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| Agostino Veneziano Apollo and Daphne 1515 engraving British Museum |
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| Barthel Beham Apollo and Daphne ca. 1520-40 engraving British Museum |
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| Andrea Schiavone Apollo and Daphne ca. 1540-63 etching British Museum |
" . . . and I, poor Marta, can still see the glare from the television that continues to broadcast and the warmth of this man who has lain down beside me again and keeps me company. As long as he is by my side, I won't die: let him stay here and do nothing, I don't want him to talk or to phone anyone, I don't want anything to change, just let him warm me a little and hold me, I need to be still in order not to die, if each second is identical to the previous second, it makes no sense that I should be the one to change, that the lights should still be lit here and in the street and that the television should still be broadcasting – an old Fred MacMurray film – while I lie dying. I can't cease to exist while everything and everyone remains here and alive and while, on the screen, another story follows its course. It doesn't make sense that my skirts should remain alive on that chair if I'm not going to put them on again, or that my books should continue to breathe on the shelves if I'm not going to look at them any more, my earrings and necklaces and rings waiting in their box for their turn which will never come; the new toothbrush that I bought just this afternoon will have to be thrown away because I've already used it now, and all the little objects that one collects throughout one's life will be thrown away one by one or perhaps shared out, and there are so many of them, it's unbelievable how many things each of us owns, how much stuff we accumulate in our homes, that's why no one ever makes an inventory of their possessions, not unless they're going to make a will, that is, not unless they're already contemplating those objects' imminent neglect and redundancy. I haven't made a will, I haven't got much to leave and I've never given much thought to death, which it seems does come and it comes in a single moment that upends and touches everything, what was useful and formed part of someone's history becomes, in that one moment, useless and devoid of history, from now on, nobody will know why or how or when that picture or that dress was bought or who gave me that brooch, where and from whom that bag or that scarf came, what journey or what absence brought it, if it was a reward for waiting or a message from some new conquest or intended to ease a guilty conscience; everything that had meaning and history loses it in a single moment and my belongings lie there inert, suddenly incapable of revealing their past and their origins; and someone will make a pile of them and, before bundling them up or perhaps putting them in plastic bags, my sisters or my women friends might decide to keep something as a souvenir or a spoil, or to hang on to a particular brooch so that my son can give it to some woman when he's grown up, a woman who has probably not even been born yet. And there'll be other things that no one will want because they are only of use to me: my tweezers, or my opened bottle of cologne, my underwear and my dressing gown and my sponge, my shoes and the wicker chairs that Eduardo hates, my lotions and medicines, my sunglasses, my notebooks and index cards and my cuttings and all the books that only I read, my collection of shells and my old records, the doll I've kept since I was a child, my toy lion, they might even have to pay someone to take them away, there are no longer eager, obliging rag-and-bone men as there were in my childhood, they wouldn't turn their nose up at anything and would drive through the streets holding up the traffic, car drivers then were still prepared to slow down for their mule-drawn carts, it seems incredible that I should have seen that, not so very long ago, I'm still young and it wasn't that long ago, the carts that grew to impossible heights as they picked things up and loaded them on until the carts were as tall as one of those open-topped double deckers you see in London, except that here the buses were blue and drove on the right . . ."
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| Cherubino Alberti after Polidoro da Caravaggio Apollo and Daphne 1590s engraving British Museum |
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| Francesco Albani Apollo and Daphne ca. 1615-20 oil on copper Louvre, Paris |
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| Domenichino Apollo and Daphne ca. 1616-18 drawing Royal Collection, Windsor |
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| Willem Basse Apollo and Daphne ca. 1628-48 etching British Museum |
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| Massimo Stanzioni Apollo and Daphne before 1656 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
" . . . and as the pile of things grew higher, the swaying of the cart drawn by a single, weary mule became more pronounced – a rocking motion – and it seemed that all that plundered detritus – defunct fridges and cardboard boxes and crates, a rolled-up bedside rug and a sagging, broken-down chair – was constantly on the point of toppling over, unseating the gypsy girl who invariably crowned the pile, acting like a counterbalance, or as if she were an emblem or Our Lady of rag-and-bone men, a rather grubby girl, often blonde, sitting with her back to the load, with her legs dangling over the edge of the cart, and from her perch or peak, she would look back at the world and at us in our school uniforms as we overtook her, and we, in turn, clutching our files and chewing our gum, watched her from the top deck of the buses that took us to school in the morning and back home in the afternoon. We regarded each other with mutual envy, the adventurous life, and the life of timetables, the outdoor life and the easy life, and I always wondered how she managed to avoid the branches of the trees that stuck out over the pavements and knocked against the high windows as if in protest at our speed, as if wanting to reach through the windows and scratch us . . . "
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| Salvator Rosa Apollo and Daphne before 1673 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Stefano Pozzi Apollo and Daphne 1730 drawing on blue paper Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Master of the Giants Apollo and Daphne ca. 1779 drawing Yale Center for British Art |
" . . . she had no protection and was alone, perched up high, suspended in the air, but I imagine that her cart moved slowly enough to give her time to see them and to duck down, or to grasp them and hold them back with one grimy hand that protruded from the long sleeve of a torn, woollen, zip-up cardigan. It isn't just the minuscule history of objects that will disappear in that single moment, it's also everything I know and have learned, all my memories and everything I've ever seen – the double-decker bus and the rag-and-bone men's carts and the gypsy girl and the thousand and one things that passed before my eyes and are of no importance to anyone else – my memories which, like so many of my belongings, are only of use to me and become useless if I die, what disappears is not only who I am but who I have been, not only me, poor Marta, but my whole memory, a ragged, discontinuous, never-completed, ever-changing scrap of fabric, but, at the same time, woven with such patience and extreme care, undulating and variable, as my shot-silk skirts, fragile as my silk blouses that tear so easily, I haven't worn those skirts for ages, I got tired of them, and it's odd that this should all happen in a moment, why this moment and not another, why not the previous moment or the next one, why today, this month, this week, a Tuesday in January or Sunday in September, unpleasant months and days about which one has no choice, what decides that what was in motion should just stop, without the intervention of one's will, or perhaps one's will does intervene by simply stepping aside, perhaps it suddenly grows tired and, by its withdrawal, brings our death, not wanting to want any more, not wanting anything, not even to get better, not even to leave behind the illness and the pain in which it finds shelter, for want of all the other things that illness and pain have driven out or perhaps usurped, because as long as they are there, you can still say not yet, not yet, and you can still go on thinking and you can still go on saying goodbye. Goodbye laughter and goodbye scorn. I will never see you again, nor will you see me. And goodbye ardour, goodbye memories."
– from the novel Tomorrow in the Battle think on Me by Javier Marías, translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996)
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| Théodore Chassériau Apollo and Daphne 1844 lithograph British Museum |
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| Nicolas Poussin Apollo and Daphne 1625 oil on canvas Alte Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Nicolas Poussin Apollo and Daphne 1664 oil-on-canvas (in progress at artist's death, and unfinished) Louvre, Paris |