António Nuno Júnior

António Nuno Júnior (b.1967) is a filmmaker and new media artist living and working in Lisbon, Portugal. He lived in Macau during the early nineties and returned there several times, later in that decade, to make a film trilogy about (among other things) the region’s transitional period. His grandmother was chinese, born in Guangzhou. His father was macanese. He’s presently working on a large-scale project that deals with perception, memory, material ontology and complex systems theory.

Iris (one)

There once was a silly middle aged man to whom life was a deep, almost unfathomable, burden only mildly alleviated by short seasonal bursts of fiction. Not that his material existence was deprived nor in any way in want of reasonable comfort, at least when compared to that of the vast majority of his contemporaries. He managed to secure his daily meals and had a roof over his head (actually quite a few, if we were to extend the notion of personal property to that mysterious not-yet-yours-but-soon-to-be quality of ancestorial patrimony). The first half of his expected duration had been spent trying to avoid dealing with the immediate contingencies of hardcore financial independence, while simultaneously struggling to find a place of recognition in the realm of artistic endeavour - of the independent kind. It didn’t seem to be a contradiction, indeed it appeared to him as a flagrant philosophical necessity from very early on. Of course his father, a reasonable, seasoned and, therefore, rather successful person by most standards, had warned him in utterly vehement terms against the dire path he was about to tread. A highway to disaster, he had told him. But although fathers know best, children with artistic inclinations know better still.

Time passed, life followed. It brought him all of the anticipated frustrations closely accompanied by the occasional misfortune that life deals to everyman. Even the past joys of adolescence were a late realization of something somehow unlived, unaccomplished and, at the day’s end, incomplete. Nothing to be missed. Actually, he felt relieved by that memory’s remoteness. What was, for most people, a period of excitement, discovery and nascent desire to be cherished throughout life, was for him a barren and windy islet off the southernmost tip of Patagonia.

His children, two boys and a dominant girl, were healthy, active and unproblematic. So intensely so that, oftentimes, his natural love for them interweaved with the slightly uncomfortable feeling that they were dangerously stupid. Their mothers had served their purpose well though, being full-witted, bright, caring vulvar entities that never really understood the full implications of living with him until it was too late. Also, they had been complete strangers to his work. After all was said and done, he considered them to be good lays, good company and good mothers. He bore no resentments. They took on the responsibility of raising his progeny on their own after ways parted, demanding nothing of him except the odd assistance and a yearly month’s vacation during the summer, when he assembled the kids and invaded their paternal grandmother’s beach house forcing the old lady to take refuge in her city flat.
Those periods, usually the full month of August, were a time for irreality and balance making. It was a time when he eased his grip on the hiltless (and sometimes also bladeless) sword that was his work, ate a strict diet of grilled fish and seafood, swam in the ocean with a fierce resolve and inevitably came to the excogitated conclusion that maybe his life was pointless. His work was never going to be duly acknowledged by the world at large (whatever the dimensions considered), let alone recognized. Not even by his putative peers. He was never going to be able to make a living out of it. Nor out of anything else, for that matter. He was quickly approaching the final third of his statistical lifespan and his life never really started. He had a thirty-year long non-career with a two-line resume. And the funny thing was that this tiresome, unprofitable, disproportionate obsession with this thing he called his ‘practice’ had kept him apart from everything else that was, it had prevented him from leading a pleasant, varied life. It was an amputation. A self-inflicted dismemberment of pathetic heights. He just couldn’t decide, at least not just yet, whether this came about as the consequence of a gross procedural miscalculation or as an unfortunate result of a wrong turn inadvertently taken somewhere in the recondite recesses of his past. He would then abruptly interrupt this string of miseries and stare at the sea for a while, with his three children

