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J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j' avais mille ans …
Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune
Où comme des remords se traînent de long vers
Qui s'acharnent toujours sur mes morts les plus chers

Which, roughly translated, I made out to mean something like:

I have more memories than had I lived a thousand years
I am a cemetery that the moon abhors
Where maggots creep like remorse
And feed upon the corpse of my best beloved.

And the other line chanted by Olga as the scene ends:

O Prince de l'exil, à qui l'on a fait tort
O Prince of exile, who has endured such wrong
…

Short as it was, Olga's sequence in the film brought one innovation with it. At the first viewing, I was annoyed to see a hair caught on the lens, jittering all the way through the scene, picking up bulk, becoming an ugly matted clot that hovered just above her face. The longer it twitched there, the more irritating it became. Finally, just as the reel ran out, it shook loose and scrabbled down the scene, merging with the closing darkness. I expected that would be the end of it; even so, before the second showing I asked Claus to be sure to wipe the lens.

“The lens was clean,” he told me. “The dust is on the film. I know this from last time.”

But how could that be? Why would Castle have permitted such an obvious flaw to survive on his finished print?

“It is deliberate,” Claus said. “If you look closely at the film you will see: it's an animation. This is the innovation I told you about.”

Olga winked at me knowingly. “One of Max's tricks. I complained also to him when I first saw it. He said, ‘Did you ever notice how it drives you crazy to see a piece of dirt like that on the lens? Well, maybe I want to drive the audience a little crazy here. Like Miss Muffet on the tuffet.' You know what he meant?”

On second viewing I did. The ugly clot of dirt did have a nervous, spiderlike quality to it. It seemed to be reaching down, struggling to get hold of Olga, to snare her in its tangled web. At last it did. Viewing the film frame by frame, I could see the way the animation developed. The clotted dust spread into a web that thickened over Olga's image, strand after strand, until the light was blocked out. The effect brought a note of unrelieved tension to the scene—like a high, screechy sound that will not go away. There was more to that piece of dust than met the eye, of that I was sure.

Though I realized that the excerpt from
Heart of Darkness
wouldn't
run more than two minutes, I found myself awaiting it with high anticipation. If I hadn't already seen the first image that appeared on the screen, I would have been suitably startled. It was the hideous fence of severed heads that Castle and Zip had filmed in Mexico. The sequence developed as I remembered, with the camera being swallowed down the gullet of the last head in the series. But this time the ensuing darkness was striped by the flames of a leaping fire.

In front of the blaze, a mass of gleaming, nearly naked bodies writhed, spun, twisted spasmodically, a drunken orgy of cavorting savages. What there was of a sound track was just barely clinging by a thread to the film, but there was enough left to give the idea: a cacophony of frenzied drumming and wailing voices. It sounded a great deal like the sound track Castle had improvised for
Zombie Doctor
but hadn't been permitted to use. Perhaps he'd salvaged it and plugged it in here. Properly recorded, it would have been spectacular.

At the center of the ritual, surrounding the fire were four people bound to stakes: two men, two women, straining at the ropes that held them. They were black, stripped to loincloths, their faces vibrant with fear: eyes rolling, mouths gaping. If they were amateurs, they were doing a damned good job of projecting absolute panic. A grotesquely costumed figure gyrated around them, a witch doctor, I assumed, threatening the captives, lunging at each in turn with what looked like an elephant's tusk equipped with a vicious prong at the tip. I recalled that the Conrad story had to do with the ivory trade in darkest Africa, part of the book's pervasive black-white symbolism; but I was sure no ritual of this kind was described in the book.

The film was by no means a polished piece of work. It was little better than a rough cut. Still, though I couldn't say why, the power of the conception was getting through. To all outward appearances, the scene was a pretty conventional bit of Hollywood jungle high jinx. The captives may have looked more convincingly frightened, the nudity of the women lent a more risqué edge to the action, but even so, there was nothing all that remarkable about what I was watching. Where the scene ended, the camera cut away just as the witch doctor made ready to drive the menacing tusk into the first of his victims. The cry of the dancers punctuated the unseen act, providing it with a jarring impact. Still, it was the sort of censoring cut one would expect in a film of that vintage.

