The Darkroom -- Part II

Not just a message, but a destination

Photo by Francisco Gonzalez on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Read Part I here

Viviana asked whether I had told anybody else. I had kept it to myself until I was certain it wasn’t all just a product of my imagination. Plus, no one would believe me -- who could be certain that I had never visited those places, or that I didn’t know those people, or that the three moons weren’t a photoshop trick? No, you’re the first one, I replied, without sharing the rest. She was quiet for what felt like a long while, although maybe it was just a few seconds, during which she sipped her tea, her eyes above the rim of the cup darting around to check whether anyone could hear. Then she set the cup down with a deliberate clink, perhaps to draw my attention to whatever she was going to say next, some kind of abstract invisible colon. So why did you think I’d believe you, she asked in a barely audible voice, as if reading my thoughts, and embarrassed to even ask. It came across as something she said out of obligation rather than conviction, while looking down at her fingers nervously playing with the edge of a paper napkin. I didn’t think you’d believe me, I said. But at least you’d give me all the time I needed to tell the whole story, a luxury no one else would grant me, probably. Isn’t it much easier to dismiss this as crazy right away, after the first ten seconds tops? It is crazy but I know you’re not, she concluded, laconically. Then her phone rang and, holding it between ear and shoulder while putting her coat back on, she silently mouthed a gotta run, waved me goodbye, and left.

Have you tried shooting two brand new rolls of the same subject, developing one yourself, and taking the other to a lab, she said when she called a couple of hours later, picking up where we left off without even saying hi. She was walking somewhere, I could tell, in a rush as always. No, I hadn’t tried that. She sounded excited to volunteer as the subject, her point being that it’d be important to know whether these photos appeared only when I developed them myself. I hadn’t thought about this.

These are visual messages intended only for you; no one else is supposed to see them, she said, looking at the two sets of developed photos: one by the lab, picturing her color portraits exactly as I had shot them, and the other by me, showing a sequence of twenty-four black and white poses, all depicting that mysterious white house at the end of an unpaved winding road, somewhere in a valley preceding pine-covered hills, with mountains in the background. She examined the photos with forensic attention under the warm glow of my desk lamp, and didn’t seem too unsettled by this whole phenomenon.

I had met Viviana many years prior, back when I was still searching for stories with women who might save me, back when I felt I wasn’t enough for myself. I remember the title of the book she had left at Gianni’s house that evening in November: The Life and Works of Oscar Amalfitano. She was sitting next to me at the dinner table, wearing a red sweater she had knitted herself; she pointed it out by showing me the cuffs, which were larger than usual. What struck me about her was that she didn’t ask what I did for a living and that she listened intently. Before arriving there, she told me she had stopped by a small used bookstore called Books and Shadows, which had recently opened and specialized in mysterious stories of mysterious characters. Later, when we got up from the table, I lost sight of her, and at the end of the evening, just as I was about to leave, I noticed her book on the console table in the entryway. I told Gianni that I knew it was hers and asked if he could give me her number so I could get in touch to return it. A few days later, we met at the café on the corner of Via Vincenzo Monti and Largo V Alpini, and from that moment on, our lives had been inseparable. We never had a romantic relationship, although she was very attractive, and I would have very much liked it right when we started frequenting each other. But we spoke every day, or nearly so, and I didn’t feel the need to go beyond that -- not with her. Once, while we were both yawning in front of a movie we found uninteresting, she asked, Have you fallen in love with me?, with disarming naturalness.

Viviana had an effortlessly elegant presence that came across in ways that might seem insignificant to most. She spoke with precision, her words carefully chosen, her tone oscillating between teasing and deeply serious, and she often paused to entertain the improbable with no hint of fear or discomfort. She always seemed to be rushing somewhere, a sign of her restless intellectual energy. Despite her busy demeanor, she had an almost uncanny ability to focus intensely when something piqued her interest. She once told me that on her third birthday, her mother had planted a cherry tree that started bearing fruit twenty years later. They harvested the cherries and made jam, and everyone who ate it began having the same strange dreams, where messages in unknown languages were delivered by people they had never seen before. Nobody was ever capable of deciphering those messages, but everyone sensed they were urgent and important.

The photos sat in silence between us, their presence heavier than the rain that had started pouring outside. She looked at me for a long moment, her gaze sharpening into something almost analytical. But what’s the point of showing so many photos of the same landscape, with the same white house and everything else?, she finally said. Occasionally, other subjects appear, but for the most part you’ve been developing this exact same scene for months now. The only new element seems to be the old couple looking at something beyond the right side of the frame. What if this isn’t just a visual message, but a destination? A place someone or something’s been telling you to reach? I didn’t know what to say. She had a way of speaking that made even the strangest revelations feel like part of a broader, cosmic logic, yet her words also unsettled me in ways I couldn’t quite articulate.

That night, I dreamed of the house. But this time, instead of viewing the scene from far away, from where the photos had been taken, I was walking up the unpaved road. As I got near the house, I heard a distant voice saying, He learned the most awful thing there is to learn -- that life makes no sense.

And the front door was open.

[To be continued]

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