“Alas,” murmurs Manuel, but he regains his composure and consoles Moses, tells him not to flagellate himself. Sometimes life is more important than art.
“What makes you think I’m flagellating myself?”
“Is it not the regret over canceling that scene that makes you seek confession?”
“No, I have no regret, only a desire to understand. And in this retrospective, I’ve come to understand that I didn’t cancel the scene out of consideration for the actress but because of the opportunity to sever the connection with the one who conceived of it. I did it in order to distance myself once and for all from this strange and alien spirit that had hypnotized my work in the early years.”
“Señor Trigano…” Manuel pronounces the name.
Moses is alarmed. “You know him?”
“Only his name.”
“How?”
“My brother spoke his name.”
“And what did Juan say about him?”
“Not much…”
A long silence.
“And?”
“He depicted him as a private person trapped in his own thoughts… a unique soul, but hardened by pride.”
“What else?”
“My brother admitted to you that it was Trigano who initiated the retrospective in your honor. If, as you say, he is now an alien spirit for you, why do you feel guilty about severing your partnership with him?”
“And why,” Moses says half seriously, “is it necessary to talk about guilt in every confession?”
“There always needs to be a little guilt,” replies the monk apologetically, “a minor sin, a tiny error… because if not, why have absolution?”
“But I told you, I have no need for absolution. Your brother Juan has a keen eye for people. If I had succumbed to the ideas and fantasies of that man, I would have slid to a place of no return.”
“Slid?” The Spaniard tastes the Hebrew word.
“Slipped… sunk… descended… entangled myself in revolutionary, pretentious stories intelligible only to the cognoscenti, which would have brought me to the point of surrendering my directing to Trigano too.”
But the Dominican, troubled that his confessant shows no regret, now tries cautiously to cross the thin line between the professional and the personal, to deepen the confession.
“If you wished to distance him,” he ventures, “perhaps it was because you wished to get closer to the woman so she would be under your wing alone?”
“The opposite… the exact opposite,” Moses answers, after a brief silence. “Like everyone in my crew, I had strong feelings for her, but we all knew that she and Trigano were soul mates. So when he broke with me, I was sure he would take her with him. I wanted him to, but he punished her and me, left her to me as a character for whom I had to take responsibility.”
“A character?”
“I mean, not as a woman, but as a character.”
“As a character?” The monk strains to understand. “A figure that resembles another figure?”
“Yes, a character.”
“As a character of whom?”
“Like a character in a book, a novel, or a character in art,” fumbles the confessant, “characters you see in a stained-glass window. A character who is herself, but not only herself.”
“You mean symbolic? Who symbolizes others?”
“Not necessarily. Not always others. Also not an archetype. A real person, an individual, but one who has something else around her… a frame of sorts… a halo… an emotional aura… as in a dream. After all, Trigano also brought her to us as a character. A character from whose very existence a story flows. So when she rebelled against him, and he gave her up and left her to others, to me, he handed her over not as an actual woman but as the character of a woman.”
Deep silence from beyond the grille. Just the muffled moan of organ music drifting from above.
“Yet when he left her, he punished himself more than he punished you,” the monk suggests to his confessant.
“His art was more important to him than his loved one.”
“And she?”
“She?”
“Or you?”
“I?”
“Has she stayed with you since then as a character alone?”
“As a woman, she had friends, and still does.”
“Just friends?”
“I mean, also lovers… they come and go. She even had a son by one of them.”
“And you?” Manuel dares to step over the fence that has utterly collapsed.
“Not to be tempted by her solitude, I hurried to get married. Besides, her spirit isn’t a good fit with mine, she comes from a wilder place. But I couldn’t abandon a character who sought a place in my work.”
“Only the character?” Manuel continues to probe.
“If this is hard for you, we can switch languages…”
“No, no,” protests the monk, “you cannot imagine how the Hebrew lifts my spirit. But I ask that you help me out with another example.”
“Take, for instance, the portraits and drawings in the book you were leafing through when I came into the library. You weren’t looking only for random individuals from the past out of a desire to learn what it was like then, how it looked; you searched for characters… something abstract that would leap out and touch you, something the artist exposed in people who sat for him. Something they embody.”
“You mean their roles?”
“The role is one way the character is embodied. But it is possible to move it from role to role, from situation to situation, from film to film, period to period, family to family. And yet we can discern its unchanging essence, which goes beyond a style of acting, more than the mannerism of an actor — do you understand?”
“I am trying, Mr. Moses, but it’s not easy.”
“That’s right, it’s not easy to understand the dreamlike dimension that makes a certain person into a character. For example, the woman I was married to didn’t understand the nature of the connection that I maintained with the character the screenwriter left me with, and although during our entire time together she was confident that I never stopped loving her, she ended our marriage.”
“Even your wife didn’t understand.”
“Perhaps she did understand, but she did not want to reconcile herself to what she understood.”
“Because of the beauty of the character?”
“Her beauty? Is she still beautiful?”
“Yes, very beautiful. And you should know that the gaze of a monk, for whom the beauty of a woman is forbidden even in his thoughts, is pure and accurate. Since the separation from your wife you have been alone?”
“I am alone, but not lonely, I am surrounded by people.”
“And the character?”
Moses is pleased that his confessor feels comfortable with the concept. “The character continues to turn up in my films, but sometimes also in the films of others… by her wish and mine too. We are free people… not dependent on each other. She is her own person as am I, even when we sleep in the same bed.”
“Yes, my brother told me he put you both in one room.”
“And though he surely didn’t tell you everything he was told about me, you understand that my confession is innocent of sin, and therefore, Manuel, absolution is unnecessary.”
Manuel’s eyes vanish from the grille, and the rustling on the other side indicates that he is rising to his feet. Has Moses’ refusal to accept absolution disappointed him so much that he has decided to bring the confession to an end?
Moses glances at his watch. No, time has not stopped. Ruth is doubtless asking herself where he’s disappeared to. He reaches for the cord to get free of the booth, but the curtain fails to move. “Can you get me out of here?” he implores, and Manuel slides the curtain and opens the gate.