And yet you could hardly tell by looking at him that he was wealthy. (Only certain women spotted it immediately, and by dozens of indications, from the expression in his eyes to his socks.) The apparent apartment house in which he lived in Paris was a little lower than the others next to it, and still looked like one downstairs in the lobby, except that from there no staircase, only an elevator, took one upstairs, with the entrance to the living area directly outside the elevator; and only later, when the guest was escorted downstairs by way of a spiral staircase concealed behind a door in the wall did he recognize that this upper floor had been merely the dining area, followed, a flight down, by another floor for sitting, conversing, and reading, then one with paintings by old masters, then an entirely empty floor, brightly lit into the farthest corners, and finally the ground floor, taken up entirely by a palatial white-tiled kitchen, with a cook: from top to bottom the tenement was the urban pied-à -terre of the painter, who finally came out with the admission that at the very top, to be reached by a sort of fireman's ladder, was the bedroom floor, at the same time his observatory, and the acquaintance who had assumed the chore of carrying the meal upstairs?â“he is my servant”âno, he said “factotum.”
It was similar in whichever of his studios you visited, the urban ones as well as the others. In the company of a visitor he could hardly be distinguished from the former. Like him, he could be a dealer, a buyer,
a speculator, a critic, a patron. In a dark pinstriped suit: he stood thus, arms crossed, at a distance from the pictures. In the presence of his guests he did not touch them. The actual displaying was done by stooped young people in gray lab coats, not students but assistants, employees, helpers, while the one responsible stood in half-shadow and with a stream of chatter seemed to want to deflect the observer from his creations as if from some awful deed. Only his sidelong glances at the works, from a distance, expressed something different. And not until the observer voiced an opinionâan exclamation was sufficientâdid the painter step forward and acknowledge his work, also join in the enthusiasm, show a pleasure in what he had made that often hardly left room for that of the person standing next to him.
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ot the fact that he earned so much, and, when he was without his work, outwardly had something of the air of an entrepreneur or a gang boss, secretly disturbed the painter, but rather the thought, which grew more powerful as he got older, that he had won. Merely to be secure was itself uncanny. And a winner, too: self-disgust. If he ever wanted to do away with himself, it was when he imagined that he had outdone or trumped “the others,” “all of them.” To be sure, for him every “Victory!” was immediately followed by “What kind of victory?”
It was something else again that he had got involved in the film. It was by no means a mere whim or an interlude. For one thing, he was not unfamiliar with the cinema, both as a moviegoer of many years, one of the most faithful, passionate, and knowledgeable in all of Spain and France, and as an actor, trained at a school in Madrid, after which he had performed in a few films, in larger supporting roles.
And then the painter saw his film as a variation on his paintings, or an added dimension.
Instead of with his color, black, on a pictorial surface, he now felt the urge to tell about his distance in a film for a change. He was not the first painter to do this, and his dream was a powerful dream. In it, regions and people appeared with an impact very similar to the shadings and figurations of black in his paintings. And the people moved; above all, they spoke.
The painter had a story to tell with his film, a story rich in both
events and images, created for the large screen and a thousand-seat theater (such as still existed everywhere in his Spain, at least until this year, even now in the small town of Toro).
And this story had long since been available as a book, one of decisive importance to the young and also to the now almost old painter, William Faulkner's As
I Lay Dying
. Time and again he had been astonished that in the almost seventy years during which the farm family from Mississippi had roamed about, having various adventures as they carried the coffin of the dead mother, so as to lay her to rest, as she had requested, in her place of origin, no one seemed to have narrated the film of the story. He, at any rate, felt the need for it. He would have been the first to go to see it. And since the film did not turn up, he wanted to make it, for himself, the moviegoer.
He bought the rights, wrote the screenplay, traced on foot the stations of the coffin expedition, Castile, Galicia instead of the American South, and put together a team consisting of professionalsâthe technical crewâand nonprofessionalsâall the actors.
The problem that arose during the shooting was the painter's or filmmaker's decision not to show, as originally planned, the transportation of the mother after her death on a first, long zigzag course through the Spanish interior provinces of Soria, Valladolid, and Zamora, but to jump immediately beyond the Cantabrian Mountains into stone-gray-glittering Finisterre by the sea: for one thing, during that early spring it was raining far more, and also heavily and unceasingly near the Atlantic, which was necessary for it to be visible on film; the rivers were overflowing their banks and thus cutting off the pilgrims' paths to the grave, as the story required, and forming, like the Mississippi in the book, that great floodplain where the coffin was supposed to disappear in the mud, in danger of never being seen again.
Furthermore, the filmmaker did not recognize until the test shoot in the Castilian highlands that the light there differed in some decisive way from that in his dream. To be consistent with that dream, an entirely different light had to prevail in the next sequence, after the family set out with the corpse of the motherâwhich, like the living, joined in narrating one phase or another of the journey, from the coffin; the light was to be that of the “Land Behind the Mirror” (the film's title).
It had to do purely with sense impressions that were missing from the Iberian interior with its lack of water and its almost nonexistent cliffs (those that did exist were dull yellow and hardly reflected anything), but not from the sparkling granite areas along the coast, where in the heart of Galicia even seemingly dry brook beds and mere mud puddles that looked like cattle watering places would swell up in the flooding and spread out to the width of the rivers or lakes they really were: not small meadow brooks, not merely damp, naked earth between two fields, but arms of the sea with salt water.
