The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) Read online

  But when the time came for me to respond, I had to pause. Without realizing it, we had started down a road so subtle that it would carry us from the lowest lows to the highest highs, without many stopovers. The only thing that was obvious, clear as a bell, fit into one very short and very simple sentence: “The actor is not the character.” But my intuition clamorously informed me that this generalization was not enough. We were talking about a specific, concrete case, and generalizing would only create a short circuit. I knew I should go back to the beginning, to the Rolex, the goatherd, the mountains, lest I risk tracing a vicious circle of reasoning that would generate still other circles and provide no way out that would allow our conversation to move forward.

  Even with these precautions in mind, I had no choice but to begin with a generalization, for otherwise not even I would have understood myself; but I took care to say it in a tone of voice that made clear that I was using it only as a point of departure. The actor, I said, was not the character.

  What are you talking about?!

  Well, yes . . . In a way, he was. The actor continued being the actor while he was playing the character; one could even say that he was more himself than ever, for he was practicing his profession and justifying his existence beyond the good life he led in Beverly Hills, with his divorces and adulteries and consumption of drugs. But a fundamental difference persisted, or better said, emerged. Though fundamental, it was impalpable, perhaps taken for granted with excessive levity. It was “impalpable” (a metaphor I apologized for using and that I would try to improve upon) because it could be perceived only in the stories and not in the beings that enact them — in the movement of the story itself, not in any one of its moments. Perhaps it should be understood in the same way as the Uncertainty Principle, even if on a different level than that of subatomic particles.

  An approving nod from my friend greeted my utterance of the words “different level,” which he would repeat shortly. I continued:

  A successful Hollywood heartthrob, I said, had enough money to buy himself an expensive Swiss watch, just as a woman in the second half of the twentieth century wore dresses with zippers. Those were their stories, or lack of stories. The imperative that prevented a primitive goatherd in the remote mountains of Ukraine from wearing a Rolex was almost as powerful as that which prevented an Egyptian queen of the first century from wearing a dress with a zipper. So, a Hollywood heartthrob and a Ukrainian goatherd on the one hand, and a modern woman and the Queen of the Nile on the other: were they the same person? Apparently, they could not be, at least not on the same level. “Level” of course is also a metaphor, and also in this instance I intended to distance myself from it, and to do so right away, because the other level was that of fiction, which was not a metaphor but rather, in a way, the real — perfectly real — lifeblood of all metaphors. Fiction created a second and simultaneous world . . .

  Here I interrupted myself twice over. I did so in the conversation, because I could see that I was getting nowhere, and I did so when I was remembering the scene of the conversation, because I saw that I was reaching my goal too quickly. The impetus to speak and to remember what was spoken, though the same, were charged with distinct and incompatible energies.

  We had the actor, the beautiful and famous blond in his mansion in Southern California, with his numerous bank accounts, his expensive watches, his swimming pool, his Ferrari, his top-model girlfriends. His agent called him and told him that a big studio was offering him the starring role in a new movie by a prestigious director, and that they had agreed without a murmur to his multi-million dollar fee. There was no reason to say no a priori. What was it about? What would be his role? It was an adventure movie that took place in the mountainous desert region of Ukraine, and its plot dealt with aspects of the sudden advent of capitalism in the republics of the former Soviet Union. He would play the role of a primitive goatherd, far removed from modern civilization, a kind of noble savage, who suddenly sees himself involved in a sinister plot . . . Anyway, something more or less predictable, with just enough originality to justify making the movie, but not too much to scare off the audience. And it behooved him to take the role because it would give him opportunities to shine, as well as a temporary reprieve from the string of urban, yuppie, fashion-

  police roles that he’d been playing for the last few years. In short: a renewal of his image, replete with the shaggy beard he would let grow, long hair, troglodyte garb; and his agent didn’t need to tell him, because he knew it all too well, that he would look fabulous in all of it, that his shaggy beard would be groomed by a hairdresser to the stars, and his rawhide garments would be fashioned by the best designer available.

  The actor was able to ascertain the potential for all these benefits a few days later when he read the screenplay they sent him. He read it in the enormous living room of his house, reclining in an armchair, with a large Portuguese water dog sleeping on the rug at his feet, in that light sleep animals enjoy: each time a page turned, there was just enough noise to make the ears of his loyal Bob twitch. I could picture the scene perfectly when I was describing it to my friend, and much better when I relived the conversation at night — so much better, that I no longer heard the words: I just saw what they evoked.

  That screenplay, I continued, was “fictional,” which meant that it told a story that had never taken place. It hadn’t taken place in reality, the proof of which was that at the moment it was being written, it could still have turned out to be something else: the story of a failed marriage, a robbery, an invasion

  of extraterrestrials, the life of the pope, or the inventor of the microwave oven. But, no: out of the almost infinite combinations of possible situations, the one that had come into being was that of a goatherd . . . And we already knew the rest. This was the plot of the movie that was made. The production team traveled to Ukraine to find the right locations, and when everything was just about ready to be filmed, there went our heartthrob — in the meantime he had had time to let his hair and beard grow and to conscientiously study his role.

