“You’ve got to tough it out,” said my father on the phone a few days ago when I told him how Lena, my wife, was doing. She is from Cuba and happy to be in Buenos Aires, but the day I spoke to my father she was down because she missed her family in Havana. I think it’s been five years since she’s seen them. A long time.
Actually, at first he let out a sound, like a cry of pain, “Yghh!” in a strong, severe voice, like a reflex. He seemed angry that I would call attention, with such a simple comment, to the profound desolation that absences, distances provoke. After a pause, he said, “You’ve got to tough it out,” didactically, as though there were no other choice, as if to go on living the only option were to arm the heart with successive layers of toughness so there is no feeling, to be strong, to be able to go on.
I don’t like toughing it out. I don’t know where I got it or why, but it strikes be as better to stop short and scream in pain. Pull over to the side of the road to cry calmly. Allow for weakness, melancholy, dispiritedness, deep skepticism to wash over you. To hope for nothing. To make no plans. At some point a gust of wind will come along to help you buck up.
I start up the car again and pull away. I’m driving slowly, looking for a bar to order gin. I find just the place. I look everything over: the simplicity, the pleasure with which a group of truck drivers is eating, the television newscast with the volume off, the women waiting the tables, the music. It might be obvious, but life itself, work, the daily routine all conspire to minimize any existential disquisition. I order another gin and return to the highway. The sun peeks through some dark gray clouds, heavy with rain, and makes the green of the countryside look like an ad for La Serenísima yoghurt. The word Argentina occurs to me. I feel a bit ashamed for thinking about my country but I do so anyway. Whenever I’m alone out on the highway, moving fast through the Pampas, I think about my country for a while. I go a little faster without getting reckless. I get myself back together with the shout of the descending murderous Indian hoards. I am both the captive and the chief. I grip the back of the horse hard with my legs, and he gallops along wildly, knee-deep in the mire of the backwaters, crossing marshes, leaping over ditches. Nippur of Lagash fighting the Minotaur in Athens, blandishing his sword. Far off in the distance you can hear Mercedes Sosa singing “Juana Azurduy. Sun of Upper Peru, there is no captain braver than you”.
A recurring image follows me: once, when I was a child, on vacation in Salta and Jujuy, we went swimming in a river and a man who kept an eye on parked cars said, his face bursting pride, almost religious rapture: “This is the river where they stripped the flesh from Lavalle's bones.” I feel nauseous. The fear of thinking about too many strange things all at once. I slow down. I accept my thirst for vengeance. My fury. The pleasure of winning. The Money. The expensive hotels. How happy I am with my newly purchased Macintosh Power Book G5 with eight gigabytes of RAM. Architecture, décor, airport lounges, the face of the sales people at the Duty-Free Shop in the Panama Airport. Persecution. The last look of the victim when he knows he is going to die. The instant in which the lion’s paw pierces the antelope. Disinfection, anesthesia, the cut, the operation, the suture. The pride and shame of battle. The hangover. The morning after, stumbling through the weeds wet with dew, avoiding bodies and the wounded.
All this leads me to the idea that the sick and the nurse are the same person. Purifying my blood with yours. May my sick blood cure your infirm soul. Finding a cure in my own tenderness. Pulling a blanket over the children in the morning. Taking them to school. Spending time buying them gifts when I am away. Pretending to converse with the good ghosts of the night. Teaching them how to see the spirits of the forest.
What more can I say that is not said in the photographs. This show was going to be called Debut and Farewell, because at times things seem so intense that I don’t want to know anything else, and I threaten to move back to Santa Fe, more precisely to Colastiné, near the river, where I’ll make watercolor landscapes, which would probably be less destabilizing and more intense than what I do here.
Because I like the feeling of a debut and at the same time I want every show to be retrospective, to show that the earlier black-and-white photos are exactly the same as the current ones. That in the look on the Bulgarian’s face in this diptych with warm tones, or the portrait that I did last week of Elba Bairon with that sideways glance, looking down at forty-five degree angel, everything I want to say with my photography has been said.
Nothing else is needed. The ideas are unimportant. The themes, too. Only small gestures matter. Staging is the same thing as documentary. Analog and digital are the same.
As my mother said the other day, talking about what I’m not sure, but I want to quote her: “Happiness doesn’t last long in the house of the poor”. Which is exactly what the raftsman feels when the dream of life and work turns his heart into a floating plant.
Marcos López