The Seducer

Tabula Rasa

And so you see, he just had to talk to somebody, he said, almost apologetically and almost bursting with eagerness, enthusiasm, agitation, as he caught up with Jonas on the steps leading down to the street. What did Jonas say? Please? Did he have a minute?

Jonas explained, by dint of a couple of well-rehearsed phrases, that he did not speak the language, that he simply happened — and here he hesitated as always — to be Norwegian, sorry, whereupon the stranger grabbed hold of his arm and resolutely stayed him, looking extremely agitated. Noruego? Noruego! The other man simply stood there repeating the name as if he had found the very password to the secrets of the universe and could not believe his luck.

‘But she is also Norwegian,’ the man said, switching to English.

‘Who?’

‘Liv Ullman.’

The stranger pronounced her name with reverence and an astonishingly accurate Norwegian ‘u’. Although he could not have said why — Liv Ullman meant nothing to him one way or the other — Jonas was glad the man had not taken him for Swedish.

‘We have to talk,’ the man said. ‘I knew it the minute I laid eyes on you. Your shoes.’ He was of an age with Jonas, dark, his eyebrows almost joining in the middle.

‘It’s late,’ Jonas said. It was getting on for ten o’clock.

‘Late? The day’s only just beginning,’ the man said. ‘Let’s walk.’

The stranger took Jonas by the arm and they set off down the street. Jonas had only the vaguest idea of where he was. They came past a café, a tobacconist’s, several shops selling leather jackets, a small square planted with leafy trees, giving way to a row of houses. The door of one stood open, and they caught a glimpse of a long passageway, its floor inlaid with a labyrinthine mosaic, a couple of chairs, a few pot-plants and a vase of flowers, barely discernible in the dim light as roses.

The man said his name was Eduardo, he asked what Jonas did for a living. Jonas said that he was studying astronomy, mainly in order to give some solid answer, he couldn’t really have said what he was doing right then. The man laughed. ‘And now you’ve switched to film stars?’ he said. ‘You must be very proud of her.’

‘Of whom?’

‘Liv Ullman.’

That name again. Had Jonas seen her as Nora? Eduardo wanted to know. Or as Rebecca West? What was she doing these days? In his excitement Eduardo stumbled over the English words.

Jonas had to admit that he did not know that much about her. Eduardo was flabbergasted, stopped dead, gesticulated frantically, lost for words.

‘You’ll have to excuse me, I’m on my way to the Avenida de Mayo,’ Jonas said. ‘I need to see it one last time before I leave.’

Eduardo shrugged this off. ‘There’s no hurry, surely. This is more important.’ He seemed almost angry, his brows drew together into one long black line, he towed Jonas along in his wake, started talking about the cinema, animatedly, about Liv Ullman, how great she was, that there was no one to touch Ullman in close-up, the greatest since Garbo. They came past a café, a tobacconist’s, several shops selling leather jackets, a small square planted with leafy trees, giving way to a row of houses. The door of one stood open and they caught a glimpse of a long passageway, its floor inlaid with a labyrinthine mosaic, a couple of chairs, some pot-plants and an old mirror, black and mysterious in the dim light.

‘And her lips,’ said Eduardo. ‘Have you seen her lips?’ He stopped, took Jonas by the shoulders, almost shaking him. ‘Even Sophia Loren doesn’t have lips like that. By God, Liv Ullman puts a whole world of emotion into her lips alone.’

Jonas had been in a funny mood all day. It still got to him every time, the way his uncertainty grew in big cities, not only as to what he should do with his life but as to who he was. When he walked along the broad avenues or through the busy streets with the hum of a foreign language in his ears, he felt as if his very identity were being brought into question or was disintegrating. He was everyone and no one. Among the crowds on the calle Florida it struck him that he could pass himself off as anyone at all: an idea that he both liked and disliked. In any case there was something about this city, more than any other city, possibly because of its air of being a copy of all other cities, or a copy of a copy, a sort of concrete denial of the possibility of original thought, that imbued him with a strong sense of loneliness or emptiness. It was this that had prompted him, an hour or so before he bumped into Eduardo, to grab a taxi, wanting to get a little further away from the most frequented parts of town. They were somewhere near the top of the calle Sarmiento — although Jonas did not know that: to him, every quarter looked like all the rest — when, out of the corner of his eye, the way you can spot a car coming from another direction even when you are looking straight ahead, he suddenly caught sight of something familiar and asked the driver to stop. Acting on impulse, as they say. He paid the fare and watched the car drive off. It was a while before it dawned on him what it was that had made him stop. On a wall behind which, as it turned out, hid the Cinemateca Hebraica, hung a portrait of Liv Ullman. Jonas had actually been pulled up short, in the middle of a strange city, by the face of the Norwegian actress, as if he had caught sight of someone he knew, a casual acquaintance or distant relative.

