by William Boyd
But I’ve lost you, haven’t I? Where was it? That bit about me hiding in the wood? Or setting up my alibi and following them to Scotland? It wasn’t a question of continuing to suspend disbelief, but rather the belief beginning to crumble away of its own accord. You were saying: if he wants us to believe him, if he wants us to think we’re reading something true, then surely confessing to a murder in cold print is, well, a bit implausible?
You’re right of course. I got carried away. Fiction took over once again. Anyway, I could never do a thing like that, could I?
PS:
Frank and ‘Louella’, wherever you are, if you should happen to read this – no hard feelings? It’s just a joke.
The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’
MAN’S VOICE (OVER)
I once heard a theory about this
town, this place where we work
and wrangle, where we swindle and
swive. It was told to me by this
writer I knew. He said: ‘It’s only a
dance, but then again, it’s the only
dance.’ I’m not so sure he’s right but,
anyway, he’s dead now . . .
FADE UP
Once upon a time – actually, not so very long ago at all, come to think of it – in east central West Africa, on one enervating May morning Aurélien No sat on the stoop of his father’s house staring aimlessly at the road that led to Murkina Leto, state capital of the People’s Republic of Kiq. The sun’s force seemed to press upon the brown dusty landscape with redundant intensity, Aurélien thought idly, there was surely no moisture left out there to evaporate and it seemed . . . He searched for a word for a second or two: it seemed ‘stupid’ that all that calorific energy should go to waste.
He called for his little brother Marius to fetch him another beer but no reply came from inside the house. He scratched his cheek; he thought he could taste metal in his mouth – that new filling. He shifted his weight on his cane chair and wondered vaguely why cane made that curious squeaking sound. Then his eye was caught by the sight of a small blue van that was making its way up the middle of the road with what seemed like undue celerity, tooting its horn at the occasional roadside pedestrian and browsing cow not so much to scare them out of the way as to announce the importance of this errand it was on.
To Aurélien’s mild astonishment the blue van turned abruptly into his father’s driveway and stopped equally abruptly before the front door. As the laterite dust thrown up by the tyres slowly dispersed the postman emerged from the auburn cloud like a messenger from the gods carrying before him a stiff envelope blazoned with an important-looking crest.
Marius No For sure, I remember that day when he won the prize. Personally, I was glad of the distraction. He had been emmerding me all morning. ‘Get this’, ‘Get that’, ‘Fetch me a beer’. I just knew it had gone quiet for ten minutes. When I came out on to the stoop he was sitting there, looking even more vacant than normal, just staring at this paper in his hands. ‘Hey, Coco,’ I said to him. ‘Military service, mm? Poor salaud. Wait till those bastard sergeants give you one up the cul.’ He said nothing, so I took the paper from his hands and read it. It was the hundred thousand francs that had shocked him, struck him dumb.
When Le Destín de Nathalie ‘X’ (metteur en scène Aurélien No) won the Prix d’Or at the concours général in Paris of L’Ecole Supérieur des Etudes Cinématographiques (ESEC), the Kiq Minister of Culture (Aurélien’s brother-in-law) laid on a reception for two hundred guests at the Ministry. After a long speech the Minister called Aurélien on to the podium to shake him publicly by the hand. Aurélien had gathered his small tight dreadlocks into a loose sheaf on the top of his head and the photographs of that special evening show him startled and blinking in the silvery wash of the flash bulbs, some natural flinch causing the fronds of his dreadlock sheaf to toss simultaneously in one direction as if blown by a stiff breeze.
The Minister asked him what he planned to do with the prize money.
’Good question,’ Aurélien said and thought for ten seconds or so before replying. ‘It’s a condition of the prize that I put the money towards another film.’
’Here in Kiq?’ the Minister said, smiling knowingly.
’Of course.’
Delphine Drelle ‘It’s impossible,’ I said when he called me. ‘Completely out of the question. Are you mad? What kind of film could you make in Kiq?’ He came to my apartment in Paris, he said he wanted me to be in his new film. I say I don’t want to be an actress. Well, as soon as I started explaining Aurélien saw I was making sense. That’s what I like about Aurélien, by the way, he is responsive to the powers of reason. Absolutely not, I said to Aurélien, never in my life. He said he had an idea, but only I could do it. I said, Look what happened the last time, do you think I’m crazy? I’ve only been out of the clinic one month. He just smile at me. He said, What do you think if we go to Hollywood?
