The Museum of Modern Love(45)
I would walk three thousand miles to see you again, Papa, she thought. I will wear red and you will wear blue. I would walk beside the Yangtze, across desert, up and down stairs, fending off bureaucrats and a million tourists, just to see you again. You are not dead. You are simply ahead on the path. When my time comes, I will be ready and you will be there. You with a flag bearing the Maltese cross. Me, I carry no flag. See, I have taken no other country than yours. Your warm, dry fingers will fold around mine and I will be safe.
‘Healayas,’ a voice said. It was Octavia, the MoMA media person they’d assigned to her. ‘Are you alright?’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Healayas, said, standing.
‘We’re about to open. It’s ten twenty-five.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s very moving. Don’t worry. Lots of people cry.’
MARINA HAS A MONTH TO go. On the radio they’re playing Antony and the Johnsons. It’s ‘Hope There’s Someone’ and Antony sounds like a sixteenth-century castrato. At least one person listening through headphones in the queue is feeling as if she wants to drink petrol and set herself on fire for the sheer beauty of vivid, searing extinguishment. The city has slipped through a misty dawn and is now poised beneath neatly arranged Pixar clouds. Alice Levin is arriving sixty seconds early to a lecture. Healayas Breen is drinking Gatorade after swimming fifteen hundred metres at the pool.
Marco Anelli, the official photographer, is carefully repositioning his Canon EOS-1D Mark IV. Every evening, after he has reviewed the photographs from the day and made his recommendations to Marina, who checks them all before he uploads them, Marco has time to sleep. He can live on six hours, although he sleeps until midday on Tuesday, the one day of the week MoMA is closed and they all get a twenty-four hour reprieve to recover a little normality. Sometimes on Tuesday night he cannot imagine how he will resume the schedule for another week and another.
There is no time for friends. No energy for friends. All day he is surrounded by people. All day he spends observing faces. His dreams have become strange police line-ups. Sometimes he is weeding faces in a giant garden, other times he is scooping them up as if they have fallen like moonbeams onto the river’s surface. Last night he dreamed of a party where he went from room to room looking for someone in particular, but never found them, and everyone was dressed as iridescent blue birds with dark masked eyes and beaks of sparkling beads.
He passed the clipboard with the permission slip to the next person in the queue, and they filled it out, signed it and asked him, as they all asked him, ‘Will it be long?’
He smiled, and said to each person who asked, ‘It is impossible to tell.’
He tried not to engage in conversation in the atrium. He was not a spokesperson. He was the photographer. When he and Marina had discussed this show, they had imagined the chair opposite Marina would often be empty. They had never imagined people would be so compelled to sit that they would queue for hours and hours.
He checked his watch, a gift from Marina. How perfect that she should have given him time. It was the thing they shared. While ever she was here he was also here. For seventy-five days he was her constant witness.
They had met in Rome when he had asked to photograph her and she offered him ten minutes the next day. It was all the time she could give him, she said. She had greeted him at the appointed time and he had surprised her because it was not her face he wanted. It was her scars.
The scars told her real stories. The scars that came from knives and ice, fire and scalpel; years of work on the tightrope between art and spirituality. Years of trying to create a philosophical bridge between east and west. He did not pretend to understand her, so he admired her. She was squisita the way older women could be squisita. They knew their own voice, the way they moved, the way to dress. They knew their curves and their own face and if they had lived, really lived, there was something like a well in them that, as a younger man, he wanted to drink from. It wasn’t entirely sexual but it was entirely sensual. That was what he felt. The sensuality of devozione for Marina. Her strength, her humour, her solitude, her impromptu meals—pollo arrosto, melanzane ripiene, risotto ai funghi. She had a way of making him feel like family. Making them all feel like family. La famiglia di Marina.
He looked at her through the lens of his camera and saw in her dark eyes generations of Slavs and Arabs, Greeks and Persians who had migrated on foot, on donkey, taking with them the possessions that would see them through the next winter. Into that crumpled landscape they had gone, at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. Being Italian he understood the sense of country people had. He imagined it wasn’t easy for your country to change names, have different masters, be a pawn in the games of monsters. Italy had known all that. Even now, Italian soldiers were dying in Iraq for Bush’s war that was now Obama’s war. The war Berlusconi, il buffone, had signed them up for. Italians understood how people who were once your neighbours could become your enemy. Italy had not united as a nation until after the First World War. But in Yugoslavia the fighting had been long and bitter and of a different order. There was a particular voltage of hatred between Serbians and Bosnians, Croatians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Slovenians. Between Muslims and Christians—una vecchia guerra.
People had picked up axes and killed women and children who lived in the same street. That was Yugoslavia. A no-longer country. A fairy story place of madmen and musicians, lovers and killers on a stretch of peninsula between Austria and Macedonia. Marina came from the once-Yugoslavia, a place that had been squeezing and twisting and folding itself up longer than places had names. A peninsula of steep-sided valleys, rushing rivers, blue lakes, winding villages, snow-capped mountains. An origami landscape with endless segreti.