Marcel in Marienbad

		Marcel in Marienbad Mark Rappaport

Enough of Parma violets and marrons glacés. The thought of their sickly sweet scents – he was able to do that at will, conjure up the sensations of an aroma – was enough to make his throat clutch. It had him gasping for air. He had his fill, at least for the time being, of princesses and principessas. Not to mention marquises, countesses, and duchesses. For the moment, he was bored with their endless chatter and his own interest in it as well. No matter how late he went to sleep, and he always went to sleep late, insomnia tormented him. Lying on his bed on the pile of clothes that he used to bolster himself up when he was sitting up in bed writing, trying to keep warm, he spent sleepless nights dreaming of rows and rows of handwritten text, in a spidery, barely-legible handwriting, scrolling across his brain as if it were on a treadmill that started going faster and faster. As he focused and seemed to be able to read the tiny script which he knew was his own, the movement sped up, becoming a blur of fevered writing which he was unable to make out, but nevertheless knew by heart. He knew what was written on the seamless scroll. He had written it. But he was always re-writing as well, mulling over a phrase, adding – adding, adding, always adding, never taking away – more evocative words, searching for a more perfectly apt metaphor to make a sensation luminously clear to the reader, although his readers were still far in the future, to make them, as Henry James (his contemporary) might have said, ‘see.’ Re-visiting sentences and paragraphs that he had already written was another opportunity to sculpt into a significant form the shapeless clay of his life. Each time it was the same. Nothing he had written was quite good enough. It stood there shame-faced, naked in its unadorned prose that could never, no matter how skilful, quite express the ineffable sensations he wanted to evoke. He would add pages to his notebooks, following Céleste's brilliant suggestion, of attaching paper to the existing pages, so that there was additional room for his innumerable revisions. And he would add paper to the already added-on sheets so that finally his notebook pages resembled a fold-out accordion, a two-dimensional ziggurat of indecipherable scribbling. He never had a restful night. All of his friends knew he was at the end of his tether and needed a vacation, a diversion, a break from the endless round of work that had become his life. Always writing, always thinking of writing and always writing about what he thought. He couldn't stop thinking. He couldn't help remembering. He couldn't stop writing. He forgot nothing and he lived to write. Even when he walked in the street, as rare as that occasion was, as he walked, he absent-mindedly composed sentences, with his forefinger tracing invisible designs of unreadable script in the air and propelling him forward, as if his finger was the prow of an icebreaker clearing the way for the ship to pass through. Then he would catch himself suddenly and stop, in case someone should notice, in case a mother walking with her child should suddenly grab her child's hand and quickly cross the street to avoid crossing the path of the dangerous lunatic. He needed a vacation although there was no time for a vacation, nor was he the kind of person who could take a vacation. He had to finish his book, which was his life. In any case, where could he go? Combray? Balbec? There was no going back there, not after all these years. Everything was gone. Everyone was dead. Only his memories of them and his ability to write about them kept them alive. He had his memories, so many of them and so detailed, and he could live in them, which he did in any case. Or go back to his ever-expanding book and immerse himself in the finely hammered, filigreed prose that took so long to beat into a compliant shape, as an alternative to the whirlpool-like nebulousness of permitting uncalled upon and unwanted memories to wash over him. But that would mean more rewriting, which was not the rest he sought.

Alain invited him to join them. They were shooting near Baden-Baden. Come. It'll be fun. You'll be able to relax, drink the waters, partake of the spa. If you insist, bring your notebooks. There were two Alains. That's what they called them on the set – les deux Alains. One was the writer, one was the director. The director, Resnais, had carved out a niche for himself. He was interested in Time and Memory – if you can call Time a theme, as if there's anything to say about time except that it's passing even as you're reading this, as if you can put your mind around something as amorphous and constantly with us as time and memory. It's like trying to imagine and contain the sea. Put it in a bucket. Put it in a beaker. An impossible task. And memory, when it belongs to invented characters, what does that mean? An ingenious and disingenuous way of providing audiences with information in a non-linear, non-expository fashion that has nothing to do, not really, with the way memory functions in a person's life. No fictional character can have as rich a memory bank as the most impoverished among us. Or as idiosyncratic. A cut or, worse yet, a dissolve may signify memory but cannot approximate the sensation, the sharp jolt of recognition and reverie that triggers a memory long buried and never thought of again. And a cut to something a character remembers, carefully worked out in the script, purposefully constructed on the set, and then in the editing room, is hardly the same as being inundated by a memory that may last a nanosecond but feels like forever and becomes thoroughly incorporated into the texture of one's everyday life, as one is crossing the street, as one is peeling a pear, as one is turning the page of a newspaper. But, in all fairness, Alain never claimed the title for himself. It was a tag that the critics slapped onto him because it was the easiest way to describe an aspect of the way his work functioned. And it stuck. He and Marcel had that in common. Time. Memory. At least superficially. Marcel was interested in many other things as well: the appearances one presents to the world; the mechanics of snobbery (about which