Aurélien No turned out of the rental park at LAX and wondered which direction to take. Delphine Drelle sat beside him studying her face intently in the mirror of her compact and moaning about the dehydrating effect of international air travel. In the back seat of the car sat Bertrand Holbish, a photographer, and ex-boyfriend of Delphine, squashed in the cramped space left by the two large scratched and dented silver aluminium boxes that held the camera and the sound equipment.
Aurélien turned left, drove four hundred metres and turned left again. He saw a sign directing him to the freeway and followed it until he reached a hotel. DOLLAR WIZE INN, he saw it was called as he pulled carefully into the forecourt. The hotel was a six-storey rectangle. The orange plastic cladding on the balconies had been bleached salmon pink by the sun.
’Here we are,’ Aurélien said. ‘This is perfect.’
’Where’s Hollywood?’ Bertrand Holbish asked.
’Can’t be far away,’ Aurélien said.
Bertrand Holbish Immediately, when he asked me, I said to Aurélien that I didn’t know much about sound. He said, You switch it on, you point the volume. No, you check the volume and you point the, ah, what’s the word? . . . What? Ah, yes, ‘boom’. I said, You pay my ticket? You buy me drugs? He said, Of course, only don’t touch Delphine. [Laughs, coughs.] That’s Aurélien for you, one crazy guy.
Delphine Drelle Did I tell you that he is a very attractive man, Aurélien? Yes? He’s a real African, you know, strong face, strong African face . . . and his lips, they’re like they’re carved. He’s tall, slim. He has this hair, it’s like that tennis player, Noah, like little braids hanging down over his forehead. Sometimes he puts beads on the end of them. I don’t like it so much. I want him to shave his head. Completely. He speaks real good English, Aurélien. I never knew this about him. I ask him once how he pronounced his name and he said something like ‘Ngoh’. He says it is a common name in Kiq. But everybody pronounces it differently. He doesn’t mind.
When Aurélien went out the next day to scout for locations he discovered that the area they were staying in was called Westchester. He drove through the featureless streets – unusually wide, he thought, for such an inactive neighbourhood – the air charged and thunderous with landing jetliners, until he found a small cluster of shops beneath a revolving sign declaiming ‘Brogan’s Mini-Mall’. There was a deli, a pharmacy, a novelty store, a Korean grocery and a pizzeria-cum-coffee shop that had most of the features he was looking for: half a dozen tables on the sidewalk, a predominantly male staff, a licence to sell alcoholic beverages. He went inside, ordered a cappuccino, and asked how long they stayed open in the evenings. Late, came the answer. For the first time since he had suggested coming to Los Angeles Aurélien sensed a small tremor of excitement. Perhaps it would be possible after all. He looked at the expressionless tawny faces of the men behind the counter and the cheerful youths serving food and drink. He felt sure these gentlemen would allow him to film in their establishment – for a modest fee, of course.
Michael Scott Gehn Have you ever seen L
e Destin de Nathalie ‘X’? Extraordinary film, extraordinary. No, I tell you, I’d put it right up there with Un Chien Andalou, Todd’s Last Walk, Chelsea Girls, Downey’s Chafed Elbows. That category of film. Surreal, bizarre . . . Let’s not beat about the bush, sometimes downright incomprehensible, but it gets to you. Somehow, subcutaneously. You know, I spend more time thinking about certain scenes in Nathalie ‘X’ than I do about Warner’s annual slate. And it’s my business, what more can I say? Do you smoke? Do you have any non-violent objections if I do? Thank you, you’re very gracious. I’m not kidding, you can’t be too careful here. Nathalie ‘X’. . . OK. It’s very simple and outstandingly clever. A girl wakes up in her bed in her room –
Aurélien looked at his map. Delphine and Bertrand stood at his shoulder, sunglassed, fractious.
’We have to go from here . . . to here.’
’Aurélien, when are we going to film?’
’Tomorrow. Maybe. First we walk it through.’
