And so I dared to interrupt my boss in the middle of making his latest film, and he arranged to meet me two mornings later, very early, taking advantage of a brief return to Madrid to shoot a few scenes in the studio, although he usually spent whole days away when he was on location, this time in Ávila, Salamanca, La Granja and El Escorial, and from there they would later have to travel to Baeza and Úbeda, and finally, to Barcelona. He was too busy to come back to the apartment and would instead be staying in a hotel with the actors. When I arrived, he was doing repeated takes of a stern speech given by the British actor Herbert Lom, who was less of a mythic figure for me than Jack Palance, but whom I had known and admired and, indeed, feared since my childhood visits to cinemas showing double bills, and had seen him in dozens of films, often playing the refined or exotic villain (he tended to appear in oriental costumes). Seeing him in person confirmed to me his fine voice and excellent English diction, although I have since found out, after his recent death at the age of ninety-five, that he was Czech by birth — or, rather, Austro-Hungarian — and that he didn’t come to England until he was twenty-one, fleeing the Nazi invasion, and with an unpronounceable surname, as long and complicated as the professional name he adopted was short and simple: he was originally called Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru, but I doubt that such a name would have been allowed either on screen or on a poster. He had played minor roles in some major films, for example, Napoleon in War and Peace, probably more because of his short stature than because of any other physical resemblance, although his broad forehead with a single lock of hair brushed forward certainly helped; he had also played Captain Nemo and the Phantom of the Opera and one of the murderers in The Ladykillers, and he had appeared in Spartacus playing a Cilician envoy; but I had found him particularly frightening in El Cid as the Almoravid Ben Yusuf, all dressed in black and with his face covered throughout the film (you could only see his eyes), and with his drumming hordes, who disembarked in my own country of Spain. It didn’t much matter that the action took place in the eleventh century, panic travels fast in fiction or in what one experiences as fiction.
Anyway, when Muriel stopped filming in order to talk to me and hear my report, the rest of the team dispersed, apart from Lom, who, after he and I had been introduced, did not move, but stayed where he was, perhaps so as not to lose his concentration. He took a cigarette out of his cigarette case, inserted it into a holder that he removed from its own tiny box and began smoking with an elegance that seemed to belong to another age. His successful career had come to a halt towards the end of the 1960s, and he had fallen into the hands of Inspector Clouseau (bringing to life Clouseau’s crazed boss in the various sequels to The Pink Panther), and into the hands of Towers and even those of Jess Franco (he had appeared in the latter’s lesbian-prison fantasy 99 Women and in Count Dracula, which no one really thinks of as being the best version). Muriel, however, considered him to be a great artist and treated him with enormous respect (‘He’s worked with Vidor and Huston, with Mackendrick, Kubrick and Anthony Mann, with Dassin and Carol Reed,’ he would exclaim, enraptured). According to what I’ve heard, he was also an extremely cultivated man and had written a novel about Marlowe, to whom, as Rico had kindly informed me, some had attributed both a fake death and the entire works of Shakespeare. And so as not to be rude to the actor and leave him out of the conversation, unable to understand a word, my boss asked me to give my report in English, having first said to me in Spanish: ‘After all, he won’t know what we’re talking about and, even if he did, it wouldn’t matter, but, as long as he remains here in our company, I don’t want him to feel excluded or sidelined.’ ‘Couldn’t you ask him to leave us alone or couldn’t we just go somewhere else?’ I asked apprehensively. ‘It’s going to seem very artificial, you and me speaking in English, and I’m not that used to speaking English, you know.’ Muriel had made films in America, whereas I had made only a few brief visits to England.
Despite his short stature, I found Lom’s presence intimidating, even terrifying, and not just because of the fear he had provoked in me as a child in the darkness of a cinema (I remembered him in a hat in North West Frontier with Lauren Bacall and Kenneth More, again playing a treacherous fanatic). His eyes were as glacial as they were magnetic, so intensely cold as to be almost troubling. His very thin upper lip (completely out of proportion with his rather plump lower lip) was clearly one of the weapons he used to radiate the air of sardonic cruelty that remained intact even though he was, by then, sixty-something years old. And yet he appeared very affable and friendly, and, having given his vehement fictional peroration, he seemed relaxed and contented, with a cigarette in one hand and, in the other, an android-green silk handkerchief, with which he was playing almost as if he were a magician. ‘I couldn’t possibly do that, boy.’ And Muriel shot me a chiding glance with his one eye. ‘It’s about time you learned some manners, Juan. Show some respect for the great man. Come on, we haven’t got much time before shooting begins again. But don’t leave out any important details. Come on, tell me.’ And to give me my cue in English, he added: ‘So, tell me, Juan.’ He shifted easily into English, as I had seen him do before with Palance and Towers.
And I did my best to relay to him my conversation with Van Vechten. Now and then, I would turn to Lom, so as not to exclude him and as if this were also his business. What we were talking about would have been of no interest whatsoever and wouldn’t even have made much sense, but I noticed that he was nevertheless paying close attention, as though he were one of those very alert individuals, incapable of not paying attention to whatever was going on around him, and interested in any story or conversation. Perhaps he was one of those actors who absorb everything, just in case it might be of use later on. When it came to reporting the Doctor’s final words to Muriel, those that had seemed of possible relevance to the investigation, I translated them clumsily into English and then asked permission to repeat them in Spanish, apologizing beforehand to the eminent Mr Lom, who, to me, was still Ben Yusuf and Napoleon: