by Don DeLillo
David moved across the room in our direction. I asked Lindsay what it was about him that always gave me the impression he was pushing people out of the way. He fed his wife some cheese and took her drink.
“Always near a woman,” he said to me, then turned to Lindsay. “Not to be trusted, these men who talk to women.”
“Tried to call you yesterday,” I said.
“I was in Tunis.”
“Are they killing Americans?”
He wouldn’t give the glass back to her.
“Per capita GNP is the fifth largest in Africa. We love them.
We want to throw some money at them.”
I gestured around us.
“Have you decided to let them live? The Turks? Or will you shut them down for ten or twenty years?”
“I’ll tell you what this is all about. It’s about two kinds of discipline, two kinds of fundamentalism. You have Western banks on the one hand trying to demand austerity from a country like Turkey, a country like Zaire. Then you have OPEC at the other end preaching to the West about fuel consumption, our piggish habits, our self-indulgence and waste. The Calvinist banks, the Islamic oil producers. We’re talking across each other to the deaf and the blind.”
“I didn’t know you saw yourself as a righteous force, a righteous presence.”
“A voice in the wilderness. Want to fly to Frankfurt and watch the bowl games on TV?”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“We can watch on a monitor at the Armed Forces studios. No problem. The bank will arrange.”
“He’s serious,” Lindsay said.
“We’re all serious,” he said. “It’s the start of a new decade. We’re serious people and we want to do this thing.”
“Let’s have a quiet New Year’s Eve,” she said, “in that little French place up the street.”
“We’ll have a quiet New Year’s Eve, then we’ll all get on a plane to Frankfurt and watch the bowl games on TV. The Huskers go against Houston. I outright refuse to miss it.”
Why was I so happy, standing in that mob of bodies? I would talk to the bank wives. I would talk to Vedat Nesin, one of the many Turks I met that year who had a name with interchangeable syllables. I would talk to a man from the IMF, an Irishman who complained that he kept walking into scenes of destruction and bloodshed that never got reported. In Bahrain he walked into a Shi’ite riot. In Istanbul he fled his hotel in a service elevator during a demonstration that no one knew was coming, that no one understood, that did not appear in local newspapers or anywhere else. It was as though the thing had never happened, as though the corridors hadn’t filled with smoke and rampaging men. His fear was going undocumented in city after city. He was disturbed by the prospect that the riot or terrorist act which caused his death would not be covered by the media. The death itself seemed not so much to matter.
I embraced the wives and looked into their eyes, studying for signs of restlessness, buried grudges against their husbands’ way of life. These are things that lead to afternoons of thoughtful love. I spoke to a Kuwaiti about the grace and form of characters in Arabic, asking him to pronounce for me the letter jim. I told stories, drank bourbon, ate the snacks and tidbits. I listened to the voices.
“You are lucky,” Vedat Nesin said. “You are a target only outside your country. I am a target outside and inside. I am in the government. This makes me a marked man. Armenians outside, Turks inside. I go to Japan next week. This is a relatively safe place for a Turk. Very bad is Paris. Even worse is Beirut. The Secret Army is very active there. Every secret army in the world keeps a post office box in Beirut. I will eat this shrimp in garlic and butter. Later I will eat profiteroles in thick chocolate sauce. After Japan I go to Australia. This is a place that should be safe for a Turk. It is not.”
I started out at first light, stopping only once, below Tripolis, for something to eat, and the same bluish clouds were massed down the coast, over the bays and processional headlands, but it wasn’t raining this time when I reached the spot where the rutted track bends its way up to the boulder and the towered village beyond. Signs of night were hours off.
I drove slowly up the hill and left the car behind the large rock. Someone, using tar, had painted over the words we’d seen six days earlier, covered them completely. It was a level stretch to the village, sixty yards, and the sky was so low and close I felt I was walking into it, into sea mists and scattered light.
Bags of cement on the ground, stacked crates of empty bottles. A woman in black sitting on a bench in an open area of mud and stones. She had a bony face framed in a head-cloth. One of her shoes was broken, split across the instep. I spoke a greeting, nodded toward the alley that led into the village proper, asking leave to enter in effect. She paid no attention and I didn’t know if she’d even seen me.
I followed the narrow unpaved passage. A millstone lay in the first ruined tower and there was cactus jutting out of other houses, stones packed solid in window slits and doorways. I kept walking into dead-ends, mud and rubble, weeds, prickly pear. There was scaffolding on a number of structures, surprisingly, and house numbers in red as well as surveyors’ marks.
I moved slowly, feeling a need to remember all this, and I touched the walls, studied the inscription above a door, 1866, examined the crude steps, the small crude bell-tower, and noted the colors of the stone as if some importance might attach to my describing them precisely someday, the unmellowed tone of this particular biscuit brown, this rust, this sky gray.
Along the intricate and twisting paths, among the broken towers, I began to wonder if this might all be one structure, the whole village, a complex formation whose parts were joined by arches, walls, the lower rooms that smelled of animals and forage. There seemed no clear and single separation between the front and back ends of the village, between this oblong tower and that.
