The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) (6 page)

Already, the mere fact that we had continued talking about this subject, after I realized that he did not know the difference between reality and fiction, was an aberration. But he was not to blame: I was, for having realized it. In a normal conversation between people like us, that kind of error or ignorance remains camouflaged in intelligent discourse — unseen, unnoticed, or, one believes, misheard. Once it is noticed, there is no going back.

Moreover, I didn’t feel like going back.
Th
e images had given me wings, and I preferred to attempt a resolution from a different angle. So I said: “Everything is fiction.”

And he, also not one to retreat: “Or: everything is reality. Which is the same thing.”

To demonstrate this apparent paradox, he returned to the world of images, though now more cautiously.

The primitive idyll could not last forever, and, as it were, a squadron of mercenaries descended from a helicopter onto the top of one of the mountains and spread out to conduct an urgent and criminal hunt. They were sent by the evil Larionov to recover the documents stolen by his lover, Varia, and of course to kill her if she had not already died in the crash. Was this not the law of the modern story, to resuscitate the dead stretches by opening a door and letting in a man with a gun? From this point on, things picked up speed, with a chase scene that led heroes and villains through cities, rivers, hotels, trains, and skyscrapers, one crucial scene that took place in the Great Synagogue of Odessa, and the dénouement on the Moldovan border . . . But prior to all that there was an episode that complicated and transformed all subsequent action, and the previous action as well: at a certain moment — simultaneous with any other moment thanks to the magic of editing — and when nobody was looking, the real Señorita Wild Savage left her impregnable hiding place to search through the wreckage of the airplane. Like a human animal (a beautiful animal: she was played by the same actress as Aria) she poked around, looking, touching . . .

But . . . just one moment! my friend exclaimed, his face indicating, with a theatrical expression, that he was shocking himself with his own words: How was it possible for a character that didn’t exist, or didn’t exist outside of popular fantasy, to play a role? Where did that leave us? Was this fiction or reality?

These were rhetorical questions, but only in part. He was addressing them to me, in a very pointed way. For the moment I did not know what to say, so he undertook, with ill-disguised indifference, the task of replying to himself.

It so happens, he said, that between fiction and reality there is an intermediary instance that articulates both: realism.
Th
at is where all the tricks of verisimilization, over which I mockingly assumed expertise, always end up. But he warned me that in this case I should not expect subtle tricks, for this was a Hollywood movie, and not even, any longer, the Hollywood of John Ford or Hitchcock but rather an industry deeply infiltrated by a young audience brought up on comic books and phantasmagorias, an audience with its taste buds savaged by extraterrestrials and superheroes. So, a break from realism was the least one could expect. After all, they had every right to take that break: they were the ones making the movie and they could do whatever they felt like. And, one had to admit that if one was not very demanding, this unexpected introduction of an element of fantasy was worthwhile, if only for the suggestive symmetries it conjured up.

Because in Señorita Wild Savage’s search through the airplane’s smashed fuselage and the dead bodies, she came across Varia’s Louis Vuitton suitcase, which had not been damaged. After several attempts, she managed to unlock it. The contents spoke eloquently of Varia’s sophistication and how high a price she had made the villain pay for her sexual favors — Prada and Chanel dresses, Cartier and Boucheron jewelry, lace lingerie, Italian shoes . . . And there I was, taking issue with a Rolex!

In spite of having spent the past century in the brush, she had not lost her instinct for fashion. It should be remembered that her story began at a beauty contest. So she picked out, tried on, and kept the smartest pieces, complementing them with the appropriate makeup — of which there was an abundance in the suitcase — and ended up looking like a gorgeous model posing for
Vogue
magazine. When shortly thereafter she crossed paths with the mountain lovers, a complete inversion had taken place: Aria, the civilized one, the executive secretary, was dressed in the crude garments of savages, and Señorita Wild Savage was, strictly speaking, the very epitome of Civilization. This inversion, and all the misunderstandings it led to with the gunmen, and what it stirred up in the heart of the handsome herdsman, was the fuel that carried the plot to a safe haven, that is, the classic “happy ending.”

At this moment in the conversation, and also in the memory of it that unfurled at night, I realized something: I had taken as a given that my friend was inventing a plot in order to prove something; but then I suddenly remembered that I had seen one of the scenes he was describing on the television screen: the herdsman and the beautiful Tatar watching emerge from the early morning mountain fog another young Tatar woman identical to the one with her arm around her primitive lover — both hirsute and dressed like cave dwellers — and the other, the double, decked out as if for a reception at the French Embassy. A somewhat surrealistic image, without extensive explanations, and for this reason apt to remain lodged in one’s memory. This was not the only reason I remembered it clearly; it was the first scene I saw after returning from the bathroom, where a command from my bladder had led me. I remembered it above all for the associations I had made. I thought about how quickly the circumstances changed in these modern action movies, that all you had to do was blink and you were lost.

That visual memory brought others in its wake, all coincident (more or less) with what I had been listening to from the lips of my friend. That said, mnemonic images have the peculiarity of always remaining in a trance of invention, and it becomes difficult to decide which are real and which fictitious. I had been so focused on my friend’s words, so deeply engaged in his story, that it could almost be said that I saw figures rather than heard words. Whereby I had no way of knowing if the other images, those that were not anchored to the memory of my sinking into my armchair after my visit to the bathroom, belonged to the movie or had been generated while I was listening to my friend. Most likely, some were superimposed on others, or the generation of visual images had benefited from the unconscious memory of what I had seen on the screen.
Th
e only way to make that distinction with precision would have been to reconstruct the plot of the movie, and here we encountered what appeared to be insurmountable difficulties. It was obvious that neither of us had paid enough attention to the movie. Of even graver import: our conversation had not dealt with it as a movie, or a cinematic story, but rather in terms of one isolated element (the Rolex), and by delving into the theory of error, we had taken apart the fabric of the narrative in order to test the certainty of our reasoning.

