The Book of Illusions

  Okay, I’ll accept that. You’re part of the family, and now that you’re an adult, you deserve to know the family secrets. But how does a private confession turn into a book? It’s one thing for him to unburden himself to you, but a book is for the world, and as soon as he tells his story to the world, his life becomes meaningless.

  Only if he’s still alive when it’s published. But he won’t be. I’ve promised not to show it to anyone until after he’s dead. He promised me the truth, and I promised him that.

  And it’s never occurred to you that he might be using you? You get to write your book, yes, and if all goes well, it’s acknowledged as an important book, but at the same time Hector gets to live on through you. Not because of his films—which won’t even exist anymore—but because of what you’ve written about him.

  It’s possible, anything is possible. But his motives don’t really concern me. He could be acting out of fear, out of vanity, out of some last-minute surge of regret, but he’s told me the truth. That’s the only thing that counts. Telling the truth is hard, David, and Hector and I have lived through a lot together these past seven years. He’s made everything available to me—all his journals, all his letters, every document he’s been able to lay his hands on. At this point, I’m not even thinking about publication. Whether it comes out or not, writing this book has been the biggest experience of my life.

  Where does Frieda fit into all this? Has she been helping the two of you or not?

  It’s been rough on her, but she’s done her best to go along with us. I don’t think she agrees with Hector, but she doesn’t want to stand in his way. It’s complicated. Everything with Frieda is complicated.

  How long did it take before you decided to send out Hector’s old films?

  That happened right at the beginning. I still didn’t know if I could trust him, and I proposed it as a test, to see if he was being honest with me. If he’d turned me down, I don’t think I would have stayed. I needed him to sacrifice something, to give me a sign of good faith. He understood that. We never talked about it in so many words, but he understood. That’s why he didn’t do anything to stop it.

  That still doesn’t prove he’s been honest with you. You put his old films back in circulation. Where’s the harm in that? People remember him now. A crazy professor from Vermont even wrote a book about him. But none of that changes the story.

  Every time he’s told me something, I’ve gone and checked it out. I’ve been to Buenos Aires, I’ve followed the trail of Brigid O’Fallon’s bones, I’ve dug up the old newspaper articles about the Sandusky bank shooting, I’ve talked to more than a dozen actors who worked at the ranch in the forties and fifties. There aren’t any discrepancies. Some people couldn’t be found, of course, and others turned out to be dead. Jules Blaustein, for example. And I still don’t have anything on Sylvia Meers. But I did go to Spokane and talk to Nora.

  She’s still alive?

  Very much so. At least she was three years ago.

  And?

  She married a man named Faraday in 1933 and had four children. Those children produced eleven grandchildren, and right around the time of my visit, one of those grandchildren was about to make them great-grandparents.

  Good. I don’t know why I say that, but I’m glad to hear it.

  She taught the fourth grade for fifteen years, and then they made her principal of the school. She went on doing that until she retired in 1976.

  In other words, Nora went on being Nora.

  She was seventy-something years old when I went out there, but she still felt like the same person Hector had described to me.

  And what about Herman Loesser? Did she remember him?

  She cried when I mentioned his name.

  What do you mean cried?

  I mean her eyes filled up with tears, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. She cried. In the same way you and I cry. In the same way every person cries.

  Good Lord.

  She was so startled and embarrassed, she had to get up and leave the room. When she came back, she took hold of my hand and said that she was sorry. She’d known him a long time ago, she said, but she’d never been able to stop thinking about him. He’d been in her thoughts every day for the past fifty-four years.

  You’re making this up.

  I don’t make things up. If I hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. But it happened. It all happened, just as Hector said it did. Every time I think he’s lied to me, it turns out that he’s been telling the truth. That’s what makes his story so impossible, David. Because he’s told me the truth.

  7

  THERE WAS NO moon in the sky that night. When I stepped out of the car and put my feet on the ground, I remember saying to myself: Alma is wearing red lipstick, the car is yellow, and there is no moon in the sky tonight. In the darkness behind the main house, I could dimly make out the contours of Hector’s trees—great hulks of shadow stirring in the wind.

  Memoirs of a Dead Man opens with a passage about trees. I found myself thinking about that as we approached the front door, trying to remember my translation of the third paragraph of Chateaubriand’s two-thousand-page book, the one that begins with the words Ce lieu me plaît; il a remplacé pour moi les champs paternels and concludes with the following sentences: I am attached to my trees. I have addressed elegies, sonnets, and odes to them. There is not one amongst them that I have not tended with my own hands, that I have not freed from the worm that had attacked its root or the caterpillar that had clung to its leaves. I know them all by their names, as if they were my children. They are my family. I have no other, and I hope to be near them when I die.

  I wasn’t expecting to see him that night. When Alma called from the airport, Frieda had told her that Hector would probably be asleep by the time we made it to the ranch. He was still hanging on, she said, but she didn’t think he’d be up to talking to me until tomorrow morning—assuming he managed to last that long.

