Between Eternities

by Javier Marías

  These comic books were, of course, written in Mexican Spanish, which meant that I learned words never used in Spain, such as abigeo – ‘rustler’. I discovered that the baddies and villains were pillos (for example, an adventure might begin: ‘A gang of superpillos are planning to attack Metropolis’), and that they didn’t just kill, they ‘bumped people off’ or ‘took them out’. Many of these adventures must have been adaptations from television series, as became clear when Novaro started publishing comic books, still with drawings inside of course, but with cover photos of actors disguised as detectives or gunmen. It was on one such cover that I first saw Clint Eastwood, who, pre-Sergio Leone, had co-starred in a series entitled Rawhide. And then there was Maverick, my particular favourite, with James Garner; Wagon Train, some episodes of which were directed by John Ford; Cheyenne with Clint Walker; The Rifleman with Chuck Connors; Gunsmoke and Tales of Wells Fargo. And Have Gun – Will Travel, the series that triggered these memories.

  Some of those TV series were also shown in Spain, but I never saw them, because my parents, who were strict about intellectual matters, as followers of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza tended to be, refused to have a television in the house until I was about seventeen, and, by then, I was already staying out late with my friends.fn1 This meant that I didn’t see any of the programmes my classmates talked about so endlessly, including The Saint, The Fugitive, Bonanza and The Untouchables. It’s something that has always rather stuck in my gullet, so when my brother Fernando (the art historian) made a present to me of the first two seasons of Have Gun – Will Travel on DVD, I couldn’t resist spending the summer watching them. The title refers to the words on the business cards that the protagonist, Paladin, hands out when offering his services as a hired gun. The series began in 1957 – fifty-five years ago, almost prehistory – and continued until 1963. The actor was Richard Boone, a man long past the first flush of youth, who always wore black when working, and had a slightly upturned moustache, a cleft chin and a craggy face. The music was written by Bernard Herrmann, much admired for the scores he wrote for Hitchcock (Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho); Sam Peckinpah wrote a script or two, and Charles Bronson, Angie Dickinson, Vincent Price and John Carradine put in guest appearances. Some episodes are more amusing or ingenious than others, but the best thing about them is the character of Paladin, and what we don’t know or aren’t told about him.

  Paladin is a permanent resident in a luxurious hotel in San Francisco, where he scans the provincial newspapers to see who might need his services, for which he usually charges a thousand dollars. He doesn’t wear black when in San Francisco, but dresses like a distinguished gentleman, plays poker and goes to the opera with various ladies whom he approaches in the foyer and then subsequently ignores. There are suggestions that he’s from Boston and studied at West Point, that he left the army as an officer, possibly after the Civil War. He’s a good strategist (his emblem is a chess knight) and has travelled quite widely: he knows London, Paris and even Madrid; he speaks Chinese and Spanish, can play a Verdi aria on the piano, has ridden camels and hunted tigers. Possibly rather too eventful a life for a man his age, but that’s heroes for you. He’s a bachelor, although he does come close to falling in love with a feisty lady doctor on the prairies. The most intriguing and striking thing about him, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that he’s a very well-read gunman: in the midst of gunfights and shootouts, he quotes Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Ecclesiastes, Homer, Sophocles and Pliny, Montaigne, Lamartine and Cervantes, he recites poems by Donne and Browning, Byron and Keats, and in one episode he saves Oscar Wilde. He is a hard-bitten, but good-humoured man, whose normally implacable expression is often replaced by a generous smile. Sometimes, if he doesn’t like the methods or intentions of the person hiring him, he changes sides. People often talk today about the golden age of television, but there were already small gems like these, modest and unpretentious, in 1957.

