Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

But where Boileau and Narcejac or Hitchcock and his screenwriters might have borrowed certain images, atmosphere, even plot points from Hoffmann, the deformities they introduce into that same narrative present us with some interesting questions: as the protagonist of “The Sandman,” it seems natural to align Nathanael with Scottie, the protagonist of Vertigo . And Scottie is there with Judy in the tower; whether he intends to destroy Judy or not — psychologically, physically — he does destroy her. Nathanael, though innocently, we would say, out of madness, definitely intends to destroy Klara, but she is saved. It is as though Vertigo is a mirror image of “The Sandman” in this, most important scene. The differences in these scenes make me think that in “The Sandman,” we have really only half of the story of Vertigo —the first half. Can it be that Elster, though seeming perfectly sane in the scene in his office and the scene at the inquest, has in fact — before the movie has even begun — been driven insane by the love for a woman who has not turned out to be, in some sense, real? Can it be that Nathanael is Elster rather than Scottie, and Scottie, in Vertigo , is only repeating what Elster has already gone through? Who else but a madman could contrive the atavistic story of Carlotta Valdes and Madeleine Elster? Who else but a madman would waylay a salesgirl and force her to play his wife playing a dead woman? Who else but a madman would ruin another man’s life by tricking him into playing witness to a death that isn’t a death, just to cover up a murder that no one has yet suspected has occurred, and which no one seems to care much about after it has been discovered? Who else but a madman could lie in wait in a church tower with the stinking corpse of his wife next to him, waiting for a woman he has hired to play this dead woman to come up through the trapdoor and scream at the grisly sight before tossing his wife’s corpse carelessly from the tower, having apparently given no thought to whether someone might then come up to the top of the tower to see if there is someone there, someone who might have pushed the woman over the edge? Scottie is the madman who succeeds in destroying the object of his love; he cannot be Nathanael. Nathanael succeeds only in destroying himself; he watches another man destroy his love. Elster, it would seem, murders his wife, but she is not after all his love. (Is she? How could he have any affection for a corpse?) Up in the tower at San Juan Bautista, he destroys his past life.

In D’Entre les Morts , the parallels are clearer. After the tower, the Elster character is broken. The Scottie character refuses to act as a witness, and Gévigne (Elster) is haunted by charges that he has murdered his wife (which, of course, he has). He loses his fortune and is killed in the war. This, we would say, is nothing more than what he has deserved. Indeed, it is difficult to understand why, especially under the Hays Code, Hitchcock and his screenwriters would have let Elster off so completely. He suffers no repercussions from the murder of his wife, none at all. If the inquest is the last word on these matters, he inherits her fortune and goes off to live in a foreign country, unbothered by allegations or suspicions, perhaps out of the way of extradition even. He has committed the perfect murder, gotten away with it. But does anyone ever truly “get away with it”? Can there really be someone out there so completely without conscience, for whom the killing, the erasing, of another human being has no effect? Psychopaths can become more psychopathic, can’t they?; if we don’t completely understand their psychology, that doesn’t mean they don’t have one.

…

In his book Invisible Cities , Italo Calvino describes the city of Zobeide: “the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein.” Zobeide, he tells us, was founded by men who had shared a dream of a woman, naked, running through the moonlight in the streets of an inscrutable city. When these men came together, it was decided that the city of the dream should be built. It is unclear to me whether they believed that building the city would draw this mysterious woman from their dreams like baking soda draws the poison from an insect’s sting or if they believed that they were simply creating a situation in which the possibility of their dream coming true was somewhat less improbable (or, for that matter, whether they felt they were carrying out some dream directive or if they were all similarly mad). Whatever their reasons for building it, each arranged for this city’s streets to dead-end where they had lost sight of this woman in their dream. When new men arrived, having also suffered this dream, they changed the city’s plan to accord more closely with their own dreams’ endings, where each had lost sight of the woman. What Calvino doesn’t tell us is that, in doing so, numerous pockets of the city, inaccessible to anyone but those who found themselves there while the new citizens were executing their own dream engineering, were then closed off, creating tiny pockets of city in which one might find that the only passage out had suddenly been blocked, creating, at a stroke, completely private courtyards, so private as to not allow entrance or exit — prison cells, in other words. Inevitably, awaiting the dream-woman’s arrival, the founders of Zobeide laid in wait in these pockets of city, ahead of their dream-selves, waiting for the woman to be driven toward them. When other seekers came along, the founders found only themselves trapped, stuck behind walls too high and too smooth to scale, in front of doors opening into buildings now without egress, their lives even more circumscribed than the ones they had planned for their dream-woman.

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A single woman contains, for the man who loves her, the souls of all other women.

(Villiers, Tomorrow’s Eve )

…

She first saw him on our way to lunch. I thought she would say something, but she just looked surprised, surprised and angry. She stopped in the middle of crossing the street, still in the crosswalk. This was how I knew she had seen him — in that instant she turned to face me, slowly, cautiously, as though the man were a poisonous snake and the moment she took her eyes off him he would strike. When the light changed and the cab in front of us honked, we had no choice but to continue crossing the street to where he was still standing. But when we reached the sidewalk, my wife slowed until she was well behind me and gave me a look meant to pierce my obliviousness, a look of displeasure that would have taken real effort to ignore. Why did we have to keep going around in circles, looking for this place where I had said we should get lunch? Why couldn’t we stop wandering and just eat somewhere? She didn’t care where we ate, she didn’t care about the historical significance or the restaurant’s Yelp scores or what it served or how well it served it, she just wanted to stop. She just wanted to sit down and to eat. She was going to go into this place (it was an Indian place with a huge buffet) and I could come with her or I could go on without her.

I was worried she would spring onto the curb and attack him. Instead, she glared at me and then went into the restaurant without saying anything. Inside, we picked at food we didn’t really want and made a point of not speaking to each other. She had chosen a table far away from the window. I really can’t remember what I ate or whether it was good.

…

Thinking back now, my memory puts her where she hadn’t been. She was asleep, in the hotel room, blocks away, but I can also see her there, with me, on the street. Which memory was the unreliable one?

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