- Introduction to the Prologue -

Ancestor Morandi

1.

Edwin, Norton, and America will soon get all of the light. But our story has a story, that begins when a poor small guy from Ligury - my Ancestor Morandi - discovers cinema in a fair. What follows is all detours and destiny.

We called him “the Ancestor”, “the one from Genova”. He started from nothing, at the end of the century, two centuries ago. We don’t have photos anymore, no relics. I imagine him small, brown-haired, green-eyed. He lived in Liguria where he was born.

Evening had fallen on a small seaside town, and the projectors covered the stars. People grouped together like grapes around the great screen extended by the carnies. With great big rhythmic sighs, a moustached gentleman started to crank his Défileur Carpentier-Lumière. As soon as the film ended my Ancestor was pulling on the fat man’s sleeve, asking a hundred questions. Years passed. He took the “cinematographe” from fair to fair himself, warming up his hand each night on the crank’s black lacquer. The more he projected under the sky, forced to pull everything at the first sign of a storm, the more he dreamed about the gold of the theaters. Those had also started outdoors. The idea came to him on a rainy day. He would install his machine in dark, quiet rooms, removed from the world, filled with velvet chairs. Families come in first. We pack the kids together on the front row. They almost lay down to see better. The pianist begins. People feel the music jumping out from the screen. Hidden behind the projection’s triangle of light, the Ancestor watches the whole room react in waves. We laugh. We cry. In those times, there was a church in each town a church - there would be a cinema. The Ancestor made his first one in Nizza, a town that for the last thirty years learned the new name of ‘Nice’. Then he extended in the french South, married into wealth, and became a fixture of the Salons in Paris. In a few years, he forgot everything about our small rocky bays, and the sea, and the celebrations at the start of summer.

But his ambition did not end with the cinemas. Having used up too many reels from the Lumière Brothers and Méliès’s magical theater, he started to dream about showing something new. It was the kid in him. The bright eyes, the dreams, the night. “A true drama”, he would say, “an adventure”, “with a great big heart”. And because he was rich, they would let him speak, but nobody really understood. Then, more and more, he talked about America. He read, took notes, scoured the papers, learned English. One morning, his secretary found his desk empty, orders for two months, and this telegram-like note : Be Back Soon.

At Le Havre port, the Ancestor boards.

He knows only the Mediterranean. Now he discovers the real Atlantic tempest, the ocean dismantled in sheets of steel, the horizon suddenly cleaned by the storm … in between two bouts of seasickness, swaying on the waves, the Ancestor suddenly catches the light of this country of legend he dreamt about as a poor child. The adults would talk about it after dinner. The generous land of a thousand Italies, of danger, of conquest, of new heroes, ten new towns a week, a world in growth, with meat and cakes everywhere, and steam-powered ships … At dawn, a brass bell rings : New-York appears like a green flash in the Sun. He discovers the city for a whole week and, drunk, understanding he could spend a whole year there, he decides to drink the whole country in one gulp : he boards the Transcontinental in third class, and races with leaps of steel towards Hollywood and California.

He speaks to everyone - that’s his method - for it is in the third class of all countries that one mines adventure, dreams and rumors. His Milan fur and his Zurich watch get stolen - no matter, that is the price. He writes everything he hears in the notebook he keeps near the heart - that’s what he has always done, and the secret of his success, that’s how he found the location for his first cinema, and how he remembered the first poem whispered to his wife. Through the window, blue deserts under stars succeed to great green valleys. This world is immense, and the stubborn horizon keeps retreating.

One evening, a cabin mate - a young pastor wearing a wooden cross and a shabby suit - suddenly confides in him. As the train slithers under the first stars, he tells, with feverish eyes, the tale of this father who abandoned his mother to become a prospector, in San Francisco. It was before the fire that had burned down the entire city, a few years prior. Trembling, the boy, half-lit by the Moon window side, describes the fire of Divine Judgement striking the sinners, the greedy raping the Earth looking for God’s Gold, and he raises his hands and preaches.

- That is where I go, he says. My father … my father, if he has not perished in the fire, I will bring him to his knees in my Church.

The Ancestor softly giggled, scratching down his notebook’s paper. So it was true, this country is filled with madmen, drama, and everything that deserves to be shown in a cinema - and he felt that his pen was a pickaxe striking at a gold-filled hill.

