[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
I'd smuggled a half-pint of Jack Daniels into his geriatric ward; he waxed
virulent, he warned me to take a snake-bite kit to the interview.
Paracelsus was, needless to say, one of the greatest box-office
disasters in the history of the movies. Plans were shelved for his
long-dreamed-of Faust, with the Spirit either as Gretchen or as
Mephistopheles, or as Gretchen doubling with Mephistopheles, depending on what
he said in different interviews. Mann was forced to perpetrate a hack job, a
wallowing melo with the Spirit as twins, a good girl in a blonde wig and a bad
girl in a black one, from which his career never recovered and her own
survival truly miraculous.
Shortly after this notorious stinker was released to universal jeers, he
did the A Star is Born bit, although he walked, not into the sea, but into the
very swimming pool, that one over there, in which his relict now disposes of
her glassware.
As for the Spirit, she found a new director, was rumoured to have
undergone a little, a very little plastic surgery, and, the next year, won her
first Oscar. From that time on she was unstoppable, though always she carried
her tragedy with her, like a permanent widow's veil, giving her the spooky
allure of a born-again princesse lointaine.
Who liked to keep her guests waiting.
In my nervous ennui, I cast my eyes round and round the terrace until I
came upon something passing strange in the moist earth of a flowerbed.
Moist, therefore freshly watered, though not by whatever it was had left
such amazing spoor behind it. No big-game hunter I, but I could have sworn
that, impressed on the soil, as if in fresh concrete outside Graumann's
Chinese Theatre, was the print, unless the tiger lilies left it, of a large,
clawed paw.
Did you know a lion's mane grows grey with age? I didn't. But the
geriatric feline that now emerged from a clump of something odorous beneath
the cryptomeria had snow all over his hairy eaves. He appeared as taken aback
to see me as I was to bump into him. Our eyes locked. Face like a boxer with a
broken nose. Then he tilted his enormous head to one side, opened his mouth --
God, his breath was foul -- and roared like the last movement of Beethoven's
Ninth. With a modest blow of a single paw, he could have batted me arse over
tip off the cliff half-way to Hawaii. I wouldn't say it was much comfort to
see he'd had his teeth pulled out.
"Aw, come on, Pussy, he don't want to be gummed to death," said a
cracked, harsh, aged, only residually female voice. "Go fetch Mama, now,
there's a good boy."
The lion grumbled a little in his throat but trotted off into the house
Page 238
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
with the most touching obedience and I took breath, again -- I noticed I'd
somehow managed not to for some little time -- and sank into one of the white
metal terrace chairs. My poor heart was going pit-a-pat, I can tell you, but
the personage who had at last appeared from somewhere in the darkening
compound neither apologised for nor expressed concern about my nasty shock.
She stood there, arms akimbo, surveying me with a satirical, piercing, blue
eye.
Except for the jarring circumstances that in one hand she held a
stainless steel, many-branched candlestick of awesomely chaste design, she
looked like a superannuated lumberjack, plaid shirt, blue jeans, workboots,
butch leather belt with a giant silver skull and crossbones for a buckle,
coarse, cropped, grey hair escaping from a red bandana tied Indian-style
around her head. Her skin was wrinkled in pinpricks like the surface of
Parmesan cheese and a putty grey in colour.
"You the one that's come about the thesis?" she queried. Her diction was
pure hillbilly.
I burbled in the affirmative.
"He's come about the thesis," she repeated to herself sardonically and
discomforted me still further by again cackling to herself.
But now an ear-splitting roar announced action was about to commence.
This Ma, or Pa, Kettle person set down her candlestick on the terrace table,
briskly struck a match on the seat of her pants and applied the flame to the
wicks, dissipating the gathering twilight as She rolled out the door. Rolled.
She sat in a chrome and ivory leather wheel-chair as if upon a portable
throne. Her right hand rested negligently on the lion's mane. She was a sight
to see.
How long had she spent dressing up for the interview? Hours. Days.
Weeks. She had on a white satin bias-cut lace-trimmed negligee circa 1935, her
skin had that sugar almond, one hundred per cent Max Factor look and she wore
what I assumed was a wig due to the unnatural precision of the snowy curls.
Only she'd gone too far with the wig; it gave her a Medusa look. Her mouth
looked funny because her lips had disappeared with age so all that was left
was a painted-in red trapezoid.
But she didn't look her age, at all, at all -- oh, no; she looked a good
ten or fifteen years younger, though I doubt the vision of a sexy
septua-genarian was the one for which she'd striven as she decked herself out.
Impressive, though. Impressive as hell.
And you knew at once this was the face that launched a thousand ships.
Not because anything lovely was still smouldering away in those old bones;
she'd, as it were, transcended beauty. But something in the way she held her
head, some imperious arrogance, demanded that you look at her and keep on
looking.
At once I went into automatic, I assumed the stance of gigolo. I picked
up her hand, kissed it, said: "Enchanté", bowed. Had I not been wearing
sneakers, I'd have clicked my heels. The Spirit appeared pleased but not
surprised by this, but she couldn't smile for fear of cracking her make-up.
She whispered me a throaty greeting, eyeing me in a very peculiar way, a way
that made the look in the lion's eye seem positively vegetarian.
It freaked me. She freaked me. It was her star quality. So that's what
they mean! I thought. I'd never before, nor am I likely to again, encountered
such psychic force as streamed out of that frail little old lady in her
antique lingerie and her wheel-chair. And, yes, there was something undeniably
erotic about it, although she was old as the hills; it was as though she got
the most extraordinary sexual charge from being looked at and this charge
bounced back on the looker, as though some mechanism inside herself converted
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]