Lookout Cartridge (39 page)

But I didn’t give Dag £12 in London for film just to piss it away.

I cut across toward him, at an angle, for he’s already at the intersection. I’m calling something to him, I cannot know what the three are doing, but now as if they are just part of a larger scene Dagger pans to me running toward him, switches off saying that I’ve run right out of focus. I don’t know why I was running. I felt for a second almost between him and them. I turn again and the girl and the two guys are there almost out of sight up their street but turning out of it toward Place Napoléon, and the blond man looks back and then they’re gone.

The exit from that loop swings by again and I don’t quite make it out but I say to Dag (and feel this takes me part way, for maybe this is a soft exit), On film I’ll look like I’m running at the cameraman to protect those people from him.

Dagger is at once, though with a certain casual slowness, into a tale about a New York friend who in the early fifties was doing a TV history-simulation called
See It Now
. So one day he was taping the show and put his eye to the viewfinder to check that he was getting what he wanted—and suddenly like a face from another dimension into the viewfinder comes an old college pal who owes him money and plans to borrow more and figures if he wanders onto the set he might even get a bit part.

Dagger’s Beaulieu may have caught in my face some record of the French boy knocking America or Melanie touching me through my wet shirt and setting off a fatherly nerve that circles a memory that, because they grew up in London, I never had of taking my daughter fishing in Sheepshead Bay on a Sunday, my family to Lindy’s in Coney Island for lobster, my children to see the sea lions and giant turtles in the aquarium that moved from the Battery to Coney Island the year Will was born in England.

Tourists, says Dag, tourists, against the wall of a fortress.

But I don’t believe him, I don’t believe he has a real idea.

But if he’s using me—for what? fun and friendship? camera practice? Will Claire’s boss pay our gas and film? I kicked in £12 in London for color stock Dagger ordered from L.A. I thought there was energy in his good nature as in the rechargeable power pack that drives the Beaulieu motor and can “transport” as many spools as we’ll conceivably need. A chance plunge yields new power. My exit comes again and I find my branch instruction and leave the loop. I have seen how to use the Corsican footage. Between the silent Softball Game and the Marseillaise game of bowls with its arcing, thudding steel balls, there will have intervened the Unplaced Room with its barren venue and its military subject matter; the Bonfire in Wales with its burning branches and the Unknown Man running from darkness to darkness; the Hawaiian hippie (whose face will connect with that of the American Indian of the preceding scene) steadfastly drumming his guitar not on the road any more but in the great long pedestrian subway that leads to the South Kensington tube station; the colors and names of things going into the Suitcase Slowly Packed opening into the colors of the pier crowd here in Ajaccio. We will then cut ahead to footage not yet taken of the U.S. Air Force base in England but just for ten seconds of NATO first-strike bombers taking off silently against Guy’s remarks about the bombing of the malaria swamps (which we’ll get him to repeat at the casino tonight against the baccarat croupiers’ calls). Then to Carlo and Letizia’s house and Melanie’s spiel, then use what she said when she wasn’t being filmed or recorded (talking about Paoli’s supporters driving Letizia out of her house) as sound track for the tourists against the fortress wall (though we’ll have to establish that it is a fortress).

Cut to the fortress street from which the girl and the two men have just disappeared (though any potential justness in our finished film will hinge on how we edit). I ask Dagger to move up and shoot along the fortress wall to see down into the courtyard behind the wall—where they used to shoot the condemned.

Something newly sound and solid is coming. I’m excited. I do not know what the Marvelous Country House will yield—Americans, another fortress, a nice life perhaps shivered into montage with the air base and thus made to seem close to it in green England. We’ll see when we get back from Corsica.

I decide we’ll take a day’s jaunt over to the west side of the island (where there’s a Roman town at Aleria) and film that area where the U.S. Air Force bombed the fever mosquitoes.

