The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) (3 page)

BOOK: The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook)
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Our actor did not travel directly there. He stopped off in Paris, where he met with his co-star and the producers, and together they gave a press conference to announce the project. This event took place in the ballroom of a large hotel in the French capital; he was besieged by flashes from photographers, eager to publicize his change of “look” (hair and beard): he was beginning to turn into the primitive herdsman of the movie, even though he was still himself. And he was so much himself that he wound up getting annoyed at the journalists’ insistence on asking about his recent divorce and the beautiful actress who had precipitated it. Nor was he pleased with their political questions about the collaboration implied by his participation in this movie with the governments of the countries in the ex-Soviet Bloc, governments he had criticized during his period of environmental activism.

The order of my reasoning was implacable. One by one I was introducing all the elements for a proof of reality, which I could then use when I contrasted it with fiction. While I was reconstructing the conversation (and there, also, I was implacable in not skipping a single word, and I might have even added a few), I realized that the “actor” was already the “character” in a certain sense: not the character that he would soon embody during the shooting of the movie, but the character of the story that I, marginally and for the rhetorical imperatives of the demonstration, was recounting. And the more details I added in order to round out the figure of the “actor,” the more of a “character” he became. This was inevitable, for fiction, in order to express itself, adopts a narrative structure that is the same as the one used by reality to make itself intelligible. Inevitable or not, however, I had to admit that it weakened my argument. It would have benefited, for instance, from a stronger contrast, from the positing of a reality that my friend and I would recognize as more real — for example, our own reality or something equivalent.
Th
e reality of a Hollywood star was colored by unreality and not easy to take seriously.

Even so, I believed I was on the right track, and I continued: we were already in the Desert Mountains, and here all we needed to do was take a quick look at the process of making the movie: the long days of filming when the lighting was good, the changes of location for scenes that took place in villages or the city, the endless repetitions demanded by the director who was a perfectionist, the inevitable interruptions due to rain or problems with the team or the local extras not keeping to the schedule. We might also pass over the no less important editing process carried out in studios back in Los Angeles. We then came to what we had watched the night before on our television sets: the story of a goatherd who was a victim of circumstance. That character didn’t exist and never had. The identification between him and the actor who had given him body and voice was momentary and functional. Once the movie was made, the actor could forget about him forever.
Th
e goatherd (the “character”) was a fantasy created for artistic and commercial purposes — much more the second than the first in this case — a fantasy made of images and words, whose precarious reality was at the mercy of the movie lovers’ voluntary suspension of disbelief. A fundamental difference resided in the fact that the life of the actor was biological, it had a long “before” — as seen from his screen career, his divorce, his dog Bob — and would have an “after” that would last as long as Destiny provided; whereas the goatherd would continue to repeat that illusory fragment of nonbiological life, made of light and electronic impulses. They had coincided only in representation.

But, with all the precariousness of his illusory existence, the goatherd also had to have a backstory, and though fictitious, that story had to be somehow “more,” that is, it had to be more intelligible than real stories, which unfold in a chaos of happenstance and twists and turns. To do this, it had to emphasize one aspect that real stories also contain: verisimilitude.
Th
is is a conventional term that includes everything mankind does in its perennial war against the absurd. In reality, there are things in any given context that cannot happen. I used as an example our “reality witness,” the life of the blond movie star: we would never see him standing at the door of a church in Beverly Hills asking for spare change, would we?

My friend raised his eyebrows and looked slightly skeptical, which I had been expecting.

