one man’s trash

by (l)a autora

It’s at times like these that I am accused – justly or unjustly – of buying junk.

I found this little gem in a pile of postcards in a fantastic used bookstore on the San Telmo-Montserrat border, where the owner struck up a lively, indignant conversation about how terrible it must be to live in Seattle (he spent a week there and it rained nonstop). There’s a whole string of great dusty bookstores running down Bolívar, as a matter of fact; I keep wanting to go back, but what stays my hand is the knowledge that I am much less likely to find a gift for someone else than I am to end up buying weird, ungiftable things for myself. Case (perhaps) in point: this photo. All right, it was 2 pesos, but the principle’s the same.

First of all, I’d like to defend my purchase: this picture is amazing. It deserves to be the enigmatic centerpiece of a story, or a short film. The four girls – siblings, presumably, with baby on the lap of the eldest (?) posing for a strange sort of portrait in a place that smells of the half-desolation of a small farm. The simple haircuts, the squinting smiles. And, of course, the unintended, off-kilter center of it all, the hole that neatly removes the tallest one’s head. It’s an elegant job, the edges are neat. It doesn’t seem to have been done with malice. And yet it seems unlikely that an overzealous scrapbooker took out the face of one of the sisters; why preserve the rest of the family like that, why leave the job incomplete? What faces can we conjure to fill that void? A black sheep, a lost sister, someone the family doesn’t speak of? The absence, quite clearly, draws much more attention than would another uncertain smile and a head of dark hair.

The problem with the photo, and its brethren, may be evident. I tend to accumulate things like this, objects that I find pleasing for one reason or another — one particularly unfathomable one from last semester was a collection of Jefferson’s writings dedicated from one Brazilian to another in 1946 — and then don’t quite know what to do with them. They’re impossible to give away, and there’s really not much to do with them (except, I suppose, to write the short story/make the short film inspired by the photograph), but they’re just such great objects that I can’t resist. The obvious solution would be to stop buying them, you say. To which I say, you are no fun, and I am going to be the next John Soane, or quite possibly the next person featured on Hoarders.