White on White

It wasn't often, she went on, that we could present ourselves to others, like a self-portrait. More often, we made portraits of the people around us, guessing at their features from occasional glimpses.

Whenever she was visiting home, Agnes's daughter said that she wanted the two of them to cook together. The deliberation of it struck Agnes as odd. It was obvious that they would cook - how could they not? - but the statement made it forced, if not artificial. Her daughter suggested lengthy recipes for foods that carried an idea of old times: jams, pies, roasted meats. She took photographs as they cooked. Once or twice, Agnes had come across these photographs on her daughter's social media pages, with a line or two about the mother-daughter bond. She didn't know how to point out the insincerity to her daughter, who was part of a generation of educated women that paid rapt attention to the things that gave them pleasure and turned them into rituals for display... The simplest acts, Agnes thought, the very fabric of life had spun out of proportion, expanded to grotesque magnitudes of egocentricity, just like old paintings, restored with too bright colours, that los the subtleties of their initial expressions.

She didn’t know how to point out the insincerity to her daughter, who was part of a generation of educated women that paid rapt attention to the things that gave them pleasure and turned them into rituals for display.

Mornings, the apartment expanded with light. For now, she could only imagine the damage it would cause and what would remain in its wake.

I thought of the lives stacked in crevices of the city, unraveling at every moment.

Until then, she said, she'd always admired her children's rational detachment from events that concerned others, as if this were proof of a superior constitution. To be sure, they were exemplary people - in their habits of consumption, politics and donations and voluntary work. They lived their lives with textbook goodness. But they didn't know that goodness might take the form of harsh words, that anger might be the guardian of the weak.

Perhaps she was just old-fashioned, Agnes said, but it seemed to her that severe introspection was a sure way to get lost in the smallest issues, to reduce one's life to a list of grievances. For her daughter, it felt like every conversation, every memory could lead to an injustice that needs talking through.

Among the strongest memories of her past, she went on, was watching her mother in the kitchen. Agnes had tried revisiting this place in her painting - that blue kitchen of her childhood and adolescence, which was both a physical and an emotional landscape.

The cousin was both real and fictional to her - an embodiment of all that Agnes wanted to be, fashioned from the particular details of her cousins tangible self. "We form ourselves through our doubles... We make ghostly twins to carry the weight of our desires.

People could be cruel when faced with suffering, she said, especially when it looked messy. It was easy to see the situation as a loss of dignity only because it was uncomfortable to look at.