| Author: |
Michael J. Prince |
| Dated: |
Sunday, September 14 2003 @ 08:01 PM EDT |
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The deluge was over; forty days of intense rain that had glutted the sewers and overflowed the gutters had finally ended. When the gray firmament over Bergen parted to reveal a patch of blue sky, I knew it was time to go out and take a stroll.
If every picture tells a story, the picture I could have taken of M. on that day might have made this entire narrative unnecessary. He was sprawled on the cobble-stones right in front of the old, mustard yellow Norges Bank building. His prone figure suggested a marksman for, indeed, he was aiming at something. The finely tooled black cylinder of his camera lens jutted out from his squinting visage just three inches above the ground. I was in the sunlight in front of the church and he was across the street, in the shadow of the bank, his brown woolen topcoat fanned out on both sides of him. He was tensed like a cat about to pounce. I couldn't make out what he was trying to take a picture of; I saw an indistinct jagged silhouette lying on the sidewalk five feet in front of him.
Yes. It was M.; it could be no other. Maurice Matin was one of those wirey-haired, caffeinated and nicotined Belgians who, with their suave French accent and impeccable taste in clothing, could be found just about anywhere, including the puddled gutter of one of Scandinavia's finer cities with a small fortune of photographic equipment pressed to his face and a fuming Gitanes dangling from his lips. He clicked the shutter, readjusted the camera, reeled off a few more shots, crawled about three feet, repositioned himself, and finished the roll of film. He sprang to his feet, took a long drag on the cigarette and threw it on the ground.
He owed me a significant sum of money and his appearance now, obviously flush and with a new and expensive toy to boot, piqued my curiosity. I resolved to follow him at a distance, contrive a "chance meeting" and, after the usual pleasantries, remind him of our agreement. Last October he had been "practically finished" with an opera buffo someone had "begged him to write" with the working title Here Comes the Antichrist! It was against these prospects I lent him the money.
He reloaded his camera and disappeared around the corner. I crossed over to see what it was that had captured his attention. Lying before me was the crumpled remains of an umbrella; the twisted silver wires helter-skelter against the black rent fabric was the product of our frequent Bergen gusts. I nudged it tentatively with my foot, as if it were a dead cat.
I caught up with M. in the park surrounding Lillelungĺrdsvann, a large pond with a high-spraying fountain. He was fast approaching a gnarled pink umbrella. He circled it, absorbing every detail. At once he fell on his back, and bending his head up, shot three pictures over the tops of his boots. Then he rolled over twice and, lying on his stomach, fired a dozen more; he vaulted over the umbrella and continued the barrage standing, squatting, crouching, and kneeling until both he and the magazine were spent. He stood up, made the pretense of brushing himself off, and traveled on.
He repeated this photographic dance perhaps a dozen more times throughout the morning and well into the afternoon. Each one was so novel and engaging that I didn't want to interrupt him. At last he ran out of film.
"M.!" I called to him warmly. "Fancy meeting you here!" We stood facing each other in front of the theater, next to his last subject, a green and orange wreck of an umbrella with a sporting goods logo on it. The fabric flapped in the breeze.
"Jack!" he said. "Oh, how fortunate running into you!" My heart lightened; perhaps he would settle his old debt, I thought. "You see, my good friend, just at the moment I'm a little short of cash. Would you indulge me in a cup of coffee."
Had I just run into him then, I would have assumed that Maurice was down and out. His beautiful brown coat was soaked and clotted with leaves, his white shirt, ripped and stained, his pants, wet in conspicuous places. Only his continental comportment and the camera around his neck belied the impression of hard times.
We ducked into a crowded café; the din had just achieved its after-work climax. I stood in line for the cappuccinos and Maurice found a place where we could insinuate ourselves at the corner of a table.
I sat down and asked how it was going with his opera.
"Oh, that," he said with a mixture of surprise and disdain. "Yes, well, you know Jack, one should never travel when one is in the middle of something."
"Oh?" I said.
"No. You see, I had the libretto finished in rough form, I mean more or less, yes? And most of the main melody lines were set — there's a couple of absolutely precious Mozartian arias for the soprano. As I was saying, I was working, you know, on the closing chorus, the finale, the culmination of the work, yes? And well, there I was weaving a rich fabric out of bass, tenor, soprano, and mezzo, when — I don't know how to put it — I felt empty. I felt forsaken, forsaken by everything, by the libretto, by my entourage of characters, by the music itself, by — Jack, I just have to say it— by art. At the very moment when it should have fused into something glorious, I was forsaken. By art."
A hint of tears welled up in his eyes. He scraped some of the dried milk from the edge of the cup and sucked on the spoon pensively.
"So, I had read in a Belgian newspaper about a car thief who had to go on a pilgrimage for penance, you know, instead of going to jail. And so I thought that might be the thing. Santiago de Campostela. I might be able to find some, some, eh . . . — je ne sais quoi — some inspiration, some meaning to it all." He waved his hands in a broad gesture of the immensity of the problem, and then deftly helped himself to a cigarette from a pack lying on the table. He was composed. "Of course, the car thief, he had to walk you see. Belgian justice," he added with a grin. "But I, Maurice Matin, do not walk on pilgrimages. I borrowed a car; it took me almost three days. I didn't sleep a wink."
