The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  Why can’t we be content with the way things are? Is it a basic human failing, this constant need to improve your life?… Is there a deep atavistic dream, which we all cherish, that however settled and content our life seems to be, it can with more effort be a little bit better? Chimeras, mirages, illusions—not to be trusted. Why did I keep pushing Doon this way? Why did I keep pushing myself? Everything was fine until I unilaterally decided it could be better. That night I kept on at her, pleading the case for matrimony with keening insistence. It became very boring for her. We snapped at each other, we argued. Then I apologized and tried to calm down, but the evening was ruined. My tone had been wheedling, selfish. Doon was right, damn her; my arguments could get no forensic purchase.

  Shortly after that abortive proposal, I came home one night at about half past eight. Sonia was in the kitchen talking to Lily. I went upstairs without greeting her. It must have been about half past nine. In the upstairs corridor I saw Vincent peering through the half-opened door to the boys’ bedroom.

  “Get to bed.” I warned.

  “Daddy, Hereford won’t talk to me.”

  “He’s a sensible boy. He’s gone to sleep.”

  I ushered Vincent back into the room and helped him into bed. Then I went over to Hereford’s cot. He was lying on his back, one arm thrown high, two glistening streams of snot trailing from his nostrils. I took out my handkerchief to wipe his lip clean. The instant I touched him I knew he was dead. He was barely warm. I picked him up and his head fell back. A curious gurgling sound came from his throat. I kissed his face, the tears running freely from my eyes, and laid him back down again. I went over to Vincent, got him out of bed and led him from the room.

  Hereford’s cold had lingered on, turned into a bad cough, gone away and returned again. He did not seem to mind. To him, I suppose, it was just another couple of orifices—nose and mouth—excreting in concert with his nether ones. He was three years old.

  VILLA LUXE, June 23, 1972

  What can I say about Hereford? I think, I believe, I sincerely believe that everything might have been different had he lived. But I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure of anything. Hamish would agree with that conclusion. All I’m left with is a sentimental aggregate of fond recollections and wishful thinking. I know only that I loved that small boy in a different way from my other children. There was something in me that responded to his anarchic clumsy presence no matter how irritated and preoccupied I was. And then he was gone.

  Is this the sort of occasion when a human life (mine) takes a quantum leap? One of those sudden jumps, an abrupt discontinuity that changes everything? Nothing was quite the same after Hereford died; the world had a different tinge and texture. From where do we get this funny idea that order, causality, sense and continuity should necessarily prevail in the world in which we humans live and breath? Yes, I thought, I can see how this place is governed by chance and random change, having just been the victim of a particularly brutal one. I can understand now how visions of discontinuity and plurality fit my experience better than ideas of order and deliberateness. We don’t know anything for certain. We can’t determine anything. We function solely on terms of hopeful probability. It worked this way before; maybe it will again. But don’t count on it.

  I go into the main town, the port, to see Eddie’s lawyer about getting the pool filled. The central square is shabbily elegant, paved with white stone and lined with mature fragrant oleanders. The yellowing stucco buildings around it have tall windows with shutters and wrought-iron balconies. At one end there is an amusing baroque statue of two heavily armed, plumed soldiers wrestling with the flag of liberty.

  Everywhere the tourists mill about. Inside his hot office the lawyer is diplomatic. He procrastinates. He apologizes. What can he do? Perhaps at the end of the tourist season …

  I leave and join gaudy visitors to our island. I find my favorite café overlooking the harbor and after waiting no more than ten minutes I secure a seat. I eat some ice cream—pistachio, always pistachio—and drink a coffee. I think about Ulrike. She’s a charming girl. The tan she has now suits her. She exudes health and a settled happy confidence in her life or work. I try to picture her boyfriend, the cineast. I see a beard, a checked shirt, a name like Rudi or Rolf. Everything seems fine, Ulrike, but tread carefully. Remember the Uncertainty Principle. It governs the molecules we’re made up of. A little of it is going to penetrate our human world. If a fig tree root can make it through a solid concrete wall, what is going to stop the Uncertainty Principle? Look at my life—lived in unswerving devotion to its capricious edicts.

