Lancelot

herself, a way of filling up time?
    Merlin and Jacoby argued about the movies they were making, or rather Jacoby seemed to be making, because although Merlin was the producer-director and Jacoby co-director, it was Jacoby who ran the set, yelling at actors and grips, even ordering local residents out of their own houses. It amazed me how meekly, even joyfully, the locals received these bad manners. Anything to be in a movie, or somehow connected with a movie. Then I thought: Listen who’s talking and who’s been kicked out of his own house.
    They were arguing about the scene where the poor white sharecropper rapes the aristocratic girl in the loft of the pigeonnier.
    â€œOf course you must realize”—said Jacoby, leaning over Margot, drawling and moving his lips muscularly—“that at this point something very important happens, Bob. Because what starts out to be a rape, an act of violence which comes from his own—how do you say, being caught—”
    â€œTrapped,” said Margot, pulling back slightly from Jacoby’s face.
    â€œYes! Trapped by being a sharecropper and so hitting out at those people, his—”
    â€œOppressors.”
    â€œRight! But a moment occurs when all this disappears and the girl through her own femaleness, feminineness, what? turns this moment into something else, that is, a man and a woman—”
    â€œDon’t you mean, Jan,” said Margot, her eyes glowing, “that the girl with her own gift for tenderness and caring converts a moment of violence into a moment of love? Isn’t it a transformation of a political act by an erotic act?”
    â€œOh, Margot, you are right!” She made him happy. “Exactly. It is a transforming of the political into the erotic.”
    Merlin roused slightly. “It is true, I agree. Margot speaks of love. Very well. Love is great. Love conquers all. But here we are content with the erotic—this pair hardly know each other. But the point is that violence, rape or murder, or whatever, is always death-dealing whereas the erotic, in any form at all, is always life-enhancing.”
    â€œYes! That’s the nice swing, what you say, switch, don’t you see, Margot?” Jacoby turned his black eyes on her. “It is the aristocrat in this case who has the life-enhancing principle and not the sharecropper, as is usually the case, since he is usually shown as coming from the dirt.”
    â€œSoil,” said Margot.
    Was he from the Bronx or Brno?
    â€œYes, and even though she comes from racism, which is equally death-dealing since it is geno—”
    â€œGenocidal. Since a whole race is involved.”
    When Janos searched for a word, his eyes roamed past me, through me, to the dark corners of the room. I felt like an actor.
    â€œAnd the sharecropper is always wavering between the two, the life and death principle. The girl guides him toward life through the erotic. She is his Beatrice.” Bay-ah-tree-chay.
    What irritated me was that despite myself I wanted to be noticed by Janos Jacoby—why for God’s sake? for Margot’s sake? and found myself trying to think of something impressive like “cinematographic semiotics.” But when his eyes swept past me, through me, for the fifth time, I gave it up and decided to satisfy my own curiosity.
    So I asked him: “What about the scene between the sheriff and the black sharecropper’s daughter?”
    â€œEh?” Jacoby swung around as if to locate the origin of this unfamiliar voice. “Ah. I am not sure I know what you mean, ah—what about it?” I swear I don’t think he knew my name.
    â€œWell, he is both erotic and racist and therefore both life-enhancing and death-dealing. Having had intercourse with her, which was by no means rape, where does that leave him, canceled out so to speak, half bad half good, back at zero?”
    Silence. Jacoby and Merlin looked at each other. Margot, between them, blushed. Was she blushing for me?
    Jacoby sighed and shook his head. Merlin undertook to explain. “Wouldn’t you agree, Lance, that there is such a thing as a sexist violent eroticism which is quite as exploitative as rape itself?”
    â€œNo. I don’t understand that.”
    Again silence. Eyes averted. It was as if there was a turd, somehow mine, on the snowy tablecloth between us.
    â€œDarling, what you don’t realize,” said Margot, blushing and