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In some ways, “Melania,” the new documentary about Melania Trump, feels almost avant-garde. It rejects everything we normally associate with the commercial success of a bio-pic: narrative, suspense, authenticity, even one unguarded moment. But in another way it’s bracingly honest. President Donald Trump and his wife have made no effort to hide that, over a dinner at Mar-a-Lago shortly after the 2024 election, she personally pitched the project to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who has vast financial interests in government contracts and antitrust policy. Nor have the Trumps dissembled about Amazon’s payment of forty million dollars for the rights to the film—more than twice as much as the second-highest bid—with twenty-eight million reportedly flowing directly to the First Lady.

President Trump has been less up front about a far larger payment—negotiated at about the same time that his wife was pitching “Melania” but revealed on its opening weekend—from the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. That payment came through World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency business announced by Trump and Steve Witkoff, his friend and now his Middle East envoy, with five of their sons and two other executives, in September, 2024. (Trump and Witkoff are currently listed as “emeritus” co-founders.) World Liberty billed itself as “inspired by ‘Chief Crypto Advocate’ Donald J. Trump” with a mission “to leverage the global reach and recognition of the Trump brand” to get internet users into crypto. But its business plan was vague.

In October, 2024, World Liberty began selling digital tokens that gave owners a right to “vote on certain matters” about what the company might someday do, without conveying any ownership or share in potential profits. Before Trump won the election, the tokens predictably found very few buyers. The company did not yet have a track record, any revenue other than those token sales, or any apparent advantage (other than its Trump connection) over better-established competitors, so determining a fair market price for it would have been exceedingly difficult.

Yet World Liberty has now acknowledged that, four days before Trump’s second Inauguration, a company controlled by the U.A.E.’s ruling family agreed in secret to pay half a billion dollars for a forty-nine-per-cent stake in the nascent venture. According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the transaction, internal documents show that the Trump family immediately pocketed about a hundred and eighty-seven million dollars, the Witkoffs thirty-one million, and the two other executives another thirty-one million, with a second payment of two hundred and fifty million dollars expected six months later. (The Journal could not determine how the second payment may have been distributed.)

In May, between the two payments, Trump, overruling objections from his national-security advisers about Emirati ties to China, approved a huge sale of cutting-edge A.I. computer chips to the U.A.E. (A spokesman for World Liberty said that the President and Steve Witkoff had not had “any involvement whatsoever” since the election and that the Emirati deal had nothing to do with Trump’s decision about the chips. Trump told reporters that he does not know about the investment and that his sons “are handling that.”)

It is well documented that Trump and his immediate family have exploited the Presidency for personal profit on an unprecedented scale. Last summer, The New Yorker calculated that over the past decade those profits came to $3.4 billion. Six months later, at the end of his first year back in office, that tally had climbed to more than four billion. But the Emirati payment raises novel questions, beginning with the Constitution’s prohibition against officeholders accepting any “present” or “emolument” from a foreign state without congressional consent. In Trump’s first term, his lawyers contended that renting hotel rooms at Trump properties to foreign states was not the kind of “emolument” that the Founders had in mind. They argued that this was a “fair value” exchange and that, in any case, Trump donated the profits to the U.S. Treasury.

Trump did abstain from new business deals outside the U.S. in his first term. In his second, he has abandoned such scruples. Yet the Trump Organization maintains that it still avoids deals with foreign governments—a claim the Emirati payment appears to vitiate. Will Trump say that it, too, was a “fair value” exchange and donate the profits?

Then, there’s the secrecy. The sheer brazenness of the Trump family’s operations has been in some ways Trump’s strongest defense against charges of corruption. Because Presidents cannot be expected to jettison all their financial ties, government ethics rules rely mainly on public disclosure to allow voters, and their elected representatives, to judge whether a President puts personal interests ahead of the public’s. And, until now, Trump always seemed unembarrassed to crow about his side hustles. But, if the Emirati payment was kept secret, what else might be? Both World Liberty and Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars from unnamed investors over the past year. Neither the companies nor the President has disclosed the sources of that money.

In the run-up to the 2020 election, Bob Bauer, who was a lawyer in the Obama White House, and Jack Goldsmith, an Assistant Attorney General under President George W. Bush, published a book, “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.” In it, they offered reforms to curtail the opportunities for the abuse of executive power that Trump’s first term had exposed—opportunities that his second term has taken to extremes. To address potential financial conflicts of interest, one proposal would require Presidents to certify that they have fully removed themselves from any role in any private businesses in which they own stakes, with no access to information about them that is not also available to the public. A second would force any such business to disclose its assets, liabilities, and other stakeholders (precluding a secret investment by a foreign government). A third would give teeth to the emoluments clause: any business connected to a President would be required to publicly report any expected payment or benefit from an arm of a foreign state. If Congress did not consent to it within sixty days, a President would be forced to sell off that interest.

Such measures are, of course, out of the question as long as Trump has a veto. But most of our current government ethics rules date back to a bipartisan backlash after the Watergate scandal. It is hardly impossible that Trump’s self-enrichment, at four billion dollars and counting, might yet trigger a similar wave. ♦

Your story in this week’s issue, “Predictions and Presentiments,” is drawn from your forthcoming book, “Beginning Middle End,” which is coming out in July. The audio version will incorporate sounds that you and your team recorded in Sicily, where both the piece and the novel are set. How would you compare the creative processes of writing and recording, and the experiences of reading and listening?

Recording sound and listening attentively have been an integral part of my writing process for a long time now. My book “The Story of My Teeth,” for example, took shape through a series of audio exchanges with a group of workers in a juice factory in Mexico. I’d write weekly installments of a story, and they would record themselves reading it out loud and giving critiques. They’d then send me these clips as well as ideas for how to continue the story. Some years later, I wrote “Tell Me How It Ends,” an essay about the U.S. immigration system, which was born from my work listening to, transcribing, and translating the testimonies of undocumented children in deportation proceedings. And, for the past five years, I’ve been working with my team on “Echoes from the Borderlands,” a sonic essay that works like a twenty-four-hour road trip along the U.S.-Mexico border. We’ve recorded hundreds of hours of material—sounds as subtle as that of the wind blowing through a saguaro forest, and some as strident as Border Patrol interrogations or rocket launches in Starbase, Texas.

“Beginning Middle End” is particularly attentive to the sounds of the natural world. The sonic version of the novel layers narrative and soundscapes that were recorded with binaural mikes, hydrophones, and geophones. Over the past year, we’ve collected field recordings from Sicily and the Aeolians: sea sounds, underwater currents, winds, volcanoes, fire, dust storms, rainstorms, church bells, fish markets. They are not meant to illustrate or enhance the narrative. Rather, they constitute a kind of emotional undercurrent.

