Lime's Photograph (6 page)

“Courtesy of the taxpayer,” she said.

“I don’t pay tax in Denmark,” I said, hitched up my camera bag and left with a feeling of uneasiness which I couldn’t explain or understand. But the period during which the photograph had been taken began to surface. I began remembering, and not all the memories from that time were worth hanging on to.

I put it out of my mind when I got home. I lived diagonally across from the café, in a top-floor flat I had bought many years ago and had extended several times by adding neighbouring flats. We had over 300 square metres, including my studio and a roof garden. We were constantly asked if we wanted to sell. It was a fantastic flat in the middle of the city, so we always said no. I let myself in and, as always, said hello to Jacqueline Kennedy who hung, life-sized and almost naked, just inside the door.

“I’m home,” I called out to the kitchen, which is where Amelia and Maria Luisa would be at this time of day. I locked the undeveloped films in the safe and threw Hoffmann’s photograph on my desk before washing my hands and sitting down to supper with my family. I was enraptured with my home, by the company of my two girls, which always filled me with a feeling of joy, mixed with a feeling of anxiety – that one day they might leave me. Amelia had made noodle soup, steak with salad and afterwards Amelia and I had manchego cheese and Maria Luisa had ice cream. It sounds banal to list the courses of an enjoyable meal, but it was in such banality that I had found my inner calm. My
wa
as the Japanese say. It’s in everyday detail that the larger story is to be found. Amelia and I tried to talk, but we let Maria Luisa
steer the conversation. We listened to her chattering, and saw in each other’s eyes how happy we were that she was the centre of attention at our table.

Sometimes after I had been away on a trip, Maria Luisa insisted that I read her bedtime story in Danish. I seldom spoke Danish with her. I had planned to when she was born, but it felt artificial, since we spoke only Spanish with friends and family. But I had read to her in Danish since she was tiny. She never answered me in my mother tongue, but it seemed to make her feel secure to hear me speak this foreign language. After supper it was time for her bath and then I read her favourite book about Alfons Åberg and his secret friend. Her eyes were heavy and sleepy by the time we reached the end, and I left her asleep with the bedside lamp on. I had a quick shower and crawled under the sheet where Amelia lay naked in the heat. Sounds of the city drifted in through the half-open window as we made love and became one.

Often I can’t sleep, and I got up when Amelia moved her head off my shoulder and turned onto her side. As I had done so many times before, I went up on our roof terrace and drank a cola and smoked a cigarette in the warm night air. I had picked up the photograph which the Danish woman had given me and I sat looking at it, surrounded by geraniums, roses, eucalyptus, orange and lemon trees, listening to the throb of the city drifting up from the plaza below. The clip-clop of heels, the roar of a motorbike accelerating, a couple laughing, a drunk man grumbling, a taxi door slamming, a metal grille being locked up in front of one of the bars, the strident siren of a patrol car, a curse as a man stumbled, someone breaking into song from sheer joy, the late night symphony. This was my window to the sky with a view over Madrid. It was here that I could think and find peace. When I had first moved to Madrid in the mid-1970s, the night sounds had been different, the sound of flamenco as people clapped their hands rhythmically to call forth the
sereno
. The
sereno
was a man, a watchman, who
walked around with a big gnarled stick and carried keys to the flats and boarding houses. People called him by clapping. He was often a disabled Civil War veteran. His pension was the small change, five pesetas – the
duro
– he received for unlocking the door. On mild summer nights the clapping echoed round the neighbourhood as if little gypsies were beating a seductive rhythm in the hours of loving between night and day break. The old
serenos
were gone now. Progress had swept them away. There were a few left, but they were on a fixed salary, museum pieces like the watchman in Ebeltoft.

