Monument Maker

by David Keenan

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams?

These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe.

MONUMENT MAKER straddles genres while fully embracing none of them, a book within a book within a book that runs from hallucinatory historical epics through future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a horribly disfigured British soldier made prophetic by depths of suffering; books that interact with Keenan's earlier novels, including a return to the mythical post-punk Airdrie landscape of his now classic debut, THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE; whole histories of art and religion; books that are glorious choral appendices; bibliographies; imagined films; tape recorded interviews; building to a jubilant accumulation of registers, voices and rhythms that is truly Choral.

Written over the course of 10 years, MONUMENT MAKER represents the apex of Keenan's project to create books that contain uncanny life and feel like living organisms. It is a meditation on art and religion, and on what it means to make monument; this great longing for something eternal, something that could fix moments in time, forever.

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 816

Sample

I met her at a bookstall in a romantic European village on the outskirts of which I had set up camp in a single, bleak, storage container, painted blue, on the edge of a disused quarry, next to a ghastly man-made lake whose opaque grey waters, in which I dipped the stone effigies that at that time in my life I was caught up in creating, seemed like a skin on the sky, these ritual creations in which I would carve abstract shapes and symbols, using blunt compasses which I would purchase at a nearby market that specialised in silverware and archaic utensils and religious icons (it was a very Catholic village), these strange signs that would speak and make themselves known to me (bird souls, I called them) and that I would then incise into these special stones with the aid of these blunt compasses, these incantations, it appears to me now, these obsessive incantatory actions, which is what masonry is, which is what true stonework is, at heart, according to Pierre, according to the obscure book that he self-published and that came to be the only text that mattered to me, at this point in my life, and which had the quality of speech which is best heard by the heart, by the wounded heart, best of all, as if it had been published expressly for myself, and had lain in wait for me, up until I was ready for it, up until my heart lay in pieces, in the past, shattered along with my belief in love as more than just a word for a season, a term, and not as something that preserves the lovers, forever, something that raises them up, beyond all other achievement, which is when I cracked its code, I believe, as I worked on its first, and still unpublished, English translation, and what that meant, I think, is that I was, in a sense, possessed by the spirit of Pierre, by his marvellous artistic seriousness, by what he said about these stones, his history of these stones, his tracking of certain relationships with these stones, it opened a whole new world to me, one that came to full fruition when I was introduced to my own Eurydice, my own manifestation of the fixed form of the female, forgive me, I know that it’s not an acceptable idea these days, though would that I could fix it further, in stone, after my hero, then mark these bastard words, I would, my hero whose watery vault I return to now, in whose paint-grey waters, beneath which the entire world stands, upside down, and undifferentiated, I dip my dolls, I almost said, my carvings, I mean, my ritual offerings, and I line them up, before me, as stones with names, as something fixed, that has spoken, forever, like an army of emissaries, to elsewhere, a determined crusade, to where there is no way, ever, I can ever accompany them.

I must remember you, Flower.

What a beautiful thought I am thinking, when I think of my ex-lover’s thighs, but still I am in tears as I write this. Is there a name for the space just above the thigh, the crease that lies just below the pelvis, or for the men who are haunted by it? I shall call it the Meridian, this valley of flesh, made anew, as every man is, for its vision; and those who would recognise the women who have worn this, most perfect, those who would be as lovers of the lines: Meridians.

Still, if I could capture anything in stone, it would be the vision of my ex-lover, on her back, with her breasts exposed, disarrayed on the bed, disarrayed, I say, and with that I taste it, her hair wild blonde hair, the perfect arc of her eyebrows, the expression on her face, and the Meridian, incised, perfectly, in a single, perfect, gesture; is tastes like this.

There is nothing water longs for more than to be surrendered on the rocks, are the first words of the book I gave a season of my life to translating, a season that resulted in my destitution, in my abandonment, and, some might say, enemies of mine, grudges held along the way, in my temporary insanity.

Is any insanity temporary? Does madness not leak? Not through stone. Not through marble or clay. Not through hard fired earth.

Harder.

