The Retrospective

by A. B. Yehoshua

  Pilar translates, and the mayor and the priest regard the old man fondly—but Moses is suddenly sick of talking about himself.

  “And so, ladies and gentlemen, to be brief, I took leaves of absence from teaching and joined these young people, whose enthusiasm swept me onto the path that has become the center of my life. During my first leave we were able to complete our earliest project, a short and unusual film that to my surprise was well received, and so we began right away to plan another. And after my confidence as director grew—and as I read the memoirs of famous directors who started making movies without special training—I gradually reduced my teaching hours, then finally quit, with no regrets. And though he had become my close collaborator, my former student made sure to maintain polite boundaries and treat me as if I were still his teacher, perhaps a surrogate of sorts for the father he didn’t have growing up. He decided that he and his friends wouldn’t call me by my first name, only by my family name, and I also addressed them by their family names, as in the classroom, and it was more or less agreed that everyone in the group would call the others by their last names, including the lady who sits here before you, who in those days was the writer’s very close friend.”

  “You also called him Moses?” de Viola asks Ruth, who sits next to him with her legs crossed, her colorful woolen scarf brushing the hem of his robe, her eyes twinkling as she tries not to miss a word.

  “Yes.” She laughs. “Even now, Moses is like a teacher to me.”

  “But how did you come to belong to the group back then?” asks Pilar. “According to your biography, you were still a child.”

  “Whoever wrote my bio was generous about my date of birth,” says Ruth, “but by now, believe me, I’m tired of hiding my real age. Besides, my connection with Trigano began when I was still a child. I grew up with only a father—my mother died in childbirth, and my father got help from the neighbors, including Trigano’s family. I am in fact younger than Trigano, and when I was in elementary school, he would create roles for me in little skits that he wrote, and it sometimes seemed that he was inventing these stories just for me. And so when he put together the group, I was naturally a part of it. I wanted so much to be an actress that I dropped out of high school. Now I’m over fifty, and I still don’t have a diploma.” Suddenly, she falls silent.

  “What was that first short film about?” the head of the archive asks Moses. “We know nothing of it.”

  The director begins to answer, but Ruth beats him to it.

  “It was a film about a jealous dog.”

  “A dog?”

  “A dog.”

  “Just a dog?”

  “No,” Moses quickly explains, “it’s about a jealous man who disguised himself as a dog to secretly follow his cheating wife.”

  “But in the film, there is also a real dog?”

  “Yes, of course, the dog who played the husband.”

  “A metaphorical dog, as in Buñuel’s Chien Andalou?”

  “A real dog, not metaphorical.”

  “The film still exists?”

  “No. Film preservation was so bad then, all that’s left is a sticky pile of celluloid.”

  “You should know, Mr. Moses, that we at the archive are able to resurrect even films that have been given up for dead.”

  “This film you could never resurrect.”

  The windows of the office are rattled by trumpet blasts and the pounding of drums. The sanitation workers have brought in musical reinforcements, finally snapping the mayor from his tranquillity. With a wave of his hand he summons his aides. Moses seizes the moment and rises to his feet, poised to take his leave. He is unaccustomed to talking at length about himself, especially to foreigners whose intentions have yet to be made clear. The others also get up. “Maybe you should advise him to raise their pay,” he jokes to Pilar as the mayor gives orders to his staff. “After all, in such a holy city, sanitation workers are little angels.”

  But Pilar furrows her tiny brow, disinclined to translate for her mayor the advice of so foreign a guest.

  7

  THEY EXIT THE municipal palace, and Moses hurries toward the sanitation workers to congratulate them on their spirited performance. And in light of the day’s crowded schedule, he suggests that Pilar postpone till tomorrow the visit to the cathedral museum, and that before the meeting with the institute teachers, they take a walk in the Old Town. It is a great pleasure to wander aimlessly in narrow streets that suddenly become little plazas with statues, to peek into hidden gardens. The pure, refreshing air reddens Ruth’s cheeks, and her eyes shine. Outside of Israel she does not expect to be recognized; she can walk around relaxed, without wondering if someone will come up and ask if it’s really her.

  The souvenir shops here are so numerous and well stocked that it seems sinful not to take home some knickknack, proof for their twilight years that the trip to Santiago was not just a dream. Moses chooses two traditional walking sticks of blackish bamboo, each with an iron tip to stick in the ground for support, and topped by a big reddish shell, the shell of Saint James, in honor of the angel who steered the shell-shaped ship bearing the body of the saint to the shores of the village of Padrón.

  “What do I do with a stick like this?” She laughs.

  “You can lean on it when I’m no longer at your side.”

  When they return to the hotel they find de Viola in civilian clothes, waiting beside his small car. They quickly deposit the walking sticks with the desk clerk, who has not forgotten the request to clarify the source of the painting Caritas Romana hanging by the bed but also reiterates his offer to replace it with another, more modest picture. “Certainly not,” insists the visiting Israeli, “this picture is important to me personally.”

