The Portrait of Mr. W. H.

Are most contemporary students of English literature required to discover these works?  Perhaps one hundred years ago we might have answered with a resounding yes; nowadays, however, when everyone allegedly engages in some kind of hidden cultural dialogue with everyone else (on terms to which, it should be said, the authors themselves seem not to have been privy), we can no longer be so sure.  Shakespeare has been lauded as the most liberated of authors and damned as manifesting the typical racist and sexist prejudices of his era.  And if the previous sentence thrills and enthralls you, you may want to find somewhere else to peddle your thoughts.  You may also not particularly enjoy this famous story.

Our protagonist has no name, which is just as well, since in time he will prove to be little more than a filter for the spirit and ideas of others.  The first and dominant spirit will be that, of course, of the greatest playwright in the history of mankind; the third will belong to a man called Erskine, who exists as the typical pseudo-intellectual, to wit, utterly consumed by some backwash of a theory, or in denial of hard and fast facts.  But it will be the second, a spirit which inhabited the forever young body of Cyril Graham, that is destined to capture and hold our interest.  A brief portrait, in Erskine's words, of Cyril will suffice:

Cyril .... certainly was wonderfully handsome.  People who did not like him, Philistines and college tutors, and young men reading for the Church, used to say that he was merely pretty; but there was a great deal more in his face than mere prettiness.  I think he was the most splendid creature I ever saw, and nothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner.  He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great many people who were not.  He was often wilful and petulant, and I used to think him dreadfully insincere.  It was due, I think, chiefly to his inordinate desire to please.  Poor Cyril!  I told him once that he was contented with very cheap triumphs, but he only laughed.  He was horribly spoiled.  All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled.  It is the secret of their attraction.  However, I must tell you about Cyril's acting.  You know that no actresses are allowed to play at the [Amateur Dramatic Club of Cambridge University].  At least they were not in my time.  I don't know how it is now.  Well, of course Cyril was always cast for the girls' parts, and when As You Like It was produced he played Rosalind.  It was a marvellous performance.  In fact, Cyril Graham was the only perfect Rosalind I have ever seen.  It would be impossible to describe to you the beauty, the delicacy, the refinement of the whole thing.  It made an immense sensation, and the horrid little theatre, as it was then, was crowded every night.  Even when I read the play now I can't help thinking of Cyril.  It might have been written for him.

If you know a little something about Wilde's biography, this passage, published in 1889, will seem to precurse what the world at large might have long suspected.  But there is, naturally, no need to know anything about Wilde or Shakespeare to enjoy one genius's love affair with the other.  More vital is the understanding that Cyril Graham, who martyrs himself early on, is speaking and thinking only of himself.  Graham gazes upon the sonnets and sees merely a reflection of his own beauty; yet, like in all daydreams, he augments what God has already granted with what God should not have overlooked.  He makes Cyril Graham, who appears womanly enough to pass for many a Shakespearean heroine, into William "Willie" Hughes, who, as opposed to Cyril, can actually do what thespians are called upon to do night after night.

Who is Willie Hughes?  You may read this novel by another Irishman and be presented one opinion, but a long story can be made very short by clarifying that our titular initials appear to belong to the person to whom the sonnets are dedicated.  This unexplained mystery has launched far too many – too many being more than zero – investigations by otherwise respectable literary scholars, utterly unrespectable hacks, and purported dilettantes on the identity behind the dedication, as if the whole matter should have any bearing whatsoever on the quality of the work in question.  For his part, Graham believes that W.H. is an English boy actor by the name of William Hughes, likewise entrenched in Shakespeare's female roles; no proof is offered from any cast list, only textual homophonic clues from the sonnets (hew and hue, and so forth).  His theory, which has never been seriously pondered by Shakespeare's biographers who seem more focused on the "dark lady" and other such nonsense, is fleshed out in almost preposterous details, and slowly but surely our narrator becomes an acolyte of Cyril Graham's vision.  Yet at length these details do not convince Erskine, who initially was just as rabid a Grahamite.  "It is," he tells our horrified narrator, "a perfectly unsound theory from beginning to end."  The two men agree that they will not be unanimous and part in some acrimony, at which point our narrator reflects upon what has come between them, namely great and eternal art:

There was a strange silence for a few moments.  Then Erskine got up, and looking at me with half-closed eyes, said, 'Ah! how you remind me of Cyril!' .... He tried to smile, but there was a note of poignant pathos in his voice that I remember to the present day, as one remembers the tone of a particular violin that has charmed one, the touch of a particular woman's hand.  The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal.  Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion.  We regret the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them.  But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us.  In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions.

