The Retrospective: Translated From the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman (38 page)

“Your wife is your wife, and my lover is my lover. There's no connection. But before you go on, put something in your mouth, the people here will be insulted if you don't touch a thing.”

“You're right. I don't know what's going on. I'm sort of nauseous. I lost my appetite.”

“The place turns you off?”

“Not the place. You . . . you're tough.”

“You haven't heard anything yet.”

“I want to talk to you about Ruth.”

“Make it fast. The night is short and I'm tired.”

“She's sick and doesn't want to admit it.”

A little smile crosses his lips, as if he is pleased by the news.

“Sick with what?”

“I don't know what the illness is, but I sense it and I'm almost sure. Her doctor has been pestering her to repeat some blood tests, which apparently were bad, but she decided to ignore them.”

“Just like her to ignore them, not because she's afraid of the results, but because she believes that ignoring a problem makes it go away. Wait a minute, what does ‘I sense it' mean—you're living with her again?”

“No, definitely not. And I never did. I don't know what you know or others told you, but after you left her I didn't want to live with her. What I felt was a responsibility toward her, an obligation to the character we used, we built, we believed in—you first and foremost as the creator, but also I as the director, and also the cinematographer and the others who worked with us. So when you left, she had to have protection, or call it what you will. Because who knows better than you the world she came from? That world could offer no cure for the breakdown you caused her. And if I hoped that Toledano's love would win her over and free me from her, I turned out to be wrong.”

“Because she found him too feminine.”

“Feminine? Why? Do gentleness and patience have to be feminine? I don't agree.”

“You can agree or not, but even in kindergarten Debdou needed someone manly, someone cruel and hard to please, because only then could she feel she had earned his love.”

“Someone like you, for instance . . .”

“For instance.”

“And someone like me?”

“You're a dubious case; the narcissism in someone like you, so sure he is an artist, erodes manhood over the years, and even if he runs to the toilet and manages to control every drop, his manhood needs more validation than that.”

And he laughs.

“I came to talk about Ruth,” you repeat patiently. “She's ill and needs to be convinced to let us at least find out what the illness is.”

“But if you don't live with her, why are you investigating her illness?”

“Even if I don't live with her, I can still tell she is deteriorating. You should know that I brought her along to my retrospective.”

“I knew that.”

“Who told you?”

“De Viola told me you asked that she be invited.”

“You're still in touch with him? You have no more films to deposit with him.”

He ignores your question.

“There, in Santiago,” you press on, “during the three days of the retrospective, I saw new symptoms. Weakness she had trouble overcoming, chronic fatigue. Sometimes watching herself on the screen she dozed off, and in
Circular Therapy,
it took her a while to recognize herself. We were staying in the same room, I could see this up close.”

Temperatures rise in the arbor. “Yes,” he says. “I know that room.”

“Not exactly a room.”

“Right, an attic they reserve for guests of the municipality, with wooden beams and a window that faces the plaza at the rear of the cathedral.”

“Exactly,” you say uneasily. “With a stone angel waving a sword or a spear.”

“A sword, not a spear.”

The revelation that the former scriptwriter had slept in the same room, and lain in the same bed, strengthens the hope that the intimacy, rebuilt and reimagined, could lead to reconciliation.

“I was not considered an honored guest, nor did they give me a prize, or a fee for coaching the actors,” continues Trigano, “but they did treat me to a nice stay at the Parador.”

You very nearly bring up the
Caritas Romana
hanging on the wall, but you resist, so as not to awaken ghosts.

“By the way,” you add, “this wasn't the first retrospective where they made a false assumption and housed us in the same room. And the bed, which you surely noticed was big and wide, was still not so big for a man not to sense what the woman lying beside him was feeling.”

You mean to hurt him, in the hope that causing him pain will bind him to you, that jealousy might diminish cynicism.

He looks you in the eye now, seriously.

“Look, Moses. I regret I agreed to bring you here, because you are about to insult a woman who is important and dear to me.”

“Which woman?”

“Have you not noticed that the farmer's wife is also in treatment here?”

“So?”

“That's why you have no confidence in the food she cooks.”

“No, why do you say that? Your confidence is more than enough for me.”

“But you told me you came here hungry, and if I read correctly in an interview you gave to some newspaper or other, in your recent films, which of course I didn't see and don't intend to, you make sure that the meals are real, long and full of detail, and that the characters relate to what they are actually eating—”

“You read correctly.”

“So there mustn't be a gap between art and life.”

“You think so?”

“Sometimes.” He laughs.

“I have nothing against this meal,” you say, snatching the wisp of goodwill that suddenly surfaces between you. “Here we are, sitting opposite each other at the dinner table, and if I were here not as a guest but as a director, I could stage an attractive scene lasting a minute or two. I would ask the cinematographer to pan this unusual arbor and try to capture the velvety darkness enveloping its greenery, and from there I would encourage him to zoom in among the plates and bowls on the table to convey precisely the lively colors of the food. From time to time, I would want to spice the dinner scene with a few quick takes inside the kitchen and the dark rooms of the patients, so some fear and mystery can trickle in. That would underscore the dramatic tension between the skinny, younger man who crackles with hostility and disdain while gobbling the food ravenously, and his interlocutor, an emotional old man who pokes his fork into one dish and another but doesn't eat a thing. This contrast alone, without a word spoken, as in a silent film, would build tension that requires a payoff and gives the producer hope of filling the theaters.”

He listens attentively but doesn't smile, not even a little. “Because the producer is what matters,” he mutters.

“And all this,” you say, sticking to the scene, “comes before we get to the heart of the matter. Reconciliation between a teacher and a student after many years.”

“No reconciliation. And I'm not saying another word until you put something in your mouth.”

