by AIRA, CESAR
These were rhetorical questions, but only in part. He was addressing them to me, in a very pointed way. For the moment I did not know what to say, so he undertook, with ill-disguised indifference, the task of replying to himself.
It so happens, he said, that between fiction and reality there is an intermediary instance that articulates both: realism. That is where all the tricks of verisimilization, over which I mockingly assumed expertise, always end up. But he warned me that in this case I should not expect subtle tricks, for this was a Hollywood movie, and not even, any longer, the Hollywood of John Ford or Hitchcock but rather an industry deeply infiltrated by a young audience brought up on comic books and phantasmagorias, an audience with its taste buds savaged by extraterrestrials and superheroes. So, a break from realism was the least one could expect. After all, they had every right to take that break: they were the ones making the movie and they could do whatever they felt like. And, one had to admit that if one was not very demanding, this unexpected introduction of an element of fantasy was worthwhile, if only for the suggestive symmetries it conjured up.
Because in Señorita Wild Savage’s search through the airplane’s smashed fuselage and the dead bodies, she came across Varia’s Louis Vuitton suitcase, which had not been damaged. After several attempts, she managed to unlock it. The contents spoke eloquently of Varia’s sophistication and how high a price she had made the villain pay for her sexual favors — Prada and Chanel dresses, Cartier and Boucheron jewelry, lace lingerie, Italian shoes . . . And there I was, taking issue with a Rolex!
In spite of having spent the past century in the brush, she had not lost her instinct for fashion. It should be remembered that her story began at a beauty contest. So she picked out, tried on, and kept the smartest pieces, complementing them with the appropriate makeup — of which there was an abundance in the suitcase — and ended up looking like a gorgeous model posing for Vogue magazine. When shortly thereafter she crossed paths with the mountain lovers, a complete inversion had taken place: Aria, the civilized one, the executive secretary, was dressed in the crude garments of savages, and Señorita Wild Savage was, strictly speaking, the very epitome of Civilization. This inversion, and all the misunderstandings it led to with the gunmen, and what it stirred up in the heart of the handsome herdsman, was the fuel that carried the plot to a safe haven, that is, the classic “happy ending.”
At this moment in the conversation, and also in the memory of it that unfurled at night, I realized something: I had taken as a given that my friend was inventing a plot in order to prove something; but then I suddenly remembered that I had seen one of the scenes he was describing on the television screen: the herdsman and the beautiful Tatar watching emerge from the early morning mountain fog another young Tatar woman identical to the one with her arm around her primitive lover — both hirsute and dressed like cave dwellers — and the other, the double, decked out as if for a reception at the French Embassy. A somewhat surrealistic image, without extensive explanations, and for this reason apt to remain lodged in one’s memory. This was not the only reason I remembered it clearly; it was the first scene I saw after returning from the bathroom, where a command from my bladder had led me. I remembered it above all for the associations I had made. I thought about how quickly the circumstances changed in these modern action movies, that all you had to do was blink and you were lost.
That visual memory brought others in its wake, all coincident (more or less) with what I had been listening to from the lips of my friend. That said, mnemonic images have the peculiarity of always remaining in a trance of invention, and it becomes difficult to decide which are real and which fictitious. I had been so focused on my friend’s words, so deeply engaged in his story, that it could almost be said that I saw figures rather than heard words. Whereby I had no way of knowing if the other images, those that were not anchored to the memory of my sinking into my armchair after my visit to the bathroom, belonged to the movie or had been generated while I was listening to my friend. Most likely, some were superimposed on others, or the generation of visual images had benefited from the unconscious memory of what I had seen on the screen. The only way to make that distinction with precision would have been to reconstruct the plot of the movie, and here we encountered what appeared to be insurmountable difficulties. It was obvious that neither of us had paid enough attention to the movie. Of even graver import: our conversation had not dealt with it as a movie, or a cinematic story, but rather in terms of one isolated element (the Rolex), and by delving into the theory of error, we had taken apart the fabric of the narrative in order to test the certainty of our reasoning.