I think that sound is a powerful antidote to the shallow and fleeting nature of our attention and of many of our contemporary experiences. We can’t really consume it the way we consume so many other things. We can’t really scroll through sound the same way we do images. Sound, attentive listening, allows us to be emotionally rooted in time, and that’s an ability that precedes writing. If we are not present in time, paying attention fully, it’s hard to write anything that is truly meaningful.

The story and book center on a mother and her young daughter. The mother, eager for “the chance to begin again,” brings her daughter to Catania, a Sicilian city that sits at the base of Mt. Etna. Why did you choose this location as the backdrop for the narrative?

There are several reasons why this piece, as well as “Beginning Middle End,” is set in Sicily. Some are political, some are geographical, and some have more to do with mythology and early philosophy.

Geopolitically, Sicily has been at the center of historical trade routes between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. It has therefore been conquered by everyone: Carthaginians, Arabs, Greeks, Normans, Phoenicians, Vandals. It has belonged to everyone, and everyone has belonged to it at one point or another. And all of that is still present, still visible in the layers of its cities and its ruins. Sicily still occupies a central space in the contemporary migratory landscape: eighty per cent of all maritime migration from Africa to Europe arrives in the region. Even though Sicily is such a small island, it’s an incredibly complex and diverse place.

Geologically, Sicily is also where the tectonic plates of the African continent meet and collide with those of Europe. Beyond how symbolic or not that may be, it has some very real implications. The Aeolian archipelago, off the coast of the main island, has one of the world’s densest concentrations of volcanoes: Panarea, Stromboli, Vulcano, among others. The sounds of Stromboli are like nothing I have ever heard: it “exhales” every twenty or thirty minutes, and it sounds like a gigantic whale. Vulcano is much quieter: it hisses and whistles in an almost ghostly way. I would love to be a vulcanologist in a future life. In the meantime, I try to listen to and record volcanic sounds, and to write about them (or with them). They are very present in the novel.

Lastly, I have been going to the same little town in Sicily every year for over a decade. The more time one spends on the island, the easier it is to understand why it was in Sicily that Empedocles’ theory of the four elements—fire, water, air, earth—was born. And I can almost confirm what many Greek and Latin authors have claimed in the past: the winds of this world are all born from the caves of Aeolus, on Stromboli; that an entrance to Hades is probably in one of the cracks on the island of Vulcano; and that on some nights, off the coast of Catania, it may still be possible to spot the cyclops Polyphemus.

The mother, who’s an author, is searching for “a way into a new form of motherhood and maybe even a way back into writing,” and she ponders what “makes a good beginning” in each context—in life and in literature. Why are these things so inextricably linked for this character? And what do you think makes a good beginning?

There is no general rule for a good beginning. I love the beginning of Musil’s “A Man Without Qualities,” for example: “A barometric low hung over the Atlantic.” Or Dostoyevsky’s deceivingly simple first line of “Notes from the Underground”: “I am a sick man.” Or Juan Rulfo’s space-time-bending beginning in “Pedro Páramo”: “I came to Comala because I was told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Páramo”—where the importance of “came” instead of “went” and “here” instead of “there” doesn’t become clear until much later in the book.

These three beginnings have nothing in common, yet they are all perfect in the context of the stories that unfold. But that is the thing with beginnings: they are susceptible to becoming re-signified over and over again, depending on the twists and turns that a story later takes.

When you are still in the early stages of constructing a story—whether in life or in literature—a good beginning is probably one that opens possibilities, rather than narrows them. But in literature, like in life, you never know if a beginning is good or not until much later; sometimes not until the story is finished. It’s a type of knowledge that comes only with hindsight.

At a fish market, the pair come across a sign, in Sicilian, that translates into: “If you are born a tuna you can’t die a swordfish.” The daughter pushes back on this sentiment, citing her great-grandmother, whose disposition changed radically as she began to lose her memory. When did you first hear this Sicilian saying, and why did it stick with you? And, to the daughter’s point, what do you make of the relationship between memory and identity?

I love that old proverb. I heard it for the first time from an old fishmonger, Fortunato, who used to have a little store by the port in a place called Castellammare del Golfo. I used to buy fish from him often, and he said it to me one day, rather off-handedly, and it stuck. I agree and don’t agree with the proverb. I do think time changes us, sometimes profoundly. And in old age, as a person loses their memory, it may seem like their very essence is disappearing. When someone close and dear to us goes through a process like this, it feels as if we have already lost them, and that we have to grieve for them even before they have departed.

This is something that “Beginning Middle End” deals with at length. In the novel, the narrator is in the “middle” of her life, observing her daughter articulate complex memories and carve out a place for herself in the world, while at the same time witnessing her mother lose grip of her memory and her sense of place. She tells her story from that difficult vantage point where life and death meet, where arriving and leaving come together, where the beginning and the end become visibly and irremediably linked.

Proteus, the Greek sea god, is depicted on a precious heirloom, a mosaic tile, that has been passed down the family’s maternal line for several generations. How did you learn about Proteus and, of all the mythological figures, why did you choose to incorporate him in a story?

I think I first encountered Proteus while reading Alice Oswald’s “Dart,” a book-length poem that works like a sonic cartography of a river. The poem ends with the image of Proteus, a sea shepherd and also an oracular god who can see not only the future but also the distant past. But he doesn’t like to reveal information, so he constantly metamorphoses in order to escape his curious captors. He’s not a very popular god in the Greek pantheon, and in fact, by some accounts, he may even have been a mortal.

In any case, Proteus made his way into this piece, and into the novel, by sheer insistence. After I encountered him in “Dart,” he kept reappearing in other books I was reading. He appeared as the “Old Man of the Sea” in Steinbeck’s “Log from the Sea of Cortez,” which I was reading for a project; then he appeared in Pliny’s “Natural History,” which I was reading for research; he appeared, again, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I was teaching at the time. So I gave up and said, “O.K., fine, I’ll write about you.” And once I brought him into the novel, everything—the bits and fragments I had been accumulating over the years—started falling into place. It was as if Proteus’ metamorphoses allowed for the novel to be a fluid, shapeshifting book, but at the same time one that finally had a coherent internal logic: it became a road novel, a mother-daughter story, a family saga, a piece of climate fiction, a rewriting of myths from a less heavily-patriarchal perspective. But more than anything, for me, it became a novel against the feeling of the end of times, and a novel about how fiction is a way to come to terms with change and constant transformation. ♦

I had been looking for something like a beginning. A strange thing, perhaps, to expect from time, or from life: the chance to begin, or to begin again. All I had to do, or so I thought, was answer a simple question: How do I reinvent it, the story, our lives? It was going to be only her and me from now on.

We step down the airplane stairs onto the tarmac, and look up at the star-clustered sky. On the horizon, behind a black mountain, the moon is rising, and my daughter stops and tugs gently on my sleeve.

“Look, Ma, a sky-yawning.”

“A what?”

“A sky-yawning.”

“What do you mean, darling?”

“Nothing, Ma, never mind.”