I looked at the photograph. It had been taken in Bogense during a harbour festival and used by the local newspaper, which must have lent it on to a bureau. I had sold the paper a series from the festival, one of my first successful attempts at selling press photos. Lola was 20 years old and lived in the same commune as me. She wanted to be a folk singer, a female equivalent to Bob Dylan. We had slept together a couple of times. She had come into my room at night, but then she went to lots of rooms. The commune had been trying to cast off bourgeois jealousy. They couldn’t of course, but Lola didn’t seem troubled by it. On the other hand, she created problems because she was desirable and provoked a feeling of possessiveness in love-struck men. The man in the photograph wasn’t called Wolfgang. His name had been Ernst. He was just 18 years old and came from Hamburg. Like everyone else, he wanted to be an artist. He wanted to write novels. He was left-wing, but I couldn’t remember him flirting with bombs. He had taken part in discussions about the necessity of violence in the struggle against the bourgeois state, but others had been writing about that in magazines and newspapers. He had been madly in love with Lola and she had dallied with him, made love to him and moved on to my – or someone else’s – bed. He had gazed at her with forlorn eyes and followed her around like a puppy.

I couldn’t remember anything else. I don’t think I’d given Lola a
second thought in the intervening time, getting on for 30 years now. But on the terrace, in the darkness of night, I suddenly remembered that she had cried the last time we had been together. I think it was the last time. I thought she was lovely and sexy, but I wasn’t in love with her. I knew I wanted to move on. I wanted out. It was as if, when she realised I was going to leave her, I took some of her power away.

I couldn’t remember our lovemaking, but in night-time Madrid I suddenly heard her frail voice.

“Peter. My only talent is for seducing men. I have the talent to make men do what I want. Why don’t you do what I want?”

I didn’t know why I remembered that so clearly. I didn’t even know if it had any significance. Memory can play the strangest tricks on you. I left the commune shortly afterwards. That’s how it was. People moved in and out during that strange period when everything seemed possible, when the pain of life was suppressed and the world was changing. I tried to recall other faces from the period, but they were a blur of long hair and beards, flared jeans, mixed bathing, naked breasts in the sun, children left to their own devices, discussions about society and politics, parkas, identical t-shirts, unfiltered cigarettes and women wearing headscarves that looked like mauve nappies. As if we had been a bunch of clones who had been thrown together under the same roof.

I got up and went down to my studio to develop and copy the photographs from Catalonia, so that Oscar wouldn’t be disappointed when he turned up, as he was bound to, first thing in the morning to admire my new scoop. It was something I could do better than anyone else: steal up on the prey and reveal it in all its nakedness.

Oscar came round at about 10 a.m.

As usual, I had prepared breakfast for Maria Luisa and Amelia at just after seven o’clock. Like most Madrileños we went to bed late, but we got up early. This was the rhythm of the city. We tried to take an afternoon nap. We led a very Spanish lifestyle, so we didn’t eat much in the morning – a croissant and a big glass of strong coffee with milk for Amelia and me, and a glass of milk with a piece of white bread with mild cheese for Maria Luisa. She was in a bow-phase, her dark hair done up with pink or gaily coloured ribbons which contrasted with her sober, blue school uniform. From down on the plaza, we could hear the morning symphony – cars, the clanging of metal security grilles as they were rolled up, the roar of motorbikes and shouting and clattering from heavy lorries delivering supplies to the bars and shops.

Amelia drank her coffee in cautious sips. Each morning was new for me. Each morning it seemed like a small miracle that she was still there. She was wearing jeans and a shirt, a touch of make-up, her work outfit. She looked like what she was, an attractive, modern woman. Our eyes met and we recalled our lovemaking. We didn’t speak much in the mornings, we didn’t need to. We ate breakfast in the kitchen, in pleasant, sleepy silence with the radio’s over-zealous traffic bulletins, sport and news in the background, and then my loved-ones set off
into the world. I often experienced an irrational feeling of loss when they left me in the morning. I dreaded losing them. They gave my life meaning.

