“I knew these people, these two people,” starts Travis, the main speaker in this short story told in the form of a dialogue. “The girl was very young, about seventeen or eighteen, I guess. And the guy was quite a bit older. He was kind of raggedy and wild. And she was very beautiful, you know?”
The other speaker doesn’t say very much, just an interjection or two, mainly at the start. It sounds like the man is telling her about two characters from the past. But by the end of the story, we can see what she, too, gradually understands – “I thought I recognized your voice for a minute” – that this story is about a woman and a man, and it’s now being told by that same man, to the very woman who features in it. He’s talking about them, their shared (disastrous) history, how he understands it now.
It’s a crushing piece of story-telling (admittedly in the film it is consummately delivered by actors Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski, with Ry Cooder on guitar), touching on the gap between how we first understand ourselves, and how we look back; about failure of love, about dreams and the limits of language; about loss. The narrative starts with the factual and historical, but turns sad, then horrific, then dream-like – she dreamed of escaping, Travis recounts, while he wanted to be far away, “Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language or streets.”
It ends, in a way, inconclusively. But what story doesn’t? You can’t include everything in one text. And then it crumbles and decays (as Shelley’s desert traveller suggests); everything will have disappeared, except a fragment or a figment.
I close with this speech because it does so beautifully the thing I’m interested in throughout this selection: it’s by telling a story about somebody else that they both come to understand that it has actually been about them all along. The short story isn’t about someone else, or, it is, but it plays tricks, moves person, time, and place, so that by the time we’ve got back to the end, it’s also about someone different: you. And you’re not quite the same as you were at the start.
I met someone, they told me a story, and now I can’t get it out of my head. It was already in there.
First screened as part of Paris, Texas [dir. W. Wenders], 1984. First published in Paris, Texas: Screenplay Ecco Press, 1991. There’s a pdf of the working script here, pp. 175-180
A Personal Anthology 