Delphine let her shoulders slump. ‘But we have the stock. Why don’t we start?’
’I don’t know. I need an idea. Let’s walk it through.’
He took Bertrand’s elbow and guided him across the road to the other side. He made an oblong with his thumbs and his forefingers and framed Delphine in it as she lounged against the Exit sign of the Dollarwize Inn.
’Turn right,’ Aurélien shouted across the road. ‘I’ll tell you which way to go.’
Michael Scott Gehn – a girl wakes up in her own bed in her own room, somewhere in Paris. She gets out of bed and puts on her make-up, very slowly, very deliberately. No score, just the noises she makes, as she goes about her business. You know, paints her nails, mascara on eyelashes. She hums a bit, she starts to sing a song to herself, snatches of a song in English. Beatles song, from the ‘White Album’, what’s it called? Oh yeah, ‘Rocky Raccoon’. This girl’s French, right, and she’s singing in English with a French accent, just quietly to herself. The song sounds totally different. Totally. Extraordinary effect. Bodywide goose-bumps. This takes about twenty, thirty minutes. You are completely, but completely, held. You do not notice the time passing. That something so totally – let’s not beat about the bush – banal can hold you that way. Extraordinary. We’re talking mundanity, here, absolute diurnal minutiae. I see, what, two hundred and fifty movies a year in my business, not counting TV. I am replete with film. Sated. But I am held. No, mesmerized would be fair. (Pause.) Did I tell you the girl was naked?
’Turn left,’ Aurélien called.
Delphine obliged and walked past the mirror-glass façade of an office building.
’Stop.’
Aurélien made a note on the map and turned to Bertrand. ‘What could she do here, Bertrand? She needs to do something.’
’I don’t know. How should I know?’
’Something makes her stop.’
’She could step in some dog shit.’
Aurélien reflected for a while. He looked around him: at the cracked parched concrete of the street, the dusty burnish on the few parked cars. There was a bleached, fumy quality to the light that day, a softened glare that hurt the eyes. The air reverberated as another jumbo hauled itself out of LAX.
’Not a bad idea,’ he said. ‘Thanks, Bertrand.’ He called to Delphine. ‘OK, go up to the end of the road and turn left.’
Michael Scott Gehn I’ve written a lot about this movie, analysed the hell out of it, the way it’s shot, the way it manipulates mood, but it only struck me the other day how it works. Essentially, basically. It’s all in the title, you see. ‘Le Destin’. The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’. Destiny. What does destiny have in store for this girl, I should say, this astoundingly attractive girl? She gets up, she puts on her make-up, she sings a song, she gets dressed. She leaves her apartment building and walks through the streets of Paris to a café. It’s night-time. She sits in this café and orders a beer. We’re watching her, we’re waiting. She drinks more beers, she seems to be getting drunk. People come and go. We wait. We wonder: What is the destiny of Nathalie ‘X’? (It’s pronounced ‘eeeks’ in French. Not ‘ecks’, ‘eeeks’.) And then? But I don’t want to spoil the movie for you.
They started filming on their sixth day in Los Angeles. It was late afternoon – almost magic hour – and the orange sun basted the city in a thick viscous light. Aurélien shot the sequence of the walk in front of the mirror-glass building. The moving clouds-cape on the mirror-glass curtain wall was disturbingly beautiful. Aurélien had a moment’s regret that he was filming in black and white.
Delphine wore a short black skirt and a loose, V-neck taupe cashmere sweater (no bra). On her feet she wore skincoloured kid loafers, so fine you could roll them into a ball. She had a fringed suede bag over her shoulder. Her long hair was dyed a light sandy blonde and – after much debate – was down.
Aurélien set up the camera across the road for the first take. Bertrand stood beside him and pointed his microphone in the general direction of Delphine.
Aurélien switched on the camera, chalked ‘Scene One’ on the clapperboard, walked into frame, clicked it and said, ’Vas-y, Delphine.’
Nathalie ‘X’ walked along the sidewalk. When she reached the middle of the mirror-glass wall she stopped. She took off one of her shoes and peeled the coin of chewing-gum from its sole. She stuck the gum to the glass wall, refitted her shoe and walked on.
