11) The sin that does not materialize

The sin that does not materialize

Back to the slides, Ponza 1984 for sure this time. Ponza is a small island in the Thyrrenian Sea west of Italy, situated roughly between Rome and Naples.

The few things Chantal and Marike have in common are their love for Italy and their capacity to speak Italian like a native. Travelling with your personal interpreter is a sheer delight. It opens hidden doors like when we ask an old lady in a remote mountain village “Do you know a place where we can have some coffee here?” She smiles and answers: “At my home of course”.  We cannot leave without a bag full of homemade cookies.

Italians contrary to Frenchmen, in my experience, are social and talkative, especially towards attractive ladies. Another thing Chantal and Marike have in common. So there we are waiting on a platform of Roma Termini Station when an old gentleman approaches us. Where do we go to? Ponza? What a pity you are leaving Rome now as a great tenor will sing in the opera house.

Another gentleman passes by and overhearing the name of the tenor mingles in the discussion saying “and what a pity he won’t sing the aria from” he names an opera of Verdi. The first gentleman agrees and all of a sudden both men burst into singing. Afterwards they salute each other and us and go their separate ways. Two young Italians also heading for Ponza grin and say: ‘This is Italy’.

The slides only show us sunbathing.

It shows also on one slide behind me part of a young man. The guy we have met in Roma Termini Station. He is travelling with his niece, a gorgeous looking girl. When we finally arrive in Ponza and find a hotel after a long and hot day Chantal is so tired she goes to bed immediately. As I stand in our corridor the girl from Termini Station enters our hotel-room. She leans against the wall and sighs with her eyes closed and lips half open.

I am in my swimming trunks and she is in bikini. I am upset as I am afraid she will faint. But when she opens her eyes after a few seconds she appears to be angry and leaves without a word.

10) The things we use

10) The things we use

Back to the slides. What have I got here? On the slide rail that says ‘Gran Canaria’ I’m confronted by a riddle. The first slide shows a tent in mountainous terrain, high tops in the far distance and among huge boulders our tent. One of our tents, the Fjällraven, beautiful tent, sturdy, easy to set up, spacey, but heavy. How does it end up in the mountains? As far as my memory will allow me to travel we use the small and lightweight Eureka Moonshadow when walking in the mountains.

The sight of the tent makes me realize equipment is important. Don’t show the surroundings, don’t show the view from a summit. Show the things you use, the jacket you wear, your headgear. What kind of stove to cook on. Things that get outdated but are considered top of the bill when you use them. All of a sudden I see we camped long before fleece or goretex became commonplace.

Did we use the Fjällraven before the Moonshadow? Then the trek must have been quite strenuous indeed.

But is it really Gran Canaria?

After the mountains we see a gentle slope with a primitive church and a lady leading a small herd of cows along a narrow path through a pine forest. This can easily be a picture made somewhere in the Alps.

Another indication of time is the map. Chantal reads a map that looks like a photocopy. Wish I could see that map. In the beginning of our travels maps were a problem. Hard to come by and expensive. Sometimes we use photocopies instead. But what strikes me is her backpack. That’s the one I carried in Indonesia in 1978.

It is a cross between a suitcase and a backpack, more a bag then a backpack. The fibre is cordura and it has lots of zips. We think we will look less like hippies in Indonesia if we carry this bag because you can hide the straps and let it look like a respectable suitcase. With a lot of fantasy that is. Back to the slides:

A meandering river in a caldeira?

A view from a window?

An ass standing in front of a church?

Where or when did we take these pictures?

Their maybe an answer to that.

Chantal leaves me with a stack of diaries. Next to an avid photographer she is a meticulous reporter. Her writings can shed light on a lot of these slides. The letters she writes me I keep and I have no problem reading her handwriting. But as yet I cannot set myself to read her diaries.

They are not meant for me. Notes for your diary are letters to yourself. They are hers. For her eyes only. That shows I’m not a detached historian of my life. With diaries from somebody-else I will not have these qualms.

I must admit. I once leafed through a diary. It is the diary of Evelyn. After I have found her in our apartment with her arm in a bucket of water and blood. It is a cry for help I cannot prevent nor answer. Her older brother comes to our place and takes her home. A week later he fetches her belongings. He forgets her diaries. They are in the bookcase.  Only when he ask me for them do I see them. I cannot resist leaving through them. To my horror I am not mentioned once.

