:18:02
and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space
in reality stands for the vertigo of time.
:18:10
He had followed all the trails,
even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores,
:18:12
where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead,
whom she should not have known.
:18:18
He followed Madelineas Scotty had doneto the Museum at the Legion of Honor,
before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known.
:18:26
And on the portrait, as in Madeline's hair,
the spiral of time.
:18:40
The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared
had disappeared itself;
:18:43
concrete had replaced it,
at the corner of Eddy and Gough.
:18:47
On the other hand, the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods.
:18:51
On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines
that measured the age of the tree and said,
:18:58
"Here I was born... and here I died."
:19:01
He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted.
:19:05
The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris,
:19:09
and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree,
outside of time.
:19:17
The painted horse at San Juan Bautista,
his eye that looked like Madeline's:
:19:21
Hitchcock had invented nothing,
it was all there.
:19:24
He had run under the arches of the promenade in the mission
as Madeline had run towards her death.
:19:29
Or was it hers?
:19:35
From this fake tower
the only thing that Hitchcock had added
:19:37
he imagined Scotty as time's fool of love,
finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it.
:19:44
Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time,
a zone that would belong only to him
:19:50
and from which he could decipher
the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate
:19:55
when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay,
:19:58
when he had saved her from death
before casting her back to death.