Days Between Stations Page 12

  In Paris Claude Avril continued to finesse the film’s finances. Marie Rinteuil and Paul Cottard told the press that while they found the notion of being directed by a twenty-year-old boy out of the ordinary, they were nonetheless ready to begin shooting. But once production was under way in Wyndeaux, Avril informed them that they too had been released from the picture. Now the picture’s investors were murderous. Marat was a joke in the papers; and Avril hid in his apartment, communicating with the outside world through desperate telegrams to Adolphe about the picture’s progress. Each day he waited nervously for an answer that never came. Finally, after two months passed, the police came to his apartment. The investors were prepared to press charges of fraud against him. Avril met with the investors and asked if they would at least look at what Sarre had done. He sent one more wire to Adolphe which read: “I will go to prison if you do not return immediately with picture.”

  Avril set up a screening at the back of the studio much like the one that had taken place several months before. The representatives of the principal investors arrived—three of them—and one of them brought a tall and rather aristocratic American who happened to be visiting Paris at the time. They waited for Adolphe until twenty minutes past the appointed hour. Repeatedly Avril would walk to the door and stare out into the dark. “Where’s the genius?” the investors asked. Then he was there in the doorway without a word, just looking at them; under his coat he clutched the reels of the picture. The only thing that seemed to catch his attention was the aristocratic American in the corner; Avril could see something in Adolphe’s eyes go slightly awestruck. Adolphe crossed the room and ran the film through the projector. When the lights were raised forty minutes later, everyone looked from the screen to each other. Adolphe stared at the empty seat from where the American had already left. The door was ajar.

  Hurriedly Adolphe packed up the film in the canisters, not even rewinding. Everyone watched as though waiting for an explanation; when he ran from the room, someone finally called out, “Why isn’t it like other pictures?” With the director gone, Avril was left to face the questions. “Why is it so dark?” said someone else. “Yes,” said another, “the actors are always in the shadows.” Asked the first, “He keeps moving the camera. Why doesn’t he just keep the camera in one place?” The second said, “I kept getting dizzy, all that moving around.”

  Avril ran from the room too. By the time he got to his apartment, he realized he was ruined; now his only concern was whether he would have to go to prison. At the top of the stairs he found Adolphe huddled outside the door; suddenly he looked like a boy again, younger than he had ever looked. Adolphe glanced up at Avril wildly and got to his feet. “You can’t let them take my movie away,” he said. Avril just looked at him in the dark of the hall; he tore the boy’s hands from his coat. He said, “I may go to prison.”

  “Did you think it was so bad?” said Adolphe.

  Avril just shook his head.

  “Did you think it was so—”

  “It doesn’t matter! I don’t know what’s good or bad. It wasn’t like anything else, that’s all I know. Why do you ask me? I don’t want to go to prison, that’s all I know.” He paused. The young director looked shattered. “Do you think it’s bad?” he said to him.

  “No,” said Adolphe.

  “Then why did you leave?”

  “Because he left.”

  “Who?”

  “Didn’t you see him in the corner?”

  “The American?”

  Adolphe looked at him amazed; he exploded with it. “It was Griffith!”

  “Griffith?” Now Avril was flabbergasted. Adolphe was leaning against the wall, staring down the stairs. He still held the film close to him. Griffith walked out of my picture, he just said vacantly. Avril sighed deeply and took him by the arm. He put the key in the door and opened it. “Come inside,” he muttered, “none of it matters now.”

  Inside, Adolphe crumpled into a corner on a pillow. When Avril woke the next morning, he was gone, and had taken the picture with him. Avril knew instantly that Adolphe had gone back to Wyndeaux to continue making the picture: when he returned to the village Adolphe told neither Janine nor the crew anything about the difficulties. Rather he explained that things had gone well, the screening had been received enthusiastically, and the picture now had to be completed as soon as possible. Adolphe knew, in fact, that this was not possible; he had only scratched the surface with what he had done so far. The company in Wyndeaux began shooting around the clock, hurried by the conclusion Adolphe knew was approaching down the railroad tracks. When he looked up one afternoon, several days after his departure from Paris, to see Claude Avril walking toward him, he dismissed the crew at once and walked with Avril into an alley out of earshot. Adolphe collapsed by the window of a patisserie. I won’t give up my picture, he said.

  “Adolphe,” said Avril, “look.” He shoved into his hands a copy of Le Figaro. On the front page was an exclusive interview with the great American motion picture director, D. W. Griffith, in which Griffith was quoted talking about European movies. He was citing the advances of the art in Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia, and France. He was talking about how just the other evening he had seen an unfinished picture about the French Revolution by a young man named Sarre. The interviewer asked incredulously whether Griffith actually meant La Mort de Marat by Adolphe Sarre, explaining that there had been a great deal of controversy about the picture, that in fact most observers considered Marat a joke. Sarre, after all, was practically a boy who had never made a picture. “That’s impossible,” answered Griffith. “He has made many pictures, that’s obvious to me. He has intuitive picture-making talents. Let me tell you, I went home that evening and woke seeing the faces in this picture, particularly the girl, and the way this Sarre moves her in and out of light. The fact that he’s young means nothing, of course. Old men don’t make pictures.” He laughed. “I am the only old man who makes pictures.” Is Sarre a genius then? asked the interviewer. “I don’t know what a genius is in this business,” Griffith said. “Let’s say he’s an original.”

