The Photograph Worth 297 Words
In the last book he wrote before his death, Tomás Nevinson, Javier Marías reproduced a single photograph, an image credited on the copyright page to the Spanish photojournalist Pere Tordera. Marías used 297 words to describe what he saw in the photograph. He has used ekphrasis in a similar manner in several earlier books, describing in words what we can see in a photograph on the same page or a nearby page with our own eyes. What’s he doing in this description?
In this book, Nevinson is a Spaniard who thought he had retired from a career spying for England and who had returned to his position at an embassy office in Madrid. But then he is asked by his old handler to do one last job: ferret out which of three women now living in a provincial Spanish town was the fundraising mastermind behind several bloody terrorist attacks that occurred more than a decade before. For a long time, Nevinson wants to say ‘No.” He’s been away from his wife too long, he feels estranged from his children, and he is worried that he is rusty. His handler tries to convince him that this terrorist must be identified and must pay for the deaths and injuries she helped to cause in two horrific bombings in Barcelona and Zaragoza, Spain in 1987. The mention of these two events causes Nevinson to recall a photograph he saw in the press at that time. “It was just one of those images you never forget.” Marías then proceeds to have Nevinson describe and think about the photograph for a full page and a half.
At the heart of Nevinson’s recollection of the photograph is his 297-word description of what it depicts. This description occurs on the page prior to the reproduction, so we read his verbal version first.
Against a backdrop of desolation and destruction, the ground was strewn with rubble and, hanging over it all, a malignant cloud of smoke, a policeman, his tie visible beneath his uniform, and his face all bloodied, is running towards the camera carrying in his arms a little seven- or eight-year-old girl whose face is a picture of pain, pure pain. In the background – it was one of those black-and-white photographs you can’t take your eyes off of – you could see a couple, the husband with his arms around his wife, and the wife with one hand on a buggy in which her baby is still sitting, the child is, at most, a year old, and given his or her age, would forget everything it was now hearing and seeing. Elsewhere, you can see a father (I assume he’s the father) putting his arms out to another child of four or five, and beside him a taller girl, who appears to be staunchly coping on her own. What I remember most clearly, though, is the expression of the face of the young policeman, or was he perhaps a fireman, carrying the little girl. Although much of his face was covered in blood, so that you really couldn’t make out his features (the blood could have been his own or someone else’s, like the blood on the girl’s arm), his expression was a mixture of determination and profound pity, perhaps there was also an element of postponed rage and another of sheer incredulity at what he was witnessing. Determination to save the injured child he wasn’t even looking at, instead staring straight ahead, his gaze perhaps fixed straight on the hospital that he needs to reach as soon as possible. And profound pity for many possible reasons.
The very fact that this photograph is reproduced in Tomás Nevinson requires some slippage between the book’s narrator and its author. Tomás Nevinson is only remembering an image he saw ten years ago. (It’s a remarkably accurate memory, but then Nevinson has spent more than two decades risking his life on his ability to see and remember details.) It was Javier Marías who decided to have this photograph reproduced in the book so that readers could see it for themselves. I think this should prompt us to be more than a little curious about his text concerning the photograph. One of the things that Nevinson is doing in his description of the photograph quoted above is focusing our eyes on where he wants us to look. But I think Marías is intervening here, as well. Presumably, Marías saw the photograph in a somewhat better version and the image would have been clearer for him. As a result, he would have been aware that he needed to prepare the reader to pay attention to something that is nearly lost among the half-tone dots of the mediocre reproduction that his book would produce. I definitely think that is why he wanted to make sure the reader noticed that the young girl in the man’s arms has lost not only one of her sneakers but part of her left foot as well.
It might seem odd that Nevinson spends only sixteen words on the site of the bombing or on any other evidence of the terrorists’ bomb, such as the blown out car windows. If this photograph wasn’t reproduced in the book, the only thing we would know about it other than the commentary on the people in the forefront is this: “The ground was strewn with rubble and, hanging over it all, a malignant cloud of smoke.” Nevinson says absolutely nothing about a street that is lined with automobiles and buildings. Then again, we have to keep in mind the reason that Nevinson has recalled this image of a newspaper or magazine photograph from so long ago. He’s in the middle of making a very human equation. What would it take for him to go out and try to bring a terrorist to justice one more time? Apparently, property damage doesn’t enter into the equation for Nevinson, he’s only sensitive to the human cost of terrorism. Does visualizing the pained face and damaged foot of a young girl tip the scales for him? This is why Nevinson is only focusing on the human cost of the terrorist bombing that is visible in the photograph.
Nevinson’s 297-word description is embedded within a longer discussion of the photograph that takes place in his head because the photograph has led him to recall both the public horror and the political arguments that took place when ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist Party, began bombing locations that involved children victims. As he sits and debates his own future with his handler, this factor weighs on Nevinson, but he still doesn’t make the decision to accept the job for another forty pages.
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Marías/Nevinson uses nearly half of the 297-word description of the photograph to tell us about the expressions on the faces of the man and the girl in the foreground. The girl’s face, the reader is told, is “a picture of pain, pure pain.” Several phrases are used to explain what should be seen on the face of her rescuer: “a mixture of determination and profound pity” . . . “an element of postponed rage and another of sheer incredulity” . . . “Determination” . . . and, once again, “profound pity for many possible reasons.” Furthermore, the reader is told that that “his gaze [is] perhaps fixed straight on the hospital that he needs to reach as soon as possible.”
The idea that we can accurately read the emotions on other people’s faces is as old as time, but it first achieved a real scientific stamp of approval in 1872 when Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, illustrated with numerous photographs intended to show what certain emotions looked like on a variety of faces. Most of the photographs used in the book were made by the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who, along with his colleague, Jean-Martin Charcot, conducted experiments on patients at Paris’ Salpêtrière, a university hospital. At least two decades before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin had begun wondering whether the psychological aspects of life were hereditary. After considerable research and consultation with psychiatrists on the subject, he became convinced that there were some core expressions that were universal among all peoples and certain animals.
As a fiction writer, Marías can make up whatever story he wishes about the events that take place within a photograph. But when he lets the reader compare the photograph to his words, he is giving us the ability to compare his ekphrastic version with what we see. I happen to be of the school that believes that it’s not always possible to accurately judge what the expressions seen on the faces in photographs are “telling” us. I’ll let you be the judge if the face of the man in the photograph represents determination, pity, rage, and incredulity.
Javier Marías’ Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. See my earlier post on this novel.
Vertigo 