The Retrospective

by A. B. Yehoshua

  The opening credits appear in Spanish, replacing the original Hebrew. The editing facility in the cellar is clearly capable of high-caliber work. The screen is flooded with glaring, undiffused Israeli sunlight as the names of the filmmakers—actors, editors, set designers—drift among old buildings of Jerusalem. The name of the scriptwriter, Shaul Trigano, tarries long on the screen, fading only as the camera focuses on a noisy old Chausson, a clunky French-made bus popular in Israel in the 1960s; it was eventually retired from service, and the chassis were used as storerooms at building sites.

  From the toxic black smoke belched by the bus emerges the name of the director, Yair Moses, also in Spanish transliteration; it is towed behind the Chausson as it pulls into the old central station. Moses is wondering if it was he who decided to stretch the screen time of his credit or if the Spanish film editor took it upon himself to immortalize the director’s name until the first passengers exit the bus.

  And now he senses that the woman who sits beside him in the dark does not recognize herself in the village girl wearing the flowered mini-dress and straw hat and clasping a cardboard suitcase to her chest as she makes her way out of the bus station. He whispers, “See what a cute dress we picked out for you,” and she seems puzzled. But then a jolt of memory prevails, and she watches her character approaching passersby, asking directions in a voice not her own in a foreign tongue, and she turns to Moses, half smiling, half panicked.

  Who would have thought that such an ancient film would be dubbed in Spanish, the Hebrew soundtrack a dim echo in the background? “What can we do about this?” he whispers to the archive director sitting to his right. “I can’t explain a film if I can’t understand a word that’s spoken.” “Of course you can,” the priest says to calm him, “it’s still your film, and even if you can’t recall the dialogue, you’ll be able to recognize the thrust of the film. And besides, my friend”—he touches the guest on the knee—“although the film you made at the beginning of your career may seem naive or primitive to you now, it nevertheless contains religious truth. It was not by accident that we chose it to open your retrospective.”

  The words religious truth put Moses oddly at ease. Yes, why not? Perhaps it’s when you skip the dialogue that forgotten details of directing and cinematography come to light. He settles comfortably into his chair and grins at Ruth, who, having recognized her youthful self, leans eagerly forward, as if to embrace it. It is now clear that owing to its flimsy plot, the film will unfold at a snail’s pace and give its heroine plenty of time to reach her destination. But walking is not easy. She keeps shifting her suitcase from hand to hand; suitcases in those days did not have wheels, and Moses insisted that suitcases carried by his characters not be empty, to heighten the authenticity of the act. Toledano’s loving camera clings to the village girl who makes her way through the divided Jerusalem of the sixties—a provincial city but content within its clear boundaries, so that even an ugly concrete wall stuck in the middle of a street to mark a border between two countries doesn’t perturb the young woman walking by, accompanied by soft music. She pauses to read the Hebrew street signs, asking directions in Spanish. Moses takes note of inventive camera angles and interesting bits of montage that offer images of Jerusalem before the Six-Day War, including streets and buildings that no longer exist and vacant sites built up in later years, like the field where the president’s house went up; it is virgin land in this old film, strewn with rocks and thistles.

  The young woman descends the steps of a stone house and rings the doorbell, and Moses is shocked to discover himself opening the door—a thin young man with wild hair, naked to the waist, a pipe in his mouth. The priest casts him an impish glance. Yes, it’s me, nods the director, who hopes, but is far from sure, that this was the only time he cast himself in a film, since the shift from one side of the camera to the other undermines his control and authority. But in this beginner’s film his acting part was small and brief, and the Spanish voice they’ve given him sounds more like yelling. He thinks of asking de Viola to tell him what he is saying, but the priest is glued to the screen, and Moses doesn’t want to break the spell.

