by
Liv Ullmann
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We are dining with friends. He is a director and has just finished his first important film. She is the wife who lives only for her husband’s career. They lived for a number of years in New York, but have now moved to Los Angeles. Bought a house they cannot afford. Sought out company and the acquaintance of those they do not really care about. Maintained a social life with men and women with whom the only thing they have in common is the hope that the association can lead to future business.
For some it is lonely and impossible not to be in “the right circles,” and they scramble and crawl over each other in order to be included; humiliate themselves and lose their souls somewhere on the way toward a goal that does not exist.
The director and his wife are having a difficult time. In her insecurity she strives so hard when they are with other people that she scares off those with whom she wishes contact. She tells them that her husband is the world’s most talented man, that he will become the greatest of them all, make the best films, earn the most money—and any strength that he himself may lack, she will provide. It is a year since I last saw her, and the change is striking.
Then they had just arrived from New York, where they lived quite happily. She was perhaps a little plump and had lovely black hair, and was all eagerness over the life that awaited them in California. Now there are sharp little lines around her mouth. She is nervous and smokes all the time.
They talk enthusiastically about the parties they have been to, about all their plans and acquaintances. That she has lost twenty pounds—can you really recognize her?
damn
Physically she is no longer as animated and alive. She looks defenseless and slightly pathetic. She has dyed her hair reddish and she talks on and on—as if not knowing what she is saying. I feel dreadfully sorry for her. She touches the protective instinct within me. She has such fine qualities, which will never blossom in the life they have now chosen. I believe she will be a different person each time I meet her. The impossible plans for the future she is building. Her longing for friendship, while she hunts useful connections. Loneliness .. beside the swimming pool and in their big new house with hardly any furniture. No children. Previously, they wanted to be just the two of them. Now they have the Career. The American dream. Success. Her dream is to stand at her husband’s side and be one of the film city’s influential people. Belong to the A group. She puts her arm through mine at table and we chat about nothing.
I feel her need of a woman friend—feel it in the gust of the confidences breathed into my ear.
The drinks are brought in. She smiles and encourages her husband. Tells us how clever he is, how good he is, how proud she is of him.
Fear sits at table with us—and I shudder at the thought of meeting her in ten years’ time.
Quite a few people have gathered for lunch. New film projects are discussed. Success is measured by the number of offers one receives. The more money you are offered, the more producers ring your agent and offer yet more.
This is Hollywood's way of talking about the weather.
An elderly actor stops at our table. He is German. A flood of words at furious speed: his wife has left him and their five children. He whispers, looking around nervously, hinting that I am the only one to receive this confidence. But I can hear that he has told his story many times. To all who have time to listen.
He can’t understand. Had thought they were so happy. She had the lovely house. Its location was a bit isolated—he would admit that—but it was so beautiful . . . and, after all, she was never alone, plenty to do with the children. He was always good to her, in love with her, did everything he could to see that she was happy. Perhaps he was away traveling too much, but when he couldn’t get work in the film city itself— what was he to do?
Now she had gone, and he tells me confidentially he is sure she was crazy all along. Only he had never realized it. He had been too gullible. He was going to get a doctor’s certificate of insanity so that she could never come back with claims on the children. Would I give evidence in court?
He is thin and his hands tremble. Once he was a handsome man that many a girl tried to get. And eventually he wed the youngest of them all. There were children—one every year— and they both waited for happiness to follow. Something in which to relax and feel secure. Now the two will meet in court. And everything they didn’t know about each other they will reveal to indifferent and tired attorneys.
I AM IN PARIS FOR THREE DAYS. IT IS NOT MY FIRST TIME, and the circumstances of my earlier visits have always been a little odd.
When I was quite young I came with a Norwegian theatre company. I was unhappily in love and only wanted to lie on my bed and read old letters from him. He went on a walking tour in the mountains to forget me. He ran up and down and around all the peaks he could find, timed himself, beat his own records, and after a while couldn’t remember why he had begun running. While I dragged myself to Sarah Bernhardt’s old theatre and acted out my suffering on the stage.
I didn’t even bother to see the Eiffel Tower.
I was in love for the first time. Although I didn’t hear bells ringing, as Mamma had promised me. But it was wonderful even So.
His name was Jens.
We didn’t talk much, for we were both shy—silence was part of our relationship. Life pulsated around us differently than it had earlier. Our good-nights by the gate were tremendously important. The nearest we ever came to bells ringing. Mamma began standing at the window behind the curtains when she expected me home. We had to find other gates. He almost always wore rubber boots and was much taller than I. One day he told me that it was over. He could not spend all his youth with a virgin, he said. Somewhere he had read that it might be harmful for a developing man not to have sex. Besides, he was about to take his exams and go to the university. As a student he could not go around with a fifteen-year old. He hoped I understood and wouldn't take it personally.
We both had red faces. I had never heard him speak that many consecutive sentences. I stood by a strange gate carrying my innocence with shame, as I watched a gangling youth walk out of my life.
lollll
Books have always been living things to me. Some of my encounters with new authors have changed my life a little. When I have been perplexed, looking for something’ I could not define to myself, a certain book has turned up, approached me as a friend would. And between its covers carried the questions and the answers I was looking for.
<3
Seeing pictures of Mamma when she was young makes me sad. She is lovely, her eyes are happy and full of expectation.
Why doesn’t life turn out as we hope and plan?
Why is Time so merciless, stealing our opportunities if we are not swift enough to grasp them immediately?
Why is it so frightening to reach sixty because one was once sixteen and believed that time existed in infinite supply?
Why couldn’t one know that Time moves on with ever-increasing speed and plays havoc with all things we once thought we could leave for tomorrow?
It hurts to remember the last part of her life. An old people’s home. Tastefully furnished. All the colors harmonizing, staff in white aprons and patient smiles. Yet as soon as the bell rang for breakfast, lunch or supper, the fifty old ladies immediately had to leave their rooms and troop to the dining room. Sit at table with people whose company they had not sought. Converse about events in which they had no interest. Find friends when loneliness and waiting were the only things they had in common.
The panic if she had to spend a day in bed; three days in bed meant being transferred to the nursing-home wing. There was a long waiting list for residents’ rooms, and seldom did anyone return from the nursing home. One day Grandma, too, was moved there.
“It is much better for the old one to have constant supervision, be able to stay with others in the same situation.”
Relatives who only want the best for their dear ones, and send them to an institution where one is no longer “I” but “we.”
:(
It never occurred to me that there must have been a number of losers that day. Future colleagues whom I would meet a long time later in a tour bus. That we would lightly trade back and forth the young people we once were, with laughter and distance.
Then I only had Grandma. By morning I was with her, and I cried my heart out. Sobbed on a breast which never had harbored the dream that now was crushed within me. In the span of a night everything that was customary and familiar had been stripped away, and I was in the middle of a transition. There was something to be learned from this, something hard to understand: that one carries one’s fate within oneself, one’s fate is not dependent on this kind of failure or success.
To become conscious is a long process, to become open to sorrow, look upon it as part of living, of developing, of changing.
A year in Oslo, where the first few months of loneliness are what I remember best. Where not being able enough, talented enough, was the big sorrow. Months that seemed endless, without any goal or meaning. Carefully jotted down in a blue diary that I still have, written by a young girl who lived long ago. Pains that I no longer recall, joys that are no longer a part of me.