Straight Cut (9 page)

Mimmo and I looked at each other across that butcher-block table where we’d been sitting.

“You seem like a sane person,” I said. “What do you want out of your life in this world?”

“I want to make film,” Mimmo said.

“You want to learn to edit?”

“Yes, very much.”

“Good. I can teach you to edit. You will learn how to edit. All I want is for you to do what I ask you to do.”

“Yes, of course.”

“So. Can you find me a screwdriver?”

And Mimmo, with the cooperative spirit which he would consistently display for the next several weeks, did in fact find me a screwdriver. I put the plug back on the Steenbeck. And then we could get to work.

It turned out, not much to my surprise, that we couldn’t get a work print processed until the next week. Mimmo, bless him, handled the details of that. I spent one day fooling around with mag stock after the film went out. I was thinking of logging it, but that was hopeless, pointless rather. The original crew had made a merry mess of everything. There were no slates on the sound, though part of it had been recorded with a cable connection to the camera, so there were bloops I could sync up to when the film came back from the lab. On the other hand, a roughly equal part had been recorded with crystal, and for those segments there weren’t even any bloops.

Now I knew why they needed an editor who spoke English. I was going to have to sync up half the rushes by lip reading.

Then there was the problem of the sound picture ratio. There was about ten times as much of the one as the other, or so it seemed to me from a glance at the film before it went out. I asked Mimmo to take up this matter with Dario, since I did not completely trust my own temper yet. What emerged from between the lines of Mimmo’s report was the probability that Dario had directed the shoot in name only. The cameraman had run loose and ignored the sound man, who had thus been forced to run miles of tape in order to be sure of covering every shot. After that, I suppose, the sound man would have gone into hiding, lest anyone should call upon him to straighten it all out.
All
of the quarter-inch tape had been transferred to sixteen-millimeter mag. I inherited the little chore of reducing it by a factor of ten before anything which could properly be called editing could begin. I estimated that it would take about two weeks, provided I could teach Mimmoto do some of it for me, to sync everything up. Well, it was their money.

Another strong probability was that Kevin had somehow messed in the nest again, letting a shoot as sloppy as this one go down. The price he’d put on my job didn’t seem so outlandish anymore. “The rough cut’s a little rough.” No kidding.

I bugged out of the QED studio for the remainder of the weekend and turned myself into a tourist. I went to the Colosseum and the Pantheon. I wandered through any number of splendid churches. I took the shortest, most manageable tour of the Vatican collection. And once I was saturated, drenched, with culture and art, I simply walked. I would cross one of the bridges from Trastevere, follow the curve of the river for a gentle shady mile, then double back and find my way home through the twisted streets on the western side. It was a tolerable exercise in geography and map reading and it killed time and tired me out enough to sleep.

I worked over my phrase book some, until I was speaking fairly effective pidgin again. Good enough so I could shop for food to cook in my borrowed or stolen Trasteverepad. And it was a pleasure to cook with fresh pasta, top-grade olive oil, the odd pear-shaped local tomatoes, the variety of available cheeses. A few meals I ate out, favoring the Trastevere restaurants, which were cheaper and less touristy, and finally settling on my own corner
trattoria
as the regular stop.

I let my weekend stretch until Thursday, the day Mimmo thought the work print would probably come in, and I kept clear of QED for the whole time. If I went there with nothing to work on I was afraid I might get irritated again at something or other. So I stayed away. I was exercising and eating well and I was on a fairly strict ice tea diet, except for that windfall bottle of vodka. I rationed that out to myself in small measures, since I’d decided not to get another one. Under the circumstances of my solitude and idleness I didn’t want to risk a binge. If my throat itched for an extra drink I’d read a little Kierkegaard.

The vodka ran out on Tuesday and by Wednesday I was beginning to look for loopholes in my austerity program. In the early evening I went to the
trattoria
for an early supper and mainly to get out of the house, and there I remembered about grappa. There’s no language difficulty about ordering grappa. You just say “grappa” and the man brings you some, in this case a sizable portion for the equivalent of about thirty U.S. cents. It’s not vodka, and it’s surely not bourbon, but it’s easy to get and not at all bad.