I disposed of my father’s caul in Durham, dropped it from the bridge into the river that flows past the cathedral, imagined it floating, undrowned, into the sea, and made my way to the cathedral itself, where I pictured all of the wooden fittings in flames and reduced to ashes and only the stone of the cathedral left standing. Stone is stronger than wood, more eternal, I told myself, as I stood before the wooden carvings of the dead Jesus and his mother, both of which were scorched with molten lead, from a fire.

Harder.

In the Whispering Gallery in the dome of St Paul’s, I repeated the word cunt in the hope that it might enter the ear of another and cause offence.

Harder.

I allowed my ex-lover to be fucked by other men. I dressed her. I chose the panties she would pull to one side as other men entered her. Sheer animal-print panties. Tiny turquoise bikini bottoms, tight, around the mound of her pussy.

Harder. Harder.

I toured the monasteries and cathedrals of France and wrote my name on every one of them.

Harder.

Is there a pill that can stop these words in my brain?

This is the pill.

Harder.

I should like to call myself Astonished, a Greek name, at the end of my life.

I intend that this book should be as a mausoleum for the two of us, and the state of our bodies, guesswork, now, buried, still entwined in each other, our very bones confused, our skulls fused in some unimaginable cataclysmic attempt at ultimate union, which is what sculpture is, which is what these language marks, carved into white by a pressure in my brain that I know can only find release in the idea of being caught up in something eternal, something that stands, as a monument, to the lovers in time, which is what these words are, then, which is an attempt to perceive the lineaments of what lies, beneath, this eternal mirror, that might hold us.

Yet I can’t resist telling you she had long blonde hair. I can’t resist the telling of her perfect hourglass figure, I squeeze it now, in my mind, in the past I hold her tight by the pinch of her waist and I draw myself inside her again, and again.

I held her, tight, by the waist, as we made love that first evening, on a chair in this echoing blue metal storage container, we fucked on our first date, she was overcome, she said, I was forceful, that was the word she used, a word I intend to always honour, even when I fail, a word like grace and chivalry and forceful, and she pulled me into her and she said to me, harder, harder, and I imagined us turned to stone, and how beautiful that would be, to be fixed, at the moment of peak passion, is the most perfect of monuments.

I can’t resist telling you, either, of the way she dressed. She wore nylons and heels and long flowing dresses. She wore hoops in her ears and grey, smoky eyeshadow. Her backside was one of the most voluptuous arses ever to tour the continent, and everywhere we went I was forced to put up with catcalls and illicit tonguing, grabbing of the balls and thrusting, and (of course) the miming of fucking her from behind. Show me a statue that provokes that kind of response. Show me the stone that can move like that. I will show you.

At the Cistercian abbey of Trois-Fontaines there was a sense that time had somehow withdrawn all that was not essential to the scene. Windows lay boarded like so many attenuated evolutionary sideroads. The air was dry, and warm, and sibilant; the sound of birds seemed as if piped in; reduced, but not merely, to its effect. You stood on the grass then, the abandoned pavilions behind you, and two trees, in the shape of dark, bristled tongues, spoke up, out of the ground, and tongued the air around you, as I, the jealous lover, hovered, perpetually out of shot. Which allows me to return there. And to watch you, darling, of my sacred manhood, queen, of my past. To watch you walk slowly across the lawn in your heels, as if you were alone with the seeing of yourself. You have a black-and-white shawl around your shoulders, with ripples, like water. You hold a flower in your hand. I will name no other flower. And there is birdsong again. And the light has held its breath, which is what a statue is.

Which is what a statue is. What we mean when we use the word love. Light holding its breath. But letting go, letting go, now; there is the key.

She was in an unhappy relationship when I met her and I was the, what is the word, I feel like there should be a word for the tools you open coffins with, the tools with which you prise open ancient sarcophagi, which is what it felt like, it had that degree of revelation, our first love, compasses, a word like that, para-somethings, incisors, where you crack something that has fixed and stuck, where you crack it open, and that first light: incisive. That first light: gasping, and you feel it yield, until the energy is wordless, and no longer you and I, and you have your fingers in my mouth, and I have grabbed hold of her jaw, strong, and hard, and fixed her beneath me, and we are speaking in breaths, in shallow breaths of my finger on her tongue, pressing down, our skulls, bearing down, on each other, is so close. And we are back, and we are after.

Afterwards, in a strange discomfited glow, I tell her I’m a sculptor. I work in stone, I tell her. I am a monument maker.