  Yes, even without the dubbed dialogue, it’s clear that the careless young man knows the visitor on his doorstep and doesn’t deny his promise to put her up at his house. Except someone got there before her, a woman emerging now from the bedroom in a flimsy bathrobe, a tenant, a lover, and the hostile look she shoots at the newcomer stops the girl cold. Humiliation and confusion flush her face, enhancing its beauty. Which is perhaps why the young man shows signs of doubt and regret, opens the door wide for the village girl to enter, and carries her suitcase into the hallway, and it seems this will be a story about two girls in a rented apartment, competing for the kindness of a mixed-up young man. But the lodger in the skimpy robe is unwilling to share her rights. She sends the young man to get the visitor a glass of water, and when he is gone a conversation ensues between the two women, of which Moses cannot recollect a word, but whatever is said, it is strong enough to convince the guest to give up her claim, enabling the screenwriter to derail the plot from a banal story into a strange and different one, a story that will struggle to be meaningful and credible.

  Moses’ performance is not over. As penance for breaking his promise to the girl, he carries her heavy suitcase in the harsh white Jerusalem light that Toledano favored in their early days, failing to understand how many subtle and important details he was bleaching out.

  To rest his arms, the young man places the suitcase on his head, taking a few hesitant steps that suggest, at least in the mind of the director, that he regrets that the extra room in his flat was not saved for this attractive young woman but rented instead to a bony, depressive tenant. Moses is shaken at the sight of his childhood street on the Spanish screen, and of his parents’ house, with some of its furnishings removed to give the camera room to maneuver.

  “Wasn’t that your mother?” whispers Ruth as the camera slowly closes in on the woman of the house, indeed his mother, an impromptu actress in her own living room, which thanks to camera angles has never looked larger.

  In the 1960s, his mother took early retirement from public service so that her husband could be promoted into her job, and the free time tempted her to take part in her son’s directing adventure, first by reading the script and suggesting minor changes, then by persuading Moses’ father to offer their house as a filming location. In those years, the filmmakers preferred to cast amateurs, not merely to save money but also because professionals who’d been trained as stage actors were prone to theatrical excess. Perhaps out of gratitude to his mother for turning her house into a set for a dubious movie project, Moses gave her a part in the film. His mother rose to the adventure over the objections of his nervous father, and the opportunity provided by her son to become a fictional character added joy and excitement to the last years of her life.

  A long time has passed since her death, yet it pains Moses that Trigano’s script aged his mother beyond her actual years. They not only whitened her hair but also added wrinkles to her face that he is sure had never been there before. Yet she retains the wise humanity of a lonely old woman who offers shelter to a confused young woman in exchange for housework and personal services. This, as the film progresses, will prompt the old woman to evolve from a recipient of care into a caregiver, an angel of mercy for a woman more impaired than she is. Through the convolutions of the plot, that woman, despite her disabilities, will herself come to the aid of a dying man, who will assume a mission of his own and with superhuman effort postpone his death. With the remnants of his strength he will drag himself at night to a shabby cafeteria in the empty bus station, not to sip the last drink of his life, but to lift the spirits of the village girl who had come to the capital filled with hope and who now waits for the first bus to get her out of there.

  For this was Trigano’s vision: everyone who receives therapeutic care can and must become a caregiver. And as this simplistic, seemingly
unfounded idea circles in scenic waves of black and white, crafted long ago by a young director, the original title of the film flashes in Moses’ memory, and he whispers it to his companion.

  2

  THE FILM’S DIRECTOR sits in the last row, with de Viola beside him in the aisle seat; this way it won’t be hard for him to get to the stage at the end of the screening. Meanwhile, his heart beats faster at the sight of his mother, her voice faintly audible under the Spanish dubbing. She is giving instructions to the new lodger, who unpacks her suitcase in Moses’ childhood room and emerges in a lightweight shirt and shorts from a bygone era—very short and baggy, with an elastic waistband. She had arrived in Jerusalem only an hour ago, at the invitation of a young man who raised her hopes, and now, weary and dejected, she wields a mop and pail in the home of a sick old lady.

  The two converse incomprehensibly, and the director notes that even at the dawn of his career, he could create a natural flow of dialogue. The Spanish dubbing is so sophisticated that it almost seems not to be the work of actors in a sound studio but that the Israelis had been hypnotized to speak another language. No wonder the audience feels at home with the foreign characters, and little Jerusalem, in the black-and-white of the 1960s, is perceived in the province of Galicia as a familiar and likable city.

