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Funny kind of transportation for a legend. But I knew she was in there, behind
the gated wall in front of me, and I needed a little time along with the ocean
before the tryst began. I climbed out of the car and crept close to the edge
of the precipice.
The ocean shushed and tittered like an audience when the lights dim
before the main feature.
The first time I saw the Pacific, I'd had a vision of sea gods, but not
the ones I knew, oh, no. Not even Botticelli's prime 36B cup blonde ever came
in on this surf. My entire European mythology capsized under the crash of
waves Britannia never ruled and then I knew that the denizens of these deeps
are sui generis and belong to no mythology but their weird own. They have the
strangest eyes, lenses on stalks that go flicker, flicker, and give you the
truth twenty-four times a second. Their torsos luminesce in every shade of
technicolor but have no depth, no substance, no dimensionality. Beings from a
wholy strange pantheon. Beautiful -- but alien.
Aliens were somewhat on my mind, however, perhaps because I was somewhat
alienated myself in LA, but also due to the obsession of my room-mate. While I
researched my thesis, I was rooming back there in the city in an apartment
over a New Age bookshop-cum-healthfood restaurant with a science fiction freak
I'd met at a much earlier stage of studenthood during the chance intimacy of
the mutual runs in Barcelona. Now he and I subsisted on brown rice courtesy of
the Japanese waitress from downstairs, with whom we were both on, ahem,
intimate terms, and he was always talking about aliens. He thought most of the
people you met on the streets were aliens cunningly simulating human beings.
He thought the Venusians were behind it.
He said he had tested Hiroko's reality quotient sufficiently and she was
clear, but I guessed from his look he wasn't too sure about me. That shared
diarrhoea in the Plaza Real was providing a shaky bond. I stayed out of the
place as much as possible. I kept my head down at school all day and tried to
manifest humanity as well as I knew how whenever I came home for a snack, a
shower and, if I got the chance, one of Hiroko's courteous if curiously
impersonal embraces. Now my host showed signs of getting into leather. Would
it soon be time to move?
It must be the light that sends them crazy, that white light now
refracting from the sibilant Pacific, the precious light that, when it is
distilled, becomes the movies. Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, the Great Art of
Light and Shade as Athanias Kircher put it, he who tinkered with magic
lanterns four centuries ago in the Gothic north.
And from that Gothic north had come the object of the quest that brought
me to this luminous hill-top -- a long-dead Teutonic illusionist who'd played
with light and shade as well as any. You know him as Hank Mann, that "dark
genius of the screen", the director with "the occult touch", that neglected
giant etc. etc. etc.
But stay, you may ask, how can a dead man, no matter how occult his
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touch, be the object of a quest?
Aha! In that cliff-top house he'd left the woman, part of whose legend
was she was his widow.
He had been her ultimate husband. First (silent movies) she'd hitched up
with an acrobatic cowboy and, when a pinto threw him, she'd joined a
soi-disant Viennese tenor for a season of kitschissimo musicals during early
sound. Hank Mann turned her into an icon after he rescued her off a cardboard
crag where he'd come upon her, yodelling. When Mann passed on, she shut up
marital shop entirely, and her screen presence acquired the frozen majesty of
one appreciating, if somewhat belatedly, the joys of abstinence. She never did
another on-screen love scene, either.
If you are a true buff, you know that he was born Heinrich von Mannheim.
One or two titles in two or three catalogues survive from his early days at
UFA, plus a handful of scratched, faded stills.
My correspondence with his relict, conducted through somebody who pp'd
for her in an illegible scrawl, finally produced this invitation. I'd been
half-stunned with joy. I was, you understand, writing my thesis about
Mannheim. He had become my pet, my hobby, my obsession.
But you must understand that I was prevaricating out of pure nerves. For
she was far, far more than a Hollywood widow; she was the Star of Stars, no
less, the greatest of them all. . . dubbed by Time magazine the "Spirit of the
Cinema" when, on her eightieth birthday, she graced its cover for the seventh
time, with a smile like open day in a porcelain factory and a white lace
mantilla on the curls that time had bleached with its inexorable peroxide. And
had she not invited me, me! to call for a chat, a drink, at this ambiguous
hour, martini-time, the blue hour, when you fold up the day and put it away
and shake out the exciting night?
Only surely she was well past the expectation of exciting times. She had
become what Hiroko's people call a "living national treasure". Decade after
ageless decade, movie after movie, "the greatest star in heaven". That was the
promo. She'd no especial magic, either. She was no Gish, nor Brooks, nor
Dietrich, nor Garbo, who all share the same gift, the ability to reveal
otherness. She did have a certain touch-me-not thing, that made her a natural
for film noir in the Forties. Otherwise, she possessed only the extraordinary
durability of her presence, as if continually incarnated afresh with the
passage of time due to some occult operation of the Great Art of Light and
Shade.
One odd thing. As Svengali, Hank Mann had achieved a posthumous success.
Although it was he who had brushed her with stardust (she'd been a mere
"leading player" up till then), her career only acquired that touch of the
fabulous after he adjourned to the great cutting room in the sky.
There was a scent of jasmine blowing over the wall from an invisible
garden. I deeply ingested breath. I checked out my briefcase: notebook,
recorder, tapes. I checked that the recorder contained tape. I was nervous as
hell. And then there was nothing for it but, briefcase in hand, to summon the
guts to stride up to her gate.
It was an iron gate with a sheet of zinc behind the wrought squiggles so
you couldn't see through and, when I reached up to ring the bell, this gate
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