  Eleven years later, I still wonder what would have happened if I had stopped and turned around before we reached the door. What if, instead of putting my arm around Alma’s shoulder and walking straight toward the house, I had stopped for a moment, looked at the other half of the sky, and discovered a large round moon shining down on us? Would it still be true to say that there was no moon in the sky that night? If I didn’t take the trouble to turn around and look behind me, then yes, it would still be true. If I never saw the moon, then the moon was never there.

  I’m not suggesting that I didn’t take the trouble. I kept my eyes open, I tried to absorb everything that was happening around me, but no doubt there was much that I missed as well. Like it or not, I can only write about what I saw and heard—not about what I didn’t. This is not an admission of failure so much as a declaration of methodology, a statement of principles. If I never saw the moon, then the moon was never there.

  Less than a minute after we entered the house, Frieda was taking me up to Hector’s room on the second floor. There was no time for anything but the most cursory look around, the briefest of first impressions—her close-cropped white hair, the firmness of her grip when she shook my hand, the weariness in her eyes—and before I could say any of the things I was supposed to say (thank you for having me, I hope he’s feeling better), she informed me that Hector was awake. He’d like to see you now, she said, and suddenly I was looking at her back as she led me up the stairs. No time to make any observations about the house, then—except to note that it was large and simply furnished, with many drawings and paintings hanging on the walls (perhaps Frieda’s, perhaps not)—nor to think about the unlikely person who had opened the door, a man so diminutive that I didn’t even notice him until Alma bent down and kissed him on the cheek. Frieda entered the room an instant later, and although I remember that the two women hugged, I can’t recall if Alma was beside me when I walked up the stairs. I always seem to lose track of her at that point. I look for her in my mind, but I never manage to locate he
r. By the time I get to the top of the stairs, Frieda is inevitably gone as well. It couldn’t have happened that way, but that’s how I remember it. Whenever I see myself walking into Hector’s room, I always go in alone.

  What astonished me most, I think, was the simple fact that he had a body. Until I saw him lying there in the bed, I’m not sure that I ever fully believed in him. Not as an authentic person, at any rate, not in the way I believed in Alma or myself, not in the way I believed in Helen or even Chateaubriand. It stunned me to acknowledge that Hector had hands and eyes, fingernails and shoulders, a neck and a left ear—that he was tangible, that he wasn’t an imaginary being. He had been inside my head for so long, it seemed doubtful that he could exist anywhere else.

  The bony, liver-spotted hands; the gnarled fingers and thick, protruding veins; the collapsed flesh under his chin; the half-open mouth. He was lying on his back with his arms out over the covers when I entered the room, awake but still, looking up at the ceiling in a kind of trance. When he turned in my direction, however, I saw that his eyes were Hector’s eyes. Furrowed cheeks, grooved forehead, wattled throat, tufted white hair—and yet I recognized the face as Hector’s face. It had been sixty years since he’d worn the mustache and the white suit, but he hadn’t altogether vanished. He’d grown old, he’d grown infinitely old, but a part of him was still there.

  Zimmer, he said. Sit down beside me, Zimmer, and turn off the light.

  His voice was weak and clogged with phlegm, a soft rumbling of sighs and demi-articulations, but it was loud enough for me to make out what he said. The r at the end of my name had a slight roll to it, and as I reached over and turned off the lamp on the bedside table, I wondered if it wouldn’t be easier for him if we continued in Spanish. After the light was off, however, I saw that a second lamp was on in the far corner of the room—a standing lamp with a broad vellum shade—and that a woman was sitting in a chair beside the lamp. She stood up the moment I glanced over at her, and I must have jumped a little when she did that—not only because I was startled, but because she was tiny, as tiny as the man who had opened the door downstairs. Neither one of them could have been more than four feet tall. I thought I heard Hector laugh behind me (a faint wheeze, the merest whisper of a laugh), and then the woman nodded at me in silence and walked out of the room.

  Who was that? I said.

  Don’t be alarmed, Hector said. Her name is Conchita. She is part of the family.

  I didn’t see her, that’s all. It surprised me.

  Her brother Juan lives here, too. They are little people. Strange little people who cannot talk. We depend on them.

  Do you want me to turn off the other light?

  No, this is good. Not so hard on the eyes. I am content.

  I sat down on the chair beside the bed and leaned forward, trying to position myself as close to his mouth as possible. The light from the other side of the room was no stronger than the light of a candle, but the illumination was sufficient for me to see Hector’s face, to look into his eyes. A pale glow hovered over the bed, a yellowish air mixed with shadows and dark.

  It is always too soon, Hector said, but I am not afraid. A man like me has to be crushed. Thank you for being here, Zimmer. I did not expect you to come.

  Alma was very convincing. You should have sent her to me a long time ago.

  You shook up my bones, sir. At first, I could not accept what you did. Now I think I am glad.

  I didn’t do anything.

  You wrote a book. Again and again, I have read that book, and again and again I have asked myself: why did you choose me? What was your purpose, Zimmer?

  You made me laugh. That was all it ever was. You cracked open something inside me, and after that you became my excuse to go on living.

