Collected Essays (86 page)

There was a yacht waiting for us by a monument to the Great Navigators (a big theme in Lisbon!). It belonged to the production company, or to one of the company’s contacts. The rain cleared up and the sun came out. Seeing Edgar and all his lively hip crew, I began to realize just how serious a gig this was. I mean, these guys had big heavy-duty 35 mm cameras, not to mention any number of Hi-8 video cams.

We got on the boat and motored around the wide Rio Teja for awhile, being filmed answering questions about time. The questions were posed by Carlos, a TV reporter who was playing a reporter. Bob, Terence, and I were cast as the Shaman, the Neuro-Magician, and the Master of Chaos. (They use X for CH in Portugal, so actually, we were the Xaman, the Neuro-Magician, and the Master of Xaos.) I was kind of stiff and like jockeying for position, worried the others would talk more than me, but eventually I got a good rap or two on film, talking about my idea that we are like eyes which God grows to look at himself with—God being thus like a giant snail or mollusk that extrudes eyestalks.

Later I actually got to see this shot onscreen in the rushes. The camera angle was low so that my head was like sticking up from behind the dome of the boat’s binnacle (compass enclosure), and I was raising up my arms to simulate eyestalks, the arms at different heights and my hands cupped as if holding eye-spheres. Right above and behind me was the great suspension bridge over the Rio Teja. This bridge looks just like the Golden Gate bridge, and was built by the long-term dictator Salazar, but is called the April 25 bridge in honor of the date of the 1974 revolution. In the shot, my hands stuck up above the lines of the bridge. Much as I liked this shot, it didn’t make it into the finished film.

The technology of the filming, which I didn’t understand at first, was that the video cameras would be on most or all of the time, but the heavy-duty 35 mm cameras would only be on for occasional bursts of three minutes. A three-minute role of 35 mm film costs $300, and another $200 for processing. Given Edgar’s finite budget for the film, he is sparing with the 35 mm, preferring to wait and wait around until finally there is a feeling that all is ripe and the key scene can be shot—almost always in one take with no repeat. The final film may include some footage from the videos to pad out or vary upon the 35 mm. For editing, everything is transferred first to video tape and then to a digital format called AVI. The edit is done by using the AVI files on a computer, much as if one were word-processing a bunch of documents. Once you have all the snips and splices figured out digitally, you print out a spec sheet, and the lab does the snipping and splicing for you.

Eventually the boat docked on the other side of the Rio Teja. They filmed us arriving—the idea of the movie is that there are Saboteurs who are changing the speed of time in various parts of Lisbon, and that they are being helped by the Xaman, the Neuro-Magician, and the Master of Xaos.

We went up the hill to have lunch in a small town with a name something like Alameda. I waited with Carlos in a square, and noticed a woman filling up big plastic pitchers at a fountain. “I can’t believe that woman has to haul water to her house,” I said. Carlos answered, “You have to understand that Portugal is the end of Europe and the beginning of the third world.”

We went into an unprepossessing place for lunch, and sat at a long table. I sat next to Michael, a guy who seemed like a Frenchman with good English, but who turned out to be a longtime expatriate New Yorker who’s acquired a French accent. He lives in Paris in an apartment above, of all places, the Procope, the brasserie where dear Sylvia and I had dinner on our 25
^th
anniversary in Paris in 1992!
Voltaire
used to hang there. Michael is a very talkative, dynamic guy, typically wearing a jump-suit with a zillion zippers. He has a shock of black hair and a long nose. Michael is the cameraman for
The Manual of Evasion
. For lunch I was served a Portuguese mixed meat plate with part of a pig’s leg, some blood sausage, some lard sausage, some beans, pot-roast, potatoes, cabbage and, lo and behold, a pig’s ear. We had red, white, and “green” wine, this being a tart slightly effervescent white wine.

