Yoav Toledano is twenty-three years old the first time he thinks about Latin America as a real possibility that exists beyond all the dismal maps. A growing allergy to war, product of his participation in Sinai in 1957, has ultimately instilled in him the secret vocation of a globe-trotter. He thinks, at first, of visiting some Asian country, green palm trees and clear coasts, but the poetic resonance of Tierra del Fuego manages to dissuade him. The terribly romantic idea of the solitude at the end of the world makes him feel he is fleeing a history that encloses him on all sides. A photograph he finds in an old fashion magazine of Bariloche, with its snowy mountains and beautiful lake, confirms his intuition. He imagines himself at the end of the world, in the company of penguins and polar bears, surrounded by the taciturn solidarity of the color white. He tells himself that on arriving in America he will need three things: a camera, a map, and the voracity that has guided his family throughout a seemingly endless pilgrimage of four centuries. Though he’s never seen the snow, he imagines himself photographing enormous ice floes aboard little boats struggling to go ever deeper south. He conceives of his mission in epic terms: he will travel west like the sun and south like the stars. To his family, however, he explains the trip as a youthful sowing of oats. He’ll return after a few months, as soon as he’s learned to recite, in perfect Spanish, the poems of his father’s favorite: the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío.
Once his parents are convinced, he turns to the selection of a camera. In a little book on the history of photography he finds the necessary inspiration: he reads about Niépce’s camera obscura and Daguerre’s device, about Talbot’s experiments, the emergence of Kodak’s first cameras, and the invention of the instant photograph. This last event fascinates him: he cannot imagine photography without that instantaneous lightness. It’s only natural, then, that when it’s time to buy, he decides on a Polaroid Pathfinder he comes across in a small electronics store in Tel Aviv. The choice of the map is simpler, but no less suggestive. In a history book, he finds a map showing the routes of Alexander von Humboldt’s American travels. He tears it out and draws over its wrinkled surface the trip he has imagined. It has four points. The first, a star drawn in red marker, is logical: the Haifa port. The second point, marked with a postage stamp, is on the southern tip of Spain, as if any transatlantic trip called for a repetition of Columbus’s voyage. The third, modern and dreamy, is New York. From there he draws a zigzagging line that again crosses the Atlantic, this time with an enormous arc that finally alights on the southern tip of South America. Marking this last point, Toledano decides to draw a little penguin, below which can be read, in Hebrew letters, the name that so fascinates him: “Tierra del Fuego.” And like that, inevitably romantic and with an imperious youthful will, he prepares himself during the winter while he waits for a trip he can only imagine under the rubric of other classic voyages: the one that deposited Charles Darwin on the southern tip of the same continent he’s headed toward; the famous circumnavigation of the globe when Magellan discovered the beauty of spheres; the sad flight that ended when Amelia Earhart disappeared, her aerial dream along with her. He traces routes, imagines sojourns, sketches projects. But mostly, he takes photos.
In the absence of a gun, the portable camera quickly becomes his greatest ally and defense, not to say his obsession. He travels the country north to south taking photos, from the Sea of Galilee to the Negev Desert, from the Roman ruins in Caesarea to the dimly lit alleys of Jaffa. After a few weeks he is an expert. His friends ask for portraits, his relatives, postcards. A family acquaintance who is an art collector even offers a commission in exchange for photographs of the five new pieces he’s just brought back from New York. Toledano doesn’t hesitate. He feverishly shoots those paintings by a young artist whose name he doesn’t know and whose style confuses him: he can’t know that behind the violent brushstrokes of a certain Willem de Kooning is a painter with whom he will soon rub elbows in the Big Apple. He can’t know and doesn’t want to. More than the art, more than painting, he is interested in the essential nature of color. And well does he know that there are two colors absent in his collection: the white of the southern snow and the green of the Amazonian jungle. So, on the sunny spring afternoon when he learns that his travel papers are ready, Toledano can only imagine himself surrounded by that Latin American world he pictures as a terribly natural monster. Anxious, he realizes that he has reached his twenty-third year without ever leaving the little clod of dirt that saw his birth. He calms himself by repeating a schmaltzy phrase that at his young age still sounds daring and poetic: “Soon I’ll photograph the end of the world.” He ignores, without the slightest qualm, the fact that the beginning of any trip is a detour.
The day of his departure, his father gives him two books. More than books, they are amulets, objects that will be with him throughout the trip as reminders of a promise of return. At least, that’s how the father imagines it; as his family looks on, he opens the first book and reads, in a very Ladino Spanish, some verses that no one but him understands:
Y llegué y vi en las nubes la prestigiosa testa
de aquel cono de siglos, de aquel volcán de gesta,
que era ante mí de revelación.
Señor de las alturas, emperador del agua,
a sus pies el divino lago de Managua,
con islas todas luz y canción.
