A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

Ruth recognizes him and speaks his name, but Moses is still grappling with the fact that Juan de Viola, their host and the director of the film archive, is also an ordained priest.

“Films and the Church?”

“Why not? If painting and sculpture, music and poetry, choral performance and theater have been nurtured for centuries under the wing of the Catholic Church, why not include their younger sister, the seventh art? What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing wrong at all,” says Moses, “but it is odd that I was not warned in advance that my retrospective was organized by a religious institution.”

“Warned?” says the priest, flaring his robe with mild irritation. “And if you had been warned, you would not have honored us with your presence?”

“I would have come.”

“And why not? Especially,” says de Viola, “since the municipality and the government are partners with the institute and archive, which also receive contributions from private individuals. My mother, for one, who in her youth acted in silent films by Luis Buñuel, is a generous contributor. This is why the bishop has freed me from certain obligations, to enable me to join the administration of the institute and make sure that my family’s assets are squandered only on worthy causes.” He winks.

A friendly and unusual fellow, thinks Moses. On the third day, before we leave, perhaps I’ll make a small confession in his booth.

“And your mother,” says the director, leaning closer to the priest, enthralled by the notion of an ancient actress from the silent era, “your mother also lives here in Santiago?”

No, his mother lives in Madrid. She is ninety-four, sharp of mind, though her body is infirm. She knows about the Moses retrospective and is one of its financial backers, and if she feels up to it, she will attend the prize ceremony on the third day. She is even familiar with a few of Moses’ films and believes in his future.

“My future?” Moses blushes. “At my age?”

“‘When the future is short,’” the son quotes his mother, “‘it becomes more concentrated and interesting.’”

They cross the big square on their way to the mayor. About thirty sanitation workers are staging a demonstration, banging pans and blowing whistles, lustily shouting rhythmic protests and waving red flags. Two bored policemen stroll calmly beside them, making sure the demonstrators do not overstep some invisible line apparently agreed upon. Yet every so often, the agreement gives way to rage, and one of the protesters bursts forth with his whistle. As the policemen casually approach him, he retreats with equal ease.

On the magnificent steps of the municipal palace, Moses realizes he left his hearing aids at the hotel. A simple courtesy call should not be a problem, provided he sits close enough to the mayor and tilts his head at a certain angle, but what if the chambermaid thinks they are used earplugs and tosses them into the wastebasket? For a moment he considers asking his hosts to wait a minute on the stairs while he runs to the hotel, but the actress, always sensitive to his anxieties, calms him. “I have brought them, though you seem fine without them.”

“Yes, my guardian angel,” says Moses shakily, “sometimes I can manage without them, but it’s better to have them with me.”

She removes the hearing aids from her bag and sneaks them into his hand, so as not to reveal his disability to strangers. But he no longer considers people who know his biography, and honor him with a three-day retrospective, to be strangers, and he sticks the devices in his ears in front of Pilar and the priest, noting with a touch of irony: “This way I can better hear the possibilities for my short but concentrated future.”

Good thing he has improved his hearing, for the mayor, Antonio Santos, a thickset man and as short as the priest, turns out to be amiable and curious, and to the joyful sounds of the sanitation protest, he shifts the routine courtesy call into a serious interview.

“I’ve read your bio,” he says in Spanish, waving the printout from the Internet with the blurry photo, “but I ask that you expand on it a bit.”

A surprising and flattering request, and though simultaneous translation by Pilar requires that he pause every few sentences, Moses expands a good deal, and looking over the great square of pilgrimage on this dazzling morning, he unspools his life story, the full director’s cut, outtakes and all.

He was born into an upstanding, educated Jerusalem family before the outbreak of the Second World War. After the establishment of the State of Israel, his father and mother both went to work for the state comptroller’s office, in which capacity they spent most of their time scrutinizing the faults and failings of the new government. At work, the mother outranked the father, who reported to her, and so at home, as compensation, she served and coddled him. Yair Moses was an only child, and he learned from his parents that every politician had a little back pocket filled with secrets worth investigating. His parents insisted that after his military service he pursue higher education that would enable him to follow in their footsteps and be useful to society. At first he studied economics and accounting, but then, breaking free of his parents, he switched to philosophy and history, and ultimately got a teaching job at an elite Jerusalem high school, the same one he had attended as a youth. He had no trouble controlling his students. If a teacher maintains a cool distance and occasionally erupts in spontaneous rage, students are careful not to defy him. In those days he still lived at home to save on rent, and his parents would pester him to go out at night to get free of his dependence on them. But as an only child, accustomed to solitude, he didn’t tend to seek the company of others and often found himself wandering about Jerusalem or going to see a film alone, never thinking he might someday want to make motion pictures and certainly not believing he had the capacity to do so.

Then, after three or four years, there appeared in his eleventh-grade class an unusual student whose creative originality and aura of self-confidence deflated the standoffish pose of the teacher. This talented young man was from a small town in the south of Israel, formerly a transit camp for Jewish immigrants from North Africa. While still in elementary school, the boy had lost his father, and was sent to a vocational school in the hope he would find employment as an auto mechanic or factory worker and support his mother. But the power of his imagination and ideas prompted his teachers to put him on an academic track, and a modest scholarship was arranged so he could attend a first-rate school. It was under the influence of this student who happened to land in his class that the teacher of history and philosophy became a film director.

“A student?”

“Who later became my screenwriter.”

“This fellow…” murmurs the mayor, perusing the bio sheet, looking for the name.

“I don’t think you’ll find him there,” Moses quickly comments, “he was the writer in only my very first films.”

“The marvelous ones…” whispers the priest to himself.

“And perhaps may again be in the future,” graciously suggests the mayor.

“Perhaps…” softly repeats the actress, closely following the detailed story she knows so well and will soon be part of.

“In the future?” Moses chuckles. “But the future is so short and concentrated…”

“If a student turns a teacher of history and philosophy into a film director,” says de Viola, “it proves that students can revolutionize the lives of their teachers, not just the other way around.”

Of course, the director continues, but if the connection had existed only in the classroom, it’s doubtful even so special a student would have had such an influence. The student’s stipend was small and he had to work. He found a job as an usher and janitor at a local movie theater beloved by Jerusalemites for the caliber of its films and its location in a pleasant, formerly Arab neighborhood outside the shabby city center. In those days — because Ben-Gurion, the legendary prime minister, prohibited television broadcasting in the young country lest hard-working citizens waste precious sleeping time — people went often to the movies. Moses would usually go to a second show, and he’d bump into the usher on entering and leaving. It wasn’t right to give only a passing nod in the evening to a student so active and intelligent in the morning, and Moses was agreeable when the young man wished to hear the teacher’s impressions of the film just seen and, even more, to offer the teacher his own opinions.