After lunch we went to shoot film in a winery. The idea was that this is where the Xaman, the Neuro-Magician, and the Master of Xaos were meeting the Saboteurs. I got in a couple of good raps about transrealism and the Central Teachings of Mysticism. For a long time we sat at a huge picnic table covered with wine-bottles, some open, sitting there, and pretending to be getting drunk. It was up to us how much we actually drank, and when they needed to reshoot a scene, they’d empty out our glasses into a pitcher so that the actresses could refill them. It was weird to have an infinite amount of wine in front of me—a moment I’ll remember during thirsty times. I kind of held back on the drinking lest I do something stupid. The actresses were a fat lively blonde woman named Suzy, and a cute actress called Ana, who was also acting in a Pirandello play.

Terence was quite funny, saying things like, “Gentlemen, the question on the floor is
What is Reality?
,” and then going into all sorts of raps about time-machines. He has this idea that logically we can’t see a time-machine before one is invented (because as soon as we see a time-machine, then we can copy it and invent one). So as soon as the first time-machine
is
invented (which will happen, according to Terence, in 2012), then time-machines from all down the future will show up, and the arrival of all this novelty at once will cause some kind of information explosion. It’s fun to hear him talk about time-machines with that same wild, unschooled excitement that I had about them as a teenager.

The river had gotten rough, so we drove back to the hotel instead of taking the boat. When we got back, my suitcase was finally there! I took a shower and changed my shirt three times in a row. My four-day underwear could have been cut into squares and sold to dysmenorrheic women needing hormone therapy. I had dinner alone in the hotel dining-room, sitting at a table near the kitchen. I had a great fish soup, and feeling casual in the European ambience just said, “Can I have another?” and they brought me another, and then a shrimp and endive salad, and then a nutcake of ground hazel-nuts. A perfect meal.

In bed I turned on the TV, and saw a Portuguese news-story about how six people on a yacht had drowned in the Rio Teje today!

January 11, 1994. The observatory. “Time flies.”

The next morning Catarina drove Bob, Terence, and me to an astronomical observatory for the day’s shooting. Bob was in a foul, sulky mood.

The observatory was a lovely pastel yellow classic mansion sitting in a small botanical garden in the misty rain. The Portuguese used to have lots of colonies: Goa in India, Angola and Mozambique in Africa, Brazil in south America, the Cape Verde islands in the Pacific, and the island of Timor near Indonesia. They have the same latitude as San Francisco, so exotic plants from the former colonies can flourish in their botanical gardens. Terence is something of a botanist due to his researches into psychedelic plants, and he told me that one of the big trees was a dragon’s-blood tree from the mid-East. Its red sap is used for incense.

Walking out alone into the rainy garden later in the day, I thought of the phrase from Sartre’s
La Nausée
which I quote in my
The Secret of Life
: “I went into the garden and the garden smiled at me.”

On this day’s shooting there were three actresses and two actors as well as Terence, Bob and me. The funniest actor was called Duarte Barrilaro Ruas; he looked like Bela Lugosi with slicked back hair, lab-coat, and a pasted-on goatee. He had a huge mouth, and liked to do crazy laughs.

For filming us they were making us go up on a creaking lacquered-wood ladder—like a library bookcase ladder—to get near the eyepiece of this huge telescope, a telescope with a big lens at one end and a little lens at the other end, the traditional idea of a telescope in other words, and not some newfangled thing with a mirror. The place was trippy and rundown but still actually functioning. The telescope was in a giant cylindrical room with the traditional penislike slit-silo-dome on top. A rotating slit. There was a balcony/catwalk all around the edge up high, with windows looking out on this part of Lisboa.

An actress called Margarida Marinho had lunch at a table with Edgar, Bob and me. She was such a funny actress; I’d been watching her pretending to be an astronomer adjusting a telescope during the morning’s shooting. It really taught me something about acting to watch her seemingly endless free flow of improvisations of gesture; different ways of twiddling the dials, looking surprised, moving about, and so on. We were doing shots with us standing on a kind of ladder next to a huge brass telescope.

