I have a good collection of videotapes, among them favourites that I’ve watched several times by now: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; We Don’t Want to Talk about It; The Red Squirrel; Junkmail; Near Dark; The Match Factory Girl. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown I identify with all of the women; in We Don’t Want to Talk about It I feel so sad for Marcello Mastroianni who falls in love with and marries a dwarf who leaves him to join a travelling circus; in The Red Squirrel I’m convinced that Julio Medem used the idea of Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, a tale of the American Civil War in which an apparent escape and return home are revealed to be happening only in the mind of a hanged man at the moment of death. I think the love story in The Red Squirrel is a posthumous one and I am haunted by the if-only of it. I love the unreliable postman in Junkmail who, having copied the keys left in a young woman’s mailbox, is hiding in her flat when she attempts suicide. He pulls her naked and dripping from the bath in which she’s overdosed and is about to drown and I’m so happy for them every time although God knows what they’ll do with each other after he follows her offscreen at the end. In Near Dark I’m touched by the vulnerability of the vampire girl and delighted when her lover unvampires her with a transfusion of his healthy blood.
Of these films the one that stays with me most is The Match Factory Girl, written and directed by Aki Kaurismaki. The match factory is in Finland, Helsinki maybe. We see the logs that once were living trees being stripped naked; we see them reduced to sheets of matchwood, we see boxes of matches, each one the same as the others, on a moving belt as the machinery clanks out the minutes and hours. Day in and day out Iris (pronounced Earriss) checks the boxes of matches as they come off the production line. Kati Outinen is Iris; she’s one of those unpretty actresses who can look beautiful or plain as required: in this film she looks plain. Iris lives with her middle-aged mother and the man who’s moved in with her mother. She hands over her pay every week and cooks and cleans for them while they drink vodka (none for her). On the TV news a man stands in front of a line of tanks which come to a stop in Tiananmen Square.
Iris goes to a dancehall where she is the only woman not asked to dance. She sits alone by the wall while the ensemble plays a tango and the man at the microphone sings, with subtitles:
Somewhere beyond the ocean
there is a distant land
where warm waves softly caress
its ever-joyful sands.
Varieties of lovely flowers
bloom all the year around.
No cares, no worries there,
no troubles, and no gloom.
Oh, if I could only reach
that land of dreams some day,
then I would never, ever fly
from paradise away.
The singer wears a white suit, a burgundy shirt, a white tie. He’s clean-shaven, has pomaded black hair. He’s backed by a violin, guitar, accordion, and drums. Behind the musicians is a backdrop on which a few trees droop wistfully against a glaucous sky as the couples revolve to the music. That tango and the words of the song open the floodgates to a sadness that doesn’t seem to be particularly mine; it’s a universal sadness. A singer and four musicians and a tango with a green-sky backdrop in a place of ice and snow!
Next payday Iris doesn’t give the whole pay envelope to her mother; she buys a red party dress, fixes herself up, and goes to a place with dancing and a bar where she’s picked up by a man who takes her home, sleeps with her, leaves some money on the bedside table the next morning, and goes off to work. This man (his name is Aarne) wants nothing more to do with her and when she asks to see him again he takes her to dinner and tells her to go away.
Iris is pregnant from that one night and she hopes for a happy family life with Aarne. He tells her to get rid of the baby and gives her money. She steps in front of a car, is knocked down, and loses the baby. While she’s in hospital her mother’s partner comes to give her an orange and tell her to find somewhere else to live.
When she gets out of hospital her brother takes her in. She buys rat poison and goes to Aarne’s flat where she says she won’t bother him any more but wants to have a goodbye drink with him. She puts rat poison in his drink, then goes to a bar where another man makes an approach. She puts rat poison in his drink, goes home, is allowed in by her mother, lays the table, and puts rat poison in the vodka for her mother and her mother’s boyfriend.
As she waits for them to die we hear the tango singer and his ensemble again and read the subtitles:
Oh, how could you turn
all my sweet dreams
into idle fancies?
The song continues and we see Iris again at her job in the match factory as the police come for her. Having stopped the tanks, she goes with them quietly.
When you give everything
only to be disappointed
the burden of memories
gets too hard to bear.
Why have I got so many videos that I watch more than once-made-up people acting out made-up stories? The people and the stories aren’t real but the ideas are: the ideas of true love and happiness, of lost love and sadness, life and death. We get such a little bit of time and it’s so hard to find a life-story that works for us. Why have I given the story of The Match Factory Girl and taken up all this space to do it in? I’m not sure. Iris’s story is nothing like mine but there’s something about it that won’t let go of me. Those tango songs!
11 Adelbert Delarue
Truly, it is not that I am simply a wealthy sybarite. (Are there poor sybarites?) No, to me there is more than that. I do not flaunt myself as a doer of good works but in that sphere I am not idle, not unknown. I have given thousands of millions of francs to all the major charities and some that are minor, even unknown. Why do I mention this? Life is a fast-flowing river of moments; to step into this river is to find it each time never the same. Last night I had a dream in which … No, I won’t talk about it just now. Everyone has dreams.
All the same, every morning is different, is it not? I wake up with Victoria warm beside me smiling in her sleep; last night was good; life is good. Certainly the dead don’t have much fun. It seems I am given to reflection today. I ponder long the Crash Test toy that aroused my interest in Roswell Clark.
I do not look back over what I have written here before this and I do not want to; I speak from the ever-changing moment. I think I have a few words said on the metaphor of this toy, the profundity of it. These thoughts remain with me. We forward go at speed; we are stopped, WHAM! You, I, the world. ‘Even the sea dies,’ said Lorca in his Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías long before anyone knew about pollution or global warming. Even the sea dies.
I have given to many of the Holocaust and Holocaust-Survivor charities. Naturally nothing goes away. This, I think, is the first law of the remembering animaclass="underline" nothing goes away. Gottfried von Peng, my father, has gone away but not as far as Genghis Khan, for example. He died full of years and billions. Death as a Friend is the title of a drawing by Rethel in which Gevatter Tod in hooded garb and sporting the scallop shell of the Santiago pilgrim tolls the bell for the old man who in his church tower has come to the end of his journey. Death of course can afford to be friendly — no one comes with a scythe to cut off his life.