Whether it is noteworthy that the above passage has been excised from many editions of Wilde's narrative we will leave to the literary investigators to determine.  And there is also that nugatory matter about the eponymous portrait, but we have already said enough as it is.

If you know a little more about our story's author, you might not be surprised that a year after composing The Portrait of Mr. W.H., he published his only novel-length work, which just happened to be about the unforgettable power of an unforgettable painting.  It may be of equal non-coincidence that Wilde would become world famous thanks to his stage writings, not his poetry, a logical outcome if one considers the universal acclaim allotted to his improvised wit.  But Wilde was one of the most Romantic of writers, one so in love with literature and the spine-tingling bliss (unmatched by few earthly sensations) it induces as to neglect so many other aspects of our existence.  Which reminds us of that old, late-nineteenth century saying about life's two tragedies.

Springtime, in Judea

A translation of a story by this Russian writer.  You can read the original here.

"These distant days in Judea which left me a cripple, lame for life, occurred at the very happiest time of my youth," said a tall, well-built fellow with a yellowish face, sparkling gray eyes, and short, still-curly silver hair.  He always walked with a crutch since he could not bend his left knee.

"At the time, I lived in Jerusalem as part of a small expedition aimed at investigating the eastern shores of the Dead Sea, the legendary locations of Sodom and Gomorrah.  While waiting for my colleagues still held up in Constantinople, I made a series of trips to one of the Bedouin campsites on the road to Jericho, to Sheikh Aaid, recommended to me by some Jerusalem archaeologists.  The sheikh procured everything needed for our expedition for which he would also act as our guide.  When I first went to him so as to negotiate our trip, I took a guide; the next day the sheikh came to see me in Jerusalem, at which point I started visiting him on my own.  There I found a riding mare whom I took to riding with immoderate frequency.  

"It was spring.  Judea was drowning in joyous sunshine, reminiscent of the Song of Songs: 'Lo!  The winter is past ... the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land ... the vines with the good grapes blossom in their fragrance.'  Yet there on that ancient path to Jericho, amidst the stone-ridden Judean desert, everything was as always dead, wild, bare, and blinding in its heat and sands.  Even then, during those flower-bearing spring days, everything seemed to me to be endlessly joyous and happy.  This was, you understand, my first time in the East, and before my eyes I beheld an utterly new world.  And in this world I beheld something extraordinary: Aaid's niece. 

"The Judean desert seems as vast as an entire country: it descends unswervingly into the Jordan valley itself, in hills and mountain passes of both stone and sands, to places overrun with wild vegetation inhabited only by snakes and partridges buried in eternal silence.  In winter, like everywhere in Judea, it rains and icy winds blow.  But in spring, summer, and autumn one finds only the serenity and uniformity of a churchyard, albeit under the heat of a sun that devours your sleep.  In the hollows where the wells are located, visible signs of the Bedouin sites persist in the campfire ash, and in the stone circles and squares on which they secure their tents.  But the site where I went, whose sheikh was Aaid, presented the following picture: a wide sand ravine between hills, and in it, a modest flock of black felt tents.  These tents were flat, four-cornered, and, against the sands' yellow sheen, rather gloomy in their blackness.

"As I passed by, I saw pile after pile of pressed dung before some of the tents, and space between the tents was very tight indeed: everywhere ran dogs, horses, mules, and goats.  I still have never understood how and where all these beasts were fed.  I also saw a multitude of naked, swarthy, curly-headed children, women, and men, some resembling gypsies, others Africans, although without the full lips.  And it was strange to see how warmly the men were dressed in spite of the heat: a dark blue undershirt to the knees, a cotton coat, and on top an abaya, that long, heavy, wide-shouldered, chlamys of striped piebald wool.  On each head was a keffiyeh, a kerchief with red and yellow stripes, loose on the shoulders, hanging along the cheeks, and held twice at the top of the head with a woolen piebald plait.  All this was in stark contrast to the women's garb: dark blue kerchiefs were tied around their heads, their faces showing; and over their bodies flowed a long dark blue undershirt with sharp sleeves that almost reached the ground.  The men were shod in coarse boots padded with iron; the women were barefoot, and they all had a light and marvelous step, their feet almost as black as coal from the sun.  Men and women alike smoked pipes.

