Nowhere (20 page)

“Come along, come along!” said an impatient voice. “The feature is just starting.” This command was directed to me by a woman dressed as a nun, who stood at a curtain-draped doorway. When I approached she held the curtain aside and switched on the small flashlight she carried and preceded me down the aisle. I had never before received this sort of service at a movie house, but could recall seeing the like in vintage films, in which a hero, seeking to hide out till some ill wind blew past, took similar refuge in a cinema, as in real life did our latest successful presidential assassin.

I wanted to continue on to my habitual place, rather nearer the screen than would be the taste of most, owing to a mild myopia, but the stern sister forced me to take an aisle seat no more than halfway along, reminding me that I had “a job to do.” I had no sense of what she meant until I sat down. Immediately I was asked for permission to go to the toilet. My eyes not having as yet adjusted to the darkness, I could not identify either the sex or the age of this personage in the seat next mine, but the voice was that of a child.

“Why do you ask me?”

“Because you’re the monitor!” said the person whose small body was climbing over my legs before I could begin to stand up.

I became aware that all this while there had been images on and sound emanating from the screen. I now took conscious note of these and saw that the black-and-white Coming Attractions were just ending in a riot of giant display type, followed by exclamation marks and printed on the diagonal. Whatever was on its way to this theater next would be SHOCKING!!!

But then the titles began for the feature, and I was incredulous when I saw, after the name and logo of the studio had come and gone (for the record, “Puma Productions” and a cougar who bared his fangs at the camera), “Ben Spinoza... in...
GATS ’N’ GALS,
” the actor and title I had created from thin air so as to defend myself when speaking with the cable clerk!

By now my vision was clearing, and therefore I could discern, when the nun returned her, fingers pincered on her ear, that my toilet-bound neighbor was about eight years old, had a short butcher-boy haircut, and was dressed in the kind of smock worn by French schoolchildren.

While the girl climbed back to her seat, the nun upbraided me for letting the child out of the aisle.

“For a person of your age to be taken in by such an old ruse is ridiculous,” said the sister. “Nobody leaves their seat
till the end of the picture!
”

After she left, the little girl said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. But I really hate gangster pictures.”

I was touched by this manifestation of decency in a human being of such a tender age—before I reflected, New Yorkly, that if you don’t find it in a child, you won’t see it anywhere.

“What kind of movies do you like?”

“Where the ladies are rich and have servants waiting on them and wear pretty clothes, and where the men have their hair combed and wear those coats with the long backs and fancy shirts and they help the ladies into carriages and they go to places with shining candles and dance in two lines, one for the ladies and one for the men.”

How I used to hate it when at her age I would be trapped at a costume picture with such tedious sissy-scenes, which one must endure so as to reach the swordfights.

“It takes all kinds,” I told her.

Gats ’n’ Gals
proved to be somewhat better than I anticipated. Its morality was oversimplistic, but it was a relief, after all these years, to see criminals presented as deplorable creatures while the men of law enforcement were courageous, honorable, and even courteous (while routinely wearing their wide-brimmed fedoras indoors, they doffed them when a woman entered the room). The dialogue would provide more grist for the cable clerk’s linguistic mill: cigarettes were “coffin nails”; women, “twists”; cars, “chariots”; and clothes, faces, and dollars were, respectively, “duds,” “mugs,” and “simoleons.” Spinoza was a middle-sized chap, on the slender side, but with a thrusting jaw. At one point he fist-fought two thugs who (in addition to being giants) pressed into service as weapons a series of found objects, chairs, lengths of pipe, and an axe, but with the use of only his two hands Ben eventually “closed out their accounts,” to quote a line of his partner, another G-man, who is subsequently shot in the back by a dastardly, toadlike ruffian, but who has recovered sufficiently by the end of the film to receive a hospital bedside visit from his winsome sister, who has fallen hard for Spinoza, but in the convention of the time had behaved snippily towards him until he appears now, with a box of candy for the invalid and a boyish grin for her. “I’ll bet I know who’d make a swell best man!” says she, simpering at her brother, whose eyebrows rise in a benevolent amazement that is surely also ingenuous.