Cut to Tuesday. The film will show the offshore battle of the landing craft. Across the Gulf of Ajaccio at a depth of forty meters are the shelves of coral the scuba man said he’d take me to for fifty francs. A gray outboard rounds a giant buoy. The eye-ear-nose-and-throat man from whom Dagger borrowed the zoom this morning lives in a large dusky apartment with heavy furniture and a calm beautiful blond woman. It is an Angenieux zoom with focal length variable from 12 mm. to 120 mm. Since one of our own prime lenses is 15 mm., our advantage with the zoom is at the long narrow end not at the short wide. It’s not even the quick lens change between shots but the flexibility while shooting that turns Dagger on. But on the way back to the école for lunch he has said he’s sorry we couldn’t dig up a 12—240, and for less than eight inches long this here zoom is awful heavy and he’s got to handle it like a China doll it’s so expensive and he’s not going to be able to do one combination he’d planned, moving the camera back while zooming at the same rate
toward
the boys in the yellow raft, because with a zoom the weight increases so much with the thing sticking out in front that you have to use a tripod; and he can’t see holding the grip with his right hand, working the zoom crank with his left, to say nothing of pan zooms
and
going backward on sand stumbling over ladies and babies. I had nothing to say. Dagger said it was impossible to have anyone else turn the crank, it had to be the one looking through the viewfinder. I got his point.

Dagger’s American friend is on the beach with Dagger and wants to help out. The magazine is mounted on top so we won’t have to reload for two hundred feet and its shape suggests cans of films. A giant soccer player in an ingenious bikini stands hand on hip, there are bare brown girls and boys discussing the camera and asking who is in the film. Dagger wears sawed-off jean shorts below his hairy torso, the San Francisco Seals baseball cap above. The Scotswoman wears two strips of black. The sand is molten. Dagger tries a five-second shot of her at ten feet. A tot is peeing in the water but perhaps not in focus. Out near the boys in their yellow rubber rafts a snorkler’s yellow hose sticks out of his head like a periscope. Melanie is not in a swimsuit. She is watching the two teams a hundred yards offshore ramming each other with rubber-ended poles. She asks Dagger if she can look, but he says the gear’s pretty tricky; then he says Oh sure.

The Scotswoman charges the water—her long-legged run is slowed, she launches a flat dive.

Dagger has fixed the W-shaped crank in the Out position and is turning it.

I’m in the water way right of Dagger. I cup my hands to frame the boys in their yellow boats. The snorkler has come so close to their combat that one of them taps him on the head with the rubber end of a pole and he comes up suddenly as if he can’t hold his breath any more. Words would not improve on Dagger’s filming here. I could have held the mike near the camera to tape the observations of those at the observing end; instead I am out in the almost acidly salty water to the right of the naval encounter, which you can understand better if you know that it continues the dusty hostilities of last evening when the American and French boys at the école took on a bunch of locals in soccer.

The sky is a ground; I kick my toes to the surface, I fly at such a height I mark no progress overland. I rest my eyes, the salt sting when I close them also muscles my chest. Closed bodies like the Med build up higher salinity and the Med is one reason the Atlantic is saltier than the Pacific. Across my eyelids’ apricot inside, quick dry intercuts occur—a collapsed and folded yellow raft on a shelf in a shop along the Cour Napoléon, three bright headbands displayed in a Greenwich Village window, bikinis in a haberdasher’s drawer, pines contoured like children’s mountains at dusk against a final brightness of sky after the sun has dropped—it would be too obvious not to say ludicrous to bring on a destroyer as backdrop for this naval engagement—my mind approaches a condition of music or more likely the phrase itself Lorna and Geoff Millan said back and forth one night and I deliberately failed to understand even when it became a branch of the conversation kindly directed at me, to wit that a formula, yes even a formula, say in engineering, might approach the condition of music—and months too late I retort that I’ll take a mechanism over a formula any day; now take a servo-mechanism, in response to a control signal a servo like the sound of a dominant chord conveys to the control system the difference between a deshed state and the actual state again and again until the difference is eliminated, like a marital grievance in a soap opera—my ears here below the surface catch tremors of warble and concussion, I drift nearer the combat; I turn back.

I let my ghostly legs drop. Something happens. In the stern of the American boat if these boats had sterns, Mike, upon seeing the Scotswoman Mary, reaches at her with his pole and just as one of the Corsicans on the far side from me dodges a pole but hangs on to its rubber end and pulls so the American boat jumps toward the Corsicans, Mary grabs hold of Mike’s rubber end and pulls, and her move finds force in his move and weight. The sync is exact and like a thought proved. And into the water goes Mike and away goes his boat, a subtraction from the international event, an addition elsewhere. Yet Mike jabbed wantonly, and his may be a subtler judo still, as if, bored with battle in a suburban gulf, he looked at Mary and thought her emphatically worth not waiting any longer for.

