The Retrospective: Translated From the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman (46 page)

Doña Elvira makes no apologies for the liberty she has taken, nor does she retreat from his bed, but instead brings a chair and sits beside him. A woman of ninety-four, an actress in both silent and talking films, wearing dark glasses to protect her eyes, begins to speak intimately to the foreigner aged seventy, as if he were her son.

“I know what happened to you last night. Not only did Manuel tell me; you will be surprised to hear that the young man you brought with you also tried to explain to me what happened. I think, Mr. Moses, that if you were frightened, it wasn't because of that poor girl. Manuel, who made sure you paid her in advance, foretold the future with his intuition and wanted her to feel she had done her job. For you know there is nothing more infuriating for an actor than when he or she is stopped in the middle and told, Get out of character and get back into yourself.”

“Very true,” says the director.

“But you were afraid not of the woman,” continues Doña Elvira, “for how much could she hurt you, at your age? You, sir, permit me to interpret you, are frightened each time by the subject, by Roman Charity. The fear is understandable, because on second look this strange story—even though so many important artists drew inspiration from it and honored it for hundreds of years—this story remains perverse. Your screenwriter has no right to demand it of you. And yet, despite everything, it pains me that you will go back to your country empty-handed, that all of us here will give up on the picture.”

“All of us?” he asks, startled, his white head resting on the pillow. “You care?”

“Of course I care. And it pains me that Manuel, whose achievements as an itinerant monk are so meager, will feel that he failed you too. Also the young man, who has gone to buy film to replace the roll you exposed yesterday, will feel disappointed, though he is just a technical person.”

“A cinematographer is not just a technical person. In my profession I came to realize, time and time again, that everything depends on the cameraman.”

“Perhaps not everything,” Doña Elvira corrects him, “but a great deal.”

Silence falls. Not since his childhood has a woman more than twenty years his senior sat by his side as he lay in bed with his head on the pillow.
What does this old lady want from me? Maybe, at my age, instead of a young girl nursing her father, an elderly mother should offer me her withered breast?

Moses smiles at her contentedly. “Yes, Doña Elvira, I hear you.”

“I think we must continue, not despair. Manuel wants to succeed, the cameraman wants to take pictures, your screenwriter wants to make peace. And it is also not good that the nice lady, your companion, should stay ill and without a role.”

“I see you're on top of things. And if everybody wants this so badly, what choice do I have?”

“The scene, the picture, must be revived and immortalized, and I know exactly where this can be done without frightening you. My son Manuel, because of his obsession, is always looking for people in distress—foreigners, the sick, the unemployed—but a woman in distress, expecting kindness from you, cannot give you any Roman Charity. I prefer simple, happy people who combine the authentic with the classical, naturally and without fear.”

“You are persuasive, but I don't really understand.”

“Give me a little time to explain it to you in actions, not words. Don't hurry to leave Spain. Let me surprise you with something worthy of your talent, but as a very old woman, I can't surprise you with what will be, only with what was.”

He tries to rise from the pillow, but his head feels like a block of lead.

“Good.” He surrenders. “I am in your hands, but only till tomorrow.”

T
HOUGH HUNGER AND
thirst wake him as a rule, he is neither hungry nor thirsty now, and he sleeps soundly. At five in the afternoon Manuel shakes him firmly: “Come, Mr. Moses, we're going, and this time the journey is longer.”

He responds to the call, rises, washes his face, puts on his clothes, and still feels no hunger. “Let's eat and drink on the road, no point in wasting time,” he says.

Doña Elvira has called for her favorite cab—a boxy black one, London-style, easy for humans whose limbs have gone brittle to climb in and out of, and the seating is capacious, so passengers sitting face to face are compelled to be convivial, to exchange witticisms.

Manuel wears his monk's robe with all its accessories, and Doña Elvira is wrapped in a robe of green velvet she may have worn in one of her past roles as a femme fatale. The taxi sails away with the four of them, navigating the streets of Madrid and escaping the city by side roads—shortcuts that are sometimes unpaved—bringing them at nightfall to a rural area where buildings are few and far between, planted on large plots of land that in the past were probably flourishing estates and that today look desolate and abandoned. The buildings are big and dark, with occasional glimmers of light that might be electric or oil—the electrical poles are now fewer in number—and the narrowing and winding roads don't cross any railroad track or highway with a gas station or cafeteria to stop at. Now and then, it's possible on this clear winter's night to spot, on a distant hilltop, the vanes of a windmill, moving slowly, like the wings of a giant, languid bird.

“Will the driver have enough gas to get back?” Moses asks Manuel, who this time is taking his chances with air pollution.

“He is a veteran and reliable driver; Mother can always depend on him. He is from the area, and if he gets lost there'll always be a roadside inn where he can get directions.”

“I haven't seen any roadside inn so far.”

“That's because they're dark. Country people go to bed early, but don't worry, if you rouse them they get up right away.”

Before long they indeed arrive at a darkened inn, and only after exiting the cab does Moses see the dim light within. By the side of the building stands a large carriage, its shafts resting on the ground, the unharnessed horses grazing nearby in a patch of soft grass. They enter a small dining hall with pots and pans hanging on the walls. In the middle is a large table, lit by oil lamps, surrounded by about ten men and women, laughing, enjoying food and drink; their colorful clothes seem like costumes. “Who are these people?” marvels Moses. “They are traveling actors,” says Doña Elvira, greeting them.