- San Francisco. This train stops there?

- Change at the next station. In the morning.

- I may. I may.

The Ancestor is undecided. Hollywood’s the destination. That’s where he has meetings, before the planned, the necessary return trip … but a fire, gold, the excitement of the Rush … so he goes to the wagon’s railing for a smoke.

There, he meets another cabin mate. This one had spent the whole trip looking at the landscape in silence. His clear half-moon eyes seemed made for the world to roll through. The Ancestor would have talked to him, as he had an air of mystery and kindness. But all his time had been taken up by madness, noise and theft. And so he burst out laughing, when he heard the Italian accent in their courteous greeting.

Gaetano seemed to shine in the small light of the oil lamp. Some men are friends only because they run into each other, one night, in the midway of their life’s path, never to meet again. The smile of Gaetano was sweet. He was among those who heal. He had the hands of a craftsman, but the light voice of an intellectual who prays when he is alone, who knows the secrets of the sea, and gets lost in a flower.

- Fellow countryman, Morandi says with delight, where do you come from, and what business have you here among those mad men ? Talking with the inflexions of a rich man from the north, Morandi felt strangely off. He turned to hide a bit the cane he had brought along out of habit, and in case it got stolen in the wagon.

Gaetano laughed in echoes, and told his story. He hailed from Sicily. He was not looking for a story, but it is also a curious, dreaming heart that had brought him to America. He had read news of this train. He knew that the price of a third class ticket would offer the chariot of the gods to the most miserable man, the whole New World unfolding itself from East to West, something that all the kings of the past could not have paid for. Gaetano loved his fellow men and the world. He wanted more than his island. He worked in Rome for a year, and crossed over. Since then, he went from one ocean to the other, working just enough for the next ticket. The Ancestor asked his question.

- San Francisco ? Gaetano answered. Yes, for your business it’s best, no doubt. There is a lot to see there. Almost too much.

The Sicilian gave a faint smile. His eyes got lost in an image.

- Take a guide. Believe me. I know one. A woman. Aha, yes, I think, yes, I think … Lilly. That’s the name you need. Ask for her at the reception of your hotel. She’ll show you the San Francisco from before the fire. Follow her. Whatever happens. And above all, you cannot not trust her. She would take it badly.

This ominous advice, Morandi took as his decision. To thank him, he gave Gaetano a cigarette from the country “the best ones”. They talked for a long time, about films and women, the country and God, until a first Sun-less light softly drew the hills of California.

Morandi took his leave, shaking in the smoke and the night’s numbness. His cold hand struggled to open the brass door. Gaetano came close, to help him.

- Lilly. Remember well. For your story.

Then he smiled, and went back to the railing, to watch the world.

A few hours later, before he got off the train, Morandi looked for Gaetano in vain. He must have seen something shine on the horizon, this mad Sicilian, and must have jumped off the train looking for it,somewhere beyond the veil, when men must always go alone.

2.

Morandi trotts after Lilly along a cliff opened on the Pacific. Nothing had gone as planned. She had appeared in the lobby of the hotel, beautiful and strict in her golden curls. She was already gone, when he was still bowing deep, as did the Three Wise Men in one Méliès fantasy. Since then he had been following her , with his luxury cane, and his short legs, like a kid who found a good stick.

She ignores his questions. Still he spends his breath. He wants to talk about the Gold Rush. He can picture it already, this scene of the prospector turned millionaire, torn between the prostitute he still loves, and who's in danger, and his gold he sees melting at the hands of the Vilain. He tries to tell the story to her - to please her - and she does not listen. She keeps her breath to climb this steep wild path along tall cricket-heavy grass. They're far from town now, and this cliff, this Ocean, this path, everything is like a bigger Liguria.

They come to a stop. Two pear trees joined at their tops give a bit of shade to what seems, at first, through the heatwave, to be a faint young tree.

But it's a tomb.

"Please - what ? - a dead man now ? Where are we ?"

This is what Morandi would have said, had he not remembered Gaetano's advice. Fortunately for him, he said nothing to this woman whose stern look was only hidden frailty.

Morandi wipes off the sweat from his eyes.

The seaside wind beat through the dry grass in a spiral, around a cross of oak eroded by salt.

Some unknown name was carved on a small panel of clearer wood :

JOSHUA NORTON

Followed by this dedication :

IN THE MEMORY

OF HIS MAJESTY

HIS PEOPLE

LAMENTING

- That's him.