In the taxi from the airport to the apartment, the man on the radio says that Etna spewed a plume of ash and gas earlier today, but that no damages were reported. He also says that there will be a lunar eclipse before dawn, and that the Levante will soon enter from the east. My daughter asks me:

“What is Etna, Ma?”

“A volcano.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not at all, darling.”

“And what’s the Levante?”

“That I don’t know.”

But the taxi-driver says he does know. There are two lineages of taxi-drivers, the ones who say they don’t know anything, and the ones who know all the things. He tells us that the Levante is a good wind, one of the many winds that sweep over this island. So many winds populate the skies here, with their furious blasts and roaring gales, that the Greeks thought it was in one of the caves off this coast that the god Aeolus housed all the winds. This soft, humming, damp Levante coming in will turn the sea a much deeper, darker blue and bring respite from the dry heat, maybe even some rain. Sailors prefer it to any other wind, he concludes with almost lyrical enthusiasm, because it carries them out with swift, smooth gusts from the stern.

It feels like a good omen, I think, to arrive with the Levante. Or am I confused, and is the Levante a good wind for leaving, rather than for arriving? In any case, I have been hoping that it would be here, on this island, this summer, that my daughter and I would finally have a real beginning. We just had to find a routine, a sustained everydayness. I had to find a way into a new form of motherhood and maybe even a way back into writing.

My maternal grandmother was originally from a small town near here. And, though she died when I was young, and this was the first time I had come to the island, as soon as we stepped off the plane I felt a distinct sense of home—past or future, I’m not sure. Or perhaps it wasn’t a sense of home but the echo of someone else’s belonging: borrowed memories, rumors passed down.

My daughter asks, so for the rest of the drive to the apartment where we will be staying I tell her things I remember about my grandmother, her great-grandmother. We called her Nanna, and she had smoked a pack and a half of Camel cigarettes every day since she was twelve. She had a quick temper but also an expansive warmth and a sharp sense of humor. She was born not far from here, in a place called Philosophiana. She was a farmer, and she collected old objects she found buried in the fields. When she was twenty-one, she dressed as a man in order to be hired as a day laborer on archeological digs near her house, and she took part in some important findings there. But then she was caught cross-dressing, got fired, and decided to emigrate. She learned how to read and write while aboard the ship, and became a voracious reader after that. She played a lot of chess, survived a shipwreck, was a terrible cook, believed in luck. She was inconveniently good-looking—dark olive skin, wild curls, disastrous teeth—and liked to brag that she had moon-yellow Botticellian eyes. She hurled insults at ungentlemanly men (cretino deficiente), aggressive drivers (cretino demente deficiente), and politicians on television (cretino deficiente del cazzo). She lost her memory in her seventies and died alone in an asylum for the insane in Mexico City in 1989.

A Baroque building, an arched entrance framed by pilasters with concrete cherubs and ornaments, a heavy wooden door, an interior courtyard, one flight of marble stairs up, keys under the doormat, apartment No. 2.

In the foyer, we leave our shoes, our suitcases, her briefcase, and my backpack. We make our way straight to the kitchen, and I fill a tiny pot—the only one I could find—with water to make a quick pasta with butter and some sage we pluck from a planter on the kitchen balcony. Then we sit at a big wooden table, waiting for it to boil. My mother writes to ask if we arrived safely. When my mother sends a message, she always sounds like she’s delivering both a horoscope and a weather report, and she sometimes signs it at the end with her name and her relationship to me, as if I did not have her saved in my contacts, as if she were sending a fax from a public machine. In this message, she confirms and doubles down on what the radio said, except that in her words the forecast sounds ominous: “Eclipse penumbral. ¡Vienen tormentas! Tiempos de cambio. Besos, Mamá, Manuela.”

Before getting into bed, I unpack our suitcases. Then I take little things out of my backpack: passports, toiletry bag, a notebook, and a mosaic fragment, about six-by-six inches, with an image of the god Proteus. He has a seaweed mane, a prominent nose, heavy eyes. His eyebrows are furrowed. He gazes both forward and a little sideways, and he looks sad and startled. The mosaic once belonged to my grandmother, then to my mother. Shortly before my daughter and I embarked on this trip, my mother gave it to me. It has been wrapped in a head scarf inside my backpack for weeks, but now that we will be staying in a single place for a while, I unwrap it and prop it up on the desk under the large window in front of the bed. Maybe home is things on a desk.

We left home at the beginning of spring. Two suitcases: one gray, one green. I was eager to be elsewhere, far from my old spaces, far from the present moment. I had finished writing a difficult book, completed a project recording soundscapes in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and then passed through a slow, entangled divorce. The constellation—finishing, finishing, finishing—had left me feeling like an astronaut: in circumflotation, enclosed but never quite anywhere.

The book had come out in several languages in Europe, and I accepted all the invitations sent to my agency. In fact, I earnestly asked my agent to look for more, for anything: readings, conferences, workshops, book clubs. A friend of mine said, “You’re like those people who will eat everything on an airplane just because it’s free.”

I took my daughter out of school a little before the end of the year and registered her for homeschooling for the rest of the seventh-grade cycle. I found perfect tenants: a couple of Canadian medievalists. They’d take care of our plants; they’d pay on time; they wouldn’t steal my books.

I didn’t reply to that friend, but for days, in my head, I kept telling him, “Nothing is free on airplanes anymore.”

It is the early morning, and I am on the bed, next to her, typing. When I sense her coming into wakefulness, her body stirring a little, her breathing more shallow, I get up to raise the blinds and open the window. The damp breeze blows through in a steady, soft stream. She takes one deep breath and finally opens her eyes.

“Morning, darling.”

“Morning, Ma.”

“How did you sleep?”

“Good. What’s the plan?”

As she sits up, she notices my display of objects on the desk in front of us, and asks, “Is that the tile you had in your backpack, Ma?”

“The mosaic? Yes.”

“Why did you take it out and put it there?”

“Because. To decorate a bit.”

“It’s like the one that Grandma had in her kitchen.”

“It’s the same one.”

“She gave it to you?”

“She did.”

“When?”

“A few months ago.”

“Why?”

“Toenails! Toenails! Ow! Ow! Ow!”

Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby

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“What’s this interrogation, darling?”

“Just asking.”

“She gave it to me, to us, for good luck.”

“O.K.”

“Breakfast?”

“Yes, I’m hungry.”

“Let’s go eat.”

“And what’s the plan after that, Ma?”

I don’t answer. The plan had been to move and move again, until things fell back into place. The first couple of months, we moved every two or three days: hotels, mostly, small and large towns and cities, readings and lectures and symposiums. But now we are here. And I’m not sure what our plan is. I’m not sure what comes next. Now we are mother and daughter, learning how to orbit each other like two new planets. The question is: Now that the gravity of the family nucleus no longer holds us together, how do I do it?

“What’s the plan, Ma?” she asks again.