No sooner had “The End” appeared on the screen than I was treated as an inanimate obstacle not only by the little girl from the seat next me, but by all the children in the row: they climbed, vaulted, swarmed, over me and pushed into the general congestion of the aisle, which was clogged with other children and, farther along, the adults who had occupied the seats more distant from the screen.

I detained, against his will, the last child to leave my row, and was informed by him, in answer to my question, that this was a toilet break and not the end of what he thought of as the school-day.

“There are more movies?”

He portrayed disgust with his mouth and nose. “Where’ve
you
been all your life? We don’t get out till five. We’ve still got to watch a chapter of a Tim McCoy serial, an Edgar Kennedy comedy, and some dumb girls’ picture with singing and dancing!”

He wriggled away and plunged into the aisle-traffic before I could ask him more. I waited until the throng had passed and then left my seat. Before I could reach the street, however, I was stopped by the stern-faced nun who had chided me earlier.

“Because of the allergies that are going round, we’ll be short-handed for monitors again at the evening session, and you’ll have to stay.”

“Excuse me?”

“I think I’m speaking clearly enough,” said she, lengthening the lines that ran from the base of her nose to the mouth. She was one of those persons who have forever the power to make one feel feckless. “You have a job to do.”

“As it happens, Sister, I am an American visitor who just wandered into the school by chance.”

This information made her no more genial. “Then tell me if you can,” said she, “why your films are of such poor quality. Some are scratched badly, and many break during a screening, and Father has to stop the machine and splice the film. At such times the children can become quite unruly. Even our adult-education groups get restless.”

“You must understand, I am not connected with the American film industry and have little technical knowledge, but I wonder whether your troubles might not be due to the age of the pictures. From what I understand, the movies you show are almost half a century old.
Gats ‘n’ Gals,
for example, obviously dates from before World War Two.”

She squinted suspiciously at me. “Can that be true?”

“Oh yes. I can assure you that if indeed he is still alive, Ben Spinoza is quite an old man. Those boxlike cars are seen only at the exhibitions given by collectors, and the clothes worn by both criminals and law-enforcers would nowadays not be seen publicly on anyone except perhaps the kind of alternative-sex people who go to parties given by celebrity designers.”

The nun looked even more grim. “I wonder whether Father knows this.” She beckoned to me. “Come along.”

I supposed I was not really obliged to obey her, but, as I say, her air of authority was that authentic kind that requires more of an effort to dismiss than to honor. I followed her black habit and white cowl through a little door and up a flight of stairs and into a projection room in which were twin movie machines, other pieces of equipment, and a balding man wearing a round collar. The last-named sat at a table in front of a film-editing device: two reels separated by a glass screen. I vaguely remembered seeing a smaller version of such a gadget in the “den” of an uncle who was familially notorious as a home-movie bore, who with his intrusive camera would delay holiday meals until the food grew cold and never fail to catch for eternity any minor embarrassment within the 360-degree purview of his lens, while missing altogether the local events of great moment (tornadoes, presidential motorcades, circus processions with prancing bears).

The nun spoke. “I’m sorry to bother you, Father, but this American has quite a story to tell.”

The priest continued to stare silently into the glass window of the machine before him, while slowly turning the right-hand reel by means of the little crank attached to it.

I didn’t like the implication that what I had to say might be questionable, and bridled when the sister made it even stronger. “You won’t believe this, but I really do think you might want to hear it.” She gave me a bleak look. “Go ahead.”

“I don’t have earth-shattering news to relate, I’m afraid, but the American films you show are of an earlier era and do not reflect the current life of my country.”

Without looking up from his gadget the priest said, “I’m well aware of that.”