And it was the grappa, the seeds-and-stems burning taste of it, that made me think of the Trevi Fountain, which I’d somehow missed out of my tourist stops. So I left it at the one glass and walked there. It was a long walk and I made it a brisk one and by the time I got there the drink had almost completely worn off.

The sun was going down and it was almost completely gone from the closed piazza which frames the fountain. A single shaft of fading sunlight fell on one of the horses that plunge out of the portico over the falling water. A busload of German tourists stood gabbling around the fountain and I waited until they organized themselves and left for their next stop. Then I went down the stairs and stood at the lip of the basin.

That bar of sunlight twisted farther down, piercing the surface of the pool, and I looked down after it, seeing the flat stones under the water, where all the money lay. I was wondering if my own coins might still be there too. The sun dropped away behind the buildings altogether and it was darker and seemed a little colder at the Trevi Fountain. My trick elbow had begun to throb a bit, as it sometimes does at a change in the weather or a circumstance of stress or an abrupt renascence of memory. It had not been so long ago, not really. But I felt as though I were now standing on the far side of a wall dividing me from my green youth and particularly from another day when I had thrown money into this fountain, to guarantee, according to the old superstition, that I would eventually return to the city of Rome. I had wanted very badly to come back, that day, and I had thrown in several of the nearly worthless coins and even a
gettone
as well. If my memory was accurate, Lauren had done it too.

I
SAT ON THE BED
in the apartment, under the lighted lamp. On the street outside it was completely dark. I had fallen into the habit of leaving the door open when I was home, as I had little to protect. Outside: the rare buzz of a car or Vespa, sequences of footfalls approaching and retreating, snatches of conversation which I could not understand — the foreign night in its senseless and devouring generality. Within: the infrequent tick of plaster dropping from the walls, dust gathering secretly on every surface, myself hemmed into a circle of lamplight which I believed could show me nothing. A book was open on my knees, but I had no will to turn the page.

“My soul is like the Dead Sea, over which no bird can fly,” Kierkegaard writes in one of his more desperately deluded personae. “When it has flown midway, then it sinks down to death and destruction.”

There is a lesion between hope and recollection, into which my spirit had slipped, void of intention or desire. My memory was a useless pain, my future a null sign, white nothingness. Could I have willed myself to death without effort I would probably have done so, but I lacked the energy even to lift my hand. In another place and voice Kierkegaard says that it is better to choose despair than to choose nothing. But for the despairing it can be hard to tell the difference, and the despairing more often feel they have been chosen by their state.

I understood that my condition was useless, pointless, and without genuine cause. Only a couple of hours before I had been, if not precisely happy, at least functional, and I knew well enough that in the fullness of time I would be so again, though perversely enough this knowledge was hateful to me now. And how much time? For now each moment had become a miniature eternity of hell, its passage slow indeed.

I was capable of nothing, could move in no direction; even breathing had become a tiresome task. It was pointless even to drink, as I knew from past experience, as I remembered. The best I had to cling to was an obligation. In the morning I would go to the QED studio and cut film; that was my duty.

But I could either go or not go, what would be the difference?

There seemed, distinctly, to be some reason for me to go rather than not go. What was it?

In one way or another I had again become a part of one or another of Kevin’s schemes. And I was interested. I wanted to find out what the scheme was and how I figured in it. A rather thin reason for being, perhaps, but it was sufficient to its season.

Now that everything is over, now that my memory and my hope have been in some sense conjoined, I remember almost everything, but I do not remember this black mood. I recall that it happened, of course, but I cannot summon the sensation of it, not that I wish to. When it comes it will come of itself and I trust that I will again survive it, though it will not be Kevin nor any thought of him which gets me out of it next time. But I must give credit where it is due. I owe Kevin the motive that got me off the bed, sleepless or not, wretched or not, and inspired me to work and live through the days that followed. It was neither my love nor my hate that he engaged on this occasion, only my curiosity. But curiosity is itself a form of hope.

