And they ascend a darkened stairway in a building that looks even shabbier on the inside than it did on the outside. They walk through narrow hallways filled with junk and rags and broken furniture and strollers. On an upper floor they are met by a tall, sturdy man, his dark hair sprinkled with gray. In a gesture of greeting he places his hand on his heart, then kisses his fingers as a sign of respect, and hurries them into his flat, locking the door behind them.
It is a rundown apartment, just one room and an improvised kitchen. On a clothesline in the kitchen hang cloth diapers. In one corner is a pile of empty bottles, apparently picked from trash cans to be exchanged for deposit money. Part of the room is set off behind a curtain stitched from old burlap bags. And as they enter Moses thinks he hears the feeble crying of a baby, or perhaps of a woman. The space is already arranged for the photography. A tattered sofa has been pushed to the side and a table laid on it upside down along with two chairs. But the space is not big enough for the required camera angle, and in the manner of cameramen confident of their craft, the photographer repositions a chest of drawers and other chairs. The North African stands silently to the side, transfixed by every movement of the foreigners. Manuel stands across from the Arab and gazes at him intently, as at a garden sculpture. “What do you think,” whispers Moses to the photographer, “do you have enough light?” “No,” answers Toledano, taking his flash from the knapsack and wondering how to set it up. “Come on, my friend,” Moses says urgently, “let’s try to get this over with.” He suddenly feels dizzy and grabs hold of a chair. Is it the wine at three in the morning on an empty stomach, or is it the anxiety of humiliation surging in his mind? Frightened and amused by the situation, he closes his eyes. It’s been many years, he thinks ruefully, since there’s been a woman by my side to make sure I don’t fall.
The photographer’s energetic movements remind Moses of the young man’s father. He sets one chair atop another and hangs the flash in the kitchen, among the diapers. A good thing he remembered to bring an extension cord from Israel, so he can unplug the refrigerator and use its socket to flood the room with light filtered through blue cellophane. This way the picture will acquire a slight aura of mystery. The North African disappears behind the thin burlap curtain, where the silhouette of the waiting woman is now visible. How nice, the light that all at once produces a woman, Moses rhapsodizes. He must produce a similar silhouette of a woman in his next film.
“If we’ve come this far,” he says to David, “let’s shoot the scene two ways, with two different cameras, then pick the right picture and destroy the others.”
The North African paces around them like a caged tiger.
“Perhaps we should pay him in advance, calm him down,” suggests Manuel in English.
“By all means,” agrees Moses, and he hands him ten greenish bills, feeling he is sinking fast into a dream.
The photographer selects a lens and snaps it into the camera, takes out the red robe and handcuffs. Moses removes his topcoat and jacket and hesitates before dispensing with the shirt, then stands naked from the waist up. He wraps the robe around him like a skirt. He takes a chair and turns it sideways and sits on it as if on a footstool, spreading out the robe-skirt to conceal it, then puts his hands together behind his back and tells the photographer to place the handcuffs on him, and now that the ancient Cimon is ready to receive the nursing woman, the man goes to get her. From behind the curtain come whispers of an argument in Arabic in three distinct pitches, then silence. A few moments later, the curtain rises, as in a theater, revealing not one woman but two: an older, heavy one, holding the baby in her arms, and, walking behind her, a veiled woman with hands as black as night and a body so boyish she seems to be a daughter, not a spouse.
Seventy years ago, thinks Moses, trembling, my mother fed me from a white breast, and now, as I approach death, the time has come for me to nurse from the black breast of a young girl. But I am still in control of the scene. This time I am the director and I am the screenwriter, and I am the actor whose lips will touch the warm nipple of the young black breast. He is on the verge of losing consciousness from fear and joy. His head is slipping downward, but the photographer, standing on a chair and adjusting his lens, calls to him: “Wait a second, Moses, she has to take off the veil, otherwise when she leans toward you, your head will disappear under the cloth and the whole point of the picture will be lost.” Moses freezes in place, his hands bound, unable to stand up, but he collects himself and conveys the request to Manuel in English, adding a literary rationale to the technical issue. “It makes no sense for the face of the daughter bestowing kindness to be veiled from her own father, so please ask the husband to remove the wife’s veil for a few minutes. We paid him handsomely.”
