Manuel speaks to the man in Arabic that sounds formal and awkward, and the man turns to the two women and gives an order to the younger one, but she, agitated, shakes her head no. The man apparently tries to coax her, but she still refuses, and in the midst of their stormy exchange the word yahud is spoken, and again a second time; the Muslim has apparently identified them. And why not? After all, Hebrew can be heard anywhere in the world these days.
The young woman begins to wail. Is it the nationality of the old man about to press his hoary head to her breast that escalates her fear and resistance? For the wailing now segues into powerful crying, and when the older woman, who might be her mother or maybe another wife of the father of her baby, tries to pull the veil from her face, the young woman snatches the child with feral swiftness and vanishes behind the curtain in a storm of tears and shouting. The man and older woman are quick to follow.
Can it be, after forty years, that the scene has again eluded him? There’s no doubt that the casting here is questionable. The money will alleviate genuine distress, but it cannot produce a credible, touching picture that enshrines a beautiful legend about a bold act of kindness. This is how it was with Ruth: a wise and experienced director knows that an actor cannot be forced to do something that contradicts his or her inner nature, even if the screenwriter believes he can bend the world to his will.
The shouting and weeping continue behind the curtain, and Moses, relieved, asks the photographer to free him from the handcuffs, dismantle the camera, take down the flash from the clothesline — in brief, to repeat what his father had done forty years before. Moses quickly takes off the skirt and puts his clothes back on. And to the utter astonishment of Manuel, he announces, “I am unwilling to force the young woman to remove the veil and thereby give offense to her faith. There’s no choice— you will have to find a more harmonious collaborator.” With a twist of irony, he adds: “Perhaps your forefathers were right after all when they believed that assumed identities are not to be trusted.”
Even as Manuel’s expression protests Moses’ decision, the man returns. The young woman has asked that her eyes be covered when she nurses the Jew. He pleads with Manuel, pointing to his own face to show the boundary between hidden and revealed. “No, it’s impossible not to have the woman’s eyes in the shot,” says Moses emphatically, “but I don’t want to coerce her to expose them, so go tell her that we’re giving up and leaving.”
Manuel interprets. The man is shocked and angry. He seizes the Spaniard as if about to tear his clothes, then turns to Moses and shouts his disappointment in shrill Arabic. “But the money?” whispers Manuel to the director, in English. “Leave them something to alleviate the misery you see around you.” And Moses, with a dismissive wave and without hesitation, says, “Money is not the issue; he can keep what we’ve given him, to make up for the anguish we caused the woman and to save her from the abuse of that unhappy man. Please find me another woman, a free-spirited woman capable of looking straight at me with compassion and love. The prize has not been used up.”
THERE WAS NO hope of finding a taxi, but it was near dawn and the subway was running. They traveled one stop and emerged into the street to find that during the short ride, subtle signs of a new day had crept into the sky of the Spanish capital. Again Manuel refrains from unlocking the door of his mother’s house and rings for the housekeeper, who arrives barefoot in her bathrobe. “Is it over? The picture’s been taken?” she inquires, hoping the guests will leave this very day. “Not yet,” says Manuel, “they are staying until we find someone else more suitable.” Moses, of course, can only guess at their Spanish conversation, but he gathers that the housekeeper, like her employer, knows why he has returned to Spain.
He asks for a glass of warm milk, and she invites him into the kitchen, seats him at the table, and serves him a slice of bread with butter. Though his hands were manacled for only a few minutes and show no signs of bruising, he continues to rub them. The excitement over the scene that nearly came to pass in the tiny apartment, the poignant entrance of the young black woman, his quick decision to withdraw — all this has left him enormously fatigued. “I want you to know,” he says to Manuel, who comes in and sits beside him, “I have no regrets about backing out, or about the money we gave them. If we had insisted they return it, they might have responded with violence, and I’ve got enough Muslim disillusion at home, I don’t need to arouse it elsewhere. So until you find me, today or tomorrow, a woman in need of both money and artistic adventure, a woman who will expose her face to uplift her soul, I, a man no longer young, will regain my strength under the covers.”
And he does so. Pleased to have been saved at the last minute from a humiliating picture with a veiled young woman — and gratified to have chosen the right photographer, who hadn’t lost his cool and with great professionalism had averted a mistake — he enters the bedroom, sees young Toledano sleeping soundly on his improvised bed, makes sure the money is still where he hid it, takes off his clothes, and puts on his pajamas. All this was not for naught, he says to himself. I learned something, I tested myself. I rehearsed, though expensively. He claps his hands and rubs them. The handcuffs actually felt good. True, the whole affair was more than a little mad, but if madness means liberation, it empowers art. And art, even in old age, is the purpose of his existence.
With this comforting thought he gives himself over to a deep sleep. When he wakes he finds a house flooded with midday sunlight but silent and empty. Young Toledano has probably gone for a walk in the city, Manuel has surely gone to find a barefaced woman, and the housekeeper has vanished, so he taps lightly on the bedroom door of the lady of the house, and, there being no reply, he opens it cautiously and finds her gone. But he doesn’t retreat, instead entering to inspect and admire the round bed in daylight. In the next film, or the one after, he thinks, we should build a round bed for a woman character waiting to die; this circularity has a calming metaphysical effect. After the shoot, I’ll take the bed home with me. I have enough space in my bedroom.
The room is clean and neat, the blankets folded, everything back in place. The Roman Charity plates are nowhere to be seen. On a little table sits the Spanish encyclopedia of the history of the Inquisition. Since he doesn’t understand the text, Moses turns pages and looks at pictures of major figures and instruments of torture. He is so absorbed, he doesn’t notice Doña Elvira soundlessly entering the bedroom, still wearing her coat and holding a pilgrim staff from Santiago de Compostela.
“Ah, Mr. Moses, here you are.”
“I didn’t find anyone at home, so I came looking for you,” he says, and quickly rises to apologize for invading her room.
Doña Elvira calms him. Her house is wide open to him, and though she is sorry over the way Manuel had failed him with the North Africans, she is glad that the director and photographer will be guests in her home for another day.