LATER THAT WEEK, I buried her next to her parents in a Catholic cemetery twenty-five miles north of Tierra del Sueño. Alma had never mentioned any relatives to me, and since no Grunds or Morrisons turned up to claim her body, I covered the costs of the funeral myself. There were grim decisions to be made, grotesque choices that revolved around the relative merits of embalming and cremation, the durability of various woods, the price of caskets. Then, having opted for burial, further questions about clothing, shades of lipstick, fingernail polish, hair style. I don’t know how I managed to do those things, but I suspect that I went about them in the same way that everyone else does: half there and half not, half in my mind and half out. All I can remember is saying no to the idea of cremation. No more fires, I said, no more ashes. They had already cut her up to perform their autopsy, but I wasn’t going to let them burn her.
On the night of Alma’s suicide, I had called the sheriff’s office from my house in Vermont. A deputy named Victor Guzman had been sent out to the ranch to investigate, but even though he arrived there before six A.M., Juan and Conchita had already vanished. Alma and Frieda were both dead, the letter that had been faxed to me was still in the machine, but the little people had gone missing. When I left New Mexico five days later, Guzman and the other deputies were still looking for them.
Frieda’s remains were disposed of by her lawyer, according to the instructions of her will. The service was held in the arbor of the Blue Stone Ranch—just behind the main house, in Hector’s little forest of willows and aspens—but I made a point of not being there. I felt too much hatred for Frieda now, and the thought of going to that ceremony turned my stomach. I never met the lawyer, but Guzman had told him about me, and when he called my motel to invite me to Frieda’s funeral, I simply told him that I was busy. He rambled on for a few minutes after that, talking about poor Mrs. Spelling and poor Alma and how ghastly the whole thing had been, and then, in strictest confidence, barely pausing between sentences, he informed me that the estate was worth over nine million dollars. The ranch would be going up for sale once the will cleared probate, he said, and those proceeds, along with all monies acquired from the divestiture of Mrs. Spelling’s stocks and bonds, would be given to a nonprofit organization in New York City. Which one? I asked. The Museum of Modern Art, he said. The entire nine million was going to be put in an anonymous fund for the preservation of old films. Pretty strange, he said, don’t you think? No, I said, not strange. Cruel and sickening, maybe, but not strange. If you liked bad jokes, this one could keep you laughing for years.
I wanted to go back to the ranch one last time, but when I pulled up in front of the gate, I didn’t have the heart to drive through. I had been hoping to find some photographs of Alma, to look around the cottage for some odds and ends that I could take back to Vermont with me, but the police had put up one of those crime-scene barriers with the yellow tape, and I suddenly lost my nerve. No cop was standing there to block my way, and it wouldn’t have been any trouble to slip past the fence and enter the property—but I couldn’t, I couldn’t—and so I turned the car around and drove on. I spent my last hours in Albuquerque ordering a headstone for Alma’s grave. At first, I thought I would keep the inscription to the bare minimum: ALMA GRUND 1950–1988. But then, after I had signed the contract and paid the man for the work, I went back into the office and told him that I had changed my mind. I wanted to add another word, I said. The inscription should read: ALMA GRUND 1950–1988 WRITER. Except for the twenty-page suicide note she sent me on the last night of her life, I had never read a word she had written. But Alma had died because of a book, and justice demanded that she be remembered as the author of that book.
I went home. Nothing happened on the flight back to Boston. We ran into turbulence over the Midwest, I ate some chicken and drank a glass of wine, I looked out the window—but nothing happened. White clouds, silver wing, blue sky. Nothing.
The liquor cabinet was empty when I walked into my house, and it was too late to go out and buy a new bottle. I don’t know if that’s what saved me, but I had forgotten that I’d finished off the tequila on my last night there, and with no hope of obliteration within thirty miles of boarded-up West T——, I had to go to bed sober. In the morning, I drank two cups of coffee and went back to work. I had been planning to fall apart, to slip into my old routine of hapless sorrow and alcoholic ruin, but in the light of that summer morning in Vermont, something in me resisted the urge to destroy myself. Chateaubriand was just coming to the end of his long meditation on the life of Napoleon, and I rejoined him in the twenty-fourth book of the memoirs, on the island of Saint Helena with the deposed emperor. He had already been in exile for six years; he had needed less time to conquer Europe. He rarely left the house anymore and spent his days reading Ossian in Casarotti’s Italian translation … . When Bonaparte went out, he walked along rugged paths flanked by aloes and scented broom … or hid himself in the thick clouds that rolled along the ground … . At this moment in history, everything withers in a day; whoever lives too long dies alive. As we move through life, we leave behind three or four images of ourselves, each one different from the others; we see them through the fog of the past, like portraits of our different ages.
