It’s a 12-year-old film that suddenly came to mind the other night as I was talking with a friend. Adapted from the French film Les Diaboliques, the Hollywood version, predictably called Diabolique — in singular form as if assigning the blame to only one person instead of two evildoers, which the original movie does — is about a cruel schoolmaster whose wife and mistress conspire to kill him. The mistress is a worldly, cynical woman (Sharon Stone) and the wife (Isabel Adjani) is an ex-nun.
The mistress, who is also betrayed by the man, convinces the wife to kill the louse by saying: “Killing him is a good thing. It’s like planting a tree.”
In my book of half-truths and unlikely excuses, this one ranks first. Yes, planting a tree is beneficial to mankind; yes, when a schoolmaster who beats up women and is cruel to children suddenly drowns in a knee-deep pond — well, that’s beneficial to mankind as well. It’s like planting a tree, giving to charity, helping a stranger change a flat tire, giving up your seat on the bus to the elderly, helping a blind man cross the street, and feeding the lepers.
You have to admire Stone’s twisted logic.
My conversation with a friend also brought to mind the time when our dog Freeway was just a puppy and she was chewing on the furniture, one chair leg at a time. She was such a lively puppy that at times it seemed like she was possessed. She would jump on the bed, make figure eights around the coffee table and pee everywhere. It was the same with our second dog, Alley, who was just as uncontrollable.
When friends would come over and comment on the friskiness of the dogs, we would just say they were possessed by Satan. The truth is, they were probably just bored. It seemed easier to believe that they were under a demon spell rather than to admit that we were too lazy to walk them.
Everybody’s so jaded today that even when something legit happens they don’t believe it. Maybe because we have heard it all — from the usual “My dog ate my homework” to “I’m having car trouble.”
My cleaning lady’s excuse for everything is “I didn’t do it.”
Writers who miss their deadlines surprisingly lack imagination: “Something’s wrong with my Internet. You didn’t get my article?”
When my husband R. forgets to run an errand: “You didn’t remind me.”
When I’m too lazy to run: “My littlest toe hurts.”
When somebody doesn’t return a text: “I didn’t get it.”
And then there are the excuses we make for people we love but treat us badly. “He has mother issues.” “He’s under a lot of pressure at work.” “It’s not that he’s not thinking of you, he’s just been too busy — for the past three weeks.” “He’s biologically wired to be unfaithful.”
Well, how about this? “He’s a lying shitheel who doesn’t care for you”?
In movies, the excuses are more forgivable, romantic even, especially if it takes place in a Paris lighted like we’ve never seen before in film. Take Amélie (Audrey Tautou), when she waits for Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz) for whom she has concocted this grand, elaborate plan to meet and solve the great big mystery of his photo ID collection.
Rather than accept that he’s not coming, she thinks: “A gang of robbers took him hostage. The cops gave chase. They got away…but he caused a crash. When he came to, he’d lost his memory. An ex-con picked him up, mistook him for a fugitive, and shipped him to Istanbul. There he met some Afghan raiders who took him to steal some Russian warheads. But their truck hit a mine in Tajikistan. He survived, took to the hills, and became a Mujaheddin.”
Again, how about this? “Traffic was terrible.”
Diabolique, Satan possessing the dogs, Amélie, my cleaning lady. This train of thought began with an actual discussion of the news headlines over drinks: that Sulpicio Lines was suing PAGASA for failing to provide proper and updated forecasts on typhoon Frank, which resulted in the sinking of its ferry.
It’s true that back in the ‘90s, whenever PAGASA announced that it would be sunny the next day, you had better bring an umbrella to school. When it announced that it would rain hard and the Education Department cancelled classes, you could start making plans with your friends to go around town in halter tops and shorts. Still, nobody thought of blaming PAG ASA if you got hit by lightning on the way to the mall just because it didn’t predict the weather accurately.
Maybe the weather bureau did screw up its weather reporting, but apart from the hundreds of deaths, there are still the other things. The toxic cargo wasn’t loaded by PAGASA, it was loaded by Sulpicio Lines on its passenger ship instead of its cargo ship. And nobody but they hid this fact in the first few days of retrieval operations. The Coast Guard circular wasn’t misread by a crewmember of Sulpicio Lines, it wasn’t read at all because the ship didn’t have the new one.
As my friend said, “Ugaling Pinoy talaga, lumulusot kahit kasalanan niya.”
Maybe it is easier to believe that the weather or God or PAGASA really was to blame for all the deaths at sea, and for the muro ami who attempted to steal from the corpses underwater, and for rescue divers having to momentarily stop their retrieval operations to safeguard their own health from pesticide exposure.
I just don’t know how it would benefit mankind if we accepted these excuses.
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E-mail the author at tanyalara@yahoo.com.