  (2012)

  Those Who are Still Here

  I recently had a truly Proustian experience, not the kind that simply makes you remember or recall something, but one that transports you, quite implausibly, to another time and, above all – and even more strangely – to another age, in my case to the remote age of four or five years old. It all started with some music: I came across the original soundtrack to one of the first films I ever saw, in fact, even though it wasn’t the very first film I saw (I believe the first was George Sidney’s The Three Musketeers, with Gene Kelly in the role of D’Artagnan and Lana Turner as Milady), I still think of it like that, possibly because I saw it several times when I was a small child and because it simultaneously provoked in me feelings of delight and feelings of sadness and melancholy. I put the CD on when I got home, and suddenly there I was, four or five years old again, and, despite having seen Lili many times, I was carried back to one particular occasion, to the María Cristina picture house in the Chamberí district – near Calle Covarrubias, the street where I lived and was born – accompanied by my mother and my brothers. The María Cristina picture house didn’t survive, unlike others in the area, like the Colón in Calle Génova or maybe the Luchana, which perhaps even now exists, and to which I could, therefore, have returned when I was much older; however, the María Cristina – like the Príncipe Alfonso, also in Calle Génova – closed its doors when I was still a child, and so I didn’t have that many opportunities to ‘shut myself away’ in those particular auditoria, for that was what you did when you went to a cinema, you shut yourself away from reality. Anyway, hearing the soundtrack again made me think that the sadness it provoked both then and now is a characteristic I doubtless share with many of my fellow human beings – or perhaps not so many of them now – and is not in the least original. Different things will provoke that same sadness in different people, but I think I first became aware of it when I saw Lili.

  I borrowed the video from my brother Miguel, and watched the whole film again all these years later. Lili was made in 1953, and its music – its theme song – was very famous in its day, so much so that almost anyone born in that decade would be sure to recognize it and be able to sing along. It was written by Bronislau Kaper, a great composer, European and classically trained, as were most of the composers who worked in Hollywood at the time. The director was Charles Walters, who made some fine musicals, and the actors were Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer, with the outrageous Zsa Zsa Gabor in a supporting role. The film has lasted well and still has genuine charm, and even though it was made for children – with a major part being played by four puppets to which the ventriloquist Mel Ferrer gave voices – it’s nevertheless tinged with a certain melancholy, as are all films about the circus or about fairgrounds, but my childhood feeling of sadness arose from a scene towards the end of the film when Lili decides to leave her job at the puppet show. She sets off alone with her suitcase along a vaguely dreamlike road, and suddenly – it’s a figment of her imagination, but children can’t really distinguish between the imagined and the real – the four puppets she had so reluctantly left behind appear at her side, except that now they’re the same size as her. The music at this point is bright and cheerful, and the five of them set off together, so that the child viewer thinks: ‘Oh, good, they’re all there and can keep each other company wherever they go.’ Then, when Lili dances with one of the puppets, it turns into Mel Ferrer and vanishes into the mist shrouding the road. After a few seconds of bewilderment and sorrow, the four remaining characters continue on, less blithely now, until Lili dances with another of the puppets, and the metamorphosis and disappearance is repeated. ‘They’re getting fewer and fewer,’ thinks the child with growing anxiety, until the same thing happens to all of the puppets, one after the other. Reynard the Fox was my favourite, a suave fellow, who was also a liar and a thief.

  ‘That,’ I thought a few days ago, ‘must be where my dislike of disappearances comes from.’ I never want anyone to disappear or go missing, not even those who have hurt me or who are poisoning
our country. I’ve often been amazed at my own reaction on hearing of the death of someone for whom I felt not the slightest liking or admiration, even someone who has done his best to make my life impossible, for I’ve felt unexpectedly sad, as if my reaction were: ‘Yes, all right, maybe he was a real pest, but at least he belonged to before. He’s been around for as long as I can remember, certainly long enough to become part of the landscape; I could depend on him; he was one of the cast, and it’s just dreadful not to have him around any more.’ It’s a feeling we’re all familiar with to some extent: nothing is more dismaying than to discover that something – however unimportant – has changed or disappeared from a city we haven’t visited for a while or from the district where we spent our childhood, and our sentiments then are along the lines of an outraged ‘How dare they!’ because we experience any such changes as an attack on our own orderly world and on our own personal memory of the place: a stationery-shop-turned-bank, a cinema transformed into a hamburger joint, a lovely building replaced by an architectural eyesore … Not to mention people: you gradually come to realize that life consists in large part of watching those around you disappear, of feeling momentarily bewildered and sad, and then, like Lili and her fast-diminishing band of puppet companions, resuming your journey along the dreamlike road with the few blessed beings who remain, and who are still here.

