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It was in 1959 — in July of that year, to be exact — when I became quite well acquainted with the actor Charlton Heston.
Acquainted in a manner of speaking, that is.
Heston was in his mid-30s, and already a motion picture and stage star of considerable reputation.
I was 10 years younger, hardly more than started in my career as a writer and journalist, and I had taken a leave from the newspaper to see a bit of the world.
That July, the month of my 26th birthday, I was stranded penniless in the picturesque town of Alicante, on the southeast coast of Spain.
I’d found lodging on the third floor of a poor rooming house operated by a kind widow lady, Carmen Cremada, and I would be there 33 days, living on credit and on Sra. Cremada’s mercy while I waited for payment for some small travel pieces I’d sold by mail.
For $1.25 a day — payable when (or if) my money came — I had a large, tile-floored room, with a writing desk, French doors opening onto a small balcony overlooking a vacant lot, and beyond that a view through date palms to the blue Mediterranean. That sum included the services of a housekeeper and laundress, and two meals a day, with wine.
Something close to paradise, I believed it was. Until darkness fell.
Then rows of folding chairs were set up in the vacant lot under my balcony and the audience came crowding in to fill them. The movie projector flung out its light onto the facing plaster wall of the building just to the left. The overture from the outdoor speakers swelled to full volume.
And the show began.
The feature that month was “The Ten Commandments,” in Spanish “Los Diez Mandamientos.” The running time of the picture is 219 minutes, or just 21 minutes short of four hours.
Full darkness comes late in July, so I suppose it would have been going on 1:30 a.m. before the images quit moving on that wall outside my room, and the thunderous music fell silent, and sleep finally was possible.
That’s how it was every single one of my 33 nights in Alicante. Before that month ended I was able to hum long passages of the musical track, could anticipate every trumpet blast, every bleat of the ram’s horn.
As I lay sleepless on the bed, a flicker of reflected light danced on the ceiling of my room. By the rumble of chariot wheels and the pounding of horses’ hooves I knew when Pharaoh’s men were about to plunge to their doom into the open jaws of the parted Red Sea.
I could recite by heart Heston’s shouted exhortations: “Behold the dawn of freedom!” and “Behold his mighty hand!” Believe me, if you attend a four-hour movie every night for a month, you get to know the lines pretty well.
All this came to mind when I read the other day that Mr. Heston had gone to his final rest at age 84, not in the arid reaches of Sinai but in the wasteland of Beverly Hills.
To refresh my memory of our acquaintance in Alicante, I rented the video, which comes on two cassettes. But in spite of my best effort, I couldn’t make it through to the end a 34th time.
I think it was as Moses was starting back down the mountain lugging the two stone tablets when I nodded off on the couch and, as Heston himself might have said, the TV remote just fell “from my cold, dead hand.”
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