  I stop. I’m getting depressed. I look up and at that moment a tourist bus goes by. And there at a window pointing at the attractions of our picturesque harbor is a man I know. An American. The bus passes; my sudden fear sizzles on, like spit on a hot skillet. Reassurance is slow to return. Relax, I say to myself, it could be a coincidence. It must be. It might not even be him at all. He never saw you, and anyway, nobody knows you are here.

  12

  End of an Era

  In the summer of 1730, Mme. de Warens quit Annecy temporarily for Paris, leaving Jean Jacques behind. He had a pleasant time in her absence, dallying with young women, several of whom, or so he claimed in his Confessions, were in love with him. On one particularly beautiful day he went for a walk in the country. In a green valley beside a stream he came across two girls who were having difficulty leading their horses across. Rousseau had met one of the girls before—a Mlle. de Graffenried—and was introduced to her by the other—Mile. Galley. They were both pretty, especially Mlle. Galley, who was “both small and well developed at an age when a girl is most beautiful.” Rousseau helped them both across the stream and the girls insisted on his accompanying them for the rest of the day. They were going to the Château de la Tour at Thônes, a large farmhouse that belonged to Mlle. Galley’s family.

  They duly arrived at the château and enjoyed a late lunch in the kitchen. Saving their coffee and cream cakes for later, they decided to round off their meal by going into the chateau’s cherry orchard to pick the ripe fruit. Rousseau climbed the trees and threw down cherries to the girls, who teasingly threw the pits back up at him. A flirtatious game ensued. Then “Mlle. Galley, with her apron held forward and her head thrown back, presented such a good target and I threw so well, that a bunch of cherries fell between her breasts. What laughter! I said to myself, ‘If only my lips were cherries I would gladly throw them there.’ ”

  But nothing happened. It was an idyll, vibrant with sexual intimations and unrealized potential. As you can imagine, this particular episode had burned itself into my mind when I read it in my barren cell at Weilburg. And remember I read it as a virgin (my two girls were Huguette and Dagmar) and at the time it actually occurred Jean Jacques had been a virgin too. He never forgot that day in the cherry orchard. For him it was a moment, he realized later, which proved that the erotic sensuality of innocence is often more powerful than the carnal pleasures of adulthood.

  I filmed the entire day just as Rousseau had related it. I cast the two girls locally, searching touring theater groups and music halls in Grenoble, Nice and Lyons. It was their appearance that was important, not their acting ability—I had no need for sophisticated, worldly actresses. All they had to do was look right, giggle and flirt. Karl-Heinz was a gauche monster of ardent frustration, positively deformed with the competing pressures of desire and shyness. In our orchard we cut out the center of one tree and mounted a camera platform there. We used embossed film for the moment Mlle. Galley’s breasts “catch” the bunch of cherries. It was during this week that I saw a further potential in the Tri-Kamera. I realized that it need not be employed solely for creating one single long, stretched image—it could just as easily make three separate ones. Throughout one exhausting evening Horst and I worked out with the aid of diagrams a sequence of massive close-ups using the embossed film. The actors were baffled as we thrust the cameras to within inches of their face
s from every possible angle, pausing between shots to consult sheaves of notes and scribbled drawings. The resulting sequence is breathtaking in its latent erotic power, as those who saw it on the three screens testified. Let me take you through it.

  Everything in the episode, in terms of filming, proceeds orthodoxly. The encounter at the stream, the ride to the château, the meal in the kitchen. Then, as the trio walk to the cherry orchard, the curtains in the cinema draw back to reveal the two angled screens adjacent to the main one. The two auxiliary projectors start up and suddenly we have three separate images. Three heads in view: Jean Jacques, flanked by Mlles. Graffenried and Galley. We see covert glances pass among them. The two girls look up on either side as Jean Jacques climbs the tree in the center screen. Then the contours shift and firm as the embossed film runs through the projector. The hanging clump of cherries seems to take on the form of three-dimensional fruit. The perfect pallor of the girls’ faces and shoulders seems cast in plaster relief against the leafy background. We look down with Jean Jacques at the two delightful lasses gazing up at him. The girls eat the cherries, spit the stones into their hands and throw them back at Jean Jacques, who ducks the gentle hail.

