The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  Somehow, Leo had managed to find accommodation for all of us, but in separate hotels scattered about the town. We went to work straightaway on establishing shots, clearing streets of modern accouterments, hiring locals as extras. For two enchanting days we sailed the small lake in a jolly saloon steamer, with its own restaurant, filming the gently sloping orchards and meadows on the shore and the careless mountains above. The setting, the weather and the clean air all had a suitable Rousseauistic effect on us. That first visit to Annecy was the happiest filming experience of my life. We worked in harmony and with a curious serene efficiency. I was able to send reassuring cables to Aram/Eddie in Berlin. All was well—except for me.

  Rousseau had fled from his unhappy apprenticeship in Geneva (we were to film this later) and gone to Savoy—then an independent duchy and a frequent sanctuary for exiles and apostates from Calvinism, who were received with sacred glee by proselytizing priests as political converts to Catholicism. Initially an old curé entertained the young Jean Jacques for a few days and then sent him on to Annecy with a letter of introduction to a Swiss baroness, herself a recent convert, who often gave shelter and succor to Protestant refugees.

  We had some trouble with Karl-Heinz, who patently did not look sixteen. We provided him with a longish dark wig—shoulder length—with a rough fringe, and this made him look strangely but suitably boyish. Annecy, in 1728, was a kind of convert center—busy and vital, well populated by exiles and attendant nuns and priests. That street scene twenty minutes into the film was one of my best-ever manipulations of a crowd and the first in which I used a mobile camera to its full effect. I had a camera and tripod bolted to a small wheeled cart, which was pulled by a couple of strong lads. We start the scene in close-up on the clashing bells of a church tower, pull back and pan down to Jean Jacques’s face looking up at them. Then the camera begins to move away and we see him push uncertainly through the throng of urchins, citizens, priests, soldiers and nuns. The camera appears to move effortlessly through the crisscrossing bodies, as if it were an invisible presence, then weaves sinuously through the arcades as Jean Jacques, clutching his letter of introduction, makes his hesitant way towards the “terrifying audience” with Mme. de Warens.

  It took me five days to shoot this scene. I admit I prolonged it unduly in order to delay and heighten Doon’s first appearance in the film, but the crew were used by now to my near-fanatical desire for perfection and no one guessed at my real motive. I had extras recostumed, buildings repainted. I even moved a line of six cypress trees fifty yards along the skyline to aid the composition of a single shot. But finally I could postpone it no longer—Doon herself was growing impatient. We had been two weeks in Annecy and she had done nothing but rehearse.

  We had discovered a spot almost identical to the site of Mme. de Warens’s original house (later demolished, would you believe, to make room for a new police commissariat!). In his Confessions, Jean Jacques relates how he called on her there only to be informed that she had just left for mass. She had a private door into the nearby church, which she reached by a small passageway, bounded on one side by a garden wall and on the other by a stream. It was here that Jean Jacques caught up with her just as she was about to enter the church. He called her name, she turned and—as he puts it—“in that moment I was hers.”

  I did not sleep the night before we were due to film the scene. How to encapsulate that instant, those boiling, tremulous seconds when your love detonates for another person? I thought back, naturally, to that meeting in the Metropol bar in Berlin. How banal, how humdrum the setting—an empty cocktail bar in a fancy hotel! How doltishly inept my first words.… How could I invest the meeting of Jean Jacques and his Maman with everything I felt for Doon? There was no possibility of doing so, of course. Music would help; so would my editing of the images and the veracity of the expressions on the actors’ faces. I even had my own lens: the Todd Soft-Focus Lens—a lanolin gel of exceptional clarity held between two plates of glass, which did not cloud or blur so much as give faces a luminous powdery beauty. (I took the precaution of patenting this in both Europe and the U.S.A.: royalties from it later provided a vital financial mainstay.) With luck and hard work we could make it look wonderful, but I could never reproduce my emotions.

