Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (4 page)

A woman’s fantasy.
A man.

He goes out and takes care of
things.

Exterior.
A narrow street, black ribbon in a yellow canyon of blank-faced
apartment buildings.
Too narrow to be an American
street, too few cars.
Lamb in medium shot, seen from behind, wearing a
black-brimmed hat, someone’s idea of the eternal past. His pace is unhurried,
almost unmodern: he
slouches,
he ambles, like a man
with no destination or agenda. But he has the crucial thing, a knowledge he
bears in his body: how to ignore the camera that follows his every move. As he
walks or shambles along there’s a rasping sound, a grating noise, and as he
shrinks in the frame we can see the plain black rolling suitcase that bounces
and drags and skitters on the pavement as he pulls it behind him. Something
paper in his hand, completing the image of a lost tourist. He pauses at a
doorway, a wooden door with flaked green paint, a brass mailslot like a
tarnished mouth. He folds the map and slips it inside. The map is a letter. The
letter vanishes.

Interior.
A
woman in a severe black dress, in late middle age, bends down with a little
grunt and picks up her mail where it lies scattered on the ragged tile floor.
The strange envelope doesn’t register at first because she flips through the
letters looking at their right corners so that the postmarks blur by, and the
hand-delivered letter of course has no postmark, and no stamp for that matter.
Tight shot of the bundle of mail in her hand as she goes back up
the dark wooden stairs, and drops the letter on the mat in front of a door, and
keeps climbing.
The camera retreats suddenly, staggers back like a
drunkard and points up the stairwell to the next floor where another woman,
also in black, stands watching. It could be the same woman, climber and
watcher. We hear a door shut and the sound registers in her eyes.

Interior.
A
simple apartment, finely if anonymously decorated in muted feminine style.
Closed French doors, a sofa,
a
vase offering a single
tulip, a lamp.
Doorway to a kitchen, to a bathroom, to a bedroom.
Tidy, silent, but for sounds from the street.

Meeting no other men with hats the solitary man continues dragging his
suitcase down the narrow street. Does he wear it unselfconsciously? To scratch
his bald spot does he raise the hat with his free hand or do his fingers creep
under the brim? How can we know about his bald spot? Close in, encircled, like
a tonsure, like Henry Miller. He pushes (he pulls) on his way.

The apartment is empty. No: there is a breeze. It stirs the curtains. There
is a whistling kettle in the kitchen.
Extreme close-up of a
smudged tall glass that fills with boiling water, with black particles that
rise and swirl to fill the screen, touching the water with their color.
The plain pewter kettle replaced on the stove with a clank. The specks like
sparrows entering a black
cloud,
suddenly pushed down
and pressed out of sight.
Ceramic rattle, cube of sugar in a
chipped cup.
The coffee streams out of the French press into the cup and
presses down on the sugar cube, breaking it down but not utterly: a sweet
residue underneath the bitter surface. The cup is carried out of the kitchen.

The envelope on the table by
the tulip.
It is a bill,
billet
doux
, it is news. Perhaps it’s news from some man gone to
fight in the war. The camera is always before the war, never after or inside
it. The camera is still, it’s a wide still shot, but our eyes are drawn
irresistibly to the empty hatrack. A shout in the street, can’t make out the
language, ricochet of a soccer ball off of someone’s stoop, a short barking
laugh. We are Americans and we call it soccer and there is a woman who is of an
age,
a fadedness
, a resilience we don’t have a name
for.
Something Mediterranean or Semitic in the angles of her
face, the prominence of her nose, the darkness of her eyes.
The hair
shimmers with its blackness, the beautiful gradated blackness of a silver
gelatin print. Alone she holds her beauty before her like a mask or a
microphone, in one untrembling hand, so that we can’t see what the other is doing.
When she turns her back to us we are blind. Is she weeping? Is she whispering?
Is she judging the time of day by the angle of the light? There are no clocks
in this room.
The envelope, torn.