he knew a thing or two from both ends of the equation) and the social fabric which its existence implies; the striations of society; perverse uses and abuses of love; the convoluted language(s) employed in love; and especially those elaborate and tortuous schemes that the lover of love invents and visits upon others. But Marcel was also friends with the writer, the other Alain, Robbe-Grillet. It was he who invited Marcel. They shared this in common: both of them were interested in perceptions and descriptions of perceptions. But in very different fashions. Marcel would go on and on, in both conversation as well as, of course, in his writing, about the way a place looked, the clothes someone wore, the aroma of the hawthorn flowers in the lane, the memories that a stained glass window evoked, the psychological temperature of a situation, the soon to be thwarted expectations of the figures in the landscape. Alain felt that it was all used up, possibly because of Marcel's heroic work itself, and that there was little more to say. Except for the very concrete description of a very brutal, implacable reality. The look of a thing, its physical attributes, the way it felt, how the perception of it changed as one altered one's relation to it, its volume, mass and disposition in space. If you could describe it over and over, somehow you could penetrate to the very essence of it. What the Germans called the sachlichkeit, the ‘thingness’ of the thing. That was all there was. The physicality, the temperature at which it burned. Its altered state, only altered by the way it is perceived or recontextualised in relation to new or rather re-arranged knowledge, is all there is. The prison house of the reality that trapped us no matter where we turned was a very real world filled with objects that were realer than our lives, which are as solid as smoke in any case. He measures the thickness and density of the concrete wall by the pain you feel as your skull is rhythmically bashed against it, Marcel thought. No room for daydreams or imagination there. Or even people and their psychologies. Especially psychology. Especially people. Only the ever-present pathology and insentience of objects. It was a fly's eyes vision, refracted a thousand-fold but never broadening our understanding beyond that impenetrable surface that it presented over and over, in multiple variations only altered by our proximity to the objects. To describe the world in any other way, according to Alain, the writer, was to suggest that the world has a spiritual component, an idea he vigorously denied, if only by the example of his writing. Romanticism is dead. Ditto, it goes without saying, for romance. No one ever accused him of being a humanist. Marcel, of course, read what Alain, the writer, wrote. It was the thing colleagues did, as a matter of courtesy. He chortled mordantly, as he nonchalantly tossed the pages aside. This man understands nothing. At first he thought the proper way of disposing of them would be to burn them, a romantic and, perhaps, even melodramatic gesture at best, and he was nothing if not a romantic fellow, but he knew that the smoke would exacerbate his asthma. What were these bald descriptions but the notes that a physicist collaborating with an eye surgeon might have written? It's all about the geography of geometry and described with the scalpel-like accuracy of an engineer trained in mechanical drawing. Ah well, everyone can't be me. It would be like living on a diet of truffles, champagne and caviar – and if anyone would know about that kind of diet, I would. Any more than you would want all the music in the world to be Mozart's or Reynaldo Hahn's, thinking of his friend and one-time lover who had lived far too long, long enough to see himself become an anachronism in his own lifetime. On the other hand, anyone born in the late19th-century who had been an accomplished artist before 1890 and had the bad form to live though both World War I and World War II would have to have been out of step with the times, a vestige of forgotten and discarded values and customs.

Marcel just came to visit the set. He didn't want any lengthy discussions with Alain, the writer, about the purpose of fiction, the mutability and imprecision of words, the shifting sands of perception. He just wanted to have a good time and he thought this set might be the perfect place. After all, he knew a thing or two about fancy digs, high society, and formal gardens, having been to many parties in his time, many of which were more elaborate than the threadbare charade at this place that pretended to have no name although Marienbad was as good as any. But it was really Nymphenburg. Marcel had never been on a movie set before although, now that he thought of it, he would have liked to go, but only in retrospect, to visit Feuillade when he was shooting his multi-part, episodic, pulp-epic mysteries. But it never occurred to either Louis or Marcel at the time. Movies didn't have that kind of cachet and mystique then. They were just made. People didn't go to visit sets of films because it was a glamorous thing to do. But this was an event that the French love affair with cinema made an imperative. Two of his friends, both of them class acts, the writer, one of the most fashionable writers of the decade, conspiring to make art: that was an event worth paying attention to. To make him feel that he was not just another hanger-on observing from the sidelines like the usual celebrity parasites that often litter film sets that seem to have prestigious pedigrees and most likely to be hits, they suggested he be an all-around consultant, a link to a forgotten past, as to how things were done then. It was a sinecure but he nevertheless was looking forward to it. He knew how dangerous that was – the looking forward to part. His life had been a series of unending disappointments very likely due to his unduly high-spirited optimism. Every promise contained within it the seeds of its own disappointment. Every anticipated event, offering the possibility of untold and unexpected riches, a potential trap that would most assuredly yield only dashed hopes, straw instead of gold. It was such a familiar story, he tried not to think of past examples, the numbers