Dirty Feet (5 page)

THREE DAYS LATER
he parked in front of a dilapidated, deserted building. There were families living on every floor. He climbed the stairs to the last floor, the sixth, just behind Olia. There were no apartments up there. A large room, the walls covered with frescos, images of cities with colonnades, towers, walls rising out of clay earth. Depictions of battles: archers bending their bows, glittering blades cutting into a cloudless sky, blood-soaked savannahs. Street scenes as well: a crowd clustered around a kora player singing of a victory, no way of knowing which one. And below each picture was the name of a city or region: Timbuktu, Gao, Djenné, Oualata, Fouta-Toro, Dedri, Kano, Katsina, Zaria, Agadez. It was a beautiful mural, and even though there were a few dates providing some context — Cairo 1496, Mecca 1497, Agadez 1515, the Sahel 1516 — he would have liked to understand more.

The wind blew into the vast loft through the smashed shutters. The daylight heightened the colours of the frescos. Olia was calm. She scanned the room. Askia thought she had class, this girl from Opalchenska. Grace and tranquility. Opalchenska, the neighbourhood in Sofia where she had grown up. She told him that the man in the turban, Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed, had lived here and had slept at the foot of the mural. It was here that Sidi had sat for her. That was ten years ago, a short time after she arrived in the city, when she was prowling around the recesses of Paris with her Leica, hunting for unusual images. The frescos, Sidi had said, recounted the story of the Songhai Empire and its king, Askia Mohammed. It showed the cities he had conquered and those he had passed through during his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1497. The man in the turban was not the one who had painted the mural. He had said, “No one knows who the artist was. But the main thing is that it exists.”

Askia studied Olia's profile. Hard to say how old she was. But she couldn't be very young if indeed she had encountered Sidi ten years earlier. Her slenderness and the childlike quality of her face gave no indication of her true age. She must have been thirty or forty. Askia began to take her more seriously. With her he was discovering a new chapter in the book of Sidi.

BACK AT THE
apartment at 102, rue Auguste-Comte, Askia wanted Olia to describe the photo session with the turban. If Sidi had in fact stepped in front of her lens and had actually agreed to stop for a while within the Leica's field of vision, he who was cursed with endless migration. The girl believed that Sidi had been willing to pose for her because he was not afraid that the lens would throw light on his soul and his many lives. And because he hoped the lens would fix him forever on paper and allow him to cast off the curse.

Askia returned later that afternoon. Her smile greeted him. They went directly upstairs to the mezzanine because she wanted to show it to him. The wooden steps creaked under their weight. When they reached the top, there were two doors on the landing. She opened the one on the right, which led to a workshop-bedroom. It was actually another, smaller mezzanine built a metre and a half below the ceiling. A raised platform, Olia's bunk. Under the bunk, the floor. In the wall on the left-hand side was a closet that must have contained clothes and odds and ends, as well as books, some of which were scattered around the room. Boxes of film, lenses, pictures, or rather picture frames, arranged in a corner next to a spotlight mounted on a stand. And in the opposite corner stood a matching spotlight, as if in dialogue. Between them the walls were naked, empty, blank. There was a screen with a rather high barstool front and centre. Two mirrors, one oval, the other square, were positioned near the spotlight, alongside a large, rectangular table that occupied the whole partition opposite the platform. The table was covered with miscellaneous items: two crates, a ruler, pliers, a length of string, a lamp, thumbtacks, another box of film, a few gizmos that Askia could not identify, a bottle containing some brown liquid, and, at the far end, a teapot.

They drank the tea without speaking. Olia raised her eyes from the cup and squinted. She described how Sidi Ben Sylla had posed for her in front of the mural in the deserted loft. She had asked him to sit on a high stool against the background of colours, figures, words, and dates that told the history of the Songhai. He complied. She triggered the camera, shooting without a flash. She paused, pulled the spotlights from the corner of the room where she had placed them, and directed them at his face. It was harsh lighting. Sidi turned his head away. She told him to sit in profile, looking first in one direction and then the other, in full face, with his back to her, in profile again, first with his face lifted towards an invisible sky and then lowered towards a hypothetical river at the foot of the stool. Sidi was calm. Olia continued to shoot, capturing the immaculate strip of cloth above the broad forehead, the regular features of the face chiselled out of dry wood, the straight nose, the high temples, and the supple bearded chin. The clicks of the Leica pelted down on Sidi's turban.

