Between turns, without changing his pace or his tone, with the monotony of the resigned, he tells me everything: he tells me about the bus that dropped them off at the edge of the jungle, he tells me about the little girl’s illness, he describes the mother’s fearful fascination. He tells me everything as if I knew nothing: the interminable nights of insomnia, the days spent crossing the jungle on foot, the sounds and the dreams, until they reached that luminous moment when he was asked to take a photo, and, at the precise instant he presses the button, he realized he would never be the same again. He tells me everything and then cries checkmate, as if the game had to end when the story did. Then, without showing the slightest consternation after his apparent confession, he stands and says we’re short on beer, and the store is closing soon. He says this, gets into his old, green jeep, and heads to town without even asking if I want to go with him.
Only then, once the story is finished, knowing that my time here is coming to an end, do I store the novel I’m reading in my backpack and finally dare to venture into the old man’s private world. With slow steps, the dogs’ eyes heavy on my back, I step into the garage with its smell of sawdust and beer, aware that I don’t belong. Outdated newspapers, beer cans, old tools, and an empty birdcage or two. Then, as I leave the canaries’ song behind, I see them. Over twenty models: all identical, all different. Models that seem to depict a small city in the shape of a quincunx. Identical models that the old man has tried to erase in different ways, perhaps trying to understand the nature of forgetting. One of the dogs licks my hand and I start in fright. Maybe that’s why I don’t linger. I continue to the back of the garage, driven mainly by fear, until I’m facing a door I open without hesitation. There, perfectly arranged on a shelf, are over a hundred old cameras, from the Polaroid Pathfinder that Toledano had when he left Haifa to the Nikon F that Larry Burrows used to depict Vietnam. A great parade of devices where photographic history accumulates like a junkyard of brands: the Canons alternate with Nikons, then Olympus, and then back to the Polaroid that started Toledano’s career, which today seems to be ending in an emptied-out town. Along with the cameras, distributed in half-closed drawers, are thousands of photos. Pictures of all kinds. Fashion portraits the old man must have taken during his New York years, still lifes that maybe he took in his very first forays, photos of a lush jungle that is perhaps the one he’s just been telling me about. The idea gives me a thrill. I’m intrigued to think that among those thousands of photos is the very one that depicts the end of the story as Toledano has just told it to me. I investigate. I search among those thousands of images to find the one that shows Giovanna’s tiny face, her confusion and resentment. The one that shows Giovanna lost deep in the jungle, prisoner of her parents’ hallucinatory passion. The one that shows her the way I knew her, timid, distant, and fragile. But I only find a jumble of impassive faces, a snarl of cold and remote gazes that refuse to look back at me.