I saw her partner in town. Her ex-boyfriend. She had warned me about him. David is a psycho, she said, only she said it Davide. He’s a psycho so look out for him, she said. Davide had short blonde hair and wore a leather jacket and looked like shit. I asked her about him. What are you doing sprawled all over my makeshift bed in a rusting shipping container at the bottom of a long-abandoned quarry, I nearly said to her, but I didn’t, if this guy is so great? He’s so full of himself, she said to me, after I rephrased it. He’s so self-centred. Plus, your cock, she said, to be honest, it’s about maybe an inch in total bigger than his. I never knew it made such a difference. Is an inch all it takes?

But I was talking about letting go. Pierre’s book had been published privately, in an edition of 120 copies, by a connoisseur printer of eccentric architectural works in 1986. And what a year for samizdat architectural works that was. I could list my favourites. But the point is this: the sound of the rain on the roof of my metal encampment. Listen to it. Imagine yourself there.

There is nothing water longs for more than (other than?) to be surrendered on the rocks (I have given the rendering of this opening sentence much thought over the years and I have come to regard it as an essentially untranslatable statement that masks a gnomic, astrological reference, as well as, of course, reflecting Pierre’s fascination with the lives of rocks, the being of stones and their firing, at distance, by the stars themselves, and the relationship between water and stone, and what came first, but more so, it occurs to me now, there is the aspect of Pierre’s Christian upbringing, here, in essence, his fascination with Christianity, and his concept of a sacrificial universe, of all the little deaths that life requires, and of course the fish, risen up, on land, is the sign of both evolution and of the secret Christ, returned). There is a wanting that expresses itself in (and as) the elements, to come up against all that they are not. Indeed, the elements are in a perpetual conference of mutual deciding (a polis of elements, as the poet Charles Olson would have it, and whose influence I acknowledge here, on my own work, my own unravelling and decoding, though I can find no trace of Olson in Pierre’s reading, in his notebooks and effects, outside of the recurrence of the phrase ‘human universe’, the title of an essay written by Olson in tribute to the Mayan conception of life and cosmos). What is soft longs to be hardened, what is spectral dreams of fixed lineaments and form, what is gaseous here imagines being pressed into the soft earth by a beautifully carved effigial slab (and here Pierre references the infamous two-volume set Incised Effigial Slabs, published by Faber & Faber at, one imagines, considerable expense, and, surely, with little hope of recouping their costs, in the year of 1976, and whose personal copy, complete with detailed marginalia, sits before me, on the mantelpiece of the room in which I write). What is flesh longs to fall, from a height, onto the hard stone floor of a cathedral.

The monastic architecture of France (and here, I would imagine, Pierre defers to Joan Evans, author of the spellbinding Monastic Architecture in France, published by Cambridge in 1964), as seen from the standpoint of the late twentieth century, seems some of the most bereft of classical buildings, the least occupied of styles, the greatest reminder of futility and pointlessness, the most like a temporary shelter, from time, and from life, in its understated grandeur, in its mute appeal there is a great slowing that generates the feeling, when experienced in the flesh, in the cold, hard, stone, on a sharp autumn morning in the early 1980s, say, with the dew on the grass and the smell of the leaves, burning, somewhere, out of sight, and that particular silence, that monastic silence that is not true silence but rather a return to silence after speech, which can never be true silence, true silence is original, and unworded, this return to silence, then, all around, that the world has ceased in its turning, that it has been temporarily arrested, by a force, raised up, from inside the world, against itself. This is stone, and how it can be set to speak.

Flower, in a cornfield, in the sun, outside the town of Souvigny, where we had gone to see the implacable remains of the Benedictine priory, implacable, I say, but then I think twice, because implacability, even, remains something to be read, as the red tulips on Flower’s black-and-white blouse now speak to me and say the word flower, the word flower is carried by women, to be laid down, I think, as she spins around slowly in the sunshine and the pollen is golden in the air.

I want to enter into pure description.

Harder.

I was seized with a mania to create in stone.

Harder.

I want to describe the experience of her.

Harder.

