Photographs courtesy of Hedi Slimane
A rented world
A ticket stub, the direction torn, its price full fare. Glimpsed trapped between the mattress and the bed, at least once used.
A postcard, lost amidst the pages of a book missing its cover, now a naked novel, refusing its, unknown anyway, indictment, having passed judgment, the sunset on the card just as faded and yellow as the pages that devoured it, unwritten, never sent, a blank tombstone, not for long, surely, ordered but remaining only temporarily nameless, the equally anonymous, anticipated, in suffering, or miraculously, avoided, or shall we say postponed, death that was the midwife of its existence waiting impatiently for the next one to have his name carved in stone, the text of the coverless book heavily annotated and underlined, maybe in search of words that were supposed to fill the almost invisible grey horizons on the humble back of the glossy, printed sunset, those pale rows of minuscule dots recognizable by everyone as the path that a graphic designer provides for the possibly calligraphy impaired epistolographer, the offering of a few lines providentially avoiding chaotic scribbles and loops of messy writing, the industrial artist supposing tourist are possibly mad with either travel fever or homesickness.
On the almond green dresser, obviously and creamily glossed over with a fresh coat of oil paint at the beginning of each new season, in the centre of an intoxicatingly bright patch of light, a piece of sun fallen on the pastel surface as it reflects the window, floats a brush, some hair still there, twisting amidst the bristles, coarse, maybe from the sea, maybe from dye.
A stack of mismatched magazines, alluding to a motley group of readers unlikely to ever have met each other, mostly gossip, some crosswords, some news, with naïve covers, heralding history as it was supposed to happen; their headlines now of course a joke, old fashioned. He finds that, if he reads them, he takes vacations from the world of contemporary relevance, a guilty pleasure.
Also, amidst the weekly but out of date thrills of celebrity inanity and political sanctimony, he finds some hefty tomes, almost books, just specialist fashion magazines really, and flicks through their pages, frantically populated by etiolated ghosts, mostly naked or, if dressed up, looking like mentally ill aristocrats, roaming across lacquered pages, dripping artfully torn couture and vintage accessories, their model eyes in a constant state of placid shock, or, sometimes, in these same glossies, amidst incredibly perfectionist advertisements and haunted glamour, in a bid for self conscious street relevance, a parade of equally endless snapshots featuring boys and girls whose ordinariness bordered on the exotic, the old cliché of snobbism in reverse dutifully present.
Neatly folded, a faded tracksuit bottom, stained and probably still waiting to be washed, forgotten and defenseless in the soft folds of the cotton bedspread, this an antique summer blanket, provided thoughtfully by his grandmother, a landlady in anticipation of her tenants’ comfort, the designs on the thin but adequately woven fabric exploding in a serpentine embroidery of turquoise and white, efflorescent and charmingly color coordinated with the season, as if holding a flag to the summer, a short lived but piously accurate nation, a nation manifested in clockwork cycles of reincarnation, this parade of temporary refugees being the only real population of this land.
On the wall, a hat, frayed, the straw brim shredding into an accidental veil, lace evolving in reverse.
A piece of chocolate wrapping paper, proudly featuring a lone mountain range resplendently washed out by airbrushed clouds, the foaming white formations accommodating lettering, the agitated logo riding the cracked horizon of snowcapped mountaintops still barely visible but still magnificent nevertheless, a piece of North European exotica.
In the bath, a benevolent white cell, on the window ledge, plaster edges rounded, seemingly softened by the glare of the sun raging outside, some suntan lotion, its safety cap still intact, yet another printed sunset, faded long ago, on the plastic bottle this time, its purpose also wasted, like the unsent postcard, the protective ingredients on the back, since years ago, illegible, the ghosts of lettering describing inexplicable chemicals long evaporated.
He, our boy, fingers the printed and faded sun rays of the trademark, slightly visible, dry, once viscous, ink raising their outlines in an old fashioned, corporate-psychedelic burst. It is the sort of decorative motif you might see flickering, ironically, behind a consciously street credible advertisement today. Nostalgia before it met fate, memories still young enough to believe in their eternity, to live in their moment, ignorant and dazed.
A sheet of paper, scrawled all over its surface, once obviously crinkled, but then, in a remorseful or even frugal manner, repeatedly re-flattened to smoothness, a state appropriate for writing an urgent but inexplicable list: fear, John, school, Monday, car, card.
A supermarket receipt, toiletries.
Mostly pairs, of plimsolls, kindly donated, either by forgetfulness or abandonment, forlorn but still hoping of graduating to a next life, after having achieved noble uselessness during their previous occupancy, now left behind as unconscious gifts to the next crusade of improvident and therefore barefoot tourists, to the strangers ebbing and flowing, their rhythm as predictable as the waves pretending to rise towards greeting them, the sea as reflexive salutation, some of these holiday faces returning for misplaced memories, regularly, every summer, to rediscover the scorching sand temperatures under the imperceptibly bubbling sun, flames in the sky, the beach a minuscule desert to be crossed before the waving sea, a microcosm of hell, burning skin and flaming rocks, a stretch of wild summer dividing the taut distance from the coolness of their rented rooms to the bracing water, each day beginning with a morning ritual of thankfulness, the bathers trailing a walk whose steps were coolly possible and therefore solemnly devoted to the misplaced flip flops faithfully following their destined path and temporary owners, the rubber soles offering a thin but necessary barrier shielding the visiting, pallid, feed over the blazing hot sand, each step a grateful offering to the memories carried on their colourful, flexible, humble backs.
All these objects, and many more, pedestrian but sacred relics by the unknown to the unknown, were forgotten in the rooms that the summer visitors rented, or, shall we say, the things where subconsciously offered to future and therefore imaginary visitors, left for the next round of strangers that might appreciate their kindness, their temporary owners either returning home or about to further amble, hop aimlessly from rented holiday rooms to other destinations, some people chase the summer like others chase happiness you know.
These particular rooms are let out to tourists by his grandmother, a silent, kind old woman that was only too happy to accommodate her visiting grandson every year, and watch our boy grow from an adorable child to a handsome, brilliant, hopeful adolescent, see him time-lapse, grow in fast forward, like a flower erupts in seconds, sequenced on a documentary about the reproductive anatomy of plants, our boy transformed to our savior, from a summer to another summer.
She doesn’t know though, that, whenever he borrows, for himself, a pair of these forgotten plimsolls, or a dollop of faded printed sunset lotion, whenever he rescues something from the sea of other peoples past, as if picking drifting pieces of unseen shipwrecks, a native sent inexplicable gifts by the horizon, whenever our boy wears these talismans for a walk, to the beach, or to a siesta under the light filled tree in the field, whenever his feet are elevated from the burning ground, held tightly by these slivers of straps and forgotten soles, carriers of donated traces, walking on a protective surface of memories that matter even if they are so worn and thin as to be imperceptible, lost and found in a rented world, their tracks left in the wake of a temporary universe, peopled by transient wanderers and pleasure seekers, whenever he smears some of the cream across his velvet shoulders, borrowed from these unknown travelers, then, a shiver, along the quivering backs of the innumerable destinies of every man, woman and child that has visited this particular beach, is felt, and our boy, our savior, does not even realize that he has changed their worlds, because he is about to dive and greet the sea.
Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDeal by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou
All photographs, kind courtesy of Hedi Slimane
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