Blow-Up

by Julio Cortazar

"Blow-Up" was first published in Argentina in 1964 in the collection Final del juego. It was
translated into English and published in the United States in 1967. The story inspired
Michelangelo Antonioni to co-write the screenplay for Blow-Up, which he also directed; the
film is now considered a cult classic. It starred Vanessa Red grave, Sarah Miles,
Verushka, Jane Birkin, and Peter Bowles, and featured a soundtrack by Herbie Hancock
and the Yardbirds. When Blow-Up was released in 1967, it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes
and was nominated for Academy Award s in Directing and Writing .

It'll never be known how thi s has to be told , in the fir st per son or in the second,
using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing. If
one might say: I will see the moon rose, or: we hurt me at the back of my eyes, and
especially : you the blonde woman was the cl ouds that race before my your his our yours
their faces. What the hell.
Seated ready to tell it, if one might go to drink a bock over there , and the typewriter
continue by itself (because I use the machine), that would be perfection . And tha t's not
just a manner of speaking. Perfection, yes, be cause here i s the aperture which must be
counted also as a machine (of another sort, a Contax 1.1.2) and it is p ossible that one
machine may know more about another machine than I, you, she--the blonde--and the
clouds. But I have the dumb luck to know that if I go thi s Remington will sit turned to st
one on top of the table with the air of being twice as quiet that mobile things have when
they are not moving. So, I have to write . One of us all has to write , if thi s i s going to get
told . Better that it be me who am dead, for I'm less compromised than the rest ; I who see
only the clouds and can think without being dist racted, write without being dist racted
(there goes another, with a grey edge) and remember without being dist racted, I who am
dead (and I'm alive, I'm not trying to fool anybody, you'll see when we get to the moment,
because I have to begin some way and I've begun with this peri od, the last one back, the
one at the beginning, which in the end i s the best of the period s when you want to tell
something. )
All of a sudden I wonder why I have to tell this, but if one begins to wonder why he does
all he does do,
if one wonder s why he accepts an invitation to lunch (now a pigeon's flying by and it see
ms to me a sparrow), or why when someonehas told us a good joke immediately there st
art s up something like a
tickling in the st omachand we are not at peace until we've gone into the office across the
hall and told the joke over again; then it feels good immediately , one i s fine , happy, and
can get back to work . For I imagine that no one has explained thi s, that really the best
thing is to put aside all decorum and tell it , because, after all's d one, nobody i s ashamed
of breathing or of putting on his shoes; they're things that you do, and when something
weird happens, when you find a spider in your shoe or if you take a breath and feel like a
broken window, then you have to tell what's happening, tell it to theguys at the office or to
the doctor. Oh, doctor , every time I take a breath.... Alway s tell it , always get rid of that
tickle in the st omach that bothers you.
And now that we're finally going to tell it , let's put thing s a little bit in order, we'd be
walking down the staircase in thi s house as far as Sund ay, November 7, ju st a month
back. One goes down five fl oors and
st ands then in the Sunday in the sun one would not have su spe cted of Pari s in
November , with a large appetite to walk around, to see thing s, to take photos (becau se
we were photographers, I'm a photographer). I know that the most difficult thing is going to
be finding a way to tell it, and I'm not afraid of repeating myself. It's going to be difficult
because nobody really knows who it i s telling it , if I am I or what actually occurred or
what I'm seeing (clouds, and once in a while a pigeon) or if , si mply, I'm telling a truth
which i s only my truth , and then is the truth only for my st omach, for thi s impulse to go
running out and to fini sh up in some manner with , thi s, whatever it i s.
We're going to tell it slowly, what happens in the middle of what I'm writing is coming
already. If they replace me, if , so soon, I don't know what to say, if the clouds st op
coming and something else st art s (because it' s impossible that this keep coming, clouds
passing continually and occasi onally a pigeon), if something out of all thi s.... And after
the "if" what am I going to put if I'm going to close the senten ce structure correctl y? But if
I begin to ask questi ons, I'll never tell anything, maybe to tell would be like an answer , at
le ast for someonewho's reading it.
