Port Issue 23 by Port

The Spirit of Travel

louisvuitton.com

dior.com

VILLA CARMINATI, LAKE MAGGIORE— ROMEO MORETTI

GLISS MASTER WARDROBE— VINCENT VAN DUYSEN D.151.4 ARMCHAIR— GIO PONTI

MILANO PARIS LONDON NEW YORK ATHENS BEIRUT BEIJING BRUSSELS BUDAPEST CHENGDU CHICAGO DUBAI GENEVA HELSINKI HONG KONG ISTANBUL JAKARTA KIEV MADRID MANILA MEXICO CITY MIAMI MOSCOW NANJING OSAKA SEOUL SHANGHAI SINGAPORE TEHERAN TOKYO TORONTO

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J O R D A N W A T S O N , Digital Curator, H U G O S A U Z A Y & C H A R L O T T E D E T O N N A C , Interior Designers I N C O N V E R S AT I O N S E R I E S . D I S C O V E R M O R E AT O L I V E R P E O P L E S . C O M

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D E S I G N PO R T R A I T.

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PRADO settee with cushion. Design: Christian Werner. www.ligne-roset.com

Contents

106

The Porter Fergus Henderson, Piero Lissoni Konstantin Grcic, Jakko Jakszyk Michel Roux Jr, Dan and Dean Caten

Kaapstad Photography Rudi Geyser Creative direction and styling Dan May

Manolo Photography Mehdi Lacoste Styling Rose Forde

70 38 Contributors The lovely people who helped make the issue 40 Out-Take Introducing Vincent Cassel 42 Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Letter 78 Lost and Found Photography Crista Leonard 88 African Winter Photography Rudi Geyser 98 Objets Nomades Photography Flora Maclean 136 Well Heeled Words Helena Fletcher Vincent Cassel Words George Upton Photography Laura Marie Cieplik

Styling Scott Stephenson Creative direction and styling Dan May Photography Lewis Khan

142 Gio Ponti Words Will Wiles

126 28

Contents

170 DĂźsseldorf, 1984 Photography Marcus Pritzi Styling Rose Forde

153 Commentary 158 Incontrarsi 198 The Autumn / Winter Collections 254 Stockists 256 10,000 Hours with Anna Karina

Words Will Ashon, Steve Martin, Don Morrison Words Giuseppe Pontiggia, translated by Zadie Smith, Ma Jian, Tash Aw Photography Lola Paprocka & Pani Paul Styling Scott Stephenson

224 Orford Ness Words and photography Tobias Harvey

David La Spina Words Kathy Ryan

Horse Play Words Susanne Madsen Photography Cian Oba-Smith

188

234 33

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Dan Crowe CREATIVE DIRECTOR Kuchar Swara DESIGNER AND STUFF (RAISED BY WOLVES) Matt Willey DEPUTY EDITOR George Upton FASHION DIRECTOR Dan May FASHION EDITOR Rose Forde ART EDITOR Ling Ko PHOTOGRAPHIC DIRECTOR Max Ferguson DESIGN EDITOR Max Fraser SUB-EDITOR Kerry Crowe EUROPE EDITOR Donald Morrison US EDITOR Alex Vadukul AUSTRALIA EDITOR James W Mataitis Bailey INTERIORS EDITORS Huw Griffith, Tobias Harvey EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jo Lawson-Tancred WORDS Will Ashon, Tash Aw, Carlo Capasa, Carlotta de Bevilacqua, Alex Doak Max Ferguson, Helena Fletcher, Konstantin Grcic, Tobias Harvey Fergus Henderson, Jakko Jakszyk, Ma Jian, Anna Karina, Jo Lawson-Tancred Piero Lissoni, Susanne Madsen, Steve Martin, Don Morrison, Michel Roux Jr Kathy Ryan, Stephen Shames, Zadie Smith, Christopher Turner, George Upton Will Wiles PHOTOGRAPHY Fabrizio Albertini, Laura Marie Cieplik, Neil Gavin, Rudi Geyser, Jay Gullion Tobias Harvey, Lewis Khan, Mehdi Lacoste, David La Spina, Dorothea Lange Crista Leonard, Lola & Pani, Flora Maclean, Cian Oba-Smith, Jack Orton Thu Thuy Pham, Markus Pritzi, Stephen Shames

SENIOR EDITORS Tom Craig, Reportage Brett Steele, Architecture Alex Doak, Horology Fergus Henderson, Food Samantha Morton, Film Nathaniel Rich, Literature

MANAGING DIRECTORS Dan Crowe, Kuchar Swara

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Laura Barber Richard Buckley Kyle Chayka Kabir Chibber Alex Griessmann Leo Hollis Albert Scardino Minnie Weisz Philip Womack

ACCOUNTS McCabe Ford Williams

PUBLISHERS Dan Crowe, Kuchar Swara, Matt Willey ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono

CIRCULATION CONSULTANT Logical Connections Adam Long adam@logicalconnections.co.uk ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono andrew@port-magazine.com CONTACT info@port-magazine.com +44 (0)20 3119 3077 SYNDICATION syndication@port-magazine.com SYNDICATED ISSUES Port Spain portmagazine.es ISSN 2046-052X Port is published twice a year by Port Publishing Limited 18 - 24 Shacklewell Lane London, E8 2EZ port-magazine.com Port is printed by Taylor Bloxham Founded by Dan Crowe, Boris Stringer Kuchar Swara and Matt Willey. Registered in England no. 7328345. All rights reserved. Reproduction, in whole or in part without written permission, is strictly prohibited. All prices are correct at time of going to press but are subject to change. All paper used in the production of this magazine comes, as you would expect, from manageable sources.

“Love set you going like a fat gold watch.” – Sylvia Plath 36

Contributors

David La Spina Brooklyn-based photographer David La Spina is cofounder of the imprint ROMAN NVMERALS and a director at photo agency Esto. He has previously held positions as a photo editor at the New York Times Magazine, where he is a frequent contributor; a faculty member at Bard College at Simon's Rock; and a visiting artist at the Cooper Union college in New York. Recently, two solo exhibitions in Brooklyn combined performance, installation and film to explore the history of American baseball. He received an MFA from Yale University in 2009.

Tobias Harvey Photographer Tobias Harvey works mainly with large-format film to produce contemplative landscapes and still lifes that respond to themes of the infinite, and natural law. Taking inspiration from Francisco de Zurbarán, Eugène Atget, Furry Lewis and Carleton Watkins, Harvey’s art projects are held in collections around the world. He has shot for Port since its inception and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, the World of Interiors and Wallpaper Magazine.

Steve Martin American actor, comedian and writer Steve Martin began his career writing for 1960s hit variety show the ‘Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour’, for which he won an Emmy aged 23. Spending the 1970s touring as a stand-up comic, Martin established himself as a host on Saturday Night Live and would go on to appear in many feature films, such as The Jerk, Cheaper by the Dozen and The Pink Panther. Musically talented, Martin performs on the banjo and piano, and in 2009 he won the Grammy Award for best bluegrass album with his debut solo album The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo.

Rudi Geyser The work of South African photographer Rudi Geyser explores the narratives around lesser-told stories on the African continent. Having spent most of his twenties in the UK – Geyser received a BA in photography from University College Falmouth and worked as an assistant for fashion photographers in London – he returned home to seek inspiration and to explore his own identity through photography. In 2017, his campaign for fashion brand Superbalist won a Loerie Award, which recognises creativity and innovation in Africa and the Middle East.

Zadie Smith Contemporary novelist, essayist and critic Zadie Smith burst on to the literary scene with her debut novel White Teeth, which became an immediate bestseller, winning both the 2000 Whitbread Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. Known for the novels On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, Feel Free, a new collection of essays, was released this year. Smith has been a tenured professor in creative writing at New York University since September 2010 and has contributed to the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Guardian and the New York Times.

Fergus Henderson Chef Fergus Henderson is known for his philosophy of nose-to-tail eating, championing the use of often-neglected offal meats and forgotten British cuisine at his London restaurant, St John. In 2004 he released The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, the updated version of a 1999 book on the same topic, to critical acclaim, sharing the methods behind regular St John dishes such as pigs’ ears, trotters and bone marrow. St John was awarded a Michelin star in 2009 and is consistently named as one of the top 50 restaurants in Restaurant magazine’s annual ranking.

“O”

Pierpaolo Ferrari, 2018

Elemental

106 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3NB Tel. 020 7631 5200 info@artemide.co.uk

Out-Take

Vincent Cassel, shot by Laura Marie Cieplik, wears DIOR HOMME

Vincent Cassel is a man of many talents. A linguist (he speaks four languages), a devotee of the Brazilian martial art capoeira and a keen surfer, he is also that rare and greatly coveted thing in Hollywood – a film star at peace with his lot. Of course, Cassel’s greatest talents – and the reason he is gracing the cover of Port’s autumn issue – lie in rendering nuanced, poised performances on screen, with turns in La Haine, Black Swan and L’Appartement confirming his ability to play brooding, troubled and often unhinged characters. All this alongside his blockbuster roles in Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen and Jason 40

Bourne, and living the high life between Rio, Paris and Biarritz with the model Tina Kunakey, who recently became his wife. Whether in the art house or the multiplex, the 51-year-old French actor keeps it refreshingly down to earth: He tells Port when we meet him in Paris, “as an actor, you have to pretend to do things you don’t really do – but it’s always quite superficial. You end up knowing a lot of things about a lot of things. But then my craft is in constructing things that are totally fake.” Head to page 126 for the cover story.

T i m e s S q u a r e , N e w Yo r k , 1 9 8 0 , S t e p h e n S h a m e s / P o l a r i s

Editor‘s Letter

Early in 2010, back when people used their phones simply for phone calls and politics resembled a conversation, we humbly started working on the launch issue of Port. We got together a ‘dummy’, a unique document that showed potential contributors and collaborators what the magazine would, in theory, look like when printed. Dummies are normally quite rough examples, yet all the elements were there: the photo stories; the interest in design; the passion for literature, architecture and food; and, of course, a focus on timeless style. The cover star for this prototype issue was Vincent Cassel. He embodied so many things that we knew we valued and wanted Port to reference: intelligence, a sense of style and fun; perhaps even a bit of human frailty – plus the guy is not without some looks… it all made sense. Timewise, it didn’t work out with Cassel for the launch – but the multifaceted actor has just got better and better. So it was with great pride that we finally shot him in Paris, eight years later, for issue 23. And what a journey Cassel has been on; go to page 126 for the full story, 42

where he is ably profiled by Port’s very own George Upton. Elsewhere in this issue we have the private lives of New Yorkers captured by street photographer David La Spina; seeing afresh the extraordinary site of Orford Ness, a place of great military history; and fashion shot all over the world, including London, New York and Cape Town. Plus Fergus Henderson, our food editor, cooking up a warming winter dish, with his team, of blood cake and fried eggs. Language and multiculturalism run through the veins of this edition: From our extended fiction feature, translated by several esteemed writers, including Zadie Smith, to Anna Karina explaining how she overcame her mother tongue to break on to the French cinema scene of the 1960s, as well as the cross-pollinating creativity at the heart of being European. I would like to personally thank the amazing team here at Port for pulling out all the stops for this issue. It’s a great achievement, and you’re a damn decent bunch. Thank you. With a handshake, Dan Crowe, editor

E B I R T C R S O B P U S TO .c ine z ga ma t r po

the porter

FERGUS HENDERSON PiERO LiSSONi KONSTANTiN GRCIC JAKKO JAKSZYK MiCHEL ROUX JR DAN AND DEAN CATEN

The Porter

EASY RIDER Jo Lawson-Tancred Irving Schott produced the first leather biker jacket in 1928 in response to the rapidly developing demand for protective clothing, as motorcycles increased in speed. Fitting the jacket with practical details such as efficient asymmetric zips, in order not to dig in as the rider lent forward, and lapels that could be fastened down so they wouldn’t flap in the wind, he had no idea that the design would soon acquire mythic status. The jacket – which was named Perfecto, after Schott’s favourite cigar – was originally sold for five dollars and 50 cents at Harley-Davidson stores in New York. It wasn’t until 1953 that Marlon Brando would turn the look into a fashion statement, as leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, in cult classic The Wild Ones. Having developed a recurring presence on the runway as well as the streets, ironically the highly functional design became a symbol of easy, carefree countercultural living, more often seen off the bike than on. A favourite on both sides of the Atlantic, the jacket became particularly associated with punk – The Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious is said to have asked that he be buried in his. The jacket’s popularity must lie in part with the qualities of the leather itself; visibly durable and tough, the biker lasts, quite literally, long enough to transcend fad and reach an enduring iconic status. Each decade has seen its own reinterpretations of the look, with threads of the original design running through each. For a new range ‘Off the Road’, Berluti has taken the quilted, protective leather that biker jackets are revered for and introduced it to a collection of accessories – from biker boots and gloves to a bag tailored for riding – that has been imagined in the same spirit.

Photography Thu Thuy Pham

THE CRUMBER Michel Roux Jr I’m not sure where the first crumb scraper (or ‘table crumber’) was used, but it’s become a staple for any formal restaurant. We use a modern incarnation at Le Gavroche that is as small as a pencil, but some of the older ones I’ve seen are amazing – silver and ornate and decorated with the most beautiful detail. They’ve been adapted over the years by adding a brush, and then a roller. Now they are more discrete, which, I think, is better.

There’s a ritualistic aspect to waiting staff coming to your table and deftly sweeping away any bits of debris that may have escaped from your plate, although I do think some restaurants overdo it a little; unless you don’t have a bread plate, there’s no need to crumb in between every course. In my opinion, you should do it after the main course. It marks a moment, that transition from savoury to sweet, in the refreshing of the table. Fewer restaurants now use tablecloths, so there is less need for a crumber, but I feel the humble crumb scraper offers a real sense of occasion, of distinctiveness, that will always have a place in dining. Michel Roux Jr is the chef patron of two-Michelin-starred Le Gavroche, London

The Porter

Photography Jack Orton

ARTISTIC BAGGAGE Konstantin Grcic Last year, the architect Rem Koolhaas asked me if I would be interested in being involved with the Prada Invites project. He, along with two other design teams – Herzog & de Meuron, and Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec – had been asked by the brand to play with the iconic black nylon fabric Prada developed in the 1980s. I started thinking about the bags that Prada produced with the distinctive, beautiful, tightly woven material, and how those products had really made the brand what it is today; but Prada now is much more a serious fashion house than a bag company. I wanted to bring the two together – to combine a garment with a bag – and what came to mind was the performance artist Joseph Beuys, and his fishing vest. I have vivid memories of seeing Beuys when I was a child. I grew up in a town near Düsseldorf, where he lived, and though I didn’t really know who Beuys was, he had this aura – you could tell he was important. He would be dressed, as ever, in a felt hat and fishing vest with buttoned pockets down the front, and I admired it without ever really knowing why.

Photography Thu Thuy Pham

I think perhaps I was attracted to the idea that he had developed his a uniform. I bought my own version of the vest some years later, as a teenager, and I started wearing a lot of secondhand army gear. It was well made and practical, but I also think, in a subconscious way, I had been inspired by Beuys to develop my own sense of style. So that was the image, Beuys in his fishing vest, that came back to me for this project. I was quite excited by the idea, and we started to mock-up our own interpretations, playing with different forms until we arrived at the apron, which is more straightforward and casual. I don’t think it should be seen as a direct homage to Beuys, but rather, like his own vest, which was made for him by his wife, it is a self-made, simplified interpretation of the real, functional object.

As told to George Upton

49 49

The Porter

SHORE LEAVE Will Wiles “It’s for adventurous types who understand that luxury isn’t about gold taps,” says Mads Møller of Danish architecture firm Arcgency. Indeed, if you were on the hunt for a luxury experience, spending the night in a disused coal crane might not be your first choice – but Arcgency’s Krane, a one-room boutique getaway, is exactly that. The Krane sits on the quayside of a dockland peninsula, just to the north of Copenhagen’s city centre. It’s one of two cranes owned by cargo operator-turned-property developer Klaus Kastbjerg. The first was transformed into a meeting space over a decade ago by Jørn Utzon, the architect of Sydney Opera House, and his son Kim, as part of a larger dockside development. But the Krane stands in glorious isolation. “We talked about how we could make it into something that people would visit, something useful,” says Møller. “We started out talking about another meeting space and then it just escalated… Where shall we put the bathroom? If we have a bathroom should we have a shower? If we have a shower would it be possible to sleep there?” On the first level of the substantial structure is a conference space, and above that a tiny spa and terrace. These are gently disguised so as to blend in with the crane’s dramatic industrial silhouette. “We were always thinking about maintaining the look of an operational crane, so it wouldn’t disappear and become a building.” The meeting room is a near-invisible glass box, and the spa is an inscrutable grey cube where the crane’s counterweight once was. The guest room occupies two cabins on the top level: a small one, where the driver once sat overseeing the unloading of coal, and a larger structure that housed cables and electrical equipment. “It’s almost like a small summer house,” says Møller of this second cabin, now the bedroom and living space. “It’s kind of odd, and we liked the oddness about it so we retained it.” Inside, the guest room is clad entirely in blackstained fir, with black leather furniture. It’s a strongly charismatic – even aggressive – theme for such a naturally stark space, where you might expect an architect to reach instead for untreated timber and softer tones, to warm things up. The effect is to focus everything on the light from outside and the view of the water. “The first time we visited the crane,” Møller explains, “we went into this space, and everything was covered with black, a combination of oil and coal dust. There was this little window where the glass was broken and you could see the water, and it was clear blue. So the idea was born: complete focus on what is outside.” But despite its industrial history and uncompromising décor, the Krane has an unexpected air of escapist fantasy: a true retreat, hidden away above the world. When Møller tried an overnight stay for himself, he brought his five-year-old daughter. “She said it was like the dream of having your own treehouse,” he says. “It has that sort of appeal. It’s playful, and it’s something that intrigues even a child.” The crane arm no longer turns, but has been fixed facing west so visitors can watch the sunset over the water, and to complete the fantasy, the steps lift up like a drawbridge at night.

Photography Jay Gullion

4 Seen here, Bottega Veneta shot their AW18 collection in the Krane – the combination of leather, wood, stone and steel in the hotel echoing the varied textures and tactile materials of the season. Inspired by life in New York City, the collection features graphic motifs, which recall the structures of the city, and luxurious styles designed for lounging at home to escape the chaos of urban life.

THE SCIENCE OF SCENT Jo Lawson-Tancred

Smell is the most potent and immediate sense. Catch even a passing hint of perfume and it can instantly evoke long forgotten memories, set an atmosphere or affect your mood – so much so, it can be easy to overlook the intricate chemistry at work. Perfumery is a complex art, and ‘the nose’, as a perfumer is known in the industry, will choose from an almost unlimited palette of ingredients to experiment with and create unique blends. Finding harmony in this chaos of scents, however, means turning to a universal structure – a deceptively simple interplay of top, middle and base notes – which allows a fragrance to develop slowly over hours. When we smell a perfume for the first time, we take in only the top, or head, notes – the briefest overture of the fragrance’s full performance. But that first impression is a decisive moment: often citruses, like orange zest or bergamot, or light fruits, like grapefruit and berries, are used to grab your attention. They almost instantly begin to evaporate as the scent dries, allowing the middle notes, often called the heart notes, to gradually emerge. This is the true body of the perfume, and lasts longer – for around three to four hours – giving the

most enduring character of the scent, so it’s worth waiting a few moments after the first sniff. Generally fruity, or floral – geranium or jasmine for example, these stronger scents might be infused with a spice like nutmeg or cardamom. The final base notes appear after half an hour, and sometimes not till four hours later, synthesising with the heart notes to deliver the final effect. This is often complementary but, crucially, distinctive – cedarwood, sandalwood, patchouli or amber. The sequence of notes means that truly appreciating a scent takes time, but it also allows ‘the nose’ to imbue their perfume with a sophisticated narrative arc. For Swedish brand Byredo’s new fragrance, Eleventh Hour, this involved distilling an adage by celebrated Swiss explorer Ella Maillart into scent: “Life is a journey that brings you to the end of the world, a return to the harmony we have lost.” Led through the peppery, citrus accents of ban timmur, grown in Nepal where Maillart travelled, we then encounter a heart of rum, carrot seeds and wild fig, which, eventually, harmonises with the warm energy of tonka beans and cashmere woods, at the base.

