Hiding in Plain Sight

3

In her hotel room, Bella takes a shower. Drying herself, she stands on the tips of her toes, craning her neck as though to see something beyond the scope of the mirror. She is a dark-eyed beauty with a prominent nose, heavier in the chest than she likes because of the attention it draws from men, even though she is overjoyed that she boasts the slimmest of waists for a woman her age and an African’s high buttocks. Drop-dead gorgeous, she also strikes most people as charming, well read, and intelligent.

Which of her names goes with which of her attributes? She is a woman whose disposition is rarely at variance with other people’s assumptions. She only reaches for the unattainable when it comes to photography, where her ambitions soar. And yet, not only as a woman but also as a Somali woman, she has had to defy harsh social conditioning to establish herself as a person equal in all respects to a man.

She puts on a robe and starts to unpack, but she makes very little headway, distracted as she is by several loose photographs of Aar that fall onto the table and floor. He is in different situations and in the company of different people, including his children, the photos having been taken when they met in Istanbul during what would turn out to be his final holiday. She looks at one of the photographs and remembers that somewhere she read that the French philosopher Roland Barthes thought that an interest in photography points to a preoccupation with death because it attests to the past existence of an object, person, or image in a never-ending present, but not necessarily to its continued existence.

Now, as Bella holds Aar’s photograph before her, her mind wanders from where she stands to engage with a distant past, where she interrogates the meaning and quality of a life that Aar had been an essential constituent in. In the photograph, Aar stands before the Hagia Sophia Museum, the sun in his eyes, facing Bella as she takes his picture, the thought of death the furthest thing from their minds. But now, looking at the photograph and studying it with death-inspired intensity, Bella senses that the two of them were in a sense preparing for death. Otherwise, why take a photograph in front of a museum representing a distant era that is no longer part of anyone’s present? That is to say, this photo, taken barely a year ago, now serves as a witness. And she listens to herself saying, as though to another, “Here we were, my brother and I, in Istanbul, marking our existence with this photograph, which now attests to his death.” A question: Can one accept the existence of anything unless one can represent it in some form or image?

—

Of the many apocryphal tales about Bella, this is the one Hurdo repeated most often: Unlike other babies, she was not born with the residue of birth smeared all over her. Nor did she announce her arrival with the usual primeval cry. Instead, she emerged from the womb with a shock of long jet-black hair and an even-tempered, almost professional expression that put Marcella in mind of a competitive swimmer emerging from a pool after a hard workout.

Digaaleh suspected from the beginning that he was not the father. Indeed, very quickly the rumors circulating gained so much momentum that he couldn’t ignore them. This did not improve his marriage, but to everyone’s surprise, he continued to put on a good show despite his obvious loss of face. He neither spoke ill of Hurdo in public nor accused her in private. He treated Aar and Bella equally as his offspring, and behaved civilly to Giorgio Fiori. Only Fiori’s wife, who had remained in Bologna with their son, found his fling unpardonable. As if to prove that all cats are not gray in the dark, she filed for divorce within a year of his return to Italy.

Hurdo, for her part, believing that a child’s happiness is built on a parent’s small gestures, devoted herself to the newborn, and in return, Bella gave her reasons for joy and a hopeful perspective on not only her daughter’s future but also her own. Aar, now twelve, had longed for a sister, and he too reveled in Bella’s presence. He was highly protective of her, even reprimanding his parents if Bella fussed in her crib and neither of them went to comfort her. When she was awake, he could be found sitting beside her, cooing sweet nothings to her. Once, when Bella took ill, Aar refused to go to school and nothing would make him leave her bedside, where he kept feeling her pulse, taking her temperature, or touching her forehead. When asked how his absence should be explained to his headmaster, he said to write that he was too sick to attend school; he couldn’t be well if Bella wasn’t.

When he had done anything to upset his mother, Aar learned that extra attentiveness to his sister would soften Hurdo toward him. They were a threesome, Hurdo, Aar, and Bella, flourishing together, never allowing anyone to come between them. For the first three years of Bella’s life, they lived just as they pleased, with no boundaries. And Bella appeared to benefit from their unusual closeness. She sat up at five months, had her first teeth at six, crawled at seven, and walked before her ninth month.

Yet Hurdo was aware that life couldn’t go on like this forever, with the three of them continually in one another’s hair, and she knew she would have to put a stop to some of Aar’s boyish mischief. In self-admonishment, she repeated to herself the Somali proverb that a parent must refrain from showing her smiling teeth to her children lest her children start showing their naked bums. Gradually, she began to introduce some order into their lives.