  The director of the archive was gratified by the conversation in the mayor’s office. It’s good that foreign artists honor the city fathers, since unlike the locals, the guests cannot be suspected of ulterior motives. Spread under the sharp blue sky, the vast pilgrim plaza is empty now. The sanitation workers have gone for their siesta, and a bored lone policeman waits for them to come back.

  The drive to the film institute takes a while. It is located outside the city limits but exploits its famous name to attract students and visitors. The car heads west, toward the Atlantic coast.

  During the reign of Franco, a native of the region of Galicia, the building that now houses the institute functioned as an army barracks. Located in an open area that offers a plethora of parking spots, it provides ample space—three screening rooms of varying size, dining halls, studios and classrooms, and dormitories for students. Even so, exchanging the stately old palaces and glorious cathedral for the nondescript quarters of his retrospective depresses the Israeli director a bit.

  In the staff dining room, a large table has been set, around which a small group of senior faculty await him, men and women of various ages. As he feels their warm welcome, his mood improves, and after everyone present introduces himself by name and specialty, a simple but generous meal is served, with vestigial flavors, or so it seems, of army food.

  De Viola doesn’t want to waste time with small talk. Having seated those who know English well next to those who do not, he taps a knife on his wineglass without waiting for dessert and poses a question of aesthetics so urgently that Moses almost suspects it was the sole purpose he was invited to a retrospective at this provincial archive.

  “We welcome you with pleasure and interest and thank you for taking the trouble to travel so far to your retrospective,” begins de Viola, “a retrospective where we shall screen primarily films from the early period of your creative work. We will discuss them one by one after each screening, but a general question has arisen regarding the sharp stylistic shift that took place in your films. It seems to us, Mr. Moses, that in the past two decades you have turned your back on the surrealistic and symbolic style of your early films and have become addicted to extreme realism that is almost naturalistic. The question is simple: Why? Do you
no longer believe in a world of transcendence, in what is hidden, invisible, and fantastical, so much so that you are mired in the mundane and the obvious? For example, in the film Potatoes, which you made five years ago, your main characters eat lunch for sixteen minutes.”

  “Eighteen minutes,” Moses corrects him, impressed that a stranger in a distant land is such an expert on a recent film of his, “if you count the two minutes I made the audience watch the table being cleared and the dishes washed.”

  “True,” proclaims the priest triumphantly, “I even remember the hesitation of the Arab waiter as he wondered whether to empty the plate into the garbage can or salvage the leftovers in a container for the poor of his village. Yet this long meal scene is within a film that is not especially long. One hundred and twenty minutes?”

  “One twenty-three,” notes the director for the record, again with a smile.

  Whereupon a young teacher, pale and handsome, raises his hand to push de Viola’s question further.

  “There is a feeling, sir, that in your latest films, the material aspect has assumed supreme importance, and not necessarily out of a new aesthetic. As if you are sanctifying the materialism of the world or succumbing to it, whether in lengthy cinematographic takes of locations and landscapes or in the physical appearances of people. You slow down movement and employ extreme close-ups to dwell on the most banal things. Sometimes the camera spends an entire minute following the gesticulation of a speaker without showing his face. Sometimes, in a long dialogue scene, we see just one of the speakers; the other we only hear. Does not such naturalistic realism smother any possibility of mystery, of rising to a higher vision? Have you permanently broken away from the strange, the absurd and grotesque, the elements that were so important and well developed in your early films?”

  Moses has heard such sentiments in his home country as well as abroad, though here the questions seem tinged by a certain antagonism. And as the English speakers finish translating for their friends, there is a murmur of general agreement, after which the room falls silent in anticipation of an answer. The director exchanges a quick glance with his companion. Trusty Ruth, her eyes sparkling, knows the answers to come. And Moses feels that despite the many years that have gone by since Trigano first introduced her to him as his friend and lover, her beauty has not faded, and it holds a clear advantage over the looks of the two chic young teachers sitting alongside her.

  For a moment Moses considers rising to his feet, to add force to his response, but the female hand placed gently on his knee keeps him in his seat.

  “Yes, ladies and gentlemen”—he smiles serenely—“I am familiar with this contention and taste its hint of bitterness. Yet in recent years I have witnessed a new phenomenon among filmgoers, especially those considered intelligent and perceptive. I have a name for this phenomenon: the Instant White-Out. People are closeted in cozy darkness; they turn off their mobile phones and willingly give themselves, for ninety minutes or two hours, to a new film that got a four-star rating in the newspaper. They follow the pictures and the plot, understand what is spoken either in the original tongue or via dubbing or subtitles, enjoy lush locations and clever scenes, and even if they find the story superficial or preposterous, it is not enough to pry them from their seats and make them leave the theater in the middle of the show.

  “But something strange happens. After a short while, a week or two, sometimes even less, the film is whitened out, erased, as if it never happened. They can’t remember its name, or who the actors were, or the plot. The movie fades into the darkness of the movie house, and what remains is at most a ticket stub left accidentally in one’s pocket. A man and a woman sit down a few days after seeing a film together and try to squeeze out a memory of a scene, the face of an actor, the twist of a plot, but they come up with nothing. The movie is erased from memory. What happened? What changed? Is it because the TV shows dancing before us on dozens of channels reduce feature films to dust in the wind?