Roberto Michel, French-Ch il ean, tran slator and in his spare time an amateur
photographer, left number
 3

11, rue Monsieur-le-Prin ce Sund ay, November 7 of the current year (now there're two
small ones p assing , with sil ver lining s). He had spent three weeks working on the
French version of a t reati se on challenges and appeals by Jose Norberto Allende ,
professor at the Univer sity of Santiago. It's rare that there's wind in Pari s, and even less
seld om a wind like this that swi rled around corners and rose up to whip at old wooden
venetian blinds behind which ast onished ladies commented variously on how unreliable
the weather had been the se last few years. But the sun w as out also, riding the wind and
friend of the cats, so there was nothing that would keep me from taking photos of the
Conservatoire and Sainte -Ch apelle. It was hardly ten o'clock, and I figured that by eleven
the light would be good, the best you can get in the fall ; to kill some time I detoured
around by the Isle Saint-Louis and st arted to walk along the quai D'Anj ou, I stared for a
bit at the hotel de Lauzun, I recited bit s from Apollinaire which always get into my head
whenever I pass in front of the hotel de Lauzun (and at that I ought to be remembering the
other poet, but Michel is an
obstin ate beggar), and when the wind st opped all at once and the sun came out at least
twice as hard (I mean warmer, but really it' s the same thing), I sat down on the parapet
and felt terribly happy in the Sunday morning.
One of the many ways of contesting level -zero, and one of the best , is to take
photographs, an activity in which one should st art becoming an adept very early in lif e,
teach it to children sin ce it requi res
dis cipline , aesthetic education, a good eye, and ste ady fingers. I'm not talking about
waylaying the lie like any old reporter, snapping the stupid sil houette of the VIP leaving
Number 10 Downing St reet , but in all
w ays when one is walking about with a camera, one has almost a duty to be att entive , to
not lose that abrupt and happy rebound of sun' s rays off an old st one, or the pigtail s-fl
yin g run of a small girl going home with a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk. Michel knew
that the photographer always worked as a permutation of his per sonal way of seeing the
world as other than the camera in sidi ously i mposed upon it (now a large cloud is going
by, almost bl ack), but he lacked no confidence in himself , knowing that he had only to go
out
without the Contax to recover the keynote of dist raction , the sight without a frame around
it , light without the diaphragm aperture or 1/250 sec. Right now (what a word, now, what a
dumb lie ) I was able to sit quietly on the railing overlooking the river watching the red and
black motorboats passing below without it occurring to me to think photographically of the
scenes, nothing more than letting myself go in the letting
go of objects, running immobile in the st re am of time. And then the wind was not bl
owing.
After , I wandered down the quai de Bourbon until getting to the end of the i sle where the
intimate squ are was (intimate because it w as small, not that it was hidden , it offered it s
whole breast to the river and the sky), I enjoyed it , a lot. Nothing there but a couple and,
of course, pige ons; maybe even some of those which are flying past now so that I'm
seeing them . A leap up and I settl ed on the wall , and let myself
turn about and be caught and fixed by the sun , giving it my face and ears and hands (I
kept my gloves in my pocket). I had no desire to shoot picture s, and lit a cigarette to be
doing something; I think it was that moment when the match was about to touch the
tobacco that I saw the young boy for the fi rst ti me.
What I'd thought was a couple seemed much more now a boy with his mother, although at
the same time I realized that it was not a kid and his mother, and that it was a couple in
the sen se that we always allegate to couples when we see them leaning up against the p
arapets or embracing on the benches in the squ ares. As I had nothing else to do, I had
more than enough time to wonder why the boy was so nervous, like a young colt or a
hare, sti cking his hands into his pockets, taking them out immediately, one after the other,
running his finger s through his hair, changing his st ance, and espe cially why was he afr
 4

aid, well , you could guess that from every gesture , a fear suff ocated by his shyne ss, an
impul se to step backwards which he telegraphed, his body st anding as if it were on the
edge of flight , holding it self back in a final , pitiful decorum.
All this was so clear, ten feet away--and we were alone against the parapet at the tip of
the island--that at the beginning the boy's fright didn't let me see the blonde very well.
