The Crossed-Out Notebook

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  THE CROSSED-OUT NOTEBOOK

  It all started with a screenplay.

  A screenplay I should never have written.

  Amadeus is a great screenplay.

  I read it more than a dozen times, studied it, chewed it up and swallowed it, then I stuck my fingers down my throat.

  Amadeus was a good play, then it became a great screenplay.

  The screenplay far surpasses the play.

  Peter Shaffer surpassed himself by turning his own good play into his own (or sort of his own) great screenplay.

  While he was writing the play, Peter Shaffer could never have imagined that F. Murray Abraham would later do what he did before the cameras that filmed his screenplay; he was completely unaware that his play was going to end up a movie, and that the movie was going to win everything, and that F. Murray Abraham was going to put body and soul into the greatest exegesis ever seen of the struggle between an artist and his irrevocable mediocrity.

  What name does the “F” in F. Murray Abraham hide?

  Ferdinand?

  Filomeno?

  Federico?

  Santiago Salvatierra says the “F” doesn’t mean anything, that F. Murray Abraham’s real name is Murray Abraham, and that Murray added the “F” because he thought it would sound better.

  Santiago told me that F. Murray Abraham is a despicable person.

  I asked him how he knew that, and he looked at me the way he looks at me when I ask him a question he doesn’t want me to ask, and he left the basement and shut the door.

  F. Murray Abraham is a despicable genius, he’d said.

  But aren’t we all despicable in some way or other?

  That’s not the problem, no; the problem is that the majority of us are not geniuses.

  The vast majority.

  Peter Shaffer is a genius.

  Is?

  Was?

  Peter Shaffer wrote his play, and then his screenplay, on a typewriter in a comfortable office with large windows and lamps of all sizes for the sunless hours.

  I live in a basement.

  Five years, I’ve lived in this basement.

  I have a lamp that illuminates little to nothing.

  I write in this notebook from six in the morning to seven in the morning.

  Then I spend a few minutes crossing out what I’ve written, just before Santiago comes down with his chair, a cup of coffee, a dish of fruit, and printed-out scenes with his scribbled notes: margins full of comments that are usually deplorable.

  This thing you are reading now (if there is a you) is nothing but crossed-out words, a text scrawled hurriedly in a Rivadavia school notebook that I brought with me from Buenos Aires.

  Text in blue ink, camouflaged by neat lines of black ink that cross it out.

  I am forty-five years old.

  I’ve been writing for twenty years.

  Though during those first few years I didn’t write, I tried to write.

  I tried for eight, nine hours a day.

  When I finished high school, I enrolled at the Buenos Aires School of Music.

  I wanted to be a session musician.

  Instrument of choice: guitar.

  But you don’t get to be a session musician when you start at nineteen.

  I didn’t even come close.

  I fled the conservatory before I finished my second year, sick and tired of seeing and hearing those kids who were still in elementary school play their instruments as if they were natural extensions of their arms and legs and mouths.

  In my hands, the guitar was an imposture.

  I don’t know if “imposture” is the right word.

  It sounds good.

  Every morning, after breakfast—Dolca instant coffee with milk and three Lincoln biscuits that I dipped in the coffee and milk until they fell apart—I’d lock myself into my room (my tiny room that fit only a short, narrow bed, the Marshall amp I’d bought in thirty-six installments, the stand with sheet music and exercises in auditory perception and musical literacy, the four-tiered Technics stereo I bought in twenty-four installments, and some books and albums scattered over the floor), I’d pick up the Mexican Fender Stratocaster that I’d bought in twelve installments, and my hands would need at least half an hour to figure out what that long object I was forcing them to manhandle was.

  When I accepted my failure as a music student and my lack of a future as a session musician, my parents, as any parents anywhere in the world would do, asked me what I planned to do with my life:

  What are your plans? We want to help you, but we need to know what you plan to do, what you want to do. We need to be sure that you know what it is you want to do.

  I told them that, unfortunately, I didn’t have the slightest idea.

  They didn’t like it when I told them that.

  For twenty minutes, in silence, they concentrated on their roast beef with pureed squash; they didn’t look at me; they didn’t look at each other; their eyes flitted from nothing to their plates and back to nothing.

  My old man worked for a millionaire who owned twenty-five percent of the world’s duty-free shops.

  His job was to evaluate the employees.

  He traveled once a month, mainly to cities in Latin America and Europe, where he would settle into a hotel near the airport and he’d spend two days going to the various duty-free shops, jotting down details both spatial and human in a little notebook with a cream-colored cover.

  He was obsessive about order and cleanliness, a fanatical believer in his own way of seeing things.

  I went with him only once, to Rio de Janeiro.