"The second time, when I came to the site without a guide, I was received as a friend.  Aaid's tent was the most spacious, and there I came upon a whole collection of elderly Bedouins seated around the tent's black felt walls with only raised flaps for the entrance.  Aaid emerged to greet me, gave a bow, and placed his right hand to his lips and his forehead.  I entered the tent right in front of him and waited until he had sat down on the carpet in the middle, then I did what he had done upon seeing me, which is always proper, that is, the same bow and touching of the right hand to the lips and forehead.  I did this several times, to everyone who was seated.  Then I sat beside Aaid and, now seated, did the same thing; of course, everyone responded in kind.  Only the chief and I spoke, briefly and slowly; this was necessary not only according to custom, but also because at that time I was not yet well-versed in colloquial Arabic; the rest smoked in silence.  In the meantime behind the tent refreshments were being prepared.  Bedouins usually eat khubz, a corn-based flatbread, cooked millet, and goat's milk.  But guests are treated without fail to kharuf: lamb cooked in a pit dug out of the sand, piling on it layers of smouldering dung.  After the lamb coffee is served, but always without sugar.  And here everyone sat around and ate in insouciance, although into the shade of the felt tent came the hellishly hot stuffiness came, and to look at its wide open flaps was simply terrifying: the sands were sparkling from so far away that, it seemed, the horizon began to swim.  After every word the sheikh would say to me, khawajah, sir, and I would say to him most honorable bedawi sheikh.  That is, son of the desert, or Bedouin. 

"Aaid was about fifty years old and not particularly tall.  He was big-boned, very thin, and very strong.  His face was burnt brick; his eyes were translucent, grey, and penetrating; his copper beard with tinges of grey was small, stiff, and well-trimmed; his moustache was groomed just as carefully (Bedouins usually keep both well-trimmed).  He wore, like everyone else, thick, iron-shod boots.  When he was visiting me in Jerusalem, he had a dagger on his belt, and in his hands was a long rifle.

"I saw his niece that same day while I, already having been deemed a 'friend,' was sitting by him in his tent.  She walked past holding on her head a large tin can full of water, and steadying it with her right hand.  I don't know how old she was; I think she was no more than eighteen.  Later I would learn that, four years prior, she had gotten married, yet that very year she had become a widow, still without children, and, being both an orphan and very poor, moved to her uncle's tent.     

"'Turn around, turn around, Sulamith!' I thought. (Understand that Sulamith likely resembled her: 'Dark am I, yet lovely, daughters of Jerusalem.')  And passing by the tent, she turned her head somewhat and followed me with her eyes.  Her eyes were unusually dark and mysterious, her face was almost black, her lips were purple and thick, and it was precisely at that moment that they, most of all, struck me.  Had it only been that!  Everything struck me: her arms, surprisingly bare to the shoulder as she held the can on her head; the slow, sinuous movements of her body beneath her long blue shirt; her full breasts that held up this shirt.  And so, it simply had to happen that soon thereafter I met her in Jerusalem by the Jaffa gate!  She was coming towards me in a crowd, this time wearing on her head something bound in cloth.  Seeing me, she stopped.  I bowed in her direction.

"'Did you recognize me?'  

"She gently touched my shoulder with her free left hand and grinned:

"'I did, khawajah.'

"'What are you carrying?'

"'I am carrying goat cheese.'

"'For whom?'

"'For everyone.'

"'You mean, to sell?  Then bring it to my house.'

"'Where?'

"'Here, this small hotel.'

"I was living just at the Jaffa gate in a tall, narrow row house, one of many on the left side of the small square from which the many-stepped King David street emerges.  It was a dark house, covered in some places by canvas, in others by old stone vaults with a passage among those arches and old workshops and stores.  And without the slightest shyness, she went ahead of me up that house's winding stone stairway, gently leaning back and freely contorting her sinuous body, her bare right arm supporting the cheese in its cloth in a blue kerchief on her head, which made the black hair of her underarm visible.  At one of the staircase's turns she stopped: there, down below behind a narrow window, one could make out the ancient reservoir of the prophet Ezekiel, the greenish water of which, like a well, was contained in a square of neighboring houses' walls with small, latticed windows.  The same water in which Bathsheba, Uriah's wife, enthralled King David with her nudity.  Stopping, she looked out the window; just as quickly, she turned around and gazed at me with her surprising eyes.  I could not restrain myself and kissed her bare forearm – and she looked at me quizzically, as kissing was not a Bedouin custom.  She entered my room and laid her bundle on a table, then extended to me the palm of her right hand.  I placed in it a few small coins; but almost immediately I became very anxious, and so I produced a gold pound and handed it to her.  She understood and lowered her lashes.  Her head slipped down submissively and she covered her eyes with the inner crook of her arm.

