dark blue satin, buttoned at the side and falling to the floor) which, bearing in mind the season, made him look slightly absurd if also touching. He alone bowed to greet the organisers of the meeting, but with no hint of sycophancy, and occasionally he raised an elegant hand, in a gesture so slow it seemed to date from a different age, to stroke his long white beard, which wafted gently in the draught from the fan hanging from the ceiling. It seemed time had stopped over him, he alone was the incarnation of an entire era, a separate universe. When he spoke his name, in just two characters, I was struck by their simplicity and familiarity, which I mentally associated with … I searched and searched as I looked at his face, but in vain. The memory stayed buried in some recess of my mind, paralysed by the nerves of this first professional experience.
When I translated the nickname that his Chinese colleagues gave him—the Living Dictionary of the Forbidden City—the directors representative burst out laughing and promised, rather condescendingly, to hire this “gentleman” for a walk-on part or even a minor role. The other Chinese people present fell about laughing, but not the old man. I heard the hum of mosquitoes dancing in the artificial draft from the fan, flitting across beams of light that striped the room. The sound of a violin through the wall acted as background music to the meeting, a Mendelssohn sonata or concerto, gentle, slightly mawkish.
Two or three hours elapsed before I turned to look at the man in traditional dress again. The meeting, during which he had remained silent, was drawing to a close and the participants were glancing impatiently at their watches when he suddenly began to speak in a cracked, reedy, almost strangled voice.
“If we have a few more minutes I would like, very humbly, as humbly as my background dictates, to plead the case for re-establishing the truth.”
In a fraction of a second, as I translated what he had said, I thought I knew what his name reminded me of. It was … Just then a large mosquito which was stuck to the forehead of the directors representative caught my eye; I saw it take off, hover, veer back and land very precisely on the end of his nose, probably a less oily site. A verse from a Russian poet whom I had just read in translation came to mind: “the mosquito beatifically raised its ruby belly.” That was exactly it. As for knowing who the old Chinese man was, my vague recollections were extinguished almost before they were lit.
“I would beg the director and his writers,” went on the old man, “either by your intermediary or through the tape recorder on which my eminent colleagues cannot help focusing, to throw this screenplay—or at least this version—in one of the hotel’s bins, where, despite the establishments reputation, there’s quite a substantial population of hidden little scrabbling creatures who, I can only hope, will nibble it page by page, word by word. So very far is it from the true character of Puyi, who, contrary to the untruthful biography on which your screenplay is based, was a pathologically complex person, and I’m not referring here to his homosexuality, for many an emperor before him had similar tendencies. That is not the question, but his sadistic cruelty and frequent fits of delirium—as unpredictable as they were uncontrollable—were due to schizophrenia, in the purely medical sense of the term.”
In our collective silence we could make out through the wall the individual notes in the opening melody of the allegro from a Beethoven concerto, then a slap rang out, one the director’s representative administered to himself. The mosquito, which I could no longer see, must have avoided the blow and escaped.
“Piece of shit!”
With this vengeful cry, the man leapt from his chair, crushed the insect between his hands and threw its oozing, bleeding corpse into an ashtray, where he burned it with the tip of his cigarette.
“What the hell was that mosquito doing here?” he said. “Did he want to get into movies too?”
He roared with laughter and declared that, on that note, the meeting was closed. Before leaving he turned to me.
“Tell the old man I’m sure he knows the truth, but it’s too dark, too negative, it won’t work with a Western audience, it has nothing to offer a movie, no one’s interested in that, least of all a world-famous director whose