  He went up to one of the employees of the largest duty-free shop in the Tom Jobim International Airport, and, in perfect Portuguese, asked him why the bottles of Johnnie Walker Red were on the shelf above the bottles of Johnnie Walker Black, when clearly Johnnie Walker Red was of inferior quality to Johnnie Walker Black; and not only that, but why were the bottles of Johnnie Walker Red in their boxes while the Johnnie Walker Black bottles were not, when there was nothing impressive about the Johnnie Walker Red boxes, they didn’t catch your attention in the slightest, while the Johnnie Walker Black boxes immediately seduced you with their golden contours and golden letters, and the finish on their boxes was so much glossier, so much more striking, than the Johnnie Walker Red’s?

  The employee stood for a long while without saying a word, staring at my father as if he were a serial killer calmly explaining how he planned to murder the employee, along with his family, and how he planned to dispose of the bodies.

  Years later, on one of those flights, my old man got up to pee in the middle of the night, went into the plane’s little bathroom, closed the door, and, while he was peeing, rested his forehead against the curved wall. But before he finished squeezing out the last drops, the plane jolted furiously in a sudden bout of turbulence; my old man’s head was still resting against the curved wall, his thoughts who knows where, and his neck snapped.

  We want to help you, son, my parents said.

  It was strange for them to call me “son.”

  My parents had called me “son” very rarely.

  They called me “son” one night when I was sixteen years old, at the Italian Hospital, after I got into a car wreck on Libertador with my only friend, Lisandro.

  We had downed a bottle of Smirnoff vodka mixed with Sprite and Minerva lemon juice.

  The right front wheel grazed the guardrail, and the car spun approximately two hundred forty degrees, and another car that was coming too fast rammed into our trunk; we shot ahead, squeezed and speeding at the same time, and something exploded in one of our cars, but miraculously no one was gravely injured.

  You nearly scared us to death, son.

  My old lady had wanted to be an actress, and for over a decade she’d struggled to become an actress, until she got sick of the struggle and she and two friends started dressing up as Disney characters at children’s birthday parties.

  It was successful.

  Very successful.

  So much so that five years ago, when I got onto the plane that carried me to San Martín de los Andes and ultimately into Santiago Salvatierra’s basement, my old lady, who was almost seventy years old, was still making her living from the children’s birthday party act, not as a performer but as the coordinator of a group of young actors and actresses who, like her, had struggled to make it in theater, film, and television, and had almost always been rudely rejected by the theater, film, and television.

  When my old man passed away, my old lady and I moved to a smaller apartment, where we shared a king-sized bed that barely left enough room for us to open the closet doors.

  After I fled the Buenos Aires School of Music, I spent several years with no idea what to do with myself.

  I lived with my mother, and I had breakfast and dinner with my mother, and during the day I went to a café to read.

  I read anything and everything.

  I always carried around a used book, and when I finished it, I would trade it in f
or another used book.

  In the evenings, I’d meet up with my friend Lisandro to eat or drink something.

  A cup of coffee.

  Sometimes a Fernet and Coke.

  Swiss chocolate ice cream with strawberry sorbet.

  If I met a girl in one of those cafés or bars or ice cream shops, I’d pray that she had her own place, somewhere we could be alone, that if she lived with her family she would at least have a room where she and I could lock ourselves away.

  I didn’t meet many girls, and the few I did meet dumped me as soon as they found out I shared a bed with my old lady.

  It was hopeless.

  They didn’t even care when I showed them it was a king-sized bed, so big that my old lady and I never even touched during the night.

  I don’t have a real bed here in the basement.

  It took Santiago several days just to bring down a mattress.

  He waited until I’d handed over the finished first act.

  He waited until he’d made sure the first act worked, that I worked.

  Now I spend my nights on a mattress that Santiago tells me used to belong to his son, Hilario.

  A fickle kid (says Santiago) who can’t focus on something, anything, for more than five minutes. Not five fucking minutes. A kid who draws like the gods, has an innate talent for drawing, but is not the slightest bit interested in drawing. Not the slightest bit interested in anything.

  I told Santiago that when I was Hilario’s age, I wasn’t interested in anything, either. Not a thing. And that my old lady had suffered a lot because of that.

  But at least you read, he told me. You could finish a book, or learn a song on the guitar. This brat’s no good even for boiling an egg. He gets bored halfway through. And the egg is just left there, overcooking, until it breaks and the white gets all foamy.

  You have to give him time.

  Time? He’s about to turn twenty-five years old.

  Twenty-five is the new fifteen.

  Says who?

  I don’t know.

  Sounds like bullshit to me.

  Santiago has spent time living in Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, a few months in Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, three weeks in Jamaica, two in Panama, and a few days in Colombia.

  He built his reputation as the greatest Latin American film director of all time by draining the coffers of the cinematic institutes of Spanish-speaking countries, winning folks over with his warm and expansive personality, his endless smooth talk.