"'When will you bring more cheese?' I asked, accompanying her to the staircase half-an-hour later.

"She shook her head gently:

"'It won't be soon.'

"Then she showed me five fingers: five days.

"About two weeks later when I leaving Aaid and had gone rather far from his campsite, behind me a shot rang out.  A bullet hit the stone in front of me with such force that it began to emit smoke.  I urged my horse into a gallop and hunched over in the saddle.  Then a second shot was fired and something very powerful struck me below my left knee.  I rode on to Jerusalem all the while looking down at my foaming, bleeding boot.  To this day I marvel that Aaid was capable of missing not once, but twice.  And I am no less surprised at how he was able to learn that I had bought goat cheese from her.  

Reverdecer

A short story ("Revival") by this Argentine.  You can read the original in this collection.

Resolved not to budge until poor Emilia's sisters had moved far enough along, he kept on watching the grave.  He also knew that the moment he turned to leave the cemetery he would enter a world where he would no longer be able to find her.  He was not resigned to running back and comforting those women with pious banalities, nor did he fool himself with the deplorably useless hope of seeking in them some trait through which Emilia could endure eternally.  At last the women left; he was about to go as well when he discovered, at a distance that may be sarcastically deemed respectful, the man from the funeral home whom he recognized by his contrite, servile, and implacable air. 

Since the night of the accident he had seen him prowling around Emilia's house in a black car.  Now he would probably try to sell him a photo album, or clippings, or some kind of funereal adornment; but he was terrified by the mere possibility that this man, in his desire to promote the company's work, would impart macabre and gruesome details.  What remained beneath the earth was not Emilia, and in all the world there was no place more incongruent from which to approach her than this marble slab bearing a name and a cross.  While he lived, nevertheless, he would bring her flowers.  Someone ought to do that and the right person was he.  The right person, he thought with pride, and the only person, as in both life and death Emilia was alone.  With a heavy heart he remembered that once upon a time he too had yearned for the certainty she now had, the certainty of knowing that nothing could happen.  Together, they had read a French poet's verse and agreed that it was true:

Chère, pour peu que tu ne bouges (Each little move you make, my love,)
Renaissent tous mes désespoirs.    (And all despair comes rushing back.)

How could one ask a being as alive as Emilia to remain still and unmoving at one's side without being inconsistent?  He did not ask for anything, but the miracle of faithfulness occurred.  Perhaps this was why he found himself in a solitude so extreme with no one to share the pain.  The fatigue of the last few days led him to think in images, and without quite daydreaming, he saw himself as a gardener of graves.  "Every Friday I will place a bouquet of flowers here," he muttered, "to make up for the money that these women will have to spend." 

When he noticed the man had left, he slowly made his way back.  He crossed open and desolate places, walked down to the square and the shade of the trees on Artiges street, and sensed in the air's warmth and the scent of leaves the still-distant spring.  A piano in one of the nearby houses was tapping out a march, circus-like and trivial, which he hadn't heard in a while.  He recalled Arguello, or was it Araujo?  What now was his predecessor's name again?  He was, in any case, a blurry figure that never bothered him.  From what he gathered, he had met Emilia when she was not yet twenty years old, and he had probably taken advantage of the situation.  Emilia had said nothing specifically negative about this first love of hers – she was incapable of that – but she let him understand without any doubt that this first love had counted little in her life.  Apart from an experience of the blindness and crudeness that is youth, the episode in itself had no significance. 

He stopped to cross the street.  He looked at his house: an imitation stone façade, a dark and narrow wood door, the two side balconies, and the two above (in anticipation of an upper floor); he was amazed that all this had once seemed happy to him.  He opened the door and entered as he might have entered a crypt. 