backlit against the greenish-blue waves. Things would eventually remain as they previously were. He was nearing his forty-eight birthday and it was summer nonetheless. He was, as usual, at mom’s beach house in the company of his children who, by now, were pretty much capable of taking care of themselves individually and of one another communally. Needless to say, he greatly enjoyed this newly attained condition of fatherhood. One that left him with more time to indulge in his self-deprecating ruminations and in his canicular absent-minded observation of external phenomena. It was in this mindset that he toddled down to the beach every morning distantly preceded by the excited bunch.
He would look briefly for a spot to set camp, a spot preferably equidistant from all the other lazy sun worshipers, and sit down for a while after ridding himself of his t-shirt. Then he would eventually open a book.
The first time he took notice of her was by indirect reference. A young boy’s vivacious voice called for some ‘Iris’. ‘Swift Chrysopteron is also enjoying a vacation’, he mumbled to himself nonchalantly, keeping his eyes on the pages of a tediously disappointing chapter from a rather mediocre book on the supposed ‘intelligence of images’. Iris was a relatively unheard name in his language, and one that rode the very thin line between middlebrow mythological erudition and sheer vulgarity, he thought. But it had a definitely pleasant sound when said aloud. He had always favoured short female names. An Iris was forcibly better than an Ermintrude. ‘Iris!’ the voice called again. This time he raised his head squinting his eyes from the harsh August sunlight. Two similarly thin boys in baseball caps were standing on the shoreline glancing at a young woman that stood smiling in the water shoulder deep. She dived suddenly only to re-emerge a few feet closer to them, smiled mischievously once more, and slowly came out of the water. An unexpected jolt ran through him. Never again would he be able to look away.

She couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen years old. There was an air of coy insecurity about the way her body laid on the sand, under that abrasive midday sun. Images of very distant summers quietly found their way back into his mind, warm and uncomfortable.

The second time he saw her she was playing beach tennis with one of the skinny small boys, whom he reckoned were her brothers (half-brothers, he preferred to imagine, for some reason), throwing a small and dense blue rubber ball back and forth with the help of a pair of awkwardly shaped wooden rackets. He had played tennis in his early youth, the proper canonical sport, not this miniaturized deviant version of it. He remembered that, back then, rackets were also made of wood, heavy laminated varnished plywood that made them look like beautiful handcrafted artefacts from another age. Indeed they were. He wondered if fresh tennis balls still had that peculiar acid smell that he used to enjoy so much. She moved her body around in a gracefully unathletic fashion, completely devoid of any tension or amplitude of movement, but ever so effortlessly that it seemed to carry no weight whatsoever. It was a perfect ideal body. Not in the sense of the unattainable Greek quality of divine proportion but rather like a tangible, sensuous, natural shape that enclosed nothing, the thereness of an absence. A very precise paradox. He needed a swim.
That night he called his closest friend on the phone for a trivial metaphysical chat and told him, light-heartedly, that he was feeling like a failed, heterosexual Aschenbach.

A couple of days later, while in the process of grilling a shiny, glittering, majestic sea-bass that looked like it had just popped out of an eighteenth century nature-morte, it suddenly struck him that she had probably noticed his relentless staring. Although he tried his best to be discreet, always pretending to be looking at something else or nothing in particular (at an abstraction, perhaps) and avoiding any straight-on eye contact, he knew that people sensed that they were being watched. Especially like that. His embarrassment dilated fast. Not because he considered the act itself to be in any way shameful or morally demeaning (although the exercise of putting himself in her place inevitably led to the ‘dirty old man’ cliché), but because he was perfectly aware of the frozen, cul-de-sac nature of the situation. He had no real intention of approaching her. By no measure would he try any come-hither manoeuvre. The fact was that this extraordinary interest for the girl actually had no specific end in view. It was a pure eruption of the ineffable. The practical status of the situation was, in any case, ridiculous. The closest he had ever stood to her must have been no shorter than fifty feet; he always went to the beach more or less surrounded by the moral palisade of his three kids; as far as he was aware he kept the lowest of profiles; he didn’t fit, by any stretch of the imagination, the description of a

predatory seducer. He didn’t fit the description of a seducer of any kind. ‘Whichever way we look at it, this is a nauseatingly safe thing’ he said to the fish on the grill.