Again, Morandi, what he does not say :

“Well what ?! Him who ?! Who is he ?!”

But he says nothing. Lilly kneels in the grass, and prays in front of the rudimentary cross.

The Ancestor dares a question, and his breathless voice betrays his impatience :

- Who's that ?

He had barely read the inscription. Drops of sweat kept dripping in his eyes. He didn't like silence. He was wandering through the hills because a soft-voiced Sicilian had served him up to an angry American woman. He felt like he was going from hands to hands like a cumbersome child.

Hearing the question, Lilly showed Morandi her profile, by turning her blue stare towards the Sun sinking in the bay. She must have been around 40 but still looked like a young girl.

- The best man who ever was.

At that Morandi could not suppress a nervous fit of laughter. If they had been closer to San Francisco, Lilly would have abandoned him there and then. But they were far up into the hills, the town could not be seen, and the final step of their journey already appeared at the end of the path, right near the edge. Thus Lilly had to forgive the Italian heretic. "They do not know what they do, " said Norton so often, "those damn fools" he added.

There she was already disappearing under the pear-trees.

Whispering ligurian swear words under his breath, Morandi follows.

An obvious reason why - her beauty.

They climb up along the cliff. The Ancestor helps himself with his luxury cane. It gets stuck in between two stones and, because it’s made to hit the parisian pavement, it breaks. At the top of the path, they come to an almost flat plateau, extending as far as the eye could see. It was like a wheat field opened on the Pacific. There was a small cabin in the center, right where the sky meets the sea. a garden of herbs bursting out with red and blue flowers framed the door. Lilly, suddenly gay, now almost adds jumps to her step, and the Ancestor follows, his eyes filled with Sun and sweat.

She opens the door. The interior is poor and dark. A desk, still covered in large sheets. A bed in the back, barely enough for one, two straw chairs, a table clothed with a tartan scarf and, on the wall, an old rusty bicycle.

The Ancestor first stops at the threshold. Milano, Paris, Rome ... and now, like a schoolboy, he was following this sweet woman strangely obsessed by a dead man. Was this Joshua Norton her father ? The bicycle was a relic from other times. The setting was beautiful, true. But the decor was lacking, and there was still no drama to speak of. A story is a promise, Morandi thought. And that promise - "the best man who ever was" was at once too big - too impressive - and too small - not attractive enough. The Ancestor knew the crowds : they were drawn by the worst, not by the best. Dante is known for his Inferno - whoo remembers his Paradise ? This golden and blue plateau did look like heaven - beautiful, quiet, and without a story.

But right there, at the fateful moment of his doubt, when he is about to turn away from Lilly, from Gaetano, the promise, he feels in himself something like a hand that tightens - somewhere near his heart. He has already seen this cabin. It's the one from his childhood. Poor and clear, everything in its place, in front of the sea. It seemed that the ghost of Norton still erred among these walls like a grey floating haze, waiting to be greeted. The American, the Ligurian ... for the sake of superstition, of this old maritime dignity, Morandi had to stay. The fur, the watch, the cane … all of this had weighed so much on him. Here is the child of Ventimiglia staring at him with eyes black. Did you have to go all the way to San Francisco to go back to your cabin by the sea ? Even then, you will run away chasing your cinema, disgraziato ? ‘All right, all right, I’ll stick around, whispers Morandi to the hundred invisible family ghosts that were pressing around the sunlit cabin.

And then there was Lilly. There is the mask, and there's the essence. Lilly was flooding the still dark room with sadness, care and restlessness. Morandi, even as filthy rich as he was, kept a child's heart and could see her. Gaetano had not been a character in a dream. All of this was true, and going somewhere.

Finally there was the tomb.

"Majesty ..."

At this thought, like a cymbal struck, the blinds are suddenly opened by a gust of wind. The shadows hiss as they escape, and the Pacific enters, infinite, with the Sun on a leash. And my Ancestor feels his heart beat in echoes.

He has heard this voice once. Like a warmth and a sign. She had been there for his first film at the fair, under the stars, near the bay, and when he had met my great-great-grandmother, on the path near Eze castle. That was it. The feeling of striking into a thread of gold.

Majesty, said the tomb. Majesty, say the sky and the sea, and this simple cabin where Diogenes, where Saint-Francis could have lived, in front of this single window opened on God.