The old reader sunk in her English cozies while the new reader is up to
her neck in noir. Meeting only once on a twilit sofa a hundred years ago in the
afternoon of a fever together thrilling to Grace Kelly in
To
Catch a Thief
, her alien blondeness like fate itself
co-piloting Cary Grant’s little convertible along the twisting mountain roads
of a Technicolor Monaco. But she shuns her mother’s library, curls up on the
floors of chain bookstores with shiny American paperbacks in her hands on the
trail of serial killers, mass murderers, conspiracies that go all the way to
the top. The new reader favors the cipher, the hard face, Eisenstein’s
principle of montage: intercut with happiness or sadness the face is happy or
sad, though the eyes never move, though the mouth remains the same, level and
transitory as a hyphen, a wink: Harry Lime vanishing in the Viennese fog.
Missing man formation.
Paradise alone of M walled in on
herself,
Murder on the Orient Express
,
Paris to Istanbul, open the first-class compartment: the lady vanishes. The new
reader follows mean streets to the city’s edge (
My
Business Is Circumference
) where a desert opens in
front of her like a map of blankness. Meeting the man, landscape of a man’s
face half-obscured by sunglasses, confronted like an object of increasingly
durable celebrity: Gabriele Ferzetti, David Hemmings, Richard Harris,
Jack
Nicholson. Navigating the face to a lonely place, a
precipice with a view of the vast conspiracy that includes her, us, the secret
to which she herself is the key (
I’m not in the business; I am
the business
). In the heart of the mountain reclines M
languid with the old world pages, inside the locked room with the Colonel and
the Countess and the Doctor and the Housekeeper and the Scion and the Mistress
and the Dowager and the Lame Footman and the Reformed Burglar and the Lusty
Squire and the Poetess and the Inspector with his pipe and his precarious
infallible chain of clews: “I knew it all along,” sniffs the Countess. We knew
all along that it had to end this way: in this drawing room this hunting lodge
this tramp steamer this prop plane this stable this abandoned warehouse this
by-the-hour motel this funicular this fishing shack this philosopher’s forest
hut this fire lookout this Duesenberg this nightclub this country road this
burning barn this suburban ranch this first-class stateroom this hospital ward
this churchyard this cattle car this lonesome prairie this dilapidated
greenhouse this twilit empire this retreat from Moscow this siege of Leningrad
this Sarajevo motorcade this occupation of Paris this Ukrainian nuclear
facility this march to the sea this grave of narrative that demands only death
to start its dominos and only death, perhaps a symbolic death, perhaps a birth
in disguise, to restore the uncontradictable order that rescues us, that
decrees What Was and Shall Be, that foils novelty and sells novels, that denies
all possibility of aerial views, from the precipice the locked room the womb.
The new reader in sleep reading on, effortlessly converting text to moving
images, restoring words to the purity of their referents, the things, as the
novel gives birth to cinema, to a narrative launched by the immobile visible
inspecting face of a man who has made his deal with the devil, the man who
never compromises, the man who is well paid to navigate and pull taut the
disparate threads, to shuttle in black and white, among the multitudinous
cities incarnadine of Europe the only colorless thing, cutting like a slender
blade to the essence between frames. Riding for days on a train, on a horse, on
a camel, walking blind, bound for the locked room, to the desert, to the
pyramid of skulls, to find her standing there on her naked native ground, heart
stripped bare of secrets, and the man, guided by a love he himself will never
feel: a speaking knife, a spear, a plunging tongue.

