Lime's Photograph (8 page)

But not all the negatives.

This particular one might be in my secret archive, which even Oscar
didn’t know about. I had not only always taken great care of my negatives, I had also considered the best and most controversial ones to be both a life insurance and a pension, plus creating a portrait of my life. I had been in the habit, since I was young, of posting these special images to my parents. I would put the negative inside a letter addressed to myself, which I then put in an envelope and sent. They knew that they just had to look after the letter until I came home. When I dropped in during one of my irregular visits to Denmark, I opened the letters to myself and put the contents in a suitcase. There had been various suitcases over the years, increasing in size, and now my archive was a big, white, steel Samsonite case with a combination lock. Only one suitcase was allowed. That was part of the ritual. Of the myth of my own making which involved a good deal of superstition. I put the negatives in order, filed them and listed the subject matter in a black notebook. It may have been an eccentricity, but I didn’t trust centralised archives and I didn’t trust computers. I didn’t store just negatives of my famous photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy sunbathing naked and other images that had earned me a fortune. There was also a landscape that meant a lot to me, or had done once. There were the first photographs I had taken with my first Leica, or with my first camera. There was a really rather banal tourist shot from the Red Square in Moscow in 1980 alongside a little portrait of my first girlfriend taken with my old Kodak box camera. The first photographs I had developed and printed myself were in my suitcase. There were negatives from Iran, from Denmark, from my childhood and adolescence, of half-forgotten lovers and girlfriends, from my lifelong project of taking photographs in all of Hemingway’s drinking-holes, and then there were the million-dollar-negatives like the one of the “Minister and his Mistress”. There were the first photographs of Amelia and Maria Luisa just after her birth. But there were also love letters from a long life, letters from my father and mother, my first
letter to them written when I had been away on a summer holiday, a couple of school reports, a couple of essays and my clumsy attempts at writing poetry, sketches and hastily scrawled diary entries and thoughts. The odd newspaper cutting, but only a few and all from my childhood and early teens – the Kennedy killings, first John F. and later Robert; the first man on the moon. The photograph I took of the Vopo laughing on the crumbling Berlin Wall. It was more than just a suitcase. It was a safe place for nostalgia, in which I had recorded my life’s adventures, for my eyes only. My will stated that after my death the suitcase should be taken, unopened, to the public incinerator and burnt. Throughout my unsettled existence, the suitcase, which I used like a diary, had been a secure berth, somewhere in which I could store my life’s secrets and innermost thoughts. After my parents died, I had a solicitor store it and receive my post for a while, but for the past five years it had been looked after by Amelia’s father. Being a former intelligence officer, he could keep a secret and, even though we saw things very differently, I knew that he trusted me and respected me, yes, was fond of me because he could see how unconditionally I loved his only daughter and grandchild.

I picked out the negative of one of the more pornographic shots and put it in an envelope, along with a note of the time and place, and addressed the envelope to myself before putting it into a larger envelope with a short message to Amelia’s father. The photograph of the mystery woman could quite easily be in the white suitcase in Don Alfonzo’s pleasant house near Madrid.

I checked my emails and replied to a couple of letters. They were mainly from sources telling me about possible hits. Rumours and hearsay about where the famous were planning to go on holiday or were holidaying already. They didn’t have to be sensational photographs. Every picture of someone well-known in a private, informal situation where his or her vulnerability was on display was
worth a fortune. I decided I wouldn’t follow up any of the tips, but I thanked my sources and transferred the $1,000 that I thought one of the informants had earned. I emailed a tip to a young photographer who worked for us as a freelancer in London and who deserved a break. I had been there too once, jostling for position in the heaving crowd of photographers waiting outside a restaurant in Kensington, because word was that a royal was having lunch there. Hours of waiting for that thousandth of a second. The photographer’s lot: hurry up and wait!