“The plan is, after breakfast, we’ll go see the port, walk around a bit, buy fish in the fish market, and eat it for dinner.”

“And that’s it?”

“And that’s it.”

We put on our shoes, and I make sure the apartment keys are in my backpack.

“How come you still use a backpack, Ma?” she asks.

It’s true that I should probably swap it for a more feminine handbag. She carries around a red leather briefcase that once belonged to my father. Everywhere we go, she obsessively buys old postcards, scribbles things on them, but then refuses to send them to anyone. She just stores them in her briefcase. Everywhere we go, all she wants to do is read on her own or play chess with me. I observe her closely, perhaps too closely now that it’s only her and me; her behavior is a strange mirror of my capacity, or incapacity, to raise her well on my own. A few weeks ago, I tried to teach her how to ride a bicycle: impossible, she pedalled always backward. I tried not to think about it metaphorically.

“Hurry. Shoes, laces,” I tell her.

“Why are you suddenly in a hurry whenever we are putting on our shoes?”

We both fix our hair in the entryway mirror—loose strands tucked behind ears, one emulating the other—and we rush out the door, down the varicosed-marble stairs, across the interior courtyard, through the arched doorway, and onto the street.

We walk amid the crowd in the direction of the fish market, near the port. She’s holding on tight to my hand, though she and I both silently suspect that she is far too old for that, for holding hands with her mother. If we ever cross paths with another child who looks her age, she’ll let go and take my hand again only when the other child is well out of sight. I tell her that Nanna left on a ship from this very port, almost a century ago.

“But what happened to Nanna’s memory, Ma?”

“What do you mean?”

“Yesterday you said that she lost her memory and died insane.”

I tell her yes, Nanna did indeed lose her mind to one of those ravaging cases of early Alzheimer’s. I don’t think the doctors called it Alzheimer’s back then, but it had to be something like that. At one point, Nanna started having hallucinations. I was eleven or twelve, so, to me, her hallucinations were a source of great entertainment.

“Like me, twelve!”

“Like you, yes.”

Nanna saw donkeys running around her living room, and we’d chase them; we dug holes in the small garden outside her building and pretended to discover ancient coins and other treasures; we were two shipwrecked Phoenician sailors in an underwater world; we were Carthaginian explorers deep inside a mountain cave, looting precious rocks and gemstones.

I don’t tell my daughter the next part of the story: as the disease progressed, the hallucinations became terrifying. Nanna saw faces hidden in the curtains of her room, limbs under her bed, everything around her being consumed by fire. Once, when we were trying to play chess, she could no longer remember how the knights moved. All of a sudden, she started screaming, tremendous animal-like screams, and then broke into tears, asking over and over how I could be so stupid as to even board that little boat that was so obviously going to sink. I think that the shipwreck she had survived came back to haunt her, even though she’d always told the story as if it were a great adventure. What is it, I wonder, that can spoil a person’s memories? Turn an epic life story into a tragic one?

Fishermen set up their stalls before daybreak, under plastic tarps that protect against the harsh summer sun. Under a blue tarp, we see a man cutting off the head of a swordfish—an enormous, powerful beast, its silver bill long, sharp, and strong. One clean strike and the head is severed, its clenched bill parting slightly at the blow of the fisherman’s knife.

She tightens her grip on my hand as we approach the stand. I ask the man how much for the head.

“Quanto per la testa?”

“Cinquanta,” he says.

“Venti?” I offer.

He says that a head that size, about three feet long, with a lot of meat around the neck, would usually go for at least fifty euros. But the morning is racing into the afternoon, the sun has reached mid-sky, and I’m probably one of his last customers, so we settle on thirty. As he wraps the head like a flower bouquet in an upward-coned sheet of newspaper, I notice a cardboard sign, in Sicilian, hanging from his stall. It says, “Cu nasci tunnu non po moriri pisci spata.”

I ask him what it means, and he translates it into Italian: “Chi nasce tonno non può morire pesce spada.”

I smile a vague smile, tight-lipped. He smiles a gentle smile. My daughter looks on in mild disapproval as I hand the man the money, though I think I also catch a glint of the rascal in her, a meteoric flicker of mischief in her glance.

The swordfish’s head: too big, too heavy. It is impossible to keep the whole thing in place inside my backpack, so the rest of our walk has to be slow and careful—a balancing act. She has to help hold the long bill, which sticks out like an old TV antenna.

The word “beginning” comes from the West Germanic onginnan, which means “to open.” And in Old High German in-ginnan was “to cut open, to sever.” I kept telling myself, over and over: all I need to do is figure out what happens after the collapse of the traditional story—the parents, the children, the house—and reinvent the narrative. But our story hadn’t exactly been traditional in the first place. My daughter did not remember her biological father, who had walked out when she was a baby. She grew up with a stepfather, who was now gone, and with a stepbrother, whom she had known and loved as a brother all her life, and who was now also gone. After the divorce, her stepfather and her stepbrother moved to a different city, a different state. And, though the “step” prefixes should have attenuated the blow, she did not know family any other way—she did not know any other distribution of love—so her loss was of the totalled kind.

Reinvent everything, start anew, make it up all over again—that is what I thought I had to do. Imprint new meanings on old things: the way we make breakfast, the way we defy rainy afternoons, the love affairs I’d have, the chores she’d take on, the new tax itemizations I’d manage on my own, the errands and grocery shopping.

We stop at a small vegetable stall at the edge of the market. I pick seven tomatoes, seven yellow potatoes, a head of lettuce, five carrots, half a pound of mushrooms, a pound of rice, and two boxes of pasta. Then I put four tomatoes and three potatoes back: so much harder to calculate quantities for two than it is for four.

“What did that mean, Ma?”

“What did what mean?”

“The man, what did he say?”

“Chi nasce tonno non può morire pesce spada?”

“Yes, that.”

“That if you are born a tuna you can’t die a swordfish.”

“Why?”

“I guess he means that people cannot change what is in their nature. If you are born one way, you will always be that way.”

“And is that true?”

“I don’t know, possibly.”

“But why did he smile like he was saying it to you, about you?”

“He didn’t. He did?”

“He did.”

We pass a row of stores that sell Sicilian tiles to tourists: representations of the island’s flag, fruit arranged into geometrical patterns, an array of old Greek gods.

“Look, Ma, that one looks like the tile Grandma gave you.”

“It does. But I think that’s Medusa, and our mosaic has Proteus.”

“Proteus,” she repeats, and then she wants to know more; she wants to know everything.

I tell her a version of the story my mother told me many times when I was growing up. She listens, holding on tight to the bill of the swordfish now, instead of my hand.

“The mosaic belonged to Nanna. She found it while she was working as an excavator on the ruins of an old Roman villa just south of her farmhouse. According to Nanna, she had discovered the villa’s enormous triclinium, which had an impressive mosaic floor that depicted each of the twelve labors of Hercules.”

“Triclinium?”