  Then the center screen is filled by Mlle. Galley looking up, apron held out to catch more fruit. Jean Jacques’s face is on one side screen as he plots his revenge; on the other, his hand plucking a bunch of cherries. Center screen: we move in slowly on Mlle. Galley’s breasts, the low cut of her gown, the pressure, on either side, of her arms forcing them ever so slightly together, the swell and subsidence of her excited breathing, the soft deep shadow of her cleavage. Jean Jacques’s hand throws. Center screen, the cherries land. Lips, cherries, lips. Eyes, cherries, eyes. Then three laughing mouths. We pull back. In the center Jean Jacques’s laughter disguises his agonized face. The side screens dim; the curtains roll back to cover them.

  It works magnificently. At the premiere the audience was in an uproar. The planning of it all was painstakingly difficult. (I must pay tribute to Mlle. Sadrine Storri, a burlesque dancer from Lyons who disappeared back into obscurity after the film, who played Mlle. Galley. She showed admirable patience and good humor as I, standing on a chair above her, dropped dozens of cherry bunches onto her bosom, Horst’s camera whirring twelve inches away.) Of course my delight and pride in this scene was delayed. We were working blind. I had to wait many months before I saw the sequence run on three full-sized screens. For myself, and I speak with total honesty and objectivity, I think it represents the most complete and effective blend of technique and content in the entire movie. Embossed film and the Tri-Kamera were the perfect devices to reincarnate the tender eroticism of that warm afternoon near Annecy. Add to that the audacious use of massive close-ups of lips and eyes, dark glossy cherries and pale heaving breasts … overpowering images. My close-ups in The Confessions: Part I were the largest ever witnessed on the screen up to that time (larger than Eisenstein’s for sure) and—this is what makes me particularly proud—not a caption in sight.

  And so we continued working throughout the summer beset by more than the usual delays and technical hitches. The embossed film stock was notoriously fragile and the Tri-Kamera presented us with understandable teething troubles. The list of problems was endless and of little interest now, but it will give you some idea of the conditions under which we had to work if I tell you that, after a day’s filming, Horst, Leo and I drove to Geneva—where the nearest lab that could develop the embossed film was to be found—to examine the prints of the previous day’s shooting. More often than not we discovered some defect, some bubbling or flaking in a negative, that necessitated reshooting. The entire cherry-tree sequence, some two and a half minutes in length, took us most of July to film. By the end of that month I realized we were in serious difficulties. I received an angry cable from Eddie pointing out that the ratio of film shot to film used was running at approximately eighty to one. In other words I was shooting eighty minutes of film to produce one minute of screen time. A ratio of thirty to one is regarded as generous. Fifteen to one is not impossible. Somehow this news leaked out and it is from around this time that vicious stories began to circulate about profligacy, extravagance, and manic perfectionism. After a particularly scurrilous and savage attack in the trashy Das Grosse Bilderbuch des Films, I even traveled back to Berlin to reassure Eddie, and calm him down.

  We were now over budget. We were behind schedule. But what was being produced was extraordinary. It is true to say—and it is one of film’s bizarre strengths—that the last category can always overrule the first two. There is no contest in the struggle between real Art and Accountancy. Audiences are indifferent to balance sheets. Eddie knew this, but our other investors were less happy. Julie had been released in 1926. We were now approaching the last quarter of 1928 and no film was in sight. Unbeknownst to me, Eddie had been obliged to buy out Goldfilm’s interest and was renegotiating his deal with Pathé. The Confessions was fast becoming a Realismus project, pure and simple.

  Delays meant we had to postpone our Les Charmettes filming yet again, and we traveled to Grex in Switzerland to shoot the Geneva scenes. The huge set—the city walls of Geneva—had been standing unused for two months and Leo was contractually obliged to dismande it by the end of September.