He decided to skip the beach outings for a few days. He would take the time to read some random idiocies from his mother’s bookshelf and sip a few bottles of dry rosé wine on the terrace overlooking the sea. Play the aestival dandy-tired-lonesome bourgeois role for a bit. His daughter the dominatrix would gladly step into his disciplinary shoes and take control of her brothers’ maritime behaviour, no worries there. And, in any event, they would still be under his protective eye, only a bit farther away than usual.
It went well. In fact, the scene he managed to create up on the terrace closely resembled a glossy TV ad for some exotic brand of rum, minus the exotic. And the bikini-clad tropical butt-shaking bimbos. It would have been nice if he had ever got into a position that allowed him to live his life that way. Etcetera.

Of course he continued to engage in his languorous observational activities, now from the cowardly impregnability of distance. But the loss in detail was compensated by an unforeseen increase in abstract insight. The girl became a figure in a landscape, a blurred, low-resolution landscape that included an exceedingly sharp and minutely defined body delimited only by its relative movement (or lack thereof). He could see the precise path she drew from her place in the sand down to the sea and back again. He noticed for the first time that she didn’t swim. She would go in the water, dive a couple of times, float for a bit, stand still with her torso emerging from the blue and then slowly return to lie down on the beach. He could perceive the exact relationship that she maintained with her two brothers through their spatial distribution in time. He could see her uniqueness. He could see her solitude.

The day he resumed his normal beach activities a momentous thing happened. It was, after all, predictable (or at least in the definite realm of plausibility) had he only given it more than half a thought. Granted the fact that he and the girl were sharing the same relatively restricted space: a beach in a small bay, a finite group of houses that lined an equally limited shoreline and a modest-sized village, it was a statistical matter of time until the fifty-foot average distance between the two got breached.
The morning was ending and he decided to swim an hygienic four hundred metres breaststroke before lunch. He would go down to the beach, do his thing, and then marshal the kids back home for an exceptional linguini ai scampi. Family gastronomy at its most consensual. That was one of the reasons they loved their father after all. He grabbed his keys, a faded red towel and off he went. The sun was biting like a bitch, he could barely keep his eyes open at first. He was walking the cracked wooden boards of the straight, narrow pathway that led to the sand, that dissolved into the sand, that went through the sand and on into a dark, fresher underworld, that went straight to a refrigerated Hades. No Charon, no Cerberus. And then her. Immediately recognizable, she was walking the same wooden boards, barefoot, in the opposite direction. She was still wet from the sea, wet and barefoot and closing in. Eyes what colour? Brown. Brown? Green. He slowed down, or something slowed down around him. Not the sound, the waves still sounded like waves, the distant voices like gulls. She was holding a burlap bag in her left hand. Her hands, slightly chubby, almost babylike. Ridiculous. Not babylike. Flowery pattern. Red-white-red. Ankles just negligibly oversized. Not green, brown. What? Eyes. Not yet close enough to be sure. Head down. Stillwalking. He was still walking. Her shoulder, shiny wet, will pass three inches away from his arm. Much shorter than him. Barefoot. Bogart. Torlato-Favrini. ‘What she’s got you can’t spell. And what you’ve got, you used to have’. Her hair strung, or clamped, at the back of the head. Black hair. Her free right hand makes a gesture, two fingers stretched. Not that. Less than a gesture. A transient. She turns her head to look back for an instant, two skinny boys following at a distance. She’s reassured. Head down. Soon she will be at arm’s length. He will have to turn his shoulders and hips slightly to his right to make way for her. Not to disturb her.

(if she speaks everything crumbles)

‘Dad?’ said one of the boys, ‘when are we leaving?’ ‘I don’t know yet. Why? Are you fed up already?’ he replied, with a smile, sitting at the end of the table. ‘Nooo. Just wanted to know how many days we got left…’ His sister shook her head frowning in mocking contempt ‘Anxiety will kill you…’ and filled her glass with iced tea. ‘We still have a couple of weeks ahead of us, at least’ he said, reassuringly ‘Come on, eat your pasta. There’s plenty of time’.