The Porter

Photography Thu Thuy Pham

BRONX BOYS Stephen Shames I started photographing the Bronx for a magazine called Look in 1977. When the magazine folded after my first day, I continued the project alone; New York at that time was on the verge of bankruptcy – it was gritty and impoverished and I was hooked. At the time, I was working as assistant director of photography at Parade magazine in the day and hanging out in the Bronx at night. With long-term photo essays, you have to spend a lot of time getting to know your subjects, for them to accept you and let you take pictures – especially when, as was sometimes the case, people are selling drugs. So – as with this image of Martin, who I got to know well and wrote the text for the book I published of these photographs – I hung out, started taking pictures and the story developed from there. It would continue for 23 years. In the ’60s and early ’70s, I photographed the Black Panthers movement and spent a lot of time in African-American areas of the US, in the ghettos, seeing both the poverty and the politicised people who were trying to do something about it. It made me realise that there’s a lot of positive energy and good, decent people trying to raise their kids and overcome these huge obstacles. I photograph survivors, people who fight to overcome their situations. And I try not to portray these people as pathetic, as many photographers do – their work becoming a form of charity.

Photography Stephen Shames

In a sense, I see myself as a kind of crusader, like Lewis Hine and Arthur Rothstein – people who photographed challenging, abject conditions in order to increase awareness. I hope my work brings a degree of visibility to these marginalised people, and if the viewer sees them in a different light, then it has been a success. We need to look at things that are hard to face; if we don’t, nothing will ever change. As told to George Upton Stephen Shames’ vital work documenting the experience of impoverished youth in the Bronx is being showcased by President’s for their AW18 campaign, reflecting the collection’s inspiration taken from New York City in the ’80s and ’90s. Since 2014, President’s has highlighted independent photographers, profiling the work of one artist each season and selecting an iconic image from their archives to represent the collection in print.

The Porter

ODE TO JOY Piero Lissoni When I started in this industry in the early 1990s, being ‘international’ came naturally to me. I’ve never designed something specifically for the Italian market – I’m not provincial in my approach. Rather I design because I believe design and architecture are common languages that are spoken, with different accents, around the world. Of course, I like to feel Italian for many reasons: our approach to the industry, the quality associated with Italian manufacturing, the coffee (which to me means espresso – anything else is black water), but, ultimately, I feel European. As with my work, to be European is all about drawing sophisticated connections between different things. It’s a contaminated culture; you need to speak English and French, a bit of German and Spanish – it’s not possible to be only Milanese or Parisian. Instead there’s a rhythm that runs through everything: I can bring together Shakespeare and Dante, the Sex Pistols and Mozart; I can eat a very good steak-and-kidney pie and a very good spaghetti with a simple tomato sauce. That is the secret of being European – the capacity to mix and match many different cultures. And so it is with influences from other places, such as the sophistication and elegance of Japan, which I have always loved, and looked to for my first project with B&B Italia. When I was a young designer I met with Piero Busnelli, the founder of B&B Italia and one of the most important figures in the design world at the time. He told me, “I don’t know if it’s today, tomorrow or sometime in the future, but we will work together.” We were in a Japanese restaurant in Milan and we toasted the idea with saké. Many years later, when I finally started working with the company, unfortunately after Piero had died, I remembered this and wanted to do something special. For that reason, I called this sofa Saké. As told to George Upton

Photography Thu Thuy Pham

MALE GAZE Jo Lawson-Tancred

In 1877, the German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden – aged 21 and suffering from lung disease – came to the Sicilian town of Taormina to convalesce. Having recovered and been accepted into the community, he would spend the rest of his life on the island, discovering an enduring subject matter in the peasantry and landscapes there. He presented the area in idealised postcard scenes that evoked a pastoral timelessness, and the local youth were captured in homoerotic portraits, for which von Gloeden is best remembered today. Veiled in a muted, classical sensibility, von Gloeden's nudes – caught on the cusp of manhood and posing against ruins, elegantly draped in robes or adorned with floral wreaths – are uncomfortably sexualised to the modern eye. Yet the few hundred works that survived destruction at the hands of the fascist authorities in 1931 have been commended for their innovative use of photographic filters and manipulation of light, and are as widely collected and exhibited today as they were during his lifetime. Von Gloeden’s fame drew visits from artists, writers, royalty and, in 1897, Oscar Wilde – and as his work became well known, his impact spread. A 1923 painting, from Picasso’s classical period,

‘Pipes of Pan’, has been explicitly linked to von Gloeden, with its depiction of two statuesque and partially undressed young men, one playing the pipes and another listening with a vacant expression. Cezanne, too, shows the influence of von Gloeden’s work – men, emotionally distant but anatomically aestheticised, display themselves proudly; in the paintings of Bloomsbury Group artist Duncan Grant, where figures are arranged in listless mannered poses, the effect is even more stark. Given his influence, a revival of von Gloeden’s vision is long overdue, and creative director of LOEWE, Jonathan Anderson, is weaving new life into his work with a series of handcrafted textiles produced by international ateliers in places as diverse as Ecuador, India and Japan. With 100 per cent of the profits from the blankets and tapestries, and 75 per cent of those from the bags going directly back to the artisans who made them, the collection continues an artistic exchange begun by von Gloeden nearly 150 years ago.

The Porter

Photography Thu Thuy Pham

MILAN, RENEWED Carlo Capasa The Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana (CNMI) – the Italian Chamber of Fashion – was founded in 1958 to create a better system for the Italian fashion industry: brands have historically been isolated from one another and needed a space to allow them to communicate and to tell the stories of their products. Recently this has expanded to include an emphasis on sustainability and responsibility – to the industry and the environment – as well as thinking about the future of Italian fashion: how to incubate young talent and share this knowledge. Expo 2015, and the new town that was built for the exposition, fostered a youthful energy in Milan. Something changed – no longer did the city feel stiff and closed to opportunity. There was a sense that young people had found a way to express themselves. When I became president of the CNMI that year, initiatives like the Milan Moda Graduate, which offers young designers essential industry experience and the chance to exhibit their work as part of Milan fashion week, became a priority for me. It was important that we did what we could to support this new movement. It’s still tough for young designers. Very few people make it, and it’s not just a question of talent – organisation, and sometimes luck, can play an

important role, but we try to provide an opportunity where we can. Fashion needs to be connected to what is going on in society, to anticipate or express a particular perspective on the time in which we are living, and it is all the more important for that reason to have the point of view of the next generation. The origins of Milan as Italy’s fashion capital go back to the Renaissance and the skilled craftsmen of the court who would create beautiful, delicately embroidered fabrics. The city may have grown since then but the fashion scene maintains the sense of a small collaborative community of designers and artisans. It’s something that makes Italian fashion unique, this close, pragmatic relationship between creativity and production. Every season I am surprised by the creativity, the new ideas and approaches, of these young designers, and it is important to capitalise on the benefits that this particularly Italian approach can bring. Fashion in this country has such a strong identity; it is vital that we remember who we are. As told to George Upton

BLOOD CAKE AND FRIED EGGS Fergus Henderson Why should vampires have all the fun? Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t shrink from blood; it can make you live forever or, if you are feeling like death, you just need a little dose to bring you back to life. At our restaurant the blood used to be delivered in sacks which caused all sorts of problems; one false move and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d have dressed your surroundings as the scene of an unspeakable murder. The delivery people would come and leave splashes through the corridor, into the bar and up the stairs to the kitchen, in a suspicious trail. The order now arrives in plastic flagons, like large milk bottles, and I rather miss those trails. For a while we had some difficulty obtaining blood at all, as slaughterhouse regulations had altered in some way. We tried briefly to make do with the powdered blood that seemed to be our only option, but the texture was grainy and, strangely, powdered blood makes me squeamish in a way that fresh blood does not. Interestingly, for others though, in the world of offal blood is in the category of brains and spleen in inspiring the greatest trepidation. And yet black pudding is an essential feature of the English breakfast plate, nestling in the beans with a friendly and approachable demeanour. Perhaps this expresses that peculiar cognitive disconnection between the plate and the process, and maybe this is why I mourn the loss of those sacks. There is less of a sense of origin. What is the difference between black pudding and blood cake? There is no punchline. As the names might suggest, the former is somewhat heavier, the ballast provided by the addition of grains. There are as many regional differences as there are regions and, flattering ourselves that we might be a little region where we sit in Farringdon, we have our own proud variation using wobbly The Porter

Photography Jack Orton

The Porter

chunks of cubed pig’s head in place of the fat. What a sophisticated blood experience! And more sophisticated still, we use polenta or semolina which gives the finished cake a beautiful lightness. Sophistication all the way! method You will need to ask your butcher for the blood. It may be difficult to obtain, but it can be got. Here we have forgone the addition of the pig’s head in favour of the more approachable back fat. The cornmeal remains, for essential sophistication. You will also need a bread tin lined with cling film. There is a love affair between a fried egg and blood cake. Both started existence as life-giving elements, both arrive on the plate getting on like a house on fire. 1 large or 2 small onions, peeled and finely chopped 6 cloves of garlic, finely chopped A dollop of duck fat Half a bunch of marjoram – pick the leaves off and chop finely 1/2 tsp crushed mace 1/2 tsp crushed allspice 1 litre of fresh pig's blood 50g yellow cornmeal (polenta) Sea salt and black pepper 250g back fat (salted lardo will suffice), cut into 5mm cubes 6 free range eggs In a pan large enough to take all the ingredients, sweat the onions and garlic in the duck fat until clear, soft and giving, but not brown. Add the marjoram, spices, blood and cornmeal, and stir on a gentle heat until the blood starts to thicken to a running porridge consistency (do not let it cook and set). It has to have density or the back fat will sink to the bottom when added. At this point (not for the more squeamish cook), taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper if necessary, and when happy remove the pan from the heat and add the chopped back fat. Stir to spread the fatty chunks through the blood and decant the mixture into the cling-film-lined bread tin. Cover with tinfoil and place on a flat folded tea towel in a deep roasting tray or dish. Surround with water (not going over the edge of the bread tin) and bake in a gentle to medium oven for one and a half hours. Check that a skewer or sharp knife comes out clean, then remove and allow to cool and set (wrapped in cling film it keeps very well in the fridge). Once firm, cut into 12mm thick slices, get two frying pans hot, add some duck fat to them, and, in one pan, gently fry your slices of blood cake until heated through. In the other pan, fry a pair of eggs per person. To serve, give each plate two slices of fried blood cake, topped with a couple of fried eggs, and eat straight away. It has surprising soothing qualities, this dish.

BACK IN TIME Alex Doak A week-long bullet train tour of Japan is what’s needed to truly get your head around watchmaking giant Seiko’s capabilities. It’s an appropriate thought, as – even with their space-age rolling stock and 200mph average speed – the first rails were laid as far back as 1964, for the Tokyo Olympics: the same event for which Seiko, as official timekeeper, successfully reduced the size of its quartz timekeeper (from cupboard proportions to handheld box). Five years later, they shrank the technology even more, launching the world’s first quartz wristwatch, the Astron. It was nothing less than the most important advance of 20th-century horology.

Seiko’s abilities stretch to synthesising their own quartz crystals: growing vast lozenges from seed crystal in 14-metre-high autoclaves – a facility resembling the engine room of the Starship Enterprise. Elsewhere, nestled in the snowy woods of Morioka in the north, you’ll find the appropriately named Grand Seiko, where you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve been transported to a traditional Swiss watch atelier in the Jura Mountains, right down to the 20 lab-coated watchmakers studiously tweezering together precision mechanical movements to rival any Omega or Rolex.

So… prestigious quartz pedigree; exquisitely crafted masterworks. And then there are the diving watches… Seen here, the Prospex 1968 Automatic Diver’s Commemorative Limited Edition is not only the latest in the unbroken, mind-boggling legacy of Seiko’s water babies in all shapes, sizes and depth ratings – representing the latest sub-aqua mod cons – but also something of a 50-year-old-classic reboot.

While there are faithful homages to that 1968 original, such as the utilitarian flatness of the steel case, this is an otherwise gorgeous reimagining. The dial and bezel’s verdant new hue, for instance, reflects the ancient cedar trees on the island of Yakushima, at the southern end of the Japanese archipelago, a World Natural Heritage Site and a much-loved destination for the diving community, due to its crystal-clear waters, coral reefs and abundant marine life. The mechanics, too, have been upgraded; the caliber 8L35 ticking inside forms the basis of many of the higher-grade movements leaving the aforementioned Grand Seiko atelier. There’s also a new monobloc-steel case construct, which upgrades the watch from only being useable by shallower ‘air divers’, to making it suitable for ‘saturation divers’: those who work at depth for long periods, eating and sleeping in pressurised chambers rich in atmospheric helium, which squeezes through the gaps in normal diving cases, popping off the sapphire crystal upon resurfacing. It doesn’t get more capable than this particular Seiko, nor more beautiful. If you can’t stretch to that bullet train tour, then you could do worse than buy one of these. As a representation of what Seiko can do, entirely self-sufficiently, it’s the whole package.

The Porter

Photography Thu Thuy Pham

LIGHT READING Carlotta de Bevilacqua This is the century of the photon. Today, fibre optic cables are using light to enable new visions through the transfer of data and information. For me, as vice-president and CEO of Artemide, the starting point for lighting projects always has to be based in new, exciting technologies, to make the most of fresh opportunities for dialogue and exchange. And this takes a multi-disciplinary approach; science is about vision, as well as rigorous research – think of Leonardo da Vinci: an engineer, a painter and a scientist. Science is also intimately connected to the idea of technique, to techne in Greek, meaning the art of making – craftsmanship: It shows the importance of creativity not just in developing new technologies, but in expressing beauty. As an architect, designer and an entrepreneur, I am well placed to take an overview of the kind of projects we run at Artemide. We aim to get away from a typological logic, to start with a new system rather than just a new form. To simply create lamps is not enough, we need to design a new platform that can host innovative systems and artificial intelligences; this is the idea I like to share with the architects we work with.

Artemide has had a great number of historical partnerships, such as with Vico Magistretti, Gio Ponti and Aldo Rossi: always architects, as they understand intimately the relationship between light and space. We continue that tradition today through collaborations with some of the most important figures in the contemporary design world. This drive to interpret different cultural perspectives on light, and our increasingly international approach, has led us to work with Bjarke Ingels and BIG. With their origins in Copenhagen, where there is limited daylight, BIG approaches light as something essential and precious, and we had a special collaboration from the beginning, an immediate and spontaneous friendship. Alphabet of Light, the product that resulted from this friendship, was born from an initial vision that has been transformed with the Artemide team into a system, a platform – a modular system of letters, straights and curves that can be played with in an infinite number of permutations, and grow in ways we don’t yet realise.

As told to George Upton

THE BEAT GOES ON Jakko Jakszyk My first memories of music were at home in Croxley Green. I was the adopted child of a Polish émigré and his French wife, and music in our house was eclectic – orchestral, like Richard Strauss, or some kind of weird Ukrainian folk music; my mum, being French, liked Édith Piaf and Georges Brassens. My father was an amateur guitarist in a Ukrainian folk group but had to leave when he lost his left index finger in a workshop accident. When he was conscripted into the German army – his father was German – he was given a year off on account of his finger, just before all of his contemporaries were sent to perish on the Russian front. Upon his return he was sent to a barracks in France: I have photographs of him from there looking rather camp with his Nazi soldier mates, all wearing those uniforms. He was later captured by the French resistance, but he managed to persuade them he was wasn’t German after all, that he was actually Polish and had been conscripted into the German army against his will. They believed him and sent him to Italy where he fought for the Polish Free Army against the Germans. That’s what I call hedging your bets! He always loved his music though. When I was in my early twenties I went looking for my biological parents and found my mother, who turned out to be Irish, living in Bearden in Arkansas, United States. As it turned out, she had been the lead singer in one of the top show bands in Ireland. In one way or another, music has always been in my family. I can’t remember a time I didn’t love playing instruments; until recently, I really was quite a purist when it came to amplifiers. I use the effects pedal seen here – called a Helix, by Line 6 – because King Crimson has three drum kits at the front, unusual to say the least, so can’t use amps with a cab (which help you hear what you are playing), as the first things the sound would hit are three sets of drum microphones. So the Helix is a magical, reliable piece of kit and recreates this effect. It also means I don’t have to have loads of different pedals like wah-wahs, delays or reverbs dotted about. I hope I’m passing on some of the passion of music to my children. My son Django is due to go to music college this autumn, and my daughter Amber is a fantastic singer and piano player, so it looks like the genes are there. The adventure continues… Jakko Jakszyk is lead guitarist of King Crimson. As told to Dan Crowe

The Porter

Photography Jack Orton

Photograph by Name Surname

BROTHER ACT George Upton Identical twins Dean and Dan Caten – founders of Milan-based fashion house Dsquared2 – are inseparable. Now 53, the brothers have stuck together through it all, from their early years growing up poor in Canada to their big breaks, designing for Versace and Diesel and eventually launching their own brand in 1995. Here they interview each other for Port, reflecting on their long career together, their working relationship and the new Dsquared2 SS19 collection.

Dean: What memory strikes you most from this journey we’ve been on with our brand? Dan: That’s a tough one. Being in New York, when we were figuring things out as we went along, is something I look back on very fondly. Having that perspective is everything though, and I think that’s what has kept us going. Dean: Yeah, I agree. Who thought two kids from Toronto would have a global brand headquartered in Milan? And yet I love the fact we haven’t changed as individuals – we have the same drive and wideeyed curiosity about things. Having worked with me all that time, what’s the one thing that drives you mad about my design process? Dan: Everything. I’m kidding! We’re very similar and complement one another well, which is why I think we’ve been able to evolve our collections through the years. I mean, look at what we did with co-ed – it’s a perfect example. Before, you focused on women’s and I led men’s. Pulling the collections together two years ago really helped us. There is a cohesive story now and we are able to collaborate more on the collections. We’re both crazy and meticulous in our own way, but it’s very yin-andyang. Dean: Building the brand was the really challenging aspect for me; with time we had to learn how to give up control and trust other people since we couldn’t do it all ourselves. I’m really happy we’ve been able to surround ourselves with people we love and who share our vision. There is a clear focus and that’s allowed us to grow positively. Thinking about our SS19 collection, the giant shoe has gotten so much buzz: Did you expect that? Dan: Like it or not, it’s such a statement. I’m really happy people paid attention to it. We need to have a bit of fun and take risks. Whether people admit it or not, everyone is curious about what is different or outside the norm. It’s important to appreciate that. Variety is the spice of life – this year for us especially, opening the guest house in Milan. Dean: It has been a really busy year and the guest house is a big highlight. It’s so nice to be able to have an environment to showcase our sensibility in such an intimate way. I’m very proud of that.

The Porter

Photography Fabrizio Albertini

Photograph by Name Surname

The Porter

Courtesy of Library of Congress

NEW PERSPECTIVES Max Ferguson Shot in 1938 by heavyweight photographer Dorothea Lange, this picture shows a barn packed with children celebrating Halloween at the Shafter camp for migrant agricultural workers, in California. The boys are in their Sunday best. Some of the girls are wearing homemade fancy dress and masks. Most of the children are looking at something beyond the frame – perhaps at the blackface musicians we see in another image in the series. One boy, however, peering through his round spectacles, is straining to see above the other children’s heads. He's looking straight at the camera, and therefore at us, bewildered. A child of the American dust bowl, he is unlikely to have seen a camera like Lange’s expensive large-plate Graflex before; but he also seems to be questioning the viewer: Why are you looking at us? Though the people at Shafter camp don’t know it yet, they have been made a part of something bigger: poster girls and boys for a new, modern form of capitalism that would come to define the postwar West. From the mid-’30s until the early ’40s, dozens of photographers were sent to the poorest parts of America by the Farm Security Administration to document the consequences of the Great Depression. President Roosevelt badly needed support for his New Deal reforms and employed image-makers to provide potent portrayals of a desperate, rural America. These photographers – Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, to name the best known – are held in high esteem as documentary photographers as a result of their work, and they contributed greatly to defining the photographic discourse around the subject. Across the Atlantic, other governments, notably in Germany and the USSR, were sponsoring artists to create favourable depictions of their regimes. But although the FSA images are not favourable, they are still part of Roosevelt’s campaign to force liberal capitalism to renew itself. To deny that the New Deal photographs, as they came to be known, are anything but propaganda does a disservice to their power.

