By ANNATERESS FABRIS*

Considerations on Paco Gómez's book.

To Tadeu Chiarelli, who gave me this book as a gift.

Can photographs tell a story? Marcelo Rubens Paiva seems to believe in this possibility when he writes: “I remember things from my childhood because I see photos. Like the time they put a real firefighter’s helmet on me, a profession I had planned to have for many years. It’s recorded, there’s a photo, so I’m sure it happened. Or is it in my memory because there’s a record of the moment? I remember the São João de Serelepe festivities, when my mother dressed me up as a country bumpkin from head to toe […] I remember because there are many photos of the square dance in which I dance with my sister Nalu, a clearly rehearsed choreography, surrounded by monitors who organize the wedding in the countryside, the escape from the snake and the rain. But I don’t remember clearly. I see the photos.”

It is precisely because there are so many photos that Paco Gómez was able to write The Modlins, published in Spain in 2013 and translated in Brazil ten years later. The story begins on a spring night in 2003, when the author is warned by his brother-in-law that, not far from his home in Madrid, there was a “mountain of photographs” thrown in the trash. The warning had not been given by chance; the brother-in-law knew that Paco Gómez liked to collect all kinds of discarded documents: “My house is full of old photographs, notebooks, postcards, books, letters from children to the Three Wise Men, unfinished diaries, invoices, X-rays… They belong to unknown people for whom I feel an irresistible curiosity that leads me to imagine their lives based on small, disconnected details.”

There was an autobiographical reason for this interest: “The obsession with delving into other people’s lives comes from the impossibility of doing so in my own. The lives I imagine are always more interesting and better. I come from a family of farmers in the mountains of Ávila de Castilla La Vieja, of no importance whatsoever, and of which I barely have any graphic accounts.” In addition to trying to find a substitute for the lack of his own images, the author, during his college days, had worked as a garbage collector, imagining “the lives of the owners of the open garbage bags. […] I learned to recognize what had happened in a house by the type of rubbish the residents discarded: a romantic breakup, a death, an eviction, or Diogenes syndrome.”^[1]

They background It is not enough to avoid the astonishment that overtakes him when he comes across “strange, mysterious, absurd, disturbing” photographs. There were people in unusual poses, animal skeletons, dried flowers, geometric figures. In some of the images, he recognizes actors, writers and film characters “disguised as priests, gunmen and Roman soldiers”.

Despite the curiosity aroused by such an unusual visual universe, Paco Gómez only returned to the images a year and a half later, when he moved to a new apartment. He then tried to put order into a “jigsaw puzzle of confusing and indecipherable pieces”. He classified the photographs into two groups: experimental and family. In these, he noticed the constant presence of three people: a woman and a man, between forty and fifty years old, and a young man in his twenties.

As a photographer, the author is interested in the persistence of those strangers in photographing themselves in “specific places: the corner of a house on a checkerboard-patterned floor, a terrace, a beach, a staircase and a ruined courtyard”. In search of logical connections, he spends hours on end poring over that “ocean of images”, but the people in the photos continue to be “unknown, strange people, alien to my customs and who came from a bygone era”.

Paco Gómez even fantasizes that the documents belonged to an English ambassador who had to move suddenly, but he soon realizes that the diplomats lived far from the Malasaña neighborhood. Some characteristics of the photos – naked people and in “weird poses” – also argue against this hypothesis. He decides to put aside that “indecipherable mosaic”, which only raised unanswered questions, and to give precedence to family and work: “I was passionate about photography and I couldn’t continue wasting time in an absurd and useless search”.

However, he did not count on chance. While photographing a friend in his room, he saw a frame on the wall with four small portraits of a woman he had seen before. The friend explained that it was a painter named Margaret and that the photos had been found in the trash. The image, however, did not correspond to the face “encased” in Gómez’s head. Upon learning that the story of the painter had been published in the press, he found an article on the internet about El País with information about Margaret Marley Modlin, who died in 1998 and left behind a collection of over 120 of her paintings; her son Nelson, who died in 2002; and her husband Elmer, who disappeared the following year. This discovery completely changes Paco Gómez’s frame of reference, who, with his curiosity heightened, decides to “reconstruct these lives thrown in the trash”, although the new details were accompanied by “more unknowns to solve”.