  Santiago Salvatierra is among the greatest directors of all time—the real and true greats.

  His camerawork and his commitment with the actors—the demands he places on them—are unparalleled.

  He is a blend of colossal energy and good taste—excellent taste.

  A glut of talent that he applies to the visual field.

  His shots spill from the screen, they splash you, they mess up your hair, they embrace you, they whisper into your ear.

  Santiago was born to direct film.

  He was built for the sole purpose of standing behind a camera.

  From the cradle.

  No formal education required.

  An ambitious autodidact.

  A flesh-and-blood balloon loaded with eternal images.

  Santiago’s problem is that he can’t write.

  His genius, the one that bursts from the screen, vanishes at the sight of a blank page.

  Santiago is two artists at once: the director who breakfasts with Fellini and Kurosawa, and the screenwriter who timidly opens the door to the writing workshop and sits at a table with six bored housewives.

  No, Santiago’s problem isn’t that he can’t write.

  A lot of directors can’t write.

  Santiago’s problem is that he thinks he can write.

  He fancies himself a screenwriter.

  He fancies himself an auteur, in the fullest sense of the word.

  Many directors believe themselves to be auteurs in the fullest sense of the word, as if it weren’t enough to just be a director, as if directing a film they didn’t write meant directing someone else’s film, or a film that wasn’t all theirs, as if a movie written by one person and directed by another was authorless, an orphan; or worse, as if it had several adoptive parents—a child with too many mothers.

  Most directors can’t write.

  I’d bet the little I have left—which is the hope that my mother is still alive—that I’m right about that.

  Ninety-nine percent of directors can’t write.

  No one will care that I say this.

  Who’s going to take the trouble to read what I’ve written and crossed out in this notebook?

  Who really wants to decipher crossed-out text?

  Ninety-nine point four percent of directors can’t write.

  So what?

  Don’t worry, directors.

  There are thousands of screenwriters scattered around, living in ditches like Beckett characters, just waiting for the chance to help you out.

  The movie will still be yours, all yours, plus a tiny bit ours.

  Put your name nice and big on the poster.

  Just don’t try to do what we can do and you can’t; don’t be so smug as to believe that writing a screenplay is something anyone can do.

  Ninety-nine point two percent of directors think it’s possible to write like Peter Shaffer, that it’s just a matter of sitting down and doing it, a matter of reading a couple of books about the basic rules of screenwriting, and that’s that.

  * * *

  Santiago just left with his chair.

  He came down with the cup of coffee, the little dish of fruit, and the printouts of the scenes with his notes.

  Of his more than forty notes, there were only three worthwhile.

  Like he does every morning, Santiago came down into the basement, turned on the light, walked over to the mattress, and held the cup of hot coffee under my nose.

  Like I do every morning, I pretended to be asleep.

  Then we sat down (him in his chair and me on the mattress) to discuss his notes.

  Over time, over the course of the two screenplays I’ve written in the basement, I’ve learned that it’s best not to oppose Santiago, not to reject his suggestions outright even if they are completely wrong—as suggestions tend to be when people who don’t know how to write critique a written text.

  Over time I’ve learned that you can write a good version of just about anything, that the best approach is to take the note (not literally), mull it over, and rummage around in it until I find what the note got right (right for me, not for Santiago), what the note contains that doesn’t upset what has been written, but rather enriches it.

  An exhausting process, I’ll admit.

  But all collaboration is exhausting.

  It has to be.

  At least, all collaboration between two artists who value each other.

  Two artists who aren’t Siamese twins separated at birth.

  This is the third screenplay I’ve written for Santiago.

  The two previous ones, as is well known (though it’s not well known that I was the one who wrote them), wrenched Latin American cinema from its slumber and set movie theaters on fire.

  Not only were Santiago Salvatierra’s last two films extraordinary successes at the box office, they also won the lion’s share of all awards in existence, from the Palme d’Or at Cannes, to the Goyas, the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes, and culminating, for both movies, with the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.

  It was the third time in history that a director won two Oscars in a row for Best Foreign Film; the other two: Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.

  But this third screenplay is the hardest.

  This third screenplay is the one that, in Santiago’s words: will win everything.

  Every. Thing.

  And when Santiago says “ev-er-y-thing,” he is specifically referring to Hollywood.

  This third screenplay (that is, the movie that will come from this screenplay) is the one that will set movie theaters ablaze in the United States, that will break all box office records, even in countries like Japan and China, and that will sweep the Golden Globes and the Oscars in the general categories, and won’t be reduced to the category of Foreign Language Film.

  According to Santiago, this film is going to be so big that the award won’t even matter.

  In addition to best film and best director, and best actor and actress, and best supporting actor and actress, and best cinematography, and best soundtrack, Santiago’s last two films, the ones I wrote for him, won several awards for best screenplay.