Manuel speaks to the man in Arabic that sounds formal and awkward, and the man turns to the two women and gives an order to the younger one, but she, agitated, shakes her head no. The man apparently tries to coax her, but she still refuses, and in the midst of their stormy exchange the word yahud is spoken, and again a second time; the Muslim has apparently identified them. And why not? After all, Hebrew can be heard anywhere in the world these days.
The young woman begins to wail. Is it the nationality of the old man about to press his hoary head to her breast that escalates her fear and resistance? For the wailing now segues into powerful crying, and when the older woman, who might be her mother or maybe another wife of the father of her baby, tries to pull the veil from her face, the young woman snatches the child with feral swiftness and vanishes behind the curtain in a storm of tears and shouting. The man and older woman are quick to follow.
Can it be, after forty years, that the scene has again eluded him? There’s no doubt that the casting here is questionable. The money will alleviate genuine distress, but it cannot produce a credible, touching picture that enshrines a beautiful legend about a bold act of kindness. This is how it was with Ruth: a wise and experienced director knows that an actor cannot be forced to do something that contradicts his or her inner nature, even if the screenwriter believes he can bend the world to his will.
The shouting and weeping continue behind the curtain, and Moses, relieved, asks the photographer to free him from the handcuffs, dismantle the camera, take down the flash from the clothesline—in brief, to repeat what his father had done forty years before. Moses quickly takes off the skirt and puts his clothes back on. And to the utter astonishment of Manuel, he announces, “I am unwilling to force the young woman to remove the veil and thereby give offense to her faith. There’s no choice— you will have to find a more harmonious collaborator.” With a twist of irony, he adds: “Perhaps your forefathers were right after all when they believed that assumed identities are not to be trusted.”
Even as Manuel’s expression protests Moses’ decision, the man returns. The young woman has asked that her eyes be covered when she nurses the Jew. He pleads with Manuel, pointing to his own face to show the boundary between hidden and revealed. “No, it’s impossible not to have the woman’s eyes in the shot,” says Moses emphatically, “but I don’t want to coerce her to expose them, so go tell her that we’re giving up and leaving.”
Manuel interprets. The man is shocked and angry. He seizes the Spaniard as if about to tear his clothes, then turns to Moses and shouts his disappointment in shrill Arabic. “But the money?” whispers Manuel to the director, in English. “Leave them something to alleviate the misery you see around you.” And Moses, with a dismissive wave and without hesitation, says, “Money is not the issue; he can keep what we’ve given him, to make up for the anguish we caused the woman and to save her from the abuse of that unhappy man. Please find me another woman, a free-spirited woman capable of looking straight at me with compassion and love. The prize has not been used up.”
4
THERE WAS NO hope of finding a taxi, but it was near dawn and the subway was running. They traveled one stop and emerged into the street to find that during the short ride, subtle signs of a
new day had crept into the sky of the Spanish capital. Again Manuel refrains from unlocking the door of his mother’s house and rings for the housekeeper, who arrives barefoot in her bathrobe. “Is it over? The picture’s been taken?” she inquires, hoping the guests will leave this very day. “Not yet,” says Manuel, “they are staying until we find someone else more suitable.” Moses, of course, can only guess at their Spanish conversation, but he gathers that the housekeeper, like her employer, knows why he has returned to Spain.
He asks for a glass of warm milk, and she invites him into the kitchen, seats him at the table, and serves him a slice of bread with butter. Though his hands were manacled for only a few minutes and show no signs of bruising, he continues to rub them. The excitement over the scene that nearly came to pass in the tiny apartment, the poignant entrance of the young black woman, his quick decision to withdraw—all this has left him enormously fatigued. “I want you to know,” he says to Manuel, who comes in and sits beside him, “I have no regrets about backing out, or about the money we gave them. If we had insisted they return it, they might have responded with violence, and I’ve got enough Muslim disillusion at home, I don’t need to arouse it elsewhere. So until you find me, today or tomorrow, a woman in need of both money and artistic adventure, a woman who will expose her face to uplift her soul, I, a man no longer young, will regain my strength under the covers.”