  Your book does not say that. It does honor to my old work with the mustache, but you do not talk about yourself.

  I’m not in the habit of talking about myself. It makes me uncomfortable.

  Alma has mentioned great sorrows, unspeakable pain. If I have helped you to bear that pain, it is perhaps the greatest good I have done.

  I wanted to be dead. After listening to what Alma told me this afternoon, I gather you’ve been to that place yourself.

  Alma was right to tell you those things. I am a ridiculous man. God has played many jokes on me, and the more you know about them, the better you will understand my films. I look forward to hearing what you say about them, Zimmer. Your opinion is very important to me.

  I know nothing about films.

  But you study the works of others. I have read those books, too. Your translations, your writings on the poets. It is no accident that you have spent years on the question of Rimbaud. You understand what it means to turn your back on something. I admire a man who can think like that. It makes your opinion important to me.

  You’ve managed without anyone’s opinion until now. Why this sudden need to know what others think?

  Because I am not alone. Others live here, too, and I must not think only of myself.

  From what I’ve been told, you and your wife have always worked together.

  Yes, that is true. But there is Alma to consider as well.

  The biography?

  Yes, the book she is writing. After her mother’s death, I understood that I owed her that. Alma has so little, and it seemed worth it to abandon some of my ideas about myself in order to give her a chance at life. I have begun to act like a father. It is not the worst thing that could have happened to me.

  I thought Charlie Grund was her father.

  He was. But I am her father, too. Alma is the child of this place. If she can turn my life into a book, then perhaps things will begin to go well for her. If nothing else, it is an interesting story. A stupid story, perhaps, but not without its interesting moments.

  You’re saying that you don’t care about yourself anymore, that you’ve given up.

  I have never cared about myself. Why should it bother me to turn myself into an example for others? Perhaps it will make them laugh. That would be a good outcome—to make people laugh again. You laughed, Zimmer. Perhaps others will begin to laugh with you.

  We were just warming up, just beginning to get into the swing of the conversation, but before I could think of a response to Hector’s last comment, Frieda walked into the room and touched me on the shoulder.

  I think we should let him rest now, she said. You can go on talking in the morning.

  It was demoralizing to be cut off like that, but I wasn’t in a position to object. Frieda had given me less than five minutes with him, and already he had won me over, already he had made me like him more than I would have thought possible. If a dying man could exert that power, I remarked to myself, imagine what he must have been like at full strength.

  I know that he said something to me before I left the room, but I can’t remember what it was. Something simple and polite, but the precise words escape me now. To be continued, I think it was, or else Until tomorrow, Zimmer, a banal phrase that signified nothing of any great importance—except, perhaps, that he still believed he had a future, however short that future might have been. As I stood up from the chair, he reached out and grabbed my arm. That I do remember. I remember the cold, clawlike feel of his hand, and I remember thinking to myself: this is happening. Hector Mann is alive, and his hand is touching me now. Then I remember telling myself to remember what that hand felt like. If he didn’t live until morning, it would be the only proof that I had seen him alive.

  After those first hectic minutes, there was a stretch of calm that lasted for several hours. Frieda remained on the second floor, sitting in the chair I had occupied during my visit with Hector, and Alma and I went downstairs to the kitchen, which turned out to be a large, brightly lit room with stone walls, a fireplace, and a number of old appliances that seemed to have been built in the early sixties. I liked being there, and I liked sitting down at the long wooden table next to Alma and feeling her touch my arm in the same spot where
Hector had touched me only a moment before. Two different gestures, two different memories—one on top of the other. My skin had become a palimpsest of fleeting sensations, and each layer bore the imprint of who I was.

  Dinner was a random collection of hot and cold dishes: lentil soup, hard sausage, cheese, salad, and a bottle of red wine. The food was served to us by Juan and Conchita, the strange little people who couldn’t talk, and while I won’t deny that I was somewhat unnerved by them, I was too preoccupied with other things to give them any real attention. They were twins, Alma said, and they had started working for Hector and Frieda when they were eighteen, more than twenty years ago. I noted their perfectly formed miniature bodies, their crude peasant faces, their effervescent smiles and apparent goodwill, but I was more interested in watching Alma talk to them with her hands than I was in watching them talk to her. It intrigued me that Alma was so fluent in sign language, that she could flick off sentences with a few rapid twirls and swoops of her fingers, and because they were Alma’s fingers, those were the fingers I wanted to watch. It was getting late, after all, and before long we would be going to bed. In spite of everything else that was happening just then, that was the subject I preferred to think about.

  Remember the three Mexican brothers? Alma said.

  The ones who helped build the original house.

  The Lopez brothers. There were four girls in the family as well, and Juan and Conchita are the youngest children of the third sister. The Lopez brothers built most of the sets for Hector’s films. They had eleven sons among them, and my father trained six or seven of the boys as film technicians. They were the crew. The fathers constructed the sets, and the sons worked as camera loaders and dolly operators, sound recorders and propmen, grips and gaffers. This went on for years. I used to play with Juan and Conchita when we were kids. They were the first friends I had in the world.