“Don’t you have flowers in your house?”
She was a limp little Indian girl, a bit lost in the labyrinth of the hotel. She answered me in an Indian language, saying she was sorry. She turned away from me and quickly went to the bathroom to hang the towels. Then I heard how she softly closed the door to the room. By then I was already in the water, my chin leaning on the edge of the pool and the book of poems getting soaked by the little waves my body inevitably made. It upset me to read the continuation of Yeats’s poem: “How many loved your moments of glad grace, / And loved your beauty with love false or true.” I preferred to look at the nocturnal lights of Acapulco, which so cleverly disguise the double ugliness of this place. The façade of skyscrapers on the beach hides the poverty of the poor neighborhoods. The night hides both, returning everything to the firmament, the stars, and the beginning of the world. Who am I to talk, dreaming every night that someone puts a mask on me and says: This is your ideal beauty. You will never be more handsome than you are tonight. Never again?
20:30
Naked, I got out of the pool and threw myself onto the pink-sheeted bed. I fell asleep, but this time I didn’t dream that a woman came over to put a mask on me. My dream, unfortunately, was much more realistic, more biographical. Again and again, I walked up onto a speaker’s platform. Like a squirrel in a laboratory cage. A dream can be an endless staircase, nothing more. On the platform, Mister Smiles was waiting for me. Not Faces. Teeth. They smiled at me and congratulated me. They handed me the golden statuette. The Oscar. I don’t know what I said. The usual thing. I thanked everyone, from my first girlfriend to my dog. I forgot the pharmacist, the president of my bank, and the guy who sold me a used Porsche without ripping me off. The old German machine is still dominating California freeways, and if I weren’t in Acapulco, you’d probably find me searching for impossible answers at 120 m.p.h., heading toward the San Fernando Valley and an accident, physical or sexual. Which is to say, a worthwhile encounter. Instead, I came to Acapulco running away from a dream, and I’m calling the desk to tell them to have a ketch I can sail alone ready for me tomorrow. The receptionist did not exactly inspire my confidence. Did I want fishing tackle? I tell him yes, even if it’s not exactly true, just so everything will seem normal. Of course, fishing tackle. Tomorrow at 6:00 a.m. I’m going out fishing. That’s why I came. My ketch will be ready at the Yacht Club pier. Its name is The Two Americas. Everything should look normal.
22:05
I’m driving a pink jeep along the mountain highway. You can’t get lost, the hotel parking lot attendant tells me. There’s nothing until you get to the discotheque lights, you can’t miss it. He doesn’t know that the night is much more densely populated than the day, that it’s much more visual than the sun, because the night is like a gigantic Cinema-Scope screen on which you can project anything that comes into your mind.
I’m fighting the powerful breathing of the tropics, which at night becomes drunker and crazier as the rest of the world calms down. Apollo and his chariot of light have sunk into the sea. The jeep’s motor can’t drown out the cicadas, the frogs, the fireflies, or the mosquitoes. I make out other lights on the mountain that aren’t electric; they’re eyes — emerald, silver, and blood-colored eyes. Foxes, coyotes, solitary animals — like me — who feel the need for a little company — like me.
I accelerate and, thanks to the intermediary aid of my rearview mirror, project onto the screen of my mental night the picture that won me an Oscar, the first prize given by the academy to an American actor in a foreign film. I conquer the darkness with the unforgettable images of Leonello Padovani’s last film, in which I had the honor to have the lead. And the extraordinary thing is that the images of the film that I conjure up like something luminous are images of night and fog.
The film is set in northern Italy. Everything happens at night or on cloudy days. A poor man can’t stand his hardworking, good wife any longer. He doesn’t know what to do, but he’s convinced he should cut his ties with his routine life and expose himself to chance. One winter night, he abandons his wife. But he takes the only thing he really loves in his house, his nine-year-old daughter. He doesn’t take clothing or money. Only the girl. But along with her, unintentionally, he brings a past and a habit. The child follows naturally, as if any decision that affects her is neither good nor bad but natural. Especially if it’s her father who makes the decision. He wishes she would understand that he’s taken her along because he loves her. He doesn’t understand that it’s possible to love naturally, obediently. For him, love is a matter of will. He confuses the love of the heart with the love of the mind. The girl doesn’t. She loves and obeys her father without having to force herself.
For a few days, the two of them wander aimlessly through that landscape of fog and cold, relying on charity but subjected to the father’s inability to tell the child why they’ve run away and why he loves her. What does she think? Will she abandon her father? Or will she go on with him to the end? What is solitude? The absence of company or a shared abandonment? Padovani provides no answers. Each member of the audience has to provide his own.
I felt that for the only time in my life my acting was in the hands of an artist. I felt that the film went along discovering itself at the same time that he, debilitated, suffering, and, ultimately, dying, filmed it. The difference between theater and film is that movies are made in a choppy way, without continuity. Padovani managed to turn that technique into artistic creation. He transformed the obligatory method in filming — the end at the beginning, the beginning at the end — into a means of searching out the picture. Besides, in each pause between scenes, in each take, in each save, and even in each coffee break, he forced me to search out myself. It wasn’t just a matter of memorizing lines and saying that tomorrow I’ve got to do from page such-and-such to this other page. It meant searching myself out as an actor and as a man, and what I discovered is that this is what a character is: someone who exists and who acts at the same time.
In my hand, I hold the hot hand of the girl who was my audience, free to decide to abandon me or to go on with me.
Then I held the Oscar statuette in my hand, and that was ice cold.
A Short Time Later
I’m dancing by myself surrounded by a thousand persons jamming the floor of this fantastic discotheque, which is floating over Acapulco Bay like one of the hanging gardens of Babylon in one of those extravaganzas that made Cecil B. deMille famous. I never saw anything like it, because European and American discotheques are usually enclosed, surrounded by cement and gasoline. They isolate you completely, but they can also turn into death traps. Here, on the other hand, the discotheque floats over the sea, a glass bubble with a roof of stars that segue into the real Pacific firmament.
I’m not dancing with anyone, and my solitude doesn’t matter to anyone. Most of the people here are between seventeen and twenty-five. I’m past fifty-five. I don’t have complexes anymore. I dance alone, not actively conscious, my eyes closed, smiling, unhappy that I don’t have fifteen-year-olds who would do me the favor of identifying the music I’m hearing and dancing to. However, I’m shamefully satisfied when some song from my own youth—“Michelle” by the Beatles, “Satisfaction” by the Stones, or “Monday Monday” by the Mamas and the Papas — sneaks into the endless rock tape whose energy spreads from the song you can dance to while hugging someone to acid rock, which demands individual, savage frenzy — the return to the tribe, the clan, the oldest and most forgotten blood ties.