Max Ferguson is Port’s director of photography

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Cassel wears DIOR HOMME throughout

On a humid day in late May, at a photography studio in the 17th arrondissement, the windows have been flung wide open. Vincent Cassel, bearded and barefoot, is at home in these conditions – until recently he lived in Rio de Janeiro, where humidity rarely drops below 80 per cent – and on set he is charming and unguarded, laughing easily with the crew. In this era of Hollywood’s international dominance, the Gallic actor is a quietly global film star. Now 51 – though he looks at least 10 years younger – and fluent in four languages (French, Italian, English and Portuguese), Cassel’s career has spanned cultures and continents. “I’ve always thought an actor should be able to feel comfortable in any situation,” he says when we speak after the shoot, drawing on an e-cigarette. “It’s about being flexible and open to new things, new languages, new people, new places.” To truly understand Cassel, it is necessary view him from these different perspectives. In France, for example, he is one of the country’s best-loved living actors, remembered as the angry teenager of the mid-’90s banlieue classic La Haine and public enemy number one in Mesrine, as well as being – alongside Italian arthouse pinup Monica Bellucci – one half of the Millennium-era power couple of European cinema. To the Anglophone world, he is the lithe master thief of Ocean’s Twelve and Natalie Portman’s predatory ballet teacher in Black Swan, while in Cassel’s adopted country, Brazil, he is the eccentric Frenchman who has learnt their language, and the balletic native martial art of capoeira, appearing occasionally on television and the big screen. He is even known in Korea, where he is soon to play the head of the International Monetary Fund in Sovereign Default. And yet, expecting to meet any one of these dark, brooding screen icons in Paris, I am surprised to find myself confronted instead by the easygoing, sun-kissed Cassel of Instagram, who surfs in Biarritz and Rio, jams with samba bands and hangs out with Tina Kunakey, the 21-year-old model who recently became his wife. There is little sign of the unhinged characters that exist on the fringes of society,

the edge of sanity, for which he has become known. Only once – staring deep into the camera, his expressive shoulders hunched, face set and fierce – do I see a flicker of the wild violence the actor has a particular ability to evoke. Cassel was born Vincent Crochon in 1966, the son of journalist Sabine Litique and the charming tap-dancing star of 1960s French cinema, Jean-Pierre Cassel, to whom Cassel Junior spent much of his early life in opposition. After running away from several boarding schools – (“If you don’t run away from boarding school, there’s a problem with you”) – including a Catholic institution, where he became an atheist, Cassel joined a circus school. It was a move that would go on to serve a higher purpose – an ultimate act of rebellion against a father who prohibited his son from following in his footsteps. “I really did the circus training, the dancing, to become an actor,” Cassel tells me. “When you do a sequence of acrobatics, you can’t stop in the middle. You do, say, a backflip somersault” – he is explaining with his hands – “and you have to commit to your decision, otherwise you’ll break your neck. In the same way, you enter your scene: You trust in the other actors; you believe in what you are doing.” Following minor parts in small features and television films, Cassel would be introduced to French audiences as the troubled Jewish youth Vinz in the critically acclaimed La Haine (Hate). Released in 1995, La Haine captured a moment of national turmoil: strikes provoked by austerity measures and the country still recovering from rioting that had erupted in the deprived, isolated housing estates around Paris, where the film is set. There, Vinz and his two friends, Saïd, of Maghrebian descent, and Hubert, an Afro-French boxer, live, joke, fight and, in the case of Vinz, die in such a convincing depiction of the troubled suburbs that Alain Juppé, France’s prime minister at the time, screened it to his cabinet. Together with Kim Chapiron and Romain Gavras, La Haine’s director Mathieu Kassovitz formed Kourtrajmé, an iconoclastic DIY

collective which radicalised French cinema in the 1990s and early 2000s. Producing, at first, short films by any means they could, they threw off the mantle of France’s by then long-established cinematic heritage. Or as Cassel – who Gavras describes as the collective’s godfather – once famously put it: “Fuck the nouvelle vague.” Cassel laughs. “I was much younger then, but the nouvelle vague [French new wave] was such a huge shadow to be under in France.” More so for you, with your father’s reputation? “I was overwhelmed. He was well known, he was talented, he was charismatic. For years I totally refused to work with anyone of his generation. That was my rule.” La Haine would be followed by L’Appartement, on which he would meet Bellucci; Chapiron’s disturbing Sheitan, with Cassel playing a Satanworshipping shepherd; and Irreversible, Gaspar Noé’s harrowing masterpiece, featuring scenes that move backwards rather than forwards in time – among them, notoriously, one of the most traumatising and unwatchable in world cinema: a 10-minute long-shot rape in an underpass. Cassel wouldn’t break his rule until 2008, over a decade after La Haine. “The first time I decided to work with my father was for Mesrine,” he tells me, candidly. “He was going to play my father in the movie, but he died before we began shooting.” It has started to rain, the sound rising up with the warm air to fill the studio, damp and clean. “For the movie I had gained weight, I wore wigs and lenses in my eyes. I was totally changed. I thought ‘I’ve never looked so like my father.’ I realised: ‘OK, it’s the end of the war. I have to let it go now.’” After five years in Brazil, Cassel is moving back to Paris to be closer to his children, Deva, 13, and Léonie, 8, where they live with their mother – he and Bellucci separated in 2013. Cassel had to renounce his Brazilian citizenship: “I’ve become French again, does it show?” But one gets a sense it’s the vibrant

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South American country that will always be his spiritual home. “If you’ve been, you don’t ask why,” he tells me, when I question what continues to draw him there. “It’s a love story. It goes deeper than whether or not I have citizenship.” He’s excited, speaking quickly. “There’s an energy there, a blurred space where anything can happen. When everything is too codified, I feel trapped.” I suggest there is a similar energy and intensity in the characters he plays. Cassel half agrees. After all, over the past 25 years he has featured in an eclectic range of films – romcoms, action, experimental arthouse, horror, westerns, animations – and he appears as athome in commercial blockbusters as he does in intellectual dramas. But it is also true that the performances that have marked Cassel out as a commanding, nuanced actor are those in which he grapples with a moment of deep psychological torment, driven to extremes of emotion. “I’ve always been drawn to that moment of drama,” he says. “To seek out that struggle: what you would fight for, or are scared of. Through movies you can experience those things that you don’t want to experience in real life.” “I love the process of putting that together,” Cassel continues, smiling and expansive. “Watching people, building a character, ensuring what you’re doing is believable. It’s not a job, it’s not work – it’s a great pastime.” Though he physically immerses himself in his roles – shaving his head, gaining or losing weight – he is refreshingly down-to-earth about making films: He is no method actor. Instead, he builds his parts through an external understanding of the physicality and psychology: “Your character should be recognisable from the other side of the street, from his back, just from the way he moves, the clothes he wears.” When I ask whether, for example, he learned to paint for Gauguin, he is frank. “I started to paint just to not look stupid. As an actor, you have to pretend to do things you don’t really do – but it’s always quite superficial.” He laughs. “You end up knowing a lot of things about a lot of things, but nothing very deeply. But then my craft is in constructing things that are totally fake.” “I was talking to my friend, the actor Louis Garrel. He was telling me that movie-making was like a documentary on life, and I said no – movie-making is actually totally fake and you have to make it real. It’s not about filming reality. When I go through these intense emotional moments in my own life – it could be the birth of my child or the death of my father – I’ve always gone outside myself and watched how I have reacted. Most of the time I think ‘Fuck, I would not have played it like that.’” Despite what may be suggested on social media, where he is rarely away from the beach, Cassel has been busy. Alongside Sovereign Default, his four other films out this year include the cop drama Fleuve Noir, Gavras’s The World is Yours and a Brazilian film, The Great Mystical Circus (with the last two screening at 134

Cannes), as well as L'Empereur de Paris, a Napoleonic-era crime thriller, currently in post-production. It’s a typically Cassel-ian mixture of genre, language and style and represents the culmination of a period of intense work following his divorce from Bellucci. The separation, at least according to the line followed by both parties in the press, was amiable and mutual, but, after 14 years of marriage, it was enough to throw Cassel off balance. “Everything was changing around me,” he explains. “I knew I would need to feel strong in myself and I feel strong when I act, so I worked almost non-stop for the past two years, and now things are going to be released.” It seems to have paid off. The Cassel I meet in the studio is content and enjoying life. He seems unconcerned by celebrity, critical success or those who take issue with the fact that his new wife – whom he married at the end of August in an intimate ceremony near Biarritz – is 30 years younger than him. He is unpretentious and grounded – an actor by choice, rather than a sense of destiny – but brings an uninhibited enthusiasm to everything he does. If there is any connection between this jet-setting, happy-go-lucky Cassel and the disturbed, villainous characters he plays, it is that they share this passion, only on screen it is inverted, twisted into arresting performances that probe the depths of human experience. “Well,” as Cassel says, “it would be boring otherwise.” The interview finishes and Cassel hops on to a motor scooter to speed home through the damp Parisian streets: His children are living with him for the week and he has just installed a trapeze in his house – they are learning tricks from YouTube. I’m reminded of something he said earlier, the secret of his vitality: “I have a new rule now: Whatever you’re doing, whatever situation you’re in, you just have to keep it fun.”

Photography assistant Peter Jordanov Styling assistant CĂŠline Gaulhiac Talent Vincent Cassel @ Agence Contact Casting direction V&Y Casting

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W E LL

HAV I N G P E RF E C T E D T HE A RT O F SOCK M A KING O V E R FOUR

GE NE R AT IO NS ,

FA L KE HAS BU ILT A LO YAL F O LLO W ING F RO M S HE I K S

S T Y L IS T S A L IKE . HE L E N A

F LE T C H E R

T RA C E S 1 2 5 YEARS

IN -

HE RI TE D H E RITA GE

IN G E RM A -

H E E L ED P HO T O G R A P H Y

LE W IS

KH A N

Open the pages of any well-established glossy or luxury weekend supplement and you'll be sure to find a FALKE credit tucked into a corner somewhere. In 2018 their socks and tights have appeared in WSJ, Vanity Fair and W Magazine, as well as in numerous international editions of GQ, Elle, Esquire and Vogue – a list any high-fashion house would be envious of. They’ve also appeared on the legs of everyone, from supermodel Cindy Crawford, in the 1980s, to her daughter and muse of the moment, Kaia Gerber. Yet, despite their hosiery’s undeniable presence in the fashion world, it’s the long-established craftsmanship, handed down through generations, that marks FALKE out. The company can trace its origins to roofer Franz Falke-Rohen, who would knit in the cold winter months and, in 1895, founded a mill. Following the turmoil of World War I, Falke-Rohen – together with his oldest son, a trained umbrella maker, Franz Jnr – purchased a wool- and hair-yarn spinning mill in the small bucolic town of Schmallenberg,

north-west Germany. Two years later, they would formally lay the foundations of FALKE with a new factory, and the company has continued to operate from the same location to this day. Led by two cousins, Paul and Franz-Peter Falke, since 1990, the company remains in the family. "FALKE was always part of my life,” Paul Falke tells me. “I saw my father and his brother in their roles as leading managing directors and wanted to continue what they and my ancestors built up.” He laughs: “There was no specific moment when I decided to join the family business; it was just a matter of time.” The family atmosphere has been infectious and, over the years, infiltrated every level of the group, right down to the factory floor. "It's not unusual for someone to have 45 years of service under their belt at FALKE," says John Woodfield, a sewing machine mechanic and chirpy British expat, also based in Schmallenberg. Having worked at the factory for 27 years, he is considered a ‘new boy’. "Most factories have a group of

long-term employees, what we call ‘lifers’ – but the labour turnover here is non-existent. People retire, and only then are they replaced.” Aside from the haute couture houses of Paris, you’d be hard pushed to find another fashion company whose employees have as much cumulative experience as those at FALKE. "It makes me proud, not only that my cousin and I are the fourth generation here, but also that some of our employees are in the same position," Falke continues. "It is interesting to see that in the beginning there were only a couple of dozen pairs of socks a day, and now, with commitment and hard work, we operate internationally.” Although socks and tights still play an integral part in what FALKE do, their output has evolved to encompass everything from foundation garments to men’s seasonal collections and technical sportswear. As well as their own-label lines, FALKE have worked with brands like Armani, BOSS and Kenzo since the 1980s to develop and produce knitted leg wear and hosiery. More recently they have collaborated with and produced capsule collections for the designers Manolo Blahnik and 3.1 Phillip Lim, and Liberty London. The group also acquired the British brand Burlington in 2008, to attract a younger audience with a fun quality take on classic styles of socks and leg wear; think argyle or fair isle reimagined, socks fabricated from glittery lurex or trimmed with faux fur. 138

Previous spread left: The sockknitting production room at the Schmallenberg factory in north-west Germany. Previous spread right: Dyed socks drying.

Opposite top: Dyed ladiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; tights being removed from the wash process by a worker. Some employees are the fourth generation of their family to work at the factory.

Opposite bottom: Part of the dyehouse colour room, where dyes are mixed and tested.

Above: A Komet knitting machine. Since the factory was built in 1920, the machines have been gradually upgraded.

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Above: A knitting machine in production. Despite using sophisticated technologies at the factory, closing the toe of a sock is always done by hand.

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Opposite top left: Part of the yarn store in the development area. FALKE uses a number of different materials in its products, including rare vicuĂąa wool that has some of the finest fibres from any animal.

Opposite top right: Special forms used to produce the final shape of the sock.

Opposite bottom: The final of the many quality controls before the socks are packed.

“Quality and design are characteristic of FALKE, and craftsmanship and innovation are at the core of our ethos”, says Falke, and it would be difficult to argue with that. Although industrial knitting machinery is responsible for much of the production, human interaction remains an integral part of the process. The panels of tights and the ends of the toes are sewn together by people on sewing machines, as the sensitivity of the human hand cannot be replicated by a machine alone. Even the most traditional products are continually being tested and redeveloped in the Schmallenberg factory, both technically and in a variety of the finest materials, to anticipate and fulfil the needs of their cosmopolitan customers: cashmere, piuma cottons, camel hair and silk, Merino wool and fil d'Ecosse. Online customisation services allow customers to personalise their socks with embroidered initials or a company logo, but for an elite few they go a step further: Made-to-order socks fabricated from the wool of vicuñas, a South American camelid – a onceendangered species, which resides in the alpine peaks of the Andes. The wool itself is kept under lock and key in a safe, hidden away in a secret

corner of the factory and only brought out once payment has been processed. Less that 20 pairs of these rather exquisite socks are made each year, at 860 euros each, usually for customers based in Russia, China or the Middle East. Hand sewn, the socks come presented in a wooden box with a signed letter from Franz-Peter and Paul Falke. It’s the definition of quality and luxury for your feet. “I’ve been working in the sock industry since I was 16, and I’ve never seen attention to detail like it,” Woodfield says. “There are quality checks at every stage of the operation, from when the raw yarn comes in, right up until the product is put in its box. There’s even a spot check to make sure that the packing conforms to the FALKE standards.” The experience and commitment of the employees, and the group’s unwavering attention to detail and passion for innovation, are what set FALKE apart. "It's a self-perpetuating mission, repeatedly challenging and satisfying," says Falke. "It's the curiosity and lust to dive into cultures, to understand customers and to anticipate their wishes and needs, and translate them into pieces – that is our permanent challenge."

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PROLIFIC,

ECLECTIC

AND INDEFATIGABLE:

CHRISTOPHER TURNER

REMEMBERS

THE

G IO

FATHER OF MODERN ITALIAN DESIGN

P ONTI

Top: Ponti’s Palladian-style house on Via Randaccio, Milan, 1924–26. Above: Advertisement for the Superleggera chair.

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Continued on page 150

Images courtesy of Gio Ponti Archive / Getty Images / Alamy

Previous spread left: Gio Ponti in Caracas, 1954. Previous spread right: The interior of the Pirelli Tower.

Giovanni ‘Gio’ Ponti was the quintessential Italian designer – a Renaissance man who designed everything from cutlery to city plans, opera sets to cars, skyscrapers to toilet seats. He was eclectic as well as prolific, creating products for 120 companies, and buildings in 13 countries, and he worked across many different styles. A restless inventor, who apparently needed only four hours sleep a night, he was also a professor, magazine editor and general cultural vortex who embodied la dolce vita. His hangar-like studio, in a former garage behind his apartment block, was so large that employees would drive their Vespas and Lambrettas right up to their desks in the mornings. Ponti imported to Italy an American iconography of sleek consumer styling, creating in the process a new Italian design culture, with a distinctive national identity. Some of the bestknown objects designed by the maestro include his gleaming 1948 expresso machine, La Cornuta (which translates as cuckold) – a curvaceous chrome-plated motor engine that was a voluptuous expression of caffeinated energy. His classic Superleggera (super-light) chair for Cassina (1957) had a thin ash frame and woven rush seat, and was so ethereal that it could be held up by a boy on his finger, an image exploited in the chair’s advertising campaign. In the ’50s, the Italian economy was expanding rapidly, and Ponti represented the post-war confidence that made the country a fashionable centre for high-quality modern design. He created hundreds of objects for Italy’s new, adventurous manufacturing culture, including Murano glass for Venini, mosaics for Gabbianelli and embroidered silk fabrics for Vittorio Ferrari. Originals are much in demand at auction, and many of Ponti’s designs, including his distinctive armchairs – with their tilted backrests, refined brass satin legs and angular heft – are still in production. By researching drawings and prototypes in his voluminous archive, Molteni&C have also reissued many of his

unique designs for private houses and clients. Ponti trained as an architect at Milan Polytechnic, graduating at the end of the first world war, and carried out industrial design alongside his architectural practice. His most significant achievement was the slender Pirelli Tower (1960) – which soars above his native Milan, where he designed 40 other buildings – often described as the most elegant tall building in the world. At 127 metres, it was the highest building in Italy until 1995, a modernist lighthouse that was intended to beam over Italy an American-style image of corporate success. “She is so beautiful that I’d like to marry her,” Ponti once said. The following year he completed the supremely stylish Parco dei Principi Hotel (1961) – a blue and white modernist symphony in Sorrento and an essential pilgrimage site for the architectural tourist, for which he designed everything down to the diving board in the saltwater pool. Other notable buildings include an unconventional cathedral in Taranto (1970), with a double-skinned façade, perforated with hexagonal and vertical slits, that was inspired by paper cut-outs; and the Denver Art Museum, a bulky castello with crenellations and apertures, covered in a million grey glass tiles. These structures have a postmodern playfulness, showing how Ponti, then in his late 70s, was able to move with the times. He was able to keep up with the architectural counterculture that, through Domus magazine and his professorship at Milan Polytechnic, he helped incubate: Mario Bellini, Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis group all owe him a huge debt. Ponti began his career in the 1920s, creating neo-classical villas and decorative objects that were far removed from the stylised modern aesthetic with which he is now identified. These included his own house on Via Randaccio, which was influenced by the Palladian villas he’d visited whilst serving as an army captain in WWI, and had flamboyant obelisks crowning the pediment of its fan-shaped façade. He had married into one of Milan’s most prominent families and was affiliated to the conservative Novecento group, whose inaugural exhibition was opened by Mussolini. The movement rejected an avant-garde aesthetic and searched instead for inspiration in the classical past. From 1923 to 1930, Ponti was artistic director of the Richard Ginori ceramics factory, for which he designed stylish hand-painted porcelain that riffed on Roman motifs and revived the fortunes of the company. In 1928, Ponti founded Domus magazine in order to campaign against “the fake antique and ugly modern” styles of so much Italian domestic culture. He edited it, with a six-year hiatus in the early 1940s after an argument with the publisher (during which time he set up the rival magazine Stile), until his death in 1979 at the age of 87. It was through those pages that Ponti exerted most influence, establishing the intellectual culture that made Italy

1 The 127-metre-tall Pirelli Tower from street level, showing the elegant tapering of the building’s sides.

PIRELLI TOWER LO CAT I O N M I L AN I TALY date 19 5 6 – 19 6 0

Often described as Ponti’s greatest achievement, the 32-storey, 127-metre-high Pirelli Tower was the tallest building in Italy when it was completed in 1960. Commissioned for the Italian tyre manufacturing giant on the site of a factory destroyed in the war and now occupied by the Lombardy regional government, the tower continues to have an iconic presence on the city’s skyline, affectionately referred to as Pirellone, literally ‘Big Pirelli’, by the Milanese. Gently tapered on either end, the expressive dynamism of the design marks the tower out from the rectilinear model typical in America and established skyscrapers as a site for architectural experimentation. While the slender profile and narrow base, realised by engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, allowed for considerable spatial and structural efficiency, Ponti never allowed pragmatism to overrule aesthetics and he was very proud of its sleek glass curtain wall and stylish shape. The tower’s enduring design, described by the architectural historian Hasan-Uddin Khan as “one of the few tall European buildings to add to the vocabulary of the skyscraper”, is proven in its form being emulated in buildings from Birmingham to Auckland – most notably in the Pan Am building in New York.