An investigation process begins, defined by the author as “an intense and unique experience chasing the shadows and dreams of people I never knew”, as “a story that I was obsessed with day and night”. The first stop is El Palentino, “a mythical bar that preserves the traditional character of the old taverns of Madrid”. Frequented by Paco Gómez, it was located opposite the building where the Modlin family had lived. He gets some information from the bartender Loli, who tells him the name of Margaret’s seamstress, who lived next door to the bar. Feeling completely involved in the investigation, he decides to make a documentary entitled The Modlins, with the collaboration of friend Jonás Bel.

Thanks to the testimony of Milagros, the seamstress, Margaret and Elmer “began to gain a real dimension. They were no longer those static characters in photographs.” The couple never spoke Spanish well; they had met in their youth and fallen in love, despite their social differences: she came from a wealthy family; he was a country boy. Everything revolved around Margaret’s painting: Elmer did everything he could to provide her with absolute tranquility and exclusive dedication to art. Milagros, who knew little about Nelson, had in her home a study of her own face in profile and a black and white lithograph entitled Henry Miller is more than an eagle, with a strange dating “Year of the moon”.

The next steps lead Gómez and Bel to the writer Javier Marías, who had noted in his phone book the name of Nelson Modlin, whom he no longer remembered; to Luis Herrero, who worked in a metal workshop, who gave them the name of Carlos Postigo, trader of Margaret; to Postigo himself; and to Miguel Cervantes. If the contact with Javier Marías had been provoked by an article published in The weekly country, dedicated to time, death and melancholy, the metal workshop had been discovered thanks to the memory of the film Blade Runner.

Inspired by the behavior of Lieutenant Deckard, who discovers “something surprising by carefully observing an image that apparently has nothing special about it”, the author decides to explore “to the limit of the grain” all the photographs found in the trash. In one of them, he realizes that Elmer had been photographed in the first house that the couple occupied in Madrid,^[2] but he cannot determine its location. Once again, chance intervenes: a road sign that had disoriented him in several photos of the Modlins taken from the same balcony helps him resolve the impasse when seen in another image from the same period hanging on the wall of the Escalada tavern.

It showed the front of the bar and the same street sign that appeared in Elmer's photo: “The streets had changed directions over the years, and this missing sign led me to the house where the Modlins had lived on Don Felipe Street. If I hadn't seen Blade Runner and if my visit to Escalada had been a day later, I would never have found out.”^[3]

The interview with Postigo is quite enlightening, as he reveals aspects of Margaret's relationship with her own work. The painter was capable of making sacrifices that included her health in order to have money to buy the best quality material for her paintings. Supported by Elmer, she asked astronomical sums for her works so as not to get rid of them. As summarized by trader: “They knew they would never be able to sell many of their paintings, because they were stuck to their skin, and they found the perfect excuse: they didn’t sell them because there was no one who would pay what they were worth.”

If Postigo did not know the whereabouts of the paintings, Cervantes, with whom Elmer had had a relationship in the last year of his life, did. The professor at the School of Agronomy was the executor of the Modlins' will and could take Paco Gómez and Bel to a warehouse specializing in the storage of works of art in Torrejón de Ardoz and facilitate access to the apartment on Calle del Pez.

Accompanied by Postigo and Cervantes, Gómez and Bel have a frustrating experience in the warehouse: they can only see Black Anne (The black) and a portrait of Nelson, which evoked Picasso's pink phase, in addition to the sculpture with the couple's heads, “of a frightening realism”, which was supposed to contain their ashes, but which was empty. Contact with The black confirms that Paco Gómez was right about the identity of the woman seen in his friend's room. The model was not Margaret but rather a woman with “Jewish features”, who “precipitated the Modlins' search”.

Disappointed by the visit to a place that resembled a “cemetery” where art “disappears stored in the form of niches,” the author had to make do with digitalized images of the paintings provided by Cervantes. In addition to the disappointment caused by the impossibility of recreating “the textures and colors of the paintings” with the camera, there was another disappointment: the images were of low resolution and the paintings, at first glance, were “somewhat childish, with strident colors and excessively baroque, full of symbolic elements.”

