Hold Fast Your Crown by Yannick Haenel

Author:Yannick Haenel [Haenel, Yannick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2019-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

19

BLOOD FROM THE BEGINNING

In fact, Cimino is still making films, I said. I realized it that evening when he began to talk about details. In the end, when the stories are done, he had said, when there is no more story, there are always details—only they survive. “The details,” he had said to me, while looking far out over the Hudson, “are sparks of truth.”

Then he stood up. “Listen to the details!” he told me. And then, with his frail silhouette and the quickness of a mime, in a few seconds he had metamorphosed the space we were in. The walkway had become a theater stage—a film set—and he began to tell a story of workers who labored in a cotton field.

“Let’s call it Blood from the Beginning,” he said, smiling.

He told—rather, he acted out—the story. As soon as he introduced a character by name, his hands sculpted a figure. Each character spoke through his voice, bringing to life the great fixed sky of Missouri, the dust on the verandas, the calloused hands of an old woman, the drops of blood on a leather apron.

Pivoting around, with a slight movement of his fingers or a simple rictus, Cimino revealed a character and launched him or her into the story. His arms moved, forming circles, spirals, his hands shaped the space, they cut into the matter of the world, and then, coming together at right angles, they created a frame.

Cimino was directing.

A crushing sun, he says. Late morning at the end of June, a harsh light. A dozen black women are stooped over in a cotton field. A few men are bent over, too. They are white, wearing uniforms of faded gray.

A tall, thin guy, his forehead covered by a dirty lock of blond hair, with a shirt of heavy fabric buttoned up to his neck, goes by on the road. Cimino says that softly, and you can see the blond guy, see the road. They both seem to come from very far away, from a drought that precedes them.

Cimino says that the guy is called Coleman and is pushing a cart with his load of furniture. Cimino is precise, he counts the items: a bed, a chest, a table, four chairs and a pile of clothes—all of that forms a pyramid, he says. You can see the pyramid. He says that a donkey is pulling the cart—you can see the donkey, as gray and dusty as the men bent over in the cotton field.

One of those men (Banks, a skinny young farmer) observes Coleman, who is climbing to the top of the cart, standing on the furniture, trying to untangle a telephone wire that is hanging above the road. The wire is caught in the furniture, it’s going to be pulled down. With three movements, Cimino cuts a piece of space. He brings that wire, the road, the cart to life.

Banks advances, he wants to help the guy with the furniture. Woods, his foreman, shouts for him not to move.

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