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PIRELLI TOWER

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Top: The foyer of the tower. Left: A floorplan of the building, showing the mixed uses of the space. Right: The open-plan office space featuring movable partitions for maximum adaptability.

Opposite: The towerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s facade is constructed from over 10,000 square metres of continuous aluminium and glass and has been described as one of the most beautiful high-level buildings in the world.

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2 148

CASA PONTI IN VIA DEZZA LO CAT I O N M I L AN I TALY date 19 5 6 – 19 5 7

Ponti’s masterpiece of domestic design – the penthouse of an apartment building he designed on Via Dezza – would be his last home before he died. A synthesis of many of the ideas Ponti articulated in previous designs, the space included an open layout, sliding walls and an array of innovative furnishings, such as a headboard with cubbyholes, an ‘organised wall’ panel and illuminated furniture. For Ponti there was no division between life and work and some examples of the vivere alla Ponti, or Ponti-style living, include a moulded plywood and elmwood veneer bookcase, partially hand painted white, and a chest of drawers with handles made of ash, Italian walnut, mahogany or rosewood. In tribute to his artist friends, Ponti included handmade Fausto Melotti ceramic floors with diagonal stripes, a chest of drawers by Edina Altara, and he adorned the walls with the canvases of Massimo Campigli. Every item features at least a touch of white and light yellow, a theme based on the colours of the sun – an energy echoed on the lively and colourful facade.

Pontiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last home brought together furniture that he had designed throughout his career with new objects and a yellow-and-white striped ceiling and floor. Opposite: The facade of Via Dezza with separate entrances for each apartment.

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“The architect must be coordinator of this difficult and total spectacle.”

Gio Ponti with Denver architect James Sudler in front of the model of Ponti’s design for the Denver Museum of Art.

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such a powerhouse of design. Ponti described Domus as an “art magazine that dreams of being turned into a work of art by its contributors” – who were themselves all architects and designers. Ponti himself wrote 560 articles – a diary of his changing tastes and eclectic, wideranging interests and influences, a cultural vociferousness that embraced fashion and car design, all interpreted through an architectural lens and treated with equal seriousness. The magazine, as the title suggests, had a special interest in themes of domesticity, and Ponti served above all to transform the idea of modern dwelling. In 1933, he published The Italian House, in which he defined the house as a ‘vase’: It should be “as beautiful as a crystal, but perforated like a grotto full of stalactites […] to be judged by the degree of enchantment one feels both when looking at it from the outside and when living inside”. From earlier Mediterranean architecture, to creating this cavernous mood of enchantment, Ponti adopted a fluid relationship between exterior and interior. “From inside, the Italian house reaches out to the open,” he wrote, “with porticoes, terraces, pergolas and verandas, with loggias and balconies, with altane (roof decks) and belvederes, all extremely comfortable inventions for serene living and so Italian as to be called in every language by the names they have here.” The house he built in Via Brin, where Ponti lived in the mid-’30s – de Chirico and other artistic luminaries were frequent guests – showed this new, fluid and open art of living. The house dispensed with corridors, standard at the time, and used large windows and sliding partitions to create an unfolding sequence of brightly lit, flexible living spaces that were in constant dialogue with the city. There was no formal dining room, but instead a big round coffee table surrounded by low armchairs, covered in a fabric of Ponti’s design – an arrangement that he considered more conducive to conversation. After dinner, this central table was piled with books, sketches and plans, as

aesthetic discussions with his friends and collaborators continued into the insomniac hours. The entire apartment was a Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’, for which he designed every custom-made detail, including the maid’s uniform: a green dress with white apron, designed to complement the patterned linoleum floor. Designed by one of the first globetrotting starchitects, Ponti’s buildings, with their easy Mediterranean style and considered, exuberant, modern aesthetic, were much in demand with rich private clients. He created a trilogy of such homes in the tropics that include two houses in Caracas, Venezuela. Villa Planchart (1955) and Villa Arreaza (1956) are both abstract sculptures that play with materials, textures and patterns, indoor windows and painted ceilings, to create a colourful op-art effect that embodies Ponti’s search for a ‘joie de vivre’ in architecture. They were made to be seen with the moving eye: “The architect must be coordinator of this difficult and total spectacle,” Ponti said. A third house, Villa Nemazee in Tehran (1960), built during the last shah’s rule, features an internal courtyard decorated with ceramic tiles, by Fausto Melotti, that create a cheerful dialogue with the niches that punctuate the internal facades. External walls and domed ceilings are decorated with patterns of white and blue pebbles, like a neo-classical folly, and the floors and ceilings are covered with large slabs of marble and bold ceramic and stucco stripes, like confection applied with playful precision to a gingerbread house. The villa, one of Ponti’s two buildings in the Middle East, has been transformed into administrative offices and is currently under threat of demolition, having been delisted to make way for a five-star hotel, to the outrage of the international architectural community. As always, Ponti’s constant reinvention was reflected in the evolving styles of the houses he built for himself in Milan. In 1957, he moved into his final apartment on the eighth floor of a block he constructed on Via Dezza, next door to his studio, and now the home of the Gio Ponti Archive. It has a yellow, red and green façade that resembles a Mondrian painting, and large picture windows that Ponti imagined as a series of proscenium arches – framing the living theatre, staged both in the street and by the occupants inside. The open plan, articulated by moveable wooden walls, which could concertina like an accordion, was unified with a ceramic floor, decorated in a strong diagonal pattern of cream and yellow ochre stripes that were echoed in the stucco of the ceiling. The interior was bright, colourful and refined, full of architectonic inventiveness, and a blueprint for Ponti’s influential idea of modern living. It was considered, hyperactive and restless, like its inventor who would return from a long day at the office and sit at his drawing table, absorbed in his designs, his fastmoving hands stained black with graphite and ink, long after his family and the rest of the city had gone to bed.

3 Top: The exterior of the Montecatini Building, featuring the innovative use of windows in aluminium alloy, and external cladding in slabs of Cipollino Apuano stone. Bottom: Workspaces in the building, organised for maximum efficiency. Right: The Montecatini chair, designed in 1935 for the Montecatini Building in Milan and currently produced by Molteni&C. Since 2012 Molteni has been pursuing a project to reissue his designs.

MONTECATINI B UILDING LO CAT I O N M I L AN I TALY date 19 3 6 – 19 3 8

The office building for the Italian chemicals company Montecatini was Ponti’s first expression of ‘total design’, in which he assumed control over even minute interior details. His eye extended to all the furnishings, from desks to door handles to elegant bisque ceramics, as well as to the functional details such as pipes and doorframes, which he left visible. Particularly innovative for the time, Ponti developed a climate control system for the building and installed modern elevators and a pneumatic communications network. From the exterior, the building bears long strips of repeated windows set into a surface that gleams in green and silver thanks to a new type of marble developed by Ponti, which he referred to as ‘storm’, as well as the use of aluminium. When it was completed in 1938, the building stood as a prototype of efficient, inventive design emblematic of an emerging Italian modernity.

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2019 DESK DIARY

Juggle work and play with a much-needed dose of humor.

Shop all ten colors online at newyorkerstore.com/diaries or call 877-843-6907 to order.

commentary

WiLL STEVE DON

ASHON MARTiN MORRISON

GIUSEPPE PONTIGGIA ZADiE SMiTH TRANSLATED BY

JiAN

TASH AW

Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em From its earliest forms in the 1970s, rhythmic invention has been an integral facet of hip hop – a complex art form, which, for the founder of music label Big Dada, jumps straight from the record to the page will ashon

ip hop is rhythm squared. Hip hop is rhythm freed. In the early 1970s, a Jamaican émigré, Clive Campbell, imported the soundsystem culture he remembered from his early childhood and began playing parties in the Bronx. The chief innovation of Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc, came when he began buying doubles of records, so that, using two turntables and a mixer, he could cut back and forth between the most rhythmically intense and exciting sections of those records – known as the breaks – to keep the crowd dancing, a looping process he called the merry-go-round. Herc had invented or discovered a manual form of sampling. The further developments of hip hop as a musical form – pulling the record back and forth under the needle to make a high-pitched, percussive scratching noise; MCing, that is rapping and chatting over those extended breaks – all flowed from this initial innovation. Technology (or more accurately speaking, the misuse of technology), however, took another 15 years to catch up. Only in the midto late-’80s did the machinery needed to really play around with the sampling and sequencing of music become both cheap and manageable enough to move out of super studios and the set-ups of ageing rock stars, and into the hands of people with the imagination and flexibility to do something interesting with it. In the meantime, hip hop practitioners had to make do with ingenuity, amply demonstrated by the use of pause-button tapes, where a loop would be constructed by recording a break to cassette, pausing, putting the needle back in the right point of the groove and taking the pause off, over and over and over again. In fact, Hank Shocklee of the Bomb Squad has claimed that the demo version of Public Enemy’s first single, ‘Public Enemy No 1’, was made using a pause-button tape and then reproduced in the studio by the engineer making a physical loop on two-inch tape. The year 1986 also saw the release of ‘Ego Trippin’’ by Ultramagnetic MCs. Probably most renowned for introducing the unique flow and lyrical ideas of Kool Keith, the tune was built on the first use of one of the all-time great hip hop breaks. ‘Synthetic Substitution’, by Melvin Bliss, contained a rock-solid lump of funk, played by Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie, a drummer renowned for his shuffling – intricate triplet-based cymbal work – but here just laying it down hard on kick and snare, with only the simplest squirt of open hi-hat sprayed over the top like lemon juice. Sampled at some ridiculously low bit-rate, crunching with fortuitous distortion, it actually sounds as if Purdie

is carving an essence out of granite. And that essence is what came to be known as boom-bap, a kind of rhythmic essentialism or celebration, in which human movement and expression is boiled down to the joyful interaction of two simple elements. Boom-bap is, of course, onomatopoeic shorthand for the kick drum and snare rattling out a rhythm: boom bap, b-boom boom bap. According to the British journalist Phillip Mlynar, the term originates from the outro adlibs on T La Rock’s ‘It’s Yours’, from 1984; but it’s an expression most bound up with the hip hop of the early 1990s. Indeed, KRS-One, whose 1993 album Return of the Boom-Bap helped to define the genre, says it’s “a style of music where the drums are highly emphasised, even exaggerated and distorted”. Part of the magic of hip hop lies in its ability to liberate two or four bars of drumming from their original role as supporter, or understated time-keeper, and make them central to the listening experience. This is what it means, in the words of James Brown (the spiritual father of hip hop), to give the drummer some. That isn’t all, though, as ‘Ego Trippin’’ amply demonstrates. On it, Kool Keith famously says of older, more traditional MCs, that “they use simple back and forth, the same old rhythm/ That a baby can pick up and join right with ’em.” He and producer/MC Ced Gee pioneered a new style of rapping: pushing and pulling hard at the beat and hence adding extra layers of polyrhythmic complexity to the music. The break from ‘Synthetic Substitution’ is the perfect foundation for these innovations in that it provides such a strong, unambiguous anchoring. For this reason (as well as for its unconquerable brilliance), it would go on to become one of the most sampled of all hip hop breaks, at a time when MCs were experimenting with the ways in which they could expand the rhythmic possibilities of rapping. My personal interest in it comes from the fact that it’s the most used break on the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), which turns 25 this November and which I’ve spent the last couple of years studying, thinking and writing about. The ‘Synthetic Substitution’ break is the ideal backdrop for a crew of nine MCs, all of whom rap in aggressive, explosive, uniquely personal styles. It’s the anchor to stop the whole thing from fracturing in every direction at once, the central bank which guarantees they can cash their stylistic cheques. Until a few years ago I ran a rap-based record label and before that I wrote about hip hop and related musics, meaning that I’ve had

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25 years in close contact with hip hop, and I’ve often been asked what effect this has had on my writing. It would be an exaggeration to say that the polyrhythmic complexity of rapping has influenced my prose – the polyrhythmic complexity of rapping is far beyond my abilities – but it’s certainly been there as an ideal. There’s a notion of flow in rap, which operates a little like the concept of swing in jazz… words which have flow, which lift you up and carry you along, which work not only because of what they say, but how they say it. Making the transition from fiction to nonfiction, though, I noticed a whole host of new correspondences between what I was doing and hip hop. My method as a nonfiction writer is to shape other people’s thoughts, insights and discoveries into new patterns, using their words as my samples (all carefully credited!) in the hope of creating collages that in some way transform the source material or, by setting it in a different context, make it new again. Plus, this being nonfiction, there’s an obsession with keepin’ it real, an early-90s boom-bap catchphrase if ever there was one. What is rhythm? If you think of it as making patterns in time then the placement of samples is a rhythmic pursuit, too. The idea is suggested by the RZA’s production on that debut Wu-Tang album. The RZA, you see, shows you all the edges, so that you don’t just hear the contents of the sample, but the shape of the sample itself – or rather, the shape of all the samples and the way those samples interact. Among hip hop producers he is one of the premier exponents of the use of space, and part ‘of what he uses this space for is so that there’s room for you to admire the seams, to revel in the intricacy of the patterns he’s creating, on both levels at once. This revelation prompted me to start looking for the perfect beat for my subject matter – trying to find a deeper structural rhythm for what I was thinking about – and indeed determined the shape of the book I was working on, Chamber Music. It’s not a huge step from this idea to wondering whether finding this underlying, structural rhythm could be the absolute key to writing (or reading) any particular piece of work. Then again, it doesn’t take much sleight of hand to suggest that all of human endeavour adds up to making patterns in time; hence rhythm is fundamental not just to writing, or reading, but to living, too. I’m yet to find the break strong enough to hold together that particular idea but, believe me, when some cratedigger finally dusts it off and loops it up, that particular, universal, beat will no doubt blow your mind.

Image courtesy of Getty Images

RZA, the de facto leader of the Wu-Tang Clan

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Rhythm is fundamental not just to writing, or reading, but to living.â&#x20AC;? 155

War Against Immigrants The border between the human and animal worlds is a thin and often meaningless one: For wildlife, migration is as instinctive a reaction to change or danger as it is for us

have a small vacation house on a small northeastern lake with a big problem. The issue isn’t Eurasian milfoil or Zebra mussels, the usual local plagues; no, my lakeside affliction is something Americans hear a lot about these days: undocumented immigrants. In years past, I would see them every spring and autumn, honking high above in their distinctive V formations, migrating between NAFTA countries. They would make occasional pit stops on my lake but seldom lingered. Nowadays, however, these migrants seem to be spending more and more time bobbing around my dock. They're likely fleeing climate change, destruction of their natural habitats by development and, for all I know, civil strife and

gang warfare in their homeland. Whatever the cause, I feel as if I am under attack, or, as our president puts it, being infested – by unwanted foreigners. Clearly, Canada and Mexico are not sending their best. These aliens are worse than rapists and murderers: They are serial defecators. Their droppings are killing my lawn. At first, I thought I could simply kill them in return. But at the town hall I learned I'd have to get a licence and await goose season, months away. I considered temporary detention as a deterrent, my own catch and release policy, but commuting fowl are protected from such indignity under the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. A travel ban, perhaps? Clearly unenforceable.

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Then I did what many Americans do in the face of perplexity: I went on the Internet. Experts advised raiding the nests of these invaders and removing their eggs. That sounded like another familiar immigration deterrence measure: separating children from their parents. Well, it did to my family, who objected strongly. Indeed, they wanted to turn the lawn into some kind of sanctuary city. My loved ones are under the impression that geese are diligent seasonal labourers who contribute more to America than they receive in benefits. There is truth in this. Migratory geese perform tasks many native-born Americans will not: eating insects, for instance, as well as those invasive weeds that clog my swimming area. Foreign geese have been providing such services in this country for centuries, so some form of deferred action status or even outright amnesty seems warranted. Still, I yearned for border security. I feared the creation of a permanent underclass of feathered refugees – living in the shadows, taking jobs from American waterfowl and refusing to adapt to our culture, our values and our standards of personal hygiene. So I built a wall. At a local hardware store, I purchased a roll of 80-centimetre wire fencing and installed it along the border. Within days, to my horror, the foreigners were goose-stepping right over it. So I escalated to a big, beautiful, 110-centimetre fence of powder-coated steel bars. I almost needed a congressional appropriation bill to finance the project, but it worked. Until, one evening, I was startled by a commotion on the shoreline and went to take a gander. A couple of goslings had managed to get their fuzzy heads caught between my coated bars. As I worked to free them, I found myself confronting a pair of enormous, indignant parents, honking and hissing as if I were a jackbooted immigration enforcer in a black T-shirt. That is when I finally understood what was at stake. You see, geese mate for life, much as we do. They are fiercely protective of their goslings, for whom they travel vast distances in search of a better future, as we would for our kids. They remove their offspring from threats – whether climate change, livelihood loss or armed conflict – just as we would if we were in their webbed shoes. They face down suspected predators – like me – without regard for their own safety. Don't get me wrong. I like my lawn, and I'm sticking with my border fence. But soon the days will grow short, and the insects and weeds will dwindle. If my noisy neighbours are still here, I might put some food outside the antiimmigration barrier. Not just for the geese, but for the sake of my own humanity.

Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

don morrison

Writing is Easy! Facing a blank page famously and needlessly terrifies aspiring writers. In fact, writing is a straightforward task, made even simpler with these handy hints steve martin

a demonstration of actual writing It’s easy to talk about writing, and even easier to do it. Watch: Call me Ishmael. It was cold, very cold here in the mountain of Kilimanjaroville.® I could hear a bell. It was tolling.1 I knew exactly for who it was tolling, too. It was tolling for me, Ishmael Twist.© [Author’s note: I am now stuck. I walk over to a rose and look into its heart.] That’s right, Ishmael Twist.© This is an example of what I call “pure” Writing, which occurs when there is no possibility of its becoming a screenplay. Pure writing is the most rewarding of all, because it is constantly accompanied by a voice that repeats, “Why am I writing this?” Then, and only then, can the writer hope for his finest achievement: the voice of the reader uttering its complement, “Why am I reading this?”

riting is the most easy, pain-free and happy way to pass the time of all the arts. As I write this, for example, I am sitting comfortable in my rose garden and typing on my new computer. Each rose represents a story, so I’m never at a loss for what to type. I just look deep into the heart of the rose, read its story, and then write it down. I could be typing kjfiu joew.mv jiw and enjoy it as much as typing words that actually make sense, because I simply relish the movements of my fingers on the keys. It is true that sometimes agony visits the head of a writer. At those moments, I stop writing and relax with a coffee at my favourite restaurant, knowing that words can be changed, rethought, fiddled with and ultimately denied. Painters don’t have that luxury. If they go to a coffee shop, their paint dries into a hard mass. location, location, location I would like to recommend that all writers live in California, because here, in between those moments when one is looking into the heart of a rose, one can look up at the calming blue sky. I feel sorry for writers – and there are some pretty famous ones – who live in places like South America and Czechoslovakia, where I imagine it gets pretty dank. These writers are easy to spot. Their books are often filled with disease and negativity. If you’re going to write about disease, I would say California is the place to do it. Dwarfism is never funny, but look at what happened when it was dealt with in California. Seven happy dwarfs. Can you imagine seven dwarfs in Czechoslovakia? You would get seven melancholic dwarfs at best – seven melancholic dwarfs and no handicap-parking spaces. love in the time of cholera: why it’s a bad title I admit that “Love in the time of . . .” is a great title, up to a point. You’re reading along, you’re happy, it’s about love. I like the way the word time comes in – a nice, nice feeling. Then the morbid Cholera appears. I was happy till then. “Love in the Time of the Blue, Blue, Bluebirds”? “Love in the Time of Oozing Sores and Pustules” is probably an earlier title the author used as he was writing in a rat-infested tree house on an old Smith Corona. This writer, whoever he is, could have used a couple of weeks in Pacific Daylight Time. a little experiment I took the following passage, which was no doubt written in some depressing place, and attempted to rewrite it under the sunny influence of California: Most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: They believe in eternal memory (of

This sentence written by Steve Martin as heard from Cindy Adams 1

people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: Everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed. – Milan Kundera. Sitting in my garden, watching the bees glide from flower to flower, I let the above paragraph filter through my mind. The following New Paragraph emerged: I feel pretty, Oh so pretty, I feel pretty, and witty, and bright. Kundera was just too wordy. Sometimes the delete key is your best friend. writer’s block: a myth Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol. Sure, a writer can get stuck for a while, but when that happens to a real author – say, a Socrates or a Rodman – he goes out and gets an “as told to”. The alternative is to hire yourself out as an “as heard from”, thus taking all the credit. The other trick I use when I have a momentary stoppage is virtually foolproof, and I’m happy to pass it along. Go to an already published novel and find a sentence that you absolutely adore. Copy it down in your manuscript. Usually, that sentence will lead you to another sentence, and pretty soon your own ideas will start to flow. If they don’t, copy down the next sentence in the novel. You can safely use up to three sentences of someone else’s work – unless you’re friends, then two. The odds of being found out are very slim, and even if you are there’s usually no jail time. 157

IN C ON TRA R SI

A STORY I N I TA LI A N BY G IUS EP PE P ON TI GGI A

P H AS E 1 — P O NT IG GIA T R A N SL AT E D INT O ENGL IS H B Y ZAD I E S M IT H

PH AS E 2 — SMITH TR A N S L ATED IN T O CH IN ES E BY MA JIA N

P H AS E 3 — MA T R A N S L ATED I NTO EN G L IS H BY TAS H AW

Phase 1 — Umberto Buti, translated into English by Zadie Smith It’s true: like all mammals it has two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and, somewhere, four limbs. —J.R.Wilcock, The Book of Monsters He is born in Empoli on the 30th of April 1931, son of Stefano Buti, holder of a degree in chemistry, and of Concetta Valori, a mathematics teacher at the technical institute. His father, director of the Osveco firm – it produces thermal valves – has published three literary articles and five rather minor editorials in Livorno’s Telegraph. He often claims to have sacrificed the lettered life for two plus two equals four. He still recalls those Greek and Latin verses of his schooldays, declaiming them with all the sonority of an auctioneer. He asks his son to name their authors, and each time his son denies all knowledge of them. He dedicates the same attention to modern poetry. He is like a spectator in the gallery, always ready to boo or applause, in a manner usually reserved for the efforts of opera singers. For poets, he lies in wait. He has an unbounded admiration for D’Annunzio, whose lyrics he calls ‘sheet music’. At least once a week he meets with a doctor, Luciano Natalucci – another literature connoisseur – and as they travel together in a Lancia Ardea, toward Pisa or Montecatini, raising a trail of dust along the Broads, pausing to rapturously contemplate the landscape, a subtle competition of citation passes between them – of elaborate, spiralling footnotes and academic dates – all of which render the son (sat behind them, with his mother) irritable and unhappy. It is from this car trip, during the summer of 1946, that he dates his hatred of culture. Around the same time he begins to cultivate certain circumscribed ideals, making him appear precociously mature to others. His choice of university – excluding the humanities faculties altogether – he bases on the demands of the market. In the Italy of the reconstruction this choice of direction is considered marvellously farsighted. The maxim ‘To keep one’s feet on the ground’ is here elevated to a life principle. Marriage with a woman who has no literary tendencies. Two children, perhaps one male and one female, separated by a few years. The refusal of all political involvement. The diligent practice of gymnastics. To be among the first to make use of the word hobby. Steadily, he tries to implement his programme. On the 16th of October 1950 he signs up to study in the faculty of agriculture, where the attempt is made to link rural Italy with the Italy of industry. He tells 160

people there will be no shortage of career opportunities in the farmlands of Tuscany and Emilia. He repeats: In no field does he aim for more than he has stated. The brothels of Florence, Arezzo, and Siena – which he regularly frequents – appear to him like cubicles linked by stairs, cells of a sordid and inexhaustible beehive. In the summer the windows open on to a small internal courtyard, sometimes throwing light upon erotic scenes that give him a sudden feel of languorous weakness in his blood. And every time the miracle happens. In exchange for a piece of paper he climbs the steps behind a woman, assured of imminent pleasure, without complication. “It’s not at all psychological,” he says. “It’s as if one’s head has been cut off.” He establishes pleasant relations with the madam and with the escorts who come and go, periodically. “It works for us,” he says, a phrase dear to him, though it arouses hilarity in his companions. Welcomed even after hours, at dead of night – like a form of loyalty bonus – he brings a reluctant pleasure to halfasleep whores, astonished by his indefatigable commitment. During the busiest hours he tends to choose the one most overlooked by other clients, as she leans in gloomy silence upon one side of the door. He thinks she’ll save her best for him, but sometimes the exact opposite happens, and he doesn’t understand why this should be. His friend Francesco Salani explains it to him, the evening of the 27th of June 1953, in Arezzo, as they leave a smoky room into tepid air, and walk the cobblestones leading downhill, between the high walls of the alley over which the swifts skim: “It’s because they understand who you are.” At the university he does not aspire to high marks. Asked by Professor Caspani (at the end of an exam on chemical fertilisers) whether he wants to retake to improve his average, he replies that a pass mark is enough. His father, listening with illc oncealed discomfort, doesn’t know whether to support or condemn him. On one occasion saying:“How different you are from me.” “I know,” his son replies. Under the guidance of Aldo Faravelli, an elderly gymnastics trainer, he devotes himself to the various apparatus of the Virtus gym. When he swings, legs together, on the parallel bars and then gives himself a push toward the top, he has the soaring sensation of flying not toward the skylight but straight to the centre of the world. But when

he trains with boxing gloves against the bag, mowing down his target with a hail of punches; sweating, panting, continually sinking blows into the leather – it is as if he has finally found his enemy. Until, exhausted, dazed, lifeless, dissatisfied, satisfied, he lays himself down on the wooden bench that runs along the wall. On the 31st of July 1954, after graduation, he leaves for the Cadets Course of Ascoli Piceno. He will remember his early days as among the most serene of his life. Running, marching, fixed hours, lights out at twenty two hundred hours, wake up at six, days defined by precise programs, by unchangeable rules. He is the only one in his platoon to think like this, but this makes him proud. On the 16th of October 1954, in the sunlit whiteness of the shooting range – standing in the hole of cement, keeping a thumb on the trigger of the Breda machine gun – he sees the target, three hundred meters away, widen and move. Then, instead of taking a few shots, he presses until the magazine is empty: a deafening noise that echoes round the walled space. “You got him!” yells a gravelly voice from on high. Emerging from the trench, a kick to the helmet dazes him. He asks for and receives an eye test and a sudden decline is noted – like attenuating circumstances – in his ability to see. Just two diopters. Escaping a reprimand, his punishment arrives eleven days later, while recovering in an infirmary from a state of acute asthenia following the refusal of food. Anorexia, with an origin in depression, is the diagnosis. It is decided he will be transferred to the military hospital in San Giorgio. Two days of intravenous feeding, then a gradual assumption of food, first liquids, then solids. And a talk with the army chaplain, Don Cerioni. To the chaplain he confesses that the discovery of a physical imperfection has thrown him into despair. The chaplain, stupefied, asks: “For two diopters?” No, he says, it’s not because of the diopters. I don’t know how to explain it. I never believed that the body could betray one like this. The mind doesn’t interest me, but the body is everything. “This is the real sickness,” says Don Cerioni. He gets up out of bed and walks in his pajamas on shiny tiles. Sometimes he walks in the courtyard, under the trees, along windows that repeat like the battlements of a fortress. At twilight, when the noises from afar weaken and disperse in the clear air, it

feels like the courtyard has become a prison. “It is your head that is a prison,” says Don Cerioni. And when he confesses to the chaplain that his mistrust of the world has only grown, the other man responds, laughing, that he has exchanged the world for himself and this is the reason for his mistrust. He decides not to confess anything more to the chaplain. Discharged on the 6th of February 1956, three months later he is employed by the livestock holding Diulio Vallegani, in Piacentino, breeders of milking cows. He discovers that despite their apparent fixity cows are in fact mobile and curious, and that Gianluca Vizzini, their guard, recognises – and knows the names of – all one hundred and ninety-nine of them. He erects a hill of earth in the immense pen, around which the cows lazily move, or, in the closeness of the afternoon, lay themselves down and rest like an industrial nativity scene. On the 2nd of July 1957, as a hot smell radiates from the herd, he leans on a fence and watches them for a long time. Then he says to Vizzini (who is shovelling dung at the foot of the little hill): “They’re better than us.” With clear admiration he observes the sexual performance of Timoteo, a black bull on loan from a Canadian stud farm. “It’s lucky that the cow is fake,” he comments, while the animal – eyes dilated, bright, enormous – copulates with an iron outline, covered by a black caparison. Ultimately all they needed to collect the sperm was that outline. “In the end we’re technological animals,” he says, eyes shining. On the 18th of September 1959 he turns to Florence, to Via della Scala, to the matrimonial agency ‘Meetings’. Doctor Amelia Ristori, the director, is politely amazed by his youth. Might she be permitted to ask him – she adds with one flowing movement, while extracting a drawer from the filing cabinet – whether he has female acquaintances among his peers? “Yes,” he replies. “A nicelooking boy like you,” she continues, “and there’s no one you’re interested in?” I don’t have a lot of faith, he says. He would like to make clear at the beginning the boundaries of any relationship, to avoid any future surprises. He fears they want to marry him to get ahead. She listens to him in silence, under a colour print of The Kiss by Hayez. He would prefer a relationship founded on reciprocal interests. For example: a girl with the necessary moral and intellectual gifts, living in an uncomfortable situation, who is looking for an equally gifted husband to make good her escape. “But what’s in it for the husband?” “Gratitude, I suppose.” She begins to transcribe the personal

data on a card. In which papers do you want to make the announcement? Regional or national? Regional. He asks her: “Do you think there will be any responses?” “Many.” When he exits at sunset onto a lively street, he comes out onto the piazza Santa Maria Novella and sees a group of girls laughing under the arcades. He has a strange feeling as he watches them, thinking that it could be one of them, but that could never be – then he sees, surfacing in the air, like a sheet of newspaper, a melancholic face looking at him. He has the sense – quietly despairing, and without knowing why – of not having any other choice. All autumn to sift through the letters and to visit gloomy families, in which the women undergo endless persecutions, hateful silences, and incest, and where to live is to scream, to cry, to serve, to rebel. Sad appeals, hiding behind the smiles in the photographs (in the background of grassy slopes, through ports crowded with masts). Some phone contact, halfway between embarrassment and malice; farewells that in their very cordiality reveal that they are, in fact, concealed renunciations. There were also painful requests for money, and coarse offers of clandestine meetings intended to triumph over – as Adele C from Grosseto put it – shyness. Two meetings in minor train stations, under the awnings of open-air cafes, including signs to recognise each other by – which their mutual hesitations soon rendered superfluous. He listens, watches, hardly speaks, takes part, judges. He thinks that he judged in the brothel, too; the suspicious and greedy eye of those who buy animals. But here the question concerned a choice for life. Often there are glaring differences between the photographs and the person – sometimes a difference of ten years – with metamorphoses of the body that leave them difficult to even recognise. On the 3rd of October 1961 he has the intuitive feeling of having met, in Piazza del Campo a Siena, the woman who would be his. Three letters had been exchanged and the precise articulation of a few points. Age: twenty-four. Education: secondary-school diploma in science. Occupation: mother’s help. Her charges were her father’s two children – he had been widowed when he was forty-two, and had taken a second wife, the checkout girl in a sportinggoods shop. She had a difficult relationship with both her father and her mother-in-law. She didn’t want to take a university course or work outside the house. Her calling, as she specified in her second letter, is to be a housewife for a man like her. She is small, brunette, plump, with a fringe that lends her the air of an Egyptian baby. She says she knows what he wants. It’s

her. She has a shy forwardness about her, an immediate irony that was not clear in the letters. Too much initiative – perhaps a difficult personality. In his mind, he begins to give her up. He confesses that he is a little cowardly. “Like many men,” she says. “But I have the courage to say it.” “Only so you can be more cowardly.” She’s right. He has already given her up. To follow another path: a thirty-yearold from Perugia, Carla Salviati. In the first telephone dates she speaks slowly, a restful conversation, almost hypnotic. A serene sort of desolation, which reminds him of a landscape he has never seen, that of the tundra, though he studied it in Nangeroni’s Geography: lichen, puddles of water reflecting a grey sky, solitude as far as the eye could see. Unusual style of life. Continuity, resignation, circular horizons, impossible to escape. One of her favourite expressions: “He has his head on his shoulders.” Her physical appearance doesn’t disappoint. Her size she described in a letter as being small and strong, which he had translated as short and fat, but instead she is only a little inflated in the breast, in the arms, and – as far as one can make out – the legs. Her physique suggests weakness, patience, availability. She laughs with a ripe indulgence that contrasts with her childlike freshness. This peculiarity makes him curious. They discover in their following meetings a comforting convergence of aims: a peaceful life, with no time-wasting – neither political distractions, nor the social whirl – and above all, free of snobbish cultural aspirations. As the sun sets on the 3rd of April 1962, on the Field of Miracles in Pisa, he says to her: “The only thing you can do is limit your illusions.” They marry on the 19th of June 1963 in the church of San Frediano in Lucca. Only the witnesses, no relatives, no social whirl. He has the moral support of Francesco Salani, the one friend to whom he had confessed the secret of how they met, and who has said to him (while insisting on the need for sincerity): “The difficulty will come afterward, when you take off the masks.” But the difficulty hasn’t arrived yet, he tells Salani, three months later, as they climb the stairs of the football stadium in Florence. Maybe because – he smiles – they haven’t taken off the mask. Or maybe because – insinuates his friend – they have become two masks. Every night they watch the television and choose the same programmes by mutual consent – usually soap operas. They enjoy Carosello, too. No cultural programmes. On that breed of boredom they are in perfect agreement. She doesn’t mind if he goes to hunt in Maremma with Salani. Or if he goes to see the 161

Empoli matches or to a game of Fiorentina. He goes with her to buy stuff for the house, but primarily to browse. He has discovered that she is thrifty and loves to daydream about the things she failed to get. Division of labour? No. Solidarity. Maybe affection. And in bed? asks Salani, eyes suddenly suggestive. It’s the testing ground of every couple. It’s not bad, his friend answers. It’s not bad? No, he replies, it’s not bad. She didn’t have experience, but she wasn’t slow to learn. Certainly she lacks the mastery of the kind of women he’s been having all these years. But she hasn’t betrayed him, and nor will she. Everyone should do it like this. “Speaking seriously really brings out the worst in you,” says Salani. Nor does she have regrets. He’s not sure she draws pleasure from intercourse – Salani listens to this impassively – but pleasure there surely is. At first it’s a muffled pleasure like the rumble of a storm, then a sudden jolt like an earthquake, and finally irrepressible like a tsunami, with cyclical waves pushing out and long shudders on the way back in. However, she says nothing, not before or after. “That you should orgasm doesn’t surprise me,” says Salani, “if only because, if you didn’t, what would be left?” “Meaning?” “Look, love can be an obstacle,” he replies. “If one wants it too much, one wants everything, one is upset for nothing. But without love, what are two people doing in a bed?” “But I love her,” he said.

Two children, just as he had imagined as a boy: Pietro, born on the 7th of January 1965, and Marta, born on the 22nd of November 1966. Life is planning, he smiles, stroking the new mother as he takes her back home in the car, through snowy scenes. The baby doesn’t cry. When he is accepted into the Circle of the Hunt, on the evening of the 6th of May 1989, on a convivial Tuesday at the Grandluca Hotel, he introduces himself reading from a card and, as the eyes of everyone at the table turn to him, finishes thusly: “I have never had any ambitions larger than my capabilities. I have a united family, and my children have graduated and married. My wife and I” – pointing to her at his right – “Have a wonderful relationship. I have learned over the years to appreciate her, and she has never disappointed me. I have reached my fiftyeighth year without any serious illnesses. I still engage in sports, above all gymnastics, and I participate with distinction in competitions for seniors. And this only confirms what the Latins used to say: Mens sana in corpore sano.” He bows to the unanimous applause of his fellow members. He has never before this moment said aloud this phrase so beloved by his father. He is slightly moved. His wife squeezes his hand. On the 16th of November 1996 the cardiologist Frederico Traglia, of Arezzo, advises him against continuing with his sporting activities. It’s not anything too grave, but some caution is necessary. In the farmhouse that he has restored

on the peak of a hill in Senese, he sees the sun set in vaporous waves. He has filled a shelf with academic texts that his father had intended for a country house and it happens that he now reads the fairytales of Fedro with Chiarini’s simultaneous translation. What truth! Maybe it had been the shadow of his father that had kept him so far from the classics. Anyway, now it is late. He dies on the 3rd of March 2005 in front of the television, watching the recording of an educational game in which he had taken part, as an expert in agriculture, forty years earlier: ‘Who Knows Who Knows It?’

Phase 2 — translated into Chinese by Ma Jian 這是千真萬確的:像所有的哺乳動物一樣，它有兩隻眼睛，一個鼻子，一張嘴，以及長在不同位置的四肢。《關於怪物》-J R 維爾科克 1931年四月30日，田懷意出生在戰亂的中國南部城市廣州。他的父親田樹林是留學義大利的化學博士，母親茱麗葉出生在佛羅倫斯，去年隨丈夫來到中國，在離家不遠的技工學院當了數學教師。父親是在一家叫斯蓋沃的義大利公司任銷售主管，主要產品是進口的熱力閥。他熱愛文學思想活躍，還在《廣州日報》上發表過三篇文學評論和五篇他翻譯的義大利詩歌。他經常聲稱自已犧牲了文學理想，就為了這種二加二等於四的單調的商業貿易。他常掛在嘴邊的話題總是說在義大利留學期間，他如拍賣行裡的經紀人般響亮而激情地朗誦那 162

些優美的詩句。他還常常問長大的兒子那些詩歌的作者是誰，當然，田懷意每次總是看著窗外的江水或山丘說不知道。這回答有時會令父親更加自鳴得意。他也不理會日本投降二戰已結束，他的義大利公司瀕臨破產，而是到處在報紙的文藝版中尋找剛發表的現代詩，然後像劇場觀眾般忽而噓聲忽而掌聲地評價著。在兒子的印像中，父親下班後總是如手握樂譜的歌手，隨時準備登臺誦唱他最喜愛的義大利詩人鄧南遮〔D’ Annunzio〕的詩。那時父親每週都會和教會的義大利醫生盧西亞諾開車去郊外野餐，他也是一位鄧南遮的崇拜者，還娶了個中國老婆。他倆經常把車停在塵土飛揚的土路上，繞過沒人填土的彈坑，爬上草坡或者是一片荒廢的田野時，便開始對著遠處的綠山，近處的草叢像棋手般引經據典地鬥詩，全然不顧坐在車上皺著眉頭

的茱麗葉和急躁的兒子。也就是在那個 1946年的夏天，母親拋棄了他和父親獨自返回了義大利，少年田懷意也徹底厭惡了文學藝術，開始確定實際的人生目標。他選擇的大學不會有人文科目，只面對國家戰後重建的需要，這也顯得他比其它少年成熟和有遠見。他的座佑銘是:必須腳踏實地。如果需要結婚的話，那也要選不愛幻想也沒有文藝細胞的姑娘，然後生一男一女兩個孩子。平時就去鍛煉身體，也遠離政治黨派。對父親要他讀《神曲》的要求，他開始使用“ 業餘愛好” 這個詞來對抗。他的人生規劃慢慢清晰。1950年的十月16日，田懷意考入了新中國剛成立的農學院，開始思考如何把落後的農村步入農業現代化，讓更多的人有飯吃有工作。在同學之中，他只談實際問題, 不說不著邊際的政治表態的大話也不談戀愛。周末，他會離開大學宿舍坐火車