of which were legion. If lives can be said to have patterns, it certainly was one of the patterns of his. Nevertheless, it was a project that piqued his interest, if for no other reason than that an established novelist wrote the screenplay and he, Marcel, thought how, had he lived in a different time, it was an idea he might have flirted with, writing for the cinema, although he abhorred the messiness, the physicalness of the enterprise. People lugging and tugging at and hauling equipment. A world of sweat, calluses, and muscle. So much effort to make a complicated image seem unforced and easy, so messy and difficult to make something that ought to appear effortless and natural. Cinema – the art of making the impossible plausible. The idea of collaborating with other people, to have other people tamper with his precious pages almost made him shiver. Céleste, without whom he wouldn't have dreamt of undertaking such an arduous trip, noticed his imperceptible shudder and was flying over to minister to him. As he turned to indicate that it was nothing, really, he saw her, resting against the doorjamb. It was the very first shot in which she appeared. Because he hadn't seen her before and he would have noticed her if she had been present earlier, as who would not? Delphine. She was resting as if she was out of breath, as if the walk down the long corridor of glass and marble and mouldings and gilded stucco vines and acanthus leaves had left her dizzy and out of breath, as it may indeed have. He had to invent a way to meet her so that she would be the first to speak. He tried to edge himself closer to the camera, unsure what it was seeing but knowing that if this experience was to be anything at all, he would have to appear in the same frame as Delphine, so that they would be compacted together in a single frozen image where time and space intersected. Then she would not be able to avoid noticing him, when they both belonged forever to and were inseparably part of the same movie frame, frozen in hypo and eternity. He thought perhaps he had unobtrusively worked his shoulder into the shot. But he couldn't be certain. No matter. It was still early. It was only the first shot that she appeared in and there would be many other opportunities, he was sure. He would try to be bolder in the future. Then Alain, the director, barked out a sharp call that Marcel didn't understand and everyone relaxed and started talking and laughing, lighting cigarettes and walking away from their fixed positions. Delphine disappeared as magically as she had appeared. He could see her walking down a mirrored corridor festooned with gilded garlands and cornucopias, surrounded by hair stylists and wardrobe assistants.

Try to imagine Delphine's walk. The graceful, boneless ease of Henry Fonda's walk combined with the muted arrogance of Bette Davis', a combination of the two, with her pelvis ever so slightly projected forward – although ‘projected’ suggests an aggressiveness that Delphine's languorous walk most certainly could never have – leading the way as if there were invisible wires reeling her in, in the direction she is moving, as she slowly cuts a path across a crowded room or an abandoned corridor, like a warm knife cutting through butter. Her back, too, like Fonda's, like Davis's, seems to be slightly hunched but only because the weight of it rests so casually on her hips, as if every part of her body was an afterthought. She moves so languidly, in such a nonchalant manner - well, a near torpor at times - one is afraid that she might actually fall asleep as she is walking, which perhaps accounts for her taking long extended rests against doorjambs, pilasters and columns. Marcel is enchanted by her somnolent grace. She is a sedated panther with her claws removed. The flush on his face for everyone to see, if they are interested, might have told him what his body already knew: that this was a woman he must pursue and capture. He knew, too, as one always knows these things, that even though she never so much as glances at him, she knows his eyes are fixed on her. She could not perform her simple task with such exquisite elegance, he intuits, if she did not know that her every step was being memorised by a dazzled audience of one who was at the same time burning a photographic imprint of her onto on his memory.

She with her hand resting on her shoulder as if she is unobtrusively checking to see if perhaps she had forgotten her string of pearls. Then she remembers. Of course, she is not wearing pearls, but she caresses the iridescent fabric of her dress to reassure herself. Of what? That she is still there? That underneath the flimsy material is a human being who has reached her limit and at any moment might start screaming and perhaps never stop? He, with his index finger pressed firmly on his jaw line and his thumb propping up his chin, with his other fingers casually curled under his lower lip, his head at a precarious angle as if he is contemplating the slow ascent of the moon and beginning to dream in rhythm with the rising moon. But he is, despite the heavy-lidded look of drowsiness in his eyes, giving her his full attention – no, much more than that. He is imagining filling reams of empty pages with precise images of her as she stands there nonchalantly posing for him but not even glancing in his direction although fully attentive to the slightest fluttering of his eyelids, his breathing in perfect unison with hers. He is hoping that she notices this coincidental but for him very significant concurrence, even though she pretends to notice nothing. The position of her hips, her knees, the carefully plotted angles at which she placed her feet, as if she is demonstrating a particularly difficult dance step and is holding the pose so that the sketch artist can quickly and accurately capture it on paper – all of it is calculated, calibrated, controlled. He must fall in love, for that is what he does. She begs for a release from the snow globe that encases her. They are made for each other, he observing and analysing everything, she in a trance, drunk on her own narcissism, craving to be observed and understood, made to be seen, parading and posturing in the torture chamber of her haute couture gowns.