That evening he could not rid himself of an absurd conviction.  When someone knocked at the door, he would arrive trembling with hope.  Despite the fact that he had lived a solitary, reclusive life, he found himself with many friends, and despite the particularities of his mourning, visit followed upon visit.  He remembered others amidst a past's landscape that remained both very close and very far: as soon as he closed his eyes he would see Emilia trailing a bit behind, agitated from the run, and he believed that in this face he could feel the freshness of her skin.  But nothing out of the ordinary occurred until Friday morning, when he arrived at the cemetery with a bouquet of white roses.  On her grave he found, hardly wilted, as if they had been lying there since the previous evening, a bouquet of red roses.  This surprised him for two reasons: that they, her sisters, could have anticipated his offering and that, in defiance of all convention, they had chosen roses of color.  He believed chance was capable of everything.  Seven days passed and he forgot the matter.  The next Friday he arrived at the grave with his white roses.  And there, of course, he found a new posy of red roses.       

Although he resolved to think nothing more of it, it weighed heavily upon his mind for several days – until Thursday morning, to be exact, when he had a sort of inspiration.  He made haste to a kiosk where he bought flowers, then, at Rivadavia, he got into a cab.  Soon thereafter, his offering made, he was at a loss and a little perplexed.  The minutes passed in marked slowness as he roamed the cemetery.  Disheartened, he crossed the portico and stopped a minute upon the sun-lit stairs.  He turned to give destiny another opportunity, and at the end of the oblique boulevard he looked on, stupefied, at the scene he had foreseen and expected the whole morning: the man placing red roses on the grave.

His somewhat neurotic and obsessive repugnance towards matters of death had made him mistake the man circling Emilia's house in a black car for a employee of the funeral home.  Now he remembered a photograph of Araujo which he had absent-mindedly considered years before.  The man was Araujo.

If he hadn't wanted someone to find him here, he should have left long ago.  Still he stayed a little longer.  He left later, walking slowly.  He waited the whole day; he waited without worry like someone who was safe and secure.  At ten o'clock at night, someone rang his doorbell.  He knew full well whom he would encounter before he even opened the door.  Araujo said to him:

"Much better to walk around as we chat, especially at night.  Do you want to take a walk?"

Through Bacacay and Avellaneda they went down towards Donato Alvarez; they walked around the Irish square; then they headed west towards Neuquén.  They walked for hours speaking peacefully about the woman both of them had loved.  Araujo explained:

"I do not bring her flowers for the dead because this strikes me as an affront to Emilia.  In her, life was so abundant!"  After a pause he added: "Nevertheless, she had something of the supernatural."

He thought: "I hadn't noticed it, but it's true."   Although it seemed to contradict several prior statements, he found another observation by Araujo no less true:

"Because she was supernatural, let us now accept it.  Perhaps she never was of this world."

At that moment it bothered him that someone knew her better than he did, and he was no stranger to jealousy.  Araujo must have sensed this, because he said:

"We cannot judge her as we might judge other women.  Emilia was on a different level.  She was of light and of air."

They bid farewell.  He saw Araujo drive off in a black car; he entered the house, turned on the heater, and prepared some maté.  He wanted to ponder this night's discovery, because another had loved her, he was not the only one.  The memory of Emilia was broadened, and beyond the grave continued the miracle of life.

The White People

Have you ever wandered through the British countryside in the early springtime's glory?  Or kissed the white lilies that line the pagan hillock paths?  Or watched the moon sit upon some crooked autumn branches, bare and baleful like a claw?  Or considered a sylvan scene that should never be considered, even if it be, for some, "that wonderful secret in the secret wood"?  And who are these some?  The some should not be known to you and me, or, in fact, anyone who wishes himself a happy, normal life.  For those, however, who long to be reft of the gladsome daytime sun and cast into a realm where every object seems animated towards an ulterior, not in any way beneficent purpose, there have always been methods and means to that end.  And hints about that perilous wish are strewn generously throughout this famous work.

All stories of the supernatural or uncanny need a skeptic, and we attach this regrettable agname to the very British and very serious person of Mr. Cotgrave.  Cotgrave the Skeptic sounds precisely like a lifelong fool, although this may change with the course of our narrative.  As we begin, however, he still counts himself among those allegedly learned minds who will never believe anything their five senses cannot relay within the thin framework of their realities.  What is particularly laughable about such types is that they often fancy themselves profound men of philosophy, as if philosophy, like beauty, were only skin and fossil deep.  For that reason Cotgrave has strong misgivings about the wisdom espoused by his host, a mysterious man by the name of Ambrose, who disabuses him of his notion of the nature of evil:

I think you are falling into the very general error of confining the spiritual world to the supremely good; but the supremely wicked, necessarily, have their portion in it.  The merely carnal, sensual man can no more be a great sinner than he can be a great saint.  Most of us are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures; we muddle through the world without realizing the meaning and the inner sense of things, and, consequently, our wickedness and our goodness are alike second-rate, unimportant.

