The sea...
It could be said that only the sea remains.
The rest is different or has been effaced with time,
like footprints in the sand.
But here it was, in the very same space
occupied by these cubes, emblem of Modernity:
the Kursaal Cinema, the Casino Gran Kursaal,
the setting where this story began.
A symbol of the city, the pride of its bourgeoisie,
opened in 1922 by the queen of Spain,
the casino had very quickly learned how its main object, gambling,
was outlawed.
This event contributed to its gradual decline;
but it was above all the march of history
which meant that the ambitions of the people who built it
would never be fulfilled.
All of them eventually disappeared from the public scene
without being able to recover the splendor
of a definitively lost "belle epoque".
The Kursaal survived this shipwreck
like a boat run aground at the edge of the sea.
Whipped by the winds, worn away by saltpeter and humidity,
its uninhabited rooms were slowly converted
into a refuge of shadows.
It is not strange that the cinema sought shelter within its walls,
giving it a life of dreams.
I ask myself
what might have become of those ghosts
that environs of the casino.
The ghosts of gamblers and croupiers,
of waiters and cooks,
of musicians and variety artists;
anonymous dead folk in the main, dissipated into the nothingness,
like the monumental building they once inhabited.
All the same,
there were beings related to this episode of initiation who,
quitting the cinema screen,
went beyond the ephemeral nature of their existence:
Sherlock Holmes and Dr.Watson;
that is to say, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.
Others, meanwhile, have also vanished with the years;
Roy William Neill, the director,
and Gerald Hamer, alias Alistair Ramson,
the actor who, off-stage, embodies his last and most brilliant role -
Potts, the postman of La Morte Rouge.
La Morte Rouge... Yes, that was the name of the place:
a village situated in french-speaking Canada
on the outskirts of Quebec.
I've never managed to find it on the map, probably because
it only existed in the imagination of the scriptwriters
of The Scarlet Claw,
the first film I remember having seen.
The boy was five at the time and it was a winter's afternoon.
For a long time I avoided putting a date
to that crucial experience,
which thus remained in an undefined spot
in the lawless territory of earliest childhood.
Until one day during a visit to the city,
in the archives of the municipal library
I meticulously went through the local newspapers of the period.
In The Scarlet Claw, red was abolished;
its images only let the colors of mourning be seen,
the black and white of the origins of cinema.
Although it formed part of a series inspired by the adventures
of the character of Sherlock Holmes,
for the public The Scarlet Claw was mainly just
one more "scary" flim.
Except that in this instance the scariness
spread forth beyond the screen,
prolonging its echo in the atmosphere of a devastated society -
on the one hand,
due to the bloodletting typical of a civil war;
on the other,
to the effects of a recently ended world struggle.
While an emotionally benumbed population
sought refuge in the imaginary world of the cinema,
there wasn't a continent on the planet those days that wasn't
counting up its dead
and missing on the battle fronts
or in the bombed cities or extermination camps.
This universal pain - did it somehow
weigh upon the heart of the boy
who, in the company of his sister - she was seven years older -
walked towards the penumbra of a cinema
to see the first film of his life?
It's difficult to know...
One had to leave behind the great closed-down halls of the casino
in order to reach the theater where the screenings were held.
That afternoon the Kursaal was full of people,
with more than eight hundred spectators dotted throughout the stalls,
boxes and balconies.
From his seat the boy had time
to let his eyes wander over the paintings on the dome,
ntil the sound of a buzzer announced the start of the session.
Of that No-Do,the scene would remain engraved in memory
of a high official doling out in the street, for Christmas, a few pesetas
into the hands of poor men and women formed in a line.
This documentary testimonial was the substratum of reality
on which a few minutes later the fiction would establish itself.
But this, the boy didn't know;
for him fiction and reality were as yet the same thing.
From its beginning, The Scarlet Claw
displayed a nightmarish atmosphere.
It was as if everyday life had been suddenly
interrupted,
while the bell of the church in La Morte Rouge
tolled unexpectedly at a late hour.
Who can ring the church bell?
Suppose nobody, father.
Maybe this is "something", and "something" is the ringing thing.
There's no ghosts, there's no monsters. I told you that many times.
"Something" have eaten Chali Russo's sheeps.
And this "something" didn't leave a trace.
At night Drake saw a strange shining that moved along the coast.
And this morning he found dead bodies, father.
Yes, they've been eaten.
Suppose the same thing rings the bell.
Resently I went to bring an urgent letter
to the Penrose pension,
then the strange light arreared in front of me on a road,
and then quickly moved to the coast
and vanished in the fog.
I turned the car and came here.
Strange, at first - the light, and now - the bell.
There must be some logical reason, why a bell rings at this time,
And I will find it.
Take me to the church, Potts.
And what should I do with the letter? It's urgent.
You'll be in safe having gone with him.
Is that true, father?
All you need is more faith and less imagination. Let's go.
The enigma didn't take long in making itself known:
I should deliver this letter. I'm sure it's very important.
a dead woman appeared stretched out on the floor of the church.
It was the first of a series of crimes
which would sow panic among the inhabitants of La Morte Rouge.
In all of them the murderer eliminated his victims by slashing their throats
in the manner of a wild animal,
using a kind of metal claw.
