1. In those days it was hard to know. You go to the movies or the theater and live your night without thinking about the people who have already gone through the same ceremony, choosing the place and the time, getting dressed and telephoning and row eleven or five, the darkness and the music, territory that belongs to nobody and to everybody there where everybody is nobody, the men or women iii their seats, maybe a word of apology for arriving late, a murmured comment that someone picks up or ignores, almost always silence, looks pouring onto the stage or the screen, fleeing from what's beside them, from what's on this side. It was really hard to know that there were so many of us-beyond the ads, the endless lines, the posters, and the reviews-so many who loved Glenda.

2. It took. three or four years, and it would not be bold to assert that the nucleus had its start with Irazusta or Diana Rivero; they themselves didn't know how at some moment, over drinks with friends after the movies, things were said or left unsaid that suddenly would form the alliance, what afterward we all called the nucleus and the younger ones the club. There was nothing of a club about it, we simply loved Glenda Garson, and that was enough to set us apart from those who only admired her. Just like them, we admired Glenda too, and also Anouk, Marilyn, Annie, Silvana, and why not Marcello, Yves, Vittorio, or Dirk, but only we loved Glenda so much, and the nucleus was formed because of that and out of that, it was something that only we knew, and we trusted in those who all during our conversations had shown little by little that they loved Glenda too.

3. Starting with Diana or Irazusta, the nucleus was slowly expanding. In the year of Snow Fire there couldn't have been more than six or seven of us; with the premiere of The Uses o f Elegance the nucleus broadened and we felt that it was growing at all almost unbearable rate and that we were threatened with snobbish imitation or seasonal sentimentality. 'The first, Irazusta and Diana and two or three more of us, decided to close ranks, not to admit anyone without a test, without an examination disguised under the whiskey and a show of erudition (so Buenos Aires, so London and Mexico, those midnight exams). At the time of the opening of Fragile Returns, we had to admit, melancholically triumphant, that there were many of us who loved Glenda. The chance meetings at the movies, the glances exchanged as we came out, that kind of lost look on the women and the painful silence of the men, showed us better than any insignia or password. Mechanics that defied investigation led us to the same downtown cafe, the isolated tables began to draw closer together, there was the gracious custom of ordering the same cocktail so as to lay aside any useless skirmishing, and finally looking each other in the eyes, there where Glenda's last image in the last scene of the last movie still breathed.

4. Twenty, maybe thirty, we never knew how many we had come to be, because sometimes Glenda would go on for months at one theater or was in two or three at the same time, and there was also that exceptional moment when she appeared onstage to play the young murderess in The Lunatics and her success broke the dikes and- created a momentary enthusiasm that we never accepted. By that time we already knew each other; a lot of us would visit each other to talk about Glenda. From the very beginning Irazusta seemed to exercise a tacit command that he had never asked for, and Diana Rivero played her slow chess game of acceptance and rejection that assured us a total authenticity without the risk of infiltrators or boobs. What had begun as a free association was now attaining the structure of a clan, and the casual inter rogations of early times had been succeeded by concrete questions, the stumbling scene in The Uses of Elegance, the final retort in Snow Fire, the second erotic scene in Fragile Returns. We loved Glenda so much that we couldn't tolerate parvenus, rowdy lesbians, erudite aestheticians. It was even (we'll never know how) taken for granted that we would go to the cafe on Fridays when a Glenda movie was playing downtown, and with the reruns in neighborhood. theaters we would let a week go by before getting together in order to give everybody the necessary time; like a rigorous regulation, the obligations were defined without error; not respecting them would have meant provoking Irazusta's contemptuous smile or that graciously horrible look with which Diana Rivero denounced and punished treason.