One wonders how rapidly theologians would cavil at this generally accurate statement for fear of then equating great evil with great good, but we can and should put aside these cares.  The paucity of true saints, Ambrose argues, implies there are even fewer true sinners because the latter path is considerably more cumbersome.  The easy vices of everyday life, sloth, lust, and its merry companions, are just that – easy: the lazy and sensual recourse of those who only care about themselves and their basic terrestrial pleasures.  As loathsome as these people can become, they are not terrifying or even particularly flagitious; instead, their lives are shallow, dull, and fickle, a vacuous pendulum swinging between satisfaction and some lack thereof.  True evil requires an extraordinary desire to poison life, since the world generally guides minds away if not to good, then to (vicious) indifference.  And true evil has already been revealed to Ambrose in, of all things, the diary of a teenage girl with the innocuous title of "The Green Book."

The interpolation of this logbook creases our tale in three, but we should restrict comment on what it contains for the very simple reason that the author herself does not seem to know – at least not yet.  Once upon a time, when she was eight or thereabouts, she was taken by her nurse to some lovely country field where she saw something she shouldn't have seen, and it reminded her of something she believes she has always seen, namely "little white faces that used to look at me when I was lying in my cradle."  Our narrator informs us that everything about these creatures – their houses, their mountains, and their clothes – had the same colorless hue.  That is to say, white is the amalgamation of all color: it is black that has no light.  But in "The Green Book" there are also patches of black; take, for example, her twice-told tale about a young local woman:

Once upon a time there was a poor girl who said she would go into the hollow pit, and everybody tried to stop her, but she would go.  And she went down into the pit and came back laughing, and said there was nothing there at all, except green grass and red stones, and white stones and yellow flowers.  And soon after people saw she had the most beautiful emerald earrings, and they asked how she got them, as she and her mother were quite poor.  But she laughed, and said her earrings were not made of emeralds at all, but only of green grass …. And one day she went to the Court, and she wore on her head a crown of pure angel-gold, so nurse said, and it shone like the sun, and it was much more splendid than the crown the king was wearing himself, and in her ears she wore … emeralds, and [a] big ruby was the brooch on her breast, and [a] great diamond necklace was sparkling on her neck …. And she was so lovely that everybody said that her eyes were greener than the emeralds, that her lips were redder than the ruby, that her skin was whiter than the diamonds, and that her hair was brighter than the golden crown.  So the king's son said he would marry her, and the king said he might.  And the bishop married them, and there was a great supper, and afterwards the king's son went to his wife's room.  But just when he had his hand on the door, he saw a tall, black man, with a dreadful face, standing in front of the door, and a voice said:

Venture not upon your life,
This is mine own wedded wife.

Then the king's son fell down on the ground in a fit.  And they came and tried to get into the room, but they couldn't, and they hacked at the door with hatchets, but the wood had turned hard as iron, and at last everybody ran away, they were so frightened at the screaming and laughing and shrieking and crying that came out of the room.  But next day they went in, and found there was nothing in the room but thick black smoke, because the black man had come and taken her away.  And on the bed there were two knots of faded grass and a red stone, and some white stones, and some faded yellow flowers.

I suppose there are more hideous passages in the annals of literature, but not many.  Our young narrator seems to comprehend the true meaning of these events, yet believes they could not possibly befall her for one very good reason: she, unlike the bride bedecked in jewels, would be a far more willing mate.  Several other anecdotes arise, all of them almost inconceivably wicked, yet all of them inconceivably delightful to our narrator.  One involves moonlight dances and "secret things ... brought out of some hiding place," a scene where, "sometimes people would suddenly disappear and never be heard of afterwards, and nobody knew what had happened to them."  Another sequence details the hunting of a white stag of boundless energy and ends in what the pursuer believes is a kiss, even though we know otherwise.

Machen's shadowy world has garnered him both recognition and scorn (alas, the two are common companions), but even the most impartial of observers cannot deny the beauty of the English countryside, a beauty that has set off a thousand poets' imaginations.  There are numerous moments in The White People of such startling vision, filtered through the diction and imagery extant to a teenage child, that one shudders at what that same child's mind would have produced had she lived long enough to carry out her deeds.  A last, unremittingly horrible passage has to do with a woman known as Lady Avelin, although she was also known as Cassup, and her ritual of forging an object called the glame stone.  And what can you do with a glame stone?  The same thing, one supposes, you can do with a statue "of Roman workmanship, of a stone that with the centuries had not blackened."  If you happen to know what to do with that.   