His proudest moment. He sidles over to Alain the director, who is in a huddle with Alain the writer, although Alain the writer never makes suggestions – everything that needs to be discussed was discussed a long time ago, long before the shooting began – and whispers to both of them. Resnais' face lights up. They agree to film Marcel’s suggestion. The camera, from a raised position so that it is eye level with the concrete statues of the man and woman in heroic Roman garb, gazing sightlessly on an unseen, indeterminate horizon, will move to the edge of the balcony with the balustrade, that will later crumble in perhaps the most violent, event-filled action in the film, rush past the balustrade for a wide angle view of the Grand Promenade, that gravel-filled walk the colour of cream turned sour, bordered by the topiary bushes in the shape of pyramids, and we will see people stand there motionless on that gravel path. The people will cast shadows. The carefully pruned pyramid-shaped shrubs will cast no shadows at all. Nor will anything else. Alain, the director, knows how to do this. We'll shoot on an overcast day. Not a shadow in sight. The art department will cut out from black cloth or paper Giacometti-like shapes, all-purpose, generic shadows that will be spread in front of each of the stationary actors, shadows that don't even try to conform to the shape of the human body. Of course, all of the shadows will face in the same direction and will be laid down at the same angle. And it's a short scene. Those in the audience who notice will lick their lips at the delicious artifice of it. Those who don't notice would not be impressed even if it were pointed out to them. The shadows that people cast in front of them, behind them, around them and, in this case, in front of them, remain immobile and can be carried with them. They can be rolled up or folded and conveniently stuffed into a pocket. But what does it mean? If the sun is not shining, where has your shadow disappeared to, if it's so much a part of you, as much a part of you as your profile or your tears? Or perhaps only people are permitted to cast shadows on the landscapes they so thoroughly dominate and can transform at will? Is that what it means? No matter. No meaning. Don't even try. Neither Marcel nor Alain the writer could abide symbolism or meaning. Down with symbolism and meaning! On this they both agreed. À bas with content and authorial intentionality! The meaning of the scene, which it didn't have in any case, could not be explained because there was nothing to explain. It would have to reside in the texture of the way it looked, the way it felt, the way the light played over lambent surfaces. That was the meaning, if an answer were needed. It was the casualness of it all, a throwaway coup de cinéma that thrilled all of them, Marcel especially, since he had not seen any movies since he died and even surprised himself with his brainstorm. As a special treat, they allowed him to ride on the crane with the camera operator, a privilege not usually granted civilians. The excitement of the swooping movement of the crane as it descended once it flew past the balustrade made him dizzy as well as feverish. After he got off the machine, he walked unsteadily towards Céleste, welcoming the embrace of her sturdy arms. She took him to a room where he could rest up, and covered him with a blanket she had brought from Paris for just such an occasion. What a treasure she was, thought Marcel, drifting off to sleep. The ancient, familiar smell of the blanket was as soothing as the luxurious plushness of the couch. He buried himself in the warmly embracing perfumed odour of the past that the blanket evoked, greedily inhaling it like an exotic, expensive drug, and let it roll over him like a wave. All of his dreams included Delphine.

In the VIP lounge, a striking young woman with sculpted cheekbones, wearing a rakishly-angled, close-fitting beanie covered with exotic shiny black feathers, was making a spectacle of herself. She deftly opens up the ropes that were supposed to contain the on-lookers and runs towards Delphine. Marlene, dressed in her Shanghai Lily outfit of black Mexican fighting cock feathers, from Shanghai Express, lunges towards Delphine similarly dressed in her black cape with a collar of cascading black Mexican fighting cock feathers. Delphine dodges as Marlene recklessly lunges at her but falls to the floor as adeptly and painlessly as any stuntman would, as Delphine, with the inner grace of a bullfighter, gingerly pirouettes aside. Marlene gets up and hurls herself again at Delphine. She screams, ‘Not the hair. Not the hair!’ protecting it with her hands, forming a vulnerable shield several inches above her hairdo, as if it is adequate protection against a force of nature like a vengeful Marlene. She spent hours in makeup and the helmet of hair - designed especially for her by Vidal Sassoon and soon to become the hairdo of fashionable woman everywhere and especially women of fashion once the movie is released - may not be mussed under any circumstances. Marlene wants to grab Delphine’s hair because she's done that in various catfights in her movies, especially in Destry Rides Again. It was very successful for her and revived a flagging career. It showed she could be a down home girl if she really wanted to be, instead of the unattainable ice goddesses she always played in those von Sternberg movies. But she appreciates Delphine's concern, having spent thousands of hours having her own hair done. A life wasted in the hair and make-up department. More hours spent there than most people spend riding subways and buses, driving to work, waiting in lines at supermarkets, banks and post offices. Such a high price to pay for being beautiful. Delphine takes shelter behind a light stand. ‘Get away from me you blonde...blonde,’ she couldn't think of a word, ‘...hetaira.’ Delphine can't help herself. In spite of herself, she laughs at the quaintness of such an outmoded word. How biblical of her! Her brushed velvet baritone laugh calms Marlene down. Marlene, suddenly seeing the foolishness of the situation she instigated, soothed by Delphine's warm gold laugh, laughs as well. They purr at each other, exchanging overlapping double throaty laughs. Teeth flash and shine. Million dollar smiles wink at each other, illuminating darknesses. Laughs overlap infecting all those in the vicinity. They gurgle crushed velvet at one another. Marcel watches unobtrusively, neither laughing nor understanding what the joke is, not taking notes but also knowing he will forget nothing and, even more dismayingly, remember everything. And when he's finished embellishing and interpolating, embroidering and analysing, this brief little exchange might take up as much as forty pages, were to he write it down. ‘But, darling,’ Marlene says to Delphine, ‘look at you. You're wearing exactly what I wore thirty years ago.’ Delphine says, ‘It might as well have been a million years ago.’ They both laugh again at the implication of the remark, Marlene graciously sidestepping and forgiving the insult buried therein. ‘Well, it sure as hell feels like it, darling. But I invented that look. I designed outfits for myself with those very same feathers. Maria, my little girl, helped me.’ ‘That's the point, Marlene. It's pastiche. When you did it, it was fashion. Now, it's practically camp. Those who know will remember. Those who don't can only fall on the sword of their own ignorance.’ ‘But, look, darling, there must be a copyright or a patent. Or something.’ ‘For feathers? Only if you're a bird. Anyway, believe me when I tell you, this isn't your kind of movie, Marlene. Be flattered. Think of it as a homage. A homage in obsidian, ebony, and - what the hell are they anyway, monkey feathers?’ ‘Unfortunately,’ Marlene said, giving up the battle, ‘the black and white image will never show the thrilling metallic emerald green lustre the feathers give off when the light strikes them the right way.’ And Marlene knew a thing or two about lighting, always telling cameramen where to put the lights to accentuate her cheekbones and forehead, transforming her face into an impenetrable blanc de chine mask.