And there was another reason for him to have his film take place in that light, besides the most obvious one. When he, already no longer young, had first found himself in Vigo, Pontevedra, and La Coruña, he had moved through the area from beginning to end with the sensation of cities behind a mirror. He had certainly known their names all his life, but not been able to imagine an existence to go with them. For him Spain ended long before that, with the Sierra Cantabrica or at most with Santiago de Compostela. (Similarly, in his childhood, in his own house, there had been forgotten corners, which, when one entered them unexpectedly, appeared brighter than the rest, with everything highlighted and graphic.)
Something was behind the mirror, it was said, had been there all the time, and very close by, too. And nevertheless one first had to get through to it, who knew how? at the suitable moment, when was that? But then there were revealed, and as a rule precisely in one's own country, on one's own continent, as if independent of it and self-sufficient, as if completely on their own and also quite healthy and sturdy, existing settlements, entire cities or city-states, in whose polished mirror surface a new world could be deciphered. At least that was how it had seemed to him that time in La Coruña, and even more in the larger town of Vigo. And all this was perfectly natural.
So for the film it was merely necessary to soften here and there the gleam in the foreground and add a glow in the background. The technical crew, uncertain at first because he, allegedly a painter, did not lay out for them a single camera angle or light setting, soon got used to being, like him, only somewhat prepared instead of completely. It even electrified them when he came up with a surprise at the last minute.
And with the passage of time they, too, seemed happy that he was not narrating his story as they were perhaps accustomed to; he allowed the images to follow each other in such a way that it looked more like a frieze than an ordinary film, and background noise, of planes, of trains, was as welcome to him as the sudden shadow of a cloud on the face of the actor who happened to be speaking. Finally a sound engineer took it upon himself, after the end of the workday, to go, in pitch-black night and heavy rain, out to the lighthouse of La Coruña because he was not satisfied with that day's recording of raindrops falling on an empty soda can out there among the cliffs; he wanted to catch the sound between the drops that fell into the can through the drinking hole.
And the actors, a family of Castilian villagers, to whom the coastal region was also new, recited their story, or watched and listened to it with a complete, almost imploring solemnity, which came perhaps from the fact that the moment of shooting was the first time all of them were speaking their monologuesâthe script had nothing elseâlearned in isolation, each of them alone.
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hings changed when the film was finished. Even before that there had been hardly anyone who seemed to be really looking forward to the film, and those who said they were curious did so in a tone that made it sound like a threat.
At a first screening for his acquaintances in the interior, they avoided his eyes when it was over, and those who opened their mouths spoke of something else entirely, or praised the shot “where the fish leaps over the coffin.” A few complete strangers had wandered in off the street, one of whom began to clap at the end but stopped at once in the general silence.
Of a second screening, for a couple of potential distributors, at which the painter was not present, he heard only that one of them had had tears in his eyes, and had at the same time given the thumbs-down sign. Then some viewers had their praise conveyed to him, and a short while later expressed to him their disappointment at his failure to respond.
Having believed that his film was for the whole world, my friend felt mute anguish at his lack of success, anguish that stemmed from the
thought of having done something that hardly anyone needed to do anymore; the timesâor who or what?âneeded stories other than those in
As I Lay Dying
.
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is loss of distance had a different origin, however. The origin lay within him. It seemed to him as though with this film, for which he had seen himself as responsible, he had lost his unity with himself, his identity; only when it was no longer present had it been transformed from a word into a thing.
That he had made a fool of himself was something he welcomed; from the beginning that had been characteristic of him, had meanwhile become, to an extent, a sort of duty, which enabled him to carry on. The waste of money was a matter of indifference to him. And if the notion of defeat came to him, he thought, “What defeat?”
Yet no such redeeming contradiction presented itself in response to the thought: “Distance and I are no longer one, I am not a painter anymore.” The question “Who am I?” had ceased to be rhetorical for him. It was he who had driven himself from his special place, to which he had laid claim from very early on and had occupied with an assertiveness unlike that of any of the painters around him. It had been said of his paintings that in them, specifically with the many variations on black, perhaps for the last time in history the coasts of the Mediterranean had been brought to life, from Gibraltar by way of Sicily and the Peloponnesus to Crete and Phoenicia, as only once before, and then by all the peoples together, in classical antiquity.
No longer to know who one was also implied culpability, incurred anew with every step. Since his transgression he was an outlaw, not vis-Ã -vis the world around him but vis-Ã -vis himself. To be without identity was not something he experienced as blissful extinction. It was a stigma he could not hide, for it was visible only to himself.
The loss of distance meant at the same time a loss of images, in the sense that without that feeling for distance he could no longer paintâcould not send his color off in any direction. Whenever he looked around for his material, as now on the Duero, light did radiate from the spot, to be sure, but it was whirling and frightening as, in his childhood, the snakes on the Medusa's head in the Roman museum in his native
Tarragona had been. Hadn't the gaze that allegedly turned people to stone looked to him more like one that summoned people to reflect? Thus in his months of confusion he thought one time: “It may be that I have blocked my way back home.” And then another time: “That's fine. What an adventure. Finally out in the wild world.”
Medusa was a beautiful, solemn young woman whose head was later cut off, and from this sprang, instead of snakes, the horse with wings, Pegasus by name.
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hat he had formed the habit of stretching out on the ground in the course of the day was not merely the result of his great tiredness. Had that been the case, he would have changed his position and would not have lain facedown the entire time, motionless, his eyes open. He lay this way on purpose, somewhat like one of his forerunners, the American Sam Francis, who, when he was sick once for a long time, was supposed to have looked for several months at nothing but the floor under his bed, through a hole in the mattressâor had he pushed the mattress off the bedspring? Except that at that time Sam Francis had not yet been a painter, and he himself now?