Is it because of the slides? I don’t know, but I dream of Chantal. We are travelling and she has to get out of the train. I lose sight of her and have to continue travelling on my own. It is inconvenient and I feel abandoned. But I feel also a consolation as I know I will see her again at the end of the trip.

9) Diaries closed with a moral key

9) Diaries closed with a moral key

But again what do I want to show my children? Okay, that a life without them can be rewarding. Sure I was happy with Chantal. I mean, look at our faces. There we are in the middle of nowhere miles and miles away from any human activity. Tremendous views and not a living soul as far as the eye reaches.

But how can I convey the happiness of walking?

To start with nothing can surpass the peace in the pace of walking. The distance that comes slowly nearer showing more and more details. What appears to be barren slowly sprouts stunted trees, bushes, grassy knolls. What is forbidden from afar becomes habitable  and at last you see signs of life. You see mountain groundhogs, birds and the occasional mountain-goat.

Walking is caressing the earth with your feet. The imperceptible changes in the landscape that prepare you for bigger boulders and steep ravines. The colour of far away mountain-flanks hints at scree and the danger of sprained ankles.

How I can long for these walks still. The days filled with little pains and huge rewards. The lingering fear that a pain hidden in my ankle will make walking impossible. A fear that will be forgotten when later on a nagging pain behind my left knee evolves. Later in the afternoon still a hip-joint from which a sudden jolt disturbs me.

All discomforts of walking surpassed by itching under my cap. But all is forgotten when we find a secluded camping-site and set up our tent. After topping our meal with coffee we fall into the blissful abyss of painless sleep.

8) Remember the first turn

8) Remember the first turn

Switzerland 1969 sees me walking for the first time in mountainous terrain. Not with Chantal but with another girlfriend, Evelyn. My life with Chantal is still years away. After the very first day of walking I can hardly breath because of severe chest-pain.

I’m bred on the flatlands of Holland. A hill of three-hundred metres is called a mountain here. Switzerland offers the uninitiated nightmares. Every time we reach a slope that seems to disappear in an abyss I hold my breath. That fear hits me so often that it causes muscle pain in the end. I won’t admit it but I suffer from fear of heights.

On black and white photo’s you can see Evelyn and me roped together crossing a glacier somewhere in either Switzerland or France. Pickax sunk firmly in the snow, crampons under our boots, almost hugging the treacherous snow you can see us climb to a top.

Later still it is Annet with whom I go mountain walking. The fear of heights is still with me. I remember vividly that sinking feeling once in France as I see in the far distance our route carved into a mountain. A thin line incredible high above the valley. A path without any safety measures.

From that period few pictures remain. I find a picture of a temporary settlement of tents. Our tent farthest away. The tent into which Annet sees a viper slithering. Had she not seen him we would have gone to bed with the animal between our improvised pillows.

What will my girls think when they see Evelyn on a glacier or Annet sitting on a rock? They won’t recognize me as the pictures show me with long hair. I have hair in the first place! I have a drooping moustache and a tuft of hair under my lower lip. Later with Annet there appears an enormous bush of hair both on top of my head and among my mouth. Your face has to be hairy in the 60s and 70s. It shows you are left-wing, anti-establishment and probably a user of soft drugs.

Of course I’m glad to have these pictures. But the girls cannot possibly appreciate them the way I do. Forgetting for a minute the political and cultural context, I see the investment, the choices I have made.

Traversing a glacier for the first time can be the beginning of serious mountaineering. I learn rope tricks with which to help someone out of a crevasse, techniques to carry a friend with a broken leg and how to use your ice-axe as a brake. On the first mountain-pictures I am still on the threshold for more ambitious expeditions to  ‘four-thousanders’ as the beginning of the serious mountain-range is called. 
But one day in the French Alps we reach a mountain-hut near the summit of a mountain. We have walked all day, rain has found us and we are frozen when we enter the hut. There is already a company of mountaineers   when we arrive. French tour-guides and their clients, a boisterous group. Two things stand out immediately. Their gear is new and expensive. Bulky down-coats in blistering colours, the newest fashion in trousers and bodywarmers but it is not their gear that sets us apart. We are still walking in cotton T-shirts, baggy trousers or jeans cut at the knee. It is the way they look at us, their condescending stare that makes me realize mountain climbers look down upon other people. I choose the mountains not higher than three kilometres as the limit of my aspiration.