Despite his frustration with Margaret’s “poor” works, Paco Gómez decided not to give up: he studied her drawings for hours, establishing connections and focusing on the details. This exercise allowed him to resolve one of the mysteries that had been obsessing him since the Modlins had entered his life: “It happened suddenly: with the same surprise as when a photographic copy begins to draw its shapes in the developing tray, I began to understand the meaning of the photographs I had found in the trash. I discovered that the images were representations of the characters that inhabited Margaret’s apocalyptic imagination and that she used as models to compose her paintings. […] That’s why the photographs were so good; because they were just tools stripped of all artistic intention. And, as I had already proven more than once, it is in the photographs from police archives, in the portraits of itinerant photographers or in the wonderful images of 19th century engineering works that photography reveals its full power.”

Continuing the investigation, Paco Gómez manages, after many attempts, to gain access to the apartment on Calle del Pez. Filled with disorder and dirt, since everything had remained the same as when Elmer was rescued, the apartment held some surprises: piles of newspapers, magazines and papers with records of important historical events for the couple; a bunch of old and new keys placed on a copper plate in the kitchen; a gray man's hat with an envelope on which was written "out of order” placed on top of the toilet seat…

The result of the visit is summarized as follows: “I felt the Modlins’ presence in the house and could see how their characters occupied the usual corners. Margaret painted in her corner; Elmer worked at a long table preparing the canvases, hitting them with a hammer muffled with rags so as not to make any noise; and Nelson played the guitar while watching the winter sun stream in through one of the balconies.”

In the next stage, Gómez and Bel travel to a village in Extremadura to interview a family that had posed for one of Margaret's most important works, the triptych The Impalement of Vera, inspired by a Holy Week tradition. The entire Luengo family had been immortalized in the painting, but the Modlins had become particularly fond of little Sotero, a “deaf and introverted boy whom Margaret compared to an angel painted by the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca.”

The visit to Valverde de la Vera is fruitful: Paco Gómez has access to a blue folder full of photographs, letters and reproductions of Margaret’s paintings “perfectly organized and classified”. This documentation allows him to understand the importance that the artist gave to the triptych. She meticulously recorded her creative process, because “she felt that she was creating an important work of art for the history of humanity and wanted to facilitate the work of historians who would be amazed by her genius”.

Increasingly consumed by research, the author felt the need to photograph the spaces in which the Modlins had portrayed themselves, embarking on “a schizophrenic and absurd scavenger hunt around the world”, which took him to Paris, Florence, Venice, a street in the Maravillas neighborhood of Madrid, and the walls of Ávila. He had the collaboration of his wife Isabelle and friends, who took on the roles of the Modlins, in “small experiments and intimate tributes lacking any rational explanation. I needed to make them and verify with my presence the reality of those spaces. I searched for the furrows that the Modlins had left in the air”.

One of these traces was discovered when Modlins Gómez enlarged the negative of a photo in which Margaret was sitting on a box in one of the rooms of the apartment: at her feet was a photographic copy that had gone unnoticed. The importance given to this discovery can be gauged by the description of the process that led him to discover the black figures of Margaret and Sotero in the image thrown on the floor: “I enlarged the paper to the maximum, contrasted it, hyperfocused it, and enlarged it again. I proceeded inspired by the protagonist of Blow Up by Antonioni”. The conclusion only reinforces the almost messianic aspect that the photographer gave to the investigation: “The Modlins left clues scattered on the floor that I had to continue interpreting. Were they trying to tell us something?”

A second visit to the apartment for a new recording resulted in the discovery of some blue-covered photocopies of typed books in English. The first two were a project by Margaret entitled The mirror of time's angel; authored by Elmer, the third volume, A poem in my pocket, contained a selection of letters and poems.

The prologue to the painter's project helps us understand the couple's relationship with Henry Miller and the dating of the engraving belonging to Milagros. Gómez realizes that the Modlins "tried to make Henry Miller their safe conduct to achieve fame. Their logic was very simple and somewhat childish: if the author of Tropic of Cancer He was a genius, so were those who had a close relationship with him. That is why Margaret and Elmer documented their relationship with the writer for posterity: they took police photographs of his letters and transcribed in great detail any type of contact between them, be it a dedication of a book, a letter or a simple note. All of this was written in the blue books that they had just found in the pantry on Calle del Pez.”