I looked at the nun. She said, “
I
wasn’t.” She made a quiet exit.

“An usherette doesn’t have to be,” murmured the man of the cloth, shaking his head at something he saw in the little screen. “I don’t know how many more splices this will take.” At last he looked up at me. “That’s the only trouble, the physical condition of many of these pictures. We could use some new copies. You don’t suppose that when you go back home you might look for somebody who could make copies of these fine films? We don’t have adequate equipment for that job over here. No doubt they might elsewhere in Europe, but we Sebastianers don’t like to admit our weaknesses to anyone nearby.”

“I suppose I could do that,” I said. “But could you tell me where you get these films nowadays?”

“Aha.” He had keen eyes under metal-rimmed spectacles and was losing his hair at those two places on the crown just above the temples. “Your USO and Army people left them behind when they went home after World War Two. It seems that Mr. McCoy had access to them. Were it not for these pictures I don’t know what our Enlightenment could have come to.”

“I confess I find it curious that the clergy of all people would condone the exchanging of schools and churches for cinemas.”

The priest laughed merrily. “ ‘Condoned’ is too mild a word, my dear fellow! We were positively ecstatic to do so. For the first time in a century we have full houses!”

“And the movies are also a substitute for school?”

He frowned. “The choice of words is not appropriate. The movies are not substitutes! If anything, church and school were the substitutes. They were poor imitations of life. Now we can see the real thing.”

“Old American films are the real thing?”

“Yes, of course,” the priest said forcefully. “The virtuous are shown to succeed, the evildoers invariably come to grief, and the general philosophy that informs every picture is that there is a common good, which is recognized by everyone—including the wicked, who of course are opposed to it, but they
know what it is.
Believe it or not, before the Enlightenment, Sebastiani society had no such standards or beliefs. The church had utterly different aims from the schools, and the code one learned in each was utterly confounded by one’s experience of life. And the government received no respect from anyone, which of course is still true, but now the government is
intentionally
performed as a farce, and is quite effective.”

“Namely, it does nothing.”

His smile became ever more radiant. “Exactly! And are you aware of what an achievement that is? Unprecedented throughout history! Not even the Austro-Hungarians were able quite to pull that off.”

“And everything is run on credit.”

“One of the most brilliant schemes man has ever devised!” said he. “And not all that different from the old way of exchanging pieces of paper, if you think of it. A bank note has no intrinsic value, nor has a check. And it has been a long time, has it not, since the coins circulated in any country have had much value as metal? All the foregoing means of payment are essentially no more than credit, eh?”

Until now, being in my peculiar situation, I had not thought of an obvious question,
viz.,
“Who decides who gets most credit?”

The priest had gone back to his movie-viewer. He now looked up with a quizzical expression. “Credit is unlimited for everybody.”

“Then everybody is rich?”

“Far from it,” said he. “We have fewer rich people than we formerly had, and of course many fewer of the poor. But some of those who
are
rich are richer than they were previously, and there are still
some
poor people.”

“And could you explain that, Father?” It might seem ridiculous that I so addressed a projectionist, but the fact was that, like the nun, the priest seemed to retain all the authority he would ever have had.

“Personal taste,” he said. “There really is an enormous variation amongst human beings. One exercises his vanity in quite another way than that of his neighbor: one by accumulation, the next by deprivation. But of course most Sebastianers, so as to allay envy, are somewhere in the middle.”

“Then vanity and envy were not eradicated by the Enlightenment?”

The priest grimaced at me. “Are you really so naïve, or should I take that question as derisive?”

I admitted, “I really can’t decide.”

His brow cleared. He accepted that answer in good humor, perhaps because he understood that it was no more or less than the truth (unless I am being too sentimental in my assessment of him, as those reared as liberal Protestants tend to be with respect to a celibate clergy).

“I’ll withdraw the question and put another,” I told him. “What do you think of the Blonds?”

“They are all God’s children.”

“I meant their situation in society.”