  Baroness Mme, de Warens. Louise Éléonore. No authenticated portraits exist, but she comes to life in Jean Jacques’s loving description. She was twenty-eight years old when they met. He was sixteen. She had abandoned home and husband for the Catholic religion, but in her life religious devotion and erotic yearnings often overlapped. She was an efficent proselytizer. Significantly, her converts were all young men who lived in her apartments as they underwent instruction. “She had a caressing and tender air,” Jean Jacques says, “a very soft gaze, an angelic smile and plentiful ash-blonde hair of exceptional beauty worn in a casual unaffected negligence that increased her attraction. She was small in stature and a little plump, but it would be impossible to find a lovelier head or more beautiful bosom, or more graceful hands and arms.”

  Doon’s height was inaccurate, but I felt the hair was a remarkable coincidence. Her hair was longer now than it had been in Julie, but we had several wigs made in the casual style described by Rousseau and in them she looked incredibly beguiling. I dressed her in a jade-green gown, quite décolleté, with a transparent silk scarf thrown across her throat and cleavage. Whether anyone would have gone to church like that in 1728 I did not know or care—the realism I sought here was emotional and not to do with any pedantic accuracy of historical costume.

  We filmed the meeting scene in the late afternoon when the light was soft and glowing and the shadows long. Technical problems managed to distract me from my own breathless emotions, though I still felt, throughout the entire day, that someone had wedged a matchbox down my throat, I kept massaging my windpipe, coughing and gulping air. At one moment I took the place of my cameraman—Horst Immelman—behind the camera. I reserved for myself the shooting of Doon’s close-ups as she reacted to Jean Jacques’s call … Doon’s face as she turned to gaze into the lens: piety—shading to surprise, to stirring curiosity. It was almost too much for me to bear. The pure curve of her jaw, neck and throat set against the dark grain of the iron-studded church door was a masterful, tense counterposition. The sheen of translucent silk over her round shadowed breasts, their barely perceptible heave and subsidence as she breathed, the subtle shifts of their pale contours, represented the very apex of discreet but fervent emotion. And then I made her walk towards Jean Jacques. Her full length was held in the frame of the lens as the camera retreated before her on its trundling dolly. I sat behind it—protected by it—and watched that particular stalking stride, and I was back that day in the Metropol Hotel as she came towards me across the thick carpets and the glossy parquet, through the groups of leather armchairs, her thighs brushing their round backs as she weaved by. Her long, muscled swimmer’s legs. Those curious, endearing, slightly splayed, slightly too large feet in their impossible dancer’s shoes …

  Do I sound delirious? Do I sound overwhelmed, engrossed, utterly trammeled up? Do I sound in love? I called “Cut” somehow and gave orders to wrap up for the day, despite the fact we had scheduled Karl-Heinz’s close-ups. The crew mutely complied. I left the scene. I had to get away. Wordless, trembling, I went down to the lake, glorious in the evening light, and spontaneously boarded one of the neat steamers that left hourly for a tour of the small summer resorts on the lakeshore. I got off at Menthon-St.-Bernard and sat on the terrace of the Pension des Glaïeuls, staring emptily at the darkening view and, steadily over the next four hours, drank three bottles of wine and numerous Cognacs. I paid a small fortune to a yokel who owned a motorcar to drive me back to Annecy. After numerous minor breakdowns and a wrong turning, we arrived there well after midnight.

  I went straight to Doon’s suite and knocked several times before she answered the door. I had clearly woken her up.

  “Jamie? What the hell’s going on?” />
  “I had to say, that this afternoon you were … it was stunning.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  She wore a child’s flannel nightdress, white, printed with small blue flowers, ankle length. I swayed; she put a hand out to steady me. It was all the invitation I needed.

  We made love that night, though I have only Doon’s word for it. I remember nothing, a rank alcoholic amnesia depriving me of all memories beyond that image of her nightgown. Doon said later that I “came in a second.” I suppose it was a fittingly impulsive coda to an impulsive day.