Oscar thought it rather amusing and slightly incomprehensible that I had turned into this bourgeois family man, but he was probably a little envious too. He feared boredom, and needed stronger and stronger stimulants to combat it. I don’t mean vast quantities of alcohol or drugs, although from time to time he stopped trying to avoid them, usually with catastrophic consequences, after which he’d dry out for a while. Speed and cocaine had both had Oscar in their clutches, but he got his biggest fix from challenges. He saw boundaries as lines to be breached, like a general always looking for the weak point in an enemy’s defences. He constantly had to prove to himself that he was still young. Oscar had always been a Don Juan, and when he was younger I suppose this had its charm because he was so successful, but now that we were nearly 50 there was something desperate about his mania for conquests. He did admit that he no longer made such a big deal out of it, but that it was important for him to try his luck. He had been brought up short when he turned 40 and realised that many young women saw him as an old man. Yes, a dirty old man at that. Gloria had ridiculed him for weeks, until they had made their peace yet again. They couldn’t do without one other. And also, of course, they had their joint businesses. Somehow or other they were joined at the hip. Without the one, the other would be useless.

I went down to the bar on the corner and read
El Pais
while I drank another coffee. The Basques were still at war with one another and the Spanish state. The previous evening ETA had killed a Spanish policeman in Bilbao. A young woman had been found murdered, shot through the mouth. The message was clear, she had grassed. A few weeks earlier they had murdered a young Basque local politician, a moderate nationalist, because the government had refused to release
imprisoned members of ETA. The fury and frustration in the Basque provinces had been overwhelming. More than a million people had demonstrated on the streets of Bilbao. A couple of days later 30,000 ETA sympathisers had taken part in a counter-demonstration in San Sebastián. It was as if a civil war was raging. It seemed as if the killing would never end. At regular intervals a car bomb would explode on the streets of Madrid, causing a blanket of anger and fear to settle over the city. In my youth, during General Franco’s dictatorship, I had regarded ETA as freedom fighters. Now they were only benighted youngsters who, at a time when Europe’s borders were blurring and becoming lines in outdated atlases, were an anachronism. A hangover from the barbaric ideologies of the 20th century.

I took the newspaper home with me, to wait for Oscar who I knew would be anxious to see the photographs. I wasn’t feeling too happy about them. Part of the secret of my profession was that officially no one knew that I was the photographer. The images were sold by the agency. But the Minister’s bodyguards had seen me and the number plate on my rented car. I ran the risk of suddenly being thrust in the media spotlight myself, and even though I made my living from the public’s ferocious thirst for knowledge of other people’s lives and misfortunes, I guarded my private life more zealously than if it were a royal household.

Oscar rang the intercom. I knew it was him from the insistent way he pressed the buzzer. Money had become just as powerful an aphrodisiac for Oscar as a shapely behind had once been. Money could turn him on.

I lifted the receiver.

“Yes, Oscar,” I said, and pressed the button that released the lock so that my old friend could come up.

Oscar and I went way back, to that extraordinary spring of 1977, when Spain had changed so dramatically. The changes in Spain that
year were just as radical as those that swept the whole of Europe in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. In 1977 there were only two countries in Europe that didn’t participate in some form of European collaboration – Albania and Spain. That spring, barely two years after General Franco died in his sick bed, Oscar and I had met in the middle of the night in a bar on Calle Echégaray, where I was living in a little boarding house. It was one of Madrid’s really old bars and Oscar seemed to fill the little room. The walls were covered with yellow decorative tiles and the tables and chairs were small and made of hard wood, so you sat very awkwardly, but they served fantastic wines and stayed open till dawn. Three down-at-heel Andalusian gypsies were attempting to sing flamenco songs. The lead singer had two front teeth missing, the rest were gold. They sang
No te vayas todavia
with hoarse smoker’s voices, while clapping out the arrhythmic, seductive beat. I noticed Oscar straight away. He was huge and cut an oddly clumsy figure as he sat, holding a large glass of beer, on one of the low seats that resembled a milking stool. Like most people at that time, he had a long, pageboy haircut and a bushy beard. I was with a colleague from Reuters who introduced us.

Oscar was a West-German freelance journalist. I was a Danish freelance photographer who had been hired by a Swedish journalist to take photographs for his articles on the democratisation of Spain, and to translate for him. The communist leader Santiago Carrillo had just returned home and was going to hold his first public rally in Valladolid, and we invited Oscar to join us in our rented car so he could get a story for his German newspapers and journals. He worked hard, but the small left-wing publications he wrote for paid small fees for very long articles.