“Dining room.”

“And what are the twelve labors of Hercules?”

“Long story, later. The thing is, she never got any recognition for finding those mosaics. All the credit went to the head archeologist, because Nanna was just a day laborer. But, later, she uncovered a series of mosaics in a much smaller room, a little vestibule. They were perfectly preserved, and portrayed a scene from a myth about Proteus, who is one of the most mysterious and elusive gods of the sea. Proteus was a prophet who could see not only the future but also the past and present with total clarity. But he detested being asked about what he saw, so the only way to compel him to speak was to capture him and hold him down. He would resist by shape-shifting, transmuting, metamorphosing. He would become a swordfish, a camera, a rainstorm, a jellyfish, a donkey, a toothbrush, fire, a boat, a book.”

“A toothbrush?” she asks.

“Or whatever else. And, more often than not, Proteus would tire his captor out with all these transformations and manage to escape.”

“A swordfish, a camera, a rainstorm, a jellyfish, a donkey, a toothbrush, fire, a boat, a book,” she repeats.

“Yes, or anything else,” I say. “Those are just examples. He metamorphosed into whatever. But, if the captor managed to hold him down for long enough, he would eventually settle into his original shape, speak the truth, and then dive back into the waters. Anyway, Nanna decided not to say anything to the archeologist, not a word to anyone, and she secretly pocketed a small slab with the head of Proteus. Then she covered the whole thing up with rocks and sand.”

“So she stole it?” she interrupts.

I say that yes, technically, she may have stolen it, but no one ever caught her.

“But did she ever try to give it back?”

“Of course not, why would she?”

“Because she stole it.”

I’m not sure if my daughter’s indignation is a sign of good character or a mark of moral rigidity. I try to explain that Nanna’s little theft was maybe a kind of self-compensation, as she was paid poorly for laboring on excavation sites all day long, and also that the question of ownership over objects found on your own land is at least debatable. “And anyway,” I tell her, “someone ratted her out for being a woman shortly after, and her boss forced her to take off her top and show her bare chest to everyone. She had beautiful, plump breasts, and so she was fired.”

“What does that have to do with anything, Ma?” she asks.

“What does what have to do with anything?”

“That she had beautiful boobs.”

“O.K., I don’t really know if she had beautiful boobs, but the point is she was fired for being a woman.”

“Maybe she was fired for lying, or for stealing.”

“No, for being a woman.”

“How do you know, Ma?”

“I just do.”

“No, you just make stuff up.”

I can’t just make anything up. I know I have to be more careful now with the stories I tell her and the stories I write. Some weeks ago, before we arrived here, I had to do a reading in Amsterdam, and then a couple of interviews in a café. During one of the interviews, a very young journalist asked me whether I would define my work as autobiographical or as autofiction. “Neither,” I said defensively. I denied it as if I were denying a petty crime, and I offered a confusing explanation about why the fiction I write is not of that sort, and why I really have no interest in it at all. But then my daughter, who had been reading in silence beside me, looked up from her book, stared the journalist straight in the eye, and reproduced an entire monologue from a character in my novel, a little girl who is the daughter of the narrator. It was a flawless delivery: she mastered the tone and spirit of the character, the talented little impostor. The journalist looked back at me with a raised eyebrow and a smug smile, as if he had caught me in my big lie, and scribbled down some notes. How was I to explain to him that my daughter was, in fact, impersonating the character, that she had learned the lines—that she was imitating me, and not me her? How was I to say all this and not have both of us, mother and daughter, sound concerning?

We wind our way out of the market and walk slowly through the public plaza. The bill of the beast tilts to one side, so she has to prop it back up every few steps.

“And what are we going to do with it, Ma?”

“Cook it.”

“And eat the whole thing?”

“And eat the whole thing.”

“Gotcha!”

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We finally get back to our building, pass through the arched doorway, then the large interior courtyard, and climb up the marble stairs to the apartment.

In the kitchen, I lay the swordfish head on the big wooden table. But of course before it’s cooked, it has to be cleaned, sliced, pondered: How does one cook something that looks so mythopoetic? Does one?

“And did he say anything, Ma?”

“What do you mean?”

“Proteus, did he at least tell Nanna the future or the past, or anything?”

I suppose I could make something up, tell her a story about how her nanna saw the future. But I don’t. Instead, I suggest we focus on the swordfish head.

“Perhaps, for now, we should just wash it and put it in the fridge.”

“It’s never going to fit in there, Ma.”

We carefully unwrap it, and peel off strands of soggy newspaper that are stuck to its scales. We wash it under a trickle of water in the sink, she and I holding opposite ends of the head. Then we dry it and wrap the bottom part in kitchen towels, leaving only its eye and bill uncovered. Finally, we have to make space for it. It is, indeed, so large. We have to take out the shelves and dividers in the fridge, and then stand the head upright. It occupies almost the entire space—bent, C-shaped, moon-shaped. Its big black eye stares at us as we close the fridge door with a little push.

“And why hasn’t anyone given it back, Ma?”

“The fish?”

“No, the Proteus mosaic.”

“I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t we give it back?”

“No. Why?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because she stole it.”

“We’ll think about it.”

“But also, because what if it’s bad luck to have it?”

“We’ll think about it.”

As the night comes over us, right before either of us falls asleep, our conversations remind me of those old men who stand on piers or sit on benches looking out toward a distant horizon, mumbling things to one another without really minding if the other is listening at all.

“What would you say makes a good beginning?” I ask.

“For example, tomorrow: breakfast.”

“And in a story?”

“I don’t know, Ma, but do you think my feet and nose are getting bigger?”

“Definitely.”

“And what are we going to do with that swordfish in the fridge?”

“Go to sleep now, darling.”

She eventually falls into a deep slumber: a rock dropping into a body of water. I watch her, the two of us so closely knit together, yet so far apart, daughter and mother. I never know if she really is asleep; she has become so good at faking it. The only way I can tell is if I reach out my palm and touch her forehead. If it’s damp, with studs of sweat, I know that she is finally down. And it seems like a little triumph. I’ve managed to carry her through one more day. I follow her into sleep: a leaf floating on the surface of that same body of water.

I have, of course, used slivers of my own life to write fiction. And maybe that has had some consequences. On my daughter, for instance. She is convinced, for example, that when she was five years old, she almost drowned in a swimming pool in the shape of an electric guitar in Memphis, Tennessee, like the girl in one of my books almost did. It took me a while to convince her that no, she has never almost drowned, that in fact she’s never been to Memphis, Tennessee, and that there is no such thing as a guitar-shaped swimming pool.

Winds carry small clouds quickly: this island in constant agitation, its moving sky. I’m in the kitchen and it’s the early morning. I am reading and making notes. She comes in, pulls out the chair next to mine, sits down heavily.

“What’s for breakfast, Ma?”

“Good morning?”

“Morning, Ma.”

“Morning, darling.”

