Burning Your Boats

by Angela Carter

  The Spirit of Cinema cameos in Paracelsus as the Gnostic goddess of wisdom, Sophia, in a kind of Rosicrucian sabbat scene. They were married, by then. Mann wanted his new bride nude for this sabbat, which caused a stir at the time and eventually he was forced to shoot only her disembodied face floating above suggestive shadow. Suggestive, indeed; from his piece of sleight of hand sprang two myths, one, easily discredited by aficionados of the rest of her oeuvre, that she had the biggest knockers in the business, the other, less easily dismissed, that she was thickly covered with body hair from the sternum to the knee. Even Mann’s ex-assistant director believed the latter. ‘Furry as a spider,’ he characterised her. ‘And just as damn lethal.’ I’d smuggled a half-pint of Jack Daniels into his geriatric ward; he waxed virulent, he warned me to take a snake-bite kit to the interview.

  Paracelsus was, needless to say, one of the greatest box-office disasters in the history of the movies. Plans were shelved for his long-dreamed-of Faust, with the Spirit either as Gretchen or as Mephistopheles, or as Gretchen doubling with Mephistopheles, depending on what he said in different interviews. Mann was forced to perpetrate a hack job, a wallowing melo with the Spirit as twins, a good girl in a blonde wig and a bad girl in a black one, from which his career never recovered and her own survival truly miraculous.

  Shortly after this notorious stinker was released to universal jeers, he did the A Star is Born bit, although he walked, not into the sea, but into the very swimming pool, that one over there, in which his relict now disposes of her glassware.

  As for the Spirit, she found a new director, was rumoured to have undergone a little, a very little plastic surgery, and, the next year, won her first Oscar. From that time on, she was unstoppable, though always she carried her tragedy with her, like a permanent widow’s veil, giving her the spooky allure of a born-again princesse lointaine.

  Who liked to keep her guests waiting.

  In my nervous ennui, I cast my eyes round and round the terrace until I came upon something passing strange in the moist earth of a flowerbed.

  Moist, therefore freshly watered, though not by whatever it was had left such amazing spoor behind it. No big-game hunter I, but I could have sworn that, impressed on the soil, as if in fresh concrete outside Graumann’s Chinese Theatre, was the print, unless the tiger lilies left it, of a large, clawed paw.

  Did you know a lion’s mane grows grey with age? I didn’t. But the geriatric feline that now emerged from a clump of something odorous beneath the cryptomeria had snow all over his hairy eaves. He appeared as taken aback to see me as I was to bump into him. Our eyes locked. Face like a boxer with a broken nose. Then he tilted his enormous head to one side, opened his mouth – God, his breath was foul – and roared like the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. With a modest blow of a single paw, he could have batted me arse over tip off the cliff half-way to Hawaii. I wouldn’t say it was much comfort to see he’d had his teeth pulled out.

  ‘Aw, come on, Pussy, he don’t want to be gummed to death,’ said a cracked, harsh, aged, only residually female voice. ‘Go fetch Mama, now, there’s a good boy.’

  The lion grumbled a little in his throat but trotted off into the house with the most touching obedience and I took breath, again – I noticed I’d somehow managed not to for some little time – and sank into one of the white metal terrace chairs. My poor heart was going pit-a-pat, I can tell you, but the personage who had at last appeared from somewhere in the darkening compound neither apologised for nor expressed concern about my nasty shock. She stood there, arms akimbo, surveying me with a satirical, piercing, blue eye.

  Except for the jarring circumstances that in one hand she held a stainless steel, many-branched candlestick of awesomely chaste design, she looked like a superannuated lumberjack, plaid shirt, blue jeans, workboots, butch leather belt with a giant silver skull and crossbones for a buckle, coarse, cropped, grey hair escaping from a red bandana tied Indian-style around her head. Her skin was wrinkled in pinpricks like the surface of Parmesan cheese and a putty grey in colour.

  ‘You the one that’s come about the thesis?’ she queried. Her diction was pure hillbilly.

  I burbled in the affirmative.

  ‘He’s come about the thesis,’ she repeated to herself sardonically and discomforted me still further by again cackling to herself.