回家，然後從車站右邊的小巷，鑽進一家沒有被查抄的地下妓屋。那條昏暗的樓梯會通向好幾處如取不盡用不完的蜂巢般骯髒的木板小間。在偶然打開塗了紅漆的窗戶片刻，他會看到外面花草叢生的小院落，幾件女人的裙子和內褲掛在夕陽之下的涼衣繩上。那時他的血液會發熱，性愛的感覺由然而生。但多數時間他都是手握衛生紙跟著妓女躺到床上，都沒看清女人的奶子就達到了高潮。 “我沒有心理負擔，” 他說，“頭腦是被斷開的。” 田懷意和妓屋的李媽媽生關係不錯，他也會和進進出出的妓女點頭打招呼。 “這對我們都有好處。” 這句話快成了他的口頭語，儘管他知道她們會笑這位漂亮的混血大學生。有時他會因必須參加的政治活動而很晚才來敲門，那半睡半醒的妓女也會迎合這位老客戶，誰叫他是浪漫的義大利雜種呢。在繁忙時間，田懷意也會與不被嫖客挑中的女人上床，而且能在她們陰鬱的沉默中，認為她是專門為了等他。當然，有時他發現情況正相反，使他很沮喪。 “這是因為她們知道你是誰。” 田懷意唯一的朋友，父親是印尼華僑的福生向他笑著，“你是個義大利情種。” 那是在 1953年6月27日的一個夜晚，他倆從一間煙霧繚繞的飯館走出，腳下是不溫不火的石板路，兩邊潮濕的高牆之上，幾隻雨燕掠過夜空。在大學的期末關於化肥成份的考試成績公佈之後，蔡教授問他想不想再多考一門以提高總分數，田懷意則回答:及格就可以了。當父親聽到這種不求進步的觀點時，滿臉不高興地推開他正在翻譯的《夏日謠曲》說:“你真不像我的兒子。” “我知道。”兒子一字一頓地說。在體育老師的指導下，田懷意的雙杠運動進步很快，他能大幅度地擺動然後雙腿併攏向上挺住不動。那一刻他不是感到騰飛到了天窗而是鑽進了地球的中心。他也喜歡拳擊，對著皮革沙袋氣喘吁吁地擊打，使他感到敵人的存在，直到精疲力竭才大汗淋漓地躺到靠牆的木凳上，失落又滿足。 1954年七月31日，田懷意大學畢業之後馬上報考了軍校。在那些立正、稍息、行軍拉練的枯躁生活中，他感到是自己人生最寧靜的經歷。他喜歡準時十點熄燈，早晨六點起床號準時吹響，全班只有他如此樂此不疲，讓他感到自己很獨特。十月16日，一個陽光普照的天氣，田懷意隨隊來到靶場，當輪到他站到重機槍面前，他很快就對上瞄準星和三百米外移動的標靶，然後食指扣動了扳機直到梭子打成了空殼，雙耳被震得嗡嗡響。 “你總算擊中目標了 ! ” 戰友不屑地看著他退到隊後面時，用槍托從高處砸在他頭盔上，當時他感到眼冒金花。下午去醫務室做了眼底測試，發現屈光度下降了。但真正的厄運在十一天之後發生了，他開始厭食。醫生明確地告訴他，

這是憂鬱症的前兆。軍校決定把他送到軍醫大學住院。打了兩天維生素吊瓶之後，他才感到有點起色，開始能喝點米粥了。當主治唐醫生來查房時，田懷意恍惚不定地說感到身體裡有個黑洞，他很無助。唐醫生透過眼鏡瞄著他 : “你不會有事，就是要調整屈光度。” “不，”他固執地說， “不是眼晴，不，我不知道怎麼解釋，我對精神和思想不敢興趣，但身體是一切，我不敢相信它會出賣了我。 “這是你真正的病因了。”唐醫生認真地說。他開始從床上爬起，穿著病號衣服走在閃亮的瓷磚地板上。有時，他也會去院子裡散步，在榕樹下呆一陣，然後沿著一排如堡壘般的窗戶慢慢地走。當黃昏來臨，院外和院內的聲音越來越弱的片刻，他感到自己站在空氣清新的監獄裡。 “你的頭腦就是一所監獄” 唐醫生看著坐在對面的田懷意說。他發現說出對外界的不信任，只會增加別人的嘲笑，說出了對外界的看法，只能招來別人的懷疑，便決定不再和唐醫生說什麼。 1956年二月6日田懷意出院了。三個月之後，他退出軍校被分配到奶牛農場工作。他開始發現奶牛不但好動，對周圍也充滿好奇。而場長對這199頭看起來差不多一樣的奶牛，每一頭都能叫出名字，猶如一個大家族。他就在這欄圈中心建了一座土丘，奶牛便會隨著陽光邊吃草邊慢慢移動。下午，它們會懶洋洋地躺在背陰處，看過去如被產業化了的耶酥誕生場面。在1957年七月的下午，牧場正散發著熱哄哄的尿味。田懷意斜靠籬笆，長時間地看著奶牛和正在土丘那兒鏟牛糞的魏班長說 : “它們比我們生活的好。” 看到微笑的魏班長走來，他又指著那只從種牛場借來的黑色公牛說 : 看它對著母牛又大又圓的眼神，嘿，它可真幸運。 1959年九月18日，田懷意又調動工作回到了廣州，在種畜進出口公司當業務員。沒過多久，他又找到了當年的李媽媽生，她在一家百貨商店當了售貨員，現在是有名的牽錢紅娘。她驚訝田懷意更帥了，忍不住問道:那你的同事朋友中就沒有女青年 ? “有。”他回答。 “那，沒有你看上的?”李豔麗從口袋掏出個筆記本，內頁插著些一寸大小的男女黑白照片。 “我不很自信，” 田懷意又馬上表示，女方要和他結婚的話，就必須是互相有利,以免將來出現意外。他又舉列說，這個女的首先是人品好也要聰明, 而且要生活在一個落後的環境，也正在尋找有本事的男人，讓這個丈夫成為她的避風港。 “那，這丈夫得到什麼好處。” “她就會永遠感謝我，不會拋棄，拋棄家庭。”他說完就看著櫃檯上飛落的蒼蠅。李豔麗把他的要求寫在筆記本上，又

抬頭問:那外省的要不要，有大學文憑。 “調動不了戶口的不要，家庭出身黑五類和政治上是黨員勞模的都不要。當然，也不要老外。” “好，這本子裡三個女的都不合適,你就等著吧。” 離開商店走入熱鬧的街道，在斜陽照耀下，他看到幾個騎自行車的女青年正穿過前面廣場下班回家，他突然感到這其中的一個就是他的未婚妻，但又不可能，他眼前又顯出那個陌生女人的臉，帶著憂鬱而且空洞，使他產生了一陣安靜的失望。整個秋天他都在收看信件，有時就去女方的家裡訪問。他進過一個又一個陰沉的家庭，女方常常是這種家的傭人角色，雙手總在充滿酸菜燉魚味的角落忙碌，父親會吆喝正在刮姜皮的母親，嚼著甘庶的男孩則眼神死板。他坐在其中，被沉默壓得說不出話。有的女青年在送他上街的空當就告訴他如何討厭流氓父親，求他帶她走，有的會因為家裡沒有幸福而哭泣。田懷意發現那些甜美笑容的照片〔背景是珠江大橋或者是擠滿桅杆的碼頭〕背後都隱藏著尖叫和傷感，斷絕交往後有的在內心積下了內疚，有的就被惡意的詛咒一番。有個叫王娟的女青年見面之後表示她來是為了克服害怕男人的缺點。還有的女人是為了錢為了他有宿舍有固定工作。他有兩次去了郊區火車站約會，在飯館的遮陽篷下，他發現事先約定的手握報紙或者車票都是多餘的，他倆只是從猶豫的眼神裡就很快發現對方。也有和照片無法對上的時候，包括記住的臉和陌生的體態無法重合，這常令雙方尷尬地看著別處。田懷意對女人的判斷過去在找妓女的時候還行，那時是帶著租隻動物的心態，可疑的眼光中充滿了貪婪。但現在是選擇人生伴侶，那他就束手無策了。 1961年十月3日，他預感到將在解放廣場見到的女青年會成為他的未婚妻。她24歲，從護士學校畢業，現在家看著兩個弟弟。他倆已經通了三封信。他知道了她母親已去逝，42歲的父親和一個賣體育用品的女人又結了婚。她不喜歡這位後媽，也不想再去上大學深造或者找工作。在第二封信裡她就表示:做他的家庭主婦，給他生兒女。她個子矮小，身材豐滿，黑髮在前額剪了個劉海，看上去象古埃及的娃娃。她說知道他想要什麼樣的女人，那就是她。田懷意感到她又害羞又大膽，矛盾又複雜的性格會難以對付。這些在信紙上是看不出來的。他在心裡開始疏離她，喝完一杯桔子水後他就承認自己無法把握她。 “你和許多男人一樣，” 她冷冷地說。 “但我有說出來的勇氣。” “那你就更加懦弱。” 她是對的。他只剩下放棄的膽量了。很快，李豔麗又給他介紹了一位剛過三十歲的女人，叫媛媛，家住廣州臨近的佛山鎮。第一次通上電話，便傳來了她緩慢的聲調，平靜的對話令他昏昏欲睡，又有點蒼涼，使他想起非洲的荒 163

原，那是在上地理課時看到的:近處的青苔和水坑映著遠處灰色天空，放眼望去一片孤獨。這使他感到有點不尋常又延續的穩定生活，一種順從和看上去無法逃避的圓形地平線。她說:我就想把頭靠在你肩上。媛嬡的外貌長得一般，在信中她形容自己又小又豐滿。但其實她乳房並不大，胳膊和大腿也許粗壯些，總體看去還是文弱有加，但這個身體有韌性和耐心，是可以放心擁有的。當她放任大笑的時候，又展示出了和稚氣不同的成熟。這種對比使田懷意更有新鮮感。接下來的約會他發現兩人各有人生目標，但有一點還是共同的:過一個平和的生活，不浪費時間，很少社交，不追求高雅的文藝生活，不看小說，更不過問政治。當太陽在1962年的4月3日又照耀在解放廣場的時刻，他對她滿意地說 : “好了，你唯一要做的就是控制住你的幻想。” 他們於1963年6月19日在被改成倉庫的天主教堂旁邊的門房舉行了婚禮。除了義大利醫生盧西亞諾當了證婚人兼神父，田懷意沒有親屬到場，遠在新疆勞改的父親音訊全無，只有他的朋友福生和紅娘李豔麗來了。他知道田懷意不是為了愛情而結婚，但還是替同學高興。他在三年前已經成了家，老婆是工廠的會計。走到教堂前面的小廣場時福生小聲說 : 等過了蜜月摘下面具之後，你的婚姻問題才會出現。三個月之後，田懷意和福生爬上足球場的階梯時笑著說 : 看，我們沒發生問題。也許是面具還沒摘下來吧。福生擦著汗笑了笑。也許，我們就是兩個面具。田懷意有點得意地說。媛媛從不介意周日丈夫和福生去江邊釣魚或者去看乒乓球比賽。晚上吃完飯之後他倆還會偷聽收音機，通常是香港電臺廣播的武俠小說《七劍下天山》或《白馬嘯西風》，碰到文藝或新聞節目就馬上換台。在愛好方面他倆從未發生爭執。他倆也會去東風路逛街，買回些房間裡需要的茶杯墊或月份牌。但經常就是進去看看。他發現媛媛很節儉也愛做白日夢，常會幻想擁有友誼商店裡賣的那些中國人得不到的象牙雕和真絲紗巾。你們在家裡有沒有分工 ? 沒有，很和氣，感情很好。在床上呢?福生眼角有一種暗示:這才是考驗男女的地方。還可以。沒問題嗎?沒問題。田懷意又說，她是沒有什麼性經驗，可學的很快。當然，她沒有我以前認識的女人那麼主動。但她不會背叛我，我也不會。做丈夫就該這樣。 “別這麼正經，像是給領導彙報成績。” 福生說。 “雖然我從未問過，但她很滿足，真的，” 他又說， “她肯定有快感，有時就像風暴般呼呼地響，能感到她抑制不住了，就如海嘯沖進了肉體，然後地震般地顛簸著。有時她會像波浪一陣一陣地顫抖。不過，無論在做愛之前或者之後，她都紅著臉不說。 “你沒有快感我不驚訝，” 福生聽了臉 164

上還是有些不屑， “但如果僅僅為了快感，那夫妻生活也沒有意義。” “我有快感，你這是什麼意思 ? ” “我是說，如果我們要愛情，就想佔有一切，如果不要愛情，那兩人在床上是幹什麼 ? ” “我愛她。” 田懷意肯定地說。正如他的願望，田懷意有了兩個孩子，男孩田野出生在1965年一月七日，女孩田園在也1966年十一月22日被母親從婦產醫院抱著來到街上。田懷意微笑著抓著老婆的手說，一切都在計畫之內。在貼滿 “吊死劉少奇油炸王光美” 的公共汽車站那兒，天空下起了一陣小雨，田園平靜地睜著眼。田懷意加入釣魚協會是在1989年5月6 日的晚上。飯局是在中外合資的珠江酒店，協會會長是已離了婚的福生，在這間能容納百人的宴會廳裡，田懷意頭一次被眾多的眼光看著，他有點激動地說: 我這個人一生做事就是量力而行，從未有過野心。所以今天，我有了一個完整的家庭，孩子們都畢業並結了婚。街上鬧學潮的遊行隊伍裡也不會有他倆。他又指著坐在右邊的老婆，她是我的賢內助，我從她身上學到了做人的本份。我很珍惜她。當然，我也沒有讓她失望。田懷意等大家笑完又說，今年，我已經五十八了，仍然每天早晨打太極拳。今年剛得過廣州市退休職工健康比賽優異獎。這也證明瞭我父親說過的 : 健康的身體才是通向智慧的源頭。說完他還鞠了躬。在一陣掌聲中，他意識到自己從未這麼大聲講演，而且說出了小時候父親說過的話。他微微感動了。他的妻子壓著他顫抖的手。 1996年十一月16日，他在為購買女兒的生日禮物時暈倒在電梯口。出院時醫生又提醒他，雖然心臟沒有大問題，但還是要小心，回家臥床儘量少活動。兒子田野租了輛車把他拉回江邊的新家，那裡拆近後被香港開發商蓋了一片新樓房，他住在二房一廳的三層樓上。從涼臺看去，近處的江邊還在建住宅社區，但遠處的山丘，甚至他父親開車的那條土路還依稀可辨，在太陽照耀下水泥攪拌車開過之後，塵土便如霧狀沿路波浪般散開。他開始讀鄧南遮的《玫瑰三部曲》了，那些書都是文革後父親單位用卡車送還的。書架上還遺留著寫滿父親手記的義大利語《夜鶯之歌》。他驚訝書本裡竟然有那麼多真理，那麼多精彩的詩句。也許是因為父親的酷愛，使他拒絕了這些經典文學藝術。那麼，反正，一切都太晚了。田懷意去世於2005年3月3日，那天他正在看一盤四十年前的農牧業先進模範表章大會的錄影帶，那是女兒在大學資料庫中找到的，而且認定裡面有他正獲得了青年農業專家獎狀的場面。 “誰知道，誰知道......” 他最後對自己說。馬建譯 2012.8.3

Phase 3 — Tian Huaiyi, translated into English by Tash Aw This is the absolute truth: like all mammals, it has two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, as well as long, unevenly placed limbs. —“On Monsters,” J R Wade Cook Tian Huaiyi was born on 30 April 1930, in the wartorn southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. His father, Tian Shulin, had studied for a doctorate in chemistry in Italy; his mother, Juliet, a Florentine, had followed her husband to China the previous year and had found a job as a mathematics teacher in a technical skills institute not far from where they lived. His father worked as a sales manager for an Italian company called Scala, whose principal product was imported thermal valves. He was passionate in his love of literature and ideas, and had published in the Guangzhou Daily three pieces of literary criticism and five Italian poems in translation. He often bemoaned the fact that he had sacrificed his literary aspirations for the everyday monotony of his thoroughly commercial job, and whenever he reflected on his life, he would become nostalgic for his time as a student in Italy, when he used to recite lines of poetry aloud, as bright and clear as the ringing cries of brokers in an auction house. He often tested his son on the names of those poets, but of course, each time, Tian Huaiyi would simply gaze out of the window at the rivers and hills beyond and shrug his shoulders. Needless to say, this response scarcely added to his father’s feeling of self-worth. Tian Shulin barely noticed Japan’s surrender and the end to the Second World War. His Italian employer was on the verge of bankruptcy, yet his main preoccupation was scouring the arts section in the newspapers in search of the latest poems. On finding them, he would alternate between hissing and applause, just like a rowdy theatre audience. In his son’s imagination, his return from work each day would seem as dramatic as a singer’s arrival on stage: music sheet in hand, ready to break into song – a concert of colourful lines from D’Annunzio, his favourite Italian poet. Every week, accompanied by Luciano, the doctor from the Italian church, he would set off in the car for a picnic in the country. Luciano, who had a Chinese wife, was a fellow devotee of D’Annunzio, which made him a perfect companion for Tian Huaiyi’s father. The two men would often stop the car along dusty stretches of dirt track before

skirting around hollowedout craters, hurtling up grassy knolls, or streaking across abandoned farmland. The green hills in the distance and the clumps of grass that dotted the countryside would seem to Tian Huaiyi like pieces on a giant chessboard, as he listened to his father and Luciano competing to recite lines from the classics. They never once turned round to pay attention to the frowning Juliet or her fidgety son in the back of the car. That summer of 1946, Juliet abandoned her husband and child and returned to Italy alone. It was at about that time, too, that Tian Huaiyi developed a profound loathing of anything related to art or literature, and began to focus solely on empirical experiences. He chose a university that did not teach the humanities, only what was needed for the reconstruction of the nation following the war, for he was much more mature and farsighted than his friends. His motto was: remain grounded in reality. As far as marriage and family were concerned, he wanted a girl who was not a member of the artistic community; and he planned that he would one day have two children, a boy and a girl. He exercised regularly and kept his distance from all political parties. And every time his father tried to get him to read The Divine Comedy, he cited “extracurricular activities” as an excuse. Thus the map of his life began to take shape. On 16 October 1950, Tian Huaiyi was admitted to the newly created College of Agriculture, where he began to work in the field of “backward rural agriculture modernisation” in order to help feed and employ more people. He was the only one among his classmates to grapple solely with practical issues, never declaring lofty political ideals or talking about romance. At weekends, he would leave the college dormitories to take the train home, and from a small alley next to the train station, he would make his way into a shady underground brothel. A dim, narrow staircase led to a honeycomb of squalid wooden cubicles. Occasionally, through an open red-painted window, he would catch a glimpse of a small courtyard, densely planted with plants and flowers; a few items of women’s undergarments and skirts would be hanging on a lifeless clothesline, bathed in the light of the setting sun. His blood would be feverish with sexual desire, but most of the time, clutching

a handful of toilet paper, he would meekly follow a prostitute to bed and, without even seeing her breasts clearly, swiftly climax. “None of this troubles me,” Tian Huaiyi would tell himself. “My mind is detached from all this.” He enjoyed good relations with Mama Li, who ran the brothel, and would always politely greet the girls as they came and went. “This benefits both of us” became his catchphrase – he would repeat it earnestly each time he went to bed with a girl, even though he knew that they would all laugh at him, this beautiful mixedblood college student. Sometimes, when he was forced to take part in political activities, he would knock on the door late, but the girls would nonetheless rouse themselves from sleep and entertain him: He was a faithful client, this irresistibly romantic Italian half caste. During busy periods, he would have to be content with a girl whom no other client wanted, and while he lurked in the gloomy silence with her, he imagined that the prettier girls were waiting somewhere else, saving themselves especially for him. Of course, when he discovered that the situation was exactly the opposite, he would feel inconsolably dejected. “They like you, they know what kind of man you are,” said Fusheng, Tian Huaiyi’s only friend; he was the son of an Indonesian Chinese and had plenty of experience with women. “You’re a red-blooded Italian.” It was late on 27 June 1953; they had just left a smoky restaurant and were strolling on warm paving stones on a road lined on either side by high, damp walls. Overheard, a few swifts flitted across the night sky. At university, after the examination on Fertiliser Composition, Professor Cai asked Tian Huaiyi if he wanted to sit for a supplementary test in order to increase his aggregate mark, but Tian Huaiyi said: A pass is good enough. When his father learned of his lackadaisical attitude, he pushed aside the copy of A Summer Night’s Dream that he was translating and said, “It’s hard to believe you’re my son.” “I know,” Tian Huaiyi said slowly, stressing each word. Under the guidance of an excellent physical education instructor, Tian Huaiyi made swift progress on the parallel bars. He would swing his legs closely together and hold them firmly aloft, absolutely unmoving. At that precise moment, he never felt as if he was going to soar into the air, but 165

