The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(155)

But apparently, before that, the mysterious hand of fate had made another appointment for me, with something very special from my past. And it happened at a cinema.

Yes, Bertie, you heard right. It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which cinema will develop from the moment the Lumière brothers first projected images of workers leaving their factory at Lyon Monplaisir. No one in your time had any inkling of the enormous potential of their invention.

However, once the novelty wears off, people will soon tire of images of men playing cards, scampering children, and trains pulling in to stations—everyday things they can see, from their windows and with sound—and they will want something more than dull social documentaries accompanied by the absent tinkle of a piano. That is why the projector now tells a story on the empty screen. To give you an idea, imagine one of them filming a play that does not have to take place on a stage raised in front of rows of seats, but can use anywhere in the world as its setting. And if in addition I tell you that the director can narrate the story using not just a handful of painted backdrops but a whole arsenal of techniques, such as making people vanish in front of our eyes by means of manipulating images, you will understand why the cinema has become the most popular form of entertainment in the future, far more so than music hall. Yes, nowadays an even more sophisticated version of the Lumière brothers” machine makes the world dream, bringing magic into their lives, and an entire industry commanding enormous sums of money has grown up around it.

However, I am not telling you all this for pure pleasure, but because sometimes these cinema stories are taken from books. And this is the surprise, Bertie: in 1960, a director named George Pal will turn your novel The Time Machine into a film. Yes, he will put images to your words. They had already done this with Verne, of course, but that in no way diminished my joy. How can I describe what I felt when I saw the story you had written take place on screen? There was your inventor, whom they had named after you, played by an actor with a determined, dreamy expression, and there, too, was sweet Weena, played by a beautiful French actress whose face radiated a hypnotic calm, and the Morlocks, more terrifying than you could ever have imagined, and the colossal sphinx, and dependable, no-nonsense Filby, and even Mrs. Watchett, with her spotless white apron and cap. And as one scene succeeded another, I trembled with emotion in my seat at the thought that none of this would have been possible if you had not imagined it, that somehow this feast of images had previously been projected inside your head. I confess that, at some point, I looked away from the screen and studied the faces of the people sitting near me. I imagine you would have done the same, Bertie. I know more than once you wished you had that freedom, for I still remember how downcast you felt when a reader told you how much they had enjoyed your novel, without you being able to see for yourself how they had responded to this or that passage, or whether they had laughed or wept in the proper places, because in order to do so you would have had to steal into their libraries like a common thief. You may rest assured: the audience responded exactly as you had hoped. But we must not take the credit away from Mr. Pal, who captured the spirit of your novel brilliantly. Although I will not try to hide the fact that he changed a few things in order to adapt it to the times, essentially because the film was made sixty-five years after the book was written and part of what for you was the future had already become the past. Remember, for example, that despite your concern over the ways man might use science, it never even occurred to you that he might become embroiled in a war that would engulf the entire planet. Well, he did, not once but twice, as I have already told you. Pal made your inventor witness not only the First and Second World Wars, he even predicted a third in 1966, although fortunately in that case his pessimism proved unfounded.

As I told you, the feelings I experienced in that cinema, hypnotized by the swirling images that owed so much to you, is beyond words. This was something you had written, yes, and yet everything that appeared on the screen was unfamiliar to me, everything that is except the time machine, your time machine, Bertie. You cannot imagine how surprised I was to see it there. For a moment I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. But no, it was your machine, gleaming and beautiful, with its graceful curves, like a musical instrument, betraying the hand of a skilled craftsman, exuding an elegance the machines in the period I had been cast adrift in had lost. But how had it ended up there, and where could it be now, twenty years after the actor called Rod Taylor who played you first climbed out of it? After several weeks spent scouring the newspapers at the library, I managed to trace its eventful journey. I discovered that Jane had not wanted to part with it and had taken it with her to London, to the house of Evans, the lawyer, who would contemplate with resignation the intrusion into his home of the absurd, seemingly useless piece of junk, which, to cap it all, was a symbol to his new wife of her vanished husband. I pictured him unable to sleep at nights, circling the machine, pressing the fake buttons and moving the glass lever to satisfy himself it did not work, and wondering what mystery was contained in this object his wife referred to as the time machine, and why the devil it had been built, for I was sure Jane would have explained nothing to him, considering the machine part of a private world Evans the lawyer had no business knowing about. When, many years later, George Pal began preparations for his film, he ran into a problem: he did not find any of the designs his people had come up with for the time machine convincing. They were clunky, grotesque, and overelaborate. None of the models bore any resemblance to the elegant, stately vehicle in which he envisaged the inventor traveling across the vast plains of time. That is why it seemed to him nothing short of a miracle when a woman named Selma Evans, close to bankruptcy after squandering the small fortune she had inherited from her parents, offered to sell him the strange object her mother had dusted every Sunday in a languid, ceremonious manner that made little Selma’s hair stand on end almost as much as it did that of Evans the lawyer. Pal was stunned: this was exactly what he had been looking for.