Bella continued to thrive. The world is at my daughter’s service and everyone in it is at her feet, Hurdo would say. Other children seemed to be infatuated with her. They threw tantrums when their parents arrived to fetch them home, crying their hearts out and insisting on staying longer and speaking of their wish to sleep in Bella’s room. Yet the moment Aar came home from school, Bella lost interest in them. Sometimes she would shoo them away disdainfully so that she could follow Aar around, going where he went and sitting where he sat, endlessly telling him things. At five or six, she threatened to kill any girls she imagined as rivals for Aar’s affection. In his absence, she often complained of feeling hunger. Asked what she craved, she would say that she longed for his return. Yet no amount of his indulgence seemed to satisfy her; Hurdo said he had the patience of a saint.

Hurdo spoke of her daughter’s attachment as a form of infatuation, comparing it to an infatuation she remembered from her own childhood. “When I was three,” Hurdo recounted to Marcella, “I felt drawn to a boy my age. My parents and the boy’s parents were amused at first. Then came the time when my parents and the boy’s parents quipped that the boy and I would marry.”

Marcella said, “Still, to experience love as hunger is a brilliant way of dealing with a complicated emotion. How apt! Your daughter is very smart.”

“Among Somalis,” Hurdo explained, “love is looked upon as an affliction, a sickness for which there is no cure. We believe that love is unattainable because true desire is impossible.”

Marcella thought that Bella’s childhood crush on her brother might make her the kind of woman men fell for and women were wary of, even hated by them. And Hurdo too worried that the intensity of Bella’s feelings for her brother were such that she might never allow herself to fall in love with anyone else.

But what was there to do? They would just have to see what would happen. And the bond between Bella and Aar stayed unbroken until Aar fell in love with a girl in Rome, and Bella went ballistic. Hurdo’s every attempt to explain things only made matters worse. Always a bad eater, Bella became anorexic, in the terrifying grip of a hunger that to her was synonymous with pining.

Eventually, her despair abated, when, thanks to a photograph of her that appeared in a fancy Sunday supplement published in Rome, she became a celebrity and began to earn a lot of money as a teen model. Bella had the uncanny ability to make her eyes flame a metallic green, and what with her exceptional looks and captivating smile, several agencies vied to represent her. After consulting Hurdo, Fiori negotiated a very favorable agreement with her with one of the best-known of them. Hurdo was not surprised when Digaaleh rang them from Mogadiscio, raising his objections, disconsolately comparing Bella’s work and the exploitation of her image to prostitution. Hurdo let him fume, seeing his reaction as that of a typical Somali father and knowing he could do nothing to stop Bella from pursuing her heart’s pleasure, while earning good money to boot.

Digaaleh, however, insisted she had misunderstood his intentions. “Essentially, it depends whether one sees Bella as Somali and therefore Muslim — and Muslims don’t go into modeling or exploit their image in exchange for cash — or Italian and therefore free to do as she pleases.” But Hurdo cut him off, saying that Bella was indeed a free person, able to make her own choices in life, and that no one had the right to impose their cultural or religious dictates on her just because she hadn’t yet attained the age of majority.

“I don’t wish Giorgio to decide her fate,” Digaaleh said.

“Well, if it comes to that, he will,” Hurdo retorted, “because he is her father.” Then she was hung up on him — and not long after, word came from Mogadiscio that he had died. And it wasn’t until many years later, at Giorgio Fiori’s funeral, that Bella heard about this heated exchange, from Marcella.

Bella has long been of the belief that there are no people on earth more narrow-minded or chauvinistic than Somalis, for whom appearances — the clothes one wears, the way one moves — matter enormously, especially when it comes to women. She recalls too that when she took up smoking and dressing in jeans, the Somalis she met in Rome, or Toronto whenever she visited, found both habits provocative and offensive in equal measure. (Looking at her fingers now, she can still see them in her memory as they were: stained brown with nicotine, as she held a fresh cigarette between them, lighting it with the butt of the previous one.)

—

It was Giorgio Fiori who sparked what would become Bella’s true vocation, for it was in his house that she saw the first piece of art that ever took her fancy — the inspiration for making art herself. It was a carving from the Dogon in Mali — a simple figure with a cylindrical body, rods for arms, broken bits of colored glass for eyes, thrown together as if in haste — that she had glimpsed in silhouette at dusk in the house he rented during one of his intermittent teaching stints in Mogadiscio during her childhood. The natural light was fading and the electric lamps had not yet come on. The carving struck her as the most beautiful thing she had ever seen or held in her hand; she was very impressionable.

She did not know then that Fiori was her mother’s secret lover, but as she held the piece, admiring its detail, she admired its owner by extension for choosing a work of such finesse. From that moment she began to adore him and to love her mother all the more for the adoration she sensed in her.