Count Dracula, aka Bela Lugosi, heartened by Marlene's success in making contact with the star, nimbly vaults over the VIP lounge velvet ropes to approach Delphine in between takes. He gracefully wraps his cape around himself in a half veronica. ‘Look at us,’ he says. ‘We could be twins.’ ‘We almost are. But it was intentional. That's what they meant. That's what they wanted.’ ‘The cape. The eyebrows. Of course, my hair never looked that good. Thin and greasy stuff. Neither did Hitler's hairdo, which was probably the real inspiration for yours. And my cape wasn't by Chanel, of course, or drenched in diamond chips.’ ‘We remembered you. We thought of you. It is a kind of a horror film, you know. All the undead searching for their proper burial ground, praying they'll find a sympathetic partner willing to hammer a stake through their hearts, trying to remember what they did the last time they did whatever it was they did. Although sometimes it's hard to figure out who is horroring whom.’ She jokingly growls and bares her incisors at him, perhaps recalling a vampire movie that she will be in several years from now, Daughters of Darkness. Lesbian vampires. It seemed like an interesting new twist at the time. He recoils in mock horror and with his cape draped around his forearm, brandished in front of his face like a weapon, pretends to defend himself against her. They laugh but not as heartily as she and Marlene laughed, a bonding of two kindred divas, trapped in similar clichés, decades apart. ‘Well, I'm honoured.’ ‘Better honoured than forgotten,’ she simps. ‘You're telling me.’ He gurgled a low sinister laugh. She baritoned him, he bass-baritoned her, eerily sounding like the Henry Kissinger who was still to come, a Kissinger without a drug habit, while he, he was merely a vampire without a foreign policy. Kissinger as Dracula. Maybe next time. ‘God cannot kiss his own ear,’ he murmured mysteriously. ‘Any more than you can kiss your own elbow,’ she quipped gamely, demonstrating the impossibility of such an action, not quite sure what he meant or even if her response was an appropriate one. He darted a pointed glance at Marcel who was transfixed by Lugosi's not easily placeable accent and haughty, seemingly regal gestures. They recognized each other as Brothers of the Night. Marcel thought: a man whose pallor is paler than mine. Marcel wondered about Lugosi’s genealogy, if his was a significant entry in the Almanac de Gotha. Marcel made a mental note to look it up later. But as his eyes grazed over the surface of Bela's cape he knew that he was no real count. That moth-eaten and patched fabric and what was it made out of – felt? – looked as if he had slept in it for a hundred years. Counts may lead shabby lives but their clothes are never tatty. You could practically see the seams stitched together. Movie magic indeed. Lugosi made a feint to kiss Delphine on the cheek. She stiffly and jerkily turned her face away by 15 degrees as if she had a sudden crick in her neck. She couldn't take the chance that an irresistible impulse of his might lead to sinking his teeth in her white alabaster neck, set off by her blacker than night cape, the one with those feathers that so ruffled Marlene's. He understood and, without stopping, continued in an uninterrupted movement as if he always intended swooping for her right hand. He kissed it dryly, smiled wanly and disappeared without a trace. A bat was seen flying in the distance. The onlookers applauded quietly.