Now, thinking back on it , I see her much better at that first second when I read her face
(she'd turned around suddenly , swinging like a metal weathercock, and the eyes, the
eyes were there ), when I vaguely understood what might have been occurring to the boy
and figured it would be worth the trouble to st ay and watch (the wind was blowing their
words away and they were spe aking in a low murmur). I think that I know how to look, if
it's something I know, and also that every looking oozes with mendacity, because it' s that
which expels us furt he st outside ourselve s, without the least guarantee, whereas to
smell, or (but Michel rambles on to himself e asil y
en ough, there's no need to let him harangue on this way). In any case , if the likely
inaccuracy can be seen beforeh and, it becomes possible again to look; perhaps it suffi
ces to choose between looking and the reality looked at , to st rip thing s of all their
unnecessary clothing . And surely all that is difficult beside s.
As for the boy I remember the image before his actual body (that will clear it self up later ),
while now I am sure that I remember the woman's body much better than the image. She
wa s thin and willo wy, two unfair words to de scribe what she was, and was wearing an
almost -bl ack fur coat, almost long, almost handsome. All the morning's wind (now it was
hardly a breeze and it wasn't cold) had blown through her blonde hair which pared away
her white , bleak face--two unfair words-- and put the world at her feet and horribly alone
in front of her dark eyes, her eyes fell on thing s like two eagles, two le aps into
nothingness, two puffs of green sli me. I'm not describing it. And I said two puff s of green
sli me.
Let' s be fai r, the boy was well enough dre ssed and was sporting yellow gloves which I
would have sw orn belonged to his older brother, a student of law or sociology; it was plea
sant to see the finger s of the gloves sti cking out of his jacket pocket. For a long time I
didn't see hi s fa ce, barely a profil e, not stupid--a terrified bird, a Fra Filippo angel, rice
pudding with milk--and the back of an adolescent who want s to take up judo and has had
a scuffle or two in defense of an idea or his si ster . Turning fourt een, perhap s fif teen ,
one would guess that he was dre ssed and fed by his p arent s but without a nickel in his
pocket , having to debate with his buddie s before making up his mind to buy a coff ee, a
cognac, a pack of cigarett es. He'd walk through the st reets thinking of the girls in his
class, about how good it would be to go to the movies and see the latest
fil m, or to buy novels or ne cktie s or bottles of liquor with green and white labels on them.
At home (it would be a respectable home, lunch at noon and romantic landscapes on the
walls, with a dark entryway and a mahogany umbrella st and inside the d oor) there'd be
the slow rain of time, for studying , for being mamas' hope, for looking like dad, for writing
to his aunt in Avign on. So that there was a lot of walking the st reets , the whole of the
river for him (but without a nickel ) and the mysterious city of fif teen-ye ar-olds with it s
sign s in doorways, it s terrifying cats, a paper of fried potatoes for thirty francs, the
pornographic magazine folded four ways, a solitude like the emptiness of his pockets, the
eagerness for so much that was in comprehensible but illumined by a total love, by the
availability analogous to the wind and the st reet s.
This biography was of the boy and of any boy what soever, but thi s particular one now,
you could see he was in sul ar, sur rounded solely by the blonde's pre sen ce as she
continued talking with him. (I'm tired of insisting , but two long ragged ones ju st went by.
That morning I don't think I looked at the sky once, because what was happening with the
boy and the woman appeared so soon I could do nothing but look at them and wait , look
at them and... ) To cut it short, the boy was agitated and one could guess without too
much trouble what had just occurred a few minutes before , at most half -an-h our. The
boy had come onto the tip of the island, seen the woman and thought her marvelous. The
woman was waiting for that because she w as there waiting for that , or maybe the boy
 5

arrived before her and she saw him from one of the balconies or from a car and got out to
meet him, st art ing the conversation with whateve,r from the beginning she was sure that
he was going to be afraid and want to run off , and that , naturally , he'd st ay, stiff and
sullen , pretending experience and the pleasure of the adventure. The rest w as easy be
cause it w as happening ten feet away from me, and anyone could have gauged the st
ages of the game, the derisive , competitive fencing; its major attraction was not that it
was happening but in fore seeing it s den ouement. The boy would try to end it by
pretending a date , an obligation, whatever, and would go stu mbling off disconcert ed,
wi shing he were walking with some assur ance, but naked under the mocking glance
which would follow him until he was out of sigh t. Or rather , he would st ay there ,
fascinated or si mply incapable of taking the initiative , and the woman would begin to
touch his face gentl y, muss hi s hair, stil l talking to him voicelessly, and soon would take
him by the arm to lead him off , unless he , with an uneasine ss beginning to tinge the
edge of desi re , even his st ake in the adventure, would rouse him self to put hi s arm
around her waist and to kiss her . Any of thi s could have happened, though it did not, and
perver sely Michel waited , sitt ing on the rail ing, making the sett ing s almost without
looking at the camera, ready to take a picture sque shot of a corner of the island with an
uncommon couple talking and another looking at one another.