Here I should add that the mnemonic exercises I carried out in the darkness of my bedroom did not help me sort things out. Remembering, in general, is an opportunity to put the facts in sequence, place the causes before the effects and rationalize a chronology. I was willingly obeying these general laws, even applying them strictly, for this is the way I derived the greatest pleasure from my reconstructions. But what I was reconstructing were the conversations, not the stories these contained. This was understandable, even logical. The two sequences did not necessarily coincide — most of the time they diverged widely — and if my intention was to take on both at the same time, I might very well get myself into a phenomenal mess. If I had to sacrifice one, I would salvage that of the conversation and allow the other to disintegrate into chaos. What did I care about stories! My task had only to do with friendship, the game of responses and understandings, facial expressions and tones of voice — in a word, everything that expressed a thought that was either rival or shared.
In reality, I had never before dealt with the problem of having to choose between them. We never talked about movies or novels or any story that wasn’t related to our common cultural interests. This time I was delving into unchartered territory.
When I took the floor, after a brief pause, it was to tell him that even though I appreciated his fine labor of persuasion, I was still far from convinced, not out of obstinacy but because I realized that he had completely misunderstood the movie. Not that I had understood it much better, of that I was fully convinced; for example, I had thought that the two women played by the same actress were one, surely because I had missed the opening scenes and not paid enough attention when they had appeared together in the frame. My friend’s full recounting clarified this point, and, for my part, I also admitted that I had been distracted.
But even so, his error was the graver one because it had taken as the main plot of the movie what in reality was a side story, which was stretched out, it seemed, and woven into the main plot all the way through. I had focused on the main one to the extent that a mind trained in Philosophy could (or wished to) focus on an entertaining pastime that only marginally served as evening relaxation. However lightweight, the subject interested me, if only for the skill with which the melodramatic absurdity had been verisimilarized. In its formal aspect, I mean. But this had to in some way coincide with the content, and here would fit the statement, “There are no insignificant subjects.” These conspiracies for world domination said a lot about the spirit of the times and, even if they were fundamentally childish, they struck a chord in me.
The romantic storyline, though skillfully inserted, was secondary — and was perhaps insisted upon by the marketing gurus who advised the studio — to the dominant storyline of the “action and adventure thriller.” Both shared, however, the theme of the confrontation between civilization and those who are marginalized, or between the present and the past, or, if one wished to put it in more concrete turns, the suicidal cannibalism of power and the idyllic equilibrium of Nature.
With Señorita Wild Savage or without Señorita Wild Savage (because that part was accessorial), the goatherd was the visible and intelligible embodiment of innocent life that was nurtured by life itself and knew nothing of ambition or progress. But there were no more Edens in the world, and the stratagems of greed and domination reached even his remote
corner. He was drawn into the conflict, and he rose to the circumstances; his relative advantage was that he was “playing a home game,” but the rules of “fair play” remained in effect, as they did in every movie made for a mass audience.
A CIA commando unit climbed the mountain to search for the famous toxic algae, whose importance for maintaining ecological balance and even for saving life on the planet had been shown to be essential. They were a large group, approximately twenty or thirty people, men and women, all carrying highly complex technical equipment. Leading the group was a veteran agent named Bradley. (The actor who played him, I told my friend in a parenthesis because I didn’t think he would have noticed, was the director of the movie. He nodded. He knew.) This man — a true gentleman — found the goatherd’s help to be highly fortuitous, for the search and communication equipment they brought with them was no match for his experience and knowledge of the mountainous terrain and its most deeply buried secrets. The two men, so different from one another, established a relationship of manly affection and trust that would be put to the test during the adventure.