The diva arrived with her dresser, and I spent an enjoyable hour while the old poseur sat for me in my studio, chatting about men past and present and affectionately telling indiscreet tales from behind the scenes. She was from a bygone era, but she had a marvellous face and, being the great actress that she was, she knew how to employ every one of her hundreds of face muscles. I tried various kinds of lighting. She wanted to look mysterious and enigmatic. She also wanted to appear 20 years younger. If the photograph was good enough, she would insist that the theatre used it for their publicity. I also had a number of authors on my client list. It had got to the point where the photograph on the back cover was more important for sales than the content of the novel. We lived in a media-driven age where image was everything and substance nothing. Everyone in the spotlight wanted to play the role they had chosen. They would claim that they were just being themselves, but I knew better than anyone that they really wanted to play a role, and that they were miserable if they weren’t able to perform it through to the finale. Even the tragic, beautiful Princess Diana was both actor and victim. She hated us when we lay in wait, but loved us when we could be used in her power struggle with husband and Palace. She couldn’t live without the media, and she ended up being devoured by it. She thought she could choose, but once you’ve invited the media in, the guests won’t leave until they’re
ready. If you live by the media, you die by the media. Either abruptly, or that slow, painful death when no one points the viewfinder at you any more. When you’re no longer a story, just a memory. When emptiness strikes and the flashbulbs go out. Fame can be both a drug and an aphrodisiac. I made my living from today’s narcissism and insatiable appetite for gossip. I was the man sitting in the middle of the global village square, passing on gossip about the famous. By making visible their sorrows and joys, infidelities and loneliness when they were abandoned, I both mythologised and humanised them at one and the same time. But I needed something more. So I took portraits, because in a photograph of a face I could, if I was lucky and skilful, lay bare the individual’s soul in all its fragile nakedness as I peeled away their chosen persona without their realising what I was doing. They couldn’t hide from me in a portrait. I revealed the depths of their being.

Afterwards, I spent a few hours in the darkroom with the diva’s portrait, but I still didn’t think we had hit exactly the right expression, so I decided I would have her to sit again. I was happy in the darkroom. The outside world disappeared. The darkroom was soundproof, and light-proof so nothing disturbed me as I created my own world and saw my art emerge under the red light. The chemical processes were simple, but it was my precise attention to detail and my ability to combine them in the right order with the right timing that made the result uniquely mine. I said goodbye to the young woman who looked after Maria Luisa during the midday break, ate a quick sandwich and went out into the afternoon summer heat, round the corner to the Japanese karate institute. They were old friends and had been my trainers for 20 years. When the institute had first opened, I had done the publicity shots and helped them through the tortuous Spanish red tape. They didn’t have any money, so they had paid me with lessons. Now they had loads of money, as did I for that matter, but I still regularly took photographs for them and they let me train
at the institute when my body needed the restlessness knocked out of it. Karate training kept me fit, and I enjoyed talking with the old trainer, Suzuki, who had the ability to look at life from a distance and put it into a perspective, which reached beyond the everyday. Talking with him was a bit like talking to the priest I could never believe.

Oscar had thrown himself into golf with the passion which only middle-aged men are able to invest in a new vice. He was far too tall to be particularly good, but he worked at it as if it was a matter of life and death. He had taken me out on the course a couple of times, but it didn’t really appeal, even though I suspected that I might have been better suited to it than he was. Oscar had more than enough money, so he invested in expensive coaching and he had improved a lot over the last couple of years, but I stuck to karate and the discipline it demanded. That self-control which Suzuki drilled into me on the mat and in our conversations afterwards.

The Madrid heat hit me in the face as I stepped out of the door and was instantly enveloped in the smells and sounds of the city. The boisterous song of the streets. The smell of freshly boiled squid emanating from a big bluish-red creature hanging over a steaming copper pan in a restaurant window. The blind lottery ticket seller’s keening chant as he promised to plead to the goddess of fortune in the next big Los Onces draw. The clattering rattle of a three-wheeled delivery scooter and the quiet hum of a Jaguar. Madrid’s and Spain’s ceaseless and conspicuous cacophony of contrasts, of old and new.

I walked past the Viva Madrid café and a few metres on to Calle Echégaray, one of the oldest streets in Madrid. I posted my letters and walked on feeling quite content. Bars and little boarding houses sit side by side. The pavement is narrow, so you have to press yourself against the buildings when the cars clatter past. In my young days I had lived at Pension las Once, halfway down the street opposite the Hotel Inglés and the Japanese karate institute. They had opened
the year that I had moved in, renting a small room on the fourth floor from señor Alberto and his señora. Their Galician domestic help, Rosa, was 30, maybe a virgin, illiterate and so sharp-tongued that I told her she could marry only a member of the Guardia Civil. Rosa couldn’t be called beautiful. She had regular but coarse features and a clumsy, round body. She looked like what she was: the daughter of a poor day labourer and a mother who was worn out because, like so many other poor Spaniards in those days, she had to grind and toil to keep the home together. Rosa always wore a pink overall when she cleaned and cooked with the señora. She came from a small village far away in green and hilly Galicia, born into a large family of poor farm workers. Her father had lined up every morning along with the other men on the village square, in the hope that the landowner’s foreman would give them a day’s work. Poverty was widespread, exploitation gross and the class barriers high. Rosa had been in service since she was seven, but I never discovered how she had ended up in Pension las Once in Madrid. In the evenings, the señora would sit with the
ABC
newspaper and try to teach her to read. It was a red-letter day when Rosa finally managed to read the headlines by herself. Old señor Alberto had fetched a bottle of special sherry which he had been keeping for 25 years, and we ceremoniously raised our glasses to Rosa who’d solved the mystery of how random letters put together in a particular order make words, which make ideas, which in turn shape dreams. It was easy to be a socialist in Spain in those days. The exploitation and oppression under Franco’s dictatorship were plain to see. The wealth created along the coast by the tourist industry benefited only a few. There is no reason to romanticise the past, so why do we do it all the time? Spain had come a long way and, whereas a generation ago there had been lots of Rosas, now there were only a few who didn’t go to school and learn the basic requirement to be a member of society – to read and write.

