I proceeded to explain: the protagonist, at the very moment when he finds one of his goats dead, and bends down to pick it up, precisely at that moment, as he places his hands under the animal’s dead body, the sleeve of his coarse, rawhide jacket gets pushed up, exposing his wrist, part of his forearm, and a large gold Rolex watch — clearly recognizable as such with its design and the company’s logo: the little crown.
My friend shook himself out of his stupor and asked me: What goat? What dead goat? He had seen no dead goat.
While remembering this, I knew that shortly thereafter we would realize that he had missed that scene. During the conversation itself, that possibility still had not occurred to me, so I tried to help him remember: it was the goat he finds dead when he descends from the mountaintop in the evening, and he carries it to his cabin. . It was impossible that my friend hadn’t noticed this episode, because it was important to the storyline, for that night, as he was getting ready to roast the goat for dinner —
That’s when he interrupted me: Yes, he’d seen the scene in which he guts the goat, but not the one before that, when he finds it. At that moment, he’d probably gone to the kitchen to get himself something to drink and had missed it. With movies they show on cable channels without commercial interruptions, such gaps were the lesser of two evils and quite common. I surely had similar ones. Everyone does when they watch movies on television. Then the missing scenes return like ghosts: one has to supply them in the imagination in order to complete the story, and then reconstruction and reality — whatever minimal reality those scenes have — get all mixed up.
Once this point had been cleared up, my friend still did not understand what I meant by my observation. What was so weird about the movie’s protagonist wearing that watch or any other watch? Don’t we ourselves wear watches? he asked, pointing with his chin at the ones we, he and I, had on our left wrists. And we don’t wear them for decoration, he added with that smile of his I know so well. We need them so we could meet at the café on time, don’t we? This was a self-referentially ironic allusion to his inveterate habit of always arriving late for our dates. I never reproached him. I was so used to it that when we planned to meet I simply added fifteen or twenty minutes to the appointed time; so, one could say that he is very punctual, in a certain sense.
I was obliged to tell him that I was not talking about the watch itself but rather the fact that it was such an elegant one and in possession of an illiterate goatherd, isolated in the mountains. I was also, though, talking about the watch itself. The fact that he had a wristwatch at all was anomalous. That community of goatherds lived in a subsistence economy, completely removed from consumer society. Even assuming that the goatherd would go down to a nearby town for a fair or a market and want to buy himself some object, he would not have chosen a watch, which would have been utterly useless to him. In the ancestral traditions of herdsmen, the only watch that mattered was the Sun. In their world, there were no dates to meet in cafés, no television sets, no trains or airplanes to catch, only the passing of the days and the nights and the seasons. And even in the case that a clever merchant had managed to squeeze a few coins out of this ignorant and innocent mountain dweller, it would have been in exchange for a cheap one, not a Rolex — not even a fake!
The subject had almost run out of steam, as far as I could tell at that moment, and my mind was already groping in other directions, toward the more habitual and usual subjects we discuss, reflections, which we like to delve into, on what we are reading or our thoughts about the world around us. At night, while remembering that point, the subjects that had presented themselves to me as possible, presented themselves again, in their same prenatal condition, without any defined form or content but with the same flavor which had trembled in their imminence — the flavor of philosophy, the intellectual delight of the elite. Perhaps memory enhanced this flavor because in the end these subjects never saw the light of day. What had seemed about to come to an end had, in fact, just barely begun. For a reason I was unable to comprehend, my explanation had not been sufficient; my friend remained perplexed.
Was he distracted, thinking about something else? Or, was it my fault? Had I rushed to my conclusion without allowing enough time for the premises? Had I considered something said that hadn’t been? I tried to take stock of the situation as quickly as possible because I felt that the insignificance of the issue called for only a few notes to be touched lightly, without leaning on them, like Arrau playing Schumann. By the same token, if they were too light, things might continue without clarification, and that would be worse. I decided to take one step back and approach the issue from a wider angle — almost as if I were thinking out loud, reviewing it for my own benefit — wanting to avoid that didactic tone that can sound offensive when used to discuss such a trifle.
In the same vein, I spoke about the mistakes that are often made during the making of a movie. They were difficult to avoid, I said, when reconstructing a specific era or environment. One famous example was in Cleopatra, in a scene where Elizabeth Taylor, playing the Egyptian queen, wore a dress with a zipper. That was a simple anachronism, not all that different from the aforementioned watch, though in “our” movie, set in the present day, it was a social or socio-cultural discrepancy rather than a temporal one.
With that, I assumed that our little quid pro quo had been resolved, but in order to eliminate any trace of a suspicion that I might have been giving him a lesson or trying to get in the last word, I continued to elaborate, by now in full-blown gratuitous thematic dissipation:
Because of how complicated it is to shoot a movie, the number of people who work on a set and the instructions that have to be given to the technicians and the actors, the director cannot possibly oversee every detail. This is well known and has been for some time, which is why in commercial productions of a certain importance, there are people who specialize in this kind of problem, “continuity people,” whose role it is to make sure that the actors wear the same clothes and have the same hairstyle and the same amount of stubble from one day to the next of filming — that everything matches. Because scenes aren’t shot in sequence. If a character leaves his house after eating breakfast and saying goodbye to his wife (scene 1), and runs into a neighbor in the street and stops to chat with him (scene 2), those two scenes require different sets, different lighting, and might be filmed weeks apart. But for the character, for the action, only a few seconds have passed, and the clothes and make-up have to be identical. .
With a gesture of impatience, my friend indicated that he already knew all that and suggested I not try to change the subject. That 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.