The “Year of the Moon” date is also associated with Miller. The painter starts the world in 1969 so that her personal calendar would coincide with her meeting with him. She decides to portray him and, with the help of her husband, photographs “each part of Miller’s body with forensic expertise”. Miller was not the only famous person admired by the couple; along with Francisco Franco, he enjoyed the reputation of being “the most extraordinary personalities of all time”. A supporter of “blind and radical patriotism”, the artist saw Franco’s dictatorship as “an enlightened stage of humanity, full of peace, beauty, order and prosperity”.

She decides to dedicate a painting to the figure who represented “the ideal of the contemporary Christian soldier,” in yet another attempt to achieve glory by reflex. She writes down the preparations for the painting in a notebook; she manages to contact a state attorney who agrees to speak with Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco about purchasing the work; he asks for an exorbitant price. When everything seemed to be going well, the unexpected happens: Carrero Blanco dies in an ETA attack on November 20, 1973, two days after Margaret tells her contact that the painting was finished.

The puzzle represented by the Modlins' lives begins to take on more precise contours. Traumatized by the experience of the Second World War, which took him to the destroyed Nagasaki, Elmer decides to “seek the meaning of his existence in fiction”: he decides to become an actor and, in this capacity, meets Margaret in November 1947.

The two of them and Nelson work in film, television and advertising productions, always in secondary roles, and among the three, the boy seems to be the most professional. Elmer even participates as an extra in the final scene of Rosemary's Baby (Rosemary's Baby, 1968), by Roman Polanski, leading Modlins Gómez to speculate whether the director had not been inspired by his life to draw the profile of the protagonist's husband: a misunderstood actor who does not accept his failure and who survives with secondary jobs, waiting for the big role.

Thanks to Nelson’s best friend, the mathematician Jaime Lipton, the author is able to paint a more accurate portrait of the family. Nelson had moved to Madrid in 1969 to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. At his American school, he stood out for his differences from his peers: at just 17 years old, he said he wanted to be a businessman and earn a lot of money to stand out from his parents. He didn’t talk much about them, but he considered his mother a brilliant artist who, when discovered, would be considered “one of the greatest painters of all time.”

It was up to him to take care of all the formalities for his parents’ transfer and to find an apartment on Miguel Moya Street, where “the myths of the Modlinian Apocalypse began to be forged”. There were two motivations behind the couple’s migration to Spain. The idea that the United States was a country that “had lost its way”, being “on the brink of ruin and civil war”. And the belief that Europe would give them the fame that had been denied them at home. A representative of apocalyptic surrealism, Margaret hoped that this would be recognized as the recovery of the true path of art, lost with modern and abstract experiments.

The conversation with Lipton gave Paco Gómez the feeling that the Modlins’ story was close to its conclusion. Within the family context, Nelson appeared to be “the one who had been most harmed by his parents’ intellectual madness” and the new questions that arose were about how he had overcome the conflict with them. To complete the picture, he proposed to speak to his three wives, to the fiancée he was going to marry and to visit the country house he had acquired shortly before his death. There was no photograph of his first wife; only her name, Berta, and her profession, flamenco dancer, were known.

The second, Olga Barrio, had hosted a famous news program in 1988, but had moved to Germany and was unwilling to cooperate with the investigation. The bride’s name, Monica Fornasieri, was known, as was the embarrassing scene Elmer had subjected her to at his son’s funeral. Shaken by Nelson’s death, he tried to convince her “that the two of them must have a child so that the Modlin lineage would survive. Elmer was desperately searching for an impossible heir. Monica ran away crying to Jaime seeking refuge. She was unable to process her father’s reaction at such a tragic moment.”

The third wife, Susana Jarabo, agreed to collaborate with Paco Gómez and provided new information about Margaret and Elmer. They lived in a run-down, dilapidated house, with paintings on the walls, and their clothes attracted attention: “clothes that could have been thirty years old and looked like scraps. I wouldn’t say they were dirty, but as if they were out of fashion, covered in dust.” Seeing Margaret’s paintings awakened in her an impression of “morbidity,” of “a very great and personal interest the mother had in her son.” Affected by this “morbid feeling,” she came to the conclusion that Nelson was “a fairly normal person considering the parents he had.”

Increasingly obsessed with the investigation, the author realized that his life and that of the Modlins “were converging in an alarming way. I wondered whether it was they who had approached me from the other side of the living, or whether it was I who had unconsciously sought them out. Was I becoming a lunatic?” Although he knew that Margaret’s works would not be able to interest the art market, he decided to make them known to the general public along with the story of the Modlins so that they would remain in Spain, as he had wished.