Remember that silly game? Everyone played it at the time. The sixteen matchsticks, the sixteen playing cards, the sixteen dominoes, the sixteen mah-jong tiles, the sixteen business cards, the sixteen whatevers ... Perhaps, as an accommodation to modern times, one could even use sixteen credit cards. In the first row there was one card, in the second row three, in the third row five and in the fourth seven. You can remove as many or few, let us say, matchsticks, as you want, from one row only. Then the other person does the same. The player who has one matchstick left at the end of the game when his turn comes is the loser. It makes no sense but there was no way to win. If you went first, the dealer won. If you went second, you also lost. Statistically impossible, no? In the film, the dealer was the cadaverous Sasha Pitoëff, called M in the script, called nothing at all in the film, Delphine's husband or jailer or keeper or tormenter, with cheekbones that went up to here and made him look like a kissing cousin of a memento mori. This guy should have had a huge movie career playing Dracula, if only Christopher Lee hadn't planted his teeth in that franchise in perpetuity. He meticulously lays out each one of the matchsticks on the gaming table. A practiced hand. A croupier in another lifetime perhaps. Delphine, as innocently as she could, cooed in Marcel's direction, ‘Let's play.’ She broke the ice. At last. She punctuated her husky growl with a laugh, trying to make it sound like fun. Marcel languidly closed his heavily-lidded eyes – which to some suggested that he was of Middle Eastern extraction – in assent, embarrassed by the blush of excitement that he felt, as if he were standing naked in a roomful of voyeurs. ‘But I want to deal,’ she commanded Sasha. The slightest mechanical movement of his head indicated that he would relinquish the pleasure, and gladly, if she requested it and it would please her. Marcel had enjoyed games as a child but as a serious writer he felt it was a severe imposition on his very limited time. He was dying, his book was unfinished, and now they profligately waste his remaining precious moments with this foolish game. But time had vanished. He watches the gaming table with the same kind of intensity he would reserve for examining roses on a rose bush or sizing up a new outfit of the Duchesse de Guermantes, as if he was memorising every texture and fold, the taffeta bruising the satin, as indeed he was. She puts down the first matchstick. Only it's not a matchstick. It's ... a madeleine! The bystanders gasp as if they are witness to an incredible faux pas. Marcel clears his throat, putting his hand in front of his mouth, as if to stifle a fit of giggles, as if he knows exactly what is coming next. And it comes. The second line of three matchsticks, three playing cards, three dominoes – madeleines all. Two burly men in tuxedos, extras in the film, assigned by les deux Alains to watch over Marcel at Céleste's instigation, fully cognizant of his frail health, positioned themselves behind him as if they thought he was going to faint. But not at all. He laughed heartily and coughed when she laid out a row of five madeleines. When she completed the set of the additional seven madeleines, he applauded approvingly, maybe too eagerly, showing what a good sport he could be, gently slapping one hand, with an open palm, on top of the other. The sound was muffled even further because he was wearing Naples yellow kid gloves, the exact shade of which Céleste had a devil of a time finding. He never went shopping himself. He would have to tell her exactly what he wanted and she would have to troll the finest shops in Paris and order them, without the benefit of a colour swatch. She would choose, hoping that her choice was the correct one, and would please monsieur. Marcel applauded the audacity of Delphine's gesture. He knew that Alain and Alain didn't have even a whiff of a sense of humour between the two of them and so he was delightfully surprised. Even if he wanted to, he would not crumple, flinch or blanche – great writers are made of sterner stuff – like Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate when Frank Sinatra fans open, face up, a forced deck of fifty-two Queens of Diamonds. Nor was that the intention of the game of madeleines. It was a delicious prank, suggesting, if anything at all, that Delphine had at least peeked into his book and could refer to it obliquely in this lovely and warmly acknowledging gesture. He glowed with a sense of triumph. She would be his. Of this he had no doubt.

The end is approaching. Darkness envelops the grounds. The castle, the palace, the hotel is a dark forbidding monolith tracing a threatening outline against the still-lit twilight sky. Lights are turned on in the windows making it a less sinister image, although it still seems deserted. The cameras are rolling and Marcel is at last in the same frame as his beloved Delphine. He has willed himself into the movie, replacing the man who originally played her pursuer, the man whom she met, or didn't meet, last year. Now it was Marcel whom she met, or didn't meet, last year. He approaches her in a hesitant, almost mechanical gesture - as if he is counting each step, as if at the same time measuring the distance between the steps, making sure that they are of equal length - and extends his hand to her. She looks away from him, her right hand softly resting on her left shoulder, as if she wants to make sure that her dress is still covering her, taking comfort in the reassuring texture of the cloth, as if she is gently massaging an itch that she dare not scratch as she might if she were alone in the privacy of her own room. She looks down the endless corridor of marble walls - with gilded stucco mouldings, curlicues and grape leaves and vines and putti gracing the ceiling, mouldings of gold and silver, thick carpets that absorb the sound of every footstep taken as well as those not taken, bronzed tarnished mirrors that are too tired to reflect back complete images - and tries to imagine them walking down these endless corridors together. ‘I've come back one last time to take you with me. To deliver you from this palace of ice and torpor.’ She looks at him the way movies stars are trained to look at actors who are playing impudent suitors whom they don't know at all or know all too well. Never for a moment does she take her eyes away from his. They promise him a universe of untold riches. Or the scorn of a woman who is too beautiful to consider such a contemptible proposition. Their eyes remain locked in what seems like eternity until she breaks the spell by smiling ever so slightly. Standing in the shadow of a faux marble pilaster is Céleste holding up a black mantilla-like shawl. She opens it as if she is spreading her wings, looking for all the world like a bird of prey, a gesture that Marcel, without looking, facing away from her, nevertheless senses. His right arm, at his side, remains motionless but his hand, as if it's not even attached to his wrist, motions to her ever so slightly (by barely moving his forefinger and index finger) for her not to dare to approach him. Delphine hesitantly stands up. It's impossible to read the expression on her face with any kind of accuracy. It is a mask of porcelain, India ink, graced with a slash of velvet vermilion. She holds her left arm across her breast, lightly resting it between her neck and right shoulder, as if she is cold or feels the need for the comforting touch of human flesh, even if it is her own. With his right hand he gently cups her elbow as if he is cradling the egg of some extinct bird or carrying with extreme caution a Fabergé egg for the czarina. The two of them, as if they have not yet gotten their sea legs, cautiously move one leg at a time, both of them in sync with each other, as if they are performing a new dance of the uncoordinated that they have not yet mastered, as if they are Molloy, needing the whole sidewalk for himself as he spasmodically thrusts and hurls his way down the street. As they slowly wend their way down the corridor, a sidelong glance is all that he needs to weave the complicated scenario that will henceforth form the pattern of their lives together, a pattern in which he had been trapped forever and forever would be.