"That's in Spain, isn't it?"
"Yes. Galicia," he added with the Castillian lisp. "But I will tell you something, Jack. In this world inspiration and meaning are commodities in extremely short supply, even at Santiago de Campostela. Besides," he added, exhaling smoke, "somebody stole the car."
We sat in silence. The girl came from behind the counter and went to the tables emptying ashtrays and lighting candles. After she left, Maurice stubbed out his cigarette in the clean ashtray and came to life.
"But, Jack! You haven't seen my pictures! You must. Oh, you must," he insisted. "The opera? Opera is a thing of the past," he said with the conviction of a sudden convert. "A bunch of puffy Florentine bankers and nobles trying to capture the lost glory of the Ancients. Bah! . . . I don't know what I ever saw in it. It's — how do you say it? — rubbish. Real creative genius shouldn't be at the mercy of state funding and benevolent impressarios. Real creative genius should speak from the individual to the individual.
"I remember when I was a street mime in Rome, I remember how it was. The raw, pure transference of art directly from me to them. Oh, it was glorious, Jack. I would wish that every human being could experience it once in the lifetime. You know?"
I nodded vaguely.
"But, enough talk! You must come and see for yourself."
M.'s apartment had undergone a transformation since I had last been there. He flipped on the ceiling light and with a magician's sweep declaimed: "Regardez.” His antique oak writing desk, his baby grand piano, in fact every possible surface, the sofa, the kitchen table, the coffee table, everything was covered with photographs, almost all of them of umbrellas in various states of decay.
"Let me explain." He got out two cups from the kitchen cupboard. "You've known me for quite a while, eh, Jack? And, you know that I have been trying to . . . to say something. I think of it as the reason that I've been put here on this — oh, never mind. It is silly." He stood before an open drawer, looking for spoons; his eyes became weighted with the burden of confession and self-analysis. He fussed absently with the coffee machine and gathered his thoughts. "I don't know when I realized it, but I've always been struggling with a barrier, trying to get what is in here" — He tapped his chest —"out there."
"Uh-huh."
"Maurice Matin's message to the masses," he sneered. "Oh, how I've tried."
"But this?" I cleared a patch of sofa. "Umbrellas?"
"It has taken me almost thirty years to come to a state where both the medium and the message are fused, where they are one. Photography, my voice! The picture, my word! The image, my message! You see, Jack, it's the frozen moment, the frozen moment out of which the conscious soul can extrapolate the entire.. the entire reality; the past, the present, the future spun out from the few meager threads of the frozen now."
"I see," I said. "And umbrellas, then are the —"
"Umbrellas, Jack, are the symbol, the basket wherein we can throw together the external and the internal of our epoch and end up with —"
"Truth?" I guessed.
"Or something just as good," he said. He sat down across from me and tried to make room on the tiny table for pot and the cups. "If you think about it, I think you'll agree. They come from out there, we do something with them in here, and, when we sent them back out again? Magic! So, when I bought my new camera, I knew this was it, the image, the symbol. They're not just pathetic forsaken metal skeletons wrapped in tatters. They were, they are, they will be. It is the artiste that changes the world by changing the way we see it! That is creation."
He continued as he went to fetch three matted and framed pictures. The motif was, naturally, wind-wrecked umbrellas, and one of them in particular caught my eye. It was a color picture of a huge puddle in front of a birch trunk, reflected in the puddle were the leaves and the sky, some fluffy white clouds and a little blue. Very bright and encouraging, really; and left of center in the puddle, — you almost had to look for it — a mangled umbrella, dark red and impotent.
"Oh, you like that one?"
"Yes, M. I really do. It's so . . . peaceful, in a way."
Some days later, Maurice sent me that picture in the mail. There was no note. As he would often do, it seemed that he simply dropped off the face of the earth. It must've been almost six months later that I saw him in Cafe Opéra, hypnotizing two co-eds with his intensity. His hair had a lot more gray in it. I sat with my back to them, pretending to read.
"Mastery of an instrument, that is a luxury. Better to start at once if one has something inside which is screaming to get out," he said with conviction.
"Yes," said one of them. "But just one chord?"
"Well, to start with. Why not? It is pristine; nothing to change, nothing to cloud up the message; the power of a hurricane and the simplicity of a bell."
I was going to turn around and ask about his pictures, but one glance told me it was a moot point. The black contoured case was leaning against the wall. Maurice had bought an electric guitar.
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believable character & a successful foil to the narrator. I
did enjoy this story.
My only niggling doubt was in his direct speech, would
have liked to have heard a conversational idiosyncrasy,
something to reinforce the differences between the two
men. (Please reply if you disagree.)
Loved the description of the photographing process!
Any more stories?