Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Page 4

  Like a sightseeing bus pushing slowly through inundated streets. That’s how he moves, deliberately, lugubriously, like someone who has rehearsed this path a hundred times before without any appetite for the destination. Yet there’s something or someone that he carries with him for whom it’s all new, and so once again he patiently treads past the cathedrals and plaques and statues and fountains and squares and shops, pausing occasionally to discharge or take on some other passenger seeking novelty, a shade of distraction, something to photograph for the express purpose of forgetting all about it. As though tourist and guide were one. The guide remembers for the tourist, but if he too has forgotten all about it he has a script he can follow in one of several languages, and if this script has been repeated often enough he’s free to think about other things, to daydream or worry or remember scenes from his own life, his own history, forever unnarrated except by himself to himself: a native to this place, let’s call him Marco, thinking there’s the flower shop where I bought her roses when they were out of those magenta daisies she likes, and she laughed at me, with real scorn I thought, for my unoriginality; there’s the auto shop where Hector works, who never looks me in the face any more since I saw him one night with his trousers down in the alley behind the bar with another bloke kneeling in front of him, and Hector’s eyes were closed and he opened them and saw me seeing him, but all he did was close his eyes again; there’s the school where the nuns beat me black and blue but mostly black, black around the bone, until I thought I was becoming a nun myself; there’s the office building where my sister was a secretary for just one little month to that bastard she married before he knocked her up with twins and knocked her down when he was drinking and then took her and the twins (Luis and Ramona) away forever to some fucking Spanish island, where they’ve never invited me to so much as visit; and all the time this secret narrative is unfolding, or jigsawing, through his mind there’s another narrative coupled to it: the history of the city, the layers of centuries peeling and disclosed to the bored, avid ears of the picture-snapping listeners on the upper deck, above it all, while all around them swirls the ordinary traffic and weary populace of the city of now, each of them unfolding or jigsawing the private narratives with which this ancient history has only apparently very little to do. Thus Marco, thus the private invisible stream making its pressure felt to the viewer, indirectly, in the length of the shot, the minutes uncut. So Lamb, weaving and waving his way down the high street, halting occasionally to tug his bag’s wheels loose from some snag in the paving stones or a curb’s edge, edging, it’s clear, with steady trepidation toward his ultimate goal.

  What he, Lamb, has to go on. Very little. A client’s scantly documented claim. The folded letters. M.

  He turns his gaze from his reflection or the array of watches or the policeman’s reflection (blue back to him now, putting the ticket book away in his hip pocket and looking at the sky reflected in his sunglasses), tips his roller bag from a vertical to a diagonal position and begins once again to move. We follow him into more crowded streets, now thronged with traffic, stoplights and gridded lines mazing the intersections and crowds of shoppers and tourists and idlers, men and women, really more people than you’d expect in what had seemed such a small and sleepy town (is it the same town or is it a geographical atrocity committed by the filmmakers, splicing together two or more places with superficially similar architecture and light, a sign of their commitment to a global audience implicitly ignorant of the difference, a rejection of local knowledge in favor of the spectacle intrinsic to film and film editing’s capacity to get along without visible parentheses), and there’s no mistaking now the sticky overlay of modernity coinciding uneasily with that stone miscellany, the flagstones and paving-stones, because there are people with cellphones pressed to their ears in the crowd, and a line of Japanese motorbikes the color of hard candies in front of a café, at which a young woman is briefly visible at an outside table tapping on the keyboard of her laptop—flash of her eyes as she looks at the man and his hat passing over the tops of her designer shades, but he takes no notice and walks on bent and leaning as though into a wind, free hand loose at his side like some sort of slow sea creature eddying past a slower one, whistling in the dark, prey and predator. She slides off the edge of the visible world as the camera tracks the man in the hat in profile, riding on parallel rails, the man’s face shadowed in the hat’s brim and his monochrome clothing and most of all the hat itself sustains a sense of his sliding somehow on the edge of time, outside our era, so that he belongs to the early Sixties at the very latest or the early Thirties at the very earliest, though his suitcase is the very mark of the modern cosmopolitan, dense and compact and massy, allocated to the last centimeter for an airliner’s overhead bins. Then he passes in front of another shop window, sheer reflection this time, just a glint of red—velvet? meat?—and again the whole street beheld behind his mirror image and no camera or tracks or crew in sight, miraculous perspective, that puts us into the scene and removes every trace of spectatorship. Just looking, not seeing. Just telling, never showing.

