Portrait of an Unknown Lady and Kiss of the Spider Woman
Oh hello
Sitting, writing to you, from a booth at a café in a theatre, which feels much like an airport’s, its customers permanently waiting, charging, checking the time—with breaks in chatter for announcements—filling the room with a giddy expectation that the space itself does nothing to create or even maintain, the energy simply swirling and swirling, leaving me, here, in my booth, ignored, as I said, writing to you.
I started this year looking for more calm, a doldrum of stability, and as im approaching the end of the year, still that is what I am reaching towards. im tired now, like always, and by that I mean my feet are sore and I want to sleep in one of those one person tent sleeping bags that are cocoons, and Im struggling to think of anything interesting to say or write other than that I am tired and I am still tired and isn’t life so tiring and how crazy is it that life is so tiring, and in that way, in my tiredness, im inspired by kate zambreno who (see e.g. To Write As If Already Dead) writes so eloquently from a position of exhaustion that it becomes something close to a method.
This email is about Portrait of an Unknown Lady (2018, trans. 2022) by María Gainza and Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) by Héctor Babenco. Both stories are about fulfilling relationships not built around honesty, but instead constructed in gaps like cracks that draw a vertebrae, like tracing a scar. They ask: what would it mean to not look for honesty in relationships, to not equate truthfulness with closeness and intimacy? More and more, as I look to reshape relationships in my family, I think it requires an acceptance of difference, of things not being said. Sometimes pushing for understanding has resulted only in alienation, misinterpretation and tension. Which is not to tell you to not live your honest, truthful, it’s all about communication, therapy pilled, happy lives, but that, in some of my relationships that level of honesty isn’t possible. Instead, I’m interested in how relationships scaffolded around difference, like the love shared between Molina and Valentin in Kiss of the Spider Woman, can shape and strengthen themselves.
Portrait of an Unknown Lady (2018, trans. 2022) by María Gainza
Someone called Maria Lydis, which is not her real name, checks into a hotel in Buenos Aires, closes the door to her room, locks it, and, wearing a “mangy black fur shawl” begins to write a story, a love story masquerading as a quest, guided by an appreciation for the imprecision of her memory and its power to reimagine, reinvent, move dates, names, details around: to make things up. She prefers to open with doubt like: ‘Let us suppose it was so’.
The story she tells begins with Enriqueta Macedo and, despite stretching itself like an elastic band pulled on your wrist, never really leaves her. The narrator works with Enriqueta at an art valuation office and, under Enriqueta’s mentorship, becomes part of an art forgery cabal in which she and Enriqueta authenticate the forgeries. Scarcely are we introduced to this world before Enriqueta dies. The narrator becomes a lazy art critic, briefly flirts again with forgery, assisting in the sale of a catalogue of counterfeits of a painter, Mariette Lydis, before searching, for the remainder of the story, for information about a forger, Renée, who was connected (as business partners? friends? lovers?) with her Enriqueta.
There is, as that summary suggests, a freedom to this novel. Her writing is direct, full of space, like it is being told, slurring slightly, at 2am in a bar. The narrator dips, indulgently and inquisitively into story lines, never too wedded to a plot with a beginning, a middle and an ending, mixing instead vignettes with lightly touched reflections on forgery, art, finding meaning in your life. Here, now, is the narrator talking about life: “It’s like this: all of humanity, in the final reckoning, is a single book, one that it’s possible to take scissors and glue to in order to create one’s own report, which in a way is what I did.”
In a life that can feel small, narrow, isolating and solipsistically internal, our narrator finds consolation in copying. While looking for Renée, she reflects that “[p]erhaps all our sadness can be attributed to living trapped within ourselves. Perhaps it’s only the counterfeiter who finds a way past this obstacle.” By sending up with comic seriousness the life of the counterfeiter and cheat, Gainza offers a parable on the importance of performance, of mimicry and theatre. In working to occupy a different position, Gainza suggests, it can set you free. “The true measure of a painting”, Enriqueta tells our narrator, “was how good it was, not the accuracy of the signature in the corner”.
I think what is most tantalising about Portrait of An Unknown Lady is that it is a search for answers where the lead is not that interested in finding anything out. She says: “I wanted to get closer and at the same time I did not.” She says: “Reality is perhaps a thing too inherently ruinous for there to be any abiding certainty about it.” Instead, the quest is a way to grieve the loss of Enriqueta who she loved. It allows our narrator not to bring Enriqueta back to life, but to keep talking to her through the aimless conversations she has with people who don’t really know someone who may have had some connection to Enriqueta. It is all she can do. “We have little and nothing” the narrator says.
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) by Héctor Babenco
In a jail in South America, Valentin and Molina share a cell. Molina, a trans woman, played by William Hurt from Broadcast News, is sad, doleful, expressive: shifting posturally and in expression between being hunched and arched. Valentin, withdrawn, moody, played by Raul Julia, awaits the revolution. Molina retells, with scarf and dressing grown, a Nazi propaganda film twisted into a romance. Valentin tells Molina that “fantasies are no escape” yet within the small bare prison cell seems to find some comfort (if not escape) in Molina’s stories.
Babenco draws heat and movement in this film by playing up the distance between the pair. Where Valentin is masculine/reserved/strong/politically active, Molina is feminine/expressive/vulnerable/ignorant about politics. Where Valentin is committed to a revolution, Molina, less optimistically, will settle for calm. The two also simply do not know much about each other. Molina never learns about Valentin’s revolutionary plans, and Valentin remains oblivious that Molina is supposed to be telling the warden any secret that Valentin shares. What I’m trying to say is that the characters are different, yes, but they also do not bridge this difference throughout the film. They become closer despite or perhaps because of what they do not know about each other. Molina, to Valentin, is unconditionally kind and loving. Valentin, to Molina, represents an inspirational revolutionary stoicness. Each offers the other, from afar, a protective embrace. As Kathy Acker emailed McKenzie Wark (collated in I’m very into you), “But when I say “top” and “bottom” I’m just talking about sexual play. Otherwise, there’s just … difference. Real difference. Not fucking games. That’s what makes friendship.”
Molina tells Valentin “Do what you want with me because it is what I want” but what Molina really wants is to be kissed and by that she means: she wants love. Molina stands in front of Valentin, the morning after having sex, each holding the other’s biceps. Molina, trembling with insecurity, scared that their intimacy might be experienced by Valentin as ‘purely physical’ or ‘just sex’ or ‘just a bit of fun’ and asks, pleadingly, for a kiss. Molina needs a kiss as a symbol to store away and turn back to; something to lodge against doubt and self-disgust; a way to remember that her private feelings of love were shared. “The nicest thing about feeling happy”, Molina says to Valentin, “is that you feel like you will never feel unhappy again.”
This is a beautiful film, driven by the vulnerability of Hurt’s performance, and the chemistry between Valentin and Molina. It makes you pull on your neck line; hold your chest. It makes you want more.
Love
Anne