  But now an ear-splitting roar announced action was about to commence. This Ma, or Pa, Kettle person set down her candlestick on the terrace table, briskly struck a match on the seat of her pants and applied the flame to the wicks, dissipating the gathering twilight as She rolled out the door. Rolled. She sat in a chrome and ivory leather wheel-chair as if upon a portable throne. Her right hand rested negligently on the lion’s mane. She was a sight to see.

  How long had she spent dressing up for the interview? Hours. Days. Weeks. She had on a white satin bias-cut lace-trimmed negligee circa 1935, her skin had that sugar almond, one hundred per cent Max Factor look and she wore what I assumed was a wig due to the unnatural precision of the snowy curls. Only she’d gone too far with the wig; it gave her a Medusa look. Her mouth looked funny because her lips had disappeared with age so all that was left was a painted-in red trapezoid.

  But she didn’t look her age, at all, at all – oh, no; she looked a good ten or fifteen years younger, though I doubt the vision of a sexy septuagenarian was the one for which she’d striven as she decked herself out. Impressive, though. Impressive as hell.

  And you knew at once this was the face that launched a thousand ships. Not because anything lovely was still smouldering away in those old bones; she’d, as it were, transcended beauty. But something in the way she held her head, some imperious arrogance, demanded that you look at her and keep on looking.

  At once I went into automatic, I assumed the stance of gigolo. I picked up her hand, kissed it, said: ‘Enchanté’, bowed. Had I not been wearing sneakers, I’d have clicked my heels. The Spirit appeared pleased but not surprised by this, but she couldn’t smile for fear of cracking her make-up. She whispered me a throaty greeting, eyeing me in a very peculiar way, a way that made the look in the lion’s eye seem positively vegetarian.

  It freaked me. She freaked me. It was her star quality. So that’s what they mean! I thought. I’d never before, nor am I likely to again, encountered such psychic force as streamed out of that frail little old lady in her antique lingerie and her wheel-chair. And, yes, there was something undeniably erotic about it, although she was old as the hills; it was as though she got the most extraordinary sexual charge from being looked at and this charge bounced back on the looker, as though some mechanism inside herself converted your regard into sexual energy. I wondered, not quite terrified, if I was for it, know what I mean.

  And all the time I kept thinking, it kept running through my head: ‘The phantom is up from the cellars again!’

  Night certainly brought out the scent of jasmine.

  She whispered me a throaty greeting. Her faded voice meant you had to crouch to hear her, so her cachou-flavoured breath stung your cheek, and you could tell she loved to make you crouch.

  ‘My sister,’ she husked, gesturing towards the lumberjack lady who was watching this performance of domination and submission with her thumbs stuck in her belt and an expression of unrelieved cynicism on her face. Her sister. God.

  The lion rubbed its head against my leg, making me jump, and she pummelled its greying mane.

  ‘And this – oh! you’ll have seen him a thousand times; more exposure than any of us. Allow me to introduce Leo, formerly of MGM.’

  The old beast cocked its head from side to side and roared again, in unmistakable fashion, as if to identify itself. Mickey Mouse does her chauffeuring. Every morning, she takes a ride on Trigger.

  ‘Ars gratia artist,’ she reminded me, as if guessing my thoughts. ‘Where could he go, poor creature, when they retired him? Nobody would touch a fallen star. So he came right here, to live with Mama, didn’t you, darling.’
/>   ‘Drinkies!’ announced Sister, magnificently clattering a welcome, bottle-laden trolley.

  After the third poolside martini, which was gin at which a lemon briefly sneered, I judged it high time to broach the subject of Hank Mann. It was pitch dark by then, a few stars burning, night sounds, sea sounds, the creak of those metal chairs that seemed to have been designed, probably on purpose, by the butch sister, to break your balls. But it was difficult to get a word in. The Spirit was briskly checking out my knowledge of screen history.

  ‘No, the art director certainly was not Ben Carré, how absurd to think that! . . . My goodness me, young man, Wallace Reid was dead and buried by then, and good riddance to bad rubbish . . . Edith Head? Edith Head design Nancy Carroll’s patent leather evening dress? Who put that into your noddle?’

  Now and then the lion sandpapered the back of my hand with its tongue, as if to show sympathy. The butch sister put away gin by the tumblerful, two to my one, and creaked resonantly from time to time, like an old door.

