all the while posing, that is until my father finally had to give up photographing her, abandoning portraiture for landscape photography, but my father wasn’t deterred, far from it, he’d started taking even more photos now that he was free to train his lens on the motif of his choosing. Every detail was apparently worth his trouble, every situation deserving of immortalization in my father’s eyes. Absolutely anything would find favor in his photographer’s gaze, some small detail that would’ve appeared banal or pointless to anyone else constituted for him something worthy of being locked inside the camera obscura. For my father, the visible world was a warehouse of images, images of things that he had to capture, as though to make sure that these things really existed—at least that’s what I think now. Truth is, my mother had never been able to stand the constant presence of his camera, and she’d gotten in the habit of systematically objecting whenever my father would point the lens in her direction—purely formal objections, I often thought. My mother used to hate to have her picture taken, in any case that’s what she would always maintain—and I thought about all the times my mother had tried to flee the lens with a wave of her hand, and all these times made up a single image of her, a photograph of my mother pushing the lens away with her hand, an image that’s engraved in my memory, I thought, and which exists only there. And when faced with the camera that had been missing for years, now suddenly resurfaced and in my father’s hands, thinking back to all those useless photos my father had taken of us, my mother could only have put her hand in front of her face again, instinctively obeying the irresistible and irate impulse lying intact inside her; yes, twenty years after the fact, how could she have done otherwise, my mother had once again escaped the lens, I told myself, and the photo would again be blurry.
67. In the villa, my father could again devote himself to his passion, a passion that had remained intact all these years, and perhaps had even grown stronger, I imagined, owing to the simple fact that he’d completely stopped taking pictures in the intervening years; for some reason unbeknownst to my mother, he’d one day put the camera away, downgrading it to the category of useless objects that one keeps without knowing why. But now, armed with the camera again, he’d even given up his diligent inspections; he was apparently so engrossed in taking pictures that he’d completely forgotten about the renovation project. Like a weary tourist lost inside his own home, my mother had said, he would turn the camera in various directions, as one might an optical instrument, a second organ of sight capable of letting him see what his own eyes could not.
68. He hadn’t lost his knack for taking the same picture again and again, always from the same angle, photos that only he could tell apart, once they were developed and arranged on a table so he could examine them closely. Each week, he would entrust my mother with several rolls of film, which she would take to the express lab in the shopping center where she bought groceries. Each week, she would wander the aisles of the grocery store, mechanically filling the basket while she waited for the photos to be ready.
69. Was he planning to reconstruct a comprehensive view of the villa by gluing dozens of photos end to end? It’s quite possible he’d had this project in mind in the beginning, my mother said, but he must have given up on it later, pointing the lens at random, photographing almost without discrimination, without method, zooming in on a detail, tracking the smallest clue liable to put him on the path to a new discovery. During this same period, he’d brought out the old photo albums, and he would often talk to her about these family photos, carefully examining each one. The older we get, the dearer these photos are to us, he would say
67. In the villa, my father could again devote himself to his passion, a passion that had remained intact all these years, and perhaps had even grown stronger, I imagined, owing to the simple fact that he’d completely stopped taking pictures in the intervening years; for some reason unbeknownst to my mother, he’d one day put the camera away, downgrading it to the category of useless objects that one keeps without knowing why. But now, armed with the camera again, he’d even given up his diligent inspections; he was apparently so engrossed in taking pictures that he’d completely forgotten about the renovation project. Like a weary tourist lost inside his own home, my mother had said, he would turn the camera in various directions, as one might an optical instrument, a second organ of sight capable of letting him see what his own eyes could not.
68. He hadn’t lost his knack for taking the same picture again and again, always from the same angle, photos that only he could tell apart, once they were developed and arranged on a table so he could examine them closely. Each week, he would entrust my mother with several rolls of film, which she would take to the express lab in the shopping center where she bought groceries. Each week, she would wander the aisles of the grocery store, mechanically filling the basket while she waited for the photos to be ready.
69. Was he planning to reconstruct a comprehensive view of the villa by gluing dozens of photos end to end? It’s quite possible he’d had this project in mind in the beginning, my mother said, but he must have given up on it later, pointing the lens at random, photographing almost without discrimination, without method, zooming in on a detail, tracking the smallest clue liable to put him on the path to a new discovery. During this same period, he’d brought out the old photo albums, and he would often talk to her about these family photos, carefully examining each one. The older we get, the dearer these photos are to us, he would say
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