Giovanni Muro (a3)- “Dedicated to you, but you were not listening”; 15.04.1972

“There are things we live among ‘and to see them Is to know ourselves’” Of being Numerous- George Orpen. “In the same way that some people suffer through a revolution , there is also a malaise connected to progress. It’s life itself and there is nothing extraordinary about that....” Michelangelo Antonioni on his film Red Desert, 1964, interviewed by Francois Maurin, published 23 September 1964 in Humanite Dimanche. Saturday morning in early Spring. Mirella heard the door ring over the sound of Mauro in the shower . She was lying in bed, wrapped up in her dressing gown and propped up on one elbow, cradling a cup of coffee , that she’d just made on the stove a few minutes before. The sound of the water abruptly ceased. One... two...there it went, the odd metallic tapping , from somewhere up in the roof ,that always followed the hot water being turned off. Mirella and Mauro had moved into this top floor apartment in Mestre some 18 months previously. The apartment was at the “wrong” end of a rather nondescript street , named after a rather sentimental 19th century poet and essayist , who had been born in Venice and who might have blanched at the appropriation. Although the apartment was unbearably hot in the Summer and damp in the Winter, it also had a bathroom ,a kitchenette and a very small spare bedroom and they both agreed that it had had the potential to be their home. Importantly the apartment had allowed Mauro to park his beaten-up fiat outside, so he could get about the region on behalf of the paper that employed him as a “photo-journalist”, a role that the editor had not welcomed and did not support, but was felt to be “of the times”. Mirella was a bit older than Mauro. When they’d first met she had seen a handsome, confident man, mature beyond his years, setting out purposefully on his career and while conscious of the age gap she’d felt that if she was taking a chance it was with good reason. But now, some five years later, Mauro seemed to her to be, if anything, less of an adult, whatever that really meant, than when they had first met. Certainly while Mirella had become evermore certain of her needs and priorities , his emotional will seemed to be ever more diffuse and his capacity to mark time and resist ambition appeared to have no limit. Through the open bedroom door Mirella could see the front room and the still shuttered windows that faced onto the street below, while the mirrored wardrobe in the bedroom reflected back her head with its large eyes and fair hair ,divided to one side with a rather severe parting. Recently Mirella had noticed that when Mauro arrived back in the car, she’d hear him pull up outside, but then keep the motor running while he sat in the driver’s seat before eventually switching off the engine, getting out , locking it up and coming upstairs. If, having heard his arrival, Mirella opened the shutters at the front of the apartment and looked down ,often as not she’d see that Mauro would have the kerb-side window down out of which his forearm would be sticking with his hand upright, either with a cigarette in his fingers ,sending a feeble column of smoke up toward her , or so that his fingers could thrum on the car roof . Either way Mirella would invariably hear some jazz or “prog rock” track being played on the car radio , which to her ear seemed to involve too many notes that sounded too trebly and went on and on, running up and down the emotional range , as if the very length of the tracks was intended to create a distance from the commercial, mass-cultural discipline of the three minute single. Sometimes Mauro would stay in the car like that for quarter of an hour or more, before turning off the engine and coming inside, never once giving a clue that he’d been outside for so long beforehand. Mirella was conscious that the sight of her hanging out the window , staring down at her dilatory lover’s foreshortened arm, was capable of being seen through any number of semiotic codes or visual lenses, not least the plangent , soft existential pastel tones of the likes Hopper, Hitchcock or Antonioni, but she couldn’t care less for any of these male , interpretative gazes. But one afternoon , a few weeks before, as the sun of a warm day in early Spring had been falling below the roof line , the older woman who lived in the opposite apartment had been taking in her washing , just after Mauro had parked his car and Mirella had leaned out to watch him from above. In barely an instant the neighbour , without pausing her practiced fingers from the task of unpegging the family’s clothes, had caught Mirella’s eye and given her a look, that while uninterpretable in any exact way was also more powerful and penetrating than that of any male auteur or artist , before disappearing inside, her arms filled with laundry, leaving Mirella feeling utterly self-aware and inadequate. Since then from midday onwards Mirella had tended to keep the windows and shutters at the front closed and she told herself that she should not concern herself with when Mauro had “returned” but only when he’d returned to her , when he had actually crossed the hearth and the door was shut behind him. But this habit of Mauro’s still bugged Mirella inordinately , probably because in her mind it seemed to have attached itself to a broader and growing source of anxiety and frustration with Mauro that she was struggling to suppress , but as the connection of these two things was personal to her way of seeing things, and the consequent turmoil so great, she did not trust herself to raise the issue and ask him about the car parking in case she came across as being some highly-strung obsessive looking for a quarrel. Mirella sipped her coffee. The door bell rang again, this time just a bit longer. When Mirella had first got to know Mauro she had been attracted by the fundamental seriousness that underpinned his apparently effortless awareness of what was happening and his capacity to live in the moment . Mirella was not alone in that , for it had similarly