Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

Then the house trembled from the movement in the windmill, and the heat was more than I could bear. A sob of effort coaxed a cry of relief, and such a flash of light it was impossible for me to believe they had survived it.

A wing-shaped shadow passed over me and left me in a thunderous chill.

“It’s only me,” said Phoebe, a half hour later, pretending she had returned.

That was one instance of the game. There were others. In the house one day, hearing Orlando go upstairs, I gave him time and then followed him to his room. I knocked. He let me in, and there I felt the vibration of a third presence.

“Maude,” he said.

He was in an old jacket. She was naked, lying on his bed, her knees drawn up, her breasts gathered between her arms, her hands over her face.

“Is that you, Ollie?”

“I was just reading.” He reached for a book.

He was standing in a screening position between me and the bed. He let me bump him to show me I could go no further.

“Read to me.” But I was stalling. I had begun to doubt that she was there. That was the game: I had to find her — to establish that they were together. After that first clear impression my vision clouded and now I was not sure.

He said, “I’ll be down in a minute.”

His lungs were choked with apprehension. He straightened, took a step and gave her away: her fragrance tumbled past him to me.

“Mind if I sit down?”

“I’m way behind in my reading, cookie.”

He was gallantly protecting her. She was lying on a thick blanket. I could sense its roughness against her skin, and more: I could feel the heat from the places his lips had reddened on her.

“Where’s Phoebe?”

“Out,” he said, too quickly. “I don’t know.”

Curled there, she was the shape of a fallen leaf.

I had won. I did not feel victorious.

Blindman’s Buff: what images! But he should not have been playing — he was supposed to be at Harvard. I knew he was taking advantage of the folks’ absence. He did not know how I could see. I saw them most clearly when they were naked; I could hear them embrace three rooms away; even their glances jarred the air like a jewel-flash on the cut faces of turning gems. And sometimes, sitting alone and listening to the radio, I would be warmed, as if the clouds had parted and the sun splashed my soul: I would know they were in each other’s arms, the posture of rescue, the lover with his lost half.

To the stairs, softly; down the hall to the vibrant room — a winter evening, but only they were in darkness. I had moved through the house in my own daylight. Their darkness deceived them — they thought they were safe.

“Ollie?”

I stroked the silence.

“Phoebe?”

The silence purred like a cat.

I paused in the doorway. If I’d had eyes I would not have seen them. But there they were, hoping I would go away. He lay on top of her, his mouth open on her nipple, his tongue stiffening it. Rescue: I watched from the shore. I was buffeted by their love and I marveled at how perfect they were, sharing blood, bone, and hair.

“Is there anyone here?”

Nose between paws, the silence slumbered. Yet how clearly I could see them — her soft cheek, his ribs, the scratches on his shoulders, their mutual grip beneath the seam where their bodies were joined. They were frail, falling through their darkness. Perhaps I frightened them; perhaps they took pleasure in the game. I envied them too much to pity them.

Had I brought them together? It didn’t matter — they had delivered me from my own darkness. I was no longer tricked by sunsets, the lowings of pine woods, the ocean’s endless march to the shore, the beguiling drum-roll of the picturesque. I saw beyond the sunset to the cold zone of colorless sky, and beneath the trooping ocean to its vastness and old slime; and what astonished me was its wondrous terror, a glissade deepening into infinity. I was ashamed of myself for having believed there could be an end to art.

Once, when I’d had eyes, I thought there was no more to see. Now I was atomized by sensation. Not the pencilings of primitive sight, or the world in two-dimensional silhouette, or the mannered smoothness of the so-called photogram; but a hubbub of color moving like a torrent of quicksilver through me, the inwardness of things, the sap in trees rising toward the chirps in their branches, tides of air mounting the windows, the pulse fluttering in a speck of dust. At the center of everything was turmoil, the gas of chaos giving light.

The natural world was revealed to me and all its mysteries were as plain as day. What was most chastening was that I had thought I had done it all before: the orchard, the beach, the house, the road, Orlando and Phoebe. No — they were newly lit to their inmost fiber. I saw to their core, and what I had taken to be the most placid object — a chair or a plank — was a mass of lighted splinters in a moment of wholeness. I was a particle of this world and matched it exactly. I could see passion in a stone, hunger in a hose pipe, my own immortality in the feeblest moth.

Somewhere within me an angel knelt over a guttering candle and kissed it and gave it a flame with her lips; and in the darkroom of my body I was ravished by visions.

MEANWHILE, I was a sensation. If there is anything more effective to celebrity than one’s public appearance it is one’s conspicuous absence. I was visible because I was missing. To know that was to know the essence of perception — photography’s deepest secret. And it was part of the paradox my blindness had taught me about Orlando and Phoebe: they had been behind a smokescreen when they were nearest to me, and I hadn’t had a real glimpse of their love — the fire I had set — until I was blind.

I had not shown my face in New York. On that brief stopover from Florida to the Cape, when I stayed in my hotel darkroom to process the plates, I had simply shoved my work through the Camera Club’s letterbox and boarded the train. I wanted more; I got it. And after my shock and subsequent blindness I had refused to speak on the telephone. It was Orlando who had authorized my one-man show at the club. The organizers had made repeated requests for me to be there, but it had opened without me. It had caught and blazed. The reviews were full of enthusiastic flapdoodle, the newspapers asked for my picture to print beside articles about me.

No portraits of me existed. I vowed not to allow myself to be photographed. I kept that vow, and later I rationalized it as: There is not one who can do me but me. The only person who understood this was, interestingly enough, not a photographer at all, but the American sportsman and storyteller, Ernest Hemingway. He said it was a goddamned noble vow and similar to the warrior’s — rather than be killed by his enemy he rushes on his own sword. Ernest blew his brains out because he said the Feds were after him. The biographers certainly were, and I think his suicide was a version of this mad, proud samurai impulse.

No one saw me, no one knew my face. That blank became an essential part of my fame. No one remembered — and I was glad — how I had wanted to set the world on fire. I had been working on that combustion for years, and now that it was nicely alight I did not go near to warm myself. I let my mystery precede me, while I stayed home and rubbed my hands. When the requests for my portrait stopped, I was asked to visit; they would hold a special ceremony for me. Where was I? Orlando relayed my answer: unobtainable.

For at that moment of fame, as my pictures were being admiringly scrutinized and I praised for my sight, I was stone blind and at my lowest point, deaf as a post and mute as well, in the first and blackest phase of my so-called breakdown.