Nathalie Léger - The White Dress

Translated by Natasha Lehrer

D OROTHY, A PUBLISHING PROJECT

Ive come to try and make amends, but he kept his voice low, as if to acknowledge that it was an excuse. Make amends? How? With what?

Imre Kertsz, The Pathseeker

Sometimes, in those empty moments when the mind isnt taken up by worry or pleasure, when no single thing is calling for attention, no obligation or even distraction, when observing is no longer enough and doing nothing is impossible, you must return to one of those unanswered questions, in a room off to the side, you switch on the light and the question is poised there, waiting.

Perhaps everything goes back to the large tapestry in the dining room that loomed over all our meals, The Assassination of the Lady , inspired by a panel painted by Sandro Botticelli and commissioned as a wedding gift. In the background, a terrified woman is pursued along a bleak shore by an armed horseman accompanied by a pack of howling dogs; she is trying to flee the mans deadly blows; a pitiful wisp of fabric, a remnant of her tattered dress, flutters as she runs; we can almost hear her screams, her panting, her ragged panicky breath, while in the foreground her already broken body lies in a clearing, the man leaning over her plunging his blade into a gaping wound, tearing out her entrails with his bare hands. In the background, the flight, in the foreground, the murderthe scene ceaselessly turning and beginning again beneath the pale streaked sky visible between the trees. This huge tapestry washed up on the wall of our dining room, a loathed or perhaps long-forgotten inheritance, heavy with its own weight in dust, its shabby foliage fashioning a ravaged landscape in the grainy gloom, only the bodies standing out with a kind of carnivorous vivacity. Beneath it my mother, pushing away the glasses and carafes, holding out her hand to my father as a sign of forgiveness.

Day after day, while the undercurrents of menace rumbled on, while family life ran its apparently harmonious course, gloomy silences persisted, gestures made in vain were futilely reiteratedgestures of appeasement or reconciliation performed in a space already surreptitiously overfilledwe never stopped identifying, without even realizing, with this huge thing that hung over the dining table that was also a family heirloom. Identifying with or mimickingthe difference isnt clear. You look at a face, you become the face, you become the act itself: the act of supplication, the momentum of the escape, the act of murder: you constantly repeat each gesture internally, even the most insignificant; whatever you might think, you cannot help but copy every gesture, including the most destructive. Thats what scientists claim: the brain of the person looking cannot help but internally mimic all the gestures of the person facing them. You might think you are barely paying attention, but in spite of yourself you copy them. You are that small body fleeing under attack, even as something inside you flutters like a thin white sail, flutters and beats, vapid, obstinate, already sketching the outline of the entrails.

I want to stay focused. There were two dresses. It took me a long time to find this out. One, spotlessly white, remained in Milan, and the other, tattered, grubby, ruined by the journey, suffused with everything it had gone through, was in the police station in Istanbul, an enormous exhibit laid out on the floor on sheets of newspaper, taken apart like a dead insect.

All my mother wanted at the end of her life was to understand. Had she been the victim of an injustice, or was it she who was responsible for her unhappiness? I am quite familiar with her unhappiness, I could even claim it to be mine too, but that would be asserting too much about the transparent mysteries of the propagation of emotions, and anyway I would far rather identify with a tapestry than with the blurred outline of my mothers body. She doesnt need to tell me what happened, I was there, and I end up saying, You have to agree it was a very ordinary unhappiness. She concursbut it was unhappiness all the same.

Whether or not you understand them, you have to take even the most outlandish gestures seriously. That was the point Id arrived at in my thinking when I first heard about this Italian artist whose gesture had been, by any stretch, absurd. All through 2008, the Italian press reported on the details of her performance, how she had left Milan wearing a wedding gown, how she planned to hitchhike to Jerusalem across the Balkans, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. One television presenter declared sententiously that the young artist had made the mistake of confusing art and life. As he stared abstractedly at the teleprompter wearing a somber expression, his face grew suddenly skeptical, as though he were pretending not to know that everything is always muddled, everything is always unclear, inextricable, and perhaps never more so than at the moment when you think youre behaving with the most algorithmic lucidityneed I list some of the more obvious examples? And so it was that, having decided in spite of myself to make this very paradox the subject of my research, muffled flashes silently exploding in my head while I watched a repeat of the news report on the television, I began to develop an interest in this young womans story, even though (in fact probably because) a few people told me it wasnt clear that she really was an artist, she was more of an idealist, a modern-day mystic, a charmingly eccentric young woman who worked for a volunteer organization; other people claimed she came from old Milanese aristocracy and was trying to make up for a longstanding genealogical commitment to fascism; still others described her as an inventive young woman with a strong personality, tenacious, committed, generous, unpredictable, with a hint of contagious, light-hearted goofinesshappily, nothing was clear at all.

Unhappiness all the same, my mother says again. We are walking from our old house to the headland. Instantly, were assaulted by the smell of pink oleander and cypress mingled with the odor of sun cream, hot sand, and beignets from farther down the beachthe lingering, sickly-sweet perfume of baking-hot late afternoons in the shadow of the pinesbut here I mustnt give in, I have to resist the pernicious nostalgia of those hours steeped in smells and light. My mother says its about time. The end of a life is no bigger than a pocket handkerchief, you keep bumping into the border whichever way you turn, she says. She knows it will be sad, but unremarkable. Not to anticipate any great drama. The banality of grief, the conscientious act of mourning. Again she says: Ive thought a lot about it, our two subjects are exactly the same, so you can help me, support me, assist me in my project at the same time as youre pursuing yours, because, she says, the violence is the same, great or small; whatever form it takes, the fight to denounce it, wherever you are, is the same, you can act in my name, you can speak for me, you can, she clears her throat, defend me or even avenge me. I dont recognize my mother in these concise formulations that are nothing like the way she usually speaks, and I wonder where this voice is coming from that is speaking over the hissing of the sea, while the waves, like little pets, come and lap at our feet; I have taken off her shoes and we are walking along the shore, exactly where, as a childI thought about it in brief bursts as I listened to the sound of the seaI learned to swim, and the memory of the lapping waves, the memory of the gray delicately turning to sea-green, coincides amazingly with the actual sight of it, the same gentle backwash, the same warmth, even as my body, or whatever is standing in for it, wrestles vainly with the inevitable sense of dislocation. I wonder where that unfamiliar voice has come from, and walking beside her I speculate about it, without any bitterness, either toward her or toward whatever had prompted in her such an absurd notion, because I too have hidden away many words inside myself, not to mention ulterior motives that arent even mine. We arent far from the end of the beach, where well get rid of the sand and our wet socks, and then I shall answer her. She leans a little more heavily on my arm and whispers in a voice that is more familiar, You have no idea what happened, no one does, the lying and the injustice, the humiliation, you never really knew, did you?