Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [14]
That’s the best I can get. Keep the print.
Bellocq dried his hand of the acid by brushing it through his hair. Habit. From the window he watched the man who had just left waving the print to dry it as he walked. He hadn’t asked him to stay longer. Lot of work tonight. He turned to the sink. He made one more print of the group and shelved it and then one of just Bolden this time, taking him out of the company. Then he dropped the negative into the acid tray and watched it bleach out to grey. Goodbye. Hope he don’t find you.
He brought out the new film and proceeded to make about ten prints until they were all leaning against the counter, watching him. He hadn’t told the man that much about Bolden. Hadn’t told him he had pictures of Nora before she and Buddy were married. He looked in the files and found a picture of Nora Bass, five years younger. He hadn’t seen her since the wedding—though it was no real wedding, just a party marriage. Buddy, who had given him free haircuts at Joseph’s when there was no one there to disturb their talking. Sometimes late into the night, when he wasn’t playing, Bolden would pull the blinds down and turn on the light of the shop so no one could look in and would warn him always about the acid in his hair. Except for cops this person tonight had been the first one here since Buddy. Not even Nora had come. He dropped her into the acid. No more questions. Watching the mist spill into her serious face.
The photographs of Bellocq. H Y D R O C E P H A L I C. 89 glass plates survive. Look at the pictures. Imagine the mis-shapen man who moved round the room, his grace as he swivelled round his tripod, the casual shot of the dresser that holds the photograph of the whore’s baby that she gave away, the plaster Christ on the wall. Compare Christ’s hands holding the metal spikes to the badly sewn appendix scar of the thirty year old naked woman he photographed when she returned to the room—unaware that he had already photographed her baby and her dresser and her crucifix and her rug. She now offering grotesque poses for an extra dollar and Bellocq grim and quiet saying No, just stand there against the wall there that one, no keep the petticoat on this time. One snap to quickly catch her scorning him and then waiting, waiting for minutes so she would become self-conscious towards him and the camera and her status, embarrassed at just her naked arms and neck and remembers for the first time in a long while the roads she imagined she could take as a child. And he photographed that.
What you see in his pictures is her mind jumping that far back to when she would dare to imagine the future, parading with love or money on a beautiful anonymous cloth arm. Remembering all that as she is photographed by the cripple who is hardly taller than his camera stand. Then he paid her, packed, and she had lost her grace. The picture is just a figure against a wall.
Some of the pictures have knife slashes across the bodies. Along the ribs. Some of them neatly decapitate the head of the naked body with scratches. These exist alongside the genuine scars mentioned before, the appendix scar and others non-surgical. They reflect