I wondered, as I often did, about Rosa and what she was doing now. She had eventually married, not a civil guardsman, but a small-holder from Andalusia. Had she slogged herself to death in some godforsaken Andalusian olive grove? What did she make of modern Spain with its computers, cars, materialism, small families, abortion, contraception, democracy, liberty and postmodern modernity? Had any of us imagined that the country would change to such an extent? I don’t think so. And somewhere along the line we probably regretted the changes too. Hadn’t we loved Spain precisely because it was different and out of date, non-European, almost African in its colours, lifestyle and expression? Now it was like every other European country. Bound together by the European Union, it still had its own cultural expression, but, in essence, this expression was the same from Stockholm to Madrid. At least where the young were concerned. And it was American. It was only in the bullring that the old Spain survived as a kind of museum for a lost individuality. The rest was moulded by the incessantly grinding, global media machine, of which I was a prosperous cog.

Maybe it was my age that made me increasingly question my profession. Maybe it was just my subconscious preparing me for the catastrophe. Maybe that’s just the wisdom of hindsight.

In any case, I was walking along lost in thought, surrounded by the reassuring life and hubbub of the city, when two men blocked my path. They were tall and trim, mid-30s, in well-cut suits.

“Señor Lime?” one of them said.

I stopped.

“You’re under arrest,” said the other, while the first one, with the unerring hands of the expert, pulled my arms behind my back and snapped on the handcuffs.

They drove me the few hundred metres along Calle Alcalá to the headquarters of the security services and the police, a massive, old red building on Puerta del Sol. The centre of Spain, where the distance marker reads zero and the walls in the looming building have absorbed the forgotten screams of the condemned and the tortured. They were firm but polite when they took away my mobile phone and the little Leica I always carried and put me in the back of the car, one of them holding my head to make sure I didn’t bang it on the doorframe. The car was a big, white Seat. There were no handles on the inside of the doors, but I was placed securely between the two plain-clothed officers anyway. I sat like a child wedged in tightly between two adults. My shoulders pressed against theirs, which felt confident and fit and muscular. The driver pulled away without a word and without turning round. Like the other two, he was close-cropped, elite corps style. They didn’t answer when I asked why I had been arrested. Spain is a constitutional state, but with plenty of violent crime and an active terrorist movement like ETA, the security forces and the police are not quite as subtle as they are in Denmark. The State’s response to the violence, and the consequent erosion of the concept of justice, lowers the threshold of what is acceptable. Only 20 years earlier I would have been terrified. At that time the police still
beat confessions out of people they didn’t think they could secure a conviction against, or who they had already decided were guilty. Even though the Basques maintained that the Guardia Civil still did it, I wasn’t worried about outright physical abuse. I asked again why they had arrested me and didn’t get an answer. The handcuffs were cutting into my wrists and digging into the small of my back and it was uncomfortable when the car accelerated or turned a corner and I couldn’t cushion myself properly. The security officers smelled of tobacco, garlic and a rather cheap men’s eau de cologne. It was depressing to be sitting there between them, watching the radiant and anarchic Madrid life going on outside as if nothing had happened. As if life could just carry on without me. I wanted to shout out to the pedestrians carrying their belongings, to the lovers walking hand in hand, to the frantic businessman with his attaché case, to the road sweeper in his yellow waistcoat with his little cart, to the well-dressed women on their way back to work after the siesta, to the school children in their blue uniforms, to the motor scooters, to the cars, “I’m stuck here. Help me. Stop the traffic. How can you carry on as if nothing has happened?”