Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Jeff: Give him time.
Kathie: You are taking me back.
Jeff: There’s no hurry.
Kathie: I could have run away last night.
Jeff: I’d find you.
Kathie: Yes, I believe you would. You’re glad you did?
Jeff: I don’t know.
Kathie: I am.
Jeff: There was a little business, about forty thousand dollars.
Kathie: I didn’t take it.
Jeff: How did you know it was taken?
Kathie: It’s what you meant. I don’t want anything of his or any part of him.
Jeff: Except his life.
Therefore, the status of this fragmented tale is suggested not only by the image
(ambiguous reality), but also by the clipped dialogues which seem to become more
portentous as their relationship evolves. She only comes out to him at night when she
“walked out of the moonlight smiling”, with beautiful views of the bay of San Francisco
sparkling in Musuraca’s splendid contrastive photography. Their meetings follow, and Jeff
gradually seems to accept his fate and even embraces it, both physically and spiritually, in
a trance-like situation:
I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left of the day
went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked. I didn’t know where she lived. I
never followed her. All I ever had to go on was a place and time to see her again. I
don’t know what we were waiting for. Maybe we thought the world would end.
Maybe we thought it was a dream and we’d wake up with a hangover in Niagara
Falls. I wired Whit but I didn’t tell him. “I’m in Acapulco,” I said. “I wish you were
here”. And every night I went to meet her. How did I know she’d ever show up? I
didn’t. What stopped her from taking a boat to Chile or Guatemala? Nothing. How
big a chump can you get to be? I was finding out. And then she’d come along like
school was out, and everything else was just a stone which sailed at the sea.
“We seemed to live by night” certainly conjures up the perfect romantic noir mood
for these two (and other) protagonists, reminiscent of the refrain which is repeated in Ray’s
In a Lonely Place (1951): “I died when she left me; I lived a few weeks while she loved
me”. Caught in an abrupt evening rain shower, she invites him for the first time to her
cabin where a single lamp, photographed from a low angle, sends out enormous shadows
behind them: “It was a nice little joint with bamboo furniture and Mexican gimcracks. One
little lamp burned. It was all right. And the rain hammering like that on the window made
it good to be in there.” As the light blows over, the room sinks into a shadowy darkness
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