And he does so. Pleased to have been saved at the last minute from a humiliating picture with a veiled young woman—and gratified to have chosen the right photographer, who hadn’t lost his cool and with great professionalism had averted a mistake—he enters the bedroom, sees young Toledano sleeping soundly on his improvised bed, makes sure the money is still where he hid it, takes off his clothes, and puts on his pajamas. All this was not for naught, he says to himself. I learned something, I tested myself. I rehearsed, though expensively. He claps his hands and rubs them. The handcuffs actually felt good. True, the whole affair was more than a little mad, but if madness means liberation, it empowers art. And art, even in old age, is the purpose of his existence.
With this comforting thought he gives himself over to a deep sleep. When he wakes he finds a house flooded with midday sunlight but silent and empty. Young Toledano has probably gone for a walk in the city, Manuel has surely gone to find a barefaced woman, and the housekeeper has vanished, so he taps lightly on the bedroom door of the lady of the house, and, there being no reply, he opens it cautiously and finds her gone. But he doesn’t retreat, instead entering to inspect and admire the round bed in daylight. In the next film, or the one after, he thinks, we should build a round bed for a woman character waiting to die; this circularity has a calming metaphysical effect. After the shoot, I’ll take the bed home with me. I have enough space in my bedroom.
The room is clean and neat, the blankets folded, everything back in place. The Roman Charity plates are nowhere to be seen. On a little table sits the Spanish encyclopedia of the history of the Inquisition. Since he doesn’t understand the text, Moses turns pages and looks at pictures of major figures and instruments of torture. He is so absorbed, he doesn’t notice Doña Elvira soundlessly entering the bedroom, still wearing her coat and holding a pilgrim staff from Santiago de Compostela.
“Ah, Mr. Moses, here you are.”
“I didn’t find anyone at home, so I came looking for you,” he says, and quickly rises to apologize for invading her room.
Doña Elvira calms him. Her house is wide open to him, and though she is sorry over the way Manuel had failed him with the North Africans, she is glad that the director and photographer will be guests in her home for another day.
It turns out that Manuel has gone to speak with a friend who works in the Department of Welfare, and the photographer took a trip to Toledo to see the place that gave its name to his ancestors.
“Everyone these days is looking for remote ancestors to get inspired by or argue with.” Doña Elvira sighs. “Only last night I saw the childish confusion of my younger son, who thought he could help a Muslim family through absurd methods that violate their religion. The evening could have ended in disaster. The obsession to atone for the deeds of the Inquisition is indeed noble, but is that a reason for me not to have grandchildren? I’ve heard that you people serve God differently, and your priests and monks are allowed to marry and even have children.”
“Many children, too many . . .”
“There is no such thing as too many. How many children do you have, Mr. Moses?”
“A son and daughter, and four grandchildren. Two grandchildren live in Germany and speak a language I don’t understand, but two are in Israel, living nearby and very attached to me. Especially the older one, the grandson.”
“In that case, you can think of yourself as a happy man.”
“Thinking is easy, feeling is harder.”
She smiles. She likes his answer. She lays the pilgrim staff at her feet, takes off her coat, sits down on her round bed, and calls for the housekeeper to bring tea and biscuits for her and the guest. As they drink their tea, Moses interrogates her about her life long ago in silent films. In what ways was it different—the manner of acting, the movements of the body, the relationship between actor and director—and how did music relate to the silent scenes? Ever since he returned to Israel from the retrospective, he’s been thinking of making a silent film in the old style, toward the end of his career. Perhaps not full-length, but silent.
Doña Elvira does not envision great prospects for his silent film. In her day, the inter-titles between the scenes were brief and to the point, so as not to impede the flow of the action. People then were more intelligent and could read between the lines, even when the words were few and the sentences short. Today there is an inflation of words. Unless you repeat the same thing dozens of times, there’s no way to get attention.
