Still lying in bed, the screenwriter realizes he’s commenced the same ritual as always: remaining in bed a long time, staring up at the ceiling, and listening to the sounds from the street below. He slept very little, and he suspects the girl is still floating around somewhere in his unconscious. He only vaguely recollects what he’s written. He gets out of bed to freshen up, has a look at himself in the bathroom mirror, takes a deep breath, and makes his way down to the canteen. The elevator takes its time arriving. He gets the feeling he may be better off taking the stairs. He’d do it if it wasn’t for his damned limp. He grips his cane impatiently and knocks it against the floor a couple of times, the strokes, muted by the carpet, rendering the act meaningless. He doesn’t like the muffled thud, he says to himself, because it probably unleashed a cloud of dust mites that are now colonizing his socks and the hem of his pants. He passes some time in the lobby reading the newspaper. He reads something about a country too far away for him to care about, peruses the personal ads, and encounters an article about the queen of porn that says she’s buried in one of the local cemeteries. He remembers there are many cinematic luminaries buried there: actors, actresses, directors, and of course people from other professions who neither matter nor warrant a visit. He went there once with a friend. He remembers her clearly: a woman with whom he was romantically involved some forty years before, and with whom he corresponded for quite some time. He reckons it’s been a decade since he last heard from her. He doesn’t recall the reason they went to the cemetery; he doesn’t recall when they started writing to each other, or why their correspondence came to an end. There’s a notice about the Little Sinfonietta’s concert in the events section. The screenwriter hurriedly finishes his breakfast and heads out. A cemetery’s quite a cinematic location. Maybe he’ll be able to set some of his scenes there. On the way, he considers some of the possibilities for the location, but he struggles to focus, and his ideas seem to dissipate before assuming any definite shape. Near the entrance, a map points to the sites of celebrity graves. He makes a rough sketch of it in his notebook, marking the ones he plans to visit. The tomb of the inventor of the cinematic spectacle is nearby: although he doesn’t consider him the most alluring figure, the screenwriter decides to pay him a visit nonetheless. He struggles up the hill with his limp, and then has a hard time finding the grave among so many anonymous ones in a sort of narrow embankment. The history of film is short, he thinks. The inventor of the cinematic spectacle died fifty-six years earlier, and his tomb is in a terrible state, not unlike all the others around it, facing the wall that separates the cemetery grounds from the street and the apartments on the other side. It seems sad and pitiful. He then wonders about people like himself, the kind who won’t go down in history, who’ll rest in unvisited tombs. He strikes his cane forcefully against the ground while making his way back to the main footpath. He’s lost the strength that got him here, replaced it with sadness, and although he continues walking, he does so without a destination in mind, and soon begins to flag. Some small pebbles and rocks have been placed haphazardly, or so it seems, atop some of the gravestones. There are people leaving postcards or small scraps of paper with messages for the dead. A few are ambling casually among the graves, some may be family members, others tourists, and there’s no telling about the rest. A woman reads while sitting on the tomb of a great writer. The screenwriter supposes it’s one of that writer’s great works, although he’s too shy to approach her and corroborate his suspicion. He’s tired from hobbling along under the hot sun, so he sits down in the shade beside a marble headstone and wipes his forehead with a handkerchief. This part of the cemetery is more modern. He reads on the tombstones the names and dates of some of the deceased. He could use them to conceive some fascinating stories: a young man dead at twenty-five, and then only a year later, the death, at forty-eight, of what appears to be his mother. It really makes you think.
After writing in the afternoon, the screenwriter rested a couple of hours. Then he took a shower, and awaited her arrival. He’s had too much to drink, and his throat is raw from all the smoking. He’s still stoned, and he can’t help but keep staring out the window on the empty street below. It’s almost dawn, and he suspects the girl is going to stand him up. He raises his eyes to look for his neighbor in the building across the street. It might be too late for her, or perhaps too early. Either way, she’s probably asleep. Her window is black, empty. Maybe black actually signifies the opposite of empty. No matter. He scans the front of the building, then the shop windows on the lower floors: the real-estate agency on the corner, the bakery, the shop selling women’s lingerie, and the shoe and handbag store that’s closed for the August vacation. It doesn’t matter, the girl isn’t coming. The screenwriter assumes her mother returned from her trip. She wouldn’t have missed the concert for anything in the world, especially after the poor performance the girl gave in her native city. Then she calls him. The concert went perfectly, she tells him on the phone, as if she were a journalist submitting a last-minute review. Before the performance, she paid tribute to the famous composer of dodecaphonic music, describing him as a teacher, an arranger of operettas, and a conductor of cabaret orchestras. His actual compositions took a backseat, and she gave them brief mention in her peroration, alluding mostly to his theory of harmony and his role as inventor of the twelve-tone method of composition. The girl has a curious fondness for odd composers, the screenwriter thinks to himself, forgetting momentarily that he’s the one responsible for her predilections. It seems she only cares about extremes, and the possibility of encroaching on them, surpassing them, of transgressing the norm. Immediately following her introduction, she began the concert with the famous composer’s 5 Pieces for piano, a difficult work, both for the performer to execute and the auditor to appreciate, although the girl knew they’d applaud anyway, for the audience came mainly to catch sight of a celebrity, not to admire her pianissimo or to listen to her rendition of what most of them would’ve thought a baffling composition. The screenwriter listens in silence, transcribing her words as fast as he can. The scene will be hazy, subjective, quite involved, and he wants to be sure it accurately reflects the reality. He makes use of the program notes for ideas on how it might be filmed. Simple ideas, really, some shots of the girl seated at the piano, alone or with the orchestra, and then some others of her transformed into a clown. Vocals aren’t her strong point, but she has the desired effect when playing the role of the cosmic clown. All she needs is a red nose, the kind that’s held in place with a rubber band, a red speckle to contrast with her black and white tuxedo, and a nasal voice that sounds like a transmission from another galaxy, a voice reciting verses about a clown who wanders in the moonlight with a shiv in his hand. At this moment, the screenwriter listens to the very same piece from a CD, ensconced in his hotel room, sitting at his desk scribbling notes for scenes. The images he records are seen first by the girl, refracted first through the lenses of her eyes. Before leaving the presbytery, which was transformed for the Little Sinfonietta into a concert venue, the young orchestra conductor, the brilliant composer, and the girl wave to the audience with a practiced air of humility. The girl then removes the red nose from her pocket and tosses it to the crowd, whose applause continues unabated. They cheer as if for a pop star, and it suddenly dawns on her that now she’ll have to repeat the same stunt every night, because she saw how their eyes gleamed when the photographers flashed in unison. Afterward, her mother shows up in the sacristy, a starlet’s makeshift dressing room, and drives her away to attend a celebratory dinner with the concert organizers.