He looks at her and can see the Delphine that she will be a year from now when his love for her will no longer be as strong as it is now, when the passion he feels for her at this moment will have faded into a dull habit from which his innermost being is already fleeing. Even now he knows, before they have even begun, that he will gently try to extricate himself from her love for him which, by that time, will have become as strong as his was from the moment he first caught a glimpse of her, but that, once reciprocated, will entrance him less than the unfulfilled promise of what is still to come, what Delphine, whose emotions once lay dormant, an invalid in tombs of ice, in realms of crystal for many years, once awakened will experience. Marcel knows from the past that he will start withdrawing slowly, long before his love has completely waned, with reckless tests of love that involve unprovoked outbursts of anger and jealousy, unkind remarks and untruths uttered in order to discomfort and embarrass his companion, to draw from her protestations of love and reassurances that can only reassure him momentarily. He will invent reasons to see her less, knowing that she will be confused by his sudden coolness, in the hopes that the less he pursues her the more fearful she will be in pursuing him, afraid to reveal that she craves his presence more than he does hers, all the while hoping that her refuelled love for him will similarly help him feel the passion that satiety has dimmed. He will feign suspicions that will soon enough prove real, like a child always complaining of a stomach-ache to gain the attention of its mother until finally the child does have a stomach-ache, but the mother's solicitude can no longer comfort him. All this was still in the future but, even so, he could see her grief at losing him and this grief, still unfelt, still many months away, touched him. He wanted to cradle that Delphine in his arms, the grief-stained, care-worn Delphine that would be his creation, a creation who is yet to come, and kiss away the tears and sadness in her face that he knew would be there once she was certain that he no longer cared for her in the way that she had become used to and which he had promised would last forever. And he knew then that the fragility and vulnerability that he will have foisted upon her, would make him feel much kindlier to her than he had been in months and even momentarily make him, although artificially, want to feel the same passion towards her that she had previously inspired in him. In his imagination, he came to love once again the woman that he had deliberately kept at arm's length, tormented by his feigned indifference which would be real soon enough, because of the grief that he knew he could cause her. He came to love especially the trace of worry marks that had begun to show on her face as a result of his behaviour that was still awaiting both of them. His sympathy for this woman who was yet-to-come reawakened his feelings towards her but at the same time repelled him, seeing how weak and vulnerable she could be - partly because of his calculatedly cruel thoughts and actions. Then he could see her, as clearly as if she was standing in front of him, years from now, long after they had each gone their separate ways, when the two of them had each had many different partners and affairs of the heart and the flesh, when they had stopped thinking about each other, and no longer swore that the love of the other was indispensable to life, as essential to their own well-being and happiness as it was to each other's. Long after they had forgotten the torments of love that he was instrumental in inflicting - the warm presence of each other, once so crucial to both his and her happiness, now a thing of the past - they would run into each other quite by chance, at soirées thrown by people that they still haven't met, where they no longer had to pretend that they didn't know each other, or even that they had ever loved each other to distraction. He could not imagine how that Delphine would look, years from now, no longer interested in the slightest details of Marcel's daily life, hanging on his every word, as he did on hers. And for the moment, sometime in the future, he wasn't even sure that he would be able to remember her face that was once so dear to him, that is so dear to him now, and that he had so carefully memorised he could make an accurate sketch of it even with his eyes shut and that he felt he must see every day or else he would die. Months from now, when he knew that his love for her would be coming to an end soon, when she was out late and he could only surmise as to her whereabouts, he could barely remember her face. He would then rummage through two old hatboxes that had once belonged to his grandmother, one bearing an ornate but faded paisley print and the other a design of vertical pale yellow and mauve stripes, the mauve having the texture of a ripely picked peach. These two hatboxes, which he kept in an art nouveau armoire made of black mahogany, served as the repository of the evidence of his memories. It was into these cylindrical cardboard boxes, with their true lowly origins disguised by rare, costly prints, that he threw theatre ticket stubs, theatre and concert programs, menus, place cards from dinners, perhaps hundreds of cartes de visite, all kinds of memorabilia that were designed to reawaken memories of the past when looked at in the distant future. These would serve as memory containers of discarded and long forgotten souvenirs for her photograph which was dropped there as casually as ticket stubs and flowers that he had once worn in his boutonnière, thinking that he would never forget the particular evening on which he wore such and such a flower, but now that he looked at the dried out, desiccated, odourless petals he had no idea which flower was associated with which memory or why he even wanted to save it; and when he found it, Delphine's photo, he instantly realized that he had never forgotten her face at all, even though at times he wasn't sure that he could remember her even if he saw her suddenly turn the corner