Even if it does limit your scope of climbing, basically you choose walking over climbing, it opens a still dazzling array of walking possibilities. But of course helping Evelyn out of a crevasse I don’t realize I jot out the Himalayas.

With Annet in the seventies I start to explore the Grande Randonnées of France. Almost no picture survives this period. Other people make pictures of us and sometime send them to us. No color-slides fortunately. Peace fills my heart as I don’t have to make choices what to keep and what to destroy.

7) Bliss cannot be registered

7) Bliss cannot be registered

We live in an age that makes it easy to register almost everything: sounds, images, movements. We can glue these temporary phenomena for eternity to tapes, disks, cassettes. Now image the treasure trove were we to find similar memorabilia of times long gone by.

Seventeenth century Dutchmen looking from the wall that protects their city to the Spaniards beneath. A Neanderthal family in front of a campfire. Romans boating on a lake. Celts gasping at the Colosseum. Just imagine the host of details that will intrigue us.

But our family in front of the TV, paddling across a pond or looking at the Eiffel tower, who would ever find that fascinating? I do of course. I still do. The kids will do so too I hope. So I keep them. But what of a life they have never been part of? My life with Chantal. ‘Look our father with eh, that must be Chantal I think?’

How do our travels start? Before we leave Amsterdam for the mountains Chantal and I read booklets and brochures. Internet does not exist. We ask the people in the travel-shop what they know about our destination. This shop will not be able to cope with Internet and is now long gone.

The people selling cards and maps are travellers themselves. You can ask them anything. When is the best time to go, what not to forget, what to wear. They know or else they know people who know. The door to their shop shows a bewildering array of notes: mate sought for camping trip; who wants to join our group of women cyclists? Tent, only used once.

We read and talk and prepare. Shall we take freeze-dried food with us? Nuts and chocolates? Raisins, high calorie food-bars? No food at all?

A trip to Italy, to France, to Spain. Walking, camping and making pictures. Color-slides in frames row after row that lay dormant for decades show our trips abroad.

And then, after a slide or two you sense already that the most rewarding places and moments have never been photographed. Like when we come upon a small church high in the Italian mountains, the Piedmonte, the foothills of the Alps. The door is locked but one of our books says the key is hidden behind a stone near the door. We find the key and make our way inside.

Wooden stairs lead us to an attic where we lay down our inflatable mattresses and our sleeping bags. We cook a simple meal on our stove. From the attic we look into the valley deep down. A few glimmering lights show where a hamlet is still inhabited. We top the meal with a watery pudding that tastes like sweet chemicals.

Sheer bliss. Impossible to capture in a picture.

So the mountains are important to us. I have introduced Chantal to this world because I have had some experience in  mountain walking.  

6) Roads leading nowhere

6) Roads leading nowhere

Chantal and I are dedicated urbanites. We love Amsterdam and its pubs, movie-theaters and museums, but if possible we try to escape the urban hustle. We make long tracks through the countryside, camp illegally in Holland, Belgium, France and later in the US. We travel by train, bus, plane and even hitchhike.

We make both short time lightweight camping tours nearby, and long journeys in remote areas. From Palawan in the Philippines to Kauai in the States, from the Azores to the Tsisikamma-trail in South Africa Chantal makes pictures of mountains, rivers, waterfalls. Travelling and camping is huge fun for us.

‘But what is the fun-part of travelling?’ my girls will ask me. How can you dedicate a whole life to travelling? What are you looking for?

Let me try to explain.

For instance; after hours of walking a steep path with all your gear on your back you reach a mountain-pass. Suddenly another world explodes into view. A vast mountain range in the far distance offers itself. Is that Italy? You feel elated but you cannot stay long here as cold gusts of wind hit you.

So travelling gives you rewards. But can a picture evoke the pain that has slowly taken possession of your knees and hips? The continuous chafing that reminds you of ill adjusted straps? The gasping for air that comes with ascending for hours on end? The silence save for the wind when you look into the next valley? The taste of a fruit-bar after hours of climbing? The relief your toes feel out of their leather prison when you find for a few minutes shelter behind a rock. You cannot stay long here because you still have a long way to go so back on the track again.