5. At that time the gatherings were only Glenda, her dazzling presence in every one of us, and we knew nothing of discrepancies, or misgivings. Only gradually, at first with a feeling of guilt, did some dare to let partial criticisms slip, disillusion or disappointment with an unfortunate scene, descents into the conventional or the predictable. We knew that Glenda wasn't responsible for the weaknesses that at certain moments clouded the splendid crystal of The Lash or the ending of You Never Know Why. We found out about other films by the directors, where the stories and the scripts came from, we were implacable with them because we were beginning to feel that our love for Glenda was going beyond the merely artistic terrain and that she alone was saved from what the rest did imperfectly. Diana was the first to talk about a mission; she did it in her tangential way, not stating outright what really counted for her. We saw the joy of a double whiskey, of a satisfied smile in her when we admitted openly that it was true, that we couldn't just stay like that, the movies and the cafe and loving Glenda so much.

6. Not even then were clear words spoken; we didn't need them. All that counted was Glenda's happiness in each one of us, and that happiness could only come from perfection. Suddenly the mistakes, the misses, became unbearable for us; we couldn't accept the way You Never Know Why ended, or that Snow Fire should include the infamous poker scene (in which Glenda didn't take part, but which in some way stained her like vomit-that expression of Nancy Phillips's) and the inadmissible arrival of the repentant son. As almost always, it was up to Irazusta to give a clear definition of the mission that awaited us, and that night we went home as if crushed by the responsibility we had just recognized and assumed, catching a glimpse at the same time of the happiness of a flawless future, of Glenda without blunders or betrayals.

7. Instinctively, the nucleus closed ranks, the task wouldn't allow for a ]lazy plurality. Irazusta spoke of the laboratory after it had already been set up in a country house in Recife de Lobos. We divided tip the tasks equitably among those who were to collect all the prints of Fragile Returns, chosen for its relatively few imperfections. No one had thought to raise the question of money; Irazusta had been Howard Hughes's partner in the Pichincha tin mines, an extremely simple mechanism put the necessary power in our hands, jets and connections and bribes. We didn't even have an office; Hagar Loss's computer programmed the tasks and the stages. Two months after Diana Rivero's remark the laboratory was all set up to replace the ineffective bird scene in Fragile Returns with a different one that gave Glenda back the perfect rhythm and the exact feeling of the dramatic action. The film was already several years old and its rerun oil international circuits didn't cause the slightest surprise; memory plays with its repositories and makes them accept their own permutations and variants, perhaps Glenda herself wouldn't have noticed the change but would have noticed, because we all had, the marvel of perfect coincidence with a memory washed clean of slag, precisely in tune with desire.

8. The mission was being accomplished without surcease; as soon as we felt sure that the laboratory was in working order we brought off the rescue of Snow Fire and The Prism: the other films entered into the process with the exact rhythm foreseen by Hagar Loss's personnel and the people in the laboratory. We had problems with The Uses o f Elegance because people in the oil-producing emirates owned copies for their personal enjoyment and extraordinary maneuvers and procedures were necessary in order to steal them (there's no reason to use any other word) and to steal them without their owners' noticing. The laboratory was functioning at a level of perfection that: had seemed unattainable to us at the start, even though we hadn't dared say so to Irazusta; curiously, the most. doubtful one had been Diana; but when Irazusta showed us You Never Know Why and we saw the real ending, we saw Glenda, who instead of going back to Romano's house, headed her car toward the cliff and destroyed us with her splendid, necessary fall into the torrent, we knew that there could be perfection in this world and that now it belonged to Glenda, to Glenda for us forever.

9. The most difficult part was, of course, deciding on the changes, the cuts, the modifications in montage and rhythm; our different ways of feeling Glenda brought on harsh confrontations that calmed down only after long analyses and in some cases the imposition of majority rule in the nucleus. But while some of us, defeated, watched the new version with bitterness over the fact that it wasn't completely up to our dreams, I don't think anyone was disappointed with the finislied work, we loved Glenda so much that the results were always justifiable, often beyond what had been foreseen. There were even a few scares, a letter from a reader of the inevitable Times of London showing surprise that three scenes in Snow Fire had been shown in a different order from how the writer thought lie remembered, and also an article in La Opinion protesting a supposed cut in The Prism, imagining the Band of bureaucratic prudishness. In every case rapid arrangements were made in order to avoid possible follow ups; it wasn't hard, people are fickle and forget or accept or are in search of what's new, the movie world is ephemeral, like the historical present, except for those of us who love Glenda so much.