Here I should add that the mnemonic exercises I carried out in the darkness of my bedroom did not help me sort things out. Remembering, in general, is an opportunity to put the facts in sequence, place the causes before the effects and rationalize a chronology. I was willingly obeying these general laws, even applying them strictly, for this is the way I derived the greatest pleasure from my reconstructions. But what I was reconstructing were the conversations, not the stories these contained. This was understandable, even logical. The two sequences did not necessarily coincide — most of the time they diverged widely — and if my intention was to take on both at the same time, I might very well get myself into a phenomenal mess. If I had to sacrifice one, I would salvage that of the conversation and allow the other to disintegrate into chaos. What did I care about stories! My task had only to do with friendship, the game of responses and understandings, facial expressions and tones of voice — in a word, everything that expressed a thought that was either rival or shared.

In reality, I had never before dealt with the problem of having to choose between them. We never talked about movies or novels or any story that wasn’t related to our common cultural interests.
Th
is time I was delving into unchartered territory.

When I took the floor, after a brief pause, it was to tell him that even though I appreciated his fine labor of persuasion, I was still far from convinced, not out of obstinacy but because I realized that he had completely misunderstood the movie. Not that I had understood it much better, of that I was fully convinced; for example, I had thought that the two women played by the same actress were one, surely because I had missed the opening scenes and not paid enough attention when they had appeared together in the frame. My friend’s full recounting clarified this point, and, for my part, I also admitted that I had been distracted.

But even so, his error was the graver one because it had taken as the main plot of the movie what in reality was a side story, which was stretched out, it seemed, and woven into the main plot all the way through. I had focused on the main one to the extent that a mind trained in Philosophy could (or wished to) focus on an entertaining pastime that only marginally served as evening relaxation. However lightweight, the subject interested me, if only for the skill with which the melodramatic absurdity had been verisimilarized. In its formal aspect, I mean. But this had to in some way coincide with the content, and here would fit the statement, “There are no insignificant subjects.”
Th
ese conspiracies for world domination said a lot about the spirit of the times and, even if they were fundamentally childish, they struck a chord in me.

The romantic storyline, though skillfully inserted, was secondary — and was perhaps insisted upon by the marketing gurus who advised the studio — to the dominant storyline of the “action and adventure thriller.” Both shared, however, the theme of the confrontation between civilization and those who are marginalized, or between the present and the past, or, if one wished to put it in more concrete turns, the suicidal cannibalism of power and the idyllic equilibrium of Nature.

With Señorita Wild Savage or without Señorita Wild Savage (because that part was accessorial), the goatherd was the visible and intelligible embodiment of innocent life that was nurtured by life itself and knew nothing of ambition or progress. But there were no more Edens in the world, and the stratagems of greed and domination reached even his remote corner. He was drawn into the conflict, and he rose to the circumstances; his relative advantage was that he was “playing a home game,” but the rules of “fair play” remained in effect, as they did in every movie made for a mass audience.

A CIA commando unit climbed the mountain to search for the famous toxic algae, whose importance for maintaining ecological balance and even for saving life on the planet had been shown to be essential.
Th
ey were a large group, approximately twenty or thirty people, men and women, all carrying highly complex technical equipment. Leading the group was a veteran agent named Bradley. (The actor who played him, I told my friend in a parenthesis because I didn’t think he would have noticed, was the director of the movie. He nodded. He knew.)
Th
is man — a true gentleman — found the goatherd’s help to be highly fortuitous, for the search and communication equipment they brought with them was no match for his experience and knowledge of the mountainous terrain and its most deeply buried secrets. The two men, so different from one another, established a relationship of manly affection and trust that would be put to the test during the adventure.

The CIA had discovered that a group of Ukrainian terrorists were experimenting with the mutant algae for unknown reasons, and they sent their task force to gather research samples and evaluate the potential threat. It was an undercover operation, carried out with maximum secrecy, though it would not have been at all difficult to disguise it as a scientific expedition or even as a trip for adventure travelers.
Th
e reason for these precautions would slowly be revealed as the corresponding connections and ramifications came to light.

The goatherd was the first to have any inkling that something strange was going on: one afternoon, when he was gathering his goats to return to his hut, he found that one was missing. He looked for it hurriedly, for night was falling, conveniently slowly at those altitudes, but even so, his time was limited. He finally found it — dead. He was mystified because his animals were the epitome of health. But the plot thickened when he went to pick it up to take it with him, ostensibly to salvage its valuable wool, and maybe, if it hadn’t died from a contagious disease, to roast and eat it. He bent over, placed his hands under the dead body, tensed his muscles before lifting, and pulled . . . His surprise was made manifest when he stumbled and fell backward. Instead of the hundred-odd pounds he had been expecting to lift, the dead goat weighed five or six, if not less. It seemed to weigh nothing, and when he budged it with so much excess effort, it shot into the air and fell on top of the goatherd, who had landed on his back. As it traced an arc through the air, it rippled in the wind, and suddenly it looked like a goat made out of a piece of fuzzy fabric, then suddenly like a shapeless piece of dough. When it landed (gently, like an autumn leaf) on the goatherd’s face and chest, it recovered its goatish shape. What had happened?
Th
e first explanation was that it was the hide emptied of contents, but when the goatherd, having recovered from his shock, looked more closely, he saw that this was not the case. It was whole. He folded it and placed it under his arm and carried it to his hut, where that night, by candlelight, he slit it open with a knife and saw that all its organs were in their proper places but the flesh had taken on the consistency of tissue paper.