Death and the Maiden

We will die from so much past.

                                                                       Gerardo Escobar

I will let the past become the past.

                                                                       Paulina Escobar, quoting Gerardo Escobar

Politics and art have, wonderful to say, very little in common, which is why an artistic mind will typically shun the affairs of state and its denizens as the hapless pursuit of the mediocre, the greedy, and the petty.  This is hardly an exaggerated assessment.  Yet those of us fortunate enough to live in a nation where we can place and replace our leaders may take for granted suffrage, privacy, and the slew of other freedoms which has predicated many a revolution.  We may bemoan small inconveniences and frivolous mistakes; we may demand more of our government than we need to demand, just because our government has kept us peaceful and prosperous long enough to raise our expectations; and we may forget about some other places, less fair and less free, where the government is built not to serve the people but to breed and devour them like cattle.  Much like, we are told, the recently deposed government in this film.

That other place will be "a country in South America ... after the fall of the dictatorship," the film's sole caption, flashed a few minutes into our story – but we should say something about those first few moments.  We are in a luxurious concert hall that could be in Europe or the Americas, with our eyes on an attractive, cygnet-necked woman around the age of forty.  Her eyes, however, are directed in horror at the stage, where a quartet plays this famous piece.  A man in the next seat, probably her companion for the evening or much, much longer, stares achingly at a person who, he believes, may reveal herself at any moment.  We do not know what memories stir within her, what images are summoned by these frenzied notes, but they cannot be those of happiness or glory.  After that brief glimpse at our heroine, we are left to contemplate the quartet in tempestuous concentration until the aforementioned caption drastically changes our scenery.  We enter an isolated house and behold an isolated woman, the first of our cattle and the woman from the theater.  Her name is now legally Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver), but once upon a time, fifteen years ago, to be exact, she was Paulina Lorca.  Fifteen years ago – to wit, in the early months of 1977 – Paulina Lorca was a student activist who had the very bad luck of loving her current husband, at the time a pseudonymous newspaper editor, Gerardo Escobar (Stuart Wilson), so much as to have literally gone through hell to protect him.  They have lasted twenty years; they have no children; and when Gerardo shows up in the pouring rain, the passenger in a car not his own, they seem to have almost nothing to do with one another.  Gerardo arrives, soaked, out-of-shape, and apologetic to find a chicken dinner already sampled by his wife during that long wait ("unceremonious" was a word coined for how she serves herself).  A wait during which she just so happens to hear that the President has just appointed Gerardo Escobar head of the new human rights commission to investigate the evils of the not-so-ancien régime.  And in the middle of this thunderstorm, her husband, the victim of both the elements and his wife's forgetfulness, pulls up in a car driven by an ostensible good Samaritan, a small, wiry, and unpleasantly energetic man called Dr. Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley).

His wife's forgetfulness?  Given the cyclone of subsequent events, critics have tended to overlook the fact that when Gerardo incurs a flat tire, he has a spare in his trunk.  The only problem is that the spare itself is flat, having never been replaced by Paulina after her own breakdown a while back.  This will prove to be an important detail, because if Death and the Maiden has one motif, it is willpower and choice.  Yes, the heavens flooded the earth and obliged Gerardo to "leap in front of" Miranda's car; yet it was Paulina's lack of foresight that enabled chance to take its course.  As he deposits his grateful passenger at his isolated home, Miranda's ears prick up at the name Escobar ("Escobar, the lawyer?"), and he scrutinizes the house with no small interest.  Is this a dramatic glitch?  Could he possibly know that Paulina is inside?  The matter is never quite clarified, and, in any case, we will get more than one version of the truth.  And the truth is a poorly guarded secret: in the same fateful year of 1977, Paulina Lorca had been distributing copies of an anti-government newspaper when she was abducted by the forces she had long sought to oust.  Two months later, after a sixteen-hour-a-day living hell in which she was subjected to evils that no human being should ever conceive of, much less physically endure, she was released because it was determined that she did not know the editor's true identity.  She came home to her Gerardo, the boyfriend and editor whose life she had just spared, and found him in bed with another woman.  "How many times did you sleep with her?" she will ask him late in our film.  He cannot count how many, but they had been lovers for about a month at that point.  A month, her whole body asks.  Yes, because it took about a month for him to believe, with all the plausibility of experience, that Paulina Lorca was no longer among the living.  This revelation to her is payback for what she reveals to him: that not only was she tortured for two months, but she was also raped repeatedly, and the perpetrator was none other than Dr. Roberto Miranda.    

