An image of Ireland, the land of my fathers, crosses before my black eyes. A valley inundated with dew. A bay, which in reality is a valley flooded by the catastrophes of time. And in the center a white island where the wild ducks gather. A white chestnut forest, white, white, all smothered in its own whiteness.
I close my eyes in order to feel all that, and when I suddenly open them I’m no longer alone. My wife is dancing with me, created by my eyes (my eyes: my desire), staring at my outfit, my Gucci loafers, criticizing me for not wearing socks, and I’m telling her that in Italy no one wears socks in summer with loafers, to which she replies that I look sloppy. What? My beige slacks, my pink shirt that looks (I only realize it now) like an ad for the hotel where I’m staying? And she says to me:
“Everything you know you learned in Italy, right?”
“No, you taught me everything.”
I say it trying to be agreeable, knowing it’s just an illusion on my part.
“You’re right. With me, you had your Hollywood career. A good career at that. You know what I mean: I mean good. You had a personality, a secure place, audiences knew who you were. You know what I mean: they knew who you were.”
“Come on, all I ever made were B films, don’t try to put one over on me or on yourself. I was typed as a hood, a gangster, the guy who always loses the girl.”
“Stop complaining. You kissed Susan Hayward, Janet Leigh, Lizabeth Scott … You probably even slept with them.”
“Cindy, Italy got me out of a rut.”
“You know what I mean? Audiences knew who you were. That’s what counts in this business.”
“What you mean is that I was character-typed.”
“Did you really go to bed with Lizabeth Scott?”
“All I ever did was offer them my arm to walk down one of those marble stairways. Universal had its own ideas about what the mansions of rich Americans look like. Marble stairways.”
“You always liked blondes.”
“Like you.”
“No, husky-voiced blondes like Lizabeth Scott.”
“I offered them my arm. They might have slipped.”
“Husky-voiced, blond, and with thick, black eyebrows, like yours and Lizabeth’s.”
“They would wear incredibly high heels so they wouldn’t look like midgets next to me. Or they’d stay one step above me. Stairs are indispensable to create illusions in movies. Just tricks, sweetheart. Like the kisses. You’re kissing Lizabeth Scott, but you’re thinking about the rent. And you know it. So don’t get jealous.”
“Audiences want something they can rely on, stupid. Audiences don’t want to see you in realistic dramas with Italian dubbing, unshaven, walking through the mud in the dark with a nine-year-old girl. Audiences want to see you with Susan Hayward, kissing her or slapping her around, whatever, but with Susan Hayward!”
“I won the Oscar, Cindy.”
“You mean you lost the Oscar. You never got another good part. You got too important for gangster parts in B movies. No one ever called you again for a great movie. But you’ve got your Oscar on the mantel. Keep it. You won’t have any other company than that gold-plated statuette. I wasn’t born to live with a has-been. I want a man who will be.”
I suspect that Cindy knew the lines in my pictures better than I did because she would repeat them from memory long after I’d forgotten them. She had a surprising way of slipping them into our real-life conversations. I knew that a script that’s been filmed is worth about as much as used toilet paper. You toss it and flush it. And you don’t bend over to see what’s at the bottom of the toilet bowl. She didn’t know that. For her, those despicable, stupid words—“I wasn’t born to live with a has-been. I want a man who will be”—are part of her ridiculous, messy unconscious. That film was never even made! The script ended up in a drawer, and she, the jerk, knows it by heart and repeats it as if it were something like “Sleep no more, Macbeth has murdered sleep”! Cindy’s unconscious is like her periods: a filthy, uncontrollable bleeding (unless, God forbid, she was pregnant, which I never wanted with her). But she’s right about something, the bitch. The Oscar can be a curse, a perverse mascot, a bad omen. Just like Macbeth, which is supposed to put the evil eye on you. Instead of Oscar, why don’t they call it the Macbeth. I joined company with Luise Rainer and Louise Fletcher, both condemned by the Oscar. But my name’s not Louis. Louis Loser. My name’s Vince Valera.
You’re a black Irishman, Cindy told me when I fell in love with her. She was platinum-blond then and identical to everything I’ve seen today from the heavens. As if I were Apollo and she the firmament lit up and traversed by my light. Cindy, identical to the tropical nightfall. Cindy, identical to the pool filled with flowers. My wife identical to a hillside glittering with lights. My love like a crystal discotheque. My beloved Cindy from the starry sky. She loved me so much she wouldn’t let me see her. Your name is Vince Valera. You’re a black Irishman, which is to say, a shipwrecked sailor. A descendant of the Spanish sailors washed up on the coast of Ireland after the disaster of the Invincible Armada. A son of squalls and foam, offspring of the wind and the rocks. A Latin from the north, Vince, dark-skinned, with the blackest, thickest eyebrows in the world (they say they’re my main feature), your black, shiny hair, and the perfection of your body, Vince, as smooth as an Apollo, with no hair on your chest or legs, shiny as black marble or an ancient gladiator, strong as the breastplate of a Roman legionnaire, muscular as a Spanish guerrilla, but with more hair in your armpits and pubis than any man I’ve ever known before, we women notice those things, Vince, the hair that creeps down from your armpits and creeps up from your sex, and our hairs mix when we make love, yours black, mine blond, don’t be anything but my lover, Vince, don’t kiss anyone else, don’t screw anyone else, only belong to your Cindy, Cinderella, make me feel I’m in a fairy tale.
Then she said this to me:
“You can only be a hood, a gangster, at most a private eye, you’re part of film noir, don’t stop being the dark villain, Vince my love, go on being the cursed Apollo of B movies forever…”
I couldn’t stand her anymore. I opened my eyes and grabbed her by the arms the way I’d grabbed the receptionist in the guayabera, right there in the middle of the dancing and the colored lights I let my violence run wild when I saw how, no matter how tightly I shut my eyes, the lights gave Cindy a fluid face, now green, now red, as if her jealousy and rage were nothing more than descriptions of the play of lights in a discotheque, and I slapped her a few times while the woman screamed and I told her that picture was my salvation! Understand? That picture gave me a past, I don’t have any past that isn’t my Italian movie! Don’t take the only film that’s really mine away from me! Don’t you understand that only once in my life was I a dream with soft look and shadows deep, and millions of people loved me, loved my moments of glad grace and my beauty, false or true…?
The woman screamed, and the captains wearing blue blazers, white trousers, and white hair separated me from the fat, fiftyish woman wrapped in a sarong, shocked, who swore: “I was dancing alone, I don’t have any hang-ups, I came to have fun, it isn’t my fault I’m divorced, this man hit me, I just came over to him because I saw he was as lonely as I was!” And when the Acapulco maître d’s calmed everyone down and opened bottles of Dom Pérignon and arranged a lambada and the music and lights rapidly changed, I was led firmly out of the place, into the night, to my jeep, and my muttered excuses, first for these poor devils who didn’t deserve them, then immediately for myself, excuse me, excuse yourself, any question makes me crazy: don’t you see that I know nothing about myself, if someone asks me why I am what I am or do this or that, because I no longer am or do, I get mad, I punch reporters, I break their cameras. They don’t know that I have a past and that one single film gave it to me. They insist on giving me a future and blame me because I don’t look for it. I have no right to be what I was. In Hollywood that’s the worst sin, to have been, to be a has-been like Gertrude the Dinosaur or the dodo bird or the Edsel, a figure of fun, a wax figure. All that matters to them is what will be, the promise, the next project, the deals necessary to get the next picture shot.