It was their place, I was sure. A place of hesitations and textures. An uncertain progress that was like the inner labor of some argument. The barred window, the black bees we’d seen on the island. A place that was a muffled question, as some places are shouts or formal lectures. All the buildings joined. One mind, one madness. Was I beginning to know who they were?
I came out above a slope of terraced earth, the empty sea. Several trees had become entangled in their growth, and the bare branches grappled and twisted and the smooth gray trunks were locked in what appeared a passionate and human fury. How strongly this element of humanness showed in that stark mingling. The wood resembled burnished stone. A mortal struggle, a nakedness, sex and death together.
I took a path back out the other side of the village. This was limestone, those were fig trees, that was a barrel-vaulted chamber. The names. I felt strangely, self-consciously alone. This place was returning to me a sense of my own motion through it, my stoopings into rooms, my pauses to judge the way.
There were two women now. The second was very old, trying to pick apart an orange section by section. I stood in front of them, asking if anyone lived in the town. Foreigners. Do foreigners live here? The old one made a gesture that either meant she didn’t know what I was talking about or that they’d gone, the people I meant, they’d cleared out.
Do you live here alone?
One other, she said. The man of the other woman.
From the car I could see the hamlet on the far ridge. Tap and I had passed through there on our way home, after coming across the road that led up the Laconian coast, and I thought I might find something to eat there, houses with people. I drove back down to the paved road, eventually heading northeast, climbing again.
I left the car next to a tower with a blue balcony, recently attached, and was directed by some children down a steep path, seeing a café with a small evergreen out front, trimmed with balloons. The dirt was redder here, the towers had an ochre glow. Volterra was standing in the doorway. He had his hands jammed in his pockets. His breath showed white.
I decided the only thing to do was smile. He gave me some
thing of a measured look. But a grin emerged as we shook hands, a crooked smile, speculative, hinting at a certain appreciation. I followed him inside, a dark room with a wood-burning stove, and ate an omelette as he watched.
“These towers are strange,” he said. “The older ones are three, almost four hundred years. These people spent all their time killing. When they weren’t killing Turks, they killed each other.”
“Where is Del?”
“In a hotel up the coast.”
“Watching TV.”
“Are you here to write something, Jim?”
“No.”
“You know how I am about privacy. I’d hate to think you came here to do a story on me. A major piece, as they say. Full of insights. The man and his work.”
“I don’t write, Frank. I have a job. It doesn’t involve writing anything but reports and memos.”
“You used to write. All kinds of things.”
“I don’t write. My son writes.”
“It’s a subject I have to raise from time to time with certain people.”
“Reluctantly.”
“Reluctantly. Even friends don’t always know how serious I am about this. The filmmaker on location. The filmmaker in seclusion. Major pieces. They’re always major pieces.”
“I only came because Owen more or less indicated they were here. It was just to see.”
“What have you seen?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“From the beginning Brademas talked about a design. That’s what got me going. This last time he seemed close to telling me what it is. Their waiting, the way they select a victim. But he changed his mind or maybe I didn’t handle it right. Maybe there’s a set of forms, a right and wrong way to pursue the matter.”
A man brought coffee for both of us. Two children stood in the doorway, watching me. When I smiled they edged away.
“Poor bastard,” Frank said.
“Where did you talk to him, this last time?”
“Athens.”
“Thanks for getting in touch.”
“I know. You offered us lodging. But we were only there a day, only long enough for me to talk to him. This thing is building. I want this thing. I’m beginning to see what it’s all about. Only Del, she’s the only person I can stand to have around me for long periods without feeling everything’s pressing in, everybody’s one purpose in life is to throw me off, to set me back.” Laughing. “The bitch.”
“You thought the desert was a frame. What about the Mani?”
“The desert fits the screen. It is the screen. Low horizontal, high verticals. People talk about classic westerns. The classic thing has always been the space, the emptiness. The lines are drawn for us. All we have to do is insert the figures, men in dusty boots, certain faces. Figures in open space have always been what film is all about. American film. This is the situation. People in a wilderness, a wild and barren space. The space is the desert, the movie screen, the strip of film, however you see it. What are the people doing here? This is their existence. They’re here to work out their existence. This space, this emptiness is what they have to confront. I’ve always loved American spaces. People at the end of a long lens. Swimming in space. But this situation isn’t American. There’s something traditional and closed-in. The secret goes back. l believe it goes back. And these tower houses, they’re perfect, they give me my vertical. Old worn rugged stone the color of the land. Lines of flat land. Lines moving diagonally to the sea. Lines up and down the hills, those stone walls, like scar tissue. And the towers showing up everywhere, unexpectedly. Black and white. The natural colors hardly stray from that anyway. You could count fifty kinds of gray out there today.”
“How do you make a movie out of it, out of the situation? Where is the movie?”
