In His Own Image

By Jérôme Ferrari

TARGET CONSUMER

• Readers of literary fiction
• Readers interested in photography

KEY SELLING POINTS

• Goncourt Prize-winning author;
• Deals with universal themes about the nature of photography and artistic representation in general;
• Exploration of death and religion by non-religious author

• Language: English
• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781609456757

Jérôme Ferrari

Je´ro^me Ferrari is a writer and translator born in 1968 in Paris. His 2012 novel, The Sermon on the Fall of Rome won the Prix Goncourt. He is also the author of Where I Left My Soul (MacLehose, 2012).

Book preview

IN HIS OWN IMAGE

In mimoria di u me cucinu caru, Jean Vesperini

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,

or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.

—EXODUS 20:4–5

Obscene! She wanted to cry but did not cry because she did not know at whom the word should be flung: at herself, at West, at the committee of angels that watches impassively over all the passes. Obscene because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden forever in the bowels of the earth [ . . . ].

—J. M. COETZEE

Elizabeth Costello

Death has passed by. The photograph comes afterwards

and, unlike painting, it does not suspend time but fixes it.

—MATHIEU RIBOULET

Les Oeuvres de miséricorde [Merciful Acts]

PRAYERS AT THE FOOT

OF THE ALTAR

1

(On the Way Home, Vojvodina, 1992)

The last time she saw him, ten years earlier, he was on his way home, and she was accompanying him. He hadn’t said a word from the time the bus from Belgrade had dropped them off at the bus station. And then he’d paused, still silent, to lean against the railing of a bridge over the Danube that the NATO bombings of 1999 would soon reduce to only rubble and towers. Antonia stood a few steps behind him, observing him, her camera in her hand. He was wearing torn military fatigues on which he’d sewn his sergeant’s stripes, and beneath the insignia of the now-dissolved JNA ¹ was the Serbian coat of arms with its two-headed eagle surrounded by four firesteels. At his feet lay a big duffel bag containing only a Hungarian edition of Imre Kertész’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child, the first volume of a Serbo-Croatian translation of the complete works of Bukowski, and a few cassettes of R.E.M. and Nirvana; he could not even remember the last time he had listened to them. He was holding his head in his hands. He wasn’t looking at the dark waters of the river, or the sky heavy with rain. A group of adolescent boys slowed their pace as they passed close to him on the bridge, and they burst out laughing, an incomprehensible laugh, blatantly looking him up and down. Antonia took the shot, the last of the feature she was devoting to him, that would never be published. At first he did not seem to react. Then he looked up, and Antonia saw he was weeping. He picked up his bag, but as she prepared to follow him, he waved his hand to stop her, and she stayed on the bridge watching him walk away until he had disappeared and it was too late for any other form of farewell.

Now on this Friday evening in August 2003, in the port in Calvi, she recognized him immediately. Dragan was walking toward her among the crowd of tourists with another NCO from the Foreign Legion, and this time his uniform was impeccable. She stopped. When their eyes met, he smiled, and went up to kiss her with a warmth that was absolutely genuine. She was so moved that at first she did not realize he was speaking to her in French. He pointed to the camera slung across her shoulder. Are there interesting things to take pictures of around here? She burst out laughing. No. Really nothing interesting. She took wedding photos now, and that was why she was in Calvi. Pictures of wedding rings. Emotional families. Couples, obviously, lots of couples, posing in front of flower beds, luxury cars, or the sun dipping into the Mediterranean. Always the same things, oddly grotesque, repetitive, and ephemeral all at the same time. She earned a decent living, but it certainly wasn’t interesting. She fell silent. She was afraid he might be able to sense how bitter she had become. She asked him if he’d like to go for a drink. He was on call. Had to get back to camp at Raffalli. But he’d be glad to spend tomorrow evening with her. Antonia had planned to go home, in the south of the island, once the wedding was over. She had promised her parents she’d have dinner with them. He shrugged. Couldn’t she stay one more day? She looked at him. Of course she could.