“What’s for breakfast?”

“There’s cereal.”

“O.K., fine.”

She opens the fridge to look for milk, and she closes it immediately.

“Ma!”

“What is it?”

“Its eye!”

“What about it?”

“It looks like it’s crying.”

I open the fridge and take out the milk, avoiding eye contact with the swordfish.

“What are we going to do with it, Ma?”

“Cook it, I told you, but later.”

I write to my mother at my daughter’s insistence, ask her how she would cook a swordfish head. She says the best way to do it is to make a broth, to keep it simple. I need a big pot, lots of thyme, oregano, coarse sea salt, an entire head of garlic, and olive oil. I look around for pots, but nothing is big enough.

We leave the apartment to look for the things we need for the broth. We walk slowly, holding hands, stopping at storefronts. We linger a while in front of a barbershop, and watch a very handsome barber shave his customer: such a radical exercise in trust and intimacy between two almost strangers, getting rid of hair. We see the barber dip his brush in a bowl, lather the man’s cheeks and neck, and then slide a blade along his neck.

“But what really happened to Nanna’s memory? How did she just lose it?”

“I don’t know, darling. Nobody knows exactly why or how these things happen. Time, biology, genetics, luck.”

“And, if someone forgets everything, do they just stop being who they are?”

“Good question. I suppose so.”

“But then if you are born a tuna you can die a swordfish.”

I smile, but don’t know what to tell her. I guess Nanna had indeed become someone else entirely. After months of terrible episodes, my mother, who was then about the age I am now, decided it was finally time to send her mother to hospice. My mother packed up all of Nanna’s belongings in one afternoon. While she filled boxes and sorted and discarded, I kept Nanna company in the living room, trying to play chess with her, though I knew she wasn’t really paying attention. Then, quite suddenly and without a word, Nanna took my hand and walked me over to the kitchen. Her hand felt leathery and cold. She opened the refrigerator and handed me a couple of oranges, a jar of candied hazelnuts, other things I don’t remember. I put them all down on the countertop, waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t. And then, from inside a plastic bag with slices of greenish ham, she took out the Proteus mosaic, and handed that to me, too. Then she left the kitchen and went back to her armchair in the living room.

I looked at the mosaic, observing it closely, unsure of what to do with it. It was slimy from the old ham, and had a strange, sweet-rotten smell. I remember studying Proteus’ face and thinking that his pearly-yellow eyes made him look eerie, and that those eyes also looked a little like my Nanna’s, like the eyes of someone dead underwater. I put the mosaic back in the fridge, and I don’t remember what happened after that. My mother must have grabbed it later, because eventually it reappeared in our house.

The barber is done with the front. Now he dips his brush one more time in the bowl of lather and spreads it on the back of the man’s neck.

“Ma, he also looks like Proteus, don’t you think?”

“Who, the barber?”

“Yes, look at his long hair and his big nose.”

“To me, he just looks handsome.”

“Can I ask you a question, Ma?”

“Sure.”

“Why did you leave my stepdad?”

The barber, finally taking one step back from his customer, finally stepping out of the deep concentration he has been in, looks sideways over his shoulder, and meets our gaze through the window. Startled, he smiles an automatic smile and waves at us with the same hand that clutches the small, smeared blade. My daughter waves back at him. I grab her hand, and we both hurry off down the street.

We have a new pot, big enough for the swordfish head, although of course part of the bill will have to stick out. We have thyme, oregano, coarse salt. I lay everything out on the kitchen table. She opens the refrigerator and takes a look at the swordfish, then quickly closes it again.

“Ma, what’s the difference between a presentiment and a prediction?”

I open the fridge again, take out the heavy head, still wrapped in kitchen towels, and lay it on the table.

“I suppose a presentiment is a feeling that something might happen, and a prediction is saying or writing that something will happen.”

“So a prediction happens?”

“No, not necessarily.”

“So what is the difference then?”

“Should we dry-brine this before putting it in water?”

“How would I know, Ma?”

She helps me, sprinkling salt on top of the head. I take a bunch of thyme sprigs between my palms and rub them together, letting the tiny leaves fall onto the silver skin.

“Don’t you think we should return it, Ma?”

“Our fish?”

“No, the mosaic with the Proteus head.”

“No, why?”

“Because it was stolen.”

“Why don’t you go shower, darling?”

Negotiations with her: almost always I lose now. She says that she doesn’t need to shower yet, that she’ll shower later, right before bed. I’ll take a long shower, I tell her. I need some time to myself, and she’s allowed to do whatever she likes, even watch a movie on my computer. She says she’d rather wait right there for me, in the kitchen, looking after the swordfish head, working on some drawings and postcards, studying new chess moves.

I find myself hesitating more and more: what things will I say to her as we try to begin anew, and what things will I write that my daughter might later remember as if they had in fact happened? What things should I then not say and not write? If fiction originates in small seeds gathered from everyday life but then grows into something quite different from that origin, how do I make sure that my daughter can pocket the seeds and not get tangled up in the thick, twisted shrubbery that they become?

The bells of a nearby church strike five times, and the afternoon sun is dropping low in the sky. I’ve taken my time bathing, shaving my legs, reading.

When I go back into the kitchen, my daughter is not there. I call out her name, check the bedroom, then the bathroom. Nothing.

Back in the kitchen, I notice that the swordfish is also not on the table, where I left it. Not inside the fridge, either.

I call her name again, and my panicked voice travels through the apartment like an old echo. I look again in the bedroom and in the bathroom. Nothing, no answer. Where could she have gone, and with the head of a swordfish?

I am standing on the edge of the curb outside our building, my knees trembling a little. I am looking for her face in the stream of people passing by. The afternoon clouds gather quickly, and the bright summer light dims.

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It has been three hours since I left her in the kitchen, and I am getting more and more worried, though at the same time I know that this is a safe enough city, that this is a city where children play in the streets, even late at night. She’s twelve years old, resourceful, smart. She started riding the New York subway alone a few months ago, and never once got lost. Should I walk around the streets? Look in the market? It seems counterintuitive to not look, to not run, to not ask, but everyone always says it’s better to stay in one place.

Nothing scares me like the thought of losing my child. I would take or give anything if it meant protecting my daughter from death. I would take or give anything, if the universe accepted bargaining. But why does the universe not negotiate? And why does my mind conjure such terrible possibilities? Nothing can happen to her, and nothing will happen to her.

The church bells strike six, and the tolls meet the sound of distant thunder rolling in, a strange, peculiar ring in the air. And, at last, I see her unmistakable silhouette rounding the corner: wild leonine curls bouncing up and down with the pace of her steps, feet turned slightly outward, long, awkward preadolescent arms. When she notices me, she slows her pace and approaches sheepishly. I stride down the street to meet her midway. She is panting a little, cheeks flushed and damp with sweat or tears or both. She is not carrying the swordfish head. I hug her tight.