Fiori had other pieces too, which he would show her later. By then she knew that he was her father; speaking in Somali, he told her that he’d kept them hidden away from the prying eyes of the Somalis when he lived there, not knowing what impression the carvings might make on such an unlearned lot. As Muslims, perhaps they’d have accused him of engaging in idol worship. But none of the pieces, much as she admired them, inspired the same reaction as that first piece. She’d wanted to possess it, pure and simple. Of course she could have it, Giorgio said. Hurdo tried to persuade Bella to withdraw her demand, but Bella wouldn’t back down. Hurdo explained that the piece was one of a series and Giorgio’s favorite, and that it would upset the balance if the piece was separated from the rest. Nothing doing: Bella wanted that one and no other. In the end, she accepted a compromise: She could borrow the piece for a month and keep it in her room on her windowsill provided she took good care of it. Bella charged headlong into Giorgio, hugging him and blurting her thanks.

Each night, Bella went to sleep with the piece in her sight, and it was the first thing she looked at when she woke. It made her feel fulfilled, joyful, satisfied with life. She worked harder in school, earned better marks, and became more purposeful and organized. She volunteered to do the dishes when it was her turn without talking back to her mother. Giorgio couldn’t make sense of his daughter’s infatuation and predicted that it would be no more than a passing fad, like several others she’d gone through. But neither her devotion to the piece nor her interest in art nor her newfound sense of purpose and discipline wavered.

It was then that Aar bought her a Polaroid camera. She began to draw too, copying the sculpture in crayon from different angles. And then she began to photograph it with the Polaroid, shooting it again and again, as though possessed. One day, Aar walked in on her when she was at work, unwashed, sweaty, her room a mess. As she worked with unbreakable concentration, she looked like someone in another world. For the first time it occurred to him that with proper support she might become a serious photographer.

Next Aar bought her an inexpensive point-and-shoot, and she began to learn which camera to use to get the effects she was after. When the cost of developing the flood of photos she was taking became more than they could afford, Giorgio introduced her to an Italian colleague who trained her to develop her own negatives and helped her to set up her own darkroom in a closet, with Giorgio covering the outlay for materials as a gift for Bella’s twelfth birthday.

With a view to becoming self-reliant, Bella began to photograph weddings and other occasions. At first she did so free of charge while she mastered the art of taking photos of unruly revelers in crowded circumstances. Next, she learned to take portraits outdoors because she had no studio. She noted that when people posed for portraits a different self came to the fore, a self behind the self they wished to present to others. And Bella discovered that the longer she held off before clicking the shutter, the more this hidden self emerged. She learned to wait for this hidden, this authentic self to emerge, surfacing after a display of nerves and fidgeting.

From childhood, Bella had wanted to free herself from her parents’ constraints and blackmailing maneuvers, and she was determined to make her own way in the world, working hard and doing well in whatever profession she chose. At eighteen, Bella apprenticed herself to a photographer friend of her Neapolitan lover. With Fiori prepared to buy her the expensive cameras she required, she was able to set her mind on pursuing her vocation.

Yet even as she became successful, Bella remained dissatisfied with the companionship on offer. Always a picky eater, who at her heaviest weighed no more than forty-five kilos, she boasted of a waistline so thin that her first boyfriend, the Neapolitan cameraman, told her she looked like a waif who needing a little fattening. This put Bella in mind of a cow being pumped with supplements to make sure it fetched the highest price, and she showed the boyfriend the door — though not before he made a jibe about her incestuous relationship with her brother, whose name she had mentioned at every possible opportunity. She fired back, “And you are nowhere near as good, as lovable, as caring, or even as amusing as he. So be off with you!”

She continued to be romantically sought after, but no man seemed to suffice. Over time, she discovered, first to her disbelief and then to her amusement, that she was not jealous if a man she was with ogled other women or made passes at them in her presence, reasoning that neither the men nor the women they noticed mattered enough to justify her jealousy or disappointment. By the time Aar married Valerie, Bella had evolved her fantasy. She would have three lovers, she decided: one of them very, very handsome; another (with whom she would have at least one child) who was very, very intelligent; and for the third, she would choose a stud — a well-hung partner with whom she would enjoy sex. Little by little, the fantasy became reality.

HandsomeBoy was first. Bella met him on one of her first major freelance assignments, which involved shooting photographs of models and animals in Kenya for clothing businesses with Italian connections. HandsomeBoy had moved from his natal hamlet near the Tanzanian border to study sociology at the University of Nairobi. He worked part-time as a model to pay for his education. If asked, he and Bella wouldn’t agree on which of them fell for the other first, each claiming to be the one to do so, such was their immediate attraction.

Her appreciation for sculpture persisted, and it was at a gallery show that she met Humboldt on a visit to her mother and brother in Toronto. A successful Brazilian sculptor of African descent, Humboldt was based in Rio and traveled the world as Bella did. He became her second lover, and the sex was great. In those days, nothing else mattered much, and neither of them had the desire to enter into a long-term relationship. Since then, they meet as their schedules permit, in hotels in various cities, for a week, for a day.

