Life Is Elsewhere (14 page)

It was so beautiful to wander over a female body, an unknown, unseen, unreal body, a body with no odor, no blackheads, no small flaws or illnesses, an imaginary body, a body that was the playground of his dreams!

It was so enchanting to write about female breasts and groins in the same tone used in telling fairy tales to children; yes, Jaromil was living in the land of tenderness, which is the land of artificial childhood. I say "artificial" because real childhood is no paradise, nor is it so tender.

Tenderness comes into being at the moment when life propels a man to the threshold of adulthood, and he anxiously realizes all the advantages of childhood he had not appreciated as a child.

Tenderness is the fear instilled by adulthood.

Tenderness is the attempt to create a tiny artificial space in which it is mutually agreed that each will treat the other like a child.

Tenderness is also fear of the physical consequences of love; it is an attempt to take love out of the world of adults (where it is insidious, coercive, heavy with flesh and responsibility) and to consider a woman as a child.

"Softly beat the heart of her tongue," he wrote in a poem. He thought that her tongue, her little finger, her breasts, her navel were autonomous beings who conversed in inaudible voices; he thought that a girl's body consisted of thousands of such creatures, and that loving that body meant listening to its creatures and hearing "its two breasts speaking a secret language."

14

The past tormented her. But one day, as she was taking a long look back at it, she found the area of paradise in which she had lived with the newborn Jaromil, and she had to correct her verdict: no, it was not true that Jaromil had taken everything away from her; on the contrary, he had given her much more than anyone else ever had. He had given her a piece of life unsoiled by lies. No Jewish woman from a concentration camp could tell Mama that her happiness had been based merely on hypocrisy and emptiness. That area of paradise was her only truth.

And the past (it was like turning a kaleidoscope) again looked different to her: Jaromil had never taken anything of value from her, he had merely torn the gilded mask away from an error and a lie. He was still unborn when he helped her find out that her husband didn't love her, and thirteen years later he had saved her from a mad adventure that could only bring her further grief.

She told herself that the shared experience of Jaromil's childhood was a commitment and a sacred pact between them. But more and more often she became aware that her son was not honoring that pact. When she spoke to him she saw that he wasn't listening and that his head was full of thoughts he didn't wish to confide to her. She noticed that he was ashamed before her, that he was jealously keeping his little secrets of body and mind to himself, and that he was wrapping himself in veils she couldn't see through.

She was hurt and irritated by this. Was it not part of the sacred pact they had drawn up together when he was a child that he would always confide in her without shame?

She had hoped that the truth they had experienced together would last forever. As she had when he was small, she told him every morning what he should wear, and by laying out his underwear for him she was a presence all day long beneath his clothing. When she sensed that this had become disagreeable to him, she took her revenge by deliberately scolding him for small stains on his underwear. She enjoyed lingering in the room where he dressed and undressed, to punish him for his insolent modesty.

"Jaromil, come here and let me see you," she said to him one day when there were guests in the house. "My God, what a mess!" she announced indignantly when she saw his carefully disheveled hair. She went off for a comb and without interrupting her conversation with the guests she took hold of his head and began to comb him. And the great poet, who had a diabolical imagination and looked like Rilke, sat quietly, crimson with fury, letting himself be combed; all he could do was wear his cruel grin (the one he had been practicing for years) and let it harden on his face.

Mama stepped back to appraise her work with the comb, then, turning to her guests: "Good God, can you tell me why this child is making such a nasty face?"

And Jaromil swore that he would always be on the side of those who want radically to change the world.

15

When Jaromil arrived the discussion was already at its height; it was about the meaning of progress and whether it in fact existed. He looked around and noticed that the gathering of the Marxist youth circle he had been invited to by one of his classmates consisted of young people you could see in any Prague high school. Attentiveness was probably better sustained here than it was during the discussions his Czech teacher had tried to organize in the classroom, but here too there were troublemakers; one of them was holding a lily that he kept sniffing, which caused so much laughter that the dark-haired fellow in whose apartment the meeting was taking place at last confiscated the flower.

Then he pricked up his ears, because someone asserted that you can't talk about progress in art; you can't say, he explained, that Shakespeare is inferior to contemporary playwrights. Jaromil wanted very much to join the discussion, but he hesitated to address people he didn't know; he was afraid that everyone would see his face turn red and his hands shake nervously. And yet he wished strongly to bind himself to this small group, and he knew that he couldn't do so unless he spoke up.

To give himself courage, he thought of the painter and of his great authority, which he had never doubted, reassuring himself that he was his friend and disciple. This thought gave him the strength to join the debate and to repeat the ideas he had heard during his visits to the painter's studio. The fact that he was making use of ideas that were not his own is much less remarkable than the fact that he was expressing them in a voice that was not his own. He himself was a bit surprised to notice that the voice coming from his mouth resembled the painters, and that this voice also induced his hands to make the painter's gestures.

That there was progress in the arts, he said, was indisputable: the trends of modern art represented a total upheaval in a thousand-year evolution; they had finally liberated art of the obligation to propagate political and philosophical ideas and to imitate reality, and one could even say that modern art was the beginning of the true history of art.

Several people now wanted to speak, but Jaromil refused to yield the floor. At first it was unpleasant to hear the painter's words and intonation coming from his own mouth, but he soon found this borrowing reassuring and protective; he hid behind this mask as if behind a shield; he stopped feeling shy and self-conscious; he was satisfied that his phrases sounded good in this setting, and he went on:

He referred to Marx's idea that until now mankind had been living in its prehistory, and that its true history only began with the proletarian revolution, which was the transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. The corresponding decisive moment in the history of art was when Andre Breton and the other surrealists discovered automatic writing and along with it the miraculous wealth of the human unconscious. The fact that this discovery occurred at almost the same time as the socialist revolution was highly significant because liberating the imagination represented for mankind the same leap into the realm of freedom as the abolition of economic exploitation.

