What Am I Doing Here? (11 page)

She seldom descended to the salon because ‘if I saw a woman who was ugly or short or fat, I would show her the door! . . .
je dirai “Va-t-en!”'
Many of her clients were the wives of Cuban sugar millionaires: ‘They were not intelligent, those Cubans! But they were properly made. They moved well, and you could do something with them.' Then Europeans began to plant beet; Cuban cane-sugar slumped, and the husbands objected to the bills.

‘We planted beets,' the old lady chuckles. ‘We lost the clients.'

Then there were the Argentines! At the mention of the word ‘Argentine' – and the memory of Argentine women with undulating buttocks like carnivores', ‘. . .
avec leurs fesses ondoyantes des carnivores . . . '
– Madame Vionnet sinks her white head onto the pillow and, in a moment of unguarded reverie, sighs, 'They always said I loved women too much . . . !'

Perhaps the loveliest of the ‘Argentines' was the Brazilian-born Madame Martinez de Hoz, who, after the Stock Market Crash, bought a share in the house of Vionnet and kept it going until Hitler's War.

‘We were a village in those days, a town even . . . ' Vionnet used to employ 1,200 people in 21 ateliers. Her seamstresses worked in rooms that were a model for their day, airy and flooded with light: ‘I remembered the horrible work conditions when I was a girl and I wanted ours to be the best . . . in that way you get the best work.' She stationed herself in a strategic position on the main floor: no one who moved across the room escaped her vigilant eye: ‘We lost no valuable time . . . '

There was no time to be lost. The Maison Vionnet produced six hundred models a year, which is twice as many as Dior. Each dress was photographed for reasons of copyright: a practice hitherto unknown. Every label on a Vionnet dress bore the fingerprint of Madame herself. Illicit pirating of her designs distressed her, not for financial reasons, but because mass-production was a betrayal of her art. She needn't have worried. A Vionnet dress relied on the subtlest combination of fine workmanship and handling of cloth. It was, in practice, uncopiable.

She rarely designed models on paper, but created them in miniature on a small doll or mannequin eighty centimetres high. The doll is now one of the more famous props of French couture, but it mystified Abel Vionnet when his daughter brought it home in the evenings. She was a middle-aged woman, yet she persisted in dressing her doll. Had she failed to grow up?

She confesses she was to blame for his bewilderment: ‘I dared not tell Papa the extent of my business. I was afraid he would pay us a visit, and make a public sermon on the evils of ambition.'

Once Madame Vionnet had evolved her style, she stuck to it. When rival couturiers lifted skirts above the knee, she refused: ‘To show the knee is
ordinaire . . . vulgaire
. . . !' She admired the fluid lines of Japanese costume and the severity of the Classical Greek tunic. Her most characteristic dress, to be seen in quantity at every race-meeting at Longchamps, was a shift of cream silk. But this Greek-inspired simplicity was manoeuvred to extremes of opulence. An evening gown of black velvet and white mink – her original combination – was the subject of one of Edward Steichen's best fashion photographs for
Vogue.

A Vionnet dress looks nothing in the hand. It contains no pads, no artificial stiffening, and flops limply on its hanger. There are two hundred of them at the
Centre de Documentation de la Couture,
and they are something of a trial to the ladies who look after them. ‘What can one do with it?' asks the curator with despairing eyes as she holds up a tube of flimsy white material – for she cannot work out how it was worn. She also tells me that Vionnet clients had the same difficulty, and used to telephone in panic when they couldn't understand how to put a dress on.

Not so Madame! She calls for the maid to take me upstairs, to the wardrobe where her favourite models are stored. We station a couturier's dummy beside her chair, and on it put a black evening dress with a design of sea-horses, in the style of Attic red-figure vase painting. Suddenly, the hands shoot forward and with a tug here, another tug there, the dress miraculously comes alive.

‘I am a woman of the most extraordinary vitality,' Madame Vionnet assures me. ‘I have never been bored for a second. I have never been envious of anyone or anything, and now I have achieved a certain tranquillity.' She is satisfied with her work, satisfied to sit in her salon and read a biography of Cardinal Richelieu.