  Moses recalls that this early film was awarded a prize by the city of Jerusalem, but the prize didn’t help draw an audience, and after two weeks in the theater, it had to cede its place to a hard-hitting action movie. His father, who was distressed to see his wife as an actress, even more so to see her as an old lady with white hair, was unabashedly delighted that the film was no longer playing, but his mother was upset that not everyone she knew had seen her. She, who never shied from self-criticism, had become a fan of her fictional character, and repeatedly praised her son for the quality of his direction, perhaps to hint she was ready for another role.

  Even had he wanted to find her another part in later films, it was not possible. Two years after the filming, his mother was diagnosed with the illness that forced her to struggle in reality and not just in the imagination of a writer or director. And now, in the small screening room of a former military barracks, as he watches her resurrection of sorts, so long after her death—a brief resurrection, since she is present in the film only through the first half—he cannot contain himself, and in a whisper he turns to the priest on his right: “There, that one . . . the old woman, she was my mother.” The director of the archive already knows—someone has told him, or he figured it out from the names of the actors—and he smiles and nods with approval at the audacious choice, and redirects Moses’ attention to a strange silhouette that appears on the right side of the screen—a flaw that escaped the film’s editor. A character unconnected to the plot is there, behind a curtain, and the cameraman did not notice the invader of the frame. Only after the film’s conversion to a sharper digital format is his father revealed, hiding behind the curtain to make sure that even as a film director, his son took pains to honor his mother.

  “You really don’t remember what you talked about?” Moses quietly challenges his companion, who is fascinated by what she is saying, even if she doesn’t understand a word. Indeed, how quickly dialogue is erased from memory, and only random images remain, such as the young lodger leaning gracefully on a broom handle, her bare foot carelessly brushing its bristles. Moses wonders if it was inexperience that led him in his early days as director to depend excessively on the power of spoken language, unfazed by the likelihood that overlong dialogue with no action would tire viewers and sap their empathy. Nonetheless, all around him are foreigners sitting attentively, murmuring pleasure, without the slightest idea where the plot will take them.

  “You really don’t remember what you said to her?” Moses persists in asking the actress, whose eyes sadly glisten, longing for lost youth. She shrugs, for she has acted in so many films and spoken so much dialogue, she says, who can remember. And yet, there is something she does recall. “In a minute you’ll see how I cook a meal for this old woman, also known as your mother. That’s what I do remember from this pitiful movie.”

  Here, then, is the lodger in the kitchen, cutting vegetables, slicing bread, frying an egg, which looks like a goldfish, owing to an error in lighting. Can it be, thinks Moses with a chuckle, that he already had the yen to poke the camera into pots and pans, or was it the cinematographer’s idea?

  The film unfolds at a sluggish pace, promising no dramatic developments yet able to sustain tension in the small hall. Is it the absence of the promise that commands continued attention? The old woman, listless and frail, eats the meal with trembling hands. When she drops her fork, she is too feeble to retrieve it from the floor, and the girl has to pick it up and rinse it off. This does not seem to be temporary weakness, and yet, after the young lodger clears the table, washes the dishes, and gets permission from the landlady to go to her room—where for a sweet second of screen time she appears in the nude—a metamorphosis takes place in the living room. The landlady rises energetically from her armchair, changes her clothes, puts on makeup, takes a basket and a cane, and, in keeping with Trigano’s vision, switches from suffering invalid to efficient caregiver. She makes her way through a crowded market, a slow-moving yet confident old woman, tracked with deep respect by the camera. She walks purposefully from stall to stall, bargaining with vendors and selecting bread, eggs, and vegetables, even a cut of red meat, and then she heads down a lonesome alley to an old house. She climbs narrow winding stairs to a peeling door with no name, a door that admits her again into that same house, his parents’ house, a place only Moses can identify, for through the skills of the cinematographer and set designer it has now become a different house, with no courtyard or garden, a dingy and neglected house with broken furniture and torn rugs, the residence of a big-boned woman confined to a wheelchair, waiting for help.

  “Matilda . . . I can’t believe it!” Ruth laughs.