She called her mother to tell her that something had come up obliging her to stay in Balagne a day longer. She wouldn’t be able to have dinner in the village Saturday evening as promised, but she’d be there for sure the following day. Even though Antonia tried to make the sudden change of plans seem as innocuous as possible, it nevertheless almost immediately triggered a tearful indictment where she was reproached for her casual, selfish, ungrateful attitude. Antonia did not make the mistake of getting angry. She assured her mother of the perfection of her daughterly love, told her she was looking forward to seeing her on Sunday, and reduced her to silence by more or less hanging up on her. Then she switched off her cell phone and went to bed.

All day long she tried to focus on her work. She photographed the young bride from the moment she left her bathroom until she put on her gown, unanimously deemed sublime by her swooning entourage; she photographed the inevitable radiance of the groom’s smile the moment he saw his betrothed; she followed them to the church, took pictures during the banquet of all the guests dazed with heat and alcohol, and ended the day on the beach, where she granted herself the guilty pleasure of having the newlyweds pose at length beneath a scorching sun in sophisticated poses she hoped were as painful as they were ridiculous. By the end of the session they had worked up a sweat but were thrilled. They were sure the results would be magnificent, just as the day had been. They paid Antonia, thanking her profusely, and she was able to go and join Dragan for dinner. They talked all night, and when she got back to the hotel, it was five o’clock in the morning. She wasn’t sleepy. If she went to bed and managed to fall asleep in spite of everything, she would still have to vacate the room at eleven. She decided to set off right away. She would stop off at her place, sleep all day, and then go up to the village for dinner with her parents. She sat at the wheel and rolled down all the windows. It was still dark out, and the temperature had not gone below eighty-five. She went through L’Île-Rousse. On the Ostriconi road as she came around a bend, although the sea below her still lay in the shadow of night, the sun, its glow vaguely coloring the sky behind the mountains, suddenly rose above the peaks, and its first rays lit up Antonia’s face. She let herself be dazzled for a moment, and closed her eyes.

Her parents and her brother, Marc-Aurèle, waited for a long time. They kept getting her voicemail. By nine o’clock that evening, her mother had abandoned indignation for despair once and for all. All three left the village to go down into the town, rang in vain at the door of Antonia’s apartment, questioned the neighbors, went down every street in the neighborhood every which way looking for her car until finally they went to the gendarmerie. The following day, late in the afternoon, two gendarmes came to the village, and Antonia’s mother began to scream the moment she saw the expression on their faces. They confirmed that what she had been dreading—not just these last twenty-four hours but basically her entire life—had happened. Their colleagues from Balagne had found Antonia’s car at the bottom of a ravine near the Ostriconi river. It had taken them some time. It was almost impossible to see it from the road, and there were no skid marks on the asphalt to help them with their search. They’d had to use a helicopter. In all likelihood, Antonia had died the day before, at dawn. The gendarmes wanted to leave, but Antonia’s father insisted on offering them coffee; they drank in silence, standing in the kitchen, eyes down and caps in hand.

Two days later, the coffin is placed on a modest catafalque in front of the altar between two tall white candles. The priest coming forward to bless it is Antonia’s uncle on her mother’s side. The same priest who, thirty-eight years earlier, in that very church, had held her to his chest as the cold water from the baptistery was sprinkled on her forehead, making her cry. At the time he was seventeen years old. He was not interested in the ritual. All he could think of was how to comfort the little child wriggling in his arms.

Now he says, Then will I go unto the altar of God, and the congregation responds: To God who giveth joy to my youth.

The words of the liturgy are not hard to say. They do not belong to him, they exist without him, they require neither his sorrow nor the untimely tenderness of his memories, merely the material presence of his body in order to become incarnate, alive, through him. It is painful, however, to hear the congregation’s response. It is as if all these voices have united to become Antonia’s voice, and that she is the one who is speaking, one last time, in a strange, multiple voice, before she will be reduced to silence. For a moment he is afraid he will be carried away by his emotions, irresistible and inappropriate. All he can do is entrust himself to the grace of God.

He says, Our help is in the name of the Lord.