“Where were you?”

“Please don’t ask me now, Mama.”

“You can’t just walk out and not tell me.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Not here, not anywhere.”

“I know.”

“And the swordfish?”

“I said don’t ask me, Ma. Please.”

“Can I ask you later?”

“Maybe.”

Maybe she will tell me later. I let it go for now. I need to cook a real dinner, get her to bed on time, keep her safe.

The plan for the night is no longer to eat swordfish soup, but we still have vegetables. The ritual of washing soil off potatoes, and fuzz and dust off tomatoes, and then soaking large lettuce leaves in water makes it feel as though we have lived an entire life here, in this apartment, in this city. Maybe home is washing vegetables.

I slice the potatoes, not too thick, not too thin, and put them in the oven with salt, oil, and pepper. She slices the tomatoes only in half.

We eat, taking big bites. She smiles at the vegetables before every mouthful. She salts tomato halves and large lettuce leaves individually. She blows vigorously on the potatoes to cool them.

“Why do potatoes always stay so hot for so long?” she asks.

“Good question.”

“When you say ‘Good question,’ that means you don’t know, right?”

“Yes, that means I don’t know the answer.”

“Can I tell you something, Ma? And promise you won’t get mad?”

“Of course, tell me.”

“Swordfish heads are free.”

“What do you mean, free? Nothing is free.”

“Swordfish heads are free because nobody wants them, so they give them away. The fishmonger in the market lied to you.”

“How do you know that?”

“I asked.”

“Who did you ask?”

“Another fishmonger.”

“When?”

“When I went back to the market.”

“So you went back to the market. And what did you do with our swordfish?”

“I can’t tell you, Ma.”

Maybe she’ll tell me one day. Or maybe she’ll invent something. I don’t insist further.

“Cretino,” I say.

“Who, Ma? Me?”

“No, not you, silly. The fishmonger.”

“Well, Ma.”

“Well Ma what?”

“Well, who asks how much for a fish head?”

It is she who starts giggling. First just soft giggles, but they turn into laughs when a half-chewed chunk of potato flies out of her mouth, landing exactly, as if she’d aimed, inside her water glass. Her laughter grows and soars, mine joins in, and her eyes become small and watery. My laughter makes her laugh more, because I snort, the way my mother does, and then she imitates my snort, unleashing another round of laughter in me, until my belly aches, good aches, until, suddenly, the kitchen-balcony doors fling themselves open, pushed by a gust of wind. We pause for a moment to look, startled, and notice the rain washing down outside. A blast of thunder rolls through the clouds, and an electric bolt slashes the air, illuminating the rectangle of sky beyond our balcony. The Levante blows hard and brings in the rain, in gusts that spray and drench the table, wet our faces and arms.

I pause, I breathe. I stand up and close the shutters and the window. I brush back her hair and kiss her forehead.

“Why does rain sometimes feel like it’s a memory, Ma?”

“Good question.”

“I know why,” she says.

“Why?”

“Because of the sky-yawnings.”

I have always thought that to invent means to imagine, devise, plan, make things up. And, all this time, I’ve felt that I and I alone was in charge of reinventing our lives, in charge of making up our story. But when I look up the word “invent” in an etymological dictionary, I learn that it means something quite different. To reinvent does not mean to make up something new all over again, but, rather, to come upon, happen upon, discover or uncover something that was always already there. ♦

This is drawn from “Beginning Middle End.”

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Valeria Luiselli reads her story “Predictions and Presentiments” from the February 16 & 23, 2026, issue of the magazine. A winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, Lusielli is the author of five books, including “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions” and “Lost Children Archive.” A new novel, “Beginning Middle End,” from which this story was adapted, will be published in July.

Exclusivity, like any product, gets more valuable the more people want it; it is both the cruellest and the most honest thing that a restaurant can sell. The Eighty-Six, a mega-swank steak house that opened in the West Village last fall, was, from Day One, clubby, celeb-packed, and impossible to get into—no surprise, as it’s the latest from Catch Hospitality Group, which previously brought us the impossible-to-get-into Corner Store. There are just eleven tables, and for a long while I had no interest in occupying any of them. That is, until a friend of mine—a very fancy friend—mentioned that she might be able to get me a reservation, and I was transformed, almost instantly, quite embarrassingly, into a person who had never wanted to be in any restaurant more urgently in my life. This is the confidence trick of exclusivity, and I am apparently a total mark: is there anything more alluring than a closed door that opens just for you?

The door, here, is green and weighty, with a wrought-iron grille over a central peephole, and has been here for ages. The building is the erstwhile home of the infamous speakeasy Chumley’s, and its address, 86 Bedford Street, is said to be the origin of “eighty-six,” Prohibition-era slang for “Get lost.” Like 4 Charles Prime Rib, another well-guarded mega-luxury oubliette in the West Village, with which it draws inevitable comparison, the Eighty-Six is a very good steak house. The Catch team has entirely remade the space in weighty, rich tones—dark woods, bronzed mirrors, copper velvets. A two-top, tucked into an alcove by the (working) fireplace, was purportedly the favored table of F. Scott Fitzgerald. You could, as he presumably did, get full-on blotto—an applewood-smoked Martini, theatrically poured tableside atop a stalagmite of ice grown, science-fair-style, from hyper-chilled water, is excellent, and potent as hell—but, in the sight lines of so many diners’ iPhones filming so much faux-blasé vertical content, it might be ill-advised.

Potato croquettes are topped with caviar.

While you’re browsing the menu, your server might shimmer over bearing a lacquered box, which opens to reveal gustatory treasures arranged as if for a Flemish still-life: a gracefully long-limbed Icelandic langoustine, a few extra-special cuts of beef. One of those steaks, so tightly filigreed with white fat that it glows like rose quartz, is a cross-breed of Spanish dairy cow and Japanese Wagyu which is available, our server assured us, only at the Eighty-Six—a triumph of sourcing for the chef, Michael Vignola, Catch Group’s culinary director and a bona-fide meat nerd. I was, for my sins, dining with a vegetarian, and twenty ounces felt too ambitious to tackle alone, so I went instead for the New York strip, served bone-in. The exterior, salted and peppered, crackled from a hard sear; the inside was tender pink from edge to edge. The sauces I’d ordered alongside were hardly necessary: an eggy, vinegar-tart béarnaise, and a wiggly, wobbly gelée-adjacent steak sauce made with veal demi-glace. I dipped my fries into them, at least, and enjoyed a whole phalanx of steak-house sides: garlicky spinach; butter-laden mashed potatoes; a strikingly photogenic creamed-corn potpie with a swirly croissant top; snappy green and yellow long beans, dressed in a sharp lemon vinaigrette that sliced through the density of the rest of the food.

