Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie

Author:Salman Rushdie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780679643883
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-17T17:00:00+00:00

VI

Why It’s Impossible to Photograph the Pampas

ON A VISIT TO MIJAS LONG AGO—MIJAS, WHERE MANUEL CORTÉS HAD hidden from Franco for three decades, spending his days in an alcove behind a wardrobe and, when his family had to move house, dressing up like an old woman to walk the streets of the town whose mayor he had been—he had met a photographer of German origin named Gustavo Thorlichen, a tall, handsome man with aquiline features, sleek silver hair, and three good stories to tell. The Mijas expat tribe whispered that he was probably an ex-Nazi because he had ended up in South America. In fact he had fled Germany in the 1930s to Argentina to escape the Nazis. One day in Buenos Aires he had been summoned to take photographs of Eva Perón, “one of four photographers,” the Perón aide told him on the phone, “to be so honored.” He took a deep breath and replied, “Thank you for the honor, but when you ask me to take photographs, you should ask me to come by myself, and in these circumstances I must respectfully decline.” There was a silence, and then the aide said, “You can be thrown out of Argentina for what you have just said.” “If I can be thrown out for saying that,” Gustavo answered, “then it’s not worth staying.” He put down the phone, went into the bedroom and told his wife, “Start packing.” Twenty minutes later the phone rang again and the same aide’s voice said, “Evita will see you tomorrow morning at eleven, alone.” After that he became the personal photographer of both Eva and Juan Perón, and the famous photograph of Evita’s face in death was, he said, his.

That was the first good story. The second involved hanging out with the young Che Guevara in La Paz and being called a “great photographic artist” in Che’s “motorcycle diaries.” The third was about being in a bookstore in Buenos Aires as a young photographer, just starting out, and recognizing the much older man shuffling into the store as Jorge Luis Borges. He screwed up his courage, approached the great writer, and said he was working on a book of photographs that would be a portrait of Argentina and he would be very proud if Borges were to write a foreword. To ask a blind man to write the preface to a book of images was crazy, he knew that, but he asked anyway. Borges said to him, “Let’s go for a walk.” As they strolled through the city Borges described the buildings around him with photographic accuracy. But every so often there was a new building in the place of a demolished old one. Then Borges would stop and say, “Describe it. Start on the ground floor and go up.” As Gustavo spoke he could see Borges putting up the new building in his mind and fixing it in its place. At the end of the walk Borges agreed to write the foreword.

Thorlichen had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.