  With the Griffith interview, Marat, though no less controversial, became a controversy to be taken seriously; the world’s greatest movie director had said so. Pathé wired Avril offering to resolve whatever financial problems existed in completing the film. Avril, pulled from the edge of ruin, was not about to quibble over pride and independence; he accepted Pathé’s offer, in essence turning his studio over to them while still retaining his role as executive producer. Adolphe plunged into the movie, fevered and impatient, and the news of the Griffith interview charged the company as well. Renting a very old theater on the edge of the village for the scenes where the revolutionary tribunal assembled and Marat met both intermittent triumph and setback, Adolphe packed the floor and the galleries with large crowds of townspeople, portraying the masses caught up in smoldering rhetoric. The director and Erik Rode got their best effect by hitching cameras to three perambulators that moved overhead along an intricate network of cables. Taxiing back and forth above, the cameras themselves provoked in the faces of the townspeople the mix of majesty and terror that Adolphe wanted. Over and over they did the scene, the heat in the hall intensifying with the light, the pressure building, makeup people dashing back and forth dabbing at faces and reapplying paint, costume people running through the crowd to rearrange a collar or a sleeve seen as askew from the galleries where Adolphe was giving directions. Over and over Adolphe exhorted both his company and the townspeople; he wanted to wear them down, push them to an edge. When he finally announced it was a take, the people on the floor turned to him and cheered, and the boy stood there astounded.

  Avril told Adolphe that since the article in Le Figaro people in Paris had been asking about the new actress, wanting to know who she was. They are asking about you, Adolphe told Janine down by the water one night, and she threw herself into his arms and clung to him. “Don’t let them take me back to Paris,” she said,
“please don’t let them.” From this place by the water, they had watched, as the evenings passed, one old woman who stood alone in a long black cloak gazing out to sea. As the evenings passed they had watched the sleeves of her cloak become entwined in the vines of the ramparts, and now Adolphe looked up from where he stood with Janine to see the cloak completely woven into the vines, the hood still raised, arms still extended, poised in the same stance as always: only now the old woman herself was gone. Of course I won’t let them take you, he said. “You can’t tell them who I am,” she said, “promise me you won’t.” I won’t tell them, he said, against the black sea.

  He could no longer delay resolving the problem of casting Marat. He had sometimes walked along the docks, in the bars and cafés, to find the face he wanted. He decided he would now have to return to Paris, and took an evening train with Avril; it was a pleasant trip almost all the way, each of them still feeling a glow of success and good fortune. But outside Paris they had a terrible disagreement. Adolphe told Avril he had to find a Marat soon, for a number of reasons. “Of course,” said Avril, “you can’t very well make a picture about Marat without having a Marat.”

  “It’s more than that,” said Adolphe, watching out the window as the sun rose over France.

  “What, then?”

  “Janine will have to take time off.” Adolphe turned to him from the window. “She’s pregnant.”

  Avril sat for a few moments in irritation. “Tell me the truth, Adolphe,” he finally demanded. “You’ve known this woman all along, haven’t you. From the beginning you knew her, before you ever saw her in that other picture, before you ever cast her in this role.”

  “Of course,” answered Adolphe. “She’s my sister.”

  Avril went white. His mouth fell and the words seemed to gurgle up. “My God,” he choked, almost inaudibly. “My God.”

  Adolphe flushed. For a moment he didn’t say anything and then he jumped up from the seat and took his suitcase down from the rack. “Fuck you, Claude,” he said, leaning over Avril, his face just inches from the other’s. “Don’t try to tell me men never take their sisters. Don’t try to tell me that.” His face was contorted with rage. He slammed open the door of the cabin, stepped out, and slammed it closed again. He moved down the hall and stood in the aisle the remaining thirty minutes into Paris while Avril sat absolutely motionless, afraid to stir, as though the shock fired into him had lodged near an artery and would tear through his heart at the slightest murmur of sound or body.

  He was drawn to Wyndeaux; he still didn’t understand why. Spring came and the blue light faded, and in the hours when he wasn’t shooting, when he still felt drawn, he went to the water and stared into it. With the glimmer of sunlight on the water he tried to peer through again, to see what was behind; but he didn’t seem able to do that anymore. He watched the sailboats and houseboats bobbing by the docks and felt, inside him, the pull, and tried to fathom it.

