Object Relations

Saturday, August 23, 2014

    I still have not entirely emptied two little containers containing personal objects I brought from New York here.  They include photos of my grandparents.  They are distant figures I never knew: my grandmother died in La Coruña in 1939, probably of intestinal cancer, towards the end of the Spanish Civil War.  She was never able to escape with her husband, my mother and my mother's brother, because when she lived in the United States, she never bothered to become a naturalized American citizen, unlike her husband.  My mother and my uncle, having been born in Manhattan, were U.S. citizens and had no problem leaving with their father.

     The photo of her is a reconstituted black and white photo probably taken at the turn of the century, because she is wearing a floor-length skirt with a high-necked blouse, her hair in a pompadour.  It is a studio portrait, and she is shown standing, poised against a rickety-looking chair with three slats and a flimsy seat.

     The black and white photo of my grandfather is of him in New York, with his two daughters and my aunt Maruja's daughter, Carmen.  The photo was taken a few years after they all arrived in the United States in 1938, and before my mother married my father in 1950.  My mother was still taking care of her father and working thirty-five hours a week in a clothing factory, making "fine" ladies' coats.  All are seated on the grass and smiling broadly, although I would have to say my mother's smile outshines everyone else's in the photograph.

     I only met my grandfather twice: once in 1957, when my parents made their first visit to Spain after the end of the Civil War; and again, in 1965, when my grandfather was already bedridden and suffering from the uremia and other ailments that killed him three years later.  Not a nice man, he went back to Spain after my mother and father decided that he was impossible to live with.  A decision which was made under the pressure of circumstances: after two years of putting up with constant abuse from my grandfather, my father left for California without telling my mother where he was going.  My mother, not wishing to end the marriage, went to my father's friends and learned he had found a job in Oakland, California.  My mother gave her father his walking papers and followed my father to Oakland, where I was born, a year later.  My parents returned to New York five weeks after my birth, but by then my grandfather had decamped for La Coruña.  There he met Concha, a barmaid twenty-five years younger, whom he married, and who took care of him until he died, to the grudging relief of his children.

     Another photo is a tiny reproduction of a Degas painting exhibited in the Houston exhibit I attended about ten years ago.  The painting, "A Cotton Office In New Orleans", was painted by Degas in 1873, on a trip to visit his relatives, the Mussons.  The painting depicts the day the firm went bankrupt:  the firm was swamped by the growth of its rival, the Cotton Exchange.  Degas' Musson cousin is seen examining raw cotton for its quality , while Degas' brother Réné reads "The Daily Picayune, which carried the bankruptcy announcement.  Another brother, Achille, rests against a window wall at left while others, including Musson's partners, go about their business.

     The painting was bought by the Musée des Beaux Arts in Pau, in France's Pyrenées, where it has remained.  The painting was the first of Degas' paintings to  bought by a museum, and marked a major turning point in Degas' career, marking the transition from struggling artist to successful painter.

      The reproduction, which is glossy, sits on a stand on a shelf in the toilet, surrounded by books in French and English.  When I look at it, I remember that I purchased it on a side trip to the Fine Arts Museum in Houston when I was attending a conference of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was a sister-agency to the one I managed, the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

      All the objects I treasure have mnemonic properties.  It's not so much the object itself that has value --although I never buy anything I don't think has some beauty-- it's the memories the object triggers.  I look at the photos of my grandparents and the family history comes back to mind, but when I look at "A Cotton Office In New Orleans" I remember my own, and feel good inside.  

     Which is why it hasn't been enough to merely furnish this house with seating and beds and appliances.  It has to have my "thumbprint", in the form of the objects associated with me.  Once again, I'm struck my the awareness that, much as I love this house and living in the Minervois, my heart is American, and specifically that of a New Yorker's.

     --Which is why the toilet seat I bought in Carcassonne for the downstairs bathroom bears the image of the Central Savings Bank Building on Broadway and 72nd Street, not far from where I grew up on 65th Street between Central Park West and Columbus.  What a find!