  We accept trompe l’oeil as the truth of looking: we accept the deceit of appearances in the name of a higher truth. If the camera follows a man we discover what he discovers a beat after he sees it, registering how to see it in the assumption of his stance: dully ambling, ambitiously striding, cautiously skulking, or bridled to a short, shocked stop in the face of what must remain literally obscene, the world of the off-screen. If the camera precedes him we never see what he sees except what’s reflected in his face: Lamb reacts to a reality we infer, the necessary fiction that when he looks at us, into the camera, he sees something that is precisely not us, and yet we are his reason for seeing it: each of us in our seats are the stand-in for the beautiful woman, the blood trail, the nemesis, the dead end that at last receives him, that births no further mystery. Like a bad conscience Lamb penetrates the visible on our behalf, always two steps behind the truth right up until the moment it’s too late. With rigid grace he navigates the labyrinth that he and we can see: mean streets, the planes and angles of treacherous faces, a fat man’s wiggling wattles: he’s nobody’s fool and so the biggest fool alive, taking for granted as we do that there’s a skull beneath the skin that will ultimately grin out at us, as skulls grinned from the spines of the books lining my mother’s shelves when I was young: Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, masters of the locked room, the fresh kill, the cozy horror. Does he, Lamb, our American man, squat down now by that same green door, that same brass mailslot, and glance around to see if he’s alone? Does he take out a pencil and use it to poke open the lid and peer inside? From his point of view we see only the dim shabby foyer, the dark stairs climbing upward. And then a shaft of light illuminating where the letter had fallen, and the letter is not there. We don’t see his face, we must glean his satisfaction or lack of it from the set of his shoulders and his slight grunt as he gets back to his feet and takes hold once more of the handle of his rolling suitcase.

  But by now some people in the audience will have walked out. After a start that promised a degree of intrigue and the pleasures of vicarious tourism, it has become evident to the discriminating that this is going to be a large bad picture, a pretentious attempt to translate certain American genre codes into the anti-vernacular of neorealism in a fundamentally uninteresting effort to present one man’s investigation of a past in which he has neither stake nor existence. The shamus is a blind man proud of the keenness of his sight, whose narrative begins innocuously and yet from frame one he is already in over his head. For the rest of the film he will collide, vertiginous body, with the violence of facts, the implacability of the past, discovering his entanglement with a conspiracy too vast to defeat or survive. And without his innocence he ceases to exist. One more American crouched before the monuments of Europe, lacking a sense of scale, of his own relative size in regard to a thousand dollhouse churches, castles, palazzos, parliaments. Lying down each night in a fres
h bed of innocence in penziones and hotels, rising each morning to put on his layers of protective coloration, impregnable behind the screen he carries or that we carry for him.

  Shamus or cowboy: if the shamus bears his innocence before him like a shield the cowboy wields his like a weapon. He penetrates the landscape, squint-eyed, the better to protect his pitiless vision. He is, his posture insists, a force for righteousness, and so will commit any crime in the name of his disinterested goodness. He dies obediently and rises again, returns as an old man to the beaches he renamed in his youth: Utah, Omaha, Pointe du Hoc: Dog Green, Easy Green, Fox Green. The cowboy is there to be seen, not heard: a living monument silhouetted against the historyless sun. Over the next rise stand the numberless unrepresentable: natives, Americans, women and children. Can a cowboy be a woman, can an Indian be white? Under his buckskins? But his eye, like the shamus’s eye, is caught looking. The shamus’s eye takes in the corruption, the conspiracy, the henchmen arranged on spider strands leading toward the unbearable unrepresentable truth. The cowboy’s eye reflects, dauntless and unwavering, crinkled by faux epicanthic folds, refusing light, revealing an empty soul or no soul, till it extracts a flinch from the opposed searching eye and closes it forever. Diagonal, simultaneous, men, the cowboy and the shamus dwell in the same foreign element, bearers of the fascination that leads them, us, hinges on which adventures and investigations turn. They are here for the purposes of the darkened theater of enthrallment. Those who remain, isolato or in couples, testify by so doing: No matter that we’ve seen it before, done better, fresher: we are not children, we understand we can never again see those films, those celluloid bandages over our wounded and regenerating innocence, for the first time. Yet we are undaunted and unblighted so long as we—though fewer and fewer—still gather with strangers in the dark and speak together the terrible affirmation in the open eye, following the gazes of straight-bodied men with faces in profile or in shadow, men with guns or cameras to kill the objects of their vision, to sacrifice, to gift our eyes. Down these streets we must go, ourselves accompanied by ourselves, seeing how far down innocence can go before dissolving into air, into thin air. We will go deeper yet. A hand dangles, the gun falls, the credits roll. Let’s sit still for a moment longer under white lights before the white screen. Close your eyes. Listen to a voice, a man or woman’s voice, recount what he or she has seen, what we will never see ourselves. That story, appendix to seeing and antidote to innocence, is what this bad and peculiar film is after.