I have named parts of the body and set flags in it as mine, as my own, its hairs, and places. I say the body, but really I mean one body only. The body of my ex-lover. The lips of her labia are felt-grey, mouse-eared. When she opens, she opens like a butterfly. I remember a night, a last night. We had made love and she had called me a wolf. I had held my fingers inside her mouth and tight around her jaw as we came together. Afterwards, she sat on a footstool and displayed her newly shaved pussy to me, her ankles still tight around her ankles, her panties, I mean, still tight, and she opens them, the veil, with her fingers, and she is looking for praise, she is vulnerable and eternal in the same moment, temporal and transcendent, bashful, which is the name of it, and I lean down, I have half pulled up my briefs, and I taste the bright grey of her lips and I taste soft, wet, stone.

I get into a conversation. One night I’m drunk at a party, one of these outdoor French nocturnal parties, and Flower’s boyfriend Davide is there, he is wearing motorcycle leathers and with short blonde hair in the dark and he approaches me and we start to talk and he uses the term beef curtains. There is a spatchcocked chicken on the grill and he sticks a prong in it and he says, beef curtains, do you know that one, I had to explain it to my mother the other night, he says, and he laughs, and he winks at me.

Let me tell you the story of my first understanding of the importance of architecture. It happened when I read a story about a sculptor, a stonemason, a worker in basalt, and an author, name of Pierre Melville. There was an article in a newspaper. Pierre had come out of nowhere. His early sculptures had been hailed as the ultimate extension of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s baroque conception (by critics of a modernist, iconoclastic bent, obviously), extrapolating from Bernini’s vison of a total work that could be viewed, somehow, as extended in time, as well as in place, and what Pierre had done, these critics argued, was mint a form of sculpture that somehow demonstrated its movement into form, its uncovering, in other words, in time, as well as its simultaneous withdrawal, back, into its point of origin, which Pierre termed its nebula.

And I felt it right then inside me. This word, Nebula. This word, Flower. And this, idea. Because I, myself, felt myself, to be in a constant predicament of becoming and withdrawing. I recognised it. And that night, the night after I read the article, my parents and I were staying at the home of a friend of the family, a holiday home in France, a gloomy place with wooden floors and haunted outbuildings, which is where I chanced upon this article about Pierre, in a magazine that had been discarded by a previous guest, and which I read by candlelight, by the pulse of candlelight, which seemed to double its effect, and as I read it I had the strangest feeling, and I masturbated, I masturbated about the future, set in stone, and all the withdrawing and becoming, up ahead.

In the morning I pointed it out to my father. Papa, I said, that is what my father liked me to call him, he was French on the brain, Papa, I said, would you look at this gentleman who sculpts artworks that retreat all the way back to their origins and he laughed and said, ah-ha, Monsieur Melville, he said. These days he is nothing but a monument maker, he said, and he shrugged. Those words; I shuddered. What do you mean? I asked my father. These days, my father said to me, Pierre is a bourgeois, he said. He is an architect of tombs, he said. Because he sold out. And then he told me the extraordinary story of Pierre’s ascension through the art world and his success as an architect and how he had been contacted by an anonymous donor who wrote to say that he wanted to pay a stipend to Pierre for the rest of his life, a considerable stipend, if he would agree to one thing only, one working, was what the anonymous benefactor said, that is the term he used, and that is that I want you to design and build my own tomb, he said, money no object, vision no limit, only I remain anonymous, as does the location of the tomb, which we can work out legally, he said, and afterwards, he said, after the tomb is completed, and I give you ten years, God willing, he said, I will continue to pay you in perpetuity, forever, until the day of your death, but your final act, after signing a non-disclosure agreement, obviously, will be to return, with a select band of family members and friends, and have my body, at the time of my death, placed in your vault, according to your vision. I never want to see it, I never want to discuss the plans. I merely want to sign off on the budget, because I have complete faith in you, he said, this voice said, these words said, on the page, and after I am interred, it said, I want you to collapse the entrance, to bury it without a trace, and to leave me, forgotten, except in the mind of an artist, and his workmen, and a select group of lovers and friends, in the Valley of the Kings, in other words, is what it said.

