topic/growing-older

Amour is a movie about an aging couple. They live happily together in a charming Parisian apartment. They are still in love. That's why the movie is called Amour. [...] One day, Emanuelle has a stroke while they're eating breakfast. Time stops. When it starts again, she is bed-ridden and incapable of speaking. She blubbers. She is transformed from elegant pianist to invalid. She is a formless mass of flesh that cannot care for itself. Her fluids leak out onto the clean floors. her living decay begins to contaminate the regal antiques and charming ornamentation. Her husband tries to take care of her. He degenerates from loving spouse to cruel, resentful caregiver. He has dreams of drowning in icy water in the basement of his own house. His wife refuses to eat. She can no longer stand. He becomes so tearfully frustrated that he slaps her, hard. A rigid part of him dissolves. [...] The different rooms of the apartment begin to deteriorate from disuse. He covers the craftsman furniture with dead plastic sheeting. He goes out to the shop to buy fresh flowers. He seals the entry to Emmanuelle's bedroom with tape. Their home becomes a dusty and beautiful tomb for the two figures within it. He is trying to preserve the gently rotting vestiges of their life together.

Whenever Marilyn sees the Pepsi cooler she is reminded of those days. Just married. No worries about skin cancer or lung cancer. No one had varicose veins. No one talked about cholesterol. None of their friends were addicted to anything other than the sun and the desire to get up on one ski - to slalom. The summer she was pregnant with Tom (compliments of a few too many mai tais, Sid told the group), she sat on the dock and sipped her ginger ale. The motion of the boat made her queasy, as did anything that had to do with poultry. It ain't the size of the ship but the motion of the ocean, Sid was fond of saying in those days, and she laughed every time. Every time he said it, she complimented his liner and the power of his steam. They batted words like throttle and wake back and forth like a birdie until finally, at the end of the afternoon, she'd go over and whisper, "Ready to dock?"

Her love for Sid then was overwhelming. His hair was thick, and he tanned a deep smooth olive without any coaxing. He was everything she had ever wanted, and she told him this those summer days as they sat through the twilight time. She didn't tell him how sometimes she craved the vodka tonics she had missed. Even though many of her friends continued drinking and smoking through their pregnancies, she would allow herself only one glass of wine with dinner. When she bragged about this during Sally's first pregnancy, instead of being congratulated on her modest intake, Sally was horrified. "My God, Mother," she said. "Tom is lucky there's not something wrong with him!"

I was born and raised under the stars of the Southern Cross.

Wherever I go, they follow me. Under the sparkling Southern Cross, I live out the stages of my fate.

I have no god. If I had one, I would beseech him not to let me meet death, not yet. I still have a long way to go. There are moons at which I have not yet howled and suns which have not yet set me alight. I have still not swum in all the seas of the world, of which they say there are seven, nor in all the rivers of Paradise, of which they say there are four.

Agnes Andrews would be sixty before very long, and for many years she had been obliged to wear spectacles with lenses so thick that it wasn’t easy to see the expression in her eyes: you had to rely on the smile or the frown or the patient, neutral look of her mouth. And her husband had to acknowledge that the rest of her was rapidly aging too. There wasn’t much left of her once-lustrous hair except what the hairdresser could salvage and primp; her body sagged in some places and was bloated in others. She looked like what she was: a woman who’d been called Mother in shrill, hungering voices for most of her life.

Long ago, almost beyond memory, she had been a neat, crisp, surprisingly passionate young nurse whose flesh he had been wholly unable to resist. The only minor deterrent, easily ignored from their first night right on up through the night he’d proposed to her (“I love you, Agnes; oh, I love you, and I need you. I need you…”), the only qualifying aspect of his love had been his knowledge that some people—his mother, for one—might think it strange of him to marry a girl of the working class.

I take a shower, look in the mirror, and think to myself that I am only twenty years old, and that it feels like I have been married for a generation. It feels like life beyond these green rooms is rushing by for other people as if to the sound of kettledrums and tom-toms. Meanwhile I am only twenty years old, and the days descend on me unnoticeably like dust, each one just like the rest.

It was midnight. Richard sloped out of his study and went to the kitchen in search of something to drink. Anything alcoholic would do. He experienced a thud of surprise, from temple to temple, when instead of the usual striplit void he confronted his wife. Gina was not a large woman, but the mass of her presence was dramatically augmented by the lateness of the hour. And by marriage, and by other things. He looked at her with his infidel's eyes. Her oxblood hair was up and back; her face was moist with half-assimilated night cream; her towel dressing gown revealed a triangle of bath-rouged throat. With abrupt panic Richard realized what had happened to her, what she had done: Gina had become a grownup. And Richard hadn't. Following the pattern of his generation (or its bohemian wing), Richard was going to go on looking the same until he died. Looking worse and worse, of course, but looking the same. Was it the kids, was it the job, was it the lover she must surely have by now (in her shoes, in her marriage—if Richard was married to Richard, he'd have one)? He couldn't object on grounds of ethics or equity. Because writing is infidelity. Because all writing is infidelity. She still looked good, she still looked sexual, she even still looked (you had to hand it to her) ... dirty. But Gina had made a definite move toward the other side.

In my desperation, I decide to make a short speech to the assembled personnel. I want to say that I have worked in films for forty years that I have made forty-five films and I am seeking new ways and want to renew my imagery. One must constantly question one’s results. I want to state that I have the capacity, am a man of great experience, that the present problem is a mere bagatelle. If I wanted to, I could move backwards and take a long shot from diagonally above. That would be an excellent solution. I don’t believe in God, I know, but it isn’t that simple. We all carry a god within us. Everything is a pattern of which we occasionally catch a glimpse, especially at the moment of death. That is what I want to say, but it’s not worth it. The people have retreated, assembled deep inside the murky studio, and are standing close together, arguing. I can’t hear what they’re saying and can see nothing but their backs.

'Thirty-nine years!' I said aloud. Before the war I was too young for the years to have weighed upon me. And then for five years, I forgot myself completely. And now I've found myself again, only to learn that I'm condemned. Old age is awaiting me; there's no escaping it. Even now I can see its beginnings in the depths of the mirror. Oh, I'm still a woman, I still bleed every month. Nothing's really changed, except that now. I know. I ran my fingers through my hair. Those white streaks are no longer a curiosity, a sign; they're the beginning. In a few years, my head will be the colour of my bones. My face still seems smooth and firm, but overnight the mask will melt, laying bare the rheumy eyes of an old woman. Each year the seasons repeat themselves; wounds are healed. But there's no way in the world to halt the infirmities of age. 'There isn't even any time left to worry about it,' I thought, turning away from my reflection. 'It's even too late for regrets. There's nothing left to do but to keep going.'