“But it’s feeling I’m talking about.”
“These are synthetic feelings, created in films like yours so the producer can massage them any way he likes, not real feelings that torment a man until his dying day.”
“His dying day?”
“Yes, Moses, even if your puny imagination cannot grasp it, I must not get near her, not even talk to her from afar, so I don’t burn her and myself out of sheer rage and hatred.”
“Even now?”
“I don’t count the years, time doesn’t affect me. Look, quite a few years after I broke up with her — I was already married — I went to see one of your films, whose title and content I have since deleted from my memory. You gave her a supporting role, and in one scene, I wonder if even you can recall why, maybe as an added turn-on for your kind of audience, you put her all alone, at twilight, in a hotel room where she was supposed to be waiting for someone who didn’t come, or was late, and she slowly took off her clothes and wrapped herself in a sheet and lay alone in the bed, and her face wore sadness that I’d never seen before.”
“I think I can locate that scene for you.”
“No!” he screams. “Don’t locate anything for me.”
“To explain—”
“No, shut up,” he shouts, “don’t locate and don’t explain and don’t interrupt, just shut up, or else I’m going to leave you here to the dogs.”
His face is twisted in pain. You are not offended but smile uncomfortably.
“Someone told me about the film,” he says, caught up in an angry memory. “Or I may have seen her photograph in some ad, and in a moment of weakness I said to myself, Let me see what became of her, that Debdou, and I went in and sat in the dark, I didn’t even tell my wife I was going to see the film. And as she lay there on the bed, naked and wrapped in a sheet, I wasn’t thinking about the cinematographer, the lighting man, the soundman, or the director in the room, only the loneliness and pain looking straight at me, and all at once my passion for her came back, I had a erection from longing and sadness, and I climaxed, and I rushed out of the theater, wet and wounded. I then understood that if I wanted a life, I had to make sure this connection remained broken forever, until the day I died. Perhaps now even you, Moses, can understand why I don’t care whether she’s a real or imaginary invalid or how her blood tests turn out. Actually, and this is the truth, I also don’t care whether she lives or dies… So don’t ask anything from me. She betrayed a deeply rooted relationship, she broke a covenant. You also betrayed me, because when I asked you to be the director of my screenplays, I believed that the screenplay was not just one element among many but the highest purpose of the film. And suddenly you betrayed me. Except you didn’t owe me anything. She betrayed the calling I created for her; my art was born from her and for her. In primary school, in fact in kindergarten, I picked her out as someone who could make a daring dream come true. Not because of her beauty. Believe me, it wasn’t because of her beauty. Her beauty was a passing, temporary detail of my vision. I felt the absurdity she radiated, the surrealistic mixture within this ragamuffin child of an old rabbi who brought her to Israel from a village at the edge of the Sahara.”
And at this moment, as if on cue, the dogs under and around the table get up, stretch, and vigorously wag their tails.
“And so you will allow me, Moses, not to believe that you came to see me only because of her. I don’t remember you as someone who cares about other people. There’s always a back pocket in your mind, and in the pocket there hides a slippery frog that will soon jump at me. Do you want to shift the caregiving responsibilities to me, because you no longer have a role for her?”
The agitated dogs drown out his voice, barking and howling for dear life.
THE MOTHERLY FARMWOMAN comes with the news that Uriel has woken up and is asking for his father. “Should I bring him to you, or will you go to him?” “He should come here,” says Trigano, “let him sit with us awhile. Dress him warmly.”
“We’ll also get Shaya to light the stove. But I see, Trigano, your teacher doesn’t like my cooking.”
“The food looks so beautiful,” you say in your defense, “it’s a shame to ruin it by eating.”
“Ruin it, please,” she pleads, “that’s what my food expects from people, otherwise only the dogs enjoy it.”
You laugh. “Yes, of course, soon. I’m just so emotional meeting with my student, whom I haven’t seen for over thirty years, I forget to eat.”
“If you haven’t seen each other for that many years, you couldn’t have met Uriel.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s a good thing he woke up, so you can see this special boy before you leave. I’ll bring him, and you should put some food in you. If you don’t like your tomato soup cold, I can make it boiling hot.”
“This soup is just fine. See, I’m going to eat it now.”
“He’ll eat, he has no choice,” promises Trigano, who puts on his white hat. “If he doesn’t eat, we’ll keep him here as a patient.”
The dogs trail behind the woman as Trigano moves chairs to make room for his son.
You dip the spoon into the thick red liquid and play with a wild idea: Should you ever be tempted, in your old age, to make a horror film, you can trick the killer in the last scene and serve him a red soup mixed with blood. You are saved from the soup by the dogs who dart excitedly between the father and son, who arrives in a wheelchair. Uriel is a small young man in army work clothes. A knitted cap flops on his head, hairs are plastered to his forehead, his eyes are innocent and blue, bright with yearning for his father, who rushes to hug him and wheel him to the table. “Abba, Papa, Daddy, Papi, Babo, Père,” gushes the son, the drool from his lips absorbed by a bib tied round his neck.
“Uriel, I’d like you to meet my old teacher.”
“My old teacher,” parrots the son, quickly specifying, “sabba, nono, opa, grandpa.”
You rise to embrace the boy. “Yes, Uriel,” you say, “I am also a sabba,” and the young man is excited to discover a grandfather. His legs are splinted in some sort of Inquisition-style apparatus that helps him control involuntary movements and be aware of his body, but his arms return your embrace, and with great affection he kisses your hand, not letting you go before resting his head on your chest. “Sabba,” he repeats with warmth and wonder, a mischievous glint in his pure blue eyes, the glint there once was in the eyes of your screenwriter.
“That clear blue he got from his mother,” you both state and inquire as you gingerly free yourself from the lad’s embrace.
“Not from his mother. From the blue skies that stretch above the desert of his ancestors,” his father says, either joking or provoking.
“What is it? Brain damage?” you ask cautiously.
“Yes, to a degree.”
“From the birth, or from the pregnancy?”
Trigano takes off his hat and looks at you strangely.
“Earlier, Moses, before the pregnancy.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning… meaning…” he repeats scornfully, “meaning, there are moments, call them delusional, but at the same time very real, when I regard my son’s injury as an extension or a consequence of the injury you caused me.”
“That’s absurd!”
“You know and remember that everything that you think is absurd, I think has value and meaning. Yes, you too, indirectly, are to blame for what happened to this child.”
“I am?” You recoil.
“That’s right, but you won’t understand what you’ve just heard and you’re better off not trying. There’s just one thing you’ll take away from this in any case. You’ll understand why I avoid you, and why, when you force yourself on me, as you are doing now, it’s torture.”