10. Basically more dangerous were the arguments within the nucleus, risking schism or diaspora. Even though we felt more united than ever because of the mission, there were nights when analytical voices contaminated by political philosophies were raised, bringing up moral problems in the midst of the work, asking if we weren't surrendering to an onanistic hall of mirrors, foolishly carving a piece of baroque madness on an ivory tusk or a grain of rice. It wasn't easy to turn our backs on them because the nucleus had only been able to do its work in the way a heart or an airplane does: by maintaining a perfectly coherent rhythm. It wasn't easy to listen to criticism that accused us of escapism, that suspected a waste of strength that was being turned away from a more pressing reality, one that was more in need of agreement in the times we were living. And yet it wasn't necessary to crush summarily a heresy that was only hinted at, as even its protagonists limited themselves to a partial objection, they and we loved Glenda so much that above and beyond ethical or historical disagreements the feeling that would always unite us remained, the certainty that perfecting Glenda was perfecting us and perfecting the world. We even had splendid recompense in the fact that one of the philosophers re-established the equilibrium after overcoming that period of inane scruples; from his mouth we heard that all partial works are also history, that something as immense as the invention of the printing press had been born of the most individual and particular of desires-to repeat and perpetuate a woman's name.

11. In that way we came to the day on which we got proof that Glenda's image was now being projected without the slightest weakness; the screens of the world were presenting her in just the way that she herself-we were sure-would have wanted to be presented, and perhaps that was why it didn't surprise us too much to read in the press that she had just announced her retirement from movies and the theater. Glenda's involuntary and marvelous contribution to our work couldn't have been either coincidence or miracle, it was simply that something in her had unknowingly respected our anonymous love, from the depths of her being came the only answer that she could give us, the act of love that included us in one last act of giving, the one that ordinary people would only understand as an absence. We were living the happiness of the seventh day, of the rest after the creation; now we would be able to see every one of Glenda's works without the agonizing threat of a tomorrow plagued by mistakes and blunders; now we could come together with the lightness of angels or birds, in an absolute presence that was like eternity.

12. Yes, but a poet had said under Glenda's same skies that eternity is in love with the works of time, and it was for Diana to discover and give us the news a year later. Ordinary and human, Glenda was announcing her return to the screen, the usual reasons, the frustration of a professional with nothing to do, a role that was made to order, an imminent filming. No one can have forgotten that night at the cafe, precisely after seeing The Uses of Elegance, which was returning to downtown theaters. It almost wasn't necessary for Irazusta to say what we were all experiencing, a hitter taste of injustice and rebellion. We loved Glenda so much that our discouragement didn't touch her, it was no fault of hers, being an actress and being Glenda, the horror was in the ruptured mechanism, in the reality of figures and awards and Oscars entering our so hard-won heaven like a hidden fissure. When Diana laid her hand on Irazusta's arm and said "Yes, it's the only thing left to do," she was speaking for all of us with no need for consultation. Never had the nucleus had such a fearsome drive, never had it needed fewer words to put it into motion. We separated, undone, already living what. would happen on a (lay that only one of us would know ahead of time. We were sure we wouldn't meet again at the cafe, that each of us from then on would hide the solitary perfection of our realm. We knew that Irazusta was going to do what was necessary, nothing simpler for someone like him. We didn't even say good-bye the way we usually did, with the nice security of meeting again after the movies some night with Fragile Returns or The Lash. It was rather a turning your hack, with the pretext that it was late, that you had to leave; we went off separately, each one bearing his or her desire to forget until everything was consummated, and knowing it wouldn't be that way, that we would still have to open the newspaper some morning and read the news, the stupid phrases of professional consternation. We would never talk about that with anybody, we would courteously avoid each other in theaters and on the street; it would be the only way that the nucleus could remain true to its faith, could silently guard the finished work. We loved Glenda so much that we would offer her one last inviolable perfection. On -the untouchable -heights -to which we had raised her in exaltation, we would save her from the fall, her faithful could go on adoring her without any decrease; one does not come down from a cross alive.