Michael Scott Gehn I have to say, as a gesture of contempt for Western materialism, the capitalist macrostructure that we function in, that takes some beating. And it’s not in the French version. Aurélien No has been six days in Los Angeles and he comes up with something as succinct, as moodily epiphanic, as that. That’s what I call talent. Not raw talent, talent of the highest sophistication.
Bertrand Holbish The way Delphine cut her hair, you know, is the clue, I think. It’s blonde, right? Long and she has a fringe, OK? But not like anybody else’s fringe. It’s just too long. It hangs to her lower eyelash. To here [gestures], to the middle of her nose. So she shakes her head all the time to clear her vision a little. She pulls it aside – like this – with one finger when she wants to see something a little better . . . You know, many many people look at Delphine and find this very exciting, sexually, I mean. She’s a pretty girl, for sure, nice body, nice face. But I see these girls everywhere. Especially in Los Angeles. It’s something about this fringe business that makes her different. People look at her all the time. When we were waiting for Aurélien we – Delphine and me – used to play backgammon. For hours. The fringe, hanging there, over her eyes. It drove me fucking crazy. I offered her five hundred dollars to cut it one centimetre, just one centimetre. She refused. She knew, Delphine, she knew.
Aurélien filmed the walk to the café first. It took four days, starting late afternoon, always approaching the café at dusk. He filmed Nathalie’s levée in one sustained twelve-hour burst. Delphine woke, made up, sang and dressed eight times that day in a series oflong takes, cuts only coming when the film ran out. The song changed: Delphine sang Bob Dylan’s ‘She Belongs to Me’ with the pronoun changed to ‘He’. This was Delphine’s idea, and a good one Aurélien thought; the only problem was she kept forgetting. ‘He’s an artist, she don’t look back,’ Delphine sang in her flat breathy voice as she combed her hair, ‘He never stumbles, she’s got no place to fall.’
Every evening they would go to the pizzeria and eat. Aurélien insisted that Delphine get drunk, not knee-walking drunk, but as far as woozy inebriation. Of course the waiters came to know them and conversation ensued. ‘What you guys doin’ here anyway? Making a movie? Great. Another beer for the lady? No problemo.’
After a week’s regular visiting Aurélien asked the owner, a small nervy man called George Malinverno, if they could film at the pizzeria, outside on the ‘terrace’, for one night only. They agreed on a remuneration of two hundred dollars.
Michael Scott Gehn Have you ever heard of the Topeka Film Festival? That’s Topeka, Kansas? No? Neithe
r have I. So you can understand that I was kind of pissed when my editor assigned me to cover it. It ran a week, the theme was ‘Kansas in the Western 1970–1980’. It’s not my subject, my last book was on Murnau, for Christ’s sake, but let’s not get embroiled in office politics. The point is I’m on my way to the airport and I realize I’ve left my razor and shaving foam behind. I pull into this mini-mall where there’s a drugstore. I’m coming out of the shop and I see there’s a film crew setting up a shot at the pizzeria. Normally I see a film crew and chronic catatonia sets in. But there’s something about this one: the guy holding the boom mike looks like he’s stoned – even I can see that it keeps dropping into shot. So I wander over. The camera is set up behind these plants, kind of poking through a gap, like it’s hidden or something. And there’s this black guy behind the camera with this great hair with beads on it. I see he’s D.P. and clapperboy and director. He calls out into the darkness and this sensational-looking girl walks into the pizzeria terrace thing. She sits down and orders a beer and they just keep filming. After about two minutes the sound man drops the boom and they have to start over. I hear them talking – French. I couldn’t believe it. I had this guy figured for some wannabe homeboy director out of South Central LA. But they’re talking French to each other. When was the last time a French crew shot a movie in this town? I introduced myself and that’s when he told me about Nathalie ‘X’ and the Prix d’Or. I bought them all some drinks and he told me his story and gave me a video cassette of the movie. Fuck Topeka, I thought, I knew this was too good to miss. French underground movies shooting next door to LAX. Are you kidding me? They were all staying in some fleabag hotel under the flightpath, for God’s sake. I called my editor and threatened to take the feature to American Film. He reassigned me.