The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) (2 page)

With a gesture of impatience, my friend indicated that he already knew all that and suggested I not try to change the subject.
Th
at last suggestion came bundled with the previous indication, thanks to the polysemy of gestures, which continued to amaze me while I was remembering them in bed. Because my memories, as I think I have said, are visual as well as auditory. Small appended meanings flourish in the unruffled time of my mind, enriching even further what was already quite rich. As for his impatience, I wasn’t worried about that, not in either time frame, for it was not a feeling of being “against” but rather “in favor” of something: I was also constantly expressing the same thing — the eagerness to rid ourselves, as soon as possible, of the static in our communication in order to be able to communicate more fully and take fuller advantage of each other’s company. It was more a recognition of the value of one’s interlocutor than irritation.

In my memory, that moment was marked by a triumphal blast of imaginary trumpets that announced my friend’s entrance into the conversation, for a quick review revealed that until then he had participated with nothing more than a few murmurs, raisings of eyebrows,
whats
,
hows
,
whiches
, and not much more. Now he was ready to talk, and the conversation was set in motion along with the engine of memory.

What he said sounded strange to me. At first, it even greatly perturbed me. During my nocturnal reconstruction, when the weight of that perturbation had lifted, his words were both light and dark. At this third instance, of writing it down, I will try to maintain a balance between the light and the darkness, and my surest guide will be the exact sequence of our exchanges.

All fine and good: he told me that he still did not see the reason for my original remark. He found nothing erroneous about the presence of my famous Rolex on the wrist of the protagonist. As to its price and its condition as a status symbol, he was perfectly aware. Perhaps I didn’t know who the actor was. He didn’t give me a chance to say that I did know who he was: nothing human is alien to me. Leaning slightly over the table and lowering his voice theatrically, he assured me that this actor had more than enough money to buy himself a Rolex, as well as six more, one for each day of the week, and, if push came to shove, the entire Swiss company that produced them.

And he wasn’t exaggerating, he added. I myself had made reference to the complexity of making a movie, a complexity that indicates the magnitude of the enterprise, on which millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars were commonly spent. Now, given the system on which Hollywood bases its audience appeal — the so-called star system — the actors occupy a place of central importance. Movies are marketed using the names of these shining figures that perform in them, and the audience pays its entrance fee to see their extremely well-known faces. That’s why they are paid so highly, for their names rather than for the actual work they do — which in the end isn’t any different than that of the lowliest electrician, who earns a pittance. This actor in particular was one of those privileged few. He had so much money that he could not possibly live long enough to count it all. True, he acknowledged, taxes take the lion’s share, but if one pays them on time, they are never more than a percentage of one’s earnings, and no wealthy person has ever become poor from paying them.

Anyway: the several-thousand-dollar watch meant nothing more to him than a cup of coffee meant to us. With this, verisimilitude had been rescued.

Even before I began to think of a reply, and while I was listening to him speak, a vague sensation came over me, the precursor to a much more vigorous one soon to come … a sensation of strangeness — tinged with a certain amount of disappointment and a remote bit of despair — upon hearing my friend speak so knowledgeably about the world of show business, the money movie stars make, such frivolous nonsense so far beneath the sphere of our interests. It was a nuanced sensation, or one with echoes, because it revealed that I possess that same knowledge. But maybe the modern world is so infused with this information, which is so much a part of even the air we breathe, that it is impossible not to know it.

But when the time came for me to respond, I had to pause. Without realizing it, we had started down a road so subtle that it would carry us from the lowest lows to the highest highs, without many stopovers.
Th
e only thing that was obvious, clear as a bell, fit into one very short and very simple sentence: “The actor is not the character.” But my intuition clamorously informed me that this generalization was not enough. We were talking about a specific, concrete case, and generalizing would only create a short circuit. I knew I should go back to the beginning, to the Rolex, the goatherd, the mountains, lest I risk tracing a vicious circle of reasoning that would generate still other circles and provide no way out that would allow our conversation to move forward.

Even with these precautions in mind, I had no choice but to begin with a generalization, for otherwise not even I would have understood myself; but I took care to say it in a tone of voice that made clear that I was using it only as a point of departure. The actor, I said, was not the character.

What are you talking about?!

Well, yes . . . In a way, he was.
Th
e actor continued being the actor while he was playing the character; one could even say that he was more himself than ever, for he was practicing his profession and justifying his existence beyond the good life he led in Beverly Hills, with his divorces and adulteries and consumption of drugs. But a fundamental difference persisted, or better said, emerged.
Th
ough fundamental, it was impalpable, perhaps taken for granted with excessive levity. It was “impalpable” (a metaphor I apologized for using and that I would try to improve upon) because it could be perceived only in the stories and not in the beings that enact them — in the movement of the story itself, not in any one of its moments. Perhaps it should be understood in the same way as the Uncertainty Principle, even if on a different level than that of subatomic particles.

An approving nod from my friend greeted my utterance of the words “different level,” which he would repeat shortly. I continued:

A successful Hollywood heartthrob, I said, had enough money to buy himself an expensive Swiss watch, just as a woman in the second half of the twentieth century wore dresses with zippers.
Th
ose were their stories, or lack of stories.
Th
e imperative that prevented a primitive goatherd in the remote mountains of Ukraine from wearing a Rolex was almost as powerful as that which prevented an Egyptian queen of the first century from wearing a dress with a zipper. So, a Hollywood heartthrob and a Ukrainian goatherd on the one hand, and a modern woman and the Queen of the Nile on the other: were they the same person? Apparently, they could not be, at least not on the same level. “Level” of course is also a metaphor, and also in this instance I intended to distance myself from it, and to do so right away, because the other level was that of fiction, which was not a metaphor but rather, in a way, the real — perfectly real — lifeblood of all metaphors. Fiction created a second and simultaneous world . . .