Yes, we might see him there, if it were a joke or because he had lost a bet, or even as the result of a rapid decline due to drug and alcohol abuse. Stranger things have happened. But it was precisely the emphasis on the verisimilar I had mentioned earlier that made it impossible in fiction. A goatherd who had always lived in the mountains, who had never stepped foot in a city, who ate whatever the earth provided, that nonexistent goatherd, created by the imagination, his life circumscribed to an hour and a half of pulses of light and color, had to maintain complete factual coherence in order to remain plausible. Above all, he should not be confounded with the actor who was playing him. For example, as he was gathering his flock before descending the mountain in the evening, he couldn’t suddenly burst out with a sentence like: “Come on, hurry up, I’m having dinner with Madonna tonight.” Even if it were true that the actor was having dinner with Madonna that night, that sentence would be out of place in the character’s mouth. Indeed, out of place in exactly the same way as the presence of a Rolex on his wrist was out of place.

But, if it was impossible, how did it come about? Here, I said, we required the intervention of the imperfection that accompanies every human endeavor. It was a mistake, the result of a momentary distraction, a small error that escaped the vigilance of all involved, who were legion. To a certain extent it was understandable, given the complexity of a movie production of that size.
Th
e night scene shot on the mountainside with a dead goat; the crew measuring the light levels, the angles; making sure the cameras were functioning; the various scenes being filmed discontinuously . . .
Th
e actor, who’d completely forgotten about his watch, was focused on the action, on showing his own best angle . . . Anyway, that’s what had happened, there was nothing more to say about it.

To my surprise, my friend remained unconvinced. Moreover, he emphatically informed me — with that momentum typical of someone who has been waiting for the other person to finish talking in order to express their own opposing opinion — that my interpretation of the movie was completely wrong.

I answered simply that I had not offered an interpretation of the whole movie, which I had watched in fits and starts and without paying much attention. I was merely pointing out a single error.

He had not watched more of it or with more attention than I had, he said, the proof of which was that he hadn’t even seen the famous night scene with the dead goat. Hence, he also would not risk an interpretation, but he did feel he was in a position to refute me.

I had the irrepressible suspicion that he was going to come out with something very off the wall; surprise gave way to deep fear. One’s social life is full of such fears, and each person reacts to them according to his character. My character is rather shy, defensive, with an excess of politeness that renders me almost pusillanimous. I am one of those people who places delicacy above all other considerations and who discovers, time and time again, that cut-and-dry cruelty at the right moments can save many other moments of unpleasantness, but I never learn. I am also one of those people who prefers to live an entire life with a lie than live one uncomfortable moment of truth.

What I feared in this case (and by “this case” I meant the occasion in the café as well as its expansion in my memory when I relived the scene in the darkness of my bedroom in the middle of the night) was that my friend would utter a couple of sentences, a couple of words — he didn’t need many — that would show me that he was a complete and utterly hopeless idiot. Because the point of our little disagreement was so obvious as to be beyond any discussion. “
Th
e actor is not the character.” Who could deny that? Only someone with the mental level of a four-year-old child — and even a child that age would not be difficult to convince. In fact, it was not a matter of convincing him but merely giving him time to see it; only a momentary mental lapse, distraction, or partial deafness while listening to the proposition could leave room for doubt.

The fault was mine. I had asked for it by launching into a long harangue full of subtleties and philosophical considerations instead of limiting myself to the basics and letting him see it. I had done this out of intellectual vanity — the pleasure of hearing myself talk; inevitably it ended up complicating what was simple, muddling what was clear. If now it was shown — as seemed imminent — that he had not seen the obvious, I would be left dangling over an abyss, weighed down by all my verbiage.

Deep down it didn’t much matter if my explanation had been long or short, except that by making it long, I had created greater expectations and exposed myself to more serious disappointment: if he did not understand the difference between the actor and the character in a movie, he was an imbecile. And if he was an imbecile, I had no choice but to lose all intellectual respect for him and, which was worse, it meant that our conversations were wiped out as far as everything about them that was good and gratifying for me. Not only would I lose them in the future — for I would necessarily lose all desire to bring up interesting subjects or share intelligent reflections with a fool of that caliber — but I would retrospectively lose the conversations that we’d held throughout the years and that constituted such a central part of my life. This revelation detracted from the past — its richness became fictitious — and created a gaping hole that would be difficult to fill. How to fill a hole in the past from the present? My conversations themselves were somewhat retrospective.
Th
e nocturnal reconstructions I put them through — no less important a part of the pleasure they gave me — displaced them in time even while they were occurring; the second time contaminated the first and thereby a circle was drawn. I had been living in that magic circle, protected by its circumference, and its dissolution filled me with dread.