  It’s not that they couldn’t have filmed it in a studio in Los Angeles. Everything can be reproduced on a set with the right staging and a few editing tricks. If they wanted the real mountains, all they had to do was send a cameraman there and then insert those takes where they belonged. But the decision to film on location was the result of the producers’ well-reasoned policy, which took into account several concurrent factors, the first being financial, for the cost of living in Ukraine was exponentially less than in the United States, and the salaries of the people they’d hire in situ would allow them to significantly reduce their budget; moreover, the Ukrainian authorities showed interest in the project, which fit in with their own policy of attracting strategic investments; with the Ministry of Culture’s cooperation, they would be allowed to shoot interior spaces normally off limits to the public, thereby exhibiting to the world the country’s unknown artistic and architectural riches; finally, there was the famous quality of light in the mountains, which would give the film its own, unique atmosphere, which could not be reproduced by artificial means.

  In any case, there went the actor. Needless to say, he did not go alone; he took his secretary, bodyguards, assistants, a coach, and a personal trainer. Nor did he pack his own bags, also needless to say, for that’s what he paid his servants to do, but he did choose certain objects or items of clothing that he wanted to take with him. One of those objects was the watch. He opened his dresser drawer where he kept watches and jewelry, quickly thought out what he would need and what would be convenient to have (this was not the first time he had traveled to film in exotic locations), and he chose his solid and reliable gold Rolex Daytona. This reliable timepiece served various purposes. In the first place, a watch — which he had little use for in the course of his pampered life — was indispensable during those frenetic days of shooting out in nature, as he well knew from experience: risings at dawn, constant moves from place to place, la
st-minute changes of plans, urgent meetings. Moreover and by the same token, the watch for such circumstances should be water and shock resistant, for he didn’t know what ordeals it would have to endure. At the same time, he wanted it to be elegant, an expression of his stature as a sex symbol and a man of success, for the shooting of the film would entail more than just acting: there would be parties, outings, and they had even planned ahead for public relations events with the Ukrainian authorities, who — he could bet on it — would want to have their pictures taken with him.

  I was putting a lot of my own into all this, but it is natural to put into any story, along with a lot of what one has seen and heard, assumptions of cause and effect, without which there are too many loose ends. I was a little ashamed to expose how much I knew about the life and work of movie stars, for it might lead one to think that I was especially interested in the subject or that I wasted my time reading “special interest” magazines. But, as I already said, knowledge of these popular subjects is in the air, and an effort must be made to not acquire it rather than to acquire it. And, as I also already said, nothing human is alien to me. Knowing does not occupy much room: information about actors or singers does not take space away from Plato or Nietzsche. I’ve always distrusted those intellectuals who have never heard of the Rolling Stones. My friend and I saw eye to eye on this; just a few minutes earlier, he had talked knowledgeably about the “star system,” by way of example.

  Our actor did not travel directly there. He stopped off in Paris, where he met with his co-star and the producers, and together they gave a press conference to announce the project. This event took place in the ballroom of a large hotel in the French capital; he was besieged by flashes from photographers, eager to publicize his change of “look” (hair and beard): he was beginning to turn into the primitive herdsman of the movie, even though he was still himself. And he was so much himself that he wound up getting annoyed at the journalists’ insistence on asking about his recent divorce and the beautiful actress who had precipitated it. Nor was he pleased with their political questions about the collaboration implied by his participation in this movie with the governments of the countries in the ex-Soviet Bloc, governments he had criticized during his period of environmental activism.

  The order of my reasoning was implacable. One by one I was introducing all the elements for a proof of reality, which I could then use when I contrasted it with fiction. While I was reconstructing the conversation (and there, also, I was implacable in not skipping a single word, and I might have even added a few), I realized that the “actor” was already the “character” in a certain sense: not the character that he would soon embody during the shooting of the movie, but the character of the story that I, marginally and for the rhetorical imperatives of the demonstration, was recounting. And the more details I added in order to round out the figure of the “actor,” the more of a “character” he became. This was inevitable, for fiction, in order to express itself, adopts a narrative structure that is the same as the one used by reality to make itself intelligible. Inevitable or not, however, I had to admit that it weakened my argument. It would have benefited, for instance, from a stronger contrast, from the positing of a reality that my friend and I would recognize as more real — for example, our own reality or something equivalent. The reality of a Hollywood star was colored by unreality and not easy to take seriously.

