The Flower of My Secret (1995)

Marisa Paredes: Leo

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Quotes 

• Leo Macías : Except for drinking, everything's difficult for me.

• Ángel : What writers do you like?

  Leo Macías : Mainly women. Adventurous, suicidal, lunatics like Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, Dorthy Parker, Jean Rhys, Flannery O'Connor, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Isak Dinesen, Janet Frame. I write about them in my article, "Pain and Life".

• Blanca : Take your phosphorous pill.

  Leo Macías : Ah, yes. It doesn't help my memory, but it makes me horny. Phosphorous is an aphrodisiac.

  Blanca : What's that?

• Leo Macías : Defenseless against the lurking madness.

• Leo Macías : Everyday I wear something of yours. Today I'm wearing the boots you gave me. Remember how you had to take them off because I couldn't do it alone? Seeing them reminded me of you and I put them on in your honor. Now they're too tight. Sometimes the memory of you, like these boots, oppresses my heart.

• Leo Macías : I don't want to write against. I have enough negative things in my life, I don't want to add more, especially if you pay me for it.

• Ángel : Do you specialize in a genre?

  Leo Macías : No. I prefer to write about what I like and avoid Spanish literature.

• Leo Macías : You should take her out.

  Rosa : She doesn't want to go out.

  Madre de Leo : Why should I? To be killed by a skinhead or run over by a car? Those skinheads always stare at me.

  Rosa : It's because she calls them hippies and dirtbags. And there are only two around here.

  Madre de Leo : I can't even see if they're skinheads or yuppies.

• Ángel : I love the title "Pain and Life".

  Leo Macías : It's from a Bola de Nieve song.

  Ángel : I know it. "If I only have pain and life left, my love, don't let me live!" Relating Djuna Barnes with the "Cuban feeling" is new, but it makes sense.

• Leo Macías : Don't you wear the robe I gave you?

  Betty : No, it's too beautiful to wear.

  Leo Macías : You should wear it.

  Betty : It's better in the closet.

• Betty : An operation is like a melon. You have to open it to see if it's good or if it's rotten.

  Leo Macías : You're right.

  Madre de Leo : Now she's a philosopher.

  Betty : The philosopher is constipated and going to the bathroom.

• Alicia : People buy our books to forget the sordidness of their lives, to dream even if it's a lie. Coffee?

  Leo Macías : No, thanks.

  Alicia : Who'll dream of people who live in a seedy slum like the living dead? Who'll identify with a protagonist who works emptying shit out of hospital bedpans, who's got a junkie mother-in-law and a faggot son who's into black men? Have you gone nuts?

  Leo Macías : Maybe, but reality's like that.

• Leo Macías : First shower, since you want to so much, then we'll fuck. then we'll rest, then we'll fuck again. and then who knows?

• Leo Macías : You can go when Paco arrives and come back tomorrow evening.

  Blanca : Señora, I rehearse in the evenings.

  Leo Macías : Then the next day. I want time alone with my husband.

  Blanca : Of course! Lots of sex!

• Leo Macías : This is like the film, "The Apartment."

  Ángel : Yes, it is. In that film, Shirley MacLaine falls in love with someone who isn't the person she's really in love with.

  Leo Macías : I'm in love with the person I think I'm in love with.

• Paco : Calm down, we'll get to bed soon enough.

  Leo Macías : We have to catch up. If not, I'll screw the first man I see. It's the phosphorus, you know.

  Paco : What?

  Leo Macías : You don't remember? My memory pills. They're aphrodisiac. With you gone, I'm going to end up an erotic writer.

• Leo Macías : God, I don't believe in you, but help me.

• Paco : Stop pressuring me. I'm blocked, I can't speak!

  Leo Macías : The great strategist, the specialist in major conflicts!

  Paco : There's no war that compares with you.

• Paco : We said we'd park our problems during the war.

  Leo Macías : I'm sorry, I'm not made of steel! You can't park me like a car!

  Paco : Can't you try to understand the situation?

  Leo Macías : What's to understand? Between me and your work, your work wins.

  Paco : I'm trying to save many lives!

  Leo Macías : Why not save mine?

• Ángel : I must have drunk too much.

  Leo Macías : Yes. And you revealed the flower of your secret.

• Betty : What must be done for you to face reality? What must we do for you to accept reality?

  Leo Macías : Not hide it from me.

  Betty : How if your whole world can fall apart because your boots are too tight?

• Madre de Leo : Remember, Leo?

  Leo Macías : Mama, how would I remember that?

  Madre de Leo : No, I mean the poem I wrote about the village: Beautiful is the morning, Leo, The sunlight sparkles, The flowers offer their perfumes, The orchard is rustling, From branch to branch, without stopping, The joyous birdies flutter and sing, And their chirping enchants me, You can hear the soft bleating, Of flocks of sheep, That stand out against the pasture, Like snowflakes, Here stands a small hut, Home for shepherds, There a white cottage, Whiter than a lily, Afterwards we come to a farm, Next to the farm, there's a garden, Next to the garden, a house, And next to the house, a church, The hill is covered with oaks, The valley with fruit, And the river with many trees...

• Leo Macías : Life is so incredible! So cruel and so paradoxical. So unpredictable and sometimes so fair.

• Leo Macías : You've come to pay? How many fucks will clear up the debt? How much am I worth?

• Leo Macías : This reminds me of the end of "Rich and Famous". Two friends, writers, making a toast, alone, far from the world in front of a fire.

  Ángel : Yes. But, you don't drink and it was New Year's Eve. That's why they toasted.

  Leo Macías : Give me a drink and I'll make it New Year's Eve.

• Madre de Leo : I was imagining it. My poor child! So young and already like a cow without a cowbell.

  Leo Macías : Like a cow without a cowbell?

  Madre de Leo : Yes, lost, with no direction, drifting, like me.

  Leo Macías : Like you?

  Madre de Leo : I'm like a cow without a cowbell too. But, at my age, that's more normal. That's why I want to live in the village. When we women lose our husband, because he's died or left with another woman, we have to return to a place where we were born. Visit the village chapel, sit outside with the neighbor and pray with them., even if you're not believers. Because if we don't, we get lost, like a cow without a cowbell.

• Ángel : Do you remember "Casablanca"?

  Leo Macías : Yes.

  Ángel : The first time Ingrid Bergman enter's Rick's? They both sit down at the same table. Bogart is rigid, speechless from emotion. Ingrid asks him if he remembers the last time they'd been together. It was in Paris. He answers, stone faced: "I'll never forget that day. The day the Germans occupied Paris, the Germans wore gray and you wore blue." You wore blue the day you fled from your life and ran into mine.

  Leo Macías : I don't remember it.

  Ángel : I'll always remember it.