(This raises an interesting question: did Shakespeare know he was Shakespeare? But that’s for another day.)
(There is no muse of cinema, nor of fiction, neither. In this case the muses-most-likely would probably be Calliope—if what I was doing could be considered an epic—or Thalia, if comedy, or Melpomene, if I could rise to the heights required for tragedy. Not very important. Never mind.)
Let it play out, I said. Let’s see what the retired policeman has to say.
Drama has a way of bushwhacking the dramatist. Something’s going to happen and I don’t know what it is, Riya said, and called on me for support, but what neither of us guessed was that the something that was going to happen was me.
We made our way back into the Golden house and found ourselves, in the large family room that gave onto the Gardens, confronted by Vasilisa holding her young son—my young son—my son!—in one hand and a gun in the other. Small, pearl-handled, golden barrel. The girl with the golden gun. She looked like an Italian movie star in her pinkish silk nightgown over which there floated a floor-length lace peignoir—Monica Vitti, or Virna Lisi, I wasn’t sure which. The gun, however, was definitely a Godard touch. I thought of his murderer heroine in Pierrot leaving the dwarf dead with her scissors through his neck. I had no desire to become a version of that dwarf. I actually raised my hands. Play the scene, I thought. Riya looked at me as if I was mad.
Good morning, Vasilisa, Riya said in a normal, non-filmic voice. Put that thing down, please.
What are you people doing in my house? Vasilisa said, not lowering the weapon. (She, at least, was sticking to the script.)
Nero called me, Riya said. He wanted to talk.
He wanted to talk to you?
He talked for a long time. There’s a man coming to see him soon.
Who is coming? Why have I not been informed?
I came because Riya is worried, I said. About the man.
We will all meet this man, said Vasilisa. This mystery will be solved. She put the pistol back in her pocketbook, where it lived.
Cut. Then a sequence of quick shots, bridging the passage of time, intended to show Nero’s poor condition. He is unsteady on his feet and in his voice and gestures.
When she woke up her husband Nero was not in good shape. The lucidity of the long night’s oratory had vanished. He was fuzzy and indistinct, as if the effort of remembering had worn him out. Vasilisa helped him into the bedroom and said, “Shower.” After he had showered she said, “Dress.” After he had dressed she said, “Shoes.” He looked piteous. “I can’t tie the laces,” he said. “They are loafers,” she told him. “Shoes.” After the shoes were on his feet she held out a handful of pills. “Swallow,” she said. After he had swallowed she commanded, “Tell me.” He shook his head. “A man from yesterday,” he said.
The only reason I know anything about Borsalino hats is that my parents used to argue in their friendly way, enjoying the argument more than the outcome, about whether the celebrated fedoras should be included in their collection of famous Belgians. The Borsalino hat company is not located within Belgian borders. It is to be found in the city of Alessandria, in Piedmont, Italy, which sits on the alluvial plain between the Tanaro and Bormida rivers, about fifty-six miles from Torino. I know three things about Borsalino hats: that they are very popular among Orthodox Jews; that they became cool when Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo wore them in the 1970 French gangster movie named after them; and that they are felt hats, and the felt is made from Belgian (aha!) rabbit fur.
The man Mastan, the retired police officer, sat on the same upright chair in the living room of the Golden house formerly occupied by the murderer Kinski, looking a little alarmed to be confronted by a grim-faced Vasilisa and Riya and myself as well as Nero. It was the weekend, so many of the household staff were away. No Blather, no Fuss. The handyman Gonzalo was absent, as well as the majordomo Michael McNally and Sandro “Cookie” Cucchi the chef. I answered the door myself and showed the inspector in. A handsome man! Silver-haired, a septuagenarian like Nero, maybe not quite as far through his seventies, he looked in profile like he could have been the model for the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota. Except that his cream suit was straight out of a Peter O’Toole movie and his tie with its slanting red and gold stripes was a tie any British gentleman would have been proud to wear. (I only found out later, with the help of research, just how proud. The tie of the Marylebone Cricket Club was a thing greatly desired in cricket-playing circles.) He sat very straight, very upright, but very ill at ease, playing with the Borsalino hat upon his knee. There was a moment of awkward silence. Then he spoke.
I came to the United States for three reasons, he said. In the first place, to visit my sister in Philadelphia. Her husband is successful in the recycling of plastic bottles. This is how one makes one’s fortune in America. Get one good idea and stick to it. Professor Einstein used to say he only had one good idea. But in his case it was the nature of the universe.
Nero was at his goofiest, unfocused, his eyes wandering, humming a little private tune.
The second reason was to visit the grave of P. G. Wodehouse, he said. (That got my attention. Wodehouse, so beloved of my parents and myself. Wodehouse, who had also come to mind when Kinski sat in that chair.) Mr. Wodehouse is very popular back home, Mastan said. His tombstone is a marble book engraved with the names of his characters. My favorite is not there however. Miss Madeline Bassett who thought the stars were God’s daisy chain. But she is a minor character. I, also, myself. The same. Mine has always been a strictly supporting role.
