“A modern museum… Nice touch.”
In civilian clothes, at this hour of night, the monk looks tough and decisive. Before they leave he pours wine for everyone and prays for success, and once the handcuffs and robe join the camera equipment in the photographer’s knapsack, they silently exit the house.
Wintry cold outside. And as they take their first steps Moses realizes that Manuel has every intention of taking them on foot to the appointed place, which he promises is not far. “No,” says Moses, stopping at the street corner, “I can’t go on foot tonight, let’s take a taxi, even if it’s close. I have plenty of money with me.” But at such a late hour, approaching dawn, there are no taxis around. Manuel leads them on a shortcut through a deserted park, passing seesaws and slides, arriving finally at an apartment building where a few lights are burning.
Moses stops at the entrance. He demands that the middleman call a halt to secrecy and reveal the identity of the husband before whose wife he must kneel with cuffed hands.
Manuel is not prepared to supply the man’s name, and the wife’s name he doesn’t know because he never saw her and didn’t ask. He introduced himself to the man at the employment office he visits from time to time to help the unemployed with their requests. There he met a North African man of about sixty who seemed wary of approaching the clerk. Manuel spoke with him and was able to win his trust. The man is an illegal immigrant who slipped into Spain more than a year ago. He apparently fled his homeland following a run-in with the law and wandered for a few months in the south of Spain. There he met a young woman, also an illegal immigrant, who joined him and supported them both with odd jobs. But recently she bore him a child, and she is still worn out from the delivery, so given no alternative, he summoned his strength and went to the employment bureau. But when he found that they required papers, he was frightened.
“Does he speak Spanish?”
“Only a little. We managed the rest in Arabic, which I learned at the same time I learned Hebrew.” At first the man was horrified, but the monk’s robe combined with the Muslim’s distress yielded the faith that proper boundaries would be observed.
“How much did you promise him?”
“A thousand euros.”
“A thousand euros? You overdid it.”
“But this family has no money for food, and you told me you were willing to sacrifice your entire prize, so I thought it would be best to be generous to the man and woman, even at the expense of others.”
“Others? Meaning who?”
“I assumed,” says the monk uneasily, “that the remainder of the money you got from my mother would be donated to charity.”
Moses smiles. At this hour, at the entrance to this building, Manuel de Viola seems much more clever and practical than he did in the gloom of the confessional booth in the cathedral.
“You thought correctly,” he says, laying a friendly hand on the monk’s shoulder. “What is left we shall give to other needy people. Since the retrospective took place in Spain, it is right that the prize money also remain in Spain.”
And they ascend a darkened stairway in a building that looks even shabbier on the inside than it did on the outside. They walk through narrow hallways filled with junk and rags and broken furniture and strollers. On an upper floor they are met by a tall, sturdy man, his dark hair sprinkled with gray. In a gesture of greeting he places his hand on his heart, then kisses his fingers as a sign of respect, and hurries them into his flat, locking the door behind them.
It is a rundown apartment, just one room and an improvised kitchen. On a clothesline in the kitchen hang cloth diapers. In one corner is a pile of empty bottles, apparently picked from trash cans to be exchanged for deposit money. Part of the room is set off behind a curtain stitched from old burlap bags. And as they enter Moses thinks he hears the feeble crying of a baby, or perhaps of a woman. The space is already arranged for the photography. A tattered sofa has been pushed to the side and a table laid on it upside down along with two chairs. But the space is not big enough for the required camera angle, and in the manner of cameramen confident of their craft, the photographer repositions a chest of drawers and other chairs. The North African stands silently to the side, transfixed by every movement of the foreigners. Manuel stands across from the Arab and gazes at him intently, as at a garden sculpture. “What do you think,” whispers Moses to the photographer, “do you have enough light?” “No,” answers Toledano, taking his flash from the knapsack and wondering how to set it up. “Come on, my friend,” Moses says urgently, “let’s try to get this over with.” He suddenly feels dizzy and grabs hold of a chair. Is it the wine at three in the morning on an empty stomach, or is it the anxiety of humiliation surging in his mind? Frightened and amused by the situation, he closes his eyes. It’s been many years, he thinks ruefully, since there’s been a woman by my side to make sure I don’t fall.
The photographer’s energetic movements remind Moses of the young man’s father. He sets one chair atop another and hangs the flash in the kitchen, among the diapers. A good thing he remembered to bring an extension cord from Israel, so he can unplug the refrigerator and use its socket to flood the room with light filtered through blue cellophane. This way the picture will acquire a slight aura of mystery. The North African disappears behind the thin burlap curtain, where the silhouette of the waiting woman is now visible. How nice, the light that all at once produces a woman, Moses rhapsodizes. He must produce a similar silhouette of a woman in his next film.
“If we’ve come this far,” he says to David, “let’s shoot the scene two ways, with two different cameras, then pick the right picture and destroy the others.”
The North African paces around them like a caged tiger.
“Perhaps we should pay him in advance, calm him down,” suggests Manuel in English.
“By all means,” agrees Moses, and he hands him ten greenish bills, feeling he is sinking fast into a dream.
The photographer selects a lens and snaps it into the camera, takes out the red robe and handcuffs. Moses removes his topcoat and jacket and hesitates before dispensing with the shirt, then stands naked from the waist up. He wraps the robe around him like a skirt. He takes a chair and turns it sideways and sits on it as if on a footstool, spreading out the robe-skirt to conceal it, then puts his hands together behind his back and tells the photographer to place the handcuffs on him, and now that the ancient Cimon is ready to receive the nursing woman, the man goes to get her. From behind the curtain come whispers of an argument in Arabic in three distinct pitches, then silence. A few moments later, the curtain rises, as in a theater, revealing not one woman but two: an older, heavy one, holding the baby in her arms, and, walking behind her, a veiled woman with hands as black as night and a body so boyish she seems to be a daughter, not a spouse.
Seventy years ago, thinks Moses, trembling, my mother fed me from a white breast, and now, as I approach death, the time has come for me to nurse from the black breast of a young girl. But I am still in control of the scene. This time I am the director and I am the screenwriter, and I am the actor whose lips will touch the warm nipple of the young black breast. He is on the verge of losing consciousness from fear and joy. His head is slipping downward, but the photographer, standing on a chair and adjusting his lens, calls to him: “Wait a second, Moses, she has to take off the veil, otherwise when she leans toward you, your head will disappear under the cloth and the whole point of the picture will be lost.” Moses freezes in place, his hands bound, unable to stand up, but he collects himself and conveys the request to Manuel in English, adding a literary rationale to the technical issue. “It makes no sense for the face of the daughter bestowing kindness to be veiled from her own father, so please ask the husband to remove the wife’s veil for a few minutes. We paid him handsomely.”