  And the laughter extends, like a fishing line, into the well of time, and out comes a colorful, almost mythological character of indeterminate age and identity, a distant relative of Trigano’s, also imported from that immigrant town in the desert, who turned out to be a natural comedienne. Moses’ mother, a refined and cultured old woman, approaches her tentatively and carefully lays the basket of groceries in front of her rickety wheelchair, apparently on loan from a nearby old-age home, and in the dark hall the filmmaker hangs his head with embarrassment over what he has created, though after many years of experience in gauging audience reactions, he can see that his message, puerile but humane, retains its grip.

  Not in a sudden recollection but simply by looking at the flow of images on the screen, he discovers that as a fledgling director, faithful to the script, he did not spare his mother the indignity of feeding the invalid and cleaning her, washing her underwear in the sink, and there is no way of knowing if these actions were in the script or added by the director’s inspiration. And perhaps also because he doesn’t understand a word of the dialogue that flows cheerfully between his mother and the woman in her care, his eyes mist over and he chokes up; it is hard to bear his mother’s humiliation. And like his father, who did not survive long after the death of his wife, he feels great compassion for the ghost of his mother, who plays her role with such devotion, and he rises from his seat. I’ll be right back, he reassures the director of the archive, and hurries for the exit.

  The long corridor of the barracks is filled with the shadows of the short winter’s day, but since Moses had made a mental note of the men’s room door, he locates it easily in the faint light. He rinses his face and closets himself in a stall and, after emptying his bladder, sits on the lid of the toilet to weigh his options for this strange retrospective of old films that speak a foreign tongue. Was the promise of a small cash prize, to be awarded at the end of the retrospective, meant to mollify him? Though, really, why be upset? After all, he is not here to represent only his own work, but also the spirit
of his nation’s rebirth. And Santiago is a city with an important cathedral. The hotel is opulent, the breakfast generous, and so far his companion is not unhappy. And even if the early films were based on the ideas of a young, opinionated, and unrealistic scriptwriter and are far from a full expression of Moses’ professional growth as demonstrated concretely over the years, he can defend them, provided he can still discern their intention.

  He looks at his watch. His mother will soon complete her role, and her departure from the screen will alleviate the remorse of the merciless director. He returns to the hall; the audience is still caught up in the film. He slides carefully past de Viola, who gazes with amused wonder at the Matilda character, now begging the elderly caregiver not to leave her, but his mother covers the huge invalid with a blanket, and before exiting, to relieve the emptiness, she turns on the radio, and an old marching song resounds in the small hall of the former military barracks.

  It’s a good thing that the Spaniards did not try to dub the words of the song, thinks Moses, for if they had, it’s doubtful Matilda could have mustered the strength to switch from invalid to caregiver. But empowered by the Hebrew marching song, still wedged in her wheelchair, she wheels herself with astounding expertise toward her own patient as the film shuns the rational choreography of people and objects. By means of clever cutting, the wheelchair moves as in a dream, along streets and stairs and courtyards to a country cottage, again his parents’ house, but this time the tiny residence of a dying man.

  “Who was that?” Moses nudges Ruth, still delighted by the sight of Matilda. Ruth shrugs, unable to identify the actor with an oxygen mask on his white bloodless face, a jungle of intravenous bags hanging round his bed, tubes and needles feeding various regions of his body, and a microphone hidden among the IV drips that transmits groans and complaints in Spanish. But who is it? Moses shuts his eyes in the hope of teasing out the truth from behind the dubbing, the makeup, and the accoutrements of illness that fill the screen. For a tiny moment he suspects that it is he himself who, having no alternative, performed an additional role in his film. But surely he hadn’t brazenly misled the audience, turning the muscular young man who had earlier greeted the village girl into a mortally ill patient lying in bed in a white hospital gown. Surprisingly, despite the scary and depressing appearance of the dying man, a few giggles are audible from the audience. Perhaps this is because the big woman, expertly maneuvering her wheelchair, has transformed her passivity as a patient into the hyperactivity of an industrious caregiver. Or maybe the original text was not just dubbed in Spanish, but altered? In any event, it would seem that hidden comic elements, embedded in the script and direction, have improved with the passage of time, and a gloomy moral drama has turned on foreign soil into farcical entertainment.