Just two Yanks left, one drops his pole, grabs a paddle and maneuvers, leaving Mike still further off but Mike is wrestling with Mary. The Corsicans seem between the Americans and Dagger, a conjunction interestingly compressed by a zoom shot’s diminished depth of field. I’m twenty-five yards from Mike and Mary; some U.S. or French firm must have thought up an underwater housing for a Nagra, but I have only ears. The mountains at my feet are brownly harsh green with maquis but the yellow blooms are past, we’re too late except for postcards. The naval encounter turns serious, the Americans are in close, swinging their poles to hit the enemy with wood now, but except to Dagger at 120 mm. the hostilities will seem from the beach all in good fun. The Americans are now attempting to board the Corsicans. The two boats have drifted down the shore to a position opposite the café. Mary and Mike like a subplot discreetly spar. She says, I’ll tell my brother. He says, I’ll tell Melanie. She says, You don’t need to. Mike and Mary are gasping and grappling. Mike says, Your brother I hear is a very bad influence on Paul. Where did you get that? says Mary. From Gene? Mike strokes over to the bobbing dark pink butt of his pole. Mary goes under, Mike twists round laughing, she’s got his legs. He sees me as Mary surfaces and he is looking at me over her slim shoulder as she says, You didn’t answer me.

Mike’s look at me is blank. He says with a hand on Mary,
I’ll
answer you, and dives. She screams while he’s under. The fight is over. The yellow rafts are empty but being reboarded.

How do you know my brother? says Mary, and Mike’s answer is too low, and she says, But how do you know
Paul?

I can’t hear Mike.

Halloween, says Mary I think, and becomes aware of me.

I swim in.

I wade out, firm and sleek.

Melanie meets me disconsolately. What were you doing out there? Aren’t you making the film too?

Dreaming, I say.

Want to have a drink? she asks; and then: He stopped filming the boats when Mike fell in.

Good, that means more film left.

He dropped a reel on his instep and now he’s limping around in agony, Melanie says, but he just went on shooting Mike and that Scotch woman.

She’s old enough, I say.

Mike said he had to discuss something with your friend tonight. Do you know where?

Can’t drape sea water over your toes like you can a blanket. Floating in the Gulf of Ajaccio, drape a line from eye to toe. Then one from toes to mountain like a suspension bridge. Document your daydream with fact.

Well here you talk about the condition of music whatever the hell that is, and let’s say in a suspension bridge like Brooklyn Bridge there’s as much melody heating up in its cables as in the formulas John Roebling used to arrive at just a couple of cables each 12½ inches in diameter and containing, helically wrapped with galvanized wire, almost as many wires as there are feet in a mile; what if we take it the other way round and, instead of finding beauty in calculations, make measurements
of
the beautiful, what about the cyano-meter Ruskin devised to measure the blue of the sky?

Mad Ruskin.

I could no more have contained in its solid slot that Corsican
cartouche
than in the diary part I gave Jenny to type add to the after-all relevant dialogue a measure of the warm span of Melanie’s breasts unbra’d beneath a spanking white T-shirt sporting a black Napoleon horsed at Waterloo, right hand inside his coat. Yet Jenny was to say next week that my style grew on her.

Once coming out of our Welsh dairyman Mr. Jones’s I converged upon Tessa who was coming to have tea with Lorna, and right there in the middle of the road in Highgate Tessa gave me a book about the Maya and told me to read the bit about physical characteristics, also Le Plongeon’s theory that through their own colonists the Maya influenced the culture of Babylon, Syria, Asia, and Africa.

You have me. Even if you have not the book. I put it in my jacket pocket. I half read it the first night but to this day I have not returned it. I told Dudley I hadn’t finished and he said the less of that we have around the house the better.

In Jenny’s typescript of the Marvelous Country House the first week in August, the name
Gene
hit me, but the night we filmed at Stonehenge and I saw that the deserter from the Unplaced Room had turned up, I thought to ask Dagger how Mike in Corsica had known Gene. Through Cosmo, Dagger said; Mike was mainly in New York.