  (2007)

  Why Don’t They Come Back?

  I don’t see a lot of Spanish cinema, and I lay the blame for this, in large part, on the exaggerated patriotism of the Spanish press and of Spanish film critics. Years ago now they decided that there simply must be several Spanish masterpieces of cinema every season, but, unable to decide which films were masterpieces, they decided to praise to the skies any and every film made in Spain. To listen to them, anyone would think that there was a pool of talent in this country comparable only to 1950s Hollywood, when the ‘pool’ included, to name but a few, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Billy Wilder, Anthony Mann, Otto Preminger, Joseph Mankiewicz, John Huston, Stanley Donen, Vincente Minnelli, Samuel Fuller, Richard Brooks, Leo McCarey and, occasionally, Orson Welles. The reality, it seems to me, is quite different, and when I do get up the courage to go and see another of these supposed works of genius, I find something that is merely soppy or kitsch or stupid or pretentious or silly or crude, or else a copy of something much better that was made long ago and which, given the cinematographic illiteracy of the semi-young and the wilful forgetfulness of the older generation, no one recognizes as being a copy (there was a recent notable example of one such ‘masterpiece’ which slavishly reproduced the atmosphere and characters from British director Jack Clayton’s film The Innocents, adapted from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw – with Deborah Kerr in the Nicole Kidman role – absurdly retitled, on its release in Spain, ¡Suspense!). So you end up not trusting any of them and tarring them all with the same brush.

  Having railed against these overhyped Spanish films on more than one occasion, it is perhaps only right, therefore, that I should welcome a great film when I see one, as is the case with Almodóvar’s Volver. It isn’t the only Spanish film I’ve liked in the last decade. There have been at least three others: Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto [No One Will Talk about Us When We’re Dead] by Agustín Díaz Yanes; En construcción [Under Construction] by José Luis Guerín; and one which I think I’m right in saying did not, unlike the other two, attract nearly as much attention from the critics and the prize-givers: Al sur de Granada [South of Granada] by Fernando Colomo.

  I’ve spoken before about the ancient phenomenon of ghosts. Over the centuries many have believed in these beings who resist leaving the world and can find no rest beyond death. Nowadays, almost no one seriously believes in them. Some of us pretend to believe in them a little, mainly because we do not wish to discredit a literary genre that has produced some genuine masterpieces. Others mix them up with the various esoterica currently in vogue, but those who embrace all the exotic or anomalous beliefs that have ever existed (from horoscopes to Templar legends) tend to be bewildered, ignorant sceptics who don’t really believe in anything and are simply trying them on for size. Volver is a ghost story and remains so to the end, because, despite the explanation given in the penultimate section, which puts everything back in its rational place, the return of Raimunda and Sole’s mother continues to function like a spell or enchantment and continues to belong to the realm of fantasies, of the improbable and the marvellous. The reason why Volver is so moving as well as so funny, and the reason why it works so well from start to finish, is possibly because it speaks so naturally of domestic ghosts, which are the ones who appear most often in dreams, the only territory where they really do appear.

  We all dream now and then of our dead. We see them so clearly, we hear their laughter, we talk to them, and sometimes, as Milton said in his sonnet about his dead wife, they’re so vivid that day, when it wakes us, brings back our endless night. There exists a fantastical dimension to life which is in no way at odds with the rational one except when the two become fused, and in that dimension everything is imaginable, even what really happened. Indeed, in my opinion, what really happened only becomes truly real once we have imagined it, that is, once we have told it to ourselves as if it were a story. In that double dimension, that of the lived and the imagined, which Almodóvar’s film explores, everything is perfectly straightforward and normal, almost sociological, a world of women accustomed to having to cope with even the worst situations with unexpected energy and pragmatism; there are lots of women like that everywhere. And yet, without it in any way undermining that normality, something extraordinary happens to them, something fantastic, or something, at least, which is experienced as such and is immediately incorporated, without contradictions or difficulties, indeed almost gladly, into the problems of everyday life. That’s why it leaves an echo in those who see the film; that’s why it resonates in the memory, why it invites us to fantasize, to imagine the potentially liveable and to live the potentially imaginable, and to ask what we all, slightly dreamily, ask ourselves from time to time, when we think of our dead: What would we do if they came back? Where would we put them? What would we want to ask them now? What would they think? What would they say to us? Why don’t they come back?