Now the dark-haired fellow spoke up; he approved of Jaromil's defense of the principle of progress but questioned his putting surrealism on the same level as the proletarian revolution. Instead, he expressed the opinion that modern art was decadent and that the era in art which corresponded to the proletarian revolution was socialist realism. Not Andre Breton but Jiri Wolker,* the founder of Czech socialist poetry, must be their model. Jaromil had heard about such ideas from the painter, who had ridiculed them. Jaromil, too, now tried to sound sarcastic, saying that socialist realism was nothing new in art, that it was difficult to tell it apart from the old bourgeois kitsch. The dark-haired fellow replied that the only art that was modern was the art that helps in the fight for a new world, which was not the case with surrealism because the masses do not understand it.

*Czech poet who died in 1924 at the age of twenty-four.

The discussion was interesting: the dark-haired fellow developed his argument with charm and without raising his voice, so that the discussion never degenerated into a quarrel, even when Jaromil, intoxicated by being the center of attention, resorted to somewhat edgy irony; moreover, no one announced a definitive verdict, others joined the debate, and the idea Jaromil was defending was soon submerged by new topics of discussion.

But was it so important to ascertain whether progress existed or not, whether surrealism was bourgeois or revolutionary? Was it so important whether it was Jaromil or the others who were right? What was important to him was that he was bound to them. He argued with them, but he felt warmly drawn to them. No longer even listening to them, he was only thinking how happy he was: he had found a society of people with whom he was not merely his Mama's son or his classroom's student but also his own self. And he reflected that one cannot completely become his own self until one is completely among others.

The dark-haired fellow now got up, and everyone understood that it was time to head for the door because their leader had work to do, which he had referred to in a deliberately vague manner indicating something important and impressive. When they were at the door, ready to leave, a girl wearing glasses approached Jaromil. Let me say at once that Jaromil had not even noticed her during the meeting; anyway, there was nothing noticeable about her, she was rather nondescript; not ugly, only a little slovenly; without makeup; with her hair, untouched by any hairdresser, falling smoothly over her forehead; and wearing the kind of clothes one wears only to avoid going around naked.

"What you said was really very interesting to me," she said to him. "I'd very much like to discuss it some more with you. . . ."

16

There was a garden square not far from the dark-haired fellow's apartment; they went toward it, constantly talking; Jaromil learned that the girl was a university student and that she was two years older than he (this piece of news filled him with pride); they went along the square's winding path, both making erudite conversation as they hurried to disclose what they believed, what they thought, what they were (the girl was more scientific, Jaromil more literary); they reeled off lists of the great names they admired, and the girl repeated that she was very interested in Jaromil's unusual opinions; then, after a moment's silence, she called him an ephebus; yes, when he came into that room she felt she was seeing a graceful ephebus. . . .

Jaromil didn't know exactly what the word meant, but he thought it beautiful to be designated by a word, whatever it meant, and a Greek one at that; moreover, he guessed that the word "ephebus" was applied to someone young and that the youth it referred to was not the awkward and degrading kind he had until now experienced but rather a youth both vigorous and worthy of admiration. With her use of the word "ephebus" the student did have his immaturity in mind, but at the same time she relieved it of its ineptness and turned it into a superiority. This was so comforting that, on their sixth circuit of the square, Jaromil dared to make the gesture he had been contemplating from the beginning but had been unable to find the courage for: he took the student by the arm.

To say that he "took" her by the arm isn't quite right; it would be more accurate to say that he "insinuated" his hand under her arm; he insinuated it there very discreetly, as if he hoped that the girl would not even notice; she actually didn't react at all to the gesture, so that Jaromil's hand remained insecurely slipped between her elbow and side like some foreign object, a bag or package its owner has forgotten and is about to let drop. But soon the hand began to sense that the arm under which it had inserted itself was aware of its presence. And his legs began to sense that the student was slowing down somewhat. He recognized this slowing and knew that something irrevocable was in the air. Ordinarily when something irrevocable is about to happen, people (perhaps to prove that they have some power over events) speed up the inevitable. Thus Jaromil's hand, which had been motionless all this time, suddenly came to life and squeezed the student's arm. She stopped, raised her glasses toward Jaromil's face, and let her briefcase drop to the ground.

Jaromil was dumbfounded by this; at first, in his awe, he had not even noticed that the girl was carrying a briefcase; now that it had fallen, the briefcase appeared on the scene like a message from heaven. And when he-considered that the girl had come to the Marxist gathering directly from the university, and that her briefcase probably contained duplicated copies of course materials and important scientific works, his intoxication increased: she had let the university drop to the ground in order to clasp him in her unburdened arms.

The fall of the briefcase was really so affecting that they began to kiss in a glorious bewitchment. They kissed for a long time, and when the kissing was finally over and they were unsure what to do next, she again raised her glasses toward him and, anxious agitation in her voice, said: "You probably think I'm like all the other girls. But that's not so. I'm not at all like them."

These words were perhaps more affecting than the fall of the briefcase, and Jaromil realized with amazement that he was with a woman who loved him, that she had loved him at first sight, miraculously, and without his knowing why. And he noted in passing (in the margin of his consciousness, so as to reread it carefully later on) that the student spoke of other women as if she saw in him a man who was already so experienced with women that any woman who loved him could only suffer.