And so Morandi retrieves at last a bit of the instinct he had as a child.. He pulls a chair. The straw cracks when he sits down. He turns to Lilly and asks the question she burns to hear. At last ... but the mask had to be broken to get to the goodness.

- Miss. Lilly. Tell me. Please. Who was he ?

A weight leaves her shoulders. A stiffness leaves her back. She sighs. For who can bear the weight of time. To deliver her, the stranger had to show the first sign of humanity, and to turn red, as he turned red asking his question. If he had not turned red, in a sense, all this story, with its thousand prologues, would not exist.

Norton had told her, a long time ago :

- Don’t give your heart to vilains, buddy …

“Buddy …”

Lilly sits on the bed. She speaks.

Four, five, six hours, she tells all of the life of Joshua Norton, her friend. At the end of the tale my ancestor declares, solemn, that Joshua Norton was in fact, no doubt, "the best man there ever was."

- At least in your country, he added. For we have Garibaldi.

But it was not the tale of this life that paid Morandi of his journey. Not exactly. He now looks at Lilly as if she was hiding some secret treasure behind her blue eyes.

- The man Norton saved in the chinese quarter, the actor. Tell me his name again.

- Edwin Forrest ?

- Yes, that's it. That’s it. Yes.

He sits.

- Tell me again how they met. In detail.

- I … I don’t know. I only saw him for a day. I don’t remember. It was a morning. I was so happy to hear Norton’s voice, I ran to my window. He had flowers with him. You know that Norton, every morning, that Spring …

- Sorry, interrupts the Ancestor, tell me again. This Edwin Forrest. Was he famous ?

- Well of course. He was the most famous. He was in the papers, answered Lilly with surprise, as if the name of Edwin Forrest was to theater what that of Napoleon was to war.

- … extraordinary …

The story he glimpsed had a secret heart, a cross, a Sun : it was Norton. But its visible center had changed. There was this Edwin Forrest. Un man of fire, a double man, a man torn apart, a man of the stage, the first maybe from this New World, itself the greatest stage ever dreamt … Morandi’s thoughts, as when he was a child, were a bit too quick-fire for his own good. He was looking for the right story, like a water diviner looking for a source, and his divining rod trembled. Hidden behind his clasped hands, he whispers in Italian :

- … Two men, so alike in their folly … so different in their state. East. West. Edwin’s quest, simple, pure : to get better, and to go home. Then the light touches : the bicycle, the paralysis … a good story takes place at the center of a hundred others, and these two men had crossed at the fatal point, between life and death. And all this country pressed behind them like a procession of ghosts and wisps.

He smiles now.

- … Then they part ways forever. Miss !

She’s startled.

- Do you go to the cinematograph ?!

The poor woman only wanted to talk about her old friend. But she admired the passion of the strange little gentleman in his exceedingly warm flannels. She stands up and, without him noticing, all absorbed in his film, she opens the dusty drawers of the desk, and takes there a wad of large sheets of paper, covered in a handwriting full of loops. She drops it on his knees, where it lands at the title page :

SOUVENIRS OF THE LIFE OF EDWIN FORREST,

FOR HIS GLORY IN ALL OUR LANDS,

AND FOR ALL TIME

Strange title that we will soon understand.

- That’s all I have, she whispers. I never read it. I don’t know why. Don't ask !

Morandi stares at her, aghast. She has gone back to the lioness air that fits her so badly.

She sits heavily on the bed, sinks in the big cushion, and watches Morandi greedily decipher the pages. She smiles, softly. It’s twilight and the Sun is waning. The night will be sacred.

The Ancestor thanks her with his eyes - his little lord air having sank to the bottom of the Pacific - and dives into Edwin’s life. A candle lights the page. There it reveals, line after line, page after page, a chunk of diamond under the vein of gold. The Ancestor is overcome with splendor. This is what he was looking for.

At the end of the last page the night was deep. Through the half-opened blind, the Ancestor watches the stars roll in the waves. Lilly was asleep. Peaceful at last, she looked like the little girl whose story he had just read - for she too was in those pages. In there, she was ‘the key of everything, the little spark’, wrote Norton.

He does not take the pages. He does not wake up Lilly. He goes out to watch the dawn gradually lighting up the bay. The salty wind mixed with the dew, and with the calming scent of sage.