Following the session, her strange model appeared sad. He let out a sigh before continuing. “You know, I've been on the move so much I've lost a few addresses. If I had them I would ask you to send a photo to my uncle Sidi Barouck in Nouadhibou, another to my brother Saidou, who stayed behind in Zinder, and finally one to my old aunt, who has probably passed away, in Médine, near Kayes.”

“I'm very sorry, Sidi.”

For Olia it was impossible to forget Sidi's gestures and words that day, even though ten years had gone by. His voice still resonated in her head.

THEY WENT BACK
down to the living room and Olia became very serious. She took up her usual lotus position in front of the low table, on which they had set their cups of tea. “The man with the turban,” she said, “stirred up something inside of me. An emotion that brought another one back to me. The past.”

The past. Harlem. A trip, an encounter, a man who had been a passage in her life. But Askia did not understand right away.

“Harlem . . . a man, a friend, a one-time lover? Someone you loved?”

“Harlem, America.”

Harlem was where she had taken her first pictures. The first real ones. She had completed her training in photography in Sofia. But without much enthusiasm. The passion — true, pure, jolting — would come later. In Harlem. Her first trip. She had been invited there by Penny, an American woman whose education in photography had followed the same path as Olia's and who wrote in her letters how the soul of Harlem inspired her. Nothing had inspired Olia up to that point. So it occurred to her that she needed her share of voyaging, a pilgrimage to the Mecca of what for her could be new and different. She might have gone to Bombay had she known someone there. To Lima, Recife . . . She went to Harlem because that was where her friend Penny was.

She told Askia that it was there that everything had started. Thanks to Willy, an artist doomed to freeze to death on 125th Street. Willy photographed the feet of passersby. He said he was capturing the feet, fixing on paper feet that could never stop walking.

She made a point of exploring the neighbourhood on her own. That bothered Penny, but it also gave her time to concentrate on her own projects. Olia found herself in the vicinity of West 144th, near the Studio Museum, where, Penny had said, certain artists were in the habit of storing their material and their dreams of greatness. She met Willy there, one fall afternoon in 1996 with the leaves painting the landscape yellow and the incipient frost tickling their toes.

She had her Leica. She strolled and took photos of an old crone stooped over her cane as she walked her dog; a grocer who resembled the Brazilian actor Grande Otelo, smoking a pipe in front of his store; a child who must have had the day off from school, bouncing a ball. In front of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a pastor sermonizing with a stack of Bibles beside him.

This was Harlem more or less as she had imagined it. But she wanted to see more. She was contemplating a visit to the Studio Museum when she saw him. Willy. On the sidewalk in front of the museum, he shouted unabashedly:

“If you were an angel you would pose for me, beautiful! If you were an angel you would say yes like an angel who never says no! If you're agreeable, I'll take your portrait and your feet. Please, don't turn down the most famous photographer on 125th Street. If truth be told, I'm honouring you!”

“I'm not an angel. Just a tourist.”

She found him funny, entertaining. She agreed to pose for him if he showed her around the museum first. He could help her. Help her to locate the soul of this place that he knew so well. They passed under the large glass marquee overhanging the museum entrance and pushed open the doors. He explained the history of the institution since 1967, the famous exhibitions that had been held there, and the one he hoped would someday be devoted to his work. And then for three whole days he showed her the places — cafés, bars, squares, lanes — all the subtleties that are apt to elude the sightseer's hurried eye. And for three whole days she posed for him. Jokingly, he said he wanted to photograph her in three dimensions: full-face to catch the light of her being, in profile to capture the intimate part of her, from behind to imprint on film what he called her mystery. She played along, and on the third day he brought her the negatives. In three dimensions: her being, her profile, her mystery.