He hears the buzz of conversation of people who could not find room inside the church and who have stayed outside to wait for the end of the ceremony to offer their condolences. There are many of them. Premature death is always, and all the more so when it is sudden, an outrage, with a formidable power of seduction. From the altar he can see the crowding in the pews of both villagers and strangers, sees his more or less distant cousins, his brothers and, in the first row, very near the coffin, his sister and brother-in-law, and Marc-Aurèle weeping unrestrainedly. He could have refused to celebrate the mass, could have been standing there beside them. If he had, he too might be weeping. But Antonia has no use for yet more tears. Now he is sure: his place is here, at the foot of the altar, it is here that he is closest to his departed goddaughter, closer than he has been in a very long time.

¹ Yugoslav People’s Army.

REQUIEM ÆTERNAM

2

(Family of Tourists Walking Toward the Beach,

South Corsica, 1979)

When, for her fourteenth birthday, he gave Antonia the first camera she had ever held, he was still at the seminary. She threw her arms around his neck in an outburst of childish joy, because at the time he and he alone gave joy to her youth. For several months, she’d been displaying a passionate interest in family photographs, spending what seemed like hours on end examining them attentively one by one after spreading them out over the dining room table. Even though they had been stored in complete and utter disorder inside an old leather briefcase, Antonia handled them with extreme care, as if they were precious, fragile icons. And yet there was nothing particularly interesting about them. You could find the same photographs in any family, all telling the same story, featuring the same characters: newborn babies in lacy gowns, girls in their communion dresses, newlyweds, women by the fountain in summer frocks, an unbelievable number of soldiers, victorious and defeated, cocky, downright virile, frightened or ashamed, posing in the trenches of the Somme, the streets of Rabat, Aleppo, or Saigon, tropical forests and deserts, with the golden anchor of the colonial armies embroidered on their képi , surrounded by their Moroccan comrades-in-arms, Senegalese infantrymen, Spahi cavalrymen mounted on Arabian thoroughbreds, next to some artillery hardware from the Maginot line or in the courtyard of a Stalag, wrapped in military blankets, children sitting on their mothers’ laps, the first groups of adolescents beaming in their swimsuits and in color, and the old veiled women whose inevitably glum expressions were proof that this world here below was indeed the vale of tears evoked in the Psalms. Antonia’s godfather initially thought she was interested in her origins, and he offered to guide her along the tangled pathways of her genealogy: women who were widowed too young, who remarried, siblings with different parents, the inevitable unwed mothers, and subtly consanguine unions, all of which contributed to make this family tree dark and confusing to the neophyte. He made a considerable effort, sometimes in vain, to identify unknown individuals and determine their degree of kinship, but Antonia showed no more than polite interest. This was not the enigma that captivated her. She did not seem to care whether she belonged to the family that had left its trace on the glossy paper. The enigma was in the existence of the trace itself: the light reflected by bodies now grown old or long turned to dust had been captured and preserved through a process whose miraculous aspect could not be exhausted by simple technical explanations. Antonia studied a portrait of her mother at the age of ten, standing in front of the house in the shadow of the laurel tree and next to a tiny, ancient relative who, appropriately, was grimacing for all she was worth; then she recognized her godfather, at the same age, among other pupils gathered in the village schoolyard for the class photo, and the house, the schoolyard, even the laurel tree, did not seem to have changed, but the ancient relative was dead, her mother and godfather had not been children for a long time now, and their vanished childhood had nevertheless deposited on the film a trace of its reality as tangible and immediate as a footprint in clay, and to Antonia it seemed that all these familiar places, and from these places the immensity of the entire world, were filling with silent forms, as if all the moments of the past were surviving simultaneously, not in eternity, but in an inconceivable permanence of the present. Yet Antonia knew very well that all adults had once been children, she knew that the dead had been alive and that the past, no matter how distant, began as the present; therefore how could proof that such commonplaces are true be enigmatic or deeply moving? It was pointless to try to find an intelligent or profound answer to this question; the photographs opposed any quest for depth with the impenetrability of their surface.

Clearly this new passion of his goddaughter-niece’s was anything but a whim. As it happened, he was proven right, but his certainty was in no way a product of wisdom. In truth, his trust in Antonia was blind; everything she did or said seemed admirable to him, and if she did get caught out now and again, he always assumed that deep down it was