The actors recognize her and make room for her and her companions. The innkeeper, a big-bellied Spaniard, greets the cabdriver warmly and pours the visitors wine in yellow ceramic cups. But Moses refuses any drink and ignores the platters of food that arrive at the table. Ever since the failed municipality cellar scene, he has, in effect, taken a vow of fasting. His eyes again take in the driver, now outside the cab, a short, chubby man, happy and content, loved and accepted by all, eating and drinking and laughing. Suddenly Moses thinks that he knows this character, that he ran into him in the distant past, but where and when? Can it be that the driver was once an actor in some film, or did he envision him when he read some old novel?

He doesn't ask Doña Elvira, who is engaged in cheerful conversation with the actors. Manuel urges him to eat. “We have far to go,” he says, “you will die of hunger.” But Moses resists. “No, thank you,” he says, “even if I lose some weight there will still be more than enough of me left, maybe too much.”

When they return to the cab they find the night has grown brighter. The moon risen in the east floods the skies with magical milky light. “How can it be that not far from the capital city we are in such an empty, deserted landscape?” asks Moses. “So it only seems,” answers Doña Elvira. “Many people live here, but the darkness conceals them from your sight.”

It is near midnight when the black box arrives at an old farmhouse. A large dog greets them enthusiastically and jumps on the driver, whom he apparently knows or who might be his master. A country woman holding an oil lamp emerges out from the ground floor and bows to them deeply, and from behind her peek boys and girls of various ages. The driver hugs them all and picks them up. It would seem, says Moses to himself, not all the locals go to bed early. He looks at the cameraman carrying his gear from the cab, and thinks,
A fine young man.
He is desperate to take pictures of the inn and the actors and the carriage and the grazing horses, but he respects my orders.

The driver leads them to the rear of the farmhouse, and on the way they pass a stable where stand a horse and a mule, like old friends, snorting at a shared trough apparently stocked insufficiently, since the horse is gaunt, a skeleton of a horse.

In a rear building, near wooden stairs that appear singed by fire, are the scorched remnants of books in leather bindings. Moses trembles with all his being:
It seems I have reached a very important place.

From the upper floor comes a man of about fifty, tall, as gaunt as the horse in the stable. His face is long, his eyes are sad, a tiny beard sprouts from his chin.
It's really him.
Tears fill the director's eyes. The knight is alive. His books were burned but he didn't die at the end of the story. Sancho Panza saved his master from deadly sanity and moved him to his house in the country, to his family and children, so he would no longer be alone in his delusions and frustrations.

The knight warmly welcomes the director and cameraman and their companions and takes them into a big room where on one wall hang an ancient helmet and spear, bent and dented over many years in battles, but gleaming with reality.

Toledano takes from his pack the old camera inherited from his father and measures the light with a meter.

Does this young man see what is going on here?
Moses asks himself. Has he ever read the wonderful book? Today you can't rely on anyone's education.

His head is spinning, he feels his face is flushed, and Doña Elvira and Manuel are happy to see the eyes of the veteran director brimming with tears.

The two are chatting with the skinny man, and the Spanish they speak sounds different now, softer, less jarring, similar to the language he heard in his childhood in Jerusalem among the Sephardic Jews who lived there for many generations.

The chivalrous man, though he has probably not left this village for many years, is not taken by surprise at the request of the foreigner who has come from far away and scornfully refuses the payment offered by Manuel. He has no need of any payment. Even if they fill the trough to overflowing, the horse will never get fat.

He opens another door and escorts his guests into an inner room, and amid the shadows cast by the oil lamp appears a stout country woman sitting up in bed. It is hard to tell how old she is or if she is still nursing.

Toledano sets up his tripod and camera; this time he clearly needs to make do with the light of the oil lamp, for not only this house, but the whole area is without electricity, and the Israeli extension cord will be of no help.

“This is the place, this is the source,” Moses says, and he takes off his overcoat, his jacket, and then his shirt and undershirt, and he allows the elderly Doña Elvira to place the robe on him but doesn't invite anyone to tie his hands.

“How is this?” he asks the cameraman. “Are you ready?”

“Do we have a choice?”

“Which camera do you want to start with?”

“My father's old camera. Only film can get the nuance, digital's not an option.”

“Then let's begin.”

“Yes,” says Toledano, “but pay attention, Moses, I'm opening the aperture to the max and widening the lens, but you have to hold still, freeze in place, otherwise we won't get a picture out of this, only mush.”

Moses approaches the country woman, who sits in her bed, and with his own hands he takes off her blouse and exposes her breasts. Though this is a country woman whose face is coarse and witless, she radiates a true and simple light. And Moses says to her in Hebrew, “I know who you are, you are Dulcinea, you are the fantasy, in person, the knight captured in the end.” And facing a massive breast bisected by a bluish vein, he thrusts his hands behind him and declares that only the Knight of the Sorrowful Face may bind them.

A fragrant breeze blows through the window.
Am I hungry? Am I thirsty?
Moses asks himself.
If Dulcinea can feed me, it means she has borne the knight a child and the fantasy of his love is not merely the fruit of imagination.
The director brings his lips to the big brown nipple, and though this is a country breast, a magnificent breast, he is unsure whether he will find it soft or hard. The woman smiles and squeezes her breast, and between his lips Moses feels a first drop of milk.

The milk is warm—strong sweetish mother's milk with a mysterious taste, a hint perhaps of a country dish consumed by the woman.
Well, then, this is the fantasy. The inspiration I craved has returned,
he muses with joy
, I am drinking it straight into the chambers of my heart, against the reality that strangles us. My heart is intact, my daughter checked it not long ago. If so, this is my true retrospective, a retrospective meant from the start only for me.

H
AIFA
, 2008–2010