Here I interrupted myself twice over. I did so in the conversation, because I could see that I was getting nowhere, and I did so when I was remembering the scene of the conversation, because I saw that I was reaching my goal too quickly. The impetus to speak and to remember what was spoken, though the same, were charged with distinct and incompatible energies.

We had the actor, the beautiful and famous blond in his mansion in Southern California, with his numerous bank accounts, his expensive watches, his swimming pool, his Ferrari, his top-model girlfriends. His agent called him and told him that a big studio was offering him the starring role in a new movie by a prestigious director, and that they had agreed without a murmur to his multi-million dollar fee. There was no reason to say no a priori. What was it about? What would be his role? It was an adventure movie that took place in the mountainous desert region of Ukraine, and its plot dealt with aspects of the sudden advent of capitalism in the republics of the former Soviet Union. He would play the role of a primitive goatherd, far removed from modern civilization, a kind of noble savage, who suddenly sees himself involved in a sinister plot . . . Anyway, something more or less predictable, with just enough originality to justify making the movie, but not too much to scare off the audience. And it behooved him to take the role because it would give him opportunities to shine, as well as a temporary reprieve from the string of urban, yuppie, fashion-
police roles that he’d been playing for the last few years. In short: a renewal of his image, replete with the shaggy beard he would let grow, long hair, troglodyte garb; and his agent didn’t need to tell him, because he knew it all too well, that he would look fabulous in all of it, that his shaggy beard would be groomed by a hairdresser to the stars, and his rawhide garments would be fashioned by the best designer available.

The actor was able to ascertain the potential for all these benefits a few days later when he read the screenplay they sent him. He read it in the enormous living room of his house, reclining in an armchair, with a large Portuguese water dog sleeping on the rug at his feet, in that light sleep animals enjoy: each time a page turned, there was just enough noise to make the ears of his loyal Bob twitch. I could picture the scene perfectly when I was describing it to my friend, and much better when I relived the conversation at night — so much better, that I no longer heard the words: I just saw what they evoked.

That screenplay, I continued, was “fictional,” which meant that it told a story that had never taken place. It hadn’t taken place in reality, the proof of which was that at the moment it was being written, it could still have turned out to be something else: the story of a failed marriage, a robbery, an invasion
of extraterrestrials, the life of the pope, or the inventor of the microwave oven. But, no: out of the almost infinite combinations of possible situations, the one that had come into being was that of a goatherd . . . And we already knew the rest. This was the plot of the movie that was made. The production team traveled to Ukraine to find the right locations, and when everything was just about ready to be filmed, there went our heartthrob — in the meantime he had had time to let his hair and beard grow and to conscientiously study his role.

It’s not that they couldn’t have filmed it in a studio in Los Angeles. Everything can be reproduced on a set with the right staging and a few editing tricks. If they wanted the real mountains, all they had to do was send a cameraman there and then insert those takes where they belonged. But the decision to film on location was the result of the producers’ well-reasoned policy, which took into account several concurrent factors, the first being financial, for the cost of living in Ukraine was exponentially less than in the United States, and the salaries of the people they’d hire in situ would allow them to significantly reduce their budget; moreover, the Ukrainian authorities showed interest in the project, which fit in with their own policy of attracting strategic investments; with the Ministry of Culture’s cooperation, they would be allowed to shoot interior spaces normally off limits to the public, thereby exhibiting to the world the country’s unknown artistic and architectural riches; finally, there was the famous quality of light in the mountains, which would give the film its own, unique atmosphere, which could not be reproduced by artificial means.

In any case, there went the actor. Needless to say, he did not go alone; he took his secretary, bodyguards, assistants, a coach, and a personal trainer. Nor did he pack his own bags, also needless to say, for that’s what he paid his servants to do, but he did choose certain objects or items of clothing that he wanted to take with him. One of those objects was the watch. He opened his dresser drawer where he kept watches and jewelry, quickly thought out what he would need and what would be convenient to have (this was not the first time he had traveled to film in exotic locations), and he chose his solid and reliable gold Rolex Daytona. This reliable timepiece served various purposes. In the first place, a watch — which he had little use for in the course of his pampered life — was indispensable during those frenetic days of shooting out in nature, as he well knew from experience: risings at dawn, constant moves from place to place, last-minute changes of plans, urgent meetings. Moreover and by the same token, the watch for such circumstances should be water and shock resistant, for he didn’t know what ordeals it would have to endure. At the same time, he wanted it to be elegant, an expression of his stature as a sex symbol and a man of success, for the shooting of the film would entail more than just acting: there would be parties, outings, and they had even planned ahead for public relations events with the Ukrainian authorities, who — he could bet on it — would want to have their pictures taken with him.

I was putting a lot of my own into all this, but it is natural to put into any story, along with a lot of what one has seen and heard, assumptions of cause and effect, without which there are too many loose ends. I was a little ashamed to expose how much I knew about the life and work of movie stars, for it might lead one to think that I was especially interested in the subject or that I wasted my time reading “special interest” magazines. But, as I already said, knowledge of these popular subjects is in the air, and an effort must be made to not acquire it rather than to acquire it. And, as I also already said, nothing human is alien to me. Knowing does not occupy much room: information about actors or singers does not take space away from Plato or Nietzsche. I’ve always distrusted those intellectuals who have never heard of the Rolling Stones. My friend and I saw eye to eye on this; just a few minutes earlier, he had talked knowledgeably about the “star system,” by way of example.