Four months later, he was on a train heading for Siberia. A foreign parasite, he was sentenced to eight years’ hard labour in a prison camp. His job in the workers’ paradise was to build railway tracks.
The women in the camp over the fence tried to entice the men across. They offered them inducements for sex. They stood at their glassless windows, lifted their smocks and exposed their breasts.
‘They promised us food,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘They stood at the windows with their smocks lifted up. They masturbated with salt stuffed into a sock.’
The shocking thing to Spencer is not the image of lascivious women standing at windows with their smocks lifted above their breasts, the Siberian cold howling at them as they masturbated with socks filled with salt, or that Spencer’s father could recollect the moment, and the image, and the emotion, and the language to describe it, but that he was even talking about the subject. Both of Spencer’s parents were, in their different ways, prudes. They did not generally speak about any subject that was unseemly.
Sitting in the Sports Book talking about sex and Siberia, watching a bowl of cereal being delivered by a waitress of Spencer’s age dressed as a Roman slave girl, Spencer realises that he is scratching the skin of his ankle beneath his sock and abruptly stops doing so. Even if the casino allowed filming to take place, which he doubts—casinos are as notoriously coy as latrophobes about showing their insides—Spencer would not want anything he made to look as uninspired and cold as a Cinema Praxis documentary.
‘A cinema audience,’ Spencer says, ‘wants, in fact it deserves, some spectacle. It’s a perversity not to give it.’
‘Sure,’ his father says.
‘The now, that’s something films can do. Make something happen in the now. And if we’re honest with ourselves, most of our favourite films have someone we fancy in them, erotic pull, that’s what movies are good for. The audience knows what rooms look like, they spend most of their time in them. Life’s got enough boredom in it without film-makers inflicting more.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘So it’s lack of imagination and generosity masquerading as some bogus kind of authenticity to inflict so-called naturalism on them. But at the same time we can’t have an enactment. That would be the worst kind of schlock, sepia-stained footage of over-enthusiastic actresses doing grimy stuff with socks. That’s how you become Ken Russell or Lina Wertmuller.’
His father has eaten as much of his cereal as he is able. He pushes the bowl away, watches with little interest the swirl of milk lapping up against the sides.
‘You know what I mean? Real guignol stuff. Orgasmic expressions, shots of thighs beaded with sweat, vulvas through the bars, pan around to the solitary prisoner standing in the snow, empty food bowl forgotten in his hand, gazing upon the spectacle not even with longing, just looking into something that he has lost, something that used to make him a man.
‘I mean, it’s impossible isn’t it? A film can’t do that, it doesn’t know how to show pain, it just becomes picturesque. What we want is the audience to feel what you felt—at least with you talking, here, now, we get some sense of who you are even if we’ll never get hold of the person you used to be.’
‘Sorry about that,’ his father says quite cheerily.
‘It’s OK. It’s not your fault,’ Spencer says.
Briefly he wonders what his father might be apologising for and why he is so reflexively quick to forgive. He wonders too why he is so ready to cover up with noise moments when things might be revealed.
‘I’m a victim of my times,’ he tells his father. ‘Nothing as dramatic as what happened to you. But just the same a Zeitgeist blew through us both. You had a brutal scarred Europe, fascism, dictators, death camps, and I had…You know, you’ll find this funny. I not only used to think that cinema can change lives, I also thought that it could tell the truth. Or at least reveal it. Do you remember…?’
‘Remember what?’ his father says.
It could be Warsaw or Siberia or Monte Cassino, or what it was like to be suddenly demobbed in Cardiff in 1946, or looking for your family in Italian Displaced Persons Camps in 1945, only to find that all of them were dead, or why you were such a bad husband to my mother and a bad father to me. And do you remember telling me once that you would have met my mother anyway, without war or the intercession of history? That it was meant to be, two Polish-Jewish families, a rebellious son, a wistful daughter, they would have found each other…And do you remember why you said this? Was it an expression of romance or just trying to make Spencer feel good about something, maybe even himself; was it just like the time you pretended to believe in God for the benefit of your son, believing that a father’s influence should be allowed to go just so far and that there were some things a man must decide for himself? And do you remember the person you used to be?
And do you remember what it was like when you won your first case?—there’s a photo of you, presumably taken by Spencer’s mother, outside the courthouse, and there’s no triumph in your face, just impatience, either for the next, bigger case to begin, or for the rendezvous with the cute stenographer in the bar around the corner, or for the photograph-taking to be over.
It is the worst kind of weakness. Sit with an old person, smooth the blanket across their knees and ask them to remember. Of course they remember. Just as it is safe to ask anyone upper-class about their family and sit back and let the anecdotes come, you can ask an old person to dribble out some memory. And they will tell you a story from the War or the factory or about someone they used to know, who might be, as far as the listener can tell, an old friend or a politician or television star or someone glimpsed one day through a train carriage window.
The old are becakked with memory, they spill out the stuff incontinently, which is maybe why Spencer despises flashback. That is not what is important, this is what is important. This thing we are making together, the squeezing together of the old gentleman’s hands, the look on the girl’s face, the shape of her neck, the sun’s reflection on the windows of a black glass building, that movement you make towards me, these are the beautiful things. They are more or less worthless if you can only understand them with backstory.