In the afternoon Manuel returns with encouraging news. He consulted with his Welfare Department friend, who is in charge of aid to artists in distress, especially foreigners from Eastern Europe recently landed in Spain—musicians, singers, actors. His friend, after Manuel explained the nature of the wish—without, heaven forbid, disclosing the identity of the wisher—promised to locate by this evening an actress who also happens to be a young mother and would consent, perhaps without pay, or for a small sum, to play the role of the daughter in the scene, out of loyalty to the grand classical tradition in which it stands.
“She must be paid,” Moses interjects, “and generously.”
“Yes . . . you are right . . . one may not exploit the actress,” agrees Manuel, suggesting that something be given perhaps to the municipal official, who was enthusiastic about the possibility of an artist’s atonement for an artist’s sin. After examining the painting that Manuel showed him, the official proposed a location: the municipal supervisory department cellar, which has a high ceiling and a barred window. Such an atmosphere could enhance the credibility of the reenactment, and should the photographer require technical assistance, say a ladder to hold up the lighting, the guard on duty would be happy to help.
“I see that little by little, all of Spain will hear about my Roman Charity,” jokes Moses. “I came all the way here to stay anonymous. In Israel there are no secrets.”
“Even if all of Spain does hear,” Manuel says, rising to the challenge, “after you leave, this country will forget you, whereas your country is always remembering the forgotten.”
At four in the afternoon Toledano returns from Toledo, exhilarated. He bought another camera there and took dozens of pictures so he could show his younger brother the city that gave its name to their ancestors, then expelled them. I hope, he says to the director, that it was all right for me, without your express permission, to photograph streets and alleys and castles and rivers, and people, with a camera not associated with you, and to keep the pictures for myself.
“I hope so too,” grumbles Moses.
The high spirits the young man brought inspire the older man to
get out and breathe fresh air of his own. If the meeting again takes place at night, why wait around for tiny dinner portions served by the housekeeper, and the monk’s theological chatter? Since the tea and biscuits, he has not eaten a thing. To be on the safe side, he asks his host to write the address and phone number of the house on three slips of paper, and briefly considers asking the old lady to lend him her pilgrim staff but deems it too intimate and takes an umbrella, which can serve as a stick if necessary, even though the skies of Madrid are calm and friendly. More people will join my adventure tonight, he thinks dolefully. If only I had settled for a Muslim veil and a hidden face, I could have been on my way back to Israel this evening instead of wandering the streets of a foreign city. Did the photographer’s perfectionism arise merely from loyalty to the original scene, or is he using it to punish both the director and his father? What would it matter to Trigano if he got a picture of the director handcuffed before a veiled black woman? In fact, such a picture, hinting at the North African desert, might have fulfilled the scriptwriter’s wish even more nobly.
With the three slips of paper in three different pockets, he undertakes a brisk walk to the city center. On arrival he slows his pace, strolls from plaza to plaza, contemplating statues of kings and generals, dropping occasional coins into the caps of young people pretending to be statues. He has never visited Madrid before and doesn’t know what’s worth seeing and what’s not; he is not necessarily keen on churches and palaces and would rather soak up daily life. He pauses by shop windows, surveys the Spanish women passing by, in an effort to discover what still arouses him.
Since he has again abandoned his hearing aids by his bed, the city of Madrid feels hushed and mysterious in the reddening winter dusk. Yes, he berates himself, tonight I need to be done with this craziness, no turning back. If she’s a foreign immigrant, a young mother, an actress pining for a job, in exchange for a proper fee, she can inhabit the role. No humiliation, just connection with mythology. The window of a small jewelry shop catches his eye. He looks at distinctive rings, bracelets, and watches, all devoid of price tags. He goes inside to inquire about cost, specifically watches. After protracted haggling he chooses a simple but elegant watch for Ruth, its hands and numbers legible by day and luminescent at night. It’s about time she replaced the little watch with the blurry face she has worn since childhood. Besides, she deserves a portion of the prize, which will soon be down to its last penny. Certainly I am not the first, he says to himself. Directors far greater than I have become entangled in obsessive relationships with actresses they eventually married.
The Retrospective Page 34