Travelling means to sweat it out; headaches, blisters, arms becoming numb, hunger, thirst and in general tiredness. A picture is flat, full of colors maybe but bereft of the smell of unpolluted air, the murmuring sound of a starting river, the buzz of swirling insects and always a picture hides the sadness of leaving a nice spot.

After a days walk you set up your tent. Lightweight and low in the wind. You have seen a small waterfall, there might even be a spring nearby according to the map and you go looking for it to fill your bottles. The cold that bites into your fingers when the water gushes over your hands. The shadows are growing and the tent is barely visible in the distance. Walking back you relish the promise of warm food. The promise of the deep silence that will cover you when you go to sleep.

Nothing in this cloud of experiences that can be convincingly registered.

Along the paths in the mountains of Europe one finds stones with white and red stripes. These balises lead to wooden signposts on which you can see how many miles to go, how many hours. They are an indication of how the mountains in Europe are tamed. Still these mountains are formidable. Especially when it snows or rains or when gale-winds hammer the land. Of course you rarely make a picture when it snows or rains and the wind is invisible.

I take out a color-slide and I see a wooden pole somewhere on a mountain-pass, stones at the bottom. Two route-indicators, but I can’t read where they direct us to. Don’t even know exactly where or when this signpost was shot. Where does the path I see in the distance lead to? Haven’t the faintest.

This experience occurs continually when you pick up an old agenda confusion sets in. Browsing through it you will encounter a bewildering array of names and phone-numbers of people  long blotted out of your memory.

Cryptic in its brevity every name and date confronts you with a benign amnesia. Fortunately these notes refer to work and one is entitled to forget work. Photos on the other hand are a different story. Forgetting why you have made a picture confronts you with dementia.

Why does Chantal shoot a picture of a signpost? Why haven’t we discarded this image on second thoughts as bereft of meaning? It must be a special place otherwise it would not have been immortalized on a color-slide. But why? 

Unable to answer this question I realize that the death of Chantal has amputated our common past.

5) Critical and selective

5) Critical and selective

Chantal is a critical photographer. More like a sniper than a machine-gunner. Afterwards when we have framed the slides we do some runs before we show them to our friends. We have always been critical.

‘No, this one does not catch the breathtaking scenery I remember we have seen. Away with it. On this one you can’t see how frightening steep it was. Away with it.’ And so on we go through the sledges until only a few slides remain.

In January 1999 a brain-tumor destroys her within weeks. I make pictures of her in the hospital, at home. I make pictures when she is dead, the mourning friends waiting in front of the mortuary and at last the funeral. Together with pictures of our last trip abroad they form a treasured photo-album.

Now it is 2012, I’m happily married and retired. Finally I have assembled the courage to go to the garage and salvage the boxes that contain the color-slides of Chantal. I want to show the children what has been important to Chantal and me. I go looking for existential pictures.

4) The burning house

4) The burning house

‘What will you take with you when your house is on fire?’ How often have I not seen or heard this question asked in interviews? How often do people not say: ‘the family pictures’. That reaction belongs to an era in which pictures were costly in several ways.

Photo’s are normally made of people and places one wants to record or parties worth remembering. At least that is what you think when the shutter snaps. Often you feel sad when you see the results, but sadder still you will be when you lose pictures made with affection. Like Marike and me.

Chantal and I live together, Marike and I get married. A friend makes a movie of the ceremony and the party afterwards. A lovingly made movie we have lost somewhere in transit from one address to the other.

When our first daughter, Mijntje, is born in 2001 we buy a film-camera. We shoot also the first year of Maike 2003-2004. That camera is stolen with the cassette still inside. So much of importance to us alone, for Marike and me now, for the kids later. Gone.

No one will ever find these films of any interest but for us they are invaluable. Gone. Curse the thief who has stolen our memories.

As long as camera’s are expensive family pictures fit in a box. But when I die my kids will inherit a staggering amount of photo’s, both digital and analogue, some movies, hundreds of color-slides. Besides these images there is also all the written material of a very personal character: diaries, official documents, agenda’s, letters and of course in my case all the digital archived newspaper articles I wrote as a journalist for the leading Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad.