“In that case,” you counter, “I'll start with the red soup, if it hasn't got cold.”

“It's tomato soup that was cold to begin with, and spicy.”

You dip your spoon into the fragrant red puree dotted with white specks, bring it to your lips, swallow a spoonful and then another, and suddenly your mouth is on fire and the spoon falls from your hand.

“Great soup. Don't worry,” you tell him, like a child to his mother, “just resting. I can't help it if my excitement at seeing you kills my appetite.”

“You, Moses, still get excited?” He reverts to mockery.

“Excited, and confused.”

“Confused? The one who should be confused here is me, as I picture the two of you in a bed I slept in. My heart is calm and cold—though I know where you want to lead me, there's not a chance that I'll go there. Anyway, objectively, don't you think it's pathetic to travel on a winter night to a dangerous area looking for a man you haven't seen or talked to in many years, all to tell him about the imaginary illness of a woman who has become meaningless to him?”

“It's not an imaginary illness, believe me, Trigano, it's real.”

“In what way real?” He reddens. “In that she refuses to play along with the patronage you offer?”

Finally. You knew that Trigano could not conceal indefinitely the root of his pain and jealousy, and you try to maintain a gentle and patient demeanor.

“Again you misinterpret my protectiveness, or call it what you will. Because as I told you, it began as professional care and not personal, and if at times it involves the closeness you're thinking of, it happens naturally in the course of working together. Which is why there are always boundaries.”

“Nice and decent, but not true.”

“True . . . believe me.”

“Okay, why not? Really, what do I care how you interpret your patronage and what you do with her and what you don't do.” But he is still angry. “A scene of two adults, lying in the same bed, and the man senses, without any attempt at touching, just from the edge of the bed, the hidden malady of the woman. I wouldn't buy such an absurd premise even in a work of literature.”

“Not even in symbolic stories like yours?”

“They have nothing to do with this.”

You change the subject and tell him about the first night, about
Distant Station,
which the Spaniards turned into
The Train and the Village
—how astonished you were to discover that the village girl at the center of the plot was a deaf-mute.

“And you forgot that?”

“Evidently.”

“But the critics at the time singled out the deaf-muteness as a daring and original element in the script. It was the only way the villagers could support a diabolical plan without incriminating themselves. Her disability created a twilight zone where meanings were confused and outcomes were blurred. Like linguistic obfuscations created by sly politicians to fool the masses and manipulate them at will.”

You acknowledge the powerful originality of the deaf-muteness in this film but give yourself some credit too, as the director who was able to elicit from the wild, confused gesticulations of a young woman a strange, alluring eroticism.

“Yes”—he is caught up in your words, eyes blazing—“yes, both I and the Spaniards who did the dubbing could feel it when we worked on those scenes. A strange eroticism floating in the studio . . .”

“In Spain Ruth told me about your sister, who was her model for the character.”

“You didn't know about my sister?”

“You never mentioned her. Maybe you were embarrassed by her.”

He averts his eyes.

“Maybe . . .” he says. “In those years I avoided exposing my personal life.”

“Is she still alive?”

“No. She couldn't keep going after my mother died.”

“I'm sorry . . .”

He says nothing. Regards you with caution. The thread of conversation has snapped, and he wonders what you're after.

“I'm afraid of causing you pain,” you say, almost in a whisper.

“Cause me pain? How?”

“You surely remember the final minutes of the film, when she is dragged into the bushes. I was amazed to see how savage and violent it was, how far I let it go, even compared to movies today. I was filled with compassion for the living character, the real one, sitting beside me in the hall.”

He tenses in his chair, his eyes narrowing, his hostility entangled in the web of your story.

“Yair Moses, I have no interest in an account of your feelings or your lust.”

“You're wrong, this is not about my lust but about her illness, which is why I am here. You wondered how I could sense her illness if I don't live with her—well, when we got back to the Parador after the screening, she crashed, fully dressed, in her coat and boots, onto that big wide bed, and sank into an unhealthy long sleep. It was as if a dead woman were lying at my side. I took off her clothes and her boots, knowing that she couldn't feel me. And then, though I had never, ever forced myself on her, not even a light touch, I held her feet and covered them with kisses—just her feet—and by the heat and dryness of the skin I could tell she was sick.”

A strange, evil smile distorts his lips. He gets up as if possessed, then calms down. Pours himself some wine, and pours some in your glass too. He sips it slowly, ceremoniously, looks at you as if you are someone he is seeing for the first time.

“Your lips are that sophisticated?”

“Apparently . . .”

“Maybe your loneliness, Moses, has bent you completely.”

“Maybe.”

“So why don't you tell me what really brought you here, so we can say goodbye?”

“A simple request. Pick up the phone and tell her you found out, from me or whoever, that she is neglecting her blood tests, and this is of concern to you—you can phrase it however you think is right—because, though many years have passed since you parted, you still care, and though you are certain, or you hope, that the test results will be reassuring, in any case it's better for the truth, any truth, to come out earlier rather than later.”

“Bottom line?”

“Bottom line, you're asking her to get another blood test, if only for your sake.”

“For
my
sake?” He stretches out the word, as if shocked and insulted. “For my sake?”

“Yes, for your sake. That way you might convince her. And if you want, you can add ‘in memory of our old love.' I leave that to you.”

“Our love?” he retorts in a hoarse whisper, as if you've invaded a vipers' nest.

“Yes, your love. I still remember its intensity and its joy. That's why she'll listen to you. You've remained an authority figure for her. Every time your name comes up, I can feel the awe she has for you. More than awe, admiration. I am asking you to talk to her . . . preferably in person, but it could be on the telephone. If that's too hard for you, write her a letter. There's nothing easier.”