  Doon had been with me all through this exciting but exhausting summer. I was immensely grateful. I think she sensed my grief over Hereford’s death was deeper than I showed and, indeed, I doubt if I could have carried on if each evening I had not been able to return to her. At Annecy she was called upon to work from time to time (we spent a frustrating week trying to reshoot her first encounter with Jean Jacques but the Tri-Kamera kept breaking down); however, at Grex there was nothing for her to do and I sensed boredom settling in. Curiously, I seemed to calm down once we reached Switzerland even though our problems in no way diminished. Perhaps it was the countryside. What I liked about the landscape was the way every possible bit of arable land was cultivated—some vineyards looked no more than twelve feet square, tucked in odd corners made by the angle between a barn and a cliff face, or set on a largish edge on a mountainside. It was this immaculate husbandry rather than the grandeur of the views that reassured me. It indicated, I thought, a determination and sense of purpose consonant with my own and I began to relax.

  In this mood it was easier for me to take a weekend off when part of the Geneva city wall collapsed and filming had to be suspended while it was rebuilt. Grex was not far from Montreux, so I suggested to Doon that we spend a couple of nights there. But she wanted to go up to the mountains, so we drove up one of the valleys, ascending steadily from the lakeshore, zigzagging through the woods up into the thin air of the mountain plateaus. We spent the night in a small village (I forget the name) in a hotel made, it seemed, entirely from elaborately carved, densely knotted wood. We were even served a meal of ham, gherkins and potatoes on carved wooden plates. We both found it somewhat oppressive. Doon said it was like living in a sinister fairy tale. We decided to leave on the Saturday morning and return to the lake for lunch.

  It was a sunny morning but cool. A level bank of cloud obscured the lake completely, as if we were shut off from the world below. We were happy as we motored easily down the tight bends, laughing about the monstrous wooden hotel.

  Rounding one corner we passed a broken-down car and a man—the driver—tried to flag us down, but we were by him too quickly to pull up in time.

  “He looks so cold,” Doon said. “Stop for him.”

  I braked, came to a halt some fifty yards farther on and got out. I waved the man on down to us. A smallish fellow, he started jogging thankfully towards us. Then, suddenly, he stopped, glanced back at his car and then leaped off the road and began to run down through a meadow towards a copse of fir trees. It was then that I recognized him. To Doon’s astonishment I took off in pursuit.

  I ran speedily down the slope through the thick dewy grass, arms windmilling backwards to keep my balance. I soon gained on my
quarry, whose city shoes seemed to give him no purchase on the slippery ground. He fell several times and I caught up with him sprawled face down at the edge of the trees.

  Eugen P. Eugen was soaked through and shivering. He stood up and plucked leaf mold and pine needles from his natty suit.

  “Mr. Todd,” he said. “How pleasant to see you again.”

  “Why are you following me, Eugen?” I asked. I was calm. I knew I could deal easily with whatever doltish blackmail was coming.

  “Your wife hired me,” he said, with a mild grin. He looked down. “My shoes are ruined.”

  “But you can’t work for her,” I said angrily. “I hired you.”

  “Herr Todd”—he spread his hands apologetically—“a fellow has to make a living.”

  He told me that Sonia had contacted him a fortnight earlier (I have no idea what alerted her: it could have been any of a dozen inept cover-ups); he had come down to Annecy and followed us to Switzerland. He had already sent two long reports back to Sonia detailing her husband’s infidelity. Eugen told me all this with perverse pride, as if it were evidence of his efficiency—a talent, so the implication seemed to run, to which I could also testify. As he elaborated on the contents of his reports, I closed my eyes. Some kind of bird was singing noisily in the trees. I could feel the dew seeping up through the soles of my shoes as if searching for the sensation of fatigue and random remorse that was spreading downwards through my body, its source—seemingly—some gland located in the crown of my head. Sonia had known for almost two weeks. What was waiting for me in Berlin?

  I was roused by Doon’s call from the road. Eugen and I looked round.

  “Ah, Miss Bogan. Magnificent actress,” he said.