My mother and my aunt took me to Zaragoza when I was very young to pass me under the mantle of the Virgin of the Pillar, but the only thing they achieved was that I kissed from behind the altar’s retablo the column that supports the image, where millions of kisses had preceded me until leaving a deep notch in the marble. As a reward for my good behavior during the trip, after my insistence on the verge of tears, I managed to spend the waiting time for the departure of the sheep train back to Valencia watching the white movie, suitable for all audiences, titled The Lost Angels, which was showing at the Argensola cinema, in which Montgomery Clift played a Yankee soldier who saved a child lost among the rubble of postwar Berlin to return him to civilization as a metaphor for peace. It’s not that I was a very sharp boy, but in that movie the hypnotic gaze of this actor caught my attention, who could express hatred and tenderness, anguish and joy with a magnetic flicker of his gray eyes without speaking.
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From a terrace of a house in the village, you could see half the screen of the summer cinema located in the ruined garden of a thermal spa. I was still a teenager when, crouched there in the darkness of the night under the stars, I saw half the movie A Place in the Sun. I remember the scene where Montgomery Clift, escaped from a party held in the halls of a great businessman’s mansion, where he felt like an outsider, had taken refuge in a billiard room and Liz Taylor, the magnate’s daughter, followed him there to establish a courtship of seduction. Both actors, she with a glass in hand, he performing caroms with the cue, circled the billiard table and sometimes one of them disappeared from the half screen and his image was lost in the darkness and only his voice remained in the night air. This seduction led the protagonist to commit a crime that took him to the gas chamber. I have not been able to forget the way Monty fixed his eyes on his wife, Shelley Winters, before killing her.
The fact that I could only see half the screen forced me to imagine what was happening on the other half. That’s how I learned that the best thing in life is that which belongs only to you and is not seen. That’s how I managed to reconstruct the full slap Glenn Ford gave to Gilda and the morbid striptease that Rita Hayworth performed by removing only one glove. That’s how I saw Esther Williams dive in Bathing Beauty into a pool that didn’t exist. On the other hand, from the bed on those summer nights I recognized the dubbed voices of the actors perfectly, I knew what was happening to Gregory Peck with Audrey Hepburn in Rome or the problems of Bogart with Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca; I made sense of those moans, shootings, voices, screams. I knew the protagonists were kissing on the mouth by the howls of the audience, whose intensity was proportional to the duration and depth. Among all, Monty was my favorite actor, at that time he was the one competing for first place with Marlon Brando. In Hollywood, when the girls gathered at a meeting, they felt a double attraction: Brando exuded an animal magnetism, but Monty only needed to look.
At those moments when a boy dreams lying on his back with his hands behind his neck about what he will be when he grows up, I imagined if I would be willing to give everything in exchange for one day wearing a tuxedo as well as Montgomery Clift when in the movie The Heiress he waits for Olivia de Havilland at the foot of the stairs, or could play that silent trumpet note as he did in From Here to Eternity. It was in Malibu, leaving a party at Liz Taylor’s mansion, this time a real party with all her friends, in the early hours of May 12, 1956, when the car accident that broke his face and extinguished Monty’s gaze occurred. He was at the peak. At first, he consoled himself thinking that all the gods taken from the ruins had broken noses, split mouths, shattered jaws. And they were still gods. It was not so in this case. Soon came the drugs, the nembutal, the alcohol, the abyss, the hell. A plastic surgeon operated on his face during several sessions to restore his soul. I always thought his soul was lost among the rubble of postwar Berlin that I saw after kissing the Virgin of the Pillar or in that billiard room where he let himself be courted by Liz Taylor that I saw with only half a screen. Somewhere in my subconscious Montgomery Clift must have left an indelible mark of that gaze with which he could express all the convulsions of the spirit.
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