instead thought that he would sink down into the centre of the earth. He also liked boxing, and, while furiously punching the leather sandbags, he would feel the presence of an invisible enemy and lash out until he collapsed with exhaustion on the wooden bench, defeated but curiously satisfied. 31 July 1954: On graduating from college, Tian Huaiyi immediately took the entrance exams for the Military Academy. In the monotony of the daily routine – standing to attention on parade, marching, going on field-training exercises – he felt more peaceful than he had ever been in his whole life. Lights out at ten, reveille at six: He liked the predictability of this regimented existence. He was the only one in the entire class who was never bored. It made him feel special. On 16 October, on a day of brilliant unbroken sunshine, Tian Huaiyi accompanied his team to the shooting range. When it was his turn to aim the machine gun at the target three hundred meters away, he squeezed his index finger until he had exhausted the entire round of ammunition; his ears rang with a hollow buzzing. “You finally hit the target,” his fellow soldiers sneered as he rejoined their ranks. He felt a crushing blow on his head, as if a rifle butt had smashed onto his helmet from a great height; he was completely dazed. That afternoon, tests on his retina and optic nerves revealed abnormally low diopter readings. But the real tragedy was discovered eleven days later, when he was diagnosed as suffering from anorexia. The doctor explained clearly that these were the first symptoms of depression. The Academy decided to transfer him to the Military University Hospital, where, after two days of vitamin infusions, his condition improved and he was able to eat a little rice porridge. When the resident doctor, Tang, came by on his rounds, Tian Huaiyi absentmindedly said that he felt as if there was a black hole within his body, and that he felt completely helpless. Dr Tang looked him in the eye and said, “There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just a problem with your optic nerves.” “No,” Tian Huaiyi replied stubbornly. “It has nothing to do with my eyes. I don’t know how to explain. I have no interest in spirituality or the functions of the brain. The physical body is everything to me. I can’t believe it can betray me like this.” “I’m beginning to understand the real cause of your illness,” Dr Tang said solemnly. Gradually, Tian Huaiyi was able to climb out of bed. Dressed in his patient’s uniform, he would walk gingerly on the shiny tiled floor and sometimes venture outside into the courtyard, resting a while under the banyan tree before strolling along the row of windows, as small and grim as those in a fortress. When dusk fell, in those brief moments when the sounds both within and 166

without the hospital began to fade, he felt as if he was standing in a vast open-air jail. “Yes, your mind is a prison,” Dr Tang said, staring at him inexpressively. Tian Huaiyi found that when he spoke, the outside world no longer believed him; his words only added to people’s ridicule of him. Speaking would only provoke suspicion, so he decided that he would no longer say anything to Dr. Tang. Tian Huaiyi was discharged on 6 February 1956. Three months later, he dropped out of the Military Academy and was assigned to work on a dairy farm. He discovered that dairy cows were not just energetic, but also full of curiosity for their surroundings. Even though the herd of 199 cows looked indistinguishable, he knew each one by name; it was just like a big family. In the middle of the paddock he built a large earth mound, around which the cows could circle as they wished – grazing in the sun in the morning or reclining lazily in the shade in the afternoon. Watching them from afar was like witnessing a scene of pastoral innocence, like the birth of Jesus Christ – even if this version of the miracle was slightly more industrial. One afternoon in July 1957, a rich smell of urine was wafting over the ranch as usual. Tian Huaiyi was resting against a wooden fence, gazing out at the cows while Team Leader Wei was shovelling manure on the earth mound. “Their lives are better than ours,” Tian Huaiyi said, pointing at the young black bull. “Look at the way he behaves with the cows. He’s getting more and more frisky with them as he gets older. He’s lucky.” On 18 September 1959, Tian Huaiyi was transferred back to Guangzhou, this time to the Animal Breeding Stock Import and Export Corporation, where he worked as a salesman. Before long, he’d found Mama Li Yanli from all those years ago. She had long since left the brothel, and was now a shop assistant in a department store. She had also become a famous and highly successful matchmaker. She was amazed to find Tian Huaiyi even more handsome than before, and could not resist asking, “So are there any young girls where you work?” “Yes,” he replied. “I mean, any that you fancy?” He shook his head. “That’s why I’ve come to see you.” Li Yanli fished out a notebook from her pocket. Its pages were stuck with small black and white photographs of men and women, about an inch in size. “I’m not a very selfconfident person,” Tian Huaiyi admitted at the outset. Nonetheless, he went on to outline his requirements: If a woman wanted to marry him, the match had to be mutually beneficial so as to avoid mishaps in the future; the woman had to be first and foremost of good character, but also intelligent; she had to come from a

simple, deprived background; she must, of course, be in search of a solid, practical man like him, and must want her husband to be a place of refuge for her – he had to be her everything. “In that case, what’s in it for the man?” “I would have her gratitude,” he said. “For she will never be abandoned, nor will the family be left wanting.” When he finished speaking, he merely bowed his head and looked at the flies on the counter. Li Yanli wrote his request in her notebook and then looked at him. “Are you interested in someone from the provinces? She has a college diploma.” “I don’t want anyone who has to be transferred without a residence permit, or anyone from the five blacklisted categories, or members of political parties and model workers – and of course, no foreigners.” “Well then, the three women I have in mind are all unsuitable. You’ll just have to wait.” As he left the store and stepped into the light of the setting sun, he saw several young women cycling home from work in the square ahead. For an instant, he thought that he recognised a former girlfriend among them, but as the girl approached, he realised that he had been mistaken. Her face was unfamiliar to him; all that he recognised was the melancholy and sadness etched across it. He felt a swell of quiet despair deep within him. Throughout that autumn, he would rifle through the post for news of matches, and sometimes he would pay visits to potential partners. He visited household after gloomy household: The girls were always treated like servants in these homes, always busying themselves in a corner with menial tasks, their hands reeking of pickled cabbage or stewed fish. The father would always be shouting at the mother, who would always be peeling ginger, and there would invariably be a son impassively chewing sugarcane, his expression numb and unchanging. Tian Huaiyi sat amid all this, steadfastly uncommunicative. Some girls would drag him out into the street and moan about how they hated their lowlife of a father, begging Tian Huaiyi to take them away from this wretchedness; others would break down sobbing because of all this misery at home. Tian Huaiyi realised that behind those sweet, smiling faces in the photographs (predictably and unimaginatively taken against a backdrop of the Pearl River Bridge or a busy marina crammed with the masts of sailboats) there were always hidden screams and silent anguish. Each time he broke up with a girl he would feel a profound sense of guilt, and some of them would be so angry that they would heap malicious curses on him. He found the whole business thoroughly baffling. One young woman by the name of Wang Juan admitted that she had

only agreed to meet him in order to overcome her fear of men. Others came because of money, simply because he had a room in a dormitory as well as a steady job. Twice, he arranged dates in suburban train stations, and, waiting under the awning of the station restaurant, he found that the prior arrangement of holding a newspaper or train ticket was completely superfluous, as they were able to recognise each other simply by their hesitant manner and general awkwardness. It was easier even than taking along a photograph, as people rarely resembled their portrait. He found that he had little clue about how to judge women. When, years before, he had gone with prostitutes, it had seemed as uncomplicated as selecting livestock, but now that he was in search of a life partner, he had no idea what to look for. On 3 October 1961, he had a premonition that the woman he was meeting at the YWCA in Liberation Square would be his future wife. She was twenty-four years old, recently graduated from nursing school, and was now at home looking after her two younger brothers. They had exchanged three letters, so he knew that her mother had passed away, and that her forty-two-year-old father had remarried a woman who sold sports equipment. She did not get along with her stepmother, but she did not want to go back to college for further studies, nor was she keen on going out to search for work. In her second letter she wrote, quite plainly, that she wanted to be his wife – to stay at home, look after the house, and bear his children. She was short but amply built, with black hair cut in a fringe that fell over her forehead; she looked like an Egyptian doll, thought Tian Huaiyi. She said she knew what kind of woman he was looking for – and that she fulfilled all his criteria. Tian Huaiyi sensed that she was at once shy and bold; her contradictory, somewhat complicated temperament would surely be difficult to deal with. This sort of problem could not be discovered in a mere letter. Even as he sat there, he began to distance himself emotionally from her, and once he had finished his glass of tangerine juice, he admitted that he could not see himself ever getting along with her. “You’re a typical man,” she said coldly. “At least I have the courage to speak plainly.” “That makes you even more of a coward.” She was right. All he had were the vestiges of the courage that had abandoned him a long time ago. Soon afterward, Li Yanli introduced him to a woman who had just turned thirty. She was called Yuanyuan and lived not far away, near the town of Foshan. The first time they spoke on the telephone, her languid way of speaking made him sleepy and even a little despondent; it made him think of the vast plains of Africa – at least as he had imagined them in geography lessons at school: green

moss in the foreground, puddles of water reflecting the gray sky, nothing but loneliness as far as the eye could see. He felt as if his life was strange and unchanging – a passive, seemingly inescapably circular existence. She said: “I just want to rest my head on your shoulder.” Yuanyuan’s looks were fairly average. In her letter she had described herself as short and plump, but in fact her breasts were not particularly ample and her arms and legs might have been stouter: The general impression was, in fact, one of frailty and gentleness. But there was also a sort of resilience and patience about her, and he felt that she was someone who could belong to him and pose him no problems. And when she laughed, she seemed at once childlike and very mature. These contrasts made Tian Huaiyi feel joyous and curiously optimistic. On their next date they discovered that although they had differing goals in life, they shared a number of crucial ambitions: to live peacefully; never to waste time; to remain apart from social circles; never aspiring to high culture, never reading novels, and certainly never showing any interest in politics. The sun was still high in the sky over Liberation Square that day – 3 April 1962 – as they talked at length about a possible life together. He said: “Fine. The only thing you have to do is promise to keep your fantasies under control.” The wedding took place on 19 June 1963, in the old Catholic church that had been converted into a warehouse; the ceremony was held in the janitor’s room. Apart from Father Jian and Luciano, the Italian doctor, who acted as the witness, Tian Huaiyi had no family present. He had had no news of his father, who had been sent to a labour reform camp in the remote reaches of Xinjiang Province. Only his friend Fusheng and the matchmaker Li Yanli attended. Fusheng knew that Tian Huaiyi was not marrying out of love, but that he was nonetheless as happy as any of his friends (Fusheng himself had, three years previously, married the slightly dull accountant at the factory where he worked). After the ceremony, while they were strolling in the small square in front of the church, Fusheng whispered, “After the honeymoon, once you’ve dropped your masks – that’s when the problems will appear.” Three months later, Tian Huaiyi and Fusheng were climbing up the stairs at the soccer ground. Tian Huaiyi laughed and said, “You see? I told you we wouldn’t have any marital problems.” “Maybe you’re still politely wearing your masks,” Fusheng said, wiping the sweat from his brow as he laughed uproariously. “Or maybe that’s just who we really are,” Tian Huaiyi replied, smugly. On Sundays, Yuanyuan never minded

her husband and Fusheng going out to fish or watch a tabletennis competition, for she would still have plenty of time with him after dinner, when they would settle down and listen to the radio together, tuning into broadcasts from Hong Kong – usually adaptations of martial-arts novels such as Seven Swords or White Horse, Roaring West Wind. As soon as a cultural programme or the news came on, they would switch stations. They had similar tastes and never argued over this sort of thing. Sometimes they strolled together down Dongfeng Road, buying things they needed for the house, such as small placemats or calendars, but often they would just windowshop without buying anything. He discovered that although Yuanyuan was very frugal, she would often daydream, fantasising about going to the Friendship Store to buy things that only foreigners were allowed to purchase, such as ivory carvings and fine silk scarves. “Is it difficult dividing up the household chores between you?” “No, we get along well – everything just happens naturally – there’s never any conflict.” “What about... in bed?” There was a glint in Fusheng’s eye, as if to say: this is the real test of a man and a woman. “It’s all right.” “No problems at all?” “None.” Tian Huaiyi then added: “She doesn’t have much sexual experience, but she’s a fast learner. Of course, she doesn’t take the initiative the way the women I’ve known in the past have, but then again, she will never betray me. And nor will I her. That’s what a husband should be.” “Don’t be so damn solemn. You sound as if you’re filing a report to your boss.” “Even though I’ve never asked, I know I satisfy her. Really.” He laughed. “She definitely gets great pleasure in bed. Sometimes, she screams like a howling gale – you can just tell that she’s lost all self-control, as though a tsunami is sweeping through her body, then she shudders and jolts over and over again, like waves crashing onto the shore. But the strange thing is, before and after we make love, she just blushes and says nothing.” “If you don’t get any pleasure, I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Fusheng said, still wearing a look of mild disdain. “But I guess married life isn’t about pleasure.” “What are you talking about?” Tian Huaiyi said quietly. “I do get pleasure.” Fusheng looked him squarely in the eye. “What I mean is, if you want true love, it has to be all encompassing. Partners have to possess every part of each other – love has to occupy every part of you. And if you don’t want true love, well – why bother even going to bed with her?” “I love her,” Tian Huaiyi said firmly. 167

Exactly as he wished, Tian Huaiyi had two children. A boy named Tian Ye was born on 7 Jan 1965, followed by a girl named Tian Yuan on 22 November 1966. As her mother carried her out of the maternity hospital, Tian Huaiyi smiled and squeezed his wife’s hand. He said, “Everything is going to plan.” In the crowded bus station there were banners proclaiming, EXECUTE THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY LIU SHAOQI! BOIL THE TRAITRESS WANG GUANGMEI IN OIL! Tian Yuan calmly opened her eyes to the world. Outside, there was a light rain shower. Tian Huaiyi joined the Anglers’ Association on the evening of 6 May 1989. A dinner was held at the Overseas Joint Venture’s Pearl River Hotel. Fusheng had since married and was now the chairman of the association, presiding over the ceremony. There were over a hundred people in the banqueting hall, and, as he took his place at the lectern to make his speech, Tian Huaiyi could not recall ever having been the centre of attention for so many people. With some excitement, he began to speak: “In my entire life I’ve been very measured in my approach, very methodical in everything I’ve worked at. I’ve never had any unrealistic ambitions. I guess this is why I have a perfect family. My children have graduated and are now married. They would never be mixed up in the noisy student rabble demonstrating in the streets these days.” He pointed to his wife sitting to his right. “She is a good wife to me. I learned from her how to be a dutiful person. I truly, truly cherish her. And of course, I have never let her down, have I?” Tian Huaiyi waited for everyone to stop laughing and said, “I’m fifty-eight this year, yet every morning, at daybreak, I practise Tai Chi, and I’ve recently won a Guangzhou City Retired Worker’s Health Competition Award. This proves what my father, who is surely watching us from a distance, used to say: A healthy body is the route to the source of wisdom.” He bowed. Amid the applause he realised that he had never before made such a confident speech in public, nor spoken of the things his father had said to him when he was a child. He was moved almost to tears; his wife held his trembling hand tightly. On 16 November 1996, on his way to buy a birthday present for his daughter, he collapsed in the elevator. As he was discharged, the doctor reminded him that although there were no major problems with his heart, he nonetheless had to be careful and stay at home, with plenty of bed rest and minimal physical activity. His son Tian Ye rented a car and took him back to his new riverside home, a brand-new development built by a Hong Kong company on the site of some derelict old buildings. The apartment was in a threestorey block and had two bedrooms 168

and a spacious lounge. Looking down from the balcony, Tian Huaiyi could see a residential community on the riverbank; in the distant hills, the dirt roads that his father had once driven through during those Sunday outings in the country were barely visible. In the hazy sunshine, a cement mixer was just starting up; the dust it created was like mist that spread like waves through the air. He began to read D’Annunzio’s Romances of the Rose – after the Cultural Revolution, his father’s work unit had returned all his books. There were so many of them that they had to be loaded onto a truck. On the bookshelf Tian Huaiyi found the notes his father had made on the “Nightingale’s Song.” It surprised him to find so much truth contained in these books, so many splendid poems. Maybe it was because of his father’s passion for these classics that he had turned his back on them. In any case, it was all too late. Tian Huaiyi died on 3 March 2005. That day, he had been watching a video of the General Assembly of Livestock Farmers from forty years ago, which his daughter had found in the university archives. In the film, there was a short scene in which he was receiving his certificate for Model Performance and Young Specialist on Agriculture. “Who knows what might have been?” he whispered to himself just before he died. “Who knows?”

NOTES ON THE TRANSLATIONS

1— My first thought on reading Umberto Buti was that the protagonist seemed strangely Chinese, with his rejection of politics, aversion to risk, sense of inferiority and thwarted desires. I asked myself: If he’d been born in China in 1931, how many details of his story would have to be altered? How much would the change of place affect his fate? I should make clear that, as my grasp of English is still dreadfully poor, my initial reading was aided by Google Translate and online dictionaries, and then, much more helpfully, by a recorded translation my partner, Flora Drew, made for me, which I then replayed, transcribed, and rewrote. I didn’t ask for clarifications, and she didn’t check my finished piece. Our aim was to leave room for ‘happy mistakes’. She did, however, read several passages of Zadie Smith’s English translation out loud to me, so that I could pick up the rhythm of the prose.

Wanting the protagonist to retain some connection with his homeland, I transplanted him to Guangzhou, the southern port where Italian Jesuits first entered China. I gave him an Italian mother and the name Tian Huaiyi. (Tian is the surname of the Chinese translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy; Huaiyi means ‘Italian heart’.) I tried to keep the structure and narrative of the original, but for the story to work in its new setting, elements needed to be added and removed. I had to find equivalents for organisations that didn’t exist in China, such as the matrimonial agency and the Circle of the Hunt, and sometimes alter the way characters spoke or thought. Whereas the original story appears to exist in a vacuum, when it unfolds in China, politics and history inevitably creep in. It’s impossible to mention the years 1931, 1966 or 1989, for example, without making reference to the tumult of the times. In Italy, the limits on the protagonist’s ambitions are self-inflicted; in China, added constraints are imposed by the state. Tian Huaiyi doesn’t choose his jobs or places of residence, he is ‘assigned’ and ‘transferred’. In such a context, people’s sense of isolation and desire for security deepens. So, whereas in the original, the wife’s favourite expression is: “He has his head on his shoulders,” in the Chinese version I have her say, “I just want to rest my head on your shoulders.” This project has been enlightening. It has made me question how much characters are shaped by time, place, and language, and convinced me that the hardest challenge of translation is to find a way to give the new version the same breath of life that animated the original. – Ma Jian

2— Problems from the outset: How to translate a work by a well-known, living writer like Ma Jian? How much had he transposed (I knew that some way up the chain lay a story in Italian), and how much did I dare alter in the text myself ? It made me realise that I approach translations differently if the piece is by a living writer – dead ones are so much easier to deal with. In the end, the nature of the translation insisted itself upon me after just one reading of the story. Ma Jian’s prose here has a tone and rhythm that is gently hypnotic, full of stillness. Wry and wistful, quietly evocative, the passages were clear and unadorned – all I had to do was tune in to this style. Once I was on the same frequency, the steady, even pacing that Ma Jian had laid down carried me smoothly through the piece. From a technical point of view, I faced the usual issues when translating Chinese. The phonetic rendering of Italian names back into English was a particular problem here, for I had no recourse either to the writer or the original text. The treatment of tenses was another – Ma Jian writes in the present, which works more fluently in Chinese in a story of this sort than in English. I guessed that the Italian version up the chain was in the present tense too, but I nonetheless decided to change to the past tense. Something about the timespan of the story – long and languid, an epic in miniature form – demanded the slower pace that the past tense seemed to offer. – Tash Aw