My husband is not well, Vasilisa stiffly said. If there is a point to this visit, please arrive at it promptly.
Oh, the point, madam, yes. Bear with me. There is the point ostensible and the point actual. The point ostensible is what I have said to him telephonically. A word of warning. But the gentleman has been a worldly man. Perhaps it is not necessary to warn him of what he already knows. The community of our people in America has grown, madam, it boasts now recyclers of plastic bottles, madam, also new technology geniuses, garlanded actors, campaigning attorneys, politicians across the spectrum, fashion designers, and also, madam, criminal gangs. I’m sorry to say. In America the word mafia has specific Italian connotations so it is better to avoid it and call our people’s gangs by other names. Let us concede that they are still small, there are only the beginnings of what the Italians call families and what our people call gharaney, households, or, nowadays, companies, a term presently popular in the mother country. However there is much enthusiasm among these American companies, these new households, much potential for rapid growth. There is also a degree of outreach to the mother country, an interest in globalization, in shared activities. Our people in the USA are willing to help the people in the mother country, to facilitate actions here, in return for parallel facilitations back home. Things change, madam. Time passes. Things formerly impossible become possible. I wished to discuss these matters with the gentleman but now that I am face to face with him I find it redundant to do so. He may be aware, he may not. It may be a concern to him, or not. His intelligence may retain the capacity for analysis of threat and risk, or it may have lost that capacity. It is not my business. I see this now.
So we come to the point actual, madam, thanking you for your patience. The point actual was to take a look at the gentleman and to see what taking such a look inspired in myself. It is a man who has escaped judgment for many wrongs. For his part in desperate deeds, madam. It is a man who has expertly covered his tracks, who has used tradecraft and money to erase all links between himself and many things that are beyond words. I promised to tell him the names of his son’s murderers but of course he knows them already, he dealt with them for years on cordial terms, until they turned against him. It is possible the security forces of this great country would have been interested in these matters and perhaps I could have interested them, but I fear that without evidence I would look to them like a fond and foolish man
even though I was once their colleague in a distant land. It is possible that having taken a look at this man I would have wished to take matters into my own hands although we are both old men. It is possible I would have wished to hit this man in the face, absurd as a fistfight between two old duffers would be. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that I would have wished to shoot him dead. I am still a crack shot, madam, and a weapon in America is easily acquired. But now that I look upon this man, a man whom I have hated for the larger part of my life, this man who was a strong man, I see that I have found him in his time of weakness, and he is not worthy of my bullet. Let him face his God. Let him receive judgment when he is standing before the judgment seat. Let hell receive him and let him burn in hellfire for all eternity. Thus my point is made and I will take my leave.
Riya’s hand was on Vasilisa’s shoulder, warning her, leave your pistol where it is.
Mr. Mastan rose and bowed his head. Then as he turned for the door Nero hauled himself up from the depths of the sofa where he sat and shockingly, awfully, shouted at the very top of his voice.
You come into my house and speak like this to me in front of my wife?
The retired policeman stopped in his tracks, his back to Nero, his hat still in his hand.
Bastard! Nero screamed. Run! It is you who are a dead man now.
When the detective arrives on the scene, the movie audience instinctively relaxes, expecting crime to be followed by justice, for right to triumph. But it is not inevitable that the just will gain the victory over the unjust. In another Hitchcock movie, Psycho, the horror arises from the fact that the wrong people die. Janet Leigh is the biggest star in the movie but, not even halfway through the running time, aah!, she’s dead in the shower. Then the detective, Martin Balsam, arrives, nice, comfortable, safe Martin Balsam, so professional, so reassuring, and our tension eases. Things will be all right now. And then, aah! He’s dead too. Note to self: it’s extra scary when the wrong people die.
The retired detective, Inspector Mastan formerly of the Bombay CID. Must we expect something terrible to happen to him?
One last thing about Mr. Hitchcock. Yes, he liked to make cameo appearances in his films, he said it made people watch the movies more closely to see when and how it would happen, but also, very often, he got the cameo out of the way early so that the search for it didn’t become a distraction. I say this because I now have to record, as the auteur of the present work in progress (to put it much too grandly, considering that this is very much a rookie project), that as I watched—participated wordlessly in—the scene I have just described, something uncontrollable welled up inside me. In that time of spilling secrets, I let my own secret spill.