Mimmo, poor boy, must have thought that I was mad at everyone again. By the time I arrived at QED on Thursday I was in somewhat better shape than I’d been in the night before. I’d even slept a little, sitting up. I could walk, but I couldn’t make conversation yet. It must have seemed fairly grim, and none of it was Mimmo’s fault at all. He’d taken delivery of the work print as promised, and somehow managed to make sure that Dario and the others were not around. I knew it was unfair to be mean to him, but I was still too twisted to make nice.

So I didn’t try to make nice, didn’t even say a word. I walked in, shut down the room light, and threaded the first roll of film on the Steenbeck. Mimmo perched on the edge of a chair next to the flatbed, intent, waiting for me to say something, anything. I watched three, four, five rolls of the film, at speed. Finally my poisoned humor began to disperse, replacing itself with ordinary professional irritation. I began to curse and take the name of the Lord in vain.

“What?” Mimmo said. “I don’t understand?”

“Your first lesson,” I said. “American swear words. They’re very important for editing film.”

Mimmo laughed, relieved. And after a moment I found that I was laughing too. And now that I had found my tongue again, I began to explain things.

I explained to Mimmo the whole problem of the sync-up, and told him that what I had been doing for the past several hours was looking for a clue, some vestige of a relationship between the picture and the sound. I hadn’t found one yet. But I had found plenty of other things, most of which fell into the category of bad news.

The footage I’d watched was an uneven mix of interviews, shots of what appeared to be rather violent encounter groups of some kind, and scene-setting panoramas and traveling shots with no people in them. There were a lot of locations, and without the sound it was difficult to tell which ones were which. Already there was a problem here, though of rather an abstract nature: not enough action. What I was likely to end up with was a talking-heads documentary. But that wasn’t really my problem. You work with what you’ve got.

From the standpoint of movement, composition, and so forth, a lot of the camera work was pretty good. Some of it I could even admire, if a little grudgingly. Some of it I thought was dreadful.

Scratches, tramlines, and other damage resulting from the mishandling of the original negative seemed to add up to less than I’d feared it might. But there was plenty of other technical trouble.

For instance, screen direction. It was worst with the encounter-group shots. The groups, evidently, had taken place in circles, and the cameraman had wandered around and around these circles like the hands on a clock, completely disregarding the famous imaginary line. Which meant, as I explained to Mimmo, that the close-ups and cutaways were not going to make a great deal of sense. People who are addressing each other would appear to be facing in opposite directions. And so on. A trying situation for the editors, namely him and me.

Then there was the matter of light. Generally speaking there was not enough of it. Film density was poor throughout much of the footage.

Here Mimmo interrupted with an explanation of his own. Dario and his cameraman, who turned out to be the frizzy-headed fellow I’d watched cheerfully ripping his own film to shreds the day I arrived, were both devoted to the concept of “available light.” Ah, yes. Mimmo began to elucidate the precedents, but I was already familiar enough with those.

In theory the concept is pleasing, I suggested to Mimmo, but if there is not enough light available to make a legible image on the film, it is better to depart from the theory and add some. Which in some cases the camera crew actually seemed to have done. In other cases, not.

A faster film might have been advisable, Ï pointed out: 7247 is a very good stock, but slow. Quite slow. Too slow altogether for the sort of light you are apt to find available for your use in dimly lit institutional buildings, night streets, and the like.

Which brought up the point that some of the footage from these darker locations really looked a lot better than circumstances suggested to me that it should. I shut off the flatbed for a moment and inspected some of the original boxes. These boxes had notes on them that said things like “Chemtone push 3
”
and “Chemtone push 4.” It looked like Kevin’s handwriting, too. Which indicated a couple of things. Kevin had been on some of the locations. And he had done something right while he was there.