The CIA had discovered that a group of Ukrainian terrorists were experimenting with the mutant algae for unknown reasons, and they sent their task force to gather research samples and evaluate the potential threat. It was an undercover operation, carried out with maximum secrecy, though it would not have been at all difficult to disguise it as a scientific expedition or even as a trip for adventure travelers. The reason for these precautions would slowly be revealed as the corresponding connections and ramifications came to light.
The goatherd was the first to have any inkling that something strange was going on: one afternoon, when he was gathering his goats to return to his hut, he found that one was missing. He looked for it hurriedly, for night was falling, conveniently slowly at those altitudes, but even so, his time was limited. He finally found it — dead. He was mystified because his animals were the epitome of health. But the plot thickened when he went to pick it up to take it with him, ostensibly to salvage its valuable wool, and maybe, if it hadn’t died from a contagious disease, to roast and eat it. He bent over, placed his hands under the dead body, tensed his muscles before lifting, and pulled . . . His surprise was made manifest when he stumbled and fell backward. Instead of the hundred-odd pounds he had been expecting to lift, the dead goat weighed five or six, if not less. It seemed to weigh nothing, and when he budged it with so much excess effort, it shot into the air and fell on top of the goatherd, who had landed on his back. As it traced an arc through the air, it rippled in the wind, and suddenly it looked like a goat made out of a piece of fuzzy fabric, then suddenly like a shapeless piece of dough. When it landed (gently, like an autumn leaf) on the goatherd’s face and chest, it recovered its goatish shape. What had happened? The first explanation was that it was the hide emptied of contents, but when the goatherd, having recovered from his shock, looked more closely, he saw that this was not the case. It was whole. He folded it and placed it under his arm and carried it to his hut, where that night, by candlelight, he slit it open with a knife and saw that all its organs were in their proper places but the flesh had taken on the consistency of tissue paper.
Bradley took charge. All he needed was one look at those floppy remains to know what was going on. He did not immediately tell the goatherd, who found out by overhearing Bradley’s conversation with the group’s scientist. The goat had drunk “the dehydrating water,” which was the real threat that had propelled the North American spies to act.
They now had to precisely retrace the goat’s steps the night before in order to find where it had drunk. The goatherd was the only one who could possibly carry out such an undertaking, and they sent him off to bed right away so he would be well rested and ready to go at dawn. They spent the rest of the night preparing the equipment they would use in their search and to deal with the samples they would take. And something more. Now they had proof that the enemy had managed to synthesize the dehydrating water, and it was urgent that they neutralize this achievement, which would require the use of force.
These nocturnal preparations lasted a while, and one by one the members of the group went to bed to get some sleep. The camp they had set up consisted of several inflatable tents connected by tubular passageways, all lit by a dim, silvery light. An aerial shot made the compound look like a globular excrescence of the mountain under the starry sky.
Finally, Bradley and his scientific consultant, also an older man, remained alone in the command room. Bradley, his face showing obvious signs of exhaustion, took a bottle of whisky out of a trunk, opened it, and poured some into a couple of glasses. In the intimacy thereby created and portrayed, the tone of their conversation became less practical. The alcohol relaxed them; and well it might, for that first whisky was followed by a second, then a third. They discussed the profession they had both chosen and practiced their entire lives, the profession that had brought them to this remote corner of the planet, just as it had brought them to so many others before. But, they wondered, had they chosen it? The scientific consultant said that science had been his true vocation, and that if he had ended up as a spy, it was due to circumstances; among those circumstances he included the budgetary cuts to laboratories and research centers, the vertiginous rise in the salaries at government agencies, the responsibility a citizen felt when faced with threats to the free world, and, in order not to externalize all the causes, a lack of creative talent to pursue his vocation. Bradley agreed: his case offered an almost perfect parallel. His original vocation had been art, and he had also been unable to stick to it with the required heroism. But he consoled himself with the thought that he had not done so badly after all. And, the alcohol having already loosened his tongue, he developed a theory about espionage as an art and a science. According to him, it was a qualitative activity. It didn’t matter if a lot or a little was achieved, that is, if a lot or a little information was collected — what mattered was its quality; it could be minimal — a word, a letter, a number — but it had to be good. Like expert appraisers, they wandered the globe in search of this precious element, their eyes growing sharper and sharper with the years. They were not searching for a vein of gold, except as a metaphor. The difference was that they were searching for something that resided in a mind, even if it was also recorded on a piece of paper or as an object. And as that mind participated in other minds, and these in still others, the search expanded . . .