  (2006)

  Music for the Eyes

  Artistic prejudices are always the most difficult to root out. Critics – whose duty should be to see beyond the pretensions of artists and the public’s passing fancies – often allow themselves to be persuaded by the way authors present their work, by what they say they have achieved, or else are guided by whatever has been a wild success – usually in order to take the opposing view – and which has been damningly labelled ‘popular’. So, in literature, it has taken almost a hundred years since the death of Robert Louis Stevenson for critics and scholars to consider his work to be ‘serious’ and to notice that one of his greatest admirers was Henry James, a writer who has always been venerated in academic circles. The fact that Stevenson wrote several brilliant novels enthusiastically devoured by children and adolescents – especially Treasure Island – was enough for him to be despised and for those same critics to forget that he was also the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other extraordinary tales, as well as essays that were far more penetrating and profound than any written by the very critics and professors who dictate what does or does not deserve to be studied and respected.

  Something similar – Stevenson is just one example among many – is beginning to happen with a music that has traditionally been the object of scorn and dubbed not just ‘popular’, but hybrid, subaltern and servile, namely, film music. As everyone knows to their cost, the symphonic music that people used to enjoy ended at the beginning of the twentieth century with Webern or possibly Schoenberg. With a few exceptions – Stravinsky and occasionally Bartók – the line indirectly linking Mozart and Wagner was broken, not as far as composers were concerned – for they felt they were being entirel
y consistent – but certainly as regards listeners. Serious contemporary music is quite simply unlistenable to. It does exist, but only for a minority audience that would have seemed unimaginably tiny to Beethoven or Schubert or Brahms or Schumann, let alone Offenbach or Johann Strauss. It seems that, nowadays, there is only what used to be called ‘light music’ in all its infinite varieties.

  And yet the symphonic music that vanished with the twelve-tone system has lived on obscurely and modestly in cinemas, and people are now beginning to say as much out loud. You can buy records not just of the soundtracks of particular films, but also records by composers who mainly compose for the cinema, and who are, therefore, beginning to be taken seriously, just as happened with Stevenson not so many years ago. It is no longer considered eccentric or in bad taste to listen to recordings of music by Bernard Herrmann, an amazingly Wagnerian composer, who was responsible for the most chilling and the most lyrical moments in nearly all of Hitchcock’s films, as well as in The Ghost and Mrs Muir; or the great Miklós Rózsa, who composed one of the most romantic violin concertos ever, which can be heard in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and the inspired scores for El Cid or Spellbound. It is no longer frowned upon to seek out records by Elmer Bernstein, whose soundtrack for The Magnificent Seven – which later became the theme for a cigarette ad – is familiar to everyone, but he was also responsible for the excellent symphonic soundtracks from The Ten Commandments and Walk on the Wild Side; or Dimitri Tiomkin, who wrote the music for The Alamo and High Noon among others; or Korngold; or the amazing Victor Young, who wrote the soundtrack for The Quiet Man and Johnny Guitar; or the maestro Max Steiner, who was responsible for innumerable epic scores such as those for Gone with the Wind, The Searchers and They Died with Their Boots on. And even Henry Mancini, usually deemed too frivolous despite his undeniable talent – The Pink Panther, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Hatari! and Charade – is now admired by those in the know because of the complex score he wrote for Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. As you can see from their names, most of these musicians were of German, Russian or Hungarian origin, and had a very solid musical training.