building. The large, rambling apartment takes up the entire southeast half of the third floor. The archdiocese of Montreal used the building to house the nuns of the Little Franciscan Sisters of Mary in the 1890s and sold it in the 1960s to a developer who converted it into a dozen high-ceilinged six- and seven-room luxury apartments.
Renée says that Madame Fife took one look at the weather and said she was glad to stay home today. Madame Fife is working in her office on her computer. She asked Renée to tell Fife that she will come out to see him when the film people start the interview.
Yeah, well, I can’t do this if she’s not here. You know what I mean? he asks again.
Renée says, since he will in reality be talking to a movie camera and the man doing the interview and the people who will someday watch the movie on television, can’t he pretend that he’s talking to his wife, the same as if she was there in reality?
He says, You talk too much.
You asked if I knew what you mean about wanting her to hear you in the interview.
Yes, I did. But still, you talk too much.
She slides open the heavy pocket door to the living room and shoves the wheelchair over the high threshold into the darkened room. The Fifes’ apartment was originally occupied by the monseigneur who supervised the seminary. It’s a wood-panelled three-bedroom flat with a formal dining room, parlour, reception hall, office, and library that Fife uses as an editing room. He bought the apartment in the late 1980s when the bottom fell out of Westmount real estate. Leonard Fife and Emma Flynn are childless, bilingual, socially attractive, and artistic semi-celebrities, and over the years they have adapted the rooms to suit the overlapping needs of their professional and personal lives.
Nothing in the room is the way he remembers it. Instead of entering a large high-ceilinged living room with four tall curtained windows, a room comfortably furnished with mid-twentieth-century sofas and chairs and lamps and tables, Fife has entered a black box of unknown dimensions. He can feel the presence of several other people in the box, perhaps as many as four. Their silence is sudden, like held breath, as if caused by his entry, as if they don’t want him to know they have been talking about him. About his illness.
They exhale, and he hears them breathing. His sense of smell and taste are nearly deadened, and his sight has turned cloudy, but his hearing is still reliable.
Over here, Leo! It’s Malcolm, speaking in English. He says, Vincent, give us some light, will you?
Vincent is the cameraman—though he prefers to be called director of photography. DP. He asks Malcolm if he wants the houselights on. So Leo can get his bearings, he adds. Good morning, Leo. Thanks for letting us do this, man. Really appreciate it. Among friends Leonard Fife is known as Leo. Vincent is a tall, pear-shaped man with narrow shoulders and head and the delicate small hands of a jeweller. He’s wearing his pink-rimmed designer eyeglasses today. He has a blond moustache, wispy and ill-trimmed, pouting red lips, and watery pale-blue eyes.
Malcolm, too, says good morning and thanks Fife. Let’s hold off on the lights for now, Vincent. It took us a fucking hour to get it totally dark, he says, and all the lamps and light fixtures are unplugged and moved.
Vincent hits a handheld switch, and a small, sharply cut circle of light appears on the bare wooden floor. It’s where Fife will be interrogated. He remembers that section of floor being covered by the kilim carpet he and Emma brought back from Iran in ’88. Fife would prefer to keep the room in total darkness, forget the pin-spot, just let him be a disembodied voice speaking from empty dark to embodied dark. But he knows what kind of film Malcolm has planned.
Fife hopes he won’t have to hear Malcolm and his crew tell him again how great he looks. He got more than enough lame, lying compliments from them last month when they came up from Toronto to visit him at the Segal Cancer Centre and someone had the bright idea to shoot this interview.
Actually, he thinks it was his idea, not Malcolm’s or anyone else’s. And it wasn’t because he thought he looked good enough to be on-camera: he knows what he looks like. It was because he knew he was dying.
A woman’s voice trills out of the darkness, thanking him. Fife recognizes the voice as Diana’s, Malcolm’s producer and longtime home companion. They are all grateful to him, she says. Her thin, high-pitched voice sounds to Fife like a repressed shriek. Fife has always hated her voice. Anytime you want to take a break, she says, or rest or whatever, just do it. Don’t push yourself.
Malcolm and his crew are based in Toronto, and everyone is speaking English now. To Renée, Diana says, Bring the wheelchair over here into the spotlight, will you, dear? We’re not going to film the chair, just Leo’s face, neck, and shoulders, sometimes straight on, sometimes in profile or from behind. Everything else will be blacked out. She says it with the authority of a grade-school teacher.
Renée probably couldn’t care less how they intend to shoot Fife, but she understands Diana’s English well enough to place his wheelchair directly under the pin-spot.
It’s the style you invented, man, says Malcolm. Backlight the off-camera side of the subject’s face, nothing else. He steps up to the wheelchair and lays a hand on Fife’s shoulder. Seemed only appropriate, he says. Right? Hope you don’t object.
No, I don’t object.
Consider it a protégé’s homage, man.
A protégé’s homage. Fair enough, I guess. What are you using for a camera?
Vincent answers. The Sony FS7.
Who else is here? In the room, I mean.
Malcolm says, Sloan’s over there in the corner. She’ll mic you and run the sound with that and a boom, if we need it. The Sony’s sound needs help. You met her a couple times in Toronto.
I remember, Fife says, cutting him off. He believes that Malcolm is having an affair with the girl. She’s Nova Scotian, a pretty redheaded kid with freckles and can’t be more than twenty-four or twenty-five. Malcolm is close to fifty now. How is that possible? Fife has ex-students, protégés, who are old enough to have inappropriate affairs with interns and famous enough to be able to hook and land the financing and distribution for a filmed final interview with Leonard Fife, himself a documentarian, but too old and sick now for inappropriate affairs and famous only in certain unfashionably leftist quarters, a filmmaker who couldn’t raise the money on his own for a project like this.
Malcolm MacLeod films the history of Canada, soft-focused liberal takes on early settlement, les coureurs de bois, the native peoples, Loyalist immigrants from the War of American Independence, American slaves who followed the North Star on the Underground Railroad, hockey, Cajun music. He’s the Ken Burns of the North, and now he’s documenting his old professor’s final confession. It will be his mentor’s last interview, and Malcolm has written out twenty-five questions designed to seduce Fife into making the kind of provocative and sometimes profound remarks and observations that he is famous for, at least among those who know him personally or studied with him at Concordia back in the 1970s and ’80s or read interviews with him in the Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques and Cinema Canada in the ’80s, when it was run by his friends Connie and Jean-Pierre Tadros.
Fife tells Renée to park him wherever they want him and then please bring Madame Fife in here, he has something important that he must tell her.
Renée moves his chair into the circle of light. She sets the brake and disappears into the darkness beyond.
Fife