I wasn’t sure if I had tricked myself into believing that I was strong enough to go on working—or if I had simply gone numb. For the rest of the summer I felt as though I were living in a different dimension, awake to the things around me and yet removed from them at the same time, as if my body had been wrapped in transparent gauze. I put in long hours with the Chateaubriand, rising early and going to bed late, and I made steady progress as the weeks went on, gradually increasing my daily quota from three finished pages of the Pléiade edition to four. It looked like progress, it felt like progress, but that was also the period when I became prone to curious lapses of attention, fits of absentmindedness that seemed to dog me whenever I wandered from my desk. I forgot to pay the phone bill for three months in a row, ignored every threatening notice that arrived in the mail, and didn’t settle the account until a man appeared in my yard one day to disconnect the service. Two weeks later, on a shopping expedition to Brattleboro that included a visit to the post office and a visit to the bank, I managed to throw my wallet into the mailbox, thinking it was a pile of letters. These incidents confounded me, but not once did I stop to consider why they were happening. To ask that question would have meant getting down on my knees and opening the trap door under the rug, and I couldn’t afford to look into the darkness of that place. Most nights, after I had knocked off work and finished eating my dinner, I would sit up late in the kitchen, transcribing the notes I had taken at the screening of The Inner Life of Martin Frost.
I had known Alma for only eight days. For five of those days we had been apart, and when I calculated how much time we had spent together during the other three, it came to a grand total of fifty-four hours. Eighteen of those hours had been lost in sleep. Another seven had been squandered in separations of one kind or another: the six hours I spent alone in the cottage, the five or ten minutes I spent with Hector, the forty-one minutes I spent watching the film. That left a mere twenty-nine hours when I was actually able to see her and touch her, to enclose myself in the circle of her presence. We made love five times. We ate six meals together. I gave her one bath. Alma had walked in and out of my life so quickly, I sometimes felt that I had only imagined her. That was the worst part of facing her death. There weren’t enough things for me to remember, and so I kept going over the same ground again and again, kept adding up the same figures and arriving at the same paltry sums. Two cars, one jet plane, six glasses of tequila. Three beds in three houses on three different nights. Four telephone conversations. I was so befuddled, I didn’t know how to mourn her except by keeping myself alive. Months later, when I finished the translation and moved away from Vermont, I understood that Alma had done that for me. In eight short days, she had brought me back from the dead.
It doesn’t matter what happened to me after that. This is a book of fragments, a compilation of sorrows and half-remembered dreams, and in order to tell the story, I have to confine myself to the events of the story itself. I will simply say that I live in a large city now, somewhere between Boston and Washington, D.C., and that this is the first piece of writing I have attempted since The Silent World of Hector Mann. I taught for a while again, found other work that was more satisfying to me, then quit teaching for good. I should also say (for those who care about such things) that I no longer live alone.
It has been eleven years since I returned from New Mexico, and in all that time I have never talked to anyone about what happened to me there. Not a word about Alma, not a word about Hector and Frieda, not a word about the Blue Stone Ranch. Who would have believed such a story if I had tried to tell it? I had no proof, no evidence to support my case. Hector’s films had been destroyed, Alma’s book had been destroyed, and the only thing I could have shown anyone was my pathetic little collection of notes, my trilogy of desert jottings: the breakdown of Martin Frost, the snippets from Hector’s journal, and an inventory of extraterrestrial plants that had nothing to do with anything. Better to keep my mouth shut, I decided, and let the mystery of Hector Mann remain unsolved. Other people were writing about his work now, and when the silent comedies were put out on video in 1992 (a boxed collection of three tapes), the man in the white suit slowly began to acquire a following. It was a small comeback, of course, a minuscule event in the land of industrial entertainments and billion-dollar marketing budgets, but satisfying nevertheless, and I took pleasure in stumbling across articles that referred to Hector as a minor master of the genre or (to quote from Stanley Vaubel’s piece in Sight and Sound) the last great practitioner of the art of silent slapstick. Perhaps that was enough. When a fan club was established in 1994, I was invited to become an honorary member. As the person responsible for the first and only full-length study of Hector’s work, I was seen as the founding spirit of the movement, and they hoped I would give them my blessing. At last count, there were over three hundred dues-paying members of the International Brotherhood of Hector Manniacs, some of them living in such far-flung places as Sweden and Japan. Every year, the president invites me to attend their annual meeting in Chicago, and when I finally accepted in 1997, I was given a standing ovation at the end of my talk. In the question-and-answer period that followed, someone asked if I had uncovered any information relating to Hector’s disappearance while conducting the research for my book. No, I said, unfortunately not. I had looked for months, but I hadn’t been able to turn up a single fresh clue.
I turned fifty-one in March 1998. Six months later, on the first day of fall, just one week after I participated in a panel discussion on silent movies at the American Film Institute in Washington, I had my first heart attack. The second one came on November twenty-sixth, in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s house in Baltimore. The first one had been fairly gentle, a so-called mild infarction, the equivalent of a short solo for unaccompanied voice. The second one ripped through my body like a choral symphony for two hundred singers and full brass orchestra, and it nearly killed me. Until then,
I had refused to think of fifty-one as old. It might not have been particularly young, but neither was it the age when a man was supposed to prepare himself for the end and make his peace with the world. They kept me in the hospital for several weeks, and the news from the doctors was sufficiently discouraging for me to revise that opinion. To use a phrase I have always been fond of, I discovered that I was living on borrowed time.
