“Good thing you decided to go back to bed.”
“Only because you said last night that uncivilized sleep isn’t restful.”
“Precisely”—he is gratified that she remembers—“which is why you need to rest before the exhausting encounter with two films we made in our childhood.”
“Exhausting?”
“Because it’s harder and harder for me to understand what we made then and why.”
“Hard? For you?”
“Even for me. Because, as you know, for me the plot is not enough, not in my films or in the films of others. And in those first screenplays, the real power was not in the story, not even in the strange situations, but in the sharp dialogue that he… Trigano… wrote. That’s where his wild imagination really shone.”
Only rarely does he explicitly mention in her presence the man who drove her away, and her face catches fire, and she seems about to respond but thinks the better of it and returns to the photo brochure.
“You still have a headache?”
“Who told you I had a headache?”
“The Spaniard, the teacher.”
“Aha.”
“So how is it?”
“Going away… Soon it’ll be gone.”
“I’m sorry I told you to postpone the blood test.”
“And I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
“Why?”
“Because I have no intention of letting anybody take my blood ever again. So don’t be sorry. I’m healthy.”
“Of course you’re healthy,” mumbles Moses, sensing the old resentment. It was imprudent of him to take her to the retrospective before clarifying in advance what would be screened. The gap between past and present would likely be painful for her. He glances at Roman Charity and notices that the little light above the picture is off. Did the bulb burn out, or did Ruth find the hidden switch? He still resists directing her attention to the painting. She should make the connection on her own.
“As a matter of fact,” he says, “the handsome young man, our escort Bejerano, an intelligent and honest man, told me that he didn’t get around to telling you that despite all the years that have passed, you still have the allure that was evident in yesterday’s films.”
“Why didn’t he get around to it?”
“Because all his talk about the double plot drove you away from the table.”
“Why should it drive me away? Your recent films are filled with double plots and I tolerate them anyway.”
“Double plots in my films?” He laughs to mask the sting. “In what sense? Tell me.”
“Not now.” She switches off her bedside lamp. “We still have plenty of time together here…”
“Not that much,” he mumbles, and puts on his jacket.
A freezing wind gusts through the huge, empty square.
“Thanks to your Israeli presence,” says Rodrigo, “we have been blessed with perfectly clear skies.”
“But very cold days,” Moses adds.
“That’s not a bad thing. Cold and dry sharpens the thoughts; rain and snow dull them.”
Rodrigo suggests going first to the museum situated beneath the cathedral. Not a large museum, nor in his view an important one, but since it is included in the schedule, best to get it over with before it is flooded with tourists. And instead of making another visit to the cathedral, he suggests taking advantage of the sunny morning and going to the promenade on the far side of the Old Town.
Is this teacher, wonders Moses, trying to save him money? For he stubbornly argues with the museum director, demanding that he not make the guest of honor and laureate of the retrospective pay for admission. Moses quickly takes out his wallet and pays for them both. The museum director offers, perhaps by way of compensation, to show him around, but Moses declines. He who pays to get in deserves an exemption from the erudition of an enthusiastic guide.
Rodrigo is right; even at first glance, the sculptures are mediocre and the paintings boring. No need to impersonate art lovers strolling through the exhibits. Moses picks up his pace and makes for the exit. “Already? Your visit is over?” The museum director is dismayed, and even as Rodrigo tries to apologize, Moses turns and asks him if he happens to have heard of Caritas Romana. He has found a reproduction hanging in his hotel room but without the name of the artist. And with his hands and lips he acts out the scene of the old man and the bare-breasted woman.
The museum director has heard of this motif in Renaissance art but does not exactly remember the story behind it. Perhaps the reproduction is on loan from the museum archive and listed in the catalog.
“The museum exhibits pictures in the hotel?”
“We have dozens of reproductions gathering dust in our storeroom, so it makes sense to lend them for a nominal fee to the Parador, which routinely rotates the pictures for the sake of bored chambermaids, or regular guests who are pleased to find something new each time they visit. Yes, there are still people who are not indifferent to the pictures hanging by their beds in a hotel, even when they stay for only one night.”
“True,” says Moses. “Like me.”
He hurries Rodrigo to the square and gladly accepts the suggestion that they go to the promenade for a view of the cathedral on a clear day from another, more distant vantage point. They walk briskly through the alleys of the Old Town, passing squares and fountains and gates, arriving at a grassy expanse with a broad promenade from which the cathedral, in all its sculpted glory, may be seen. Above it, like the veil of a floating bride, hover wisps of morning fog that the bright sunshine has yet to dispel. Farther along the promenade, in a pleasant little garden paved with white marble, stand two stern-faced women arm in arm: one in a fiery red coat with a folded black umbrella in her hand, staring ahead with steadfast grimness, and her companion, a flamboyant woman in a headscarf and shiny blue robe, looking sideways and extending her hand toward the sky as if asking a question. Their thin, straight legs are firmly fixed to the pavement with bolts, needing no further means of support.
“What’s this?” asks Moses.
“These pieces are left over from a whole sculpture garden that students from the art college set up years ago as a kind of fantastical secular response to the seriousness of the cathedral and its statues of the saints.”
“But who are these figures?”
“They are called the Two Marys, but they are not saints. If you keep walking, you’ll see another sculpture on the bench.”
Indeed, a few steps farther on, sitting upright with legs crossed at the edge of a public bench, is the figure of a skinny, gray-haired intellectual with a long pointy beard, clad in a gray suit, peering intently into the far distance through oversize eyeglasses.
“What’s he made of?”
“Mostly rigid plastic. Like the clothes of the Two Marys.”
“And he manages in the cold and the heat?”
“Does he have a choice?” jokes Rodrigo. “Go on, feel him…”
But Moses declines to reach out to the weird intellectual.
A group of students, boys and girls, sit on a nearby lawn with books and notebooks, apparently studying together for an exam. Some of them spot Rodrigo and rush over to greet him. “Yes,” he explains to Moses, “they are my high school students, that’s actually my main job.” And as he banters with his students, he does not fail to introduce them to an important foreign film director who has fond memories of the days when he, too, was surrounded by students.
An Israeli retrospective at the archive of the film institute? Yes, they think they may have heard something of it. The sight of the youngsters chatting with a beloved teacher spurs the suspicion that flickered at the museum. Trigano? Who else could have informed the Spanish archive about early Israeli films? Who other than the scriptwriter is still loyal to those ragged old movies? The cameraman is dead, the soundman left the country, the editors dissolved into other films. Only the writer could try to augment the value of his forgotten work in a faraway film archive, thus also tarnishing what his director had later done without him.