And, though I didn’t say so, this fact explained something else: that both of us could have seen the entire movie in spite of the telephone interruptions. We had referred to these more than once in the course of our conversation, without saying, or perhaps without remembering, that the longest one had, in fact, been a phone call between the two of us, when we called each other to make the date to meet at the café the following afternoon, and we had prolonged it with remarks about our recent readings, as we always did, anticipating the conversation itself and touching on some topics we wanted to discuss. This shared distraction must have also created a shared blank, but the time lag (which, if it really was a half-hour long, coincided with the amount of time we spent on the phone) voided that blank.
But, to return to his previous question, which had been left unanswered: no, when I spoke of fragmentation I was not referring to channel surfing, or not exclusively to it. Experience itself, the experience of reality, already posited a model of fragmentation. Without needing to get philosophical, we could say that this happened in life the same way it happened in the movies. As real humans — imperfect and incomplete because real and human — we were always missing important things, essential links needed to understand the greater general story; afterward, full of doubts and errors, we pieced it together. It was memory that established the continuum; and since memory was also a reality of experience, it was also fragmented.
According to a well-conceived and well-executed constructivism, seeing half a painting should make it possible to know what the other half contained. And reading half a novel or poem, the same thing. Or half a symphony. Or half a movie, right? Though speaking of “halves” could lead one to think of bilateral symmetry, which is not what this was about. It could be any fragment, even a dinosaur’s worn-out vertebra.
But, haven’t we then fallen into the conventional and the predictable?
Yes, maybe so. But this was about a special kind of predictability, for it obeyed a convention created for that particular work, one that did not serve any other. At the end of the day, art was a convention, and if pushed, everything was a convention. Art was creation, and the first thing it created was its own convention.
My thoughts were fleeting, and I revisited them under less pressure while I was reconstructing this step in the conversation, in my conversations, to be more precise. Didn’t I re-
establish the continuum of what was naturally fragmentary and interrupted? Because a conversation, no matter how civilized and articulate it may be, is always made up of leaps and digressions, and steps backward, and, “I didn’t understand you,” and, “I understood you all too well.” The memory that organizes and completes them is a chance excrescence, which exists as it did for me: secretly, almost shamefully. Although it probably isn’t all chance, judging from the fact that memory is full of conversations.
Could a conversation be completed by deducing the recently born conventions after hearing only half of it? One would have to consider a conversation a work of art, which was not far from what I thought. But which half? Because it could be a temporal half, for example, the first hour, or the second, if it lasted two hours. Or the half that belongs to the responses of only one of the interlocutors. In this case it would be the kind of reconstruction — so common — that one performs when one hears someone talking on the telephone.
My friend responded to all of this with a sleepy expression on his face, his eyes half closed, staring off into space. He must have been carrying out a general review of our digressions, and the conclusion he reached is that we hadn’t made any progress. We continued in the same “tic” or the same “toc” of the Rolex.
No, that wasn’t quite it. I wanted to retract my former skepticism, because in reality I had proven something, almost without meaning to, or “without meaning to mean to”: I had proven, through the positive absurd, that fiction was fiction. To ride on a dehydrated goat through the star-studded sky, wasn’t that fiction? Who could ask for anything more? Through simple deduction, the actor who played the goatherd. . Wasn’t that crystal clear? In a certain way, we had reached the point where words die.
This reference to silence seemed to arouse my friend, exactly as when one has been hearing a constant noise for so long that one ceases to notice it, then when it stops, the contrast becomes deafening. He looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me, or on the contrary, as if he suddenly recognized somebody he had thought was a stranger. The expression on his face was so peculiar that when I tried to mentally reproduce it in my memory, I almost failed to find the representational resources to make it credible. What he said when he emerged from his state of perplexity was so amazing (to me) that I became electrified, and I moved into the present. My memory accompanied me into the present, like a written play that is being performed.
But then. . are you talking about the real-real actor?
Who else? And what does that mean? Are you saying there is a double “real” and a single “real”?
Don’t start again with your twisted logic. Let’s talk about the movie we both saw, please. There was the actor who played the goatherd, and the actor who played the actor who played the goatherd, right?
Just one moment! Now you’re the one with the twisted logic. What’s with this regressus ad infinitum?
Infinitum my foot! Did you see the movie or didn’t you?
Of course I saw it! I saw more of it than you did!
It doesn’t seem like it. It seems like you missed the whole part about the actor. . But I know you didn’t miss it. You yourself told me about it, about his mansion in Beverly Hills, his dog Bob, the press conference in Paris. .
I was stunned.
But what does that have to do with it?
What do you mean, what does that have to do with it? Did you see it or didn’t you see it?
I saw it. . Yes. . Now that you mention it, I remember seeing it, but I don’t know what that has to do with the movie. So it wasn’t. .?
You thought it was. .?
You thought that I thought. .?
The questions and answers crisscrossed back and forth over the café table at the speed of light, until the questions turned into answers and the answers into questions. In bed, while nervously tossing and turning, I couldn’t manage to make them occur in the correct order. The quid of the question was that I thought that they had inserted scenes from one of those documentaries about the making of the movie — what they call “backstage” scenes — that are so common these days when they show a movie. It seems, however, that these were part of the movie itself. I would not have gotten so confused had I paid closer attention, but one does not pay close attention to such entertainment.
Little by little, then all in one fell swoop, with that majestic slowness the instantaneous tends to have, everything became crystal clear. The basic plot of the movie, the one we had both watched, was of the filming of a movie. The CIA wanted to investigate the supposed production of enriched uranium by the Ukrainian separatists and sent their agents to investigate an area under suspicion, but they did so under the guise of shooting an action and adventure thriller, a coproduction, on location. To make themselves credible, they hired a famous actor, obviously imaginary, though played by a real famous actor. And to perfect appearances, they really did make the movie, though they were not very concerned about its quality or verisimilitude, for it was merely an excuse to carry out their espionage; a few scenes from that nonsensical shoot (whose plot involved Señorita Wild Savage and the Goatherd) were mixed in without much explanation, creating a second level for the audience, independent of the first though not completely, because the characters on the “real” level remained in costume and in character just as they did on the “fictional” level. I had not perceived that there were two levels: I had fused them as best I could, adding patches and sewing lateral and transverse seams, any which way. My friend, on the other hand, more attentive than I on the one hand and more distracted on the other, had correctly discriminated between the two levels, but he was mistaken as to the hierarchy between them: he held that the story of Señorita Wild Savage and the Goatherd was “real,” and that of the Secret Laboratory was “fictitious.” An excusable error, because even after we had cleared this up à deux, we did not manage to decide which of the two levels the dehydrated water belonged to. The most disorienting thing of all was that the entire movie followed the growing awareness of the main actor, an actor they’d hired under false pretenses, telling him he was to play in a real action and adventure movie set in the mountains of Ukraine; little by little, in conjunction with the strange events that took place during the filming, he began to realize that he was involved in espionage and politics, a plot that was not at all fictitious, and he ended up by accepting his role as a real hero.