  He had found his Marat in Paris, an Irishman reading poetry in an English bookshop near the Deux Magots. His name was Terry Tonay, and while Adolphe was amused by the irony of an Irishman playing the great Frenchman Marat, he decided to change the poet’s name to Thierry Touraine. Within a month after Touraine had returned with Adolphe to Wyndeaux to shoot, it became clear to the director that his star was a bit disturbed; Touraine’s eyes took on a gleam too luminescent, and Adolphe, who had always understood well the meaning of light, understood that something in the poet’s head was afire, the brain was crackling. Summer came and then autumn, and now there was beginning to be trouble again. The sensation of the Griffith interview had become old hat, old questions were being raised anew; there was the suggestion that perhaps Griffith, who was coming to be regarded as old hat himself, was a little too easily taken in by Sarre. No one was calling Adolphe a joke anymore; but a lot of suspicious people held that in fact he was neither a genius nor an original but a shrewd con artist, who could not, when all was said and done, deliver. It was unheard of to spend this much time on a movie. Pathé wanted to see rushes. Janine was about to have the child, and Avril was trying to keep it undercover, certain he was sitting atop a horrible scandal that would wreck everything.

  They named the child Jacques. Janine adored him from the moment she saw he wasn’t blue. She took the baby’s head in her hands the way she had taken Adolphe’s hair. Adolphe was caught up in other things—using the time to film Marat’s scenes and realizing that he’d shot all he could in Wyndeaux, that the big scenes would have to be filmed in Paris. Adolphe needed to get back to a studio—either Avril’s or, ideally, Pathés, and construct a Bastille for the section of the picture that involved its siege. But Paris was problematical: Adolphe knew there were new rumblings there, and interference he wouldn’t be able to tolerate; he knew Janine would adamantly, for reasons she still hadn’t told him and which he’d never asked, refuse to return to the city; and there was Wyndeaux itself, which Adolphe was loath to leave, for reasons he asked himself continually, never receiving an answer.

  Coordinates of crisis and conflict crisscrossed the landscape. Almost immediately Janine became pregnant again, to Adolphe’s astonishment and rage; he railed at her in the bedroom, stricken with resentment and frustration, even as the other child cried in the night. Then the following week, he found Janine and Jacques gone, the lamp burning by her bedside and everything in disarray; and assuming she was leaving him, he summoned two stagehands in the hotel and they ran across town for the station. They could see the train huffing in rattled repose, smoke billowing from its front and the ground quaking from pending departure; the cries of the baby would be heard from the platform where Adolphe had waited patiently for her that first day. They caught up with two men forcibly putting mother and child aboard, and the scuffle resulted in Janine breaking loose and running to Adolphe with Jacques in her arms, while the two abductors lay beaten and dazed in the doorway of the train’s second car as the engine pulled out heading back to Paris. But relieved as she was by the rescue, back in her room she would not tell Adolphe who the men were or why they were trying to take her back; and Adolphe wound up storming from the room, slamming the door behind him, while Janine sobbed on the bed. From the next room he listened to her all night.

  Adolphe placed two guards by the actress’s door. But when the strangers who had tried to take her showed up again six days later, still a little bruised and bandaged from the fracas, it was Adolphe they came to see. This time there was no fracas. Contritely they took off their hats when he answered the door, and presented him with a card that read Varnette. They said Monsieur Varnette requested a meeting with Monsieur Sarre for the purpose of discussing a business proposition. They led Adolphe to the station where the Paris train was waiting once more, gleaming and wreathed in blank white smoke, with a single private car where the shades of the windows were drawn—all but one. When Adolphe was ushered into the car this Monsieur Varnette was standing at the window staring out; over his shoulder Adolphe could see the still blue night of the empty station, as though it had been vacated just for this meeting. The car was adorned in dark maroon silks and velvet, immaculately trimmed with ivory and gold; a small lamp shrouded by a cover of etched glass burned on the desk, where a crystal brandy decanter stood waiting between two snifters. Monsieur Varnette’s head turned slightly at Adolphe’s entrance; he watched back out the window another moment before approaching. When Monsieur Varnette stepped from the corner shadow of the car, Adolphe thought he felt his whole self rush up from the pit of him, leaving him and looking back down on his own flabbergasted panic.

  The two talked. Adolphe could barely concentrate on what the other was saying; at first he couldn’t even bring the brandy to his mouth, then found himself gulping it down, all the while studying Monsieur Varnette’s face. Varnette did not look much different from some years before. Part of the side of his jaw seemed slightly misshapen, and he carried one side of his body a bit stiffly; perhaps those were the results of the fall. At no time did he s
eem to recognize Adolphe. He spoke calmly, charmingly, while Adolphe just sat staring into his eyes, trying to determine what exactly Varnette remembered, and whether the memory was obscured by the circumstances of the event—the crazed way he looked when he took her, the way Adolphe had pushed him out the window without allowing for a second glance—or the trauma of the event, or the fact that Adolphe simply didn’t look much like Adolphe anymore; everyone told him that, that he always looked different. Finally beginning to relax, Adolphe mused awhile over his ability to change appearance, which he decided was directly related to his power over light and shadow, before finally turning his attention to what his host was saying.