In the father’s voice the syllables are rough, the r’s scratchy, the pauses uncomfortable. No one knows why he adopted as his preferred poet that Nicaraguan writer of somewhat grandiloquent phrasing, but that day, gathered around the departing son, they all take it as a kind of bad joke. All except Yoav, for whom this secret language represents a world. Still, curiosity wins out, and he puts aside the book of Darío’s poems and opens the second volume. A biography of Nadar, a photographer he’s read something of in his little history of photography, but about whom he knows only the basics: he was born and he took portraits. Soon he’ll know more: he will know, for example, that the same man who photographed the distinguished Baudelaire also depicted the Parisian catacombs. Years later he will wonder what would have happened if, instead of a book by Rubén Darío, his father had given him one by Baudelaire. But that will come later. On the day of his departure the book on Nadar is nothing more than a book. With eager curiosity, Yoav reads a few pages and stashes it in his backpack, between the book of poems and the history of photography that has kept him company during recent months. He kisses his father, kisses his mother, kisses his little brother, and leaves.
First stop: Spain. His parents have asked him to visit the place of origin that is tattooed on his name—Toledo. So when he disembarks in Madrid, the first thing Yoav does is determine the cardinal points. He will travel south in what he considers a practice exercise for the final trip that, according to his plan, will leave him at the southern tip of the American continent. His parents have asked him to try to take photos of the famous Toledo Synagogue, where the family history began. Yoav, however, is more interested in the beautiful name the Christians use: Santa María la Blanca. More than history, he is chasing the twists and turns of his name. Two days later, after a pilgrimage that involved a train and two buses, Toledo welcomes him with the uncertain melancholy of a parent receiving a prodigal son. As afternoon falls, Yoav recognizes the old synagogue and repeats to himself that this is where the whole story begins. It’s six in the afternoon on a Friday. This Sabbath will find him far from home, alone in a postcard landscape.
His grandfather has told him the story over the course of many evenings, in fragments scattered over countless Sabbaths. The story, as he’s heard it told, begins precisely there, in Toledo, when Yusef Abenxuxen, son of the most skilled finance minister of Alfonso VIII of Castile, decides he will be the one to convince the king that his people’s prayers also deserve a home. He will convince the crown that Toledo needs a synagogue. The twelfth century is approaching and a new wave of anti-Semitism has awakened anxiety in Toledo’s Jews. Using his influence and going against his father’s wishes, Abenxuxen secures a meeting with the king’s adviser. On a rainy afternoon, sitting across from a man who doesn’t seem to be listening, he tries to explain the need for this temple that he imagines, per the concepts of sacred scriptures, as a space for silence, prayer, and law. After an hour, tired of struggling with this enthusiastic young man’s rhetoric, the consul sends him away with the assurance that he will bring his complaints to the king, though he doubts the reaction will be positive. So, two days later, when the reply reaches Abenxuxen mid-supper, his surprise is considerable: the king has accepted. The problem is that Jewish architects aren’t exactly in abundance. The building, emphasizes the messenger, will have to be designed by Moorish architects. Yusef does not despair. Young and pragmatic, he knows that the important thing is to get the building up. But then comes the problem of convincing the old rabbis. Before long, he sees another way out. He remembers a friend of his who could always be found drawing architectural designs that never materialized. It occurs to him that if he can convince this architecture aficionado to join the team of Moorish architects, the rabbis will agree. That original architect, Yoav’s grandfather told him, was the first of their family line.
His name was Yosef Ben Shotan, but after two weeks go by, the Moorish architects with whom he now shares the joy of a profession baptized him with a more neutral name: Toledano. The shyness of genius lent him a chameleonic aspect. He could go an entire afternoon without uttering a word, but when he did say something, it seemed as though he’d been there speaking from the start. He had the ability to fit in anywhere, to harmonize in any group. “He was the first Marrano,” his grandfather said, while little Yoav looked at him and nodded, not knowing what that word meant. He was only eleven years old, and history was already starting to intrigue him, even when it seemed incomprehensibly distant. “He was a few centuries early,” the old man went on, “but his expression already held the bravery of the Marranos.” Hours later, hidden among old volumes of Shakespeare in his father’s enormous library, captive to the bewilderment those family anecdotes made him feel, Yoav would find in an old encyclopedia a brief article on the secret systems of the Jewish conversos and the clandestine practice of religious traditions. He would find, scattered throughout the article, words that would confuse him even more—shining, winding words, like crypto-Judaism. Farther down, as one final aid, he would find a pictorial rendering that showed a group of Jews gathered in the dark, praying among candles, clearly in an age long past. Yoav forgot the rest and retained only that image. Every time his father repeated that Yosef Toledano was the first Marrano, he imagined a shadowy scene with ancient people chanting over candles. The secret of that word, for him, had much to do with twilight. So, eight years later, when he reaches the old synagogue of Santa María la Blanca past six in the evening, Yoav thinks to himself that his arrival could only be thus: late, Marrano.
