The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [116]
Meanwhile in the front office of Lené Studio, I had calmed down enough to remember that I had not eaten anything since dinner the night before. I sank down onto a fussy little chair that was only meant to be looked at or photographed. Nothing about it gave comfort, not the ornately carved back or the green velvet seat, which felt suspiciously as if it were stuffed with uncooked lentils. After a few uninviting minutes, I decided that it was better to stand on my own two feet. I got up and slowly walked my hunger around the room. The walls of the front office were covered with sample photographs. There was a wide range of sizes represented, beginning with those tiny enough for a locket. The profusion of faces, I thought, gave the empty room the appearance of being crowded. I studied the expressions of the people who stared out at me from their carefully chosen photographic tableaus—the photographer Lené is well known in the city for his ability to provide his sitters with a wide selection of fantasy locales, from the simple Grecian Garden in Springtime to the more exotic Midnight in the Harem of the Last Moor—and I wondered how they came to be placed on these walls. I tried to find the commonality that brought them all here. Uncanny beauty, soulful carriage, fearless engagement with the camera's lens? Or maybe these sitters also could not pay for the other half of their photographs and had to forfeit their faces and their bodies to the front office of the fabricator of their now forsaken dreams. I had had no dealings with the photographer Lené, as Lattimore had done all the talking the last time we were here, so it was difficult for me to say which method of culling his subjects was more true to the photographer's character. As I made my way from photograph to photograph, a journey from one fantasy to another, I began to notice that some of them were not black and white. Some showed subtle washes of color, purples and blues, roses and browns, as if they were taken in the subdued light of dusk or dawn. I scanned the walls, spotting the variations in tone. That was when I saw him. I climbed atop the fussy chair for a better look at the man on the bridge, or rather his youthful face, in a photograph no larger than the size of my open hand.
"Do you know him?"
I turned around to see the very top of the photographer Lené's balding pate addressing me. But before I answered him, I thought it best to have the good graces to climb down from his chair.
Lené repeated his question.
"Yes ... I mean no. I am not sure." I replied in a fine example of how this language delights in catching me off-guard and ill-prepared.
"That describes him perfectly." Lené laughed. "The best photograph retoucher I have ever had. Better than that idiot whom I've working for me now."
"What is his name?"
"Pierre Bazin."
"No, no, the man in the photograph."
Lené's assured but atonal response told me that I needed to take a different approach. I handed Lattimore's receipt to the photographer. I asked him to please write down the name of the man in the photograph. When Lené gave the blue slip of paper back to me, there was an unmistakably Vietnamese name written on the back of it: "Nguyễn Ai Quốc." Clever, I thought, a bit heavy-handed but clever all the same.
"So what's this I hear about weekly payments, Monsieur?"
I looked up from the receipt and without hesitation replied, "Give me that one." I pointed to the photograph of the man on the bridge.
"Ah, you do know him then," Lené said. "Let me tell you, no one can paint eyelashes like that one. No one. More delicate than the real thing. Remarkable, remarkable."
"Please, I will pay for the other half of this," I said, again handing him Lattimore's receipt, "but you can keep the photograph for ... for your walls. I will take that