I don’t think I was wrong to have held on to my secrets for all those years, and I don’t think I was wrong to have told them now. Circumstances changed, and once they changed, I changed my mind as well. They sent me home from the hospital in mid-December, and by early January I was writing the first pages of this book. It is late October now, and as I come to the end of my project, I note with a certain grim satisfaction that we are also closing in on the last weeks of the century—Hector’s century, the century that began eighteen days before he was born and which no one in his right mind will be sorry to see end. Following Chateaubriand’s model, I will make no attempt to publish what I have written now. I have left a letter of instruction for my lawyer, and he will know where to find the manuscript and what to do with it after I am gone. I have every intention of living to a hundred, but on the off chance I don’t get that far, all the necessary arrangements have been made. If and when this book is published, dear reader, you can be certain that the man who wrote it is long dead.
There are thoughts that break the mind, thoughts of such power and ugliness that they corrupt you as soon as you begin to think them. I was afraid of what I knew, afraid of falling into the horror of what I knew, and therefore I didn’t put the thought into words until it was too late for the words to do me any good. I have no facts to offer, no concrete evidence that would hold up in a court of law, but after playing out the events of that night again and again for the past eleven years, I am almost certain that Hector did not die a natural death. He was weak when I saw him, yes, weak and no doubt within days of dying, but his thoughts were lucid, and when he gripped my arm at the end of our conversation, he pressed his fingers into my skin. It was the grip of a man who meant to go on living. He was going to keep himself alive until we had concluded our business, and when I went downstairs after Frieda told me to leave the room, I fully expected to see him again in the morning. Think of the timing—think of how quickly the disasters accumulated after that. Alma and I went to bed, and once we fell asleep, Frieda tiptoed down the hall, went into Hector’s room, and smothered him with a pillow. I’m convinced that she did it out of love. There was no anger in her, no sense of betrayal or revenge—simply a fanatic’s devotion to a just and holy cause. Hector couldn’t have put up much resistance. She was stronger than he was, and by cutting his life short by just a few days, she would be rescuing him from the folly of having invited me to the ranch. After years of steadfast courage, Hector had buckled in to doubts and indecision, had wound up questioning everything he had done with his life in New Mexico, and the moment I arrived in Tierra del Sueño, the beautiful thing he had made with Frieda would be smashed to bits. The craziness didn’t begin until I set foot on the ranch. I was the catalyst for everything that happened while I was there, the final ingredient that triggered the fatal explosion. Frieda had to get rid of me, and the only way she could do that was by getting rid of Hector.
I often think about what happened the next day. So much of it turns on what was never said, on little gaps and silences, on the curious passivity that seemed to radiate from Alma at certain critical junctures. When I woke up in the morning, she was sitting beside me on the bed, stroking my face with her hand. It was ten o’clock—long past the time when we should have been in the screening room watching Hector’s films—and yet she didn’t rush me. I drank the cup of coffee she had put on the bedside table, we talked for a while, we put our arms around each other and kissed. Later on, when she returned to the cottage after the films had been destroyed, she seemed relatively unfazed by the scene she had witnessed. I’m not forgetting that she broke down and cried, but her reaction was far less intense that I had thought it would be. She didn’t rant, she didn’t lose her temper, she didn’t curse Frieda for having lit the fires before she was compelled to do so by Hector’s will. We had talked enough in the past two days for me to know that Alma was against burning the films. She was awed by the magnitude of Hector’s renunciation, I think, but she also believed that it was wrong, and she’d told me that she had argued with him about it many times over the years. If that was so, then why didn’t she become more upset when the films were finally destroyed? Her mother was in those films, her father had shot those films, and yet she barely said a word about them after the fires went out. I have thought about her silence for many years, and the only theory that makes sense to me, the only one that fully accounts for the indifference she displayed that evening, is that she knew the films hadn’t been destroyed. Alma was a deeply clever and resourceful person. She had already made copies of Hector’s early films and sent them out to half a dozen archives around the world. Why couldn’t she have made copies of his late films as well? She had done a fair amount of traveling while working on her book. What would have prevented her from smuggling out a couple of negatives each time she left the ranch and taking them to a lab somewhere to strike new prints? The vault was unguarded, she had keys to all the doors, and she wouldn’t have had any trouble getting the material in and out without being noticed. If that was what she had done, then she would have hidden the prints somewhere and waited for Frieda to die before making them public. It would have taken years, perhaps, but Alma was patient, and how could she have known that her life would end on the same night that Frieda’s did? One could argue that she would have let me in on the secret, that she wouldn’t have kept such a thing to herself, but perhaps she was planning to tell me about it when she came to Vermont. She didn’t refer to the films in her long, disjointed suicide letter, but Alma was in a state of anguish that night, trembling in a delirium of terror and apocalyptic self-judgments, and I don’t think she was truly in this world anymore when she sat down to write me the letter. She forgot to tell me. She meant to tell me, but then she forgot. If that was the case, then Hector’s films haven’t been lost. They’re only missing, and sooner or later a person will come along who accidentally opens the door of the room where Alma hid them, and the story will start all over again.
I live with that hope.