Mr. Stone put a single hand to his cheek and I saw his eyes light up with a suggestive gleam as he raised them towards the ceiling.
“And will it be quite faithful to the novel?” Mrs. Stone went on, “or will it only use the parts that are more, more sentimental?”
“Do you mean more sexual?” I answered: speaking from on high confers daring and a sense of impunity, as despots, bankers, businessmen, judges and tyrants have always known. The Stones had read the novel, then, someone else’s copy, perhaps even Roger Dobson’s. “No, I hope not, I don’t think so, but I doubt they’ll be very faithful, and of course parts of the book will be left out completely. As you know, the cinema is very rich in some ways, very limited in others.”
Mr. Stone broke in then, in a tone both eager and apologetic. “Gillian was asking, Mr. Márias”—both of them pronounced my surname wrong, making it rhyme with “arias”—“because if they happen to need actors to play the booksellers in the novel, you know, that couple, the Alabasters, well, we’d be able to do it with great pleasure, I think we’d be right for the part, don’t you agree?” He paused for a moment, he was speaking timidly yet vehemently, as if it truly mattered a great deal to him. “Did you know? In my younger days I had considerable experience on the stage, and recently I’ve gone back to it, I played a small part in an independent dramatic production, that’s what they call them, at the last Edinburgh Festival, my son was involved in putting it on and asked me to lend a hand. Great fun. We are also members of the OSCA”—“the O.S.C.A.,” he said each letter separately—“and we’ve appeared in a few films that were shot here, The Madness of King George—ahem — was the most recent. Roger Dobson and Rupert Cook are also members. Acting is marvelous. So, if they consult you on the casting, don’t forget us, we’d be delighted to participate. Though we’ve already written to the Spanish producer, something like Elijah … Er, well, I’m incapable of pronouncing it, something with Q and the word ‘reject’ in it, isn’t that right, love?”—he asked his wife, who nodded—“which certainly isn’t very promising, for our hope that they won’t reject us, I mean, by offering us the parts that are so perfect for us. But we’ve had no answer at all, and we even wrote on stationery with the OSCA logo, if I remember aright. Is it normal in Spain not to answer letters?”
That acronym again. “The OSCA?”
“The Oxford Society of Crowd Artistes,” explained Mrs. Stone; in English, the word “artiste,” à la française, has a more modest and jocose ring to it than “artist,” and is reserved for singers, cooks, dancers, fashion designers, actors and milliners. Mrs. Stone handed a sheet of the stationery with the logo on it up to me, I came down a rung to take it. “The Oxford Society of Crowd Artistes (OSCA),” it said, “is an Oxford-based cooperative of extras for film and television with over one hundred members whose experience covers period dramas, thrillers, the Inspector Morse series and numerous important films, working both on location and in the studio.” I kept that piece of paper; in England there are all kinds of societies and organizations like this one.
“You wrote to the Querejetas? How did you know their address?”
“Oh, that was easy, we found them in the annual world guide to movie production companies. Mr. Dobson gave us the name. Do you think there’s any chance? Do you think they’ll answer us? Or that they’ll keep us in mind for the Alabasters?”
I went back up to the top rung and looked at the volume which I already had at home but was now going to buy for Manolo R. R., and a very instructive and amusing volume it is, because you don’t have to deal with the pirates, only read about them. There was expectation and agitation in Ralph Stone’s eyes, and a little sadness in Gillian Stone’s, she was waiting with her hands crossed in her lap.
“I don’t know”; I was expressing pessimism rather than doubt. “I’m afraid they may not be very attentive to the wishes and offers of people they don’t know.” I was going to say “people of no influence” but fortunately stopped myself.
It was hard to believe. The Stones not only assumed themselves to be the model of the Alabasters, but wanted to incarnate them, lend them their presence and their physiques if the fictional characters emerged from the book and acquired corporeality and physiognomies in a film; a strange round trip it would have been had their belief and their appropriation or identification been correct, which it was not. And if such an incarnation were to occur, then the fictional Alabasters would become, in turn, a model for the real Stones, who would study and imitate them, though only while they played the Alabasters before a camera, or who knows if the thing might not have gone even farther. Pity that this whole dimension or zone of the novel, like so many others, and, in fact, in the end, all of them, held, from the start, no interest whatsoever for either Elijah or his daughter; I still don’t know what they saw in Todas las almas to pursue it so ardently at first and then run from it like the devil as soon as they thought it was theirs alone.
It struck me that Mrs. Stone was growing sad, as mothers grow sad when their children are rejected or fail at something, they usually love them all the more for it, in vain; sorrow engenders love, I don’t know why it bothers so many people to inspire it. Perhaps the marriage — and maybe it was early and iron-clad — had cut short a vocation for acting that Ralph, the husband, was now trying to return to before the onset of old age or its foreshadowings, and she must have been the most enthusiastic proponent of any project related to this difficult, late, chimerical compensation, perhaps she felt she owed it to him; many women easily feel themselves to be indebted, few men. It must have been she who wrote and sent the letter to the Querejetas, the idea must have been hers. That letter undoubtedly went straight into the waste-basket, Crowd Artistes logo and all; the filmmakers weren’t even receptive to the wishes of their avowed source of inspiration, whom, though he is a person of no influence, they did know, or one of them at least wanted to know. I refer to the person who invented the story and the atmosphere and the characters.
At that moment, Mercedes López-Ballesteros arrived with her customary punctuality, “Freud’s granddaughter,” it was already time for lunch. I’d hardly had a chance to look around the shop at all, my only booty, The General History of the Pyrates, was scant in comparison to old times, and not even for my own library. Mercedes was in a cheery and very decisive mood; she was carrying an umbrella because she had no confidence in the British sun and she plunged it joyously into the umbrella stand; we all heard it puncturing the packet deposited there — the nauseating sound of many soft grapes being squashed. I’d eaten only one, just after I bought them. Fortunately the Stones took a sportsmanlike view of the whole thing, they didn’t make faces or scold. No book had been stained.
We were about to leave, with Rodríguez Rivero’s Defoe wrapped in rough paper, when they asked me to sign a copy of All Souls for Rupert Cook, their fellow crowd artiste who had loaned it to them quite a while before so they could read it. “That’s how we’ll make up for the delay, we’ll return it to him with value added,” Mrs. Stone said generously after taking it out of her drawer. They occasionally sold books that were signed or inscribed by their authors, the greatest and most costly treasures of any antiquarian book dealer, but an inscription of mine can’t be worth much, I’m still contemporary, not even dead yet. They also, with some hesitation, gave me a photocopy.