Meeting Paula again
When I was in Portugal in July, in what seems now like a former life, I stumbled onto a not-yet-opened exhibit of photographs by a woman named Paula, with testimonies of women who, like herself, had been political prisoners in Argentina. I wrote about our meeting with great joy, because in the midst of my pilgrimage, meeting Paula was in some ways like walking through a mirror. Not that I mean to flatter myself. She she is younger than I by more than a decade, beautiful, brilliant, confident, successful in her art and in her life. None of that mirrors anything to do with me. But we hum to a similar frequency, and she shows me facets of myself I couldn’t see clearly till I met her and saw her work. Her pictures of walls, stairways, grills, barriers, stains, pipes, and rags explore a prisoner’s landscape. Her pictures are landscapes of trauma and violence, landscapes of survival, walls we build to protect ourselves, walls that, once constructed, are difficult to take down. I spent Sunday afternoon with Paula again, as she has come to Houston in connection with the next Fotofest, scheduled for March, 2008, by which time I will have gone on to whatever comes next in my life.
We met during a steamy Houston rainstorm, at the Menil Collection, my favorite Houston museum and hers; we walked straight to the surrealists and looked at the stones, the holes, the dark spaces, the walls in their works; and then our talk overtook our surroundings and we couldn’t look any more. We sat, surrounded by Mark Rothko’s walls of color, talking, talking. We carried our talk to a cafe and kept on talking. For me it was magical.
We talked about Where to Plant Ourselves. She is Argentinian, but she escaped after her imprisonment and has lived in France for (could it be?) twenty years–some long period of time, when the pieces are added together, though not that many years at one stretch; long enough to “pass” for French, though she doesn’t mean to. Her husband is in France, with her younger daughter. Her elder daughter, with whom Paula was pregnant when she was kidnapped and tortured, is about to “return” to Argentina. Argentina calls. Go there? Go to Portugal? She said, “I learned this past summer, in Portugal, that much of what I love about Argentina came from Portugal.” Will she continue travelling the world filming documentaries? She makes a living (marvelous!) with the French film crew that created Winged Migration and is still creating more of such work. For them she is an on-location point person, calls herself an “arranger.” But her art, at least her art at this moment in her life, is black and white photography. Like me, she lives in questions and possibilities.
We talked about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa: the privilege I felt, living in the midst of that miracle. We talked of her work, collecting testimonies of survivors in Argentina. The importance to the survivors of having other survivors to hear their stories: the importance of telling the stories to others who can hear them. She pulled Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery out of her bag, and we passed the book back and forth and pointed to pages where she’d underlined passages that I have underlined in my copy at home. We talked about why I left South Africa, about my daughters and their trauma, their continuing struggles with walls inside themselves, my continuing dance with walls inside myself. Paula noticed my missing finger and said, “Missing fingers are very important. Our identities are in our fingers.” We told pieces of our stories, thoughtfully, tenderly, sometimes laughing. We didn’t cry. Well, she didn’t cry. I was moved to tears when she told me about her next project, her project for next year. I hold it sacred, a secret, a treasure that will bloom in its time.
We kept speaking as if in echoes. The years 1998-99 were a horrible time for her. A horrible time for me. She has never stayed in one place longer than six years. Six years is my record. She feels a restlessness. I’ve never settled down. She wants to know one place really well, to settle down. To know one place really well, over time. From 1992-1998 she was in Argentina. From 1992-1998 I was in southern Africa. She says everyone marvels that she is “so open.” So open. And yet there is a barrier others can’t cross. She holds her two hands on the table, erecting a wall between us. I have already placed my two hands on the table the same way. Our hands stand firm, back to back, two inches apart. Our eyes meet, laughing. We talk about why I have been called for so many years to work with prisoners. Her work is with survivors of imprisonment. We talk about varieties of imprisonment. Jobs. Relationships. Responsibility. We talk about Buddhism: she attributes the light she sees in me to my Buddhism. I tell her that celibacy has lightened me. I lift my wings in the cafe to show her how easily I float, I say celibacy is so much easier than the terror and the turmoil of intimacy, the way that drama pulls me down, I clench my fists and bang the table. Down. She talks tenderly about skin, the importance of touching another person’s skin. I listen, but I have sailed out to sea. No more skin for me. Not willing to pay the price. She laughs. The price. The price. Echoes.
We talk of books, web sites, blogs, and language. She says she feels awkward in English. I find her English exquisite, her occasional doubt about words enchanting. We are facially expressive women, we talk with our hands, with our arms, our torsos, our legs and feet, and yet I am ashamed of how limited I am. Only one language. She can talk about art, friendship, and matters of the soul in cascading Spanish, French, Portuguese and English. I stutter less than a smattering of all of those and speak a mouthful of Sesotho. I am unilingual, bound and fastened to this one tongue, holding onto it for dear life, a word person with only one language. Pathetic. We laugh. I say I am grateful, if I must be a word person, that at least I have some facility with this one language. If I were a picture person I would not be so desperate for words. We laugh again.
Our tenses shifted. I left her in the cafe, because I had to go home and grade humanities papers and American lit papers. We had been talking for five hours, she had appointments, she had to leave for New York this morning to meet with a Dutch book designer who will help her with her book of pictures and testimonies. I am still dazed with wonder for the joy of our talking. What a dance that was! I am so grateful for that trip, for those five hours of talk, for Paula’s gold-flecked hair falling over her eyes, for the movement of wings and walls in a cafe in Houston. Portugal is still giving me gifts. Whatever else happens, I am grateful that I went to Portugal exactly when I did. Everything else in my life flows from there.
Tags: Texas
Kendall
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