In order to appreciate the magnitude of my disappointment, I should explain just how important conversations are for me. At this stage of my life, they have become the single most important thing. I have allowed them to occupy this privileged position, and have cultivated them as a raison d’être, almost like my life work. They constitute my only worthwhile occupation, and I have devoted myself to enhancing their value, treasuring them through their reconstruction and miniaturization on my secret nocturnal altar. Hence, if I lose the day, I also lose the night. In fact, my nights even more than my days would be emptied out, for it is always possible to find other distractions during the day; nights are more demanding; their entire sustenance is intelligence and the complicity of intelligence, which becomes complicity with myself through my system of duplication. To lose that would be to lose myself, to remain alone in my aimless insomnia.

It’s true, he was not my only friend nor my only conversational partner. He was one among many — I did not value him above the others. But it would be a loss that would go beyond the unit he represented. In my relationships with my friends, I have noticed — and I think this must be a universal phenomenon — that each one is regulated by a distinct line of interests, a distinct tone of friendship, even a different language. Friends are not interchangeable, even when the degree of friendship is the same and the level of culture and social standing is equivalent. There are unspoken understandings and agreements and codes that are built up over time and that make each one irreplaceable. But the loss, as I said, would go beyond what was unique. The conversations from which I derive so much pleasure form a system, and the disappearance of that “vein” of topics or shared opinions with this friend would create an imbalance, and this in turn would lead to the collapse of the entire network.

Nevertheless, beneath these fears, a doubt remained, the same one that had led to my initial surprise: Was this possible? Wasn’t it a bit excessive? The contrast between my educated and civilized friend and the ignorance of a person thus impaired was almost supernatural. Shouldn’t he be above such suspicions? Had he not given me sufficient proof, throughout the years, of his intelligence and perceptiveness? I had lost count of the number of times we had discussed, as equals, philosophers and artists and social and historical phenomena. My trust in his responses never flagged. And I was not under some kind of illusion, of this I could be certain, for I had submitted each conversation to the nocturnal test of memory, and I had scrutinized every last crease. During these reconstructions, I even scrutinized what had not been said. This discovery, if that is what it was, would be like suddenly discovering, after years of a relationship, that a friend had only one arm, or not even, because a one-armed man can hide his handicap with a prosthetic arm; to refine the simile, it would be more like a man discovering, while celebrating his silver wedding anniversary, that his wife was Chinese. Was that possible? Unfortunately, I had to respond in the affirmative. It was possible. In this case, evidence didn’t help; the strength of the unexpected destroyed it.

Nor did it help me to consider this as one of those blanks we all have in our education and that are sometimes as scandalous and as shocking as the one I was confronting at this moment. It had happened to me before, that I believed I knew something without knowing it because as a child I had adopted an erroneous idea about it, which worked well enough to never have felt the need to revise it or put it to the test. Due to extremely long concatenations of happenstance, one might never come across certain subjects, even when in possession of an alert mind and universal curiosity. This is possible because there are so many. Sometimes it is a question of pure laziness. For example, I know that there is an explanation for the fact that stagecoach wheels in Westerns appear to be turning backwards when the vehicle is moving quickly forward; I have even seen it written up and illustrated with diagrams, but I never bothered finding out about it in more detail. To have one of these gaps of comprehension or information is the most common thing in the world; however, this didn’t do me any good here, because the difference between fiction and reality was not an isolated issue that could reside in a blind spot; it was instead an oil spill, which spread over everything, even over what surrounded everything.

BOOK: The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook)
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