And now we come to something which may be hard to understand but which nonetheless can be said of a great many Norwegians: Jonas Wergeland had never seen Liv Ullman, neither in the cinema nor on stage. To him Liv Ullman was just a name from magazines and newspapers, a face out there on the ether; something negative almost, something epitomizing a certain tristesse, intense films involving a lot of staring into space and great dollops of pathos.

And so it was that Jonas Wergeland, possibly in a fit of shame or curiosity, first saw a film starring Liv Ullman in this foreign cosmopolis, in a cinematheque far up the calle Sarmiento, a packed cinematheque at that, in a brown-panelled auditorium with mouldering seats and wall-mounted fans that almost drowned out the soundtrack. It was not any old film, either; it was Ingrid Bergman’s Persona, one of the highpoints of cinematic history, I would say, if forced to state my preferences, and a film which was to have a great effect on the people involved, inasmuch as it changed Liv Ullman’s life and, according to the director himself, saved his life, no more nor less. And even if Jonas could not follow everything that was going on — or, to be honest, not much at all — in this remarkable black-and-white film, partly because he had missed the first few minutes, which do give some idea of what has gone before, he was left with a distinct impression of having been confronted with a wordless secret, and that Liv Ullman was not, most definitely was not, what he had been led to believe by all the rumours, allegations and clichés that he had picked up during his boyhood and youth in Norway.

‘Have you visited Eva Peron’s grave?’ Eduardo asked.

‘No, but I want to go to the Avenida de Mayo,’ said Jonas. He scanned his surroundings as if trying to get a fix on something, while they strolled along street after street. They came past a café, a tobacconist’s, several shops selling leather jackets, a small square planted with leafy trees, giving way to a row of houses. The door to one stood open and they caught a glimpse of a long passageway, its floor inlaid with a labyrinthine mosaic, a couple of chairs, what might have been an old encyclopaedia, a suggestion of scuffed silver in the dim light.

‘Relax, I’ll take you there,’ said Eduardo. ‘Evita was a film star, too, you know.’

‘I don’t think Liv Ullmann has all that much in common with Evita.’

‘Why not? They have the same charisma. Do you think Liv Ullman could ever become president of Norway?’

‘We have a monarchy.’

‘Well, queen then?’

Jonas could not help but like the man, like this eager, almost childlike admiration of a Norwegian, as if some of this reverence rubbed off on himself, making him less lonely, less melancholy, less lacking in identity — he was also happy to discover that here, too, on the other side of the ocean, people roamed the streets, that here, too, people were apparently willing to wander all night long, wander and discuss things. Jonas had a vision of a secret brotherhood, urban nomads, caravans crossing all the cities in the world.

Eduardo wanted to talk about the film. Jonas said he had no idea what it was all about. Eduardo launched into a long explanation, he had seen the film four times already, discovering new things in it each time, not least about Elisabeth Vogler, the woman played by Liv Ullman: an actress who had turned her back on the world and chosen the stratagem of silence. The way Eduardo saw it, the question as to why Madame Vogler stops speaking was as relevant as the question as to why Hamlet hesitates. Jonas’s interest was aroused, he asked the odd little question, Eduardo replied, pondered, casting invocations and theories at stars they could not see because of the street lamps. ‘Did you notice the scene when she is lying in the hospital bed, listening to Bach while the light slowly fades? How her face fills the whole screen, straight on?’ Jonas vaguely remembered it. ‘God, what a scene, with the lines gradually being blotted out and then, just before it goes totally dark, she turns her face upwards and we see it in profile. Jesus and Mary, it was so beautiful, so open, so rich in possibilities, I just can’t get it out of my head. The graininess of the picture, grey like a boulder. Or as if her face were slowly turning into a landscape. I’ve been thinking of doing a sculpture that would convey something similar. Oh yes, I’m a sculptor. I’d like to create something that resembled Liv Ullman’s face. Only the great Brancusi has ever come close, with that head that looks like an egg — the closest you can get to a tabula rasa.’ They came past a café, a tobacconist’s, several shops selling leather jackets, a little square planted with leafy trees, giving way to a row of houses. The door of one stood open and they caught a glimpse of a long passageway, its floor inlaid with a labyrinthine mosaic, a couple of chairs, some pot-plants and a little table on which lay a large coin, a glimmer of gold in the dim light.