There are things that Spencer would like to know. Some of them might even be meaningful. And Spencer believes that there are stories that should not die, that should pass down the generations with a greater intrinsic value than money. But Spencer and his father exist in the now. If his father is to persist in time, if the two of them are going to perform anything valuable together, then it is the now they are pursuing, not some finished then.
It is go-kart racing, blackjack in the Wild West, not memories of Siberia.
Death by food in the buffet. Taking the all-you-can-eat dare.
His father looks at the empty place on his wrist where his watch used to be.
‘Well, it’s been nice,’ he says, pushing at the table to get his unsteady body to rise.
Chapter Six
Spencer’s interview is imminent. The journalist, who has a sweet fresh voice that makes Spencer think of drum majorettes, Tuesday Weld, of girls in 1960s movies who wear white patent-leather boots and miniskirts, calls Spencer’s room from the lobby.
‘The festival has a room for interviews, but I can come up,’ she says. ‘Whichever is best for you.’
Spencer takes a quick look around the room, its disshevelled state, which mirrors his own, the plastic bags from the casino shop, the rumble and hiss of his father’s oxygen machine, boxing on the TV, tissues on the floor, and his father, who sits on the edge of his unmade bed in baggy white briefs and high black socks, his stomach pulling out and in with each laboured breath.
‘I’ll come down. It’s probably easier,’ Spencer says.
His father ignores him, which he usually does when there is boxing to watch. Spencer stands for a moment in front of the bathroom mirror, pats down his hair, smooths down his T-shirt, puts on his jacket, double-checks he has the room key. He f
eels light and nervous, as if for a date.
But when Spencer leaves the room, his father tags along too, wearing just his underpants and socks.
‘Where are we going?’ he asks.
‘I’ve got an interview. And you’re going nowhere looking like that.’
He dresses his father, feels an unrequired lurch of sympathy for his stepmother while doing so. And together they make their way down to the elevator and the lobby.
Tuesday Weld is not waiting for him. The woman who approaches them is inside a shapeless black T-shirt and baggy black jeans that Spencer tries not to recognise as a variant of his own dress code. She wears large glasses and carries two handfuls of plastic bags—the Bongo African Grocery, Boom Supermarket, the United Adult Book Store.
She tries to offer him a hand to shake through the jumble of her bags.
‘I’m Jenny De Soto. From Film Culture!
‘Spencer Ludwig. From London.’
‘And is this…?’
‘No,’ Spencer wearily says. ‘It’s not a leading Albanian filmmaker. It’s—’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. I was going to say, is this your father?’
‘It is actually. Jenny De Soto, Jimmy Ludwig. Dad, this lady is from a magazine.’
Nervously, Spencer awaits the expression of disdain that his father inevitably displays when meeting an unkempt female. For poor people, Spencer’s father has a little sympathy, because he was once poor himself. Women who eschew any attempt at glamour he finds distasteful, as if they have chosen to wear their lack of moral value on their bodies. In this case, though, perhaps out of loyalty to the situation, however he understands it, and to Spencer, he puts on his old-world charm, which most women, even intelligent ones, find peculiarly affecting. ‘It’s delightful to meet you,’ he says.
‘And you, sir. There’s something so much alike about the two of you. It’s a pleasure to meet you both. Shall we set up? There’s a room set aside.’
‘Let me just dispose of my father. So to speak.’
Spencer gives his father $110 from his poker winnings and steers him past the slot machines to the $5 minimum blackjack table. His father docilely sits down, exchanges the money, and before Spencer can witness what happens to the entire stack of chips that his father confidently slides on to his betting box, he demands from him the promise that he won’t move from this area, and returns to the lobby to follow Jenny De Soto to the film festival interview room.
‘Your father’s delightful,’ she says as she extricates cassette recorder and notebook and two pens (biros, one black, one blue) from three different bags.
‘Is he? Thank you. I haven’t seen one of those for a while.’
‘The tape machine? It works.’
‘I’m sure it does. I’m sorry, I hadn’t meant to…’
He is taking the wrong tone. If he were Rick Violet, or even his father, he would be charming his interviewer, making her feel as if she were the only woman in his world.
She picks up her pens with the delicacy that some overweight people possess and holds them out for him to see.
‘You remember…?’ she says.
His mind is blank. She is referring to something specific here, something she wants to be shared. ‘Gold Treatment’ she says to prompt him. ‘Oh. Yes. Sorry. Very good.’
In that film, an early short, the main character, an architect who refuses to make the compromise of constructing a building, has a fetish for Bic biros.
‘It’s probably that I’m not used to being interviewed by someone who is actually familiar with my work,’ he says. ‘Oh I can’t believe that!’
She admires his films, she knows them very well, and as the conversation goes on, the claims she makes for his work are just what he would hope for an ideal audience to apprehend. He should not judge her; he is no oil painting himself, so why shouldn’t a bulky woman with supermarket bags be his audience angel?
‘Your films are numinous.’
‘Luminous?
‘Numinous.’
‘Numerous?’
‘Numinous.’
‘Oh.’
