With no warning, the moon is freed from the last tuft of a stubborn cloud, and the skies are bathed in lunar brilliance that reveals secrets of the night. Moses can see now that the homeless man who relinquished his seat is not far away, leaning his head on the shoulder of the Mary with the outstretched hand, waiting for the director to abandon his post beside the intellectual.
The two exchange sharp glances and Moses realizes that he read the fellow wrong. The tall, athletic man with a beard and bushy eyebrows, who wishes to retrace his steps and reclaim the bench, is not a homeless vagabond or beggar but a lone pilgrim who arrived not as part of a group but on his own. By the looks of the cape, the unruly beard, the woolen leggings, and the knapsack, he is a true believer who chose to come to Santiago on foot, on a long and difficult path. But Moses, who sometimes talks with death, is not afraid of a man holding a large, thick staff with a huge clam shell affixed to the top — an authentic staff, not the kind for sale in souvenir shops. If he wants to harm me, he says to himself with a smile, maybe I deserve it, and he stands up and gestures graciously at the place no longer occupied. And if he were invited to make a movie in Spain, he would include, regardless of the plot, a pilgrim like this to walk around in silence before the camera.
DURING HIS NOCTURNAL outing, there’s been a change of personnel at the front desk, and he returns the scarf not to the young chemist but to a stern middle-aged clerk, who hangs it on its hook and discreetly points to a man sitting by the closed dining room door, leafing through a newspaper. Moses recognizes the teacher of cinematic theory, embalmed in his black suit. Apparently he has agreed, or perhaps requested, to serve as the escort of the Israeli director on the last day of the retrospective. But Moses decides to postpone his encounter and slips back to the attic.
He takes off his shoes in the dark, quietly, so his footsteps will not wake the sleeper, and, remembering that the closet door squeaks, he drops his coat on the floor. But the eyes that opened as he entered do not close.
“You’re awake?”
“More or less.”
“Since when?”
“Since the time you left.”
“But I was careful.”
“I’m not awake because of you.”
“Really? Why not worry over me?”
“You don’t need worrying over. Anyway, where were you?”
“I walked around a little, to get away from this place. Past the Old Town there’s a promenade and sculpture garden of clever local characters. Rodrigo showed it to me yesterday, and tonight I had the urge to feel them so I could tell what they were made of.”
He sits down on the bed, and cautiously, in the darkness, reaches for her hand. He counts her fingers one by one as if to be sure none is missing.
“If I didn’t ruin your sleep, what did?”
“Thoughts.”
“For example?”
“For example, the film today. The Refusal.”
“You too? Funny, because ever since you said it would be closing the retrospective, I’ve been trying to remember what we did there. Do you remember it well?”
“Yes. It’s the first film that centered on me alone from beginning to end.”
“Even before the beginning, from preadolescence, from the childhood of the main character.”
“Childhood?”
“Childhood, girlhood. The young amateur we brought in who played you as a grade-school student. For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about her tonight. I’m curious to see how I created your precursor.”
“You won’t see a thing.”
“Why?”
“Because you cut all of her scenes from the final film.”
“Oy,” cries Moses in sorrow, “she was cut in the end?”
“You claimed at the time that the film turned out too long, and the producer was demanding cuts, so without asking or notifying anyone you took out all the early scenes in elementary school and began with my graduation ceremony.”
“Your graduation?”
“I mean the heroine’s.”
Moses feels a need for self-defense. “I wouldn’t have cut it shorter just for the producer. There was surely some other reason, which I don’t recall at the moment. Trigano was sharp and clever with dramatic stories told in a limited time frame but was less convincing when it came to giving a character a strong background, like inventing a childhood for you that would add depth to what happened to you later.”
“To me?”
“I mean the heroine. But that girl, who in the end wasn’t in the movie, keeps me up at night like a ghost. What was it about her that I want so much to see? Was she especially attractive? Did she really look like you?”
“Toledano, who discovered her, thought she looked like me as a schoolgirl, and there were people in the crew who saw a resemblance, but for me it was hard to see, which is natural. But she really was an impressive girl, smart and ambitious, and I invested a lot in her. In any case, you never had the patience to work with little kids or teenagers. There’s also something about you that seems to scare them.”
Moses is amused. “What about me could be scary?”
“When you are next to the camera, fixated on your goal, you’re not aware how alienated and hostile you become toward anything unconnected to the film. Although toward that girl, as I remember, you were a little more patient, maybe because her father the colonel was always at the rehearsals and shooting. That’s why you didn’t dare yell at her. Or maybe because you also thought she looked like me. Or because back then, every so often, you were a little in love with me.”
“I’m always in love with you. Sometimes a little, and sometimes more. But what was her name?”
“Ruth.”
“Ruth?”
“It was because of her that I added her name to my old one.”
“Because of her? Why? You never said you changed your name because of her.”
“I intended just to add it, but her name, the new one, swallowed up the old one.”
“Why because of her?”
“Because I was happy that a real Israeli like her, from a good, established family, was picked to represent the childhood of the heroine who gets into such trouble. Therefore, after you dropped her from my film, I decided to compensate her by adopting her name.”
“Compensate her for what?”
“For the fact that until the film’s premiere, she didn’t know she wasn’t in it. And that you didn’t see fit to inform her, and I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know because you never, in any film, wanted to get near the editing room and always waited to see yourself in the finished film.”
“Because it was hard to watch how you and the editors would cut us up, destroy our continuity, then paste us back together. And therefore, at the premiere, as I recall, not only she but I was astonished to see that you had dropped all the scenes of my youth.”
“Again yours. Not yours. The heroine’s.”
“No, mine too. Because I liked it that you chose such a perfect girl to portray me in my childhood.”
“What do you mean, perfect?”
“Perfect. Rooted. A real Israeli. Salt of the earth. Well connected. Because in those days I thought… and now too, really… I know that we — Trigano, Toledano, the lot of us — would always somehow stay a bit in the margins, so I was happy that you gave me a little sister, so to speak, a twin who could strengthen me.”
“Again you?”