And then, far too soon, the excerpt was over. But it left behind a
singularly unsavory aftertaste that I at once identified as the result of one of Castle's subliminal techniques. It was exactly what I remembered feeling when I first saw the
Judas,
the sense that I'd witnessed some holy terror not meant for my eyes, no part of my world.

Claus ran the segment three more times. At my side in the darkened theater, I could feel Olga's tension mounting. She wasn't enjoying this a bit; in fact, she was fighting it. That made it difficult for me to maintain my concentration. I felt guilty to discomfit her so much. When I suggested we end the session, her relief was immediate, like a drowning swimmer finally breaking the surface of the water to take a breath of air. Jokingly, I said, “I didn't see you in the film, unless you were the witch doctor.”

Not at all jokingly, she answered, “No, I wasn't there, was I? But I was so close to Max when he worked on this, sometimes I think maybe I see myself dancing there… .”

Claus reassured her. “Come now, my dear. If you were in the movie, wouldn't we see you?”

I knew an answer to that question, but for Olga's sake I decided to keep it to myself.

Before we left the theater, I thanked Claus for his time. “My pleasure,” he replied, and then thought again. “No, really, it isn't a pleasure to see these films. Especially the second. I feel each time I see it that I have no right to watch. Like once when I was a child, a Catholic friend told me that at the Mass he eats the body of Jesus. I had never heard such a thing before. It was very frightening but also, I thought, very sacred, something I would have no right to see. Taboo. You understand?”

“I understand.”

Later, back at Olga's home, I went over my notes with her, using the opportunity to drain her of everything she remembered about the films, every word Castle had said. “I wish I'd seen more of you up there on the screen,” I said.

“Oh, but you did,” she answered. “I wasn't the witch doctor, but I was the shooter.”

“With the machine gun?”

“Yes. Max wanted that I should do that part, the killing of the children. I hated it. It was a real gun, you see. Not the bullets, of course, but the boom-boom-boom. He puts in front of me pictures of children to shoot at. He says it will help me feel the sorrow. The damned gun, it nearly broke my fingers.”

“Do you know where the poetry comes from?” I asked.

She did. “The French poet. The sick one.” Max had once marked the passage for her in a book. She searched a few shelves and found it. Baudelaire. Two poems. One called “Spleen,” the other—for the line “Prince of exile”—entitled “Litanies of Satan.”

“Was Castle fond of Baudelaire?” I asked.

Olga shrugged. “Once he said he wanted for this part of the movie that it should feel like decadence. This was poetry of decadence. ‘Why so morbid?' I asked him. I remember he said, ‘Decay is a great mercy.'” She gave a shudder of disapproval.

Olga actually had little to tell me about
Prince of Exile.
The filming had been done in several sessions scattered over about three months. Castle had rented space in a Paris studio where he had connections. The desert scene was a process shot filmed in the studio; the children Castle used were from one of the orphanages, loaned out for the shoot. He hadn't been happy with the technical work on that part of the movie and intended to redo it. The crew Olga worked with was minimal. A few men on the lights and sound, somebody for makeup, an assistant or two, and Zip Lipsky on camera. There had been more material filmed, using two other actors, but Olga had no idea what became of that. She remembered an eating scene: she and two men richly costumed, gorging themselves at a lavish banquet, stuffing away like hungry pigs, covering themselves with grease. Max had laid out a hefty sum to have the meal catered with disgustingly heavy food from one of the best charcuteries in town, though by the time they were set up the food was cold and far from palatable.

“When we are finished, Max says he wants another take. And out comes more food. By then, we are stuffed to the ears. But he makes us eat again. Right away I start to get sick. One of the others also. But Max doesn't cut, he just keeps shooting. He don't let us even leave the table. You see, he wants that scene—eating till we get sick. That makes me very mad with him. I don't want anybody filming me throwing up. So I just walk off. He could be very mean, very tricky.”