After lunch one of the guys ran up to me with this ice-cream-cone shaped cigarette and said, “Rudy, would you like some psychedelic? This is tobacco with hashish.” And we all smoked some of that and the afternoon got funnier. Bob Wilson cheered up a bit, but then was cranky again, and when I said enthusiastically, “We’re going up on the wobbly observing ladder to be filmed again,” he said, “I don’t like to see sadism in a man,” and I said, after a minute or two of it sinking in, “I didn’t mean to sound sadistic, I was just trying be cheerful,” and then Terence chimed in, “I hate to think of all the atrocities that have been committed under the name of trying to be cheerful.” Well that moment was bum, but much else was wavy during this stony afternoon.

A simulated swarm of gnats.

I noticed that rain leaked in through the windows on the high room circling balcony, and that there was crumbled off window-glazing on the sills, and there were lots of little flies there, breeding in the water or something, funny little baby Portuguese flies, and I got into this rap, rehearsing it to whoever would listen, that the insects were
timeflies
, which relates, you wave, to Zeno’s Second Paradox of Motion: “Time flies like an arrow, but at each instant there is no time, so how does the arrow move?” And relates further to the classic automatic language translation program which translated “Time flies like an arrow,” into Russian and back into English, yielding: “Insects which live on sundials enjoy eating arrows.” And, most weightless fact of all, the arrow which the timeflies enjoy eating is
Zeno’s
arrow!

In the milling around, I happened to walk up the stairs behind Durte and Juanne, a striking woman who turned out to be a professional model, aged 19. You could tell she was a model from the way she held herself, posing so perfectly. Before I’d grasped that she was a model, she’d just seemed kind of bland and skinny, but once I thought of her as a
model
, she seemed very attractive. She was wearing thick-soled sexy boots and tight leather pants, oh my. I filmed her a little with my own video camera. And then they filmed a big scene of me and Terence talking on the room-circling balcony, and Juanne was supposed to turn a big crank on the wall next to me as I talked, and I’d been flirting with her a little, and she said, “In the scene, I will bump you, yes?” And I said yes, so then she kept bumping me with her leather butt while I was talking—what thrills these sporadic contacts sent through me! I tried to
act
a little, and show reactions to the bumps. Finally in fact I pulled out my handkerchief and started polishing her bent leather butt—much to the filmed outrage of Terence who was just then holding forth to me about liberating oneself by pursuing the erotic element of life, and, noticing my polishing of Juanne’s butt, complained that I wasn’t listening to him. Another of my favorite moments that didn’t appear in the film—ah, the heartbreak of being an actor.

My clowning was greatly to the amusement of a hip young guy called Daryl Pappas, moved to Portugal from L. A., who was taking publicity still photos for the film. When we finished shooting, he was hitting on Juanne. “Are you a virgin?” Juanne: “I’m saving myself for God.” Daryl: “Well, I’m him!” Juanne: “No, God has no head.” Heavy. Juanne’s way of showing heightened sexual interest was to chew her gum a bit faster.

Back at the hotel, I had a few drinks in the hotel bar with Bob. He cheers right up when he’s having drinks or drugs. It would be fun to write an SF story together sometime, he’s an incredible fount of knowledge with an idiosyncratic worldview. A little later, I had dinner at the hotel with Edgar, his wife Marguerite, Terence, Catarina, Bob, and Michael. I had dried fish appetizer (swordfish and lox), some duck breast in a delicious Madeira sauce, and a lot of drinks.

January 12, 1994. Around Lisbon, the Alfama.

I slept late, till 10:30, and woke feeling like shit. In the morning we went out to shoot on location in Lisbon. Terence was friendly and full of gossip about all the
Mondo 2000
people on the way over.

Our first shot was in a giant free-standing outdoor seven-story elevator that goes down a cliff into the shopping district, known as Beixa. I talked a lot to Carlos, he was explaining a headline I saw about a man named Xanana being arrested. What a cool first name. He’s a Portuguese-speaking resident of East Timor who is leading a rebellion against the Indonesian government, who took Timor over about seventeen years ago. The Portuguese are on the side of the rebels, but according to Carlos the U.S. has been on the side of the Indonesian oppressors. Then we walked down the Beixa main street to the dock where the ships used to arrive, the caravals. According to Terence, the king’s men would be right there to take the valuables from the ships as they landed.