‘I could, of course, live in Rome,' she reflects, as if a move to Rome were a possibility. ‘But I love my country and I wish to die here.'

She does tire easily and, towards the end of the interview, her conversation tailed off into staccato bursts. But she is still interested in the events of Paris fashion – and certainly knows what to dislike!
‘Totalement déséquilibré!'
she snorts at a photo of a Courrèges dress in Vogue. Couture is the art for which she has lived, and she feels it is dying with her: ‘It's very sad now . . . very reduced!'

Other dressmakers are divided into friends, foes, and those consigned to a limbo of indifference. She cherishes the memory of Balenciaga, ‘
Un ami . . . un vrai!'
On the subject of Christian Dior she was vague: ‘He had a pretty name, but I did not know him.' And of Madame Chanel, who at one time must have galled her considerably, she had this to say: ‘She was a woman of taste . . . Yes. One had to admit it. But she was a
modiste.
That is to say, my dear, she understood hats!'

On leaving her, I was worried that our photographer might disturb her tranquillity.

‘No. He will not disturb me. I shall be very pleased to see him.
But
he cannot photograph my brain . . . !'

 

M
aria Reiche is a tall, almost skeletal, German mathematician and geographer who has spent about half her seventy-two years in the Peruvian desert surveying the archaeological monument known as the ‘Nazca lines'. This astonishing curiosity lies on the Pan-American Highway some three hundred miles south-east of Lima and fifty miles inland from the coast, a flat waterless plain, lying high above two irrigated valleys, with the foothills of the Andean Cordillera backing up behind. This plain, the Pampa de Ingenio, is covered with a thin layer of sand and pebbles which has oxidised a warm brown colour on the surface. It has a texture rather like a meringue and overlies a bed of whitish alluvium. If you so much as tread on the Pampa you leave a white footprint that will last for centuries.

Nearly 2,000 years ago the local inhabitants realised they could use their pampa as a gigantic etching plate. And over the generations, they made what is surely the largest, and certainly one of the most beautiful, works of art in the world. The surface of the desert is furrowed with a web of straight lines, linking huge geometric forms – triangles, rectangles, spirals, meanders, whip-like zig-zags and superimposed trapezes – that look like the work of a very sensitive and very expensive abstract artist. There are lines as thin as a goat path, and as wide as airport runways. Some converge at a single point, others run on, five miles and more, straddling valleys and escarpments in their unswerving course. These surface drawings make little sense on the ground, and no aerial photographs do them justice. But from a light aircraft you can only gasp with amazement at their scale and the imagination of their makers.

As you bounce about the sky in the thermals that rise off the plain, you soon distinguish other figures. Apart from the geometric forms there is a zoo of animals and birds, looking rather like Steinberg drawings on an enormous scale. There is a whale. There are a guano-bird, a pelican, a humming bird, other unrecognisable birds and a frigate bird, with a distended sac under- its bill. There is a dog. There is an Amazonian spider-monkey with a prehensile tail curving upwards in a spiral. There is a copy of a spider (of a species called
Ricinulei
that copulates with its hind leg). There is a tom-toddy figure with head and no body; a flower; a strange kind of seaweed; and a beast, half-bird and half-snake. There is also a lizard with its body shorn in two by the highway.

The lines on the Pampa de Ingenio were spotted in the late Twenties by the Aerial Survey of Peru. But for more than ten years the archaeologists were either ignorant of their existence or chose to ignore them. In 1939 Dr Paul Kosok of Long Island University was surveying Ancient Peru and followed up a rumour of ancient irrigation channels on the Pampa. He found the mysterious lines and was doubly astonished when the figures of birds and animals emerged from under his footprints. Kosok was not perplexed by the origin of the figures. Their style roughly coincided with those that decorated the pots of the local Nazca culture (even if the figures on the desert were finer and less folkish than the figures on the pots). But other questions troubled him. What was the point of this colossal creation when its makers, who did not have the aeroplane, could never have seen them properly? How could a people of simple peasants and warriors have mastered their superlative surveying technique without a knowledge of higher mathematics?