Yet she wished now that even this disagreeable scene, along with others Castle had shot that summer so long ago, had survived on the reel she owned. Such as it was, she treated the little scrap of film as a personal treasure. When I asked her to let me copy it, she agreed but insisted the job be done locally in Amsterdam. She wouldn't trust me to take the film away. “There is so little left of the real Max Castle,” she reminded me. She was sure her friend Claus could find
somebody for the copy job; she would make sure he supervised the work personally.

I waited until I had only an hour or so left to spend with Olga before I left for the airport; then I asked, “Now will you tell me about
Heart of Darkness?”

She must have known the question would come up again. She unloaded a deep sigh of reluctant consent, then nodded. “Like all Max's serious movies, it wasn't a movie. Just little pieces of things he was going someday to put together. Things shot in Mexico, things shot in the studio, but nothing ever finished, everything all mixed up. This time Max thought maybe he had a big chance to do something high class—because of Orson Welles, you know. Orson had lots of money. And he liked so much this story about the jungle and the natives. Such a terrible story it is. You know the book?”

I said I did.

“Terrible. When Max first tells me the story, right away I hate it. But he says it will be a movie for our time—about the evil inside people, how everywhere we see civilized people becoming savages. So yes, I say, I will be in this movie because it meant so much to Max. Also because I think it will be my last movie. And it was.”

She was clearly laboring as she recounted the experience. I realized that asking her to do that was callous on my part. But it was now or never. I kept my questioning pressure upon her.

“You see,” she went on, “I don't remember so clearly. It is very fuzzy in my head. I wanted to help Max, but it was so extreme what he wanted. Nudity, yes. This I don't mind. Max and me, we did movies like that before. But this time, he wants more. He wants me to make love to the actor. The real thing, you understand. He wants to have this on film, like a blue movie.”

“Who was the actor?”

“A black man. Dandy Wilson was his name. He wasn't an actor. He was a dancer in one of the clubs. Lovely body. Very strong. Max dresses him up like a bird.”

“A bird?”

“Yes. I think he is supposed to be some kind of god like the pagan people got, you know? He has such great wings. And over his face a mask like a hawk or eagle. He is very fierce to see. This is an ‘unspeakable rite,' Max tells us, like it says in the book. A sacrifice. We got to be very serious about it. We got to feel it.”

She halted. I could see she was thinking back to something more than unpleasant, possibly traumatic. I sought to keep her talking. “You had to use a sword at one point, didn't you?”

Her eyes gave a sudden flash of recognition. “Yes, there was a sword.” She stalled again.

“Was it dangerous?”

She gave herself a shake and continued. “You see, I couldn't do it—what Max wanted. I couldn't make love to this black fellow. I never did that before in the movies. Only make-believe. I told Max, I can't do this. So he gives me something to make it easy.”

“What did he give you?”

“One of his evil little pills. It makes me very tipsy. Everything starts to go crazy in my head. This is why I don't remember so good. But I remember … I remember what Max was telling me all the time. That Dandy isn't Dandy. He is God, the
true
God. Things get so mixed up with me. I think I am making love with God. I don't know what we did, Dandy and me. But I think it was very wrong. And then Max tells me, I must take the sword… .” She fell into a long, tense pause, gazing at the wall behind me as if she were seeing the memory there.

“And do what?” I asked, coaxing the words from her.

Her voice went frigidly brittle. “Chop off his head.” She gazed at me with hurt, questioning eyes as if I might be able to tell her why Castle had asked this of her. “But I can't do it. Because the pill is making everything so
real.
I can't tell I'm in a movie no more.” A guilty hush came into her voice. “I think I am really killing God.” She let out a nervous little laugh. “I am not a religious person. But then, I don't know … the pill was doing funny things to me inside. I start to cry. I was hysterical. I couldn't use the sword. But Max makes me do it. ‘Kill him!' he says. ‘Do it! Do it!' And I get very scared. Because I think Max is becoming crazy. ‘Kill him!' he says. And … I … do … it.”