And thus it was, in the midst of what the vast majority thought of
as a pastime,
that the boy discovered that people died;
and, furthermore, that men were able to kill other men.
During the screening,
with a sense of curiosity that was momentarily greater than his fear,
seeking an explanation,
he kept watch on the faces of the adult spectators.
Attentive but unmoved, they seemed unaffected by the deaths
that were taking place in front of their eyes.
There wasn't indifference in their face, it was something else altogether,
perhaps what Potts the joker had hinted at:
"something".
This fact awoke a suspicion in the boy:
the unanimous attitude of the adults had to be the consequence
of a pact they'd all agreed to,
consisting of saying nothing and carring on watching.
Because all of them possessed on feature in common:
they knew something he didn't know,
a secret that explained everything.
To uncover it was the disturbing adventure to which
he felt drawn by a force superior to his will,
the one which caused him to glimpse the other face of fiction,
a black hole in the fabric and unfolding of reality down
which the entire innocence of the world had gone.
At the end, Sherlock Holmes would discover that the cruel murderer
in La Morte Rouge was the most inoffensive person of all:
Potts, the jokester postman, lover of the occult.
Such is life, Emil -
As the birth costs money, as the death.
But Potts wasn't Potts,
rather he was Alistair Ramson,
a resentful actor obsessed by revenge,
who passed himself off as a postman in order to get close to his victims
without being recognized.
- Are you afraid, Emil? - Sure, same as you.
But what was an actor?
The boy didn't know exactly.
What he deduced was that an actor was someone who didn't have a soul of his own;
that, furthermore, by means of false beards, hairpieces, and moustaches,
changes of clothing and of voice,
he was capable of choosing an identity at will.
And if Potts could be everybody,
then everybody could be Potts,
the evil Potts.
The two siblings returned home along the bank of the river.
In its dark waters the streetlights were glittering.
There was a moment in which she, pausing,
made the boy look at the reflections while she called on his aid,
repeating an old game, "I Spy".
The familiar reply in question form, "What do you spy?"
didn't arrive this time, despite her stubborn insistence:
"I spy, I spy..."
He looked into her eyes as if she were a stranger,
lips pressed together, saying nothing.
For a time,
letters were an emblem of death for the boy;
postmen its agents.
Dressed in their blue uniforms,
heads covered with round peaked caps,
they crossed the city streets with light steps,
bearing on their shoulders leather mailbags
in which all the menace of the world might have been contained.
Each morning at the same time,
one of them entered the hallway of the house.
As it was a period of electricity cuts
and the bells weren't working,
in order to announce his presence from the stairwell
he blew on a whistle.
On hearing it the boy would run to take refuge in a corner.
His sister must not have realized the extent of the inner turmoil
that was gripping him; she only perceived his fear.
Dedicating herself to stimulating his memory
of that uniformed figure of Evil,
she began a new game:
she would repeat to him before going to bed,
"The postmans's coming, the postman's coming".
Althought perhaps, deep down,
she was doing nothing other than exorcising her own fear;
a fear that came from afar,
accumulated in the besieged Madrid of the Civil War, during her days as a little girl
subjected to the horror of the bombings.
"The postman's coming, the postman's coming..."
Night after night the door of his room remained open
onto the darkness of the passageway that connected every place
of the house.
From his bed, being unable to sleep,
the boy observed the artificial light that came in through the balcony.
It was a strange light, filtered by the net curtains,
that was concentrated on the whitewashed surface of the ceiling
only to be dispersed from there throughout the rest of the bedroom.
The chiming of the nearby church clock
was the prelude to the mysterious music which promptly issued
forth at these late hours from the apartment above.
It could be said that some insomniac hands
finished preparing the requisite atmosphere so that, at the very threshold of sleep,
the memory of the murderous postman would reach the boy.
He thought he could feel him getting closer
tep by step from the end of the passageway;
then, very still, in silence -
he never called out to his parents -
he would close his eyes.
laying dead was perhaps the only way
death wouldn't notice him,
as if he were an already claimed victim,
and so would pass by without stopping
in search of other sleeping bodies.
Fot weeks the boy lived this nightmare to the depths of his being.
Until cinema itself came to his aid:
if a film had, in a sense, disturbed him,
there were soon others which, little by little,
placed balm upon the would.
This double game of pain and consolation, of suffering and joy,
that reached him from the screen,
was the basis for his contradictory relationship with moving images.
I've always wanted to know more about Roy William Neill,
the director of The Scarlet Claw,
but I was hard put to find a few lines in a couple of encyclopaedias.
They all gave a plain and simple summary of his life.
Just enough to discover that, like the postman Potts,
Roy William Neill was also a pure invention.
Apparently, he was originally called Roland de Gostrie,
a French-sounding name
perhaps as false as the one he finally adopted.
He came into the world in 1887, on the high seas,
on board a ship captained by his father,
off the coast of Ireland.
He managed to make more than a hundred films, in part lost today.
The last one dates, precisely, from 1946.
He died that same year from a heart attack in London,
not far from 221 Baker Street.
He invented a place, La Morte Rouge, belonging to a country
that doesn't figure on the maps, called cinema.