Strange how the scene (almo st nothing: two fi gures there mismatched in their youth) was
taking on a disquieting aura. I thought it was I i mposing it , and that my photo, if I shot it ,
would reconstitute things in their true stupidity . I would have liked to know what he was
thinking , a man in a grey hat sitt ing at the wheel of a car parked on the dock which led up
to the footbridge , and whether he was reading the paper or asleep . I had just di scovered
him because people inside a parked car have a tendency to disappear, they get lost in
that wretched, private cage st ripped of the beauty that motion and danger give it. And
nevert hele ss, the car had been there the whole time , forming part (or deforming that
part) of the i sle . A car: like saying a lighted st reetl amp, a park bench. Never like saying
wind , sunlight , those element s always new to the skin and the eyes, and also the boy
and the woman, unique, put there to change the i sland, to show it to me in another way.
Finally , it may have been that the man with the newsp aper also because aware of what
was happening and would , like me, feel that malicious sen sation of waiting for everything
to happen. Now the woman had swung around smoothly, putting the young boy between
herself and the wall , I saw them almost in p rofil e, and he was t aller, though not much
taller , and yet she dominated him, it see med like she w as hovering over him (her laugh,
all at once, a whip of feathers), crushing him just by being there , smiling, one hand taking
a stroll through the air. Why wait any longer? Aperture at si xteen , a sighting which would
not include the horrible black car, but yes, that tree, necessary to break up too much grey
space....
I raised the camera, pretended to study a focus which did not include them, and waited
and watched closely , sure that I would finally catch the revealing expressi on, one that
would sum it all up, life that is
 6

rhythmed by movement but which a stiff image destroy s, taking time in cross section , if
we do not choose the essenti al imperceptible fraction of it. I did not have to wait long. The
woman was getting on with the job of handcuffing the boy smoothly, stripping from him
what was left of his freedom a hair at a time , in an incredibly slow an deliciou s t ort ure. I
imagined the possible ending s (now a small fluffy cloud appears, almost alone in the sky),
I saw their arrival at the house (a basement apartment probably, which she would have
filled with large cushi ons and cats) and conjectured the boy's terror and his de sper ate
decisi on to play it cool and to be led off pretending there was nothing new in it for him. Cl
osing my eyes, if I did in fact close my eyes, I set the scene: the teasing kisses, the
woman mildly repelling the hands which were trying to undress her , like in novels, on a
bed that would have a lilac-colored comfort er, on the other hand she taking off his cl
othes, plainly mother and son under a milky yellow light , and everything would end up as
usual, perhaps, but maybe everything would go otherwise , and the initiation of the
adolescent would not happen, she would not let it happen, after a long prologue wherein
the awkwardnesses, the ex asper ating caresses, the running of hands over bodies would
be resolved in who knows what , in a sep arate and solita ry pleasure , in a petulant denial
mixed with the art of tiring and disconcerting so much poor innocence. It might go like that,
it might very well go like that; that woman was not looking for the boy as a lover, and at
the same time she w as dominating him toward some end impossible to under st and if
you do not imagine it as a cruel game, the desi re to de si re without sati sfaction, to excite
herself for someoneelse , someone who in no way could be that kid.
