XIV. RED PATIENCE

Geryon did not know why he found the photograph disturbing.

 

She had taken it herself standing on the roof of the house that afternoon in 1923

 

with a box camera. “Red Patience.”

 

A fifteen-minute exposure that recorded both the general shape of the cone

 

with its surroundings (best seen by day)

 

and the rain of incandescent bombs tossed into the air and rolling down its slopes

 

(visible in the dark).

 

Bombs had shot through the vent at velocities of more than three hundred kilometers an hour, she told him. The cone itself

 

rose a thousand meters above the original cornfield and erupted about a million tons

 

of ash, cinder, and bombs during its early months.

 

Lava followed for twenty-nine months. Across the bottom of the photograph

 

Geryon could see a row of pine skeletons

 

killed by falling ash. “Red Patience.” A photograph that has compressed

 

on its motionless surface

 

fifteen different moments of time, nine hundred seconds of bombs moving up

 

and ash moving down

 

and pines in the kill process. Geryon did not know why

 

he kept going back to it.

 

It was not that he found it an especially pleasing photograph.

 

It was not that he

 

did not understand how such photographs are made.

 

He kept going back to it.

 

What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava

 

has just reached his window?

 

he asked. I think you are confusing subject and object, she said.

 

Very likely, said Geryon.