Sometimes another kind of relative joined the family of traveling salesmen: people seeking free travel.
Within this group, there were two classes: idealists who believed in the kindness of strangers, and stingy individuals who were prepared to talk for the whole trip to save what the fare would have cost.
I never managed to classify E as belonging to either category, so I decided to position him halfway between.
E’s job was to screen films at the university cinema.
As well as screening them, he sourced them, and he was responsible for opening and closing the cinema too. His fifth duty consisted in charging a fee that most filmgoers didn’t pay. This didn’t bother E, as his aim wasn’t to turn a profit (the business wasn’t his), but to have others watch the film so he would have someone to talk to about it afterward.
And it was thanks to 2001: A Space Odyssey that D and E met. D was not really a film buff, but sometimes he “needed” to see a film. That’s how he explained it. Generally, the films he “needed” to see were about detectives or boxers. But that day, on seeing the image of the spaceship orbiting the moon, which is the opening of Kubrick’s film, he had an epiphany: he, not the machine, was orbiting the earth. And, seen from above, the earth was a speck, a tack like all the others, lost in that great timber structure that was the dawn of time. Due to a distancing effect, everything was condemned to disappear. To disconnect. To keep hurtling headlong toward who knows where.
They watched the film three times in a row. That was the other advantage of E’s cinema. If the viewers wanted to watch the film again, E could start it over. It wasn’t for nothing that E was the operator; within that bastion of uncomfortable chairs, things were done his way.
After E closed the cinema for the day, they went to a bar. And, though it was always best not to talk about politics, they talked. And since they were on that topic, they touched on religion too.
On arriving at that place of trust and transcendence, D told E about Kramp products, and E told D that his true passion wasn’t film but black-and-white photography.
When they were on their third bottle of wine, E said that there was a town that he wanted to photograph in particular, a ghost town, which was located on the route that D’s Renault (which, when viewed from the moon, was a speck that looked like it had come to a standstill along a straight line) took every week.