had the fortune to be less famous in this photograph and to grow
more famous as time has passed.
This sometimes happens in reverse, resulting in the fading light of once
bright stars, in the creation of hacks out of poets. Marías is well known for his philandering, which is ironic
because he is not in any substantial way that sort of man. His characters in his novels sleep with
women, but only because Marías is an honest writer. He is leaning back in his chair, his right arm brought up,
his hand poking out of his shirtsleeve and supporting his chin. He is looking at the camera, and his
gaze is so direct that one feels he is looking past it, past the photographer,
past the photograph, and at you.
Another honest writer, Sebald, once included an image of Javier Marías’s
eyes precisely because of this directness:
They are Latin eyes, with none of the actual look of
almonds, but with the hint of that look, and so, other than being direct, the
writer’s eyes are a cliché or a trope.
His left arm is pressed across his chest, giving the right arm a base on
which to rest. His left hand is
grabbing tight to the right side of his shirt, just below the armpit (his
knuckles look drained of blood), but he appears relaxed. He has a slight smile, almost always
there, which most people take for smugness, an assumption he takes no pains to
correct. He is wearing dark
slacks, though the round of the bistro table cuts off all but a portion of his
right leg from the viewer.
Next is R. Shea, a hack writer, a sycophant, chubby and
growing fatter by the moment, tall, hair like a willow tree after a storm (he
is the only male with long hair at the table). Shea is perhaps amused with the
knowledge that he is in the process of ruining lives, of becoming this group’s
Judas, this group’s titanic son of a bitch. It is possible that he is
internally amused, but he doesn’t show it here. He wears a perpetual frown, developed in childhood, and his
brow is furled as if he has come to the crux of an unsettling and
intellectually demanding problem, though as often as not he is thinking about
nothing. The rest of him is
unremarkable, so much so that I cannot even recall his first name. He is wearing a white cotton shirt with
starched collar and the long sleeves rolled up haphazard, part of his own
particular mixture of dandy and slob.
The table hides his legs, but smart money says he is wearing khaki
shorts and dark leather sandals.
Besides Blake, he is the only American in the group. He is leaning toward Blake, though not
looking at him, forming an invisible link between the two countrymen that
Marías appears to be avoiding by leaning back and away from the conversation. It looks to be a conversation, too, and
perhaps Shea has just said something, something about the appropriateness (or
lack thereof) of gawking at Maria’s breasts in the middle of a café on the
Ramblas while someone is taking a photograph, and Blake is straining to process
the words he did hear, taking the ones he didn’t to be unintelligible instead
of having to contemplate any sort of hearing loss, and of course still gawking
with the thin veil of discretion.
Shea, chastisement offered, is looking off into the distance, at
nothing, at no one, like always.
Maria Iniesta, a South American expat, is the Christ, the
center of the photograph, a hinge around which all of the other people are
rotating, even if they appear to be ignoring her completely. She is looking down at the table, at
the piece of bread and her petite wine glass, the body and the blood, and her
shoulders are sloping, but not out of relief or success like those of the
waiters no longer burdened with Olympic tourists and burnt out hookers. The lines of responsibility and guilt
are beginning to line Maria’s dark face, though she is rather young, the
youngest of them all. She is
wearing a white blouse, or perhaps it is faded peach, with lace straps across
the shoulders, the left side hanging lower, the tip of the white scar that runs
across her chest just peeking out.
If you look very closely, and if you know where to look, if you have
looked at that scar myriad times when she was naked on top of you, making love
to you in the frenetic way she did, her eyes closed, tears falling across her
smile, then you can see the beginnings of that scar very well. Her black hair is tangled, each long
strand like a jewel in a crown of thorns around her forehead, cascading down
her back. Her downcast eyes remind
one of the stones set in the eyes of a statue. Her right hand is reaching for the sharp knife near the
bread. Her left is under the
table, though probably nowhere near Swildon.
E. N. Swildon, the British classicist, sits like a god upon
his throne. His chest stretches
the silk of his blue dress shirt.
His tie is tastefully unfastened and hanging around his neck, equal in
length on either side down to his shirt pocket. His chin tilts up, and his mouth hangs open in the midst of
a roar of laughter, the laughter of a lion at play. His eyes are closed, so the viewer cannot see that they are
the color of sherry, or the color of sherry in a decanter, and that those eyes
shimmer whenever Swildon looks at you, as he waits the extra few seconds for
you to feel compelled to speak, as he weathers silences. This photograph is the only other time
I have seen his eyes closed, and like when I saw them closed 15 years later as
Swildon’s body occupied his coffin, I have the urge to wait with the patience
Swildon used upon his friends until those eyes opened again.
Lord Rymer finishes the group portrait. The fat man, fatter than Shea, he is
known in Oxford as the flask.
Marías used him as a character once, and Rymer has never forgotten it,
states that he is eternally in the Spaniard's debt. Rymer is a writer in his own right, the author of ‘The Book
of Dead Novelists’ and ‘Eça de Quieros as a figure of Jest,’ which won some
prestigious award in Oxford and nothing but biter condemnation from the
intelligentsia of Portugal. His
beady eyes are fixed on the food, and his tongue darts out of his thick lips in
spasms. He is paying for this
meal, and the photograph is nothing more than a speed bump on the way to his
gastronomical satisfaction
I would like to wind back the clock on them all, to take
them out of this group photograph, to get them all away from the titanic son of
a bitch and safeguard the secrets he has already begun to tell about them to
complete strangers for nothing more than his own amusement. But dare I?