Michel i s guilty of making literature , of indulging in fabricated unrealitie s. Nothing
pleases him more than to imagine exceptions to the rule , individual s outside the spe cies,
not -always-repu gnant monster s. But that woman invited spe culation , perhaps giving
clues enough for the fanta sy to hit the bull' s-eye . Before she left , and now that she
would fill my imaginings for sever al days, for I'm given to ruminating , I decided not to lose
a moment more. I got it all into the view-finder (with the t ree, the rail ing, the eleven-
o'clock sun ) and took the shot. In time to realize that they both had noticed and st ood
there looking at me, the boy surpri sed and as though questi oning, but she w as i rrit ated,
her face and body flat-footedly hostil e , feeling robbed, ignominiously recorded on a small
chemical image.
I might be able to tell it in much greater detail but it' s not worth the t rouble. The woman
said that no one had the right to take a picture without permissi on, and demanded that I
hand over the fil m. All thi s in a dry, clear voice with a good Pari sian accent, which rose
in color and tone with every phrase. For my part , it hardly mattered whether she got the
roll of film or not, but anyone who knows me will tell you, if you want anything from me,
ask nicely. With the result that I rest ri cted myself to formulating the opinion that not only
was photography in public spaces not prohibited , but it w as looked upon with decided
favor, both private and official. And while that was getting said, I noticed on the sly how
the boy was falling back, sort of actively backing up through without moving, and all at
once (it see med almost in credible ) he turned and broke into a run, the poor kid, thinking
that he was walking off and in fact in full flight , running past the
side of the car, disappearing like a gossamer filament of angel-spit in the morning air.
But filaments of angel-spittle are also called devil-spit , and Michel had to endure rather
particular curses, to hear himself called meddler and imbecil e, taking great pains
meanwhile to smile and to abate with si mple movements of his head such a hard sell. As
I w as beginning to get ti red, I heard the car door slam. The man in the grey hat was there
, looking at us. It w as only at that point that I realized he was playing a part in the
comedy.
He began to walk toward us, carrying in his hand the paper he had been pretending to
read. What I remember best i s the grimace that twisted hi s mouth askew, it covered his
face with wrinkles, changed somewhat both in location and shape because hi s lip s
trembled and the grimace went from one side of hi s mouth to the other as though it were
 7

on wheels, independent and involunta ry. But the rest st ayed fi xed, a flour-powdered
clown or bloodless man, dull dry skin, eyes deepset , the nost ril s black and prominently
visible , blacker than the eyebrows or hair or the black necktie . Walking cautiou sly as
though the pavement hurt his feet ; I saw patent-leather shoes with such thin soles that he
must have felt every roughness in the pavement. I don't know why I got down off the rail
ing, nor very well why I decided to not give them the photo, to refuse that demand in which
I guessed at their fear and cowardice. The clown and the woman consulted one another in
sil en ce: we made a perfect and unbearable t riangle, something I felt compelled to break
with a crack of a whip. I laughed in their faces and began to walk off , a little more slowly, I
imagine, than the boy. At the level of the fi rst h ouses, be side the iron footbridge, I turned
around to look at them.
They were not moving, but the man had dropped his new sp aper; it see med to me that
the woman, her back to the parapet , ran her hands over the st one with the classi cal and
absurd gesture of someonepursued looking for a way out.
What happened after that happened here , almost ju st now, in a room on the fifth floor.
Several days went by before Michel developed the photos he'd taken on Sund ay; his
shots of the Conse rvatoire and of Sainte-Chapelle were all they should be. Then he found
two or three proof-sh ots he'd forgo tt en, a poor
 8

attempt to catch a cat perched ast onishingly on the roof of a rambling public urinal, and
also the shot of the blonde and the kid. The negative was so good that he made an
enlargement; the enlargement was so good that he made one very much larger, almost
the size of a poster . It did not occur to him (now one wonders and wonder s) that only the
shots of the Conservatoire were worth so much work . Of the whole serie s, the snapshot
of the tip of the island was the only one which interested him; he tacked up the
enlargement on one wall of the room, and the fi rst day he spent some time looking at it
and remembering , that gloomy operation of comparing the memory with the gone reality ;
a frozen memory, like any photo , where nothing i s missing , not even, and espe cially,
nothingness, the true solidif ier of the scene. There was the w oman, there was the boy,
the tree rigid above their heads, the sky as sh arp as the st one of the parapet, clouds and
stones melded into a single substance and inseparable (now one with sharp edges i s
going by, like a thunderhead). The fi rst two days I accepted what I had done, from the
photo it self to the enlargement on the wall , and didn't even questi on that every once in a
while I would interrupt my
t ranslation of Jose Norberto Allende' s t re ati se to encounter once more the woman's fa
ce, the dark spl otches on the railing. I'm such a jerk ; it had never occurred to me that
when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the positi on and the
visi on of the lens; it' s the se thing s that are taken for granted and it never occurs to
anyone to think about them. From my chair, with the typewriter directly in front of me, I
looked at the photo ten feet away, and then it occurred to me that I had hung it exactly at
the point of view of the lens. It looked very good that way; no doubt, it was the be st way to
appreciate a photo, though the angle from the diagonal doubtl ess has its pleasure s and
might even divulge different aspe ct s.