We are talking about personal data amassed on a staggering scale. Never before in history has man had the opportunity to record his life in such a quantitative way. But to what effect? What do these data tell us?

3) Divorce

3) Divorce

My parents divorce officially when I am four. They are both of mixed European and Asian parentage. Even nowadays in Indonesia Eurasians are called “Indo’s”. My father is dark skinned, my mother is proud of her skins’ yellowish hue.

Their marital life before they get a divorce is characterized by lapses of isolation and separation. He is a forest architect and has to travel from island to island.

My mother follows him from Java to Borneo with me and a few suitcases finally settling in then Dutch New Guinea. Mostly waiting for him to return from the forest. Until in 1951 when she finally leaves him and settles for ever in Holland.

My father has always loved camera’s and shoots pictures by the thousands. I still have an album mainly filled with utterly boring black and white bush pictures.

He marries another Eurasian lady and lives among her kinsmen. I don’t see him very often so I don’t come to know them. The slides he makes when he is in Holland are mostly of Indo’s unknown to me. By throwing away all these color-slides  of smiling Indo’s I have destroyed the very image of a short lived culture in Holland. That of the Indo’s clinging to there kin.

His death makes me delve into his past and doing so I unearth question upon question. To name but a simple one, I am baptised a catholic. According to my mother my father on his way to the registry office for my birthday certificate met a priest who offers a drink to celebrate. A few drinks later I am a catholic.

After the death of my father I find his military passport. It states as his religion: protestant.  I have nothing against protestants, nothing against catholics either, but what has happened on the way to the registry-office? Questions like these give me a sense of obligation to present my past to my children as clear and transparent as possible.

My mother prides herself not only of her light skin but also of having mainly Dutch friends. She is assimilated even before she sets foot in Holland. Had she ever made pictures of her friends I would have recognized these Dutch friends but she rarely makes pictures.

2) To start with the colour-slides

2) To start with the colour-slides

A story like this one starts the day you decide to sort out the color-slides. In my case the slides made by my late, former wife Chantal. She died ten odd years ago.  I have published a book about her death, Chantal, and the kids can read it when they feel like it. But her color-slides are a different story all together. What do they tell me now and what story do they contain for the children?

Of course the girls know me and their mother Marike. They’ll remember the life we all lived together, but they don’t know the life I have lived with Chantal. Maybe one day they’ll want to know: how has your life been with Chantal, what did you do without children? How do you create a fullfilling life without children?

In Chantal I describe how desperate we want to have children. How we decide in the end when all hope has faded to dedicate our childless life to travelling. Travelling and photo-shooting.

Chantal is a gifted photographer. Composition comes natural to her and her charm closes the distance to any subject. Looking at the slides I’m moved. It is her smile I see mirrored in the faces of all these people she has immortalized. At the same time I’m confronted with a problem.

However beautiful these portraits are, be they of shepherds with weather-beaten faces or old smiling ladies in traditional attire, I don’t know who these people are. Don’t know there names, don’t know there histories and I often don’t know where or when they were photographed.

It is not the first time that frustration besets me when I leaf through color-slides. I have had the same problem with the color-slides my father left me. Thousands of nameless faces smiling into the camera. I have kept but one slide-rail and threw the others away. At this point I must say something about my parents.

1) Pictures of my parents

1) Pictures of my parents

My mother will leave me with very little when she dies. A handful of black and white pictures at most. I cannot ask my mother anything about her past as at 92 her memory is dwindling. If you are like my mother and leave your children but a few pictures this book is not meant for you.

On the other hand my father, with whom I had little contact, has left me decades ago with an enormous amount of color-slides. These slides almost all feature people unknown to me. They show that for pictures to be interesting the same rule applies as for milk, they have an expiration date. As I cannot ask my father who all these people are their significance has died with him.

Also if you are like my father and don’t care what your children will do with your pictures, this blog is not meant for you either. This blog is for people who will bequeath their children rather with answers than with questions. Basically this book is meant for my children. 
My children are 11 and 9 years old and taking myself as an example, their age of questioning is still miles away. I am 35 when my father dies and only then it becomes clear to me that his life is wrapped in riddles and question-marks. When my oldest daughter is 35 years old, heavens willing I’ll be 89 years of age. As I’m 65 now I feel it is time to sort out my tangibly visible past.