  Even so, I believed I was on the right track, and I continued: we were already in the Desert Mountains, and here all we needed to do was take a quick look at the process of making the movie: the long days of filming when the lighting was good, the changes of location for scenes that took place in villages or the city, the endless repetitions demanded by the director who was a perfectionist, the inevitable interruptions due to rain or problems with the team or the local extras not keeping to the schedule. We might also pass over the no less important editing process carried out in studios back in Los Angeles. We then came to what we had watched the night before on our television sets: the story of a goatherd who was a victim of circumstance. That character didn’t exist and never had. The identification between him and the actor who had given him body and voice was momentary and functional. Once the movie was made, the actor could forget about him forever. The goatherd (the “character”) was a fantasy created for artistic and commercial purposes — much more the second than the first in this case — a fantasy made of images and words, whose precarious reality was at the mercy of the movie lovers’ voluntary suspension of disbelief. A fundamental difference resided in the fact that the life of the actor was biological, it had a long “before” — as seen from his screen career, his divorce, his dog Bob — and would have an “after” that would last as long as Destiny provided; whereas the goatherd would continue to repeat that illusory fragment of nonbiological life, made of light and electronic impulses. They had coincided only in representation.

  But, with all the precariousness of his illusory existence, the goatherd also had to have a backstory, and though fictitious, that story had to be somehow “more,” that is, it had to be more intelligible than real stories, which unfold in a chaos of happenstance and twists and turns. To do this, it had to emphasize one aspect that real stories also contain: verisimilitude. This is a conventional term that includes everything mankind does in its perennial war against the absurd. In reality, there are things in any given context that cannot happen. I used as an example our “reality witness,” the life of the blond movie star: we would never see him standing at the door of a church in Beverly Hills asking for spare change, would we?

  My friend raised his eyebrows and looked slightly skeptical, which I had been expecting.

  Yes, we might see him there, if it were a joke or because he had lost a bet, or even as the result of a rapid decline due to drug and alcohol abuse. Stranger things have happened. But it was precisely the emphasis on the verisimilar I had mentioned earlier that made it impossible in fiction. A goatherd who had always lived in the mountains, who had never stepped foot in a city, who ate whatever the earth provided, that nonexistent goatherd, created by the imagination, his life circumscribed to an hour and a half of pulses of light and color, had to maintain complete factual coherence in order to remain plausible. Above all, he should not be confounded with the actor who was playing him. For example, as he was gathering his flock before descending the mountain in the evening, he couldn’t suddenly burst out with a sentence like: “Come on, hurry up, I’m having dinner with Madonna tonight.” Even if it were true that the actor was having dinner with Madonna that night, that sentence would be out of place in the character’s mouth. Indeed, out of place in exactly the same way as the presence of a Rolex on his wrist was out of place.

  But, if it was impossible, how did it come about? Here, I said, we required the intervention of the imperfection that accompanies every human endeavor. It was a mistake, the result of a momentary distraction, a small error that escaped the vigilance of all involved, who were legion. To a certain extent it was understandable, given the complexity of a movie production of that size. The night scene shot on the mountainside with a dead goat; the crew measuring the light levels, the angles; making sure the cameras were functioning; the various scenes being filmed discontinuously . . . The actor, who’d completely forgotten about his watch, was focused on the action, on showing his own best angle . . . Anyway, that’s what had happened, there was nothing more to say about it.

  To my surprise, my friend remained unconvinced. Moreover, he emphatically informed me — with that momentum typical of someone who has been waiting for the other person to finish talking in order to express their own opposing opinion — that my interpretation of the movie was completely wrong.

  I answered simply that I had not offered an interpretation of the whole movie, which I had watched in fits and starts and without paying much attention. I was merely pointing out a single error.

  He had not watched more of it or with more attention than I had, he said, the proof o
f which was that he hadn’t even seen the famous night scene with the dead goat. Hence, he also would not risk an interpretation, but he did feel he was in a position to refute me.

  I had the irrepressible suspicion that he was going to come out with something very off the wall; surprise gave way to deep fear. One’s social life is full of such fears, and each person reacts to them according to his character. My character is rather shy, defensive, with an excess of politeness that renders me almost pusillanimous. I am one of those people who places delicacy above all other considerations and who discovers, time and time again, that cut-and-dry cruelty at the right moments can save many other moments of unpleasantness, but I never learn. I am also one of those people who prefers to live an entire life with a lie than live one uncomfortable moment of truth.

  What I feared in this case (and by “this case” I meant the occasion in the café as well as its expansion in my memory when I relived the scene in the darkness of my bedroom in the middle of the night) was that my friend would utter a couple of sentences, a couple of words — he didn’t need many — that would show me that he was a complete and utterly hopeless idiot. Because the point of our little disagreement was so obvious as to be beyond any discussion. “The actor is not the character.” Who could deny that? Only someone with the mental level of a four-year-old child — and even a child that age would not be difficult to convince. In fact, it was not a matter of convincing him but merely giving him time to see it; only a momentary mental lapse, distraction, or partial deafness while listening to the proposition could leave room for doubt.