Every few minutes, for example when I was unable to find the way to say in good French
what Jose Norberto Allende was saying in very good Sp anish , I raised my eyes and
looked at the photo; sometimes the woman would catch my eye, sometimes the boy,
sometimes the pavement where a dry leaf had fallen admirably
situ ated to heighten a lateral section . Then I rested a bit from my labors, and I enclosed
myself again happily in that morning in which the photo was dren ched, I recalled ironically
the angry picture of the woman demanding I give her the photograph, the boy's pathetic
and ridiculou s fl ight , the entrance on the scene of the man with the white face. Basically,
I was sati sfied with myself ; my part had not been too
bril liant , and sin ce the French have been given the gift of the sharp response , I did not
see very well why I'd chosen to leave without a complete demonst rati on of the rights,
privileges and pre rogatives of citizen s. The important thing, the really important thing was
having helped the kid to escape in time (thi s in case my theorizing was correct , which
was not suffi cientl y proven, but the running away itself see med to show it
so). Out of plain meddling, I had given him the opportunity finally to take advantage of his
fright to do something useful; now he would be regretting it , feeling his honor impaired ,
his manhood dimini shed . That was better than the attentions of a woman capable of
looking as she had looked at him on that island.
Michel i s something of a puritan at times, he believes that one should not sedu ce
someonefrom a positi on of st rength . In the last analysi s, taking that photo had been a
good act.
Well , it wa sn't be cause of the good act that I looked at it between paragraphs while I
was w orking. At that moment I didn't know the reason, the reason I had tacked the
enlargement onto the wall; maybe all fatal acts happen that way, and that is the condition
of their fulfil lment. I don't think the almost -furtive trembling of the leaves on the tree
alarmed me, I was working on a senten ce and rounded it out
successfully . Habit s are like immense herb ariums, in the end an enlargement of 32 X 28
looks like a movie screen, where, on the tip of the island, a woman i s spe aking with a
boy and a tree is shaking it s dry leaves over their heads.
 9

But her hands were just too much. I had just translated: "In that case , the second key
reside s in the intrinsic nature of difficulties which societies... "--when I saw the woman's
hand beginning to stir slowly, finger by finger. There was nothing left of me, a phrase in
French which I would never have to fini sh , typewriter on the fl oor, a chair that sque aked
and shook, fog. The kid had ducked his head like boxers do when they've done all they
can and are waiting for the final blow to fall ; he had turned up the collar of his overcoat
and see med more a prisoner than ever, the perfect victim helping promote the
catastrophe . Now the woman was talking into his ear, and her hand opened again to lay it
self against hi s cheekbone, to caress and caress it , burning it , taking her time. The kid
was les s st art led than he was suspi cious, once or twice he poked his head over the
woman's shoulder and she continued talking , saying something that made him look back
every few minutes toward that area where Michel knew the car was parked and the man in
the grey hat , carefully eliminated from the photo but present in the boy's eye s (how doubt
that now) in the word s of the w oman, in the woman's hands, in the vi carious presence of
the woman. When I saw the man come up,
st op near them and look at them , his hands in hi s pockets and a stance somewhere
between disgusted and demanding, the master who i s about to whistl e in hi s dog after a
frolic in the squ are, I underst ood, if that was to under st and, what had to happen now,
what had to have happened then , what would have to happen at that moment, among
these people , just where I had poked my nose in to up set an est abli shed order,
interfering innocently in that which had not happened, but which was now going to
happen, now was going
 1

to be fulfil led. And what I had imagined earlier was much less horrible than the reality,
that woman, who was not there by herself , she w as not caressing or propositioning or
encouraging for her own pleasure , to lead the angel away with his t ousled hair and play
the tease with his terror and his eager grace. The real boss was waiting there, smiling
petulantl y, already certain of the busine ss; he was not the fi rst to send a woman in the
vanguard, to bring him the prisoners manacled with flowers. The rest of it would be so
si mple, the car, some house or another, drinks, sti mulating engravings, tardy tears, the
awakening in hell. And there was nothing I could do, thi s time I could do absolutely
nothing. My st rength had been a photograph, that , there , where they were taking their
revenge on me, demonst rating clearly what was going to happen. The photo had been
taken, the time had run out, gone; we were so far from one another, the abusive act had
certainly already taken place, the tear s already shed , and the rest conjecture and sorrow.