The photograph of Toledo that he sent his family shows Yoav between two of the synagogue’s famous white arches, smiling in the sunset. He looks tall, handsome, his hair short and neat, just as he was when his parents said goodbye to him. There is a hint, however, of a certain nomadic inclination. Turning the photograph over we find a short note, written in Hebrew: “Here at the first temple, during a Marrano sunset. Hugs.” Farther down, in a nod to the books his father had given him, there’s a quote from Nadar: “There is much photography in the sunset.” He has barely left his house behind, and already he seems to have found a second home. He’s imagined the trip as an odyssey to the end of the world, but this first stop already strikes him as conclusive and comfortable.
He spends two weeks in Spain. He wants to finish his tour of the family history hidden behind that first name, Yosef Toledano. He has only the information his grandfather gave him: dates, a few names, general outlines of the story of the Marranos in old Spain. Still, he doesn’t give up. Nor does he care that he doesn’t speak the language. He has picked up several key words, which, combined with a few gestures and a dictionary, are enough to survive on. In the mornings he explores the streets of the old Jewish quarter, those aged sectors that stretch through the city with the force of a secret. He walks the streets of the walled city, crosses St. Martin’s Bridge to the Puerta del Cambrón, from the old Assuica district to Santo Tomé. He sits down to drink a beer in Montichel, enjoys a sunny afternoon on the outskirts of the Bab Alfarach neighborhood. In an alleyway in Hamanzeite, a couple of Gypsies try to steal his camera, but he fights them off. He knows the camera is his true language. Everywhere he goes he takes a lot of Polaroids; after lunch, he arranges them in a travel album, and at the end of the day, he sits down to write a diary that snakes among the photos as it grows. A luminous intuition tells him that the novels of the future will be something like this: illustrated almanacs, enormous catalogs, curiosity cabinets on which the authors, mere copyists, write commentaries.
One afternoon, looking for a map, he enters a small store in the old Arriaza neighborhood. He’s greeted by an enormous man, fat and stinking. The whole place smells of old alcohol and fermented food. The scene is completed by a half-dozen cats that wander around the truly tiny space, whose walls are adorned with dozens of useless artifacts: broken record players, rusted rifles, a decrepit phonograph. Yoav considers leaving, but his politeness makes him stay. Winding his way through the cats, he picks up a map and tries to locate the Samuel Ha-Levi synagogue. The man asks what he is looking for. Yoav, shy and unable to express himself in that still-foreign language, shows him a photograph of the synagogue and merely pronounces the key word: Marrano. The man doesn’t understand. Then he switches languages. It’s the first and last time, in his entire trip through Spain, that someone will speak to him in English. And in perfect English, no less, in spite of the booze on his breath. The fat man tells him that years ago he’d studied architecture in England—Cambridge, specifically—among British aristocrats and buttoned-down ladies, until one day, sick of libraries, he opted instead for cats and alcohol. He talks to Yoav about the London afternoons that tended to encompass all four seasons, about the ever-lukewarm English beers, about the Natural History Museum, about girls he kissed in the rain. Then, between sips of liquor, prisoner of the nostalgia brought on by the English language, he shows Yoav an old folder. And there, among papers dotted with coffee stains, Yoav glimpses what seems to be a map of the entire city. Between grotesque peals of laughter, the fat man swears this map depicts the Toledan underground. It looks, rather, like two maps superimposed, one over the other, doing battle. He said the map had once been part of his doctoral thesis, which had promised to discover, through an archaeological study of the Toledo subsoil, the ruins of ancient cemeteries. According to him, right there beneath the living city, there was a subterranean history that included remains left by Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Muslims, and Arabs.
“Our own private Hades,” he repeats.
Yoav finds the story fascinating, loves to imagine that he’s walking on a secret world, the underground history that, according to this drunk archaeologist, at times emerges into the city’s surface. The fat man tells him there are some corners of the city where intact traces of the cemeteries remain: a half-erased gravestone can be found in Calle de la Plata, another one persists near the Santo Tomé bridge.