“I could have cried”, he wrote later to his grand-daughter.

“I had gone on such a trip for a story, not knowing what I would find. I found it at last. And it was too big for me. This one needed far more than a few images and an air of piano. Or we would need a thousand reels put together, all the sundays of the year, the work of ten editors ... And I stood there, watching the morning, while projecting in me the film of Edwin, Kate and Jack, the West, the Astor, the death of the Captain and Norton, Joshua Norton, the best of all men. His rosemaries grew just near. They dried in the Sun. Their perfume suddenly brought me back to the hidden beach of Ventimiglia. It was time."

The Ancestor tucks Lilly in and leaves, on the desk, a signed check allowing her, if needed, to buy the cabin and this piece of the hills ten times over. He leaves a thank you note.

He goes down the path freely.

Through the windows of the Transcontinental and Transatlantic, he watches the world unfold.

The Ancestors bought things. He bought cinemas, brasseries and houses, from Nice to Montpellier. The years passed. Then the Ancestor ran into History again, and into an occasion to prove his honour.

In those days, the Russian crown had a few difficulties, and started to emit bonds. The French state guaranteed to his richest men the investment on those bonds. The Ancestor bought some, and advised his friends to follow suit. What could be more solid than a state guaranteed by another ? But 1917 came. The Tsar and his family massacred, France did not guarantee anything anymore. The Ancestor lost a bit of money. But he insisted on repaying his friends' losses, and thus lost his fortune and his friends.

He had nothing left, except for his wife’s house, in Fabrègues, of which we have only half a quarter today. There he planted the bamboos and the linden. The verbenas and the olive trees. That’s where the child of Liguria ended, close to the young trees, under the shadow of this great blue cedar he had transplanted from Lebanon at the time of his fortune. We say he spent his days on a wicker chair. We say he “made up movies”, dreaming of an infinite cinematograph. We say he became “blind out of sadness”.

But I don’t think so. I, for one, think he orchestrated his ruin. That he saw in the repudiation of this debt an occasion to bow out and run, and finally escape, without bad feelings, the soft dominion of money, and of these ‘friends’ so unlike himself. There, I see the golden epaulettes of our friend Norton shine. "A ruin is an opportunity", he said to Edwin in those pages, "for a broken heart, an opened heart".

In those days, the Ancestor started to write many letters to his beloved granddaughter, my great grandmother, who loved me very much, and told me those stories in turn. She grew up through the war and French communism and told with nostalgia, as if it was a fairy tale, the “American Story”. She spoke of her grandfather, “who gave us everything". I know he would fall asleep sometimes, an unfinished letter on the belly, under the linden tree. One always dreams under a linden tree. Was it his America he dreamed, and Lilly asleep in her golden curls, and the golden stripes on His Majesty Norton’s uniform, and the red armor of Edwin Forrest ? Or was it his family’s future destiny, and the life of his granddaughter he would never see as a woman ? Maybe he dreamt about a man asleep under a linden tree in a garden lined with beautiful white stone walls, who dreams.

Over time he did lose his eyes. Then, he had nothing but vision. Everything around him must have been like a silver screen, or like water. In those final days, he would not write, but spent all his time telling stories. His granddaughter listened, and took notes, in a notebook on one lap.

We lost the letters she did not copy in that notebook, that she passed on to me near the very end. It was a tight, cursive handwriting, in Italian, which I could barely decipher. It was the memory of a tale, of a book, of a tale, of an entire life.

Everything came to me thus, from Ancient Times, as a book of unfinished fragments. For years, I gathered new information here and there, about old America, about theater, about Edwin. Then I dedicated myself to it fully, digging every archive, visiting everything, New-York, San Francisco, going everywhere, searching for everything, gathering everything. For I was given, out of random chance, a treasure - gold and diamond maybe, as had dreamt Morandi - but flame, life, love - as he had discovered. And all of this wants telling.

At four years old, going to the cinema for the first time - it was The Iron Giant at the Grand Rex - I believed we were entering my Ancestor’s palace, occupied for a time by strangers. For he had made cinema, and all films.

And in those pages of mine, a century later, I would like to put the thousand reels, the piano, Lilly’s emotion, and the blind tales of my Ancestor - and then something more, that happens only in books. God wills that … ah - enough now, we’re late already :

To tell this story well, we must begin on a cold winter night, in Saratoga.