  “Amazingly enough, live theater, no matter how weak or shallow the play, always manages to leave some impression. Of course, people don’t remember every turn of the story, and whole scenes are forgotten, but there’s something about the tangible reality of the stage or the living presence of actors that sticks in the memory for years, and like a locomotive it can pull a whole train out of the darkness. Therefore, in honor of the art of cinema, I have decided to combat forgetfulness by means of the staying power of materialism.

  “I’ll give you an example. Three years ago, I saw a Korean or Vietnamese film about a village girl who gets pregnant and is determined to have an abortion but there’s no one she can trust not to expose her shame to the community. Eventually she convinces a young boy to help her, and by primitive, life-threatening means they succeed in aborting the fetus. But while the girl is writhing in pain, the director doesn’t back off; he forces the young man to look at the dead fetus, at four or five months of development, that lies on a towel in the bathroom. At first the camera lingers on the frightened face of the boy looking at the fetus, and then the director moves the lens toward the fetus itself, and suddenly the screen is filled with a creature, smeared with blood, that appears to be not an artificial prop but the real thing, an actual fetus. The camera stays on it for twenty seconds, which seems endless. Many viewers squirmed in their seats and averted their eyes, but I decided to meet the director’s challenge, and I saw, in that bloody mass, the image of a primal man, something in the chain of evolution, that looked dimly back at me and filled me with deep sorrow but also with strange excitement.

  “The following day, I went to see the movie again, this time freed from the suspense of the plot. And when the bloody fetus on the bathroom floor again spoke to me of humanity brutally nipped in the bud, it was clear that despite the film’s simplistic story and amateurish acting, I would remember it to the end of my days. And I told myself that if I wanted a movie of mine not to be quickly erased from memory, I needed to strengthen it with something along the lines of this fetus.”

  “Fetus?” says Pilar, as she leans to whisper translation to two teachers.

  “Fetus as a symbol, a metaphor,” Ruth explains to her, knowing well both the story and its conclusion.

  “Therefore,” continues Moses, “in recent years I have been using two cameras, and even three, to explore the realm of reality in search of the fetus that can never be forgotten. First I collect available morsels of reality, rare or commonplace, and then my scriptwriters and I choose the ones that can be strung together into a story.”

  A tense silence falls among the film teachers, who try to fathom the depth of thought and technique while also eyeing the chocolate cake that has been placed in the middle of the table. Darkness deepens in the narrow windows, and for a moment Moses imagines he hears an echo of his words in the roar of a nearby ocean.

  But when the housekeeper brings the coffee, the tension lifts. The visitor looks around with a reassuring smile, as if he’d been jesting all along, and those present respond in kind. Idle conversation has begun, a packet of slim Spanish cigarillos is passed around. Moses takes one, sucks the smoke with pleasure.

  Prior to the screening, de Viola takes his guests on a quick tour of his little empire, the film archive that occupies the chilly basement of the barracks. First they visit the film lab, dominated by an old-fashioned editing table, still apparently in use, with film on its reels. Then they go to the modern editing rooms and see the big AVID computer and a row of screens. From there, they head for the up-to-date sound studio, where the dubbing is done, and then the director of the archive leads them down a narrow, chilly passageway, and on its shelves, instead of shells and bullets, are reels of old celluloid film. Before they ascend from the cellar, the host takes them for a peek at a small museum of the history of the barracks. Amid pictures on the wall of officers who killed one another in the Spanish Civil War dangle a few rusty pistols from the same era.

  “Can they still shoot?” asks Ruth.

 
; “Can they?” The priest laughs. “Maybe, but at whom? The dead are dead. And the living want to keep on living.”

  two

  Circular Therapy

  1

  THEY ARE GREETED with applause as they enter. The screening room is small, but the guest prefers a small and crowded hall to a big one half empty. Every seat is taken, and several young people are sitting on the stairs. Can it be, wonders Moses, that everyone here is a student or a teacher? But then he notices a few heavyset senior citizens in the room. It turns out that the provincial administration extended support to the retrospective on condition that the film archive set aside seats for old people from the area.

  De Viola begins with words of appreciation, and an announcement. The first two films will be shown in the small hall, but the third, The Train and the Village, will be screened in the evening in the big auditorium. As is customary, before the lights go down, the director is called upon to say a few words of introduction. Moses keeps it short, to lessen the burden of translation, not failing to mention his surprise at the decision to open the retrospective with such an early, rudimentary film, one made more than forty years ago and whose concept, let alone details, the director can barely remember. Therefore, he tells them, in everyone’s interest, it is best not to offer explanations that will turn out to be inaccurate. He also issues a warning: “Even if the film, in your opinion and also mine, turns out to be amateurish and full of holes, I will try to defend it to the best of my ability, but on condition that you will treat me with mercy.”

  Laughter ripples through the room. The priest raises his hands in a display of piety and says, “Don’t worry, even though artists are not allowed to ask for mercy for the fruit of their imagination, compassion and forgiveness are plentiful around here.” He motions to dim the lights.