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he annual Saut Hermès in Paris sets the bar high for showjumping competitions: at 1.60 metres, for the grand prix showpiece finale, to be precise. Here, the world’s most talented riders glide over fences held by stands that form a Hermèsian ‘H’, on a course laid out under the vast glass nave of the Grand Palais, the smell of sawdust and horse filling the air. Winners parade in orange blankets to cool down, there’s a pony riding area for children; Shetlands, in matching ginger hues, and spectators can browse an immaculately curated equestrian bookshop. Like everything in the French maison, it’s all just-so but not too much. “The Saut is special,” notes Simon Delestre. The French showjumper, Olympian and Hermès partner rider has just finished his morning warmup and is sitting backstage, where, just off the Champs-Élysées, stables have been erected and an orange carpet rolled out for the four-legged superstars. Across a manicured lawn, Delestre’s top mount, Hermès Ryan, is relaxing ahead of the competition. A strapping chestnut gelding with astronomical prize winnings to his name, Ryan, of course, wears head-to-toe Hermès, from his crochet fly veil to the bespoke saddle. There’s an old saying ‘No foot, no horse’, to denote the importance of healthy hooves, but similarly, you could say ‘No saddle, no jumping’. A saddle is a crucial and required instrument, not least for showjumpers who have to jump with their mount by standing up in stirrups, allowing their horse to properly use its back and helping it sail effortlessly over massive fences. Having the wrong saddle is akin to doing an Ironman in shoes three sizes too small. The right saddle is the difference between playing a Chopin nocturne well, and playing it exquisitely. Both horse and rider need Previous spread left: A traditional button-plaited mane. Previous spread right: Simon Delestre atop the 12-year-old gelding, Sultan de Beaufour. Left: Master saddler Laurent Goblet with a prototype jump saddle. Above: Goblet’s office, stacked with saddle trees and offcuts.

to be comfortable so their bodies can work as one. “The saddle is really the interface between the horse and the rider,” explains Laurent Goblet, master saddler at Hermès. “I want to make that interface disappear… for there to be no constraint, basically. And it should be well made so it’s long lasting, and pleasant to look at: It gives that additional element to the function.” Under the roof of 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the Hermès saddlery team work in rooms flooded by sunlight, crafting some 500 saddles a year in black, Havana or natural calf leather, cowhide and buffalo. A long running joke at the house – founded in 1837 by Thierry Hermès, who originally made horse harnesses for carriages – is that the horse was the company’s first customer. It remains a regular if rather demanding client. 190

Each saddle is made by only one saddler. “The fact that you’re making it from beginning to end is very gratifying. And it makes the craftsman responsible for his work. When you finish a piece you’re happy. It’s like a baby,” muses artisan saddler Vincent Leopold with a chuckle. Centuries-old techniques, such as the use of tapestry nails instead of staples and cotton canvas straps inside the seat, are still used alongside the stateof-the-art: carbon fibre saddletrees, the ‘skeleton’ of the saddle, which at Hermès is sized for each individual horse using a tool that gives hundreds of measurements to replicate the horse’s back. “Before, 40 or 50 years ago, if the saddle didn’t hurt the horse, fine – it was up to the rider to know how to ride well. Now, more and more, it has become about ergonomics, for horse and rider,” Goblet notes, his office packed to the rafters with the saddletree prototypes that he crafts himself. For 40 years he has been in pursuit of the perfect saddle. “Based on the previous model we learn the shortcomings. But you also have to be careful when you remove something, that it doesn’t change the good parts. It’s a very holistic process.” True to the timeless yet unconventional spirit of the house, he might add a bold red stitch to a dressage saddle, to trace the outline of the leg – as he did with the Arpège, developed in collaboration with top German dressage rider Jessica von Bredow-Werndl. “In the design, I include the function. I don’t do design for the sake of design.” His work on a saddle for dressage – the discipline that involves ‘dancing’ with the horse – may now even inspire a hitherto unseen jump saddle. “I love dressage because I learned a lot. It’s a complicated discipline.” The saddle, he says, will be the result of 40 years of work and reflection. Above: Sultan de Beaufour, a sport horse sired by the famous Cardento, a silver medal-winning Olympic stallion. Right: Hermès partner rider Alexandra Paillot.

“I’m a saddler but I’m also an artisan. That’s the magic, when you can actually make something that is artistic and beautiful and at the same time high-tech. If you have these elements you can make miracles,” he smiles. On his wall are pictures of a young Goblet riding racehorses. “I was born in Chantilly, and Chantilly is the city of racehorses in France.” His love for horses, coupled with “the desire to work by hand, to work with leather”, led him to a career as a saddler, coming to Hermès as an apprentice. “And soon I’ll be retiring!” Riders can choose from different models, which can then be customised further: the angle one’s leg sits at, padding or no knee padding, foams for seat firmness, a flat or curved seat. For an average saddle, 40 pieces are assembled using the original Hermès saddle-stitch, which also adorns bags and accessories – a technique done by hand, requiring 191

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two needles that lock a thread by working in opposite directions, giving unmatched solidity. It’s a process that can take anywhere between 25 and 60 hours to complete, depending on the client’s requests. In true artisan spirit, Leopold’s favourite saddle is the one that involves the most steps to complete: the Oxer. He pulls out a leather-bound book dated 1927 to 1937 from a glass cabinet that holds journals containing details of every order placed with Hermès saddlers since 1909. “The number of the saddle, the name of the customer, the measurements of the saddle and the materials used – it’s all here. Every week I use it for repairs after sales, to remake a customer’s favourite saddle from the 1950s or simply for a customer who may have got a saddle from his family and wants to know about it. In two minutes, we can find the information.” Recently, the team repaired a side-saddle from 1929, changing only safety-related pieces such as straps. The saddle itself was still in beautiful condition. It takes two to three years before a saddler can work independently on the different house models. The hand-stretched calfskin across the seat is especially tricky. “The feeling, the touch is vital – it’s difficult to explain when it’s too tense or if it’s not stretched enough. It takes a lot of practice,” Leopold says, noting that it becomes almost intuitive. It’s a sentiment echoed by Delestre when he speaks about jumping. “You have to have the feeling with horses,” he reflects. “When you are skilled, and your technique is OK, it’s the feeling that makes the difference.” For Delestre, this always means putting the horse first. If, using his experience and intimate connection with his mount, he senses that something is off during a morning warm up, but no one else can find Previous spread left: Detail of an Hermès bridle. Previous spread right: Inside the Hermès atelier on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris. Previous spread and above: Serenity and adrenaline in the Grand Palais arena, where riders tackle vertical fences, walls and wide-set jumps known as oxers. Right: Morocco’s Abdelkebir Ouaddar, who won the Grand Prix Hermès trophy in 2016.

anything wrong “you don’t jump, because something bad will happen. That makes all the difference between jumping one round and jumping for six years.” As if on cue, a horse somewhere kicks out loudly at the stable wall. “It’s not mine,” he says, with a relieved smile. “It doesn’t break my heart directly.” Equestrian sport, like high fashion, may seem like a leisure class pursuit for the privileged few, but it is also a blood, sweat and tears affair. “For us, horses are a way of life,” Delestre says. “We go from show to show, we live with them every day, every hour, and we have to be wary of everything, because, with horses, every morning and every night, something will go wrong. That’s life with horses.” Delestre rides in the Caval, a saddle he developed with Laurent Goblet’s expertise which allows him to be very close to the horse and have his 196

leg quite fixed. “It’s special, what I have with Hermès – it’s a close and honest relationship. We really help each together, to do the best for the horses, but also to always have a view of the future.” Goblet has seen and facilitated a lot of change throughout his 40-year career. But while the horse’s role has changed from a worker – for war, agriculture, transport – to an athlete, equipped with sporty gear, one thing remains the same: the main material used. “We haven’t found anything better than leather to make saddles. We tried jersey, for example, but leather takes the shape, it fits to the rider. It’s beautiful. It’s not this cold, inanimate material; it’s warm,” he says, playing with a piece of calfskin. Delestre speaks with the same love about his vocation. “Jumping is different. You can feel the power of the horse – a power that is difficult to conceive of, and with every horse you have a different feeling. You have to make the right choice for the horses. You have to work on a horse six, seven years to bring it to [grand prix] level; so if you take it for one wrong ride, you work for six years and then you can do nothing.” As a rider, you’re a horse trainer and a bit of an equine psychologist, then? Delestre laughs. “Yeah, we have to think for them. You try to feel how they are, to think how they think, to explain why they have this reaction instead of another one. And when you have the right explanation it becomes easy.” Hence the crucial role of the right saddle. For horse and rider to feel as one, nothing should complicate their symbiotic relationship, especially when every showjumping course is different – planned by a course designer whose job it is to thoroughly test riders and horses at Above: Poles for the jump fences, which, at the Saut Hermès, reach 1.6 metres for the competition’s top classes. Right: Alexandra Paillot and her horse Tonio la Goutelle wearing a coveted orange cooling blanket and rosette for third place in the Prix du Grand Palais class.

the level they’re competing. Communication and timing is everything. A rider will take into account distances between fences depending on whether their horse has a big, ground-covering stride or takes smaller steps; if it’s hot-headed, or capable of making very small turns, that will save time. While Delestre and Ryan are clearly in a league of their own as athletes, their attention to detail – from training and care to the bespoke Hermès saddle that brings their bodies and minds together – is a joy to behold. Three days after our conversation, Delestre and Hermès Ryan soar to victory in the grand prix finale among 48 other riders as the first French combination to win the prestigious class. “He’s a big, big fighter – Ryan,” Delestre beams. “He likes the shows. He has an incredible mentality. He’s really a special horse.” 197

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Separated from the Suffolk mainland by the River Ore, Orford Ness is a slip of shingle spit – the most vegetated of its kind in Europe, as precious and fragile as coral, and a peculiar place to find relics of the Cold War, lying beaten and rattled by the wind. The crossing to the spit, while brief, is as all crossings – filled with a sense of transition; peaceful and somehow tense, the river, silver and dark, parts thickly with the bow of the boat. Time exchanges land for land; Andrew our ferryman becomes Ranger, our vehicle becomes a Land Rover: the engine shakes into shape and we roll on. Now a nature reserve of international significance, the island was once home to a testing ground for mechanisms of the post-war arms race. At the opposing end of the peninsular is the mysterious hulking form of Cobra Mist, an Anglo-American experimental over-the-horizon radar station. Now in private hands, it is said to house a downed UFO. We set out for the ‘pagodas’ – the strange and iconic underground bunkers, laboratories and testing stations used for research into hydrogen and atomic weaponry. A confusing and lost community, the spit is dotted with these abandoned structures. Seen on the horizon, they grow into great brutalist cadavers rent from function and dense in a forgotten cabal. While no fissile material was ever used on site, the buildings were designed as compression tanks – in the event of an accident concerning high explosives, the roofs would collapse, enclosing the building as with a great tomb. One could be tempted to describe these buildings as temples to science – where man overcame their gods, and it’s a persuasive notion underneath the heavy skies of East Anglia. Despite this heightening of the spirit here, the humble concrete lines of the forsaken structures, interrupted by bramble and foliage, create a sense of a Methodist church abandoned by its parishioners – old, innocent and rural – and given back to the landscape.

Previous spread: Built in 1933, the ballistics building was the centre of the experimental bombing range on Orford Ness. Here, state-of-the-art equipment was developed to track the flightpath of projectiles to improve aerodynamics and anticipate the trajectories of atomic weapons. The facilities steadily improved over the years, most notably from the 1950s for the development of the atomic bomb. 226

The building’s roof provides a panorama of the peninsula and was used as an observation post – naval binoculars can still be found in situ. From here the remnants can be seen of the airfield and flood protection walls built by German prisoners of war held on Orford Ness during World War I.

This spread: Laboratory 2, built between 1955 and 1958, was originally used to test the casing for Blue Danube, the first operational British nuclear weapon. Constructed with a concrete roof and blast doors, the building was used to subject the weapons to extreme temperatures, vibrations and shock: In 1959, the environmental test programme was expanded to simulate the conditions encountered during transportation, storage and use.

The late 1950s marked a high watermark for testing prototype weapons on Orford Ness, including warheads for the Blue Steel standoff missile; an intermediate range ballistic missile, Blue Streak; the Blue Water surface-to-surface missile; freefall bomb Yellow Sun and the naval Seaslug missile.

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Further to the west are the most distinctive structures on the peninsular – the two vibration test buildings, now commonly referred to as the ‘pagodas’, constructed in 1960. The specifications for construction included the ability to withstand the accidental detonation of 180kg of high explosives: In the event of

a conventional explosion, the blast would be diverted up through the open spaces under the roof; anything stronger would cause the supporting pillars to fail, and the concrete roof covered with gravel would collapse, containing the explosion.

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The most significant experiments conducted at Orford Ness took place under the blanket of the Ionospheric Research Station (IRS), set up in 1935 by Robert Watson-Watt, a pioneer of radio direction finding and radar technology. In a meeting of the committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defence, it had been suggested to Watson-Watt that a ‘death ray’ could be used to stop enemy aircraft. Watson-Watt rejected this as impractical with the technology available at the time, but suggested the potential to use radio waves as a detection system.

The IRS was a cover for the development of the radio-detection system that briefly became ‘radio direction finding’, or RDF, before it was established under the American acronym RADAR (radio detection and ranging). The first-ever purpose-built radar masts were installed at Orford Ness in 1935; built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, they were 76 metres high. Without the work undertaken at Orford Ness, it is very possible that the Battle of Britain in 1940 would have been lost by the UK and, on the Luftwaffe gaining air superiority, with it, World War II.

Interior of one the pagodas, showing the steel slots on which test equipment was mounted. The first of the six cells was completed in 1956 and was capable of testing the largest weapons in the British arsenal, which were lowered into the pit by a 10-tonne crane. Vibration units would then be attached and the cell sealed to avoid contamination. Other cells contained hydraulic rams and centrifuges, designed to test the weaponry at extremes of G-force.

With the introduction of the modern WE177 bomb and the Polaris submarine-based nuclear weapon systems, the peninsular was used less and less, until, in April 1969, the decision was announced to close it completely. Many of Orford Ness’s functions moved to Aldermaston – where the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) is still based – and the buildings were abandoned. The last test took place on June 1971 and the closure completed in October of that year, with the use of the peninsular passing from the AWRE to an ordnance disposal unit of the RAF. It was acquired by the National Trust, from the Ministry of Defence, in 1993.

Opposite: The Orfordness Rotating Wireless Beacon was an early radio navigation system introduced in July 1929. Built so the angle to the station could be measured from any aircraft or ship with a conventional radio receiver, it was accurate to about a degree. This enigmatic building, designed to look like the lower section of a Dutch windmill, and painted black, remains a distinctive landmark on the peninsular.

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All you need to know about David La Spina is in the first picture of this portfolio. He is motivated when the light is hot and strong and the contrast is high. He frames chaos within chaos. He picks up on signifiers of how we live. Two women grip cell phones with ferocity. Are they hostage takers or hostages? One of the women listens intently to one phone while holding another. What does it mean to have two phones? La Spina’s photos are full of everyday mysteries and nuances. The uncanny waits for him. With quick reflexes he snags the splatter of light and shade on their faces. The smudgy shadows tumbling down the side of the woman’s face as she steps into sunlight could not be more perfect if he drew them in with a charcoal stick. As the women come towards us, La Spina also registers the back of a man walking towards them. And then he re-raises the ante by lassoing the leafy shadows on the gentleman’s shoulders, and then the shadow of yet another person falling across the man’s back. Is it La Spina’s shadow? Can this be the portraitist inserting a self-portrait among the pedestrians on an ordinary day of extraordinary Manhattan light? The man’s bent fingers at the edge of the frame add to the choreography of hands. A ‘Parking’ sign descends in the background, testament to

La Spina’s love of vernacular typography. La Spina is the equivalent of a studio musician laying down all of the tracks in a song, all at once. La Spina’s images savour the urban elegance of stairs, wrought iron railings and fire escapes. The angles, edges, reflective surfaces and intersecting shapes of urban buildings inspire and delight him. His eye owes its rigour and discipline to his love of architecture. Later on in the story, laundry hanging behind two buildings stands out. The clothes hang from a grid of bars that echoes the grid of windows in the background. One can imagine the windows and bars aligned and matching perfectly. Does every walk La Spina takes down a city street on a sunny day result in a moment of visual ecstasy? After years of working with sophisticated cameras, La Spina started shooting with his smartphone, liberating him to make pictures quickly – usually when he is in transition: on his way to the subway, heading to work or pushing his daughter in a stroller. At first he was “very insecure about these pictures and thought they were second fiddle”. Then he realised “they were getting better than the pictures I thought were my serious pictures.” These vividly beautiful, impatiently captured and elegantly rendered photographs are proof of the irrepressible power and pleasure of great street photography.

Kathy Ryan is director of photography at The New York Times Magazine

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10,000 Hours

I was 17 when I ran away to Paris. I grew up in Denmark but I had always been fascinated by France – I had gone there when I was 14 and I loved the cafes, the people, the music. I knew when I went back I would stay for good. I arrived there not knowing anyone, but by chance I started modelling. I was in a cafe called Les Deux Magots in SaintGermain-des-Prés and was approached by a woman who asked me in English – I couldn’t speak much French at the time – if I wanted to take some fashion pictures. I was afraid of what she might ask me to do, but I did the shoot. The pictures came out in a magazine called Jour de France, and with my paycheque I went up the Eiffel Tower! Later I met Hélène Gordon-Lazareff, the founder of Elle, and shot for the magazine. At the shoot there was a strange lady in a big jacket who looked at me and told me in English: “I believe you want to be an actress… You need to learn French. What’s your name little girl?” I told her. "Hanne Karin Bayer.” “No: Anna Karina – call yourself that.” It was Coco Chanel. I took her advice. I was put on the cover of Elle and a lot of modelling work followed – I was even the face of Coca-Cola in England for a time. Meanwhile, I had been going to the cinema to learn French. In those days you could stay in the cinema on one ticket from 10 in the morning to midnight – some films I watched six times. I first met Jean-Luc Godard after he saw me in a soap advertisement. He offered me a small part in A Bout de Souf-

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fle, the film that launched his career as a director, but the role would have required me to take off my clothes. I found him quite bizarre with his dark glasses, and I was a little afraid, so I left. Three or four months later I got another call asking me to come back. I had forgotten who he was, but my friends, who knew more about cinema, convinced me to go. When I got there, he just looked at me and said “Yeah ok, you’ve got the part.” I asked him if I had to take my clothes off. “No, no; this is a political film. Come back tomorrow and sign your contract.” I was still underage and had to get my mother’s permission but, eventually, she came to Paris and signed for me. It took three months for Jean-Luc and I to fall in love. Le Petit Soldat had the longest production of any of the films I made with him, and I was fascinated; I couldn’t take my eyes off him. One night we went to dinner in Lausanne, close to Geneva, where we were shooting, and he gave me a piece of paper under the table that read: “Je vous aime. Rendez-vous au Café de la Paix à minuit à Genève.” When I got there he was reading a newspaper, and I stood for what felt like hours, but was probably only seconds, before he lowered it and said: “Well here you are. Let’s go.” When I woke up the next morning he had already left, but he came back later with a beautiful white dress. I’m wearing it in the film. Le Petit Soldat was banned by the minister for culture, André Malraux, because it was about the war in Algeria, but another director saw the film in a private screening and cast me in a comedy. Jean-

Luc said I shouldn’t do the film, but I did it anyway, and when he saw it he asked me to do Une Femme Est une Femme, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Claude Brialy. They were real stars at that time but put me at ease, and I went on to win the Silver Bear in Berlin and the jury prize at Cannes for my performance. Jean-Luc taught me a lot. I was a little girl when we first met, listening intently to him talk about cinema, going all the time together with him to the cinematheque. We had fun. The problem was that he was never there: I was always waiting for him. He would say he’s going for cigarettes, that he was coming back in two minutes, and return three weeks later. I would find out that he had been to see Bergman in Sweden, or Rossellini in Italy. After a while you get a bit tired of it. We divorced in 1965 after four years of marriage and seven films. People say my best performance was actually without Jean-Luc, in The Nun by Jacques Rivette. It caused such a scandal – also banned by Malraux. I would go on to work with Fassbinder and Delvaux, write novels, direct my own film and work with Serge Gainsbourg. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to have done so many different things. I never asked for anything, it’s all been an incredible gift. Of course, I worked hard – especially on my French, to lose my accent – but I’m also just grateful. I’ve had a great life.

As told to George Upton

Image courtesy of Getty Images

No single figure represents the Nouvelle Vague – the period of intense, dynamic creativity in French cinema in the 1960s – better than Anna Karina. A model-cum-actor who epitomised the chic style of the era, she collaborated with some of the greatest names in 20th-century filmmaking, most notably her husband, Jean-Luc Godard, with whom she produced, as director Caveh Zahedi says, "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema”. A writer, singer and director in her own right, Karina remembers here how she went from teenage runaway to an institution of French cinema.