MARCH 18, 2021 – As I lifted the receiver and started dialing home, Barbie S_________ (don’t worry; by fifth grade she’d become “Barb” and “Barbara”) interrupted me. She was one of my party group and consistently the smartest, most aware kid in our class. “We’re not leaving in the middle of the movie, are we?!” Barbie asked.
In that instant, I learned two things: First, “Intermission” wasn’t a fancy word for “The End” but a smart person’s word for “middle of the movie.” Second, Barbie was an even sharper knife than I’d realized.
Not wishing to confirm I was not as sharp, I “pivoted,” as people on today’s cable channels like to say.
“Huh?” I said. “You don’t really want to sit through the rest of the movie, do you?” It was a desperate move, but it was the best work-around I could devise, given the pinch I was in.
“Of course I do!” said Barbie. “Don’t you?”
This encounter was turning into a . . . bad movie. If Barbie wanted to see the rest of El Cid, it meant she understood what was going on and would be apt to think that I didn’t. Why else would I want to leave at . . . “Intermission”?
“Oh, okay,” I said with exaggerated resignation. “I guess so.” Like a reluctant knight, I led my squires back to medieval Valencia. Since I’d blown our candy money at the beginning, we went hungry for the rest of the siege.
After all these years, I remember the arrow shot that Charlton Heston takes to the chest, followed by his agony as he snaps the arrow’s shaft, leaving the tip deep in his flesh; and the final scene in which El Cid’s corpse, wearing a white cape, is attached to a hidden frame and propped up on his steed . . . and sent off to battle. The trick works—the enemy Ibn Yusuf (clad in black, of course), thinking the dead hero has returned from the dead, is crushed in the resulting stampede. The full nonsense of the movie was now apparent—even after he’s dead, the good guy thinks he won.
Confident that the marathon was finally over, I called home. Time for cake and ice cream—and presents—in the full light of modernity.
In one of my mind games, I locate the kids who attended my birthday party and ask them, “Do you remember the first time you encountered the word . . . ‘Intermission’?” Only Barbie remembers, and surprisingly, her answer is, “El Cid.”
“At first I wondered,” she continues, “since I’d never seen the word before. But then I overheard the guy in front of me tell his movie date, ‘If this is only the halfway point, it’s gonna be a long movie.’ Because the movie wasn’t making a whole lot of sense to me, I thought maybe we needed to see the second half to understand the first half.”
THE END
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