These paragraphs rhyme in Miranda because Paulina's world has always rhymed in the same smell, the same voice, the same manner of speech, all aspects of a past that has become an unbreakable fortress of ice frozen around the present.  As she was blindfolded in captivity, she never saw her purported captor, whose name comes from mirar, to look or watch (in delightful irony, the name Escobar evokes escoba, a broom to sweep all the dirt under some rug).  Could she be mistaken?  Some may say it would be impossible to be wrong unless one were deluded; but people do modulate their behavior, habits, and voice, especially when they have something to hide.  But there is one more proof: every time her invisible assailant entered her, he played Schubert's stormy piece for ambience.  While sadists have been known to aspire to culture or what they perceive as culture, this sidelight, which informs the entire play and christens it, has another implication: that the educated, the sophisticated, and the cultured were as involved in the evils of this unnamed country as the quick-twitch thugs who existed solely to destroy the disobedient.  Miranda revisits the Escobars' residence that fateful night, allegedly to return a tire but also to wax more than a bit toady to the new head of the human rights commission.  "I've followed your career ever since you petitioned on behalf of the missing prisoners in –" but Miranda does not attempt to finish this compliment and Gerardo waves it off modestly.  Miranda is insecure, or so it seems, and a bit too bent on coming off as an intellectual: he is a little too sardonic, too interested in quoting famous thinkers, too smug about life's vicissitudes.  And as he is invited in for a drink to celebrate his kindness, his voice is recognized by a hidden Paulina in a very effective sequence of gestures and actions.  Within a couple of hours, Paulina will have hijacked and demolished Miranda's car (not before, however, she finds a damning object), effectively stranding him in that isolated house, and Miranda and Gerardo will have drowned themselves in booze and low-key misogyny.  Believing Paulina to have left him for good, Gerardo retires for the night only to wake up and find his bleeding, gagged guest bound to a chair under the gun-toting watch of his long-suffering wife.  And this wife has a long-devised plan for Dr. Roberto Miranda.

Since we have only three characters, more or less one set, and a whole lot of talking, we may safely assume that the work was originally a play.  Polanski elects to maintain the cadence and projection common to the stage; the dialogue seems overfraught with meaning; even asides come off as histrionic.  What lies behind this artistic choice?  Probably the implication of a façade: Paulina, Gerardo, and Miranda are all playing roles, roles they have taken up to protect themselves from memories, pain, or criminal prosecution.  More natural dialogue might have reduced the whole production to a cheap thriller; as it were, we are constantly reminded we are watching great tragedy unfold.  Weaver is a rather attractive woman, but possesses a tomboy quality, as well as a strong jaw, a man's height, and shorter hair that all lend her much-needed toughness.  While it is perhaps not fair to say that a more delicate-seeming female would not have survived the same ordeals, we also do not know how she was before April 1977.  That she seems scarred but determined makes her a very plausible victim (flagellation marks spider across her back), especially considering the events of the film's second half.  While this is indeed Weaver's show, and her acting is splendid (Kingsley, with a far less challenging part, is likewise excellent), it is, interestingly enough, Wilson who has the toughest role and he is bizarrely flawless.  The victim who can soliloquize on the evils committed upon her person (the camera gives her the entire frame for minutes on end as Weaver unfurls wickedness after wickedness) lends itself to melodrama, self-loathing, and bloodlust; the ostensibly malevolent doctor has been performed a thousand times, although Kingsley brings a particular emptiness to the role, a concentrated effort to have absolutely no personality and yet still be a 'normal' citizen.  It is the portrayal, however, of a pasty, cowardly, weak, and indecisive lawyer who not once – not the entire film – shows an ounce of courage that is nearly an impossible feat, and Wilson acquits himself grandly.  So when, very late in our film, he tells Paulina, "I love you.  I love you.  It has been the logic of my life.  But I have a feeling it's going to destroy me," he is utterly and wonderfully convincing.  Alas, the same cannot be said of Dr. Roberto Miranda.