  I woke early the next morning, naked, in Doon’s big double bed. My head pulsed and hummed like a dynamo. I imagined my temples bulging and retracting horribly, like the throats on certain tropical frogs when they croak, or rut, or claim territorial precedence or whatever they do. Then Doon came in from the sitting room with a wide rattling, clinking tray of breakfast, which she sat down on the bed by my feet. Then she cruelly threw back the curtains and my eyeballs seemed to shrivel as if a jet of lemon juice had hit them. With my eyes shut I felt her open the windows. A breeze.

  “Lovely day,” she said. “Morning.”

  She pecked me on the cheek. “Who tied one on last night, then?” She smiled. She seemed to be in a good mood.

  Slowly, very slowly, I was taking in the implications of our circumstances. She sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed. She still wore her nightgown (bluebirds, not flowers), its skirt stretched, a drumskin, between her knees. She poured me coffee. I took the cup and noisily set it down on my chest, its comforting warmth soon penetrating the intervening sheet. She lit a cigarette for me and handed it over.

  I took a few sips of my coffee, a cautious puff on my cigarette. I found my voice.

  “Doon, I—”

  “Don’t talk,” she said. “You don’t need to say anything.” She shifted her position, rested her weight on one elbow, sipped at her own coffee or tea. A breast bulged heavily against the flannelette of her nightdress. Her ivory-blond hair was untidy. She looked at me across the small steaming crater of her cup.

  “You were nice last night,” she said. “You came in a second, but you were nice.”

  Her lips were wet. She reached back behind her for a plate, which she filled with toast, butter, a honey pot, a knife. Her breasts shifted, flattened and fell with her movements. I gulped my coffee, felt its hot horizontal progress to my gut. I clenched my buttocks against the rumpled cotton of the sheet. I rubbed the back of my head very slowly to and fro on the pillow. Heard the hairs on my head grate against each other. Doon’s knee—blunt, bony—appeared beneath the hem of her nightdress. Knife scrape on toast. Textures everywhere, suddenly.

  “You can’t remember,” she said.

  “I can. I meant—mean—every word.”

  She bit. Shkrnch. Palp of a finger on a crumb at her lips’ corner. She unscrewed the lid on the honey jar. Milled metal on milled glass. Clear honey. Liquid sun in this warm light. Sun glanced off her knife. Those rays—photons, Hamish called them—from sun across curved solar space to this angled blade to my phobic retina. Outside, the blue lake and the mountains …

  “What did you say, then?”

  I felt my swelling cock roll across my thigh.

  “Well?”

  The tented sheet at my groin sagged, rose.

  “Come on.”

  I lifted my coffee cup from my chest, a preliminary move to setting it down on the bedside table, but before I could do so Doon had reached forward and flipped the sheet back.

  “Mmm. What have we here?” Her grip closed firm about its base.

  I was in the middle of the big bed. My right arm, extended, holding the coffee cup and saucer was six inches short of the right bedside table. My cigarette was in my left hand. I had to put that cup down. I transferred it, urgently to my left hand with some rattling and slopping. Four inches short. I felt pinioned, immobilized. Arms spread, crucified, pegged down. Doon’s hand on the stake that held me fast.

  “Doon!” I said weakly. She was doing something with her knife.

  The honey was cool, surprisingly—it always looks warm, like something molten, but it was cool. I watched her spread it. It ran thickly down the ridges of her knuckles and pooled, gleamy, in the hairs on my groin. My left leg twitched, my back arched.

  “Doon, Christ …” Feebly, as if succumbing to an anesthetic. The coolness shifted quickly up through the heat spectrum, warming.

  She looked at me as she did it, cheeks hollowed, eyes candid and lively. Full of fun. I could not meet that gaze for long. I lay back. The pressure grew. The cigarette fell and rolled off the bed. Then, soon after, the coffee went with a clatter, spilling, soaking into the sheets.

