The first three-dimensional image Phosphor produced was of Cosima sitting navel-deep in a tub of water. Around her slender neck she wears a silver cross—a gift from Señor Fantasma—and the tub, as well as her knees and elbows (as are her shoulder blades) are all revealed in luminous and dramatic relief. Her great head of hair appears to be burning.
What is curious about this picture, extraordinary in fact, is Cosima’s face. She is gazing at the photographer with an expression I can only describe as a cross between ferocious complicity and defiance. Cosima’s eyes appear to be saying: Yes. I am his hireling for now! But the slave shall outsmart the master: wait and see!
Until then, Cosima had seen herself in her father’s mirror: a large oval of polished steel, it had offered her an infinite stage and an interminable sequence of dramatic situations. A passionate dreamer, a little tigress, she dreamed of pirates, of performing in scarlet skirts on a sailing ship the size of a small country, dreamed of dancing under a rain of gold and silver money. The mirror delivered to Cosima her essence—that of a creature of the instant who appeared to be there but who was always elsewhere. Whatever Cosima did, she did because her mirror had told her that she looked beautiful doing it. The mirror taught her to weep with an unfurrowed brow, to laugh in such a way that her brown throat, softly pulsing, was heartbreakingly visible.
Like Petronius’ silver doll, she was a gorgeous automaton—and this should come as no surprise: when Cosima was but an infant, her father had, with the help of a switch, harsh words, and harsher threats, with stays and pins and a clever use of rouge, transformed his daughter into a mechanical toy. Each Saturday Cosima performed in the marketplace from dawn to dusk until she dropped.
And the mirror gave Cosima the power not only to leave the confines of her room and body, but to double those few meager treasures she had found in the street after a performance when, for example, she had played the monkey to her father’s organ. These she kept hidden from Cosme’s avaricious eye: a large pearl earring, a bent silver cat’s-eye brooch, and one brass ring.
Phosphor hated the way Fantasma had reduced Cosima—far more than fate had done. He gave her an image of herself that she could carry everywhere. Whenever Cosme’s threats and Fantasma’s fucking threatened to submerge her in wretchedness, she took hold of the image of a blossoming child contained within its little hinged box—so like a reliquary—and felt powerful again, fearless too; somehow secure. This image was more than a mirror: it was the hearth by which she warmed herself, a miniature altar at which she could worship her own inviolable soul. For, if badly bruised, Cosima was not broken. Her capacity to seem rather than be had protected her.
Cosima’s eyes were so like her own mother’s eyes—eyes that had once gazed upon her with delight—that the certitude she had once been loved, and deeply, was hers each time she opened the little box. And no matter how miserable she was, how tattered, the image always showed a girl combed and scrubbed, and wearing a precious lace mantilla, draped and pinned in such a way one could not see it was full of holes.
Cosima’s face is illumined by the moon of a solitary pearl—although, gazing at it now, I could say it is the pearl that is illumined by the moon of Cosima’s beautiful face. (Yes! The image exists: catalog #444.) Clearly the photographer had not stolen his subject’s soul, but instead, secured it—a tangible kernel of shadow and light.
Interestingly, Phosphor never thought of his invention as more than a toy. “My black box seizes reality,” he wrote somewhere, “it does not reveal anything.” It seemed to him that words evoked more than images. “In the beginning was the word,” he later would joke with Tardanza. “We are still waiting for the light.” Knowing this about him, we may now move on to the next chapter.