Toledano spends the following days sunk in his diary, sketching out diagrams, drawings, commentaries, aphorisms. In school he was precocious in math, and that skill is evident in his notebooks, which seem to adhere to a precarious order. An ordered chaos, that’s what stands out in the pages he devotes to the most insignificant occurrences: notes about the southern sunset, comments on photographic texture, sketches of cats and even a train ticket. More than a diary, it’s an almanac, a conceptual collage, a little like those magazines from the turn of the century that diffidently featured, side by side, short stories by Poe and the most frivolous fashion ads. In the afternoons, when the heat becomes unbearable, he takes shelter in some small, fanned café and reads, with a joy not free of restlessness, his little book on the history of photography. He returns over and over to the same stories: the camera obscura by Giovanni Battista della Porta, William Hyde Wollaston’s magic lantern, the complicated and treacherous story of Daguerre and Talbot. He likes the way the characters of this story bet everything on ideas that seemed crazy at first. He is fascinated by how, in the name of the purest science, they pursued projects that must have seemed like hallucinations. In that same book, between liters of beer that he’s slowly learned to drink without disgust, he reads of Niépce’s heliographic project. Heliography: he likes the word, distant and light, but he likes even more what it means. “Sun writing”—he repeats the definition in the middle of the tavern and the idea lights up the afternoon.
In the midst of the Enlightenment, two brothers, tired of listening to old Kant go on about the light of reason, say to each other that it would be better to invent an apparatus that could write with the light of the sun itself. Shrouded as it is in romantic frenzy, the project strikes Yoav as intensely poetic—to defy reason, in the full swing of the Enlightenment, by imagining an impossible artifact that could illuminate everything the old philosophers talk about. To add a pinch of luminous darkness to so much conceptual blather. Yoav soon discovers that there is indeed a lot of darkness in early photography. Paging through the book’s illustrations, he finds a blurry photo that looks more like an inky blotch than anything else. Below it is an explanation that declares this image the very first photograph, a reproduction of the landscape just as it looked from the window of Niépce’s studio one morning in 1826. Overcome, he thinks how photography is an art of pause and suspension, an art of static light that nevertheless contains a great deal of darkness. Surrounded as he is by drunk men, he says, “It’s something like that, slow and light like alcohol.”
Of all the information in his book, one story quickly becomes his favorite: the invention of the photographic negative by the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot. He is so interested in the anecdote that, so as not to forget it, he copies it out word for word like a primary school child. It’s the story of an invention that, like all inventions, is more of a stroke of luck. One afternoon when he’s vacationing near Lake Como, Talbot decides to put a few leaves out in the sun on paper that has been immersed in silver nitrate. After a few hours he finds that the light has traced an inverse image of the outline of the leaves. All that’s needed is a little salt, and those inverse shadows are fixed to the paper. Years later, the Englishman would be able to transfer his technique to the camera obscura. It’s the true birth of modern photography, of mechanical reproduction, the visual universe that sometime later Toledano himself will try to escape. Young Yoav, however, is interested not so much in the invention itself but in its conceptual implications, the metaphorical flight of the anecdote. He likes the idea of photography as an art of inversion, like a mirror in which reality finds its subterranean opposite. The anecdote brings him immediately back to the fat man’s story, the image of that sepulchral city that exists below Toledo’s surface. He pastes Talbot’s first photograph in his notebook beside the anecdote he’s just copied, and then he writes a reflection that he titles, not without irony, “Toledan Sunset.” It’s a small reflection on inversions, shadows, and invisibilities. Here he notes that he has read little in his life, really very little. He spent his school years on equations and soccer games. Now, when he sits down for the first time to write something he considers legitimately literary, the words arise freely, if orphaned. They have no tradition, no base, no territory. Yoav, however, likes that state of absolute contingency, the innocent power of one’s first writing, the tabula rasa that belies an errant reflection on his own lineage. “Toledan Sunset” is a text of conceptual contretemps that hides something more: for the first time, the young photographer is imagining photography as the possibility of escape. More than the visible, he tells himself, photography pursues the invisible. More than light, darkness. More than the ground, the underground. He writes everything like that, couched in somewhat pathetic reflections. He is ignorant of tradition and a long way from satire, and pathos doesn’t strike him as a problem. He reads over what he’s written and his prose convinces him. He feels for the first time the pleasure of a voice of his own, even when it’s precisely that voice he wants to escape. Toledan is, at the end of the day, not just an adjective but also pretty much his own last name; his writing is ultimately a veiled reflection on the secrets of his name. Among the terms he writes down, there is one he finds particularly suggestive, one he will return to many times: negative history. Behind every event, behind every story, Yoav says to himself, there is something more, a kind of photographic negative of meaning, a historical shadow of what has been.
That night he dreams. He dreams he is back in the archaeologist’s shop, searching through papers in a file that grows along with his confusion. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he keeps looking, as if the meaning of the task lay in absurd repetition. In his dream he hears something. An echoing laugh that he quickly recognizes as the fat man’s. Then he notices that at the back of the store there’s a small staircase that leads to a basement. When he goes down, he finds himself in a much larger underground space. It seems to be an art studio. And it is: there, among dozens of identical paintings, the fat man is ambling around and applying the final touches to one of the mountainous landscapes. To one side, an old man completes crossword puzzles while the room starts to fill with cats. Then Yoav wakes up, terrified, swearing it’s time for him to depart.