By chance Kosok timed his visit to coincide with the Winter Solstice, 21 June, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. That evening at sunset he was crossing the Pampa where several lines ran in an east-west direction. He was delighted to find that the lower rim of the sun touched down at a point where one of the lines met the horizon. He decided that the line had been made for determining the date of the Winter Solstice. And he went on to speculate that all the lines and geometric forms were used as sightings to predict the risings and settings of the sun, moon and stars. The Nazca people, he said, had imprinted on the desert ‘the largest astronomy book in the world'.

The Nazca Culture had been discovered in 1905 by the German Peruvianist Max Uhle. It was a smallish empire of warriors and peasant cultivators that flourished and declined between the second and eighth centuries of our era. The empire looked in two directions – across the Cordillera to the jungle, with its humming birds, its spider-monkeys and spiders; and to the sea coast, where white guano islands float on a heaving silvery sea. Nobody knows the real name of the Nazca people. First they were absorbed into the Inca and even earlier empires; then the Spaniards killed off the Indian population of these valleys and assured for them the anonymity of oblivion. One can but reconstruct their lives from the things they buried with their dead. And this is a rather hazardous business, since tomb-robbing is almost a national pastime and the robbers (the
huaceros)
have ransacked all but a few cemeteries. Seen from the air, the sides of the valleys are pockmarked with their holes.

On their patchwork of fields, irrigated by the annual run-off from the Andes, the people of Nazca grew the potato, the sweet potato, the avocado, the chile pepper, the lima bean, maize, manioc, pineapples, guavas and a multitude of littleknown grains and fruit and vegetables. They had fishing boats and rafts which could only skim one of the world's best fishing grounds. For meat they ate llama and large quantities of guinea pig. They knitted and wove some of the most exquisite textiles the world has ever seen. They used every inch of the valley-floor for. cultivation and stationed their houses, their temples and their cemeteries on the desert rim.

On the whole they seem to have been a cheerful and quite democratic people, well aware of the comic possibilities of life, and very unlike the character of their sinister northern neighbours, the Mochica. They did, however, share at least one of the Mochica's less pleasant customs – the cult of the severed head, preferably the head of a defeated enemy.

In trying to explain the existence of the Nazca observatory, Kosok outlined a theory of civilisation that has best been expounded by the German historian Kornelius Wittfogel. Wittfogel, himself a refugee from the politics of terror, saw an ominous continuum between the age of the Pyramids and the modern totalitarian state. In his scheme, the early empires of Peru, like those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, were ‘hydraulic civilisations', that is, civilisations which owe their existence and their ideology to waterworks. He maintained that wherever you found large-scale irrigated agriculture, you found slave gangs and overseers. You found a population explosion and the emergence of a centralised state, with military dictators and foreign wars, whose purpose was to ensure a supply of cheap or free labour, and to purchase peace at home by sowing chaos abroad.

These early states saw the first paid informers, police methods, the systematic murder of rivals and savage inequality, with surpluses in the hands of the few and grinding poverty the lot of the masses. So important were the dates of the seasonal cycle – for planting, inundating and harvesting – that you found an outburst of astronomical calculation and astrological prediction. So important was it to keep the workforce in passive dependence, that this knowledge became the exclusive property of a caste of managerial bureaucrats, the futurologists of the ancient world. These were men morbidly wrapped-up in themselves and responsible to nothing but the system; they dwarfed the people with monumental architecture and threatened them with implacable sky gods.

Wittfogel was on the right lines but overstated his case. Archaeologists were able to contest his thesis by pointing out that the authoritarian state came into existence
before
the large-scale waterworks and not because of them. In other words, the dictators build the dams, not the dams the dictators. Perhaps more important is one feature that all states, early and late, have in common. To achieve cohesion they fix on a symbolic, ceremonial centre, which almost invariably carries celestial overtones, appealing to the inflexible order of Heaven to sanction authority on Earth. Stonehenge, the Temple of Heaven in Peking, Red Square, St Peter's, the Ka'aba at Mecca, the Versailles of the Sun King, or the Great Pyramid, to say nothing of the installations at Cape Kennedy, are a handful of examples only. The question here is whether the Pampa de Ingenio was the centre of such a state, and whether it was the creation of a managerial caste of priest bureaucrats. This was Kosok's question.