‘Are there any statues of Liv Ullman in Norway?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Jonas said.

Eduardo was shocked. He asked if there was a plaque on the wall of her childhood home in Trondheim. Again Jonas did not think so. Eduardo shook his head. What sort of a country was Norway? How many Norwegian actors had been nominated for an Oscar? How many Norwegians had made the front cover of Time magazine? He took Jonas’s arm, dragged him into a café and there, in that café with its pale-green walls and lurid glaring light, over a cup of coffee, while everyone else in the room was staring at the television set high up in the corner, Eduardo proceed to reel off facts about Liv Ullman. Did Jonas know that when she was a little girl she could do handstands on the handlebars of her bike? That her great-grandfather was called Viggo, her sister Bitten, her nanny Karen, her press secretary Emily? That her mother had worked in a bookshop? That as a young girl Liv had painted? That she had studied with Irene Brent in London and that for her audition at the College of Drama in Oslo she had played both Julia and Ophelia, but had not been accepted? ‘It really is quite shocking! Doesn’t it make you feel embarrassed for Norway?” Again Eduardo’s dark eyebrows drew into a straight line, he eyed Jonas accusingly before plunging into even more facts about Liv Ullman, from the name of her first husband and that of the dog she had had at that time, to her penchant for freshly-squeezed orange juice. Jonas was amazed. Here, in a café in Buenos Aires, was a man who knew a hundred times more about Liv Ullman than him, probably more than most Norwegians; he was even familiar with a Norwegian film as pathetic as Fjols til fjells. And most surprising of all, Jonas could tell, the plethora of biographical information notwithstanding, that the other man’s main interest was in Liv Ullman the actress, in her art — ‘her greatness’ — on stage and screen.

Eduardo eventually left the subject of Liv Ullman behind when they resumed their stroll, striding through streets running at right angles, their corners all looking alike. He talked about himself, about his own frustrations. He was not sure what he wanted to be, who he was, he felt lonesome, depressed; he was everyone and no one. ‘I bet you we could swap jobs,’ he said. ‘You could be a sculptor and I an astronomer.’ They wandered through the city; Jonas noted that they were walking in step, taking the same length of stride. They passed a darkened shop window containing a display of hats. They both halted, almost spontaneously, and stood there studying their reflection. They were the same height, same build, both were wearing white cotton shirts, buttoned to the neck. Jonas was standing slightly behind, for an instant he saw them merge into one person.

They continued their walk; they must have walked for miles — if they had not been going in circles, that is. Jonas suddenly found himself wishing that they could go on like that all night, noticed that he was unconsciously slipping Spanish phrases into his remarks; Eduardo began to introduce the odd Scandinavian word, expressions he must have picked up from the film: ‘Nej, låt bli!’, that sort of thing. More than once he murmured ‘Ingenting, ingenting, ingenting’ — ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing.’— looking at Jonas and smiling. They came past a café, a tobacconist’s, several shops selling leather jackets, a little square planted with leafy trees, giving way to a row of houses. The door of one stood open and they caught a glimpse of a long passageway, its floor inlaid with a labyrinthine mosaic, a couple of chairs, some pot-plants and a niche containing a figurine of an animal, possibly a tiger, dreamlike in the dim light.

Just as Jonas was thinking that they must be well and truly lost or that they must be right out on the outskirts of the city, suddenly there they were, in the middle of the Avenida de Mayo where, earlier in the week, he had stumbled about with his eyes out on stalks, hardly able to believe what he was seeing, his head tilted back to take in the staggering conglomeration of buildings of every style, a street which — for the benefit of anyone who did not know this already — was to change his life, moving him to drop astronomy for architecture, a magical street embodying the streets of all the great metropolises.

Eduardo flung out an arm disdainfully. ‘I’d give you all of this, to have the chance, just once, of meeting Liv Ullman,’ he said. And then, the next moment, as he gazed pensively along the street: ‘Ingenting, ingenting, ingenting.’ ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing.’