It is one of those words that he has learned and then forgotten again; he vaguely supposes it to refer to something religious but he isn’t sure what.
‘Uh. Thank you,’ he says.
‘What are your plans?’
‘To make some money.’
He has disappointed her.
‘But…?! If you wanted to make money, if you wanted to sell out, then you could have done that years ago.’ ‘I could?’
‘With your gifts you could have turned your hand to anything. It’s obvious. Look. For example, you say here…’ She rummages in her bags, pulls out snatches of paper, which she glances over, stuffs back in again. ‘…well somewhere, I read an interview where you said you would never make a commercial. We think that’s wonderful.’
‘We?’
‘Your fans.’
He does not think of himself as having fans. His world doesn’t allow for the notion of consequence. Each time he embarks on a film, he is making a film for the very first time to an entirely new audience.
‘But,’ she says, and she rubs her face quite hard as if she has to punish herself for her temerity in beginning a question with a possible objection. ‘But.’
‘But what?’ he asks, feeling playful.
‘But. About the, you know, well, it. I was surprised. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with it, per se, but given what you’d said and so forth and therefore, and…’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand what you’re asking.’
‘OK. OK. That’s OK. Let’s move on. Who do you make your films for?’
‘Me, I suppose.’
‘Isn’t that kind of selfish?’
‘I don’t mean it quite like that. In a way, the films I make are the films I would like to see. So it’s not like I have some ideal audience in mind, the little lady in Ongar or anything like that. They have to stand for something, they have to be new, they have to be the sort of thing that I would want to see, that I’ve never seen.’
‘That’s wonderful.’
‘Is it?’
‘It’s exactly what I would have hoped you’d say. Well not exactly, because I wouldn’t have found the right language for the idea if you know what I mean.’
Does what he is saying actually accord to the truth or just to the overgenerous conceptions she has of him?—or could he just tell her anything and she would incorporate it into the dreams she has for him and his work and therefore, presumably, herself?
‘And who do you admire?’
‘You mean directors? The usual suspects, Dreyer, Nick Ray, Fassbinder and Bresson of course, John Ford. Bertolucci before he stopped being a Marxist. Buñuel, except I’ve always thought there was something fishy about him. But I think what we need to realise is that it’s the work that’s important, not who made it. Trust the song, not the singer, you know what I mean? So we can love Simon of the Desert or The Conformist or In a Lonely Place without having to bother about what Buñuel’s relationship to religion was or Bertolucci’s aestheticisation of revolution or how cruel and fucked-up a man Nicholas Ray was.’
Give Spencer Ludwig a rapt appreciative audience and he becomes loquacious. His thought processes achieve a suppleness and fluidity. His sentences become prose. For a moment, in her appreciation of him, in what it enables him to be, she becomes beautiful.
‘Well yes. Uh huh. OK. I get it. But I was really thinking more of people working in the present day. Almodóvar, for example. Dee Selby. And Rick Violet, of course.’
And how his spirits sink.
‘Why of course?’
‘Well. Just. I don’t know, you know. Rick Violet.’
All roads lead to Rick Violet. It would not surprise him to walk out of this room and see a hundred-foot poster advertising Rick Violet, to step outside into the Boardwalk chill and find it has been renamed Violet Way.
‘To be honest—and this goes a
gainst what I’ve just been saying—but I went off him a bit after his conviction.’
‘Conviction?’
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned that. Let’s get back to your question.’
‘Conviction? Are you talking about a criminal conviction?’
‘No no, let’s forget about it. He’s hushed it up very successfully and I shouldn’t have mentioned it, it’s bad of me.’
Worse than she can possibly know, this casual action of petty vindictive malice.
‘I’m very surprised. I mean, we’ve heard rumours, but…’
‘No. I’m sorry. It’s awful of me to mention it. Let’s talk about contemporary film directors. Remind me again what you wanted to know. Dee Selby, yes, is very good. I’m a big fan of her work.’
She is flustered again, as she had been at the beginning, before he had put her at her ease, or, more accurately, before they had found an accord in each other’s company.
In his left jacket pocket are the messages from Michelle that Dwight has given him. Each is more beseeching than the last, and each would deliver a promise should he have chosen to receive it. He has glanced at numbers with zeros, multiple exclamation marks, and the words Please and SPENCER! and You can and They will before crumpling them up and adding them to his pocket, which now bulges with the irregular paper balls of Michelle’s entreaties.
Perhaps this is the time to read them, spread them out on the table, push Jenny De Soto’s cassette recorder to one side, smooth out the pages, the Horseshoe crest of, he cannot think why, a flower and a sword, Dwight’s neatly printed writing, Please call, there is, he has, they want… and he might read them now.
‘Would you like me to take you on a tour of the town? You could bring your father.’
For the first time since they embarked upon this trip, he has forgotten about his father. Even playing poker the night before, an occupation that usually obliterates the world, shrinking existence to a narrow arena of felt, the gold watch on his wrist had kept his father close; and during the night his dreams had been full of the image of his father, as they had used to be when he was young and wanted from his night, like every other male adolescent, to dream of adventures and loose women.
A Film by Spencer Ludwig Page 11