After that he went on to her feet, which he took in the act of walking. Because, he said, they were a story. What's more, they were beautiful. Olia's feet. They barely touched the ground when she walked. She didn't want to take root. She was unable to. She was not of that breed. Willy said all these things to her.

It was a splendid adventure but there was something amiss. The little cough nagging at Willy when they first met had worsened. It had been cold the past two nights in the alley that was home to a few unfortunates, including him. He told her that all America had given him was the alley where he slept at night and a red and blue sleeping bag with a star over his heart when he lay on his back rather than on his side, as was his custom. The alley, the sleeping bag, the star, and a birth certificate: William Locke, born June 27, 1959, in Montgomery. From Alabama he had trekked up to New York on foot. He coughed, but he was proud and happy because his portraits of Olia's feet were good, and this made his small, shrivelled body quiver with emotion. There was fire in his eyes. Not the sort that warms the insides but the violent kind that burns and consumes a person. Willy was consuming himself. He wanted to give her the pictures but she refused. She tried to convince him they were good enough to draw a connoisseur's attention, and who knows? But he coughed even harder and wanted to sit down on the curb and catch his breath.

He ended up lying on his side, with both hands pressed against his heart. In a final effort, his left hand slid down to his jacket pocket, pulled out the negatives of his latest work, and held them out to her. She looked around for help, spotted a phone booth at the far end of the block, and ran over to call 911. When she came back, he greeted her:

“Delighted to have made your acquaintance, beautiful. You have superb feet. Looks like you were lucky enough to have met the greatest artist on 125th Street before he left to join the gods. Looks like his time has come. You know, I hope that in Hell they stop going up from the South to the North to find salvation. I hope that, down there, we can finally come to rest . . . It's still a great mystery. The title I gave your portraits is ‘Olia and Her Feet' . . . Olia in . . . my . . . Goodbye, Olia.”

“Goodbye, Willy.”

She was disconsolate. The firemen arrived twenty minutes later. Willy had died speaking of “Olia and Her Feet.” When she returned to Sofia, she developed her friend's last pictures. The luminous shadows of the negatives proved to be a poignant study of the vast metropolis's hurried steps. Walkers. An exploration of how far the steps could go, of how many times they could be multiplied.

Feet can get tired too. But is that visible in photographs? When they are printed, can one step be told apart from the next? The step that is coming from the one going away? The step that knows where here is from the one that does not?

ASKIA WAS
moved by Willy's story. And, as sometimes occurred in such cases, he spent a troubled night dreaming of Sidi. He found himself in the countryside. Sidi was taking him to the bank of a creek that cut through a wood. He liked Sidi's smell, a mixture of incense and cowpats. It came from his grimy hair, the haircut that lent him the appearance of a Rastafarian in some Kingston ghetto. He was not wearing his turban. They sat down on the grassy bank, and Sidi spoke to him, proud to open the book of his speech. He told him a strange story, the story of Juan Preciado, a young man searching for someone who was absent, his father, in the ruins and shadows of a village named Comala.

The young man in Sidi's book wandered the roads, questioning living beings who turned out to be anguished ghosts, fleeting forms with peculiar names: Pedro Paramo-Ulysses, Doloritas-Eurydice, Susana-Electra. These names meant nothing to the child he was in the dream. Yet he liked the aura of strangeness that enveloped them, the mystery that they inhabited, and Sidi remarked that the ghosts came from a great mythology: their names, their destinies, the location of the villages, the roads they haunted. They were men and women on the move.

Most of the story escaped him, but he urged Sidi to go on with it. He needed to know if the young man from Comala finally discovered signs of the absent one's passage. He thought the phantoms might have informed the young man. But Sidi cut him off: “End of story. I'll tell you the rest tomorrow. Just keep in mind that Juan Preciado is still searching for the absent one, Pedro Paramo, according to the official records. Remember that he follows him, walking, running, riding a sorrel mare, a train, a bus, a taxi, in the hope of finding him as quickly as possible.”

“The young man in the book,” Sidi explained to him another day, “is Telemac. A nice name, don't you think? Wouldn't you like to have it? I'll gladly give it to you . . . Take the name and forget everything else — the roads and the search that will wear you out.”

His waking cut short the troubled night.