And there was much speculation. And Pierre was allowed to talk about it in public, there was no clause against that, why not, and so he told people, I am working privately these days, he said, in his own terrible pronunciation that made him sound like an intelligent halfwit, I am engaged in the burial of a living man, he said, on Pebble Mill at One, I think he might have said that then, and when the girl asked him why he had taken a job that would remove him from the public eye for so long and what about his career, Angela Rippon it may have been, he simply said, I am captured by it, is what he said, and though Rippon pressed him about what exactly he was captured by, was it the idea, was it the money, was it the opportunity to fix monuments, in secret, still he just sat there, and stayed mum, which led to the rumour that he had gone feudal and that he was just the latest in a long line of clowns who had been flattered into building monuments to temporal power, to mere economic triumph, to game-playing and bullshit and filthy lucre.

Although he is today best known as a sculptor and architect, Pierre Melville began life as a poet. He had published several volumes by the time he was in his early twenties, two of which have been translated into English. One was titled White Marble, the other Lonely Caravan, but you can forget about ever finding a copy of that one because you have no chance. They were figurative sculptures in text, was what Pierre said on the back, talking about his poems, apparently, but who knows how reliable the translation is, I said to my Flower, when I gifted her a second-hand copy of White Marble, inside of which I had inscribed a pair of brackets and inside of them my initials (D.K.), who knows how seriously to take that, I said, it could be some kind of retrospective anointing of Pierre’s earlier works with everything that we know now, his proclivities, his visions, I said, the terms themselves, I said, could be approximate, a mere happenstance of translation or a brazen rewriting of history, even. But then, I said to her, and I showed her this; then this, I said:

How, have I beento Purgatory,how, have I, in the mannerOf the Saints, which is,to have gone so far, insideas to come upon coldwhite marble, is to approach,bright     greystone

Then this, I said, and I showed her some more poems and we kissed and she tongued my lips as I held her by her slender waist and ate from between her legs and slid her dress up and drew myself into her again and again until we collapsed on the filthy sheets as the sun was coming up, all aglow, I thought, all aglow, which is what blood does, when it has found its medium. But white marble; white marble struck me as some kind of final frontier. And so, I set out.

I read some book about how the prerequisites of sculpture were something like mass and balance and motion and outline and detail, something ludicrous like that. Even then, when I was only beginning, when I was only – what’s the term? – feeling my way, even then I knew that it was about presence, and its lack, about form, and its shadow, about, let’s face it, a chasm and a cocoon. Have you ever seen Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne?

What does it mean to look? And shut your mouth about the gendered gaze for a minute with that claptrap. What does it mean to look, for the first time; do you believe that is possible? If not, whatever do you go to art galleries for? What do you travel to Florence for? What do you fall in love for, over and over again?

First look: what a wonderful look I am looking as I am looking at the woman that I loved. She is filling our car with petrol. She has on patterned tights and aviator shades. Her long blonde hair, her waist. Is there no way to re-see it? We take a picnic, perched up on logs, looking out across a wide field. There are bees in the air and the horizon is lit up like a foundry. She spots a bird, and she names it, and I watch it fly off, as named, by her. Is there no way to re-see it?

What does the myth of Daphne and Apollo mean? It strikes me as this: Daphne (and what a beautiful name that is naming) knows she will be pursued forever, and so she fixes herself, or rather disguises herself, in movement, in agelessly slow movement, in simple matter – almost, but not quite – in order to both elude, and to endlessly bewilder and attract, her would-be god suitor.

Have you ever seen Bernini’s tomb for that wretched pope of his? The red marble like wounded flesh or brain stuff, the Fates, singing, standing in for concepts, bracketing the scene, on both sides, and the pope up above; but there, in the middle, is the shining skeleton of Death itself, golden and enfolded in the flesh of the brain, as if the flesh grew bones as its own persecutor, and brain stuff drew all three. But then the bones hold the hourglass in their hands, and Death presents it to us, so.

These are the words that I fantasised my Flower might say to Pierre as he held her on the end of his dick and speared her in bed every night (though by that point whether he was capable of the action of spearing or not is something we’ll never know).

I love your big cock, baby.

Harder.

Do me, baby.

Slap my swollen titties.

Feel how wet you’ve got me.

Make me come, oh make me come.

Give me your juice, baby.

I’m your little slut.

I hope you know I’m a real whore.

Baby, your cock is too big, baby.

Slap my ass while you fuck me.

