The Strange Case of Rachel K

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One day ten years ago I sat down and for approximately twenty hours read an enormous book on the history of so-called civilization, a work of seductive details (the Peruvians believed the world was a box with a ridged top, the Egyptians that it was an egg) and an Occidental outlook, critical of every religion and ideology except the dogma of progress itself. Its successive assertions—“People who could agree on few other facts about the remote regions of the earth somehow agreed on the geography of the afterworld” and “More appealing than knowledge itself was the feeling of knowing”—were like the galloping of horses to me. My heart beat with their hooves. I wanted to run alongside, but with my own version of discovery and progress. I did so, by writing “The Great Exception.”

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“The Strange Case of Rachel K” was something else, the name of a Cuban film made in the early 1970s, during Cuba’s great revolutionary film renaissance (not documented in big books about world progress). I have never seen it. It is one filmmaker’s interpretation of a vague historical record concerning a real person named Rachel K, a 1930s courtesan found murdered in a hotel room. I followed an instinct to build my own interpretation of her, making the record less vague, more specific, and procuring for her, as foil, another real historical figure, Christian de la Mazière, whose dubious and fascinating personal history is recounted in Marcel Ophüls’s documentary The Sorrow and the Pity. I started from the presumption that Rachel K definitely would not die, at least not in the way prescribed by the lessons of history. You might notice that she shares my name; I did too.

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