Aware that neither he nor his friend Jonás had the experience or the means to make a quality documentary, they handed over the collected material to Brazilian director Sergio Oskman. After three years of work, he transformed Gómez into the film’s protagonist, telling the story of a character who “finds photographs in the trash and interprets the Modlins’ lives.” When the film premiered, Paco Gómez did not hide his disappointment at not finding his name in the credits: “Everything in the film seemed to be mine, but I had disappeared from the Modlins’ story like Elmer disappeared from the films he worked in as a supporting actor.”^[4]

In an attempt to find a patron who would allow Margaret's paintings to remain in Spain, the author had promoted, together with Cervantes and Bel, the exhibition The three magical ems at the AVA Gallery, between March 7 and 30, 2007. In addition to Margaret's main paintings, the exhibition made available to the public photographic studies, objects, sculptures, documents and a video montage by Bel, which “made the Modlins' odyssey more palatable and credible”.

The folder featured a colorful portrait of the family, in which Gómez detected the keys to their story: “An image that is a door to another dimension and represents a complex, narrow, encrypted and invented universe where everything is measured and posted. There are the three of them, the mother, the father and the son, in a perfect representation of a tri-being. Margaret Marley Modlin symbolized with this photograph a familiar planetary system with two satellites orbiting it.”^[5]

Having turned the investigation into a “personal matter”, Paco Gómez travels to Villa Margarita, Nelson’s country house, where in the garden he comes across a sculpture of Margaret left out in the open, “as if it were an archaeological remains”. Inside the house there are his parents’ blue books, a good number of portraits, film footage and images of Nelson with Susana Jarabo. The feeling of having finished the investigation is put into question by the videotape given to the author by the owner of the house; in it, the couple chatted and highlighted the sculpture that was to be placed on their tomb.

To finally end the process and say goodbye to the Modlins, Paco Gómez heads to Casa de Campo Park, where the ashes of Margaret, Elmer and Nelson had been scattered. The story was supposed to end where “their footprint was lost”. Once again, however, chance played a trick on the couple who had so fervently pursued fame. On the plaques of the funeral urns that were supposed to be thrown into the lake, the surname had been engraved incorrectly, Modglin. This leads the author to conclude: “The Modlins had sacrificed everything to achieve fame and recognition, and even in this last memory of their lives, a stranger had made a mistake when engraving their names on the plaques. It was as if failure had to survive them”. Ironically, the mistake had also affected Nelson, who had been a successful businessman after abandoning his career as an actor, model and broadcaster.

Paco Gómez does not consider the outcome of the adventure to be positive: “Undertaking a project of this nature showed me the complete catalogue of our pettiness and weaknesses, but above all it exposed me to the venom of those I trusted, the same ones who betrayed me as soon as they could to obtain their miserable dose of notoriety. I mortgaged my life and that of my children, and for what?, I ask myself. That is why I put all the photos I found on the street in a garbage bag and brought them with the intention of throwing them at the bottom of the lake.”

As the 2013 book proves, the author did not carry out this act. On the contrary, he added to the documentation found in the trash photographs of his own authorship and others provided by Elmer's heirs, by Ana, his maid, by Postigo, Raúl García, Susana Jarabo, Francis Tsang and by the Luengo family. In addition to these, the book includes a photo of the hospital boat that took Elmer to Nagasaki, a photogram of Rosemary's Baby, frames from a video recorded by Bel and from the U-matic tape that was in Nelson's country house. With the help of this visual set^[6], Paco Gómez gives realistic contours to a story that, at times, could seem implausible due to the idiosyncrasies of the couple who believed they had a mission to fulfill in the world.

How can we define the book in literary terms? It is a mix of genres – journalistic chronicle, autobiography, detective story, diary –, accompanied by abundant photographic documentation that, little by little, transforms the reader into a spectator capable of creating “a film in his imagination”. A story “that is read while being seen or seen while being read” – as stated on the website. NOPHOTO –, the work is structured like a puzzle made of disparate and scattered memories waiting for someone willing to bring them together into a coherent composition. A suitable title for Paco Gómez’s undertaking could be Three characters looking for an author, because, thanks to their obsession, the Modlins emerged from the trash to which they had been destined by insensitive relatives to become people with their own personality and life projects.

