84.
At a quarter past nine in the morning, fifteen minutes after the Cinématèque is supposed to have opened, Vikar pounds on the door at the top of the steps. Someone walks by and says to him, “Fermé.”
“What?” Vikar says. He looks at the sign that says 9h — 17h.
“Fermé,” the other person says again, and points at the sign below the hours where it says MARDI FERMÉ.
Vikar explodes and attacks the door until five minutes later it’s smeared with blood from his hands.
83.
A punk couple with spiked sea-green hair wearing rings in many various appendages stops Vikar by the fountains of the Trocadero. They don’t seem to notice his hands are bleeding. They keep pointing at his cap trying to say something, chapeau one keeps repeating, and they consult a little book until Vikar realizes they speak English. They’re from London and want him to take off his cap; they saw him the previous day. If they hadn’t been punks and spoken English, Vikar probably would have smashed their heads together. They tell him the Cinématèque is open the next day and of an American bookstore near Notre Dame where he might be able to spend the night.
82.
From a public phone booth he tries to call his house back in Los Angeles. None of the operators speaks English, and when he hears a phone ringing, no one answers and it doesn’t sound like his and he can’t tell if the operator has connected him or not. When he runs out of francs for the phone, he pounds the plastic enclosure around the phone in a futile attempt to shatter it; his hands begin bleeding again.
“I will cut a path of destruction across this heretic city that has many movies but where all the prints are horrible!” Vikar bellows at the corner where the boulevard St-Michel meets the river, though he realizes he can’t really say for sure all the prints are horrible. Passersby stare at him. He goes into the café at the corner and is told to leave. He goes up the boulevard and at another café on St-Germain orders a tall vodka.
81.
The American bookstore across from Notre Dame is on the rue St-Jacques. Downstairs is where the books are sold but at the back of the store is a staircase that leads up to two rooms, including one with a desk and an old French typewriter, and another with two old sofas and floor pillows. Vikar sits upright on one of the sofas barely dozing, as though afraid he’ll sleep through the next six days when the Cinématèque is open. He shakes himself awake to find a young woman perched on the edge of the sofa studying his head. She holds his cap in her hand. He doesn’t remember taking it off.
80.
She says, “Who are they?”
“Elizabeth Taylor,” he says. He wipes his eyes. “Montgomery Clift.”
“Oh,” she nods. He can’t tell if this means anything to her or not. “My name is Pamela.” She’s in her mid-twenties, pleasantly attractive without being beautiful, her body invitingly round. “Where are you from?”
“Hollywood,” says Vikar.
“I’m from Toronto.” Without asking, she runs her fingers lightly along the pictures of his scalp.
79.
That night, under her blanket he says, “I can’t.” He stares at the ceiling.
She looks down at him. In the light through the window from the cathedral across the street, she can see he’s hard. “Are you sure?” she says.
“Yes.”
“It looks like you can.”
“No.”
“It’s O.K.,” she says. “We can just sleep.”
“All right.”
78.
But he doesn’t sleep. In the early morning hours, he steals from Pamela’s bedding and creeps down the stairs of the bookstore, stepping over cats, and unlatches the front door. He pushes open the grating enough to slip through, then heads for the river, descending to the quays and heading west, following the light of the dawn sun that slips up the Eiffel Tower.
77.
At a quarter past nine, he’s walking the massive passages inside the Chaillot Palace, unsure where to go. When security guards come into sight, he turns and walks the other way. He wanders the Palace nearly an hour until standing before him is a small balding man in a dirty jacket with a scarf; all of his clothes seem dirty except the scarf, which gleams. The man looks at Vikar with a funny smile. Vikar touches his head to see if his cap is on. The man walks up to him, still smiling. “Can you imagine,” he says in English with a French accent, “Bogart fucking Bergman with a cube of butter on the Champs-Elysées?”
76.
He laughs. “It is you, oui?” He points at Vikar’s head, and slowly Vikar takes off his cap. “I knew it,” the man claps his hands once, “I was there! At that press conference! Fantastic! Quelle scandale! The only man,” he proclaims, “to win a prize at Cannes for montage.”
“No one,” Vikar says, “is sure of that.”
“It is my honor,” and the man grabs Vikar’s hand to shake it.
“Do you …” Vikar has to think what to say, “… work for the Cinématèque?”
“I only have managed it these last few years, since the death of Monsieur Langlois.” He holds Vikar’s hand and examines it. “I saw the blood on the door this morning,” he concludes with delight.
75.
“But I am afraid, monsieur,” the man says half an hour later in the Cinématèque office, “what you search for in all likelihood does not exist. My country’s record on this is shameful.”
“I believed,” Vikar says, “that since the alternate version came from here, perhaps the real version was here as well.”
The small balding man with the gleaming scarf lights another cigarette. “I wish it were so,” he says, “but if there were a real version then there would not be an alternate version, do you understand? The Cinématèque has had a tumultuous fifteen years or so — revolutions, government oppression, fires. So what I mean to say is that it is difficult to be completely confident anymore of anything that has to do with the Cinématèque. But we would know of this, I feel certain.”
74.
Vikar says, “Where do I go next?”
The man shrugs. “You could try Berlin, I suppose. There are stories the film was in Berlin at one point. But the same stories claim the film burned in a fire there, as well. Always the fires with Joan.”
Vikar is something between crestfallen and exhausted. He wavers where he stands.
“Monsieur Jerome, are you well?”
“I’m tired.”
The man nods sympathetically. “It is a heroic quest.”
“I don’t know.”
“In a film, if one is on a heroic quest, how would you, what do I want to say? get from one place to the next? In the film, I mean? What is the word …?”
“Continuity.”
“Continuity.”
“Fuck continuity.”
“C’est ca, monsieur! Bravo!” The man repeats it with relish. “Fuck continuity. Perhaps that is the way to conduct this heroic quest.”
“I’ll go to Berlin.”
“Good luck, monsieur. Are you certain you’re all right?”
“Yes.”
As Vikar reaches the door, the man says, “You know, there is another rumor about the Jeanne d’Arc. Not so reliable, but …”
“Yes.”
“But fuck continuity, as you say!”
“Yes.”
“It is that the real film actually circulated the mental institutions of Scandinavia.”
“Mental institutions?”
“I know,” the man shrugs, “it seems one more, what do you say? tall tale. A mad film, starring an actress who went mad making the film, playing to madmen. But that’s the rumor, for what it is worth. The real film made the rounds of various hospitals and asylums in the late twenties. One of the dozen greatest movies ever made, a film that doesn’t even exist anymore, circulating among the loony bins of Europe, seen only by madmen just as, of course,” the man seems embarrassed by the metaphor, “the world itself was about to go mad.”