been the case with his newspaper , where it had been his uncanny ability to be five minutes ahead of everyone else in identifying what would matter most that had been the thing that had most appealed to them, for in truth his photos were not that distinguished .But these days, despite still sharing the occasional moment of exhilaration, when together they would see the world a bit differently to all those around them and Mauro would exhibit a beguiling sureness in their then social setting, in truth Mirella was tired of his growing tendency toward whimsy and distraction , let alone the strained analogies and pop-cultural repartee . These days he seemed in a sort of late adolescent reverie and ever-less committed , whether that was to his career, his photography or to her. Maybe it was a sign of the fracturing times they were living through, but where did it leave her? Model? Muse? Mistress? Comforter and ultimate distractor? Was it that her relationship with Mauro was becoming the source of all that which increasingly frustrated her about him and his changing behaviour? Mirella would not have admitted it publicly, even under growing pressure from her mother and sisters , who vehemently disapproved of her living in this way with Mauro, but perhaps, for all the ills and issues with traditional Italian manhood, the social strictures of previous generations had served to get couples committed and while the ensuing marriages would often end up at times being a bit of a mess, at least there was an understanding that you both had to look ahead and make it work , if only for the sake of appearances, the family name and the baby or two that tended to add purpose to all that. The bell rang a third time. Mirella glimpsed Mauro in belted jeans but bare chested, his wet hair well down the nape of his neck, go to the door, towel in hand. Mirella got up and stood in the bedroom doorway, just a few feet from where Mauro was letting in his friend Giovanni Muro. Muro was even younger than Mauro but while clearly not Mauro’s equal, he seemed nevertheless capable of exerting real influence on her boyfriend, in a way that Mirella found particularly vexing. Muro passed to Mauro an album by the Keith Tippett Group . Mauro, having looked at the gate-fold cover across which there was printed a striking drawing of a young woman’s head, thanked Muro and put it on the mantelpiece in the front room. Mirella was aware that her dressing down was barely covering her right breast but equally she knew that that would discomfort Muro as he passed by, so she did not attempt to cover herself up. But she was wrong , as by then Muro had seen and studied a number of Mauro’s nude photographic portraits of his girlfriend, including a set that mimicked well-known nude portraits by painters such as Manet, Picasso and Freud , and ,as a consequence ,Muro did not appear to be discomforted in being so close to contact with her nakedness. “Ah I see Mauro that Aphrodite arises” Muro said to Mauro, “...or is it the lovely Lady Caroline? Either way, enchanted, as ever.” Mauro laughed , while Muro deftly went to take Mirella’s hand and take it to his lips. But Mirella was not having any of it and having not seen the joke, turned away, back into the bedroom , shutting the door behind her. Sometime later Mauro and Muro had left. Mauro had been asked by his paper to cover a concert being given by an English band called Genesis that night in a sports hall outside Lugo, a small town some way to the south, near Ravenna, and had suggested to Muro that he come along. But before they went to Lugo the plan was to take a detour to try and photograph the Medicina Radio Telescope to the north west of Bologna. Although the Medicina array was in a very remote area it was far from unknown, even to Giovanni , who had little interest in the related science or engineering, as it had been used as a setting for a scene in Antonioni’s Red Desert and had also been the subject of a celebrated photograph by the Venetian member of the “Gondolier” neo-realist photography group, Paulo Monti. Mauro had the idea of using it as a context for his article on the Genesis concert and he hoped to capture in the site’s outreaching steel arms, haunted by fugitive sound waves and, ideally, framed against an atmospheric background sky, the eerie yearning for the immanent and the attentive openness to the hard to see that he found in Genesis’ music. This was to prove prescient as some six months later Genesis would record and release a track called “Watcher of the Skies”, that almost exactly embodied what Mauro had been looking for in his photograph, although on that day in mid April 1972 he was unable to take a shot at Medicina that captured what he had in his mind as the scale of the telescope in the flat land was too large for his fairly basic lenses and the cloud cover never resolved itself into a striking backdrop to the composition . However the dark wooden shed that had seemed to intrigue Antonioni was still there albeit a bit dilapidated and Mauro took some photographs of that. Then as they were trudging back towards the car they came upon a deep excavation in the turned soil of the field that surrounded the observatory, as if some workmen had dug a sample pit and then abandoned it. The pit had some water in the bottom but nevertheless Mauro managed to persuade Muro to clamber down into it, whereupon Mauro , crouching down, his camera close to the soil, took a series of photos of him stretching up and crouching down, that were not unlike Keith Arnatt’s photographic series “Television Interference Project, self burial” of more or less the same time. But despite the similarities and near coincidence of their production, given that each was ignorant of the other and both lacked a common , generative source of influence, the fact of Arnatt’s and Mauro’s photographs coming into existence at the same time without any apparent agency or influence should not be seen in this case as being a manifestation of some epochal “universalising equivalence”. It just happened. It would be some 12 years or so before Muro would see those photographs ,when , helping to clear-out Mauro’s stuff. Seeing the prints he looked back at himself and re-remembered those moments ,now seeing the occasion in a different way . Prior to opening up Mauro’s box Giovanni had associated that episode ,more than anything else , with his senses being filled with the pungent smell of the damp, clay based soil, especially when he had crouched down until his nose was below the rim ,the endless horizon before him as he had peered out from so low down and the growing chill and dampness seeping into his shoes. But now he could see that more had been at stake that day and that Mauro had seized the chance to make a point at Giovanni’s expense. Later , in the early evening, after another diversion, this time to the small , stranded town of Classe, south of Ravenna, to experience the church of San Apollinaire ( where in the kiosk Giovanni had found a number of old monochrome postcards , originally printed for sale by Ravenna’s museum, and had bought one , showing an image of a mosaic in San Vitale, even though he had never been there, because the figure on the left could have been a portrait of him as he imagined himself to have been a few years previously), before driving a couple of kilometres to the coast in a fruitless search for the location of the quay where Antonioni and Carlo Di Palma had filmed the sinister freight ship in Red Desert, wreathed in mist, they had reached the “Hit Parade” club outside Lugo , which had been packed. The concert had started quite slowly as if the band were pacing themselves and , now that the room was so full, testing the acoustics. The crowd was very supportative and good natured, if a bit vocal and in between the songs the singer, Peter Gabriel, had tried to engage them in somewhat halting Italian. But as the concert progressed and despite the drummer’s kit at one stage failing, the experience within the hall had somehow built into an immersive , immense release of suppressed emotions and yearnings , offered up by the crowd and given flight ,expression and dignity through sound and word, words that while, at times ,hard to catch , as they reverberated and echoed in the hard-walled hall and the narrative meaning was often hard to grasp, were incantatory and gnomic , Gabriel’s voice and body switching between tones and postures of youthful bravado to angry frustration . By the time the band reached what proved to be the climax of a track called The Musical Box Giovanni, like the crowd at large, was blindly and unconsciously enthralled ,and when Gabriel cried out at the end of the song with the repeated refrain “Why don’t you touch me?” Giovanni felt that it was as if it was his younger self, that he was now separated from, asking the same question but to something immense and exterior to his current being (fate ? Godhead? inspiration ? the feminine? the thing that meant everything else that was not him…?), asking to be chosen, to be singled out , to confirm that there was a purpose that had been picked out for him and that his life somehow answered a need of the world ,or of someone or of something in it , other than his own need to survive. Meanwhile Mauro had been taking his pictures and making his notes, at least in the early part of the evening. But between “Stagnation” and “The fountain of Salmacis”, Mauro had slipped away from Muro, who saw him easing forward towards the stage, his lank hair and jacket almost indistinguishable from that of the many other guys in their early 20’s who were crowded into the hall, one of whom was to later sell him some pills wrapped up in blue paper which at first made him feel wondrous , but later not so good. ..................................... As Mauro and Muro had headed out through the suburbs of Mestre in Mauro’s car, Mirella had sat in the front room. The shutters were now drawn back and ,even though it was still early morning and despite the lack of direct sunlight , the room was sufficiently well lit from the windows that she did not need the electric light. Through Mirella’s eyes , the room was now just a room, furnished and tidy, rather than part of her home. She looked about , taking in the details one last time. Her hand brushed the fabric of the settee she was sitting on, that she and Mauro had bought together from the shop that had a parrot in a cage in the corner when they had first moved in as her eyes flicked from item to item. On the mantelpiece, tucked behind a flower vase that her sister had given to her, was a postcard of a painting by Pierre Bonnard. Of course the market had sought to universalise the image by naming it “Nude crouching in the Tub”, but here , as so often else, before the nude there had been a naked woman, in this case Marthe, then Bonnard’s lover, only later his wife. It was a painting based upon a black and white photograph that Bonnard had taken of Marthe, only the right arm ”re-arranged” in the final version of the painting and, of course the black and white substituted by his trade-mark saturated colour , which was another way that Bonnard had covered his domestic tracks. “ Marthe, the painter’s companion, having a wash- have a good, long look” would have been a better title. Somewhere, Mauro had a photograph of Mirella, taken in a similar pose , and having the postcard out on view had been their private joke. Maybe not any more. Moving along the mantelpiece Mirella’s eye fell upon the Keith Tippett album with its pop art , day-glo, faux-surrealism depicting a Ragazza’s head in profile, with a brain in the form of a foetus, and the album’s title, “ Dedicated to you but you weren’t listening” , akin to a speech bubble placed beyond her mouth. Mirella got up and walked over to the mantelpiece where Mauro had left it, picked it up , along with the postcard, and examined the album’s cover, before casting the latter aside on the nearby table. Then she went back into the bedroom , dragged out a couple of suitcases from beneath the bed, packed and a little while later left , leaving the postcard ,now with a note written on the back, on the table.