The
camera clings to him, practically hanging on his shoulder, as he turns onto an
avenue. There are cars now, there is traffic. He passes a group of schoolgirls
in blazers and skirts, chattering to themselves in a language without
subtitles; we understand that these are schoolgirls on the near side of
puberty, talking about what schoolgirls talk about: boys, or rather not boys
but those other schoolgirls not present, schoolgirls who are with or have been
with those boys and what they’ve done or might be willing to do with those
boys. Lamb lowers his head and pushes through them without looking back, and
the camera doesn’t linger either, but maybe he swivels his head a quarter-turn
to the right, a little twist; blink and you’ll miss that infinitely complex
appraisable line or fractal territory suggesting a nose’s wing, a heavy black
eyebrow. A little farther and he pauses in front of a window, turns fully, one
hand still on the long handle of his roller bag, and the camera turns with him,
so we can see something of his reflection in the spotless picture window,
nothing to deter our sense of the fundamental monochrome atmosphere that
follows this man like the lens itself, passing through a halftone world into
which color, now, is starting to creep.
Flashes now behind
him of a red car, a green skirt, a blue policeman pausing to fill out a ticket,
his face a depthless shadow under the brim of his cap.
Lamb studies an
array of jewelry, nothing particularly expensive, without moving much, his face
as invisible as the policeman’s under the brim of his hat, but we can make out
the outlines of a dark tie against a light shirt behind further layers of
darkness: a suit coat, an overcoat, too heavy for the weather. There are
watches, bracelets, brooches, necklaces, earrings, pins, ankle bracelets,
chokers, armbands, wristbands, breastplates, or so it seems to the tourist and
so it must seem to us, marveling now at the neatness of the trick, for we seem
to be standing directly behind him and yet there’s no camera or cameraman in
the reflection, just the streaks of light that resolve themselves into cars or
pedestrians and the twin pillars of darkness, the man staring unresolvedly at
the many watches (no one of which shows the same time) and the policeman, head
bent over his ticket book, scratching away.

Terrain of sounds.
A long scraping noise.
Indistinct voices.
Foreigners.
Small engines, tires on macadam, whine and
wheeze of a bad fan belt,
receding.
A motorbike’s
burr, dopplering toward us, getting louder and more aggressive, then its
reflection whizzing past in the window,
then
dopplering away. In this film our man is closely miked: we hear his slightly
heavy breathing, the soft movements of his clothing, his footsteps, when he
lights a cigarette we hear the heavy snap of the lighter and the audible
combustion of the first strands of tobacco, hear him inhale, hear the smoke
pouring down his windpipe, scratching up against precancerous polyps, hear him
cough shortly, a bark, hear his blood and heart agitated by the nicotine,
starting to beat louder and more quickly, hear his pupils dilate, snapping
wider with an audible click, hear the dripping sound as sweat glands above his
hairline gather moisture and salt to form beads of sweat to be absorbed by his
hatband, a kind of reverse sponge-squeezing sound as that no doubt already
stained ribbon of cloth takes on a further burden of the very essence of his
tourist’s anxiety, if he feels anxiety. We have, we hear, so much and no more.
Lamb is almost a palindrome, almost a blade, petit mal, blam. He carries us
toward what comes next.

She
sits on her sofa staring into a compact, fixing her make-up. It’s discreet,
made visible only by her application of it, or by her repair, for there’s a
little black streak of mascara under her left eye that even now she wipes away
with a bit of cotton. She studies herself in the little mirror and sighs, not
quite audibly, then bends again to her tools. As she reapplies her mascara we
are struck by the absoluteness of her concentration, of her utter presence to
herself in the mirror as simply a face, a severe beautiful face with lines at
the brow and at the corners of her eyes, and slightly sharper edges around the
cheekbones, the curve of the mouth. She gives herself the kind of scrutiny our films
don’t give to women her age, older than thirty, older than forty or fifty, an
American unperson’s face still lovely in its mobility, though just now she’s
holding it steady, as steady as any starlet or woman holds her muscles when not
being looked at; though a woman is never not looked at, so if she smiles or
frowns because of that she does so invisibly, under the skin so to speak. She
bears our looking, she wears our desire, masculine and feminine, men and women
desire her, that still firm and erect body, though past middle age, a desire
she herself cannot feel but understands abstractly, as an astronomer’s most
sophisticated instruments help him know about distant bodies without seeing
them, that understanding of desire that she holds at a distance because of what
we call age, what we call experience, like a second skin, and that hides the
smile or frown, though it cannot, quite, hide her tears.