Not every dish achieved expert levels of precision. A duo of stone-crab claws were half sublime, one pincer tender and sweet, the other stringy and bland. My companion’s sweet-potato ravioli—the only vegetarian dish, besides sides, though some meatless options are available off-menu—had a sugary filling held between oddly stiff, cardboardy sheets of pasta. There is mixed messaging, too, in the story that the Eighty-Six is telling, a tension between Old New York brawn and contemporary glitz—the speakeasy vibes and complimentary pickles versus the swoops of caviar atop warm Mimolette croquettes, the cut-glass decanters for tap water, and the vintage French steak knives. But this is the dissonance of all steak houses, really; the rough-and-ready cowboy mythology is forever at odds with the fundamental frilliness of the performance of wealth, which is built on that least manly-man of things: caring what other people think.

The Eighty-Six seems unfazed by this tension, or indeed by anything at all. As at 4 Charles—and Rao’s, whose time-share system of “table rights” is the model for this sort of restaurant power-brokery—access is the main asset: the product is the door, and what a door! An impossible door! The best kind of door you can possibly enter! In a sense, it was somewhat amazing to discover that the Eighty-Six is actually good, when it really doesn’t need to be. The steak was terrific, the whole experience was ridiculous, and I absolutely want to do it again. ♦

Chilled pineapple with blackstrap-rum syrup.

He could have hidden the soil from view. But there it is, honest, without adornment or apology. Spilling across the bottom of the frame, unconcealed by any carpet or contrivance, soil forms the literal foundation of so many photographs by the Malian photographer Seydou Keïta. In one such picture—of two forward-leaning women in long, sumptuous dresses—the prosaic roughness of dirt seems, perhaps, firmly at odds with how splendidly ornamented the sitters are; it is an element of sheer bathos when read against their beautifully patterned garments (even in black-and-white the designs seem to vibrate), their lustrous jewelry and skin, their nonchalant elegance, so present in their postures and hands and eyes. But the soil has a way of making the poetics of Keïta’s pictures whole: just like the people who sat before his camera, the soil is ineluctably of a particular place and a climate and a land. Together with the subjects in the picture, the soil speaks of Mali’s flesh and marrow.

Born in Bamako sometime between 1921 and 1923, Keïta began taking pictures in 1935, when his uncle gifted him a Kodak Brownie flash camera. After cultivating his gaze for more than a decade—while training alongside the Bamakois photographer Mountaga Dembélé—he opened his own studio in 1948. Fifteen prolific years of studio photography ended in 1963, after Keïta was hired as Mali’s state photographer, forcing him to close the studio. (Keïta retired in 1977, and died in 2001.) But the images from his studio—their panache and sensuality, the rich density of their optical terrains—have made Keïta a lodestar of West Africa’s twentieth-century photography. At the Brooklyn Museum, a retrospective of his work, “Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens,” is currently on view.

“Untitled,” 1949-51.

Many of Keïta’s sitters were part of Mali’s middle class: civil servants and soldiers, teachers and tradespeople. Some were local to Bamako, and others travelled long distances just to get their portrait taken by the man who had emerged as the region’s authority in portraiture. All came adorned and unrepentant in their right to adornment. Keïta and his studio fostered the embellishment of style and persona, the pleasure and play of fashioning a look and of desiring to be looked at.

“Untitled,” 1956-57.

Clients were drawn to Keïta for his distinct capacity to weave together blazing technical and aesthetic precision with a soft eye for the interiority of his subjects. He was known for taking only one shot per person or group; the shutter would click, and there would be no room for waste. He almost exclusively used large-format cameras, always with a shallow depth of field, yielding a fineness of detail that magnifies the presence of his subjects.

So, too, did this orientation to detail deepen those less tangible matters simmering behind the portrait subjects’ eyes and in their aura. Take, for example, one of Keïta’s best-known photographs, which pictures a suited young man in glasses holding up a plastic flower. Coiled around the bottom of the stem, his long fingers—like those we might find in a Mannerist painting—offer an endearing combination of awkwardness and beauty. The sharpness of the image is indelible: the punching contrast between the man’s crisp white suit and a black pen tucked in his coat pocket or the blackness of his skin; the robust detail of each flower petal. But there is also a subtlety in the man himself: his gaze is murky, uncertain, at once trained toward the camera and retreating underneath the thick rim of his glasses, eyes rippling inward.

“Untitled,” 1959.

Many of Keïta’s images are imbued not only with an air of psychological ambiguity but also with a certain cultural ambiguity. The momentum of his career was swept up in the whirl of Mali’s rapidly evolving political circumstances: the country, formerly known as French Sudan, gained its independence and became Mali in 1960. Images from Keïta’s studio attest to the polymorphic consciousness of a colony hurtling toward independence, caught in a kind of fugue between tradition and novelty, between the resurgence of African taste and the appropriation of European sensibilities, between the grandeur of pan-Africanist aspirations and the specificity of the local. All these tensions—and the attendant endeavor to resolve them into a national identity—vie at the surfaces of Keïta’s pictures: they are exercises in individual style and self-fashioning which mirrored the fashioning of a nation.

“Untitled,” late nineteen-forties to mid-seventies.

Attire—particularly textiles—helped set the key of this tune. Keïta kept a vast repository of cloths and fabrics in his studio, using these as backdrops (in contrast to the painted backdrops of European and North American studio portraiture). His sitters often draped themselves in a variety of West African textiles—paying homage to the centrality of the textile in African sartorialism—as well as cloths from Europe and the Islamic world. The ensuing density of pattern pressing against pattern animates a play of geometries and rhythms that links Keïta’s visual schemas to those of European abstraction. Naturally, this latter conceit also belies the African influence that made European modernism possible.

“Untitled,” 1949-51.

We see this, for example, in an untitled portrait sometimes called “Two Ladies of Bamako.” Here, Keïta captures a pair of women—holding each other at the shoulders and the hands—dressed in traditional Malian robe-like garments called boubou. Behind them is a printed-fabric backdrop, and at their feet, a woven rug tessellated with oval patterns. Enveloped in all this optical dazzlement, and cutting across the frame with their bold, frontal gazes, the women are the very embodiment of dignity and power, mirrors of the independence roiling at the heart of the nation.

“Untitled,” late nineteen-forties to mid-seventies.

Keïta’s legacy continues to send shock waves through Mali’s creative world, and through the arena of contemporary photography. He and his younger contemporary Malick Sidibé were among those to turn Bamako into Africa’s cardinal site of image production—and one of the most important loci of photography in the world. (Since 1994, the city has been the site of the photography biennale Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie.) Keïta is lionized in the photo world, and in the art world at large, and rightfully so. But, as with many African image-makers whose work has been accepted by Western institutions, a certain hagiography has been drawn around Keïta’s name which reductively synonymizes it with “African photography.” He and his images are indeed of Mali, but they are more than a mere symbol of Mali. His photographs vibrate with the excess of their ornamentation, with an audacity of presence that exceeds the realm of the emblematic. How radiant is their defiance.

“Untitled,” 1952-55.