  ‘No, no, no, young man! Laughton certainly was not addicted to self-abuse!’

  And out of the dark it came to me that that dreamy perfume of jasmine issued from no flowering shrub but, instead, right out of the opening sequence of Double Indemnity, do you remember? And I suffered a ghastly sense of incipient humiliation, of impending erotic doom, so that I shivered, and Sister, alert and either comforting or complicitous, sloshed another half pint of gin into my glass.

  Then Sister belched and announced: ‘Gonna take a leak.’

  Evidently equipped with night vision, she rolled off into the gloaming from whence, after a pause, came the tinkle of running water. She’d gone back to Nature as far as toilet training was concerned, cut out the frills. The raunchy sound of Sister making pee-pee brought me down to earth again. I clutched my tumbler, for the sake of holding something solid.

  ‘About thish time,’ I said, ‘you met Hank Mann.’

  Night and candlelight turned the red mouth black, but her satin dress shone like water with plankton in it.

  ‘Heinrich,’ she corrected with a click of orthodontics; and then, or so it seemed, fell directly into the trance for, all at once, she fixed her gaze on the middle distance and said no more.

  I thankfully took advantage of her lapse of attention to pour my gin down the side of my chair, trusting that by the morrow it would be indistinguishable from lion piss. Sister, clanking her death’s head belt-buckle as she readjusted her clothing, came back to us and juggled ice and lemon slices as if nothing untoward was taking place. Then, in a perfectly normal, even conversational tone, the Spirit said: ‘White kisses, red kisses. And coke in a golden casket on top of the baby grand. Those were the days.’

  Sister t’sked, possibly with irritation.

  ‘Reckon you’ve had a skinful,’ said Sister. ‘Reckon you deserve a stiff whupping.’

  That roused the Spirit somewhat, who chuckled and lunged at the gin which, fortunately, stood within her reach. She poured a fresh drink down the hatch in a matter of seconds, then made a vague gesture with her left hand, inadvertently biffing the lion in the ear. The lion had dozed off and grumbled like an empty stomach to have his peace disturbed.

  ‘They wore away her face by looking at it too much. So we made her a new one.’

  ‘Hee haw, hee haw,’ said Sister. She was not braying but laughing.

  The Spirit propped herself on the arm of her wheel-chair and pierced me with a look. Something told me we had gone over some kind of edge. Nancy Carroll’s evening dress, indeed. Enough of that nonsense. Now we were on a different plane.

  ‘I used to think of prayer wheels,’ she informed me. ‘Night after night, prayer wheels ceaselessly turning in the darkened cathedrals, those domed and gilded palaces of the Faith, the Majestics, the Rialtos, the Alhambras, those grottoes of the miraculous in which the creatures of the dream came out to walk within the sight of men. And the wheels spun out those subtle threads of light that wove the liturgies of that reverential age, the last great age of religion. While the wonderful people out there in the dark, the congregation of the faithful, the company of the blessed, they leant forward, they aspired upwards, they imbibed the transmission of divine light.

  ‘Now, the priest is he who prints the anagrams of desire upon the stock; but whom does he project upon the universe? Another? Or, himself?’

  All this was somewhat more than I’d bargained for. I fought with the gin fumes reeling in my head, I needed all my wits about me. Moment by moment, she became more gnomic. Surreptitiously, I fumbled with my briefcase. I wanted to get that tape recorder spooling away, didn’t I; why, it might have been Mannheim talking.

  ‘Is he the one who interprets the spirit or does the spirit speak through him? Or is he only, all the time, nothing but the merchant of shadows?

  ‘Hic,’ she interrupted herself.

  Then Sister, whose vision was not one whit impaired by time or liquor, extended her trousered leg in one succinct and noiseless movement and kicked my briefcase clear into the pool, where it dropped with a liquid plop.

  In spite of the element of poetic justice in it, that my file on Mannheim should suffer the same fate as he, I must admit that now I fell into a great fear. I even thought they might have lured me here to murder me, this siren of the cinema and her weird acolyte. Remember, they had made me quite drunk; it was a moonless night and I was far from home; and I was trapped helpless among these beings who could only exist in California, where the light made movies and madness. And one of them had just arbitrarily drowned the poor little tools of my parasitic trade, leaving me naked and at their mercy. The kindly lion shook himself awake and licked my hand again, perhaps to reassure me, but I wasn’t expecting it and jumped half out of my skin.