He could illustrate it with an everyday situation, like choosing a barber. For a man even moderately interested in looking good — in other words, everybody — the choice of someone to cut one’s hair was a great minor problem that was generally made haphazardly, and with unsatisfactory results, because of one’s ignorance of the mysteries of the guild. A guide for the perplexed might be based on the answer to the following question: Who cut the hair of barbers? Even the most skilled barber might have difficulty cutting his own hair, and though not completely impossible, barbers were sworn enemies of the “do-it-yourself-cut”; and surely they would want to have the best cut possible in order to make a good impression on their own clients. And since barbers knew the rubric, and knew their colleagues, they would choose the best one available in a given city or neighborhood. Not the most expensive or the most famous, as would someone ignorant of the field, but really the best one, even if he worked out of a filthy hovel and created masterpieces on the heads of truck drivers and pensioners. So, all you had to do was find out where any barber whatsoever had his hair cut and that would be the first clue.
Next, Bradley continued, a clue had to be followed; it was not a point of arrival but rather one of departure. Logic dictated that this second barber would have his hair cut by a third, and the third by a fourth, and the chain would keep getting longer because the optimal in human resources was always one step away.
To start this chain one had to begin with any barber, preferably a humble neighborhood barber, not too young (he wouldn’t yet know enough) or too o
ld (he would have lost interest in his own hair). One could strike up a relationship with him, become his customer, engage him in conversation, and at an opportune moment ask him, casually, where he went to have his hair cut. It was the only reasonable and viable method, but according to Bradley, we had to reject it out of hand, for many reasons. But if we rejected the only reasonable and viable method, what was left? Vigilance, follow-up. All we had to do was think about it for a minute to see the insurmountable practical difficulties. Who would spend months working to obtain such a trivial piece of information? We would have to pay a private detective, who would need assistants, perhaps also pay bribes, and, moreover, take certain precautions because a spy might be subject to legal reprisals for violations of privacy. And the result, laborious and expensive, would be merely the first link; it would all have to be started over with a second, then a third, a fourth . . .
One had to admit, however, that it was possible. The two of them, with all their experience, and with the experience of having survived, were living proof. That ordinary man who combed through the urban labyrinth to find the Grail of scissors was the image of the destiny they had chosen, or that had chosen them. The fleeting nature of information leaped from head to head, and resignation to imperfection was merely another maneuver in the search for perfection. How ascetic
espionage was!
This simile, like any well-wrought allegory, allowed for further expansion. That chain, which would lead through its series of human links to the best of all possible barbers, could be cut (precisely, be cut!) before it had gotten very far if one of the barbers in the chain was bald and had no need for the services of a colleague. Or, by mere accident, for example, if barber number X found a colleague who created true disasters on the heads of his clients, but who could cut his, and only his, hair perfectly because of the particular shape of his head or the nature of his curls. (Though in this case, the chain would not need to be cut, because that defective barber who by accident got it right would also need to find a barber to cut his own hair.) Or, it could be cut if two barbers simply cut each others’ hair, whereby the chain would end in a little circle, a “ringlet,” to use the terminology of the profession. (The circle could also be large, and by carrying things to their ultimate consequences, could “link up” all the barbers in the world.) They had — Bradley reminded his friend, who nodded with a sad smile — lived through all these possibilities, and those “cuts” had left their marks on them, like scars on their brains.