Although the story is structured around several genres, it is clear that its author is a photographer, capable of detecting in the photographs rescued from the trash not only the apparent narrative, but also a second level of reading, in which details unnoticed at first glance emerge. Inspired by fictional characters, Paco Gómez interrogates the visual material at his disposal at length, uses the technical resources of photography to reveal and give consistency to what could otherwise seem like a blur, and stages performances with his wife and friends in an attempt to nullify the temporal arc that separated him from that peculiar family.^[7]

Paco Gómez’s frustration at the end of the project could be contrasted with an episode recounted in the book. The 2007 exhibition brought him satisfaction: a white sticker that a stranger had stuck on the intercom on Calle del Pez read “Here lived the Modlins. Remember them.” Furthermore, a year earlier, the Madrid City Council had placed a plaque on the property with the following inscription: “In this house lived and painted from 1975 until her death MARGARET MARLEY MODLIN ‘The greatest painter of the Apocalypse of all time’ together with her husband, Hollywood actor ELMER MODLIN, and her son NELSON MODLIN, a model and radio announcer who never orbited the mystical universe created by his parents.”^[8]

The cover of the Brazilian edition, which shows the couple sunbathing on a boat, is quite bland and does not immediately introduce the reader to a peculiar universe made up of grandiloquent dreams and an absolute symbiosis between Margaret and Elmer. The Spanish edition, on the other hand, proposes an ambiguous view of the couple, in order to highlight the deep bond between the two, which is not without its fractures. The cover depicts a fragmented face, apparently masculine, as the jacket and tie worn by the figure would lead one to believe. A female face is superimposed on it, which becomes the dominant element of the composition, if we take into account the detail of the hair that refers to Margaret's hairstyle.

The overlapping is not perfect and gives the whole thing an enigmatic aspect, generating a disturbing sensation in the observer. The observer feels compelled to go beyond the cover and enter a universe in which reality and dreams merge and become confused thanks to Gómez's expertise and his stimulating mosaic composition. The cover can therefore be seen not only as an index of the couple's relationship, but also as an allusion to the fragmentation of the narrative, which mimics Paco Gómez's wanderings through the Modlinian universe and allows his characters to remain as open forms, impervious to any anticipated crystallization.

*Annateresa Fabris is a retired professor at the Department of Visual Arts at ECA-USP. She is the author, among other books, of Reality and fiction in Latin American photography (UFRGS Publisher).

Reference

Paco Gomez. The Modlins. Translation: Mari-Jõ Zilveti. New York: Fotô Editorial, 2023. [https://amzn.to/3Qd02nX]

REFERENCES

NOPHOTO. “Los Modlin. An incredible story recovered from the bottom”. Available at:http://nophoto.org/los-modlin>

PAIVA, Marcelo Rubens. I'm still here. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Notes

[1] Diogenes syndrome is a type of depression that causes people to neglect their hygiene and compulsively accumulate rubbish at home.

[2] Later Gómez discovers that this was the couple's second residence.

[3] The author had been at the bar on the day it closed for good because it was located in a dilapidated building.

[4] Entitled A story for the Modlins, the short film premiered in 2012 and is structured in two moments: Elmer's life and his participation in Polanski's film; the escape to Spain and the transformation of Margaret's art into the central axis of family life. The film uses as a scenic resource a hand that arranges in a shot the material found by Gómez, while a narrator describes this same material and interprets the Modlins' life as a large jigsaw puzzle thrown in the trash.

[5] About the exhibition, see also: NOPHOTO. “Los Modlin. An incredible story recovered from the bottom".

[6] Gómez does not publish all the images he has in the book. The article “Los Modlins. Una historia increíble rescatada de la rubbish” (The Modlins. An incredible story rescued from the rubbish dump) contains other photographs, particularly those recreated in the places where Margaret and Elmer had been.

[7] He himself participates in these recreations. This is demonstrated by a photo montage composed of a faded image of Elmer saluting in front of the Eiffel Tower (1970s) and a photo of Gómez replicating the pose (2007).

[8] A photo of the plaque can be seen in the aforementioned article “Los Modlin. An incredible story recovered from the bottom".

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