“I want to talk about Ruth first.”
His face darkens; he looks to the side.
“I want you, Trigano, to help me save her.”
“I don’t believe you came down just for her.”
“For her and maybe a new film.”
“Look, Moses”—he sounds serious now—“you went to all this trouble for nothing. I warned you that there was no point in our meeting. But you’re stubborn, so I’m telling you again flat out, I can’t give you anything because I don’t want to give you anything.”
“Don’t give, just listen. I want to tell you about Ruth.”
“I put her out of my mind a long time ago.”
“Be that as it may, she was your childhood sweetheart and for years your lover and partner. Look, my wife and I also split up years ago, but I never refuse to listen to her and I care about her.”
“Your wife is your wife, and my lover is my lover. There’s no connection. But before you go on, put something in your mouth, the people here will be insulted if you don’t touch a thing.”
“You’re right. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m sort of nauseous. I lost my appetite.”
“The place turns you off?”
“Not the place. You… you’re tough.”
“You haven’t heard anything yet.”
“I want to talk to you about Ruth.”
“Make it fast. The night is short and I’m tired.”
“She’s sick and doesn’t want to admit it.”
A little smile crosses his lips, as if he is pleased by the news.
“Sick with what?”
“I don’t know what the illness is, but I sense it and I’m almost sure. Her doctor has been pestering her to repeat some blood tests, which apparently were bad, but she decided to ignore them.”
“Just like her to ignore them, not because she’s afraid of the results, but because she believes that ignoring a problem makes it go away. Wait a minute, what does ‘I sense it’ mean — you’re living with her again?”
“No, definitely not. And I never did. I don’t know what you know or others told you, but after you left her I didn’t want to live with her. What I felt was a responsibility toward her, an obligation to the character we used, we built, we believed in — you first and foremost as the creator, but also I as the director, and also the cinematographer and the others who worked with us. So when you left, she had to have protection, or call it what you will. Because who knows better than you the world she came from? That world could offer no cure for the breakdown you caused her. And if I hoped that Toledano’s love would win her over and free me from her, I turned out to be wrong.”
“Because she found him too feminine.”
“Feminine? Why? Do gentleness and patience have to be feminine? I don’t agree.”
“You can agree or not, but even in kindergarten Debdou needed someone manly, someone cruel and hard to please, because only then could she feel she had earned his love.”
“Someone like you, for instance…”
“For instance.”
“And someone like me?”
“You’re a dubious case; the narcissism in someone like you, so sure he is an artist, erodes manhood over the years, and even if he runs to the toilet and manages to control every drop, his manhood needs more validation than that.”
And he laughs.
“I came to talk about Ruth,” you repeat patiently. “She’s ill and needs to be convinced to let us at least find out what the illness is.”
“But if you don’t live with her, why are you investigating her illness?”
“Even if I don’t live with her, I can still tell she is deteriorating. You should know that I brought her along to my retrospective.”
“I knew that.”
“Who told you?”
“De Viola told me you asked that she be invited.”
“You’re still in touch with him? You have no more films to deposit with him.”
He ignores your question.
“There, in Santiago,” you press on, “during the three days of the retrospective, I saw new symptoms. Weakness she had trouble overcoming, chronic fatigue. Sometimes watching herself on the screen she dozed off, and in Circular Therapy, it took her a while to recognize herself. We were staying in the same room, I could see this up close.”
Temperatures rise in the arbor. “Yes,” he says. “I know that room.”
“Not exactly a room.”
“Right, an attic they reserve for guests of the municipality, with wooden beams and a window that faces the plaza at the rear of the cathedral.”
“Exactly,” you say uneasily. “With a stone angel waving a sword or a spear.”
“A sword, not a spear.”
The revelation that the former scriptwriter had slept in the same room, and lain in the same bed, strengthens the hope that the intimacy, rebuilt and reimagined, could lead to reconciliation.
“I was not considered an honored guest, nor did they give me a prize, or a fee for coaching the actors,” continues Trigano, “but they did treat me to a nice stay at the Parador.”
You very nearly bring up the Caritas Romana hanging on the wall, but you resist, so as not to awaken ghosts.
“By the way,” you add, “this wasn’t the first retrospective where they made a false assumption and housed us in the same room. And the bed, which you surely noticed was big and wide, was still not so big for a man not to sense what the woman lying beside him was feeling.”
You mean to hurt him, in the hope that causing him pain will bind him to you, that jealousy might diminish cynicism.
He looks you in the eye now, seriously.
“Look, Moses. I regret I agreed to bring you here, because you are about to insult a woman who is important and dear to me.”
“Which woman?”
“Have you not noticed that the farmer’s wife is also in treatment here?”
“So?”
“That’s why you have no confidence in the food she cooks.”
“No, why do you say that? Your confidence is more than enough for me.”
“But you told me you came here hungry, and if I read correctly in an interview you gave to some newspaper or other, in your recent films, which of course I didn’t see and don’t intend to, you make sure that the meals are real, long and full of detail, and that the characters relate to what they are actually eating—”
“You read correctly.”
“So there mustn’t be a gap between art and life.”
“You think so?”
“Sometimes.” He laughs.
“I have nothing against this meal,” you say, snatching the wisp of goodwill that suddenly surfaces between you. “Here we are, sitting opposite each other at the dinner table, and if I were here not as a guest but as a director, I could stage an attractive scene lasting a minute or two. I would ask the cinematographer to pan this unusual arbor and try to capture the velvety darkness enveloping its greenery, and from there I would encourage him to zoom in among the plates and bowls on the table to convey precisely the lively colors of the food. From time to time, I would want to spice the dinner scene with a few quick takes inside the kitchen and the dark rooms of the patients, so some fear and mystery can trickle in. That would underscore the dramatic tension between the skinny, younger man who crackles with hostility and disdain while gobbling the food ravenously, and his interlocutor, an emotional old man who pokes his fork into one dish and another but doesn’t eat a thing. This contrast alone, without a word spoken, as in a silent film, would build tension that requires a payoff and gives the producer hope of filling the theaters.”
He listens attentively but doesn’t smile, not even a little. “Because the producer is what matters,” he mutters.
“And all this,” you say, sticking to the scene, “comes before we get to the heart of the matter. Reconciliation between a teacher and a student after many years.”