in the street. As he looked at the photo, he said, of course, that is her face, that is the face I dreamed of so many times so many sleepless nights ago, in Marienbad perhaps, before she finally became truly mine. But the photograph reminded him how familiar he was with every line and curve in that once beloved visage. As he looked at it, he was able to see her face years from now with her face changing the way faces change when they age, getting longer or rounder, the features getting flatter and puffier, the flesh no longer hanging symmetrically and firmly on the once youthful bones. Lines formed by age or sorrows or heredity appeared. He could see her hair growing grey, not the kind of grey that comes out of a make-up kit, that she would wear two years from now ( by which time they will have long since separated ) in Muriel, also directed by director Alain, pretending artificially to add fifteen or twenty years to her life, and thereby suggesting that she had fifteen or twenty years more of life experiences than she could possibly have had. His was a genuinely older Delphine, with her face finely lined as if she was wearing custom-made cobwebs around her eyes. In spite of himself, despite the indifference he knew he would feel for Delphine sooner than he imagined, his eyes misted up. He began to weep thinking of the young Delphine ageing before his eyes, dying before her time at the age of 58, as he too had died before his time at the age of 51, knowing that for both of them, even though there might have been many years of satisfying and perhaps even splendid work ahead of them, both of them had fully realised themselves in the work they left behind. The future would not resemble the past. There would be no more. All that was ahead of them was behind them. The future had receded in the frozen yet open-ended past, open to endless interpretations and readings by scholars and aesthetes, and, in fact, their paths would never cross either again or before, no matter how many trips to Marienbad or Karlstadt or Friederichsbad or Nymphenburg they would make ever again. He wept openly for both of them knowing that he would never fall in love again without being able to see the object of his love age before his eyes, knowing that he could never be able to see in any young face he encountered anything but the finger of mortality traced upon it, that he could never again experience the youthful beauty of a fresh face without seeing at the same time the old person's face that lay behind it, reluctantly waiting to be unveiled, as if in his eyes only there was a magical mirror in which the unfortunate gazer would age thirty years in the space of several seconds, the kind of tricks Hollywood would soon become so adept at that it would replace the word spectacle with the weary trick of once unimaginable but suddenly manufacturable images that paradoxically rendered the magic of the created image empty and artificial and (worst of all ) disposable, dull, and thoroughly forgettable through misuse. He was reminded of what his friend, Jean Cocteau, would say, many years hence, when he said that death comes through the mirror. Marcel's eyes were those mirrors. He knew that from now on he would only see the blue veins beneath the porcelain, powdered skin, and the aging infirm person with a face that lived underneath the still youthful face, waiting impatiently to be revealed, that the loved one, still young and fresh before him, would turn into in the years and decades ahead. He could pierce the beauties of the present to find the decaying and soon to be withered flowers, not as if he actually saw death in life, but he would be able to penetrate beyond the beauty of the moment to see its inevitable decline. He knew that if he ever wanted to see Delphine again as he once loved her, his Delphine, every year he could, if he so chose, encounter her again at Marienbad - the film, not the place - he would have to go there again next year. And, if not, then the year after... And ... But it's always last year. Never this year, never next year. And if ever she had the urge to meet him again, all she had to do on her part was to take a few short steps to her bookshelf and browse at will through the yellowing pages of Combray and Balbec, where he too would remain young forever, as Marcel, the boy, the youth, and the man, and not the revered literary lion he would soon become sometime in the not-so-distant future. In the artefacts they will have left behind, they can both find each other, preserved forever in a bell jar of time.

The endless corridor still looms before them and extends behind them in equal distance as they walk in a rhythmic step, as if they had rehearsed their movements many times over, keeping time to an unheard funeral march, on the plush carpeting that muffles the sound of their silent footsteps. They walk very slowly as if each step caused excruciating pain, as if there were pebbles in the bottoms of their shoes, but also as if they wanted to prolong this journey down the corridor as long as could be humanly endured. They pass gilt-edged mirrors which line both sides of the corridor, reflecting their images into infinity. They are suffocatingly surrounded by glazed, unblinking replicas of themselves, the reflected images repeating endlessly until one can no longer count the number of times the couple appear in one or the other mirrors on either side of the corridor. The camera is still rolling as night envelops the hotel. The chandeliers in the palace belie the chill night air outside. Thin crystals of ice form on the edges of the little man-made ponds that dot the grounds. Soon everything will be covered with hoar frost. Not a soul is stirring on the grounds, although in a little while, if one listens carefully, one might hear the crunch of footsteps on gravel. For the moment, the light from the windows is the only suggestion of the incandescent warmth of a love that, like a moth blindly bashing its wings against an unyielding flame that must inevitably consume it, lies within.

		© Mark Rappaport and Rouge 2003. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors of Rouge.