  God alone knows what the chambermaids thought when they saw that ruined bed later that morning, covered in honey trails, toast crumbs, coffee stains and a cigarette burn. My foot at the moment of climax kicked the tray awash with Doon’s verbena infusion, sent knives sliding, tipped out plates’ contents. It was only later, that evening, when I saw the immaculate plateau of the remade bed, that I remarked on it to Doon. She laughed. “God, you’re a messy bastard,” she said. She reassured me. Chambermaids have seen it all, she said; they’re like nurses, nothing shocks them.

  During the filming at Annecy we slept together every night. When we moved to Chambéry in October, Doon returned to Berlin for ten days. She was not required, she said, and I had a lot of work to catch up on. She was right—we were at least two weeks behind schedule. I asked her not to see Mavrocordato when she was in Berlin. She told me not to be stupid.

  She left and the weather changed: squalling rain and snow showers, which made us even slower. When she came back we managed some scenes at the Les Charmettes farmhouse and also shot the celebrated summer house episode.

  Time has passed and Rousseau is now twenty-one, earning his living as a music teacher in Chambéry, where Mme. de Warens has moved her household. An attractive young man, he is proving rather too alluring to the mothers of the young girls he teaches. It can only be a matter of time before he is seduced. Mme. de Warens decides to act herself. The moment occurs, or rather the option is mooted, in a summer house set in a herb garden that Mme. de Warens owns. Rousseau works in this summer house regularly and in fine weather he and Mme. de Warens dine there. One evening, after dinner, Mme. de Warens suggests quite openly to him that it is time he lost his virginity and proposes that she be his partner in the enterprise. In a tone of high seriousness she gives him eight days to reflect on the proposition, which delay Rousseau, somewhat shocked, eagerly accepts. Eight days later in the little summer house, sexual congress takes place.

  I had an identical summer house built in a suitable walled garden. Some mornings we spent hours sweeping the fresh snow from the pathways and lawns, re-creating sunlight with our powerful arc lights. It was an important scene—both bizarre and comic—and a key to Mme. de Warens’s own compromised sexual nature that would have special bearing on Part I’s conclusion.

  I felt strange directing Karl-Heinz and Doon in a love scene. I intended to fade out on the first kiss to an exterior of the summer house, the panes of glass suddenly opaque and golden with flashing sunlight. The caption I had written was taken directly from the book: “Was I happy? No. I had tasted the pleasure but some invincible sadness poisoned its charm for me.”

  How well I understood that emotion! I had never experienced the same natural abandon as I had that first morning with Doon. We made love with intense mutual pleasure and enthusiasm, but she always stopped me when I wanted to tell her how much I cared for her. But you’ve told me that before, she would say. You don’t need to tell me again.

  We were back in Berlin by mid-November, the weather having called a halt to filming. I was feeling unwell, I remember, a heavy cold and heavy heart. In Annecy and Chambéry I had felt free of my conscience and responsibilities. The banal truth is that physical distance is all that is required to make adultery safe and worry-free. Now, back at home, d
uplicity had necessarily to be enrolled as my co-partner. I found the strain of collating my lies and falsehoods with parts of the truth enervating and depressing. And the house seemed like a veritable zoo with the ubiquitous Shorrolds back again for two months over Christmas and New Year’s. Had a year really gone by? I should have been celebrating: my film was being made; I was the lover of the one woman I had ever truly adored. But these equations never work themselves out neatly. In our Charlottenburg villa there were nine of us: five adults and four children and only one bathroom. I started spending nights out at the studio in Spandau just to keep away.

  There were huge problems with the film. We edited together a rough cut of the material filmed so far. It came to four hours and forty-five minutes. I did not know how I was going to break the news to Eddie (curiously, it was only now that I found his name easy on the tongue). Part I, furthermore, was nowhere near complete. We had still to shoot the Geneva scenes, and the bad weather we had endured at Annecy and Chambéry meant we would have to return there next year. At the same time there was no gainsaying that what we actually had in the can was superb. A story was unfolding here that was utterly enthralling and both Karl-Heinz and Doon glowed on the screen.

  In early January I showed Eddie carefully chosen segments of our rough cut interposed with linking commentary from me. All my caution was needless: he said he was overwhelmed and deeply moved. But then he paused.