Five years into this second relationship, on a day when she was in New York, she attended a lecture by Cisse Drahme, a Malian philosopher of note. He was speaking on “The Wonders of Dogon Astronomy,” and after the lecture, she was invited to join a group at a bar, which led to a dinner for two and then a meeting of the minds that has blossomed for more than ten years. And thus Bella fulfilled her fantasy of three lovers.

Within reason, any of them would drop what he is doing and go where she chooses to meet up with her. She has keys to their houses or apartments, and she can come and go as she pleases, while none of them even has her exact address. All they know is that she lives in Rome. The arrangement has served Bella very well. She has had to curb neither her love life nor her professional ambitions. But now?

—

A journalist for an Italian daily newspaper once asked Bella, “What makes you think that a nervous subject makes a more interesting photo than a calm one?” And Bella replied, “As a child, when I had to get a shot, I feared the jab of the needle, just as I hated the nurse saying not to think about the pain. I mean to wait until the person photographed no longer thinks of what I am doing. That way, I am in charge. And I like being in charge, in total control.”

The journalist asked, “Do you believe that photography is a matter of power, with the photographer lording it over the subject? Is this what you are trying to say?”

That was indeed how Bella felt. “I like to think that my subjects are as powerless as a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.”

“Isn’t that an unhealthy attitude to hold?”

“I am a woman,” Bella explained, “and a Somali one at that.”

“How do you mean?” the journalist asked.

Bella found it difficult to explain, but she tried. She talked about how the colonized Asians, Africans, North American Indians, and Australian aboriginals had been eroticized and trivialized by their colonizers. And just as American photographers produced naked portraits of Native Americans or Africans for the tourist trade, women photographed in the nude were put to similar service. Bella asked, “If that is not power that allows the mighty to lord over the weak, I don’t know what is.”

But lately, the journalist observed, Bella had been photographing children more and more, especially Somali children. Why was that?

Bella pointed out that she had never photographed anyone in the nude or eroticized any of her subjects. “Please note,” she said, “that I make sure they look straight into the camera. I let them laugh and gesticulate naturally instead of shaping their bodies into objects of desire.”

“When does photography become art?” the journalist asked.

The photographer achieved the status of artist by virtue of his lenses, his choice of paper, his mastery of printing and tone, Bella said. And she spoke of her favorite photographers, many of whom were also painters, and the works she regarded as their masterpieces, such as Stieglitz’s The Terminal and the nude portraits he’d made of his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe. For a time, early on in her career, he’d been the only photographer she idolized. But the more Bella developed her own style, the wider the range of photographers she admired. Still, she remained partial to the photo, which reminded her of a painting. She had always believed that photography owes its existence to painting. “I would like my photographs to think of their favorite painters,” she said.

The journalist pointed out that Somalis, whether male or female, are physically reserved. “They are undemonstrative. It is as if they have never heard of sexual freedom, with parents shying away from standing even half nude in front of their children. The body, whether female or male, is in chains.”

Given the opportunity, and unlimited funding, the journalist asks, what photographic project would she be eager to embark on?

Bella smiled and shook her head. “I wonder if there is any point in answering your question, which I take to be nothing but a sort of a trap.”

“Let me ask it in a different way,” said the journalist. “Who would you rather be, a Sebastião Salgado or a Robert Mapplethorpe, given the chance?”

“A Sebastião Salgado any day.”

“Why?”

“Because I would start my own series about the end of women’s manual labor,” Bella replied.

The truth is, Bella did photograph her lovers in the nude before she was intimate with them, but she will never discuss this. She believes this affirms her power over them. As she prepares them to sit for her, she watches them from behind the camera lens, intently waiting and deliberately making them nervous before her finger presses the shutter.

Nor does she share with her interviewer the shock and then the amusement she experienced when, in a hotel in New York where she was staying, she found a Mapplethorpe book of black male portraits in the nude where a Gideon Bible would normally be. Did she like what she saw? Did she think that what she saw was art? She wasn’t sure. Of course, she wouldn’t deny there was novelty in doing what Mapplethorpe did, and she admired the way he’d made his own niche, in both the market and the art of photography. But she wasn’t so sure that what he was doing was any different from the titillating nude photographs so many photographers had taken of so many women.

“Who in your experience is the most difficult subject to photograph?” the journalist had asked.

“The eye of the camera sees what is in front of it, and it records the moment it captures truthfully,” Bella replied. “However, it may have difficulties in fronting impossible situations. My mother hated being photographed despite knowing that there was nothing more pleasing to me than taking her picture. So I would say she was the most impossible subject to photograph.”

“And who is the most delightful subject to photograph?” the journalist asked.

That one was easy. “Aar, my brother, and his children,” Bella had answered.