Yes: characteristically, I hide my feelings. I lock them away or I sublimate them into movie references. Even at this crucial moment in my narrative, when I step out of the shadows into the center-stage spotlight, I’m trying (and failing) to resist talking about Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece Ran, in which, so to speak, King Lear was married to Lady Macbeth. The thought was triggered by something Inspector Mastan said. He called himself fond and foolish and whether he knew it or not was almost quoting Shakespeare’s broken king. Pray, do not mock me, Lear pleads. I am a very foolish fond old man….And to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. There he sat upon his sofa, his last throne, screaming senile hatred. The Ancient of Days, who had disrupted the lives of his three sons and was destroyed not as Lear was, by their hostility, but by their destruction. And here before him, as monstrous in my eyes as the Lady Kaede in Ran, Kurosawa’s Lady Macbeth, stood Vasilisa Golden, mother of his fourth and only surviving—and only supposed—child, with a pistol in her pocketbook and fire blazing from her eyes. And I, the fool, beginning my soliloquy which would reveal the truth. As if I didn’t understand that mine was a supporting role. As if, like Inspector Mastan, I could be, at least for this one scene, the star.
I had come to despise the second Mrs. Golden for her airs, for the way she discarded me like a used tissue once I had served her purpose, for the gun in her handbag, for her sanctimonious worship of an imitation icon, for her fake babushka mother, for the undeniable truth that everything she did, every gesture, every inflection of her voice, every kiss, every embrace, was motivated not by true feeling but by cold-blooded calculation. The wisdom of the spider, the wisdom of the shark. She was loathsome. I loathed her and wanted to do her harm.
In the retired police inspector’s British-Indian delivery, in his rigid self-control, in his voice that was never raised even when cursing Nero Golden to eternal damnation, I recognized something of myself. Maybe Suchitra had been right when she said that everyone in my story was an aspect of my own nature. Certainly I heard myself not only in Mr. Mastan’s suppression of feeling but also, at this moment, in Nero’s impotent dotard’s shriek. I was no dotard, not yet, but I knew something about powerlessness. Even now as I chose to cast away the shackles placed by Vasilisa on my tongue I understood that the truth would hurt me most of all. Yet I would tell it. When Riya called me summoning me to the Golden house, something’s going to happen, Riya in her own state of distress and confusion, in which mourning was now mingled with dreadful knowledge, provoked in me a flood of feeling I didn’t immediately understand but whose meaning had now, abruptly, become clear.
The election was upon us and Suchitra in her usual indefatigable way had volunteered to work the phones and then on Tuesday do the legwork and get out the vote. She should have been the one with whom I first sat down, calmly, to confess, to explain, to express my love and beg forgiveness. I owed her that at the very least and instead here I was up on my hind legs in the Golden living room with my mouth open and the fateful words trembling on my lips.
No, there’s no need to set down the words themselves.
Near the end of Satyajit Ray’s sublime Pather Panchali can be found what I consider to be the greatest single scene in the history of the cinema. Harihar the father of little Apu and his older sister Durga, who left them in their village with their mother Sarbajaya while he went to the city to try to earn some money, returns—having done well—with gifts for his children, not knowing that in his absence young Durga has fallen ill and died. He finds Sarbajaya sitting on the pyol, the porch of their home, silenced by tragedy, unable to welcome him home or respond to what he tells her. Not understanding, he begins to show her the children’s gifts. Then in an extraordinary moment we see his face change when Sarbajaya, whose back is to the camera, tells him the news about Durga. At this moment, understanding the inadequacy of dialogue, Ray allows music to surge up and fill the soundtrack, the high piercing music of the tar-shehnai crying out the parents’ grief more eloquently than their words ever could.
I have no music to offer. I offer only silence instead.
When I had said what there was to say, Riya walked across the room to stand in front of me. Then, raising her right hand, she hit me as hard as she could on the left side of my face. That is for Suchitra, she said. Then with the back of her hand she hit me even harder on the right side, and told me, That is for you. I stood still and did not move.
What did he say? Nero, in the confusion of the morning, wanted to know. What is he talking about?
I went over to where he sat, got down on my haunches, and looked him in the eye, and said it again.
I am the father of your son. Little Vespa. Your only surviving child is not yours. He is mine.
Vasilisa descended upon me in Byronic fury, came down like the wolf on the fold, but before she reached me I saw a light come on in the old man’s eyes and then there he was, present again, alert, the man of power returning from his cloudy wandering exile and reentering his skin.
Bring the boy, he commanded his wife. She shook her head. He shouldn’t be a part of this, she said.
Bring him at once.
And when Little Vespa was brought—Vasilisa holding him, the babushka mother beside her, the two women’s bodies half turned away from the man of the
house, shielding the child between them—Nero looked keenly at the boy, as if for the first time, then at me, then back at him, and back at me again, and so on, many times; until the child, unprovoked but perceiving the crisis as children can, burst into noisy tears. Vasilisa gestured to the older woman, enough. The boy was removed from his father’s presence. He did not look in my direction even once.
Yes, Nero said. I see. He said no more but I seemed to see, hanging in the air above his head, the terrible words once thought by Emma Bovary about her daughter Berthe. It’s strange how ugly this child is.