  The Spirit broke into speech again.

  ‘She is only in semi-retirement, you know. She still spends three hours every morning looking through the scripts that almost break the mailman’s back as he staggers beneath them up to her cliff-top retreat.

  ‘Age does not wither her; we’ve made quite sure of that, young man. She still irradiates the dark, for did we not discover the true secret of immortality together? How to exist almost and only in the eye of the beholder, like a genuine miracle?’

  I cannot say it comforted me to theorise this lady was, to some degree, possessed, and so was perfectly within her rights to refer to herself in the third person in that ventriloquial, insubstantial voice that scratched the ear as smoke scratches the back of the throat. But by whom or what possessed? I felt very close to the perturbed spirit of Heinrich von Mannheim and the metaphysics of the Great Art of Light and Shade, I can tell you. And speaking of the latter – Athanias Kircher, author, besides, of Spectacula Paradoxa Rerum (1624), The Universal Theatre of Paradoxes.

  Her eyelids were drooping now, and as they closed her mouth fell open, but she spoke no more.

  The Sister broke the silence as if it were wind.

  ‘That’s about the long and short of it, young man,’ she said. ‘Got enough for your thesis?’

  She heaved herself up with a sigh so huge that, horrors! it blew out all the candles and then, worse and worse! she left me alone with the Spirit. But nothing more transpired because the Spirit seemed to have passed, if not on, then out, flat out in her wheel-chair, and the inner light that brought out the shine on her satin dress was extinguished too. I saw nothing, until a set of floods concealed in the pines around us came on and everything was visible as common daylight, the old lady, the drowsing lion, the depleted drinks trolley, the slices of lemon ground into the terrace by my nervous feet, the little plants pushing up between the cracks in the paving, the black water of the swimming pool in which my overexcited, suddenly light-wounded senses hallucinated a corpse.

  Which last resolved itself, as I peered, headachy and blinking, into my own briefcase, opened, spilling out a floating debris of papers and tape boxes. I poured myself another gin, to steady my nerves. Sister appeared again, right be
hind my shoulder, making me jog my elbow so gin soaked my jeans. Her Indian headband had knocked rakishly askew, giving her a piratical air. In close-up, her bones, clearly visible under her ruined skin, reminded me of somebody else’s, but I was too chilled, drunk and miserable to care whose they might be. She was cackling to herself, again.

  ‘We hates y’all with the tape recorders,’ she said. ‘Reckon us folks thinks you is dancin’ on our graves.’

  She aimed a foot at the brake on the Spirit’s wheel-chair and briskly pushed it and its unconscious contents into the house. The lion woke up, yawned like the opening of the San Andreas fault and padded after. The sliding door slid to. After a moment, a set of concealing crimson curtains swished along the entire length of the glass wall and that was that. I half-expected to see the words, THE END, come up on the curtains, but then the lights went off and I was in the dark.

  Unwilling to negotiate the crazy steps down to the gate, I reached sightlessly for the gin and sucked it until I fell into a troubled slumber.

  And I awoke me on the cold hill-side.

  Well, not exactly. I woke up to find myself tucked into the back seat of my own VW, parked on the cliff beside the Toyota truck in the grey hour before dawn, my frontal lobes and all my joints a-twang with pain. I didn’t even try the gate of the house. I got out of the car, shook myself, got back in again and headed straight home. After a while, on the perilous road to the freeway, I saw in the driving mirror a vehicle approaching me from behind. It was the red Toyota truck. Sister, of course, at the wheel.

  She overtook me at illicit speed, blasting the horn joyously, waving with one hand, her face split in a toothless grin. When I saw that smile, even though the teeth were missing, I knew who she reminded me of – of a girl in a dirndl on a cardboard alp, smiling because at last she saw approaching her the man who would release her . . . If I hadn’t, in the interests of scholarship, sat yawning through that dire operetta in the viewing booth, I would never have so much as guessed.