All at once the order was inverted , they were alive, moving, they were deciding and had
decided , they were going to their future; and I on thi s side , pri soner of another time , in
a room on the fifth floor, to not know who they were, that woman, that man, and that boy,
to be only the lens of my camera, something fi xed , rigid , incapable of inte rvention. It
was horrible , their mocking me, deciding it before my impotent eye, mocking me, for the
boy again was looking at the flour-faced clown and I had to accept the fact that he was
going to say yes, that the proposition carried money with it or a gimmick , and I couldn't
yell for him to run, or even open the road to him again with a new photo, a small and
almost meek intervention which would ruin the framework of drool and perf ume.
Everything was going to resolve it self right there, at that moment; there was like an
immen se sil en ce which had nothing to do with physi cal sil en ce. It was st ret ching it
out, setting it self up . I think I screamed, I screamed terribly , and that at the exact second
I realized that I was beginning to move toward them, four inches, a step , another step ,
the tree swung it s branches rhythmically in the foreground, a place where the railing was
tarnished emerged from the frame, the womans' face turned toward me as though surpri
sed , w as enl arging, and then I turned a bit , I mean that the camera turned a littl e, and
without losing sight of the woman, I began to close in on the man who was looking at me
with the black holes he had in place of eyes, surprised and angered both , he looked,
wanting to nail me onto the air, and at that inst ant I happened to see something like a
large bird outside the fo cus that was flying in a single swoop in front of the picture, and I
leaned up against the wall of my room and was happy because the boy had just managed
to escape, I saw him running off , in focus again, sprinting with his hair flying in the wind,
learning finally to fly across the isl and, to arrive at the footbridge, return to the city. For the
second time he'd escaped them, for the second time I was helping him to escape,
returning him to his pre carious p aradise. Out of breath, I st ood in front of them; no need
to step cl oser, the game was played out. Of the woman you could see just maybe a
shoulder and a bit of hair, brutally cut off by the frame of the picture ; but the man was
directly center, his mouth half open, you could see a shaking black tongue, and he lifted
his hands slowly, bringing them into the foreground, an in st ant stil l in perfect focus, and
then all of him a lump that blotted out the island, the tree , and I shut my eyes, I didn't want
to see any more, and I covered my face and broke into tears like an idiot .
Now there' s a big white cloud, as on all these days, all thi s untellable time. What remain
s to be said i s always a cloud, two clouds, or long hours of a sky perfectly clear, a very
clean, clear rectangle tacked up with pins on the wall of my room. That was what I saw
when I opened my eyes and dried them with my finger s: the clear sky, and then a cloud
that drifted in from the left , passed gracefully and slowly across and disappeared on the
right. And then another, and for a change sometimes, everything gets grey, all one
enormous cl oud, and suddenly the spl otches of rain cracking down, for a long spell you
can see it raining over the picture , like a spell of weeping reversed , and little by littl e, the
frame becomes cle ar, perhaps the sun comes out, and again the clouds begin to come,
two at a time , three at a time . And the pigeon s once in a whil e, and a sparrow or two.