  She wraps a shawl around her shoulders, drops her keys into a simple black purse. She’s going out. She deposits the letter into her purse and shuts the clasp with a click. Then she stands there a moment longer. Then she turns decisively and marches toward the door and opens it a little too hard so that it swings open and bangs into the wall—there’s a dimple the knob has made—and we see her lit from below going down the stairs, her back and her shoulders and her head and then just a band of diffuse light, and around this time the apartment door swings shut and just before it shuts we hear the street door open, and then the apartment door shuts and we’re alone in her living room. Straining our ears we can just make out her heels on the pavement below but they quickly fade. Yet we linger a bit longer in this sparsely decorated room, with its uncomfortable-looking sofa and single easy chair, a watercolor or print of a watercolor over the sofa that looks like a negative Monet, and the tulip with petals continuing in their process of blooming, of parting, of drying, of desiccating, of dropping to the table and to the floor and the simple rug at the center of the floor, off-white, the color of an empty page.

  Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

  She walks quickly, taking short swift steps as her knee-length skirt requires, the short heels clacking down the little street to a corner and then up a little hill, like a little Montmartre, for there’s a church hunched on the hilltop framed by gray chopped clouds. The few people she passes are young, with the scattered affect of students, moving in pairs and threes, some with headphones and earpieces, even as they maintain a desultory conversation that’s live there on the street. She seems to be headed for the cafe on the edge of the plaza that belongs to the church, where a little gray fountain splashes or rather seeps, just barely contained by its plain smooth square rim—an abstract fountain, curiously modern, all right angles, an atonal intruder in the very lap of the Romanesque church, a rectangle in deadly opposition to its ancient roundness. But at the last moment she swerves left and into a doorway under a sign that reads, simply, Poste. Inside an antiseptic space, linoleum, row of mailboxes, the counter, an old woman in black stands arguing in what sounds like Italian with the long-suffering middle-aged overtall clerk folded down with his elbows leaning on the counter, eyes almost closed, absorbing his customer’s untranslated wrath. The woman with the shining black hair takes a key out of her purse, steps up to one of the mailboxes, opens it, slides out a few letters, a folded newspaper or broadsheet, snaps the door shut again. She opens her purse, puts in the new mail, takes out the letter. Slips it casually into the slot of the letterbox on her way out the door. We want to follow her: maddeningly the camera remains fixed on the blank face of the letterbox, its single slit the only expression, while in the background the old woman in black’s harangue goes on and on, interrupted occasionally by the clerks’ world-weary half-whispered repetitions of Si. As if roused from slumber the camera lurches away now from the letterbox, stumbles almost out the door into the sunshine of the square, handheld suddenly canted casting about to the left and right as though questing. This woman’s pair of legs or that woman’s, walking away from us: not her. Surging up to the tables at the outdoor café where couples murmur and solitary old men read copies of a newspaper called Il Piccolo; not there. Swerving back the way it came, back up the hill, taking in the view of the cathedral with its face nearly as blank as that of the letterbox, coming to rest finally on her door, on its own mail slot, even more mouthlike under the nose of the doorknocker and the pair of eyelike windows. Resting there. Sounds on the street. We’ve lost her. The image remains.