“Look. You have a strong bare place. Four or five interesting and mysterious faces. A strange plot or scheme. A victim. A stalking. A murder. Pure and simple. I want to get back to that. It’ll be an essay on film, on what film is, what it means. It’ll be like nothing you know. Forget relationships. I want faces, land, weather. People speaking whatever languages. Three, four different languages. I want to make the voices part of a landscape of sound. The spoken word will be an element in the landscape. I’ll use the voices as synchronous sound and as off-screen narration. The voices will be filmed voices. The wind, the donkeys braying, the hunting dogs. And then this line that moves through the film. A scant narrative line. Everything else gathers around this line, hangs from it. Somebody’s being watched, he’s being followed. There’s a pattern, something inevitable and mad, some closed-in horrible logic, and this cult is locked into it, insane with it, but calm, very patient, faces, eyes, and the victim is off in the distance, he’s always in the distance, among the stones. All the elements are here. Some strong and distinct like the towers. Some set back a ways like the victim, a crippled goatherd maybe, a vague figure, throwing stones at his flock, living in one of those tin-roof enclosures up in the hills.”
“Do you film the murder?”
“Eat your eggs.”
“You haven’t thought that far ahead.”
“There won’t be a murder. Nobody gets hurt. At the end they raise their arms, holding the weapons, the hammers or knives or stones. They raise their arms. That’s all we see. We don’t know what it means. Are they surrendering their weapons? Are they preparing to strike? Is it a gesture that means the illusion is over now, you can go on with your lives, we give you permission to go on with your lives, the film is over, the mass is over, Ite, missa est. This image has been in my head. The cult members raise their arms. Will they kill him once the camera stops turning? I want this question to linger.”
“How do you know they won’t kill him? This is what they do, after all.”
“Obviously we make an agreement. We’ll have to agree. If they’re interested in doing the film at all, I think they’ll agree to this condition. They’ll see it’s the only way I can do it. Whatever else they are, they’re educated. I almost want to say they’re reasonable. I have a sense of these people. I spent enough time with Brademas to understand certain things about them. My conviction is that they’ll want to do it. The life they lead out here, what they do, seems so close to something on film, so natural to film, that I believe once I talk to them they’ll see it’s an idea they might have thought of themselves, an idea involving languages, patterns, extreme forms, extreme ways of seeing. Film is more than the twentieth century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. It’s the filmed century. You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves. The whole world is on film, all the time. Spy satellites, microscopic scanners, pictures of the uterus, embryos, sex, war, assassinations, everything. I can’t believe these people won’t instantly see they belong on film. Instantly. I want them to film some of it themselves. It’s time for me to go back to a sharing of duties, anonymous, a collective effort. I want them to handle the camera, appear on camera, help me plan shots and sequences. I want them to recite alphabets. Strange things. Whatever they do, whatever they say and do. It’ll be like nothing you know, Jim. They’ll shoot some of it, I’ll shoot some. Maybe shoot backgrounds myself, landscapes. We all do something. That’s appealing, that idea, right now.”
“How do you get it all going?”
“I’ve found one,” he said. “I’ve got one.”
I’m not sure I would have known what he meant except for the look, the grim pleasure of the will, showing through. One what, I would have said.
He took me outside, where we stood between two carob trees and looked over the valley to the towered village I’d just been wandering through. It stood among swirling banks of earth, the terraced groves that seemed a lyrical
attempt to ring the hill with steps, a rippling descent of dream trees and lunar tones. Mist pooled around the towers. The village from this distance and perspective was an aerial fancy. It had an element of medieval legend about it, something I hadn’t found in the cactus and mud, where there was mystery, true, but not of folklore or narrative verse.
“Four days ago. Those towers. I found him sleeping in a damp cellar, stinking of goats. Andahl. He knows my work.”
It was cold, we went back inside.
“He was with them on the island. He’s still with them but the situation isn’t the same. They had to leave that village and they’re a little scattered now but still in one area, the Deep Mani. Five people. Andahl likes to deliver recitations. I let him recite. I’m not here to argue with the bastards.”
“Why did they have to leave that village?”
“It’s being developed. The whole place is being renovated. Workmen start coming in any day. Somebody wants to make guest houses out of the towers. Open the area to tourists.”
“Real life,” I said. “Where is he now?”
“There are caves on the Messinian coast. Some well known, very extensive. Others just holes in the sea rock. I drop him on the road that leads to the caves. I don’t know where he goes after that. Last three days that’s been the routine. In the morning I show up, same place. Eventually he appears. They’re talking. He’s trying to arrange a meeting.”
“Have you asked him what the pattern is? Why they keep a watch. How they decide who and where to strike.”
“He puts a finger to his lips,” Frank said.
Because part of the eastern coast is without roads of any kind, we had to cross the peninsula twice before reaching Githion, beyond the towers, a tiered port town that opens directly, almost bluntly on the sea. Sundown. We found Del Nearing in a waterfront café, writing a postcard to her cat.