Slide my panties down, like that.

Finger my mound.

You like my little shaved pussy, I did it for you.

It’s like an iron bar, baby, it’s like a fucking, iron, bar.

These are the course notes for the first semester in sculpture I will never teach.

Everything is empty and insincere. These are the words written over the collapsed tomb of a dead man, which is the state of my body, since I lost my Flower, forever. This is the strength of my antipathy towards love, which betrayed me, you, love, I say to the stone that promised me, you are a betrayer, even as I see, in my touching, of cold white marble, the lineaments of desire are longing, there, in stone, longing to be uncovered, wanton, to be disrobed, obedient to the most disobedient impulse as if it were fused, in every rock itself, as if, in the base matter of the earth, in every grain of sand, the eternal relationship, fixed, as surely as the cross.

Stonemason, carve your stone. There is no such thing as inanimate matter.

And now I can hear her writing the farewell letter in my head, the farewell letter that she never wrote, because there was no farewell letter, and yet, why can I hear it, why is its tone so implacable, where is the inflection, it reads like a chapter from The Bible, lifeless, you think, but here is all of life, you think, again, as she explains to you the nature of change, as if either of the two of you were in any way unfamiliar with the nature of change, and yet, to speak it, it is heartbreaking, to admit that we are not permanent, you and I, well, it’s further than I can go, and I prefer to be press-ganged to those ends, and never to willingly offer myself up, and so I am replying, in my mind, in my mind I am the one writing the sad farewell letter, now, and I’m saying, you make me anxious and you make me doubt, you make me believe this whole world is a battlefield, you make me feel like I have to play the game when really, now, at this age, I have no heart for it, and then I recall Pierre, spearing you, and eliciting those words, in my head, and I feel like a wounded animal, that has stumbled, and that will struggle to regain its feet.

Pierre and I took the car, a rusty old turquoise Morris Minor, in the rain, all the way from Linlithgow, where we were staying, to visit Durham Cathedral. Why were we in Linlithgow? I honestly can’t recall; the palace, perhaps, but why? There was a lovely bookshop there, and a tea room by the canal, and a house, up high stone steps, that slept two, if one of us slept on the couch, which was me, and the only thing I remember now about that visit, this strange annex in my life, is that I took down the net curtains from the window and wrapped them around me on the couch in place of a duvet so that now I remember that trip as wearing a chrysalis or a shroud.

The floor had rusted through his car. We could see the road beneath us as we sped.

The title of Pierre’s book, in my translation, is Full Length Mirror. He never commented on the quality of the translation at all and, to be honest, there wasn’t a huge amount of text to speak of, outside of the odd, offbeat introduction, which is what struck me so powerfully in the first place, and which took me a season to translate, an introduction that somehow sets you up to read the pictures as a form of unfolding autobiography, even when they contain nothing but stone and tree and sky, but most especially the enigmatic photographs of monastic architecture that feature himself, his chic 1970s car, and a ghostly, elegant female, who in one picture appears to expose her breasts to the cameraman. But who was the cameraman? He remains uncredited and unfound. Though there are a few stories. Like this one.

Pierre and his lover Hildegard are driving from Paris to view the Benedictine nunnery of Saint-Désir at Lisieux, which features, according to my translation of Full Length Mirror, ‘a carving that shows the birth of the infant Jesus, as a fully formed adult, in the outspillage of the menses of his mother’.

On the road they pick up a hitch-hiker. In one of the shots of the nunnery, it is true, there is the shadow of a finger to the left of the viewfinder. He has run away. The hitch-hiker. Not from a home or from a prison or a press-gang situation, but from a marriage. Do me a favour, this dark-skinned stranger says to them, from the back seat of the car, from somewhere barely imaginable, but almost imaginable, now, thanks to this Full Length Mirror; make love tonight, he says. And we can imagine Pierre, or his partner, looking in the rear-view mirror right then.

They pull up at the nunnery. They have themselves photographed beneath the outspilling menses by this hitch-hiker guy. I have that photograph. It’s a Polaroid. Hildegard is wearing a long yellow dress with a large belt and with her hair in a svelte blonde bob. You can pick out the nipples on her small tits through the cloth of her top. She wears a neckerchief like an air stewardess or an artist’s muse would.