  The apartment. Nothing has changed, but everything is changing. The sun has crossed the street sufficiently to blaze in through the windows, to send dust motes sparkling and rippling like a second, heavenly set of curtains. The tulip is in ragged bloom; gap-toothed, it discloses its stamen shamelessly, as death has crept an hour further up its severed stem. A phone begins to ring in another room, an ancient phone with an actual bell powered by an actual motor triggered by an electrical signal that travels through twisted copper wire from an analog elsewhere. It rings nine times. Each time the phone rings the tulip seems to tremble a bit in our vision, the curtains seem to vibrate, the dust motes seem to shiver in time to the summons. We begin to notice that the frame is shrinking, the camera is dollying in, so that we lose the doorframe, we lose the French doors, we lose the tips of the curtains, we lose the dust motes, we lose the lamp and sofa, the tulip is larger and larger, but moving out of the center of the frame, and as the seventh ring comes it is abruptly bathed in voluptuous sunlight, afire with red depths and pink shallows. With the eighth ring the tulip is almost gone and we become aware of its pale shadow. With the ninth ring we see a little bell of color in the shadow’s head begin to glow against the wall. As the ring dies away we see the tulip’s shadow born into color, a red patch on the white wall, a tumescence, a little cauldron, bubbling away its living secret in shadow form on the wall: that no one can see. That only we can see.

  In the mornings now Ruth wakes alone. Ben has taken up running again, so before dawn he slips as quietly as he can out from under the covers and pads downstairs to pull on his shorts and a pair of running shoes he’s had practically since college, though they’re falling apart and bad for his back. She’s asked him a million times to take his keys with him and he says that he does, but at times like now she lies awake knowing in her heart that he’s left them behind—how do you carry a set of keys when you’re running?—a
nd the front door is unlocked, and anybody could walk in, with her and her daughter sleeping upstairs. She burns, quietly, thinking of this, gripping her pillow. Ben walks fast, limbering up, passing a few other joggers and dog walkers following the same path as him, drawn ineluctably as though for a ritual to the lakeshore and the sunrise unfurling there, the sky streaking with pink scissor-cuts. She lies still, waiting for Lucy to start crying or for feet on the steps that may or may not belong to her husband. You’re being ridiculous, she tells herself. She sits up in bed and turns on the lamp. The book from last night is lying there face down, its binding creased. She’s never fetishized books, any more than she’s fetishized food: she treats them casually, roughly even, dog-earing pages, smearing them with jam or spaghetti sauce, tossing them on the floor. It appalls Ben, not because he’s any sort of book lover but because he’s a sanctimonious neatnik. She rolls the words sanctimonious neatnik off of her tongue and realizes that she’s in a rage, pointlessly. Lucy isn’t up yet. She throws over the covers and stalks out into the hall, where a few of Lucy’s toys are scattered—a little wooden car is perched on the lip of the top stair, ready to make a racket or break someone’s neck. The white noise machine that Lucy’s slept to since she was an infant trills softly behind the closed door, rolling its r’s. Ben is running now, easily, still breathing through his nose. Dark houses, mansions really, on his left; the sun’s disc brightening the lake on his right. Sometimes he encounters friends on these runs, men he’ll encounter later on the train platform; the sort of not-quite-friends you never seek out, never have to seek out, your paths just keep crossing. There’s a set of chin-up bars by the tennis courts and he stops to do a quick set, then jogs off again. It’s autumn and his feet crunch the leaves. A power-walking woman with a shitzu scrambling behind her on its lead gives him an efficient smile as he passes her. In forty-five minutes he’ll be showered, shaved, dressed, and riding the train southbound to his job in the city manager’s office. In the kitchen he’s started a pot of coffee and she sips a mug of it black and sweet after firing up her laptop—she has to move a stack of catalogs and junk mail to find it. The house is a mess, which means Ben’s having one of his periodic moments of resignation in which he doesn’t dervish around cleaning up after her and Lucy, which itself reminds her of a kind of ragefulness, which takes her back to her own inexplicable sense of having been ill-used, even violated in some unmemorable unforgivable way. There’s a new e-mail. Ruth doesn’t click on it. She closes the computer and puts down the coffee and drifts to the front window overlooking their street. The plants need watering. She puts her hand to her cheek and looks at her fingers. Tears. Ben has circled the university campus, is pounding his way back now. He’s thinking about the day’s projects, about the upcoming election, about Lucy, about her, Ruth. Anything but himself, she thinks bitterly. And upstairs, Lucy starts to wail.