Life Is Elsewhere (15 page)

He told the girl that he didn't consider her at all like other women; the girl picked up her briefcase (now Jaromil could get a better look at it: it was really large and heavy, filled with books) and they set off on their seventh circuit of the square; when they stopped to kiss again, they suddenly found themselves in a cone of glaring light. Two cops were facing them, demanding their identity cards.

Embarrassed, the two lovers looked for their cards; with trembling hands they gave them to the policemen, who were either cracking down on prostitutes or only looking for some amusement during a long tour of duty.

In any case they provided the two young people with an unforgettable experience: for the rest of the evening (Jaromil accompanied the girl to her door) they talked about love persecuted by prejudice, morality, the police, the old generation, stupid laws, and the rottenness of a world that deserved to be swept away.

The day had been beautiful and the evening too, but it was nearly midnight when Jaromil returned home, and Mama was nervously pacing through the rooms of the villa.

"I've been so anxious about you! Where were you? You have no regard for me!"

Jaromil was still bursting with his great day and started to answer her in the voice he had used at the Marxist youth circle; he was imitating the painter's selfassured tone.

Mama immediately recognized that voice; she saw her son's face with her lost lover's voice coming out of it; she saw a face that didn't belong to her; she heard a voice that didn't belong to her; her son stood before her like the image of a double repudiation; that seemed intolerable to her.

"You're killing me! You're killing me!" she shouted hysterically, and she ran off into the next room.

Frightened, Jaromil stood rooted to the spot, and a sensation of great guilt spread through him.

(Ah, my boy, you'll never rid yourself of that feeling. You are guilty, you are guilty! Every time you leave the house you will sense behind you a reproachful look that will shout out to you to come back! You will walk in the world like a dog on a long leash! And even when you are far away you will always feel the contact of the collar on the nape of your neck! Even when you are with women, even when you are in bed with them, there will be a long leash attached to your neck, and somewhere far away your mother will be holding the other end and feeling through the spasmodic movements of the cord the obscene movements to which you have abandoned yourself!)

"Mama, please don't be angry, Mama, please forgive me!" He is now timidly kneeling at her bedside and caressing her wet cheeks.

(Charles Baudelaire, you'll be forty and still afraid of your mother!)

And Mama puts off forgiving him in order to feel as long as possible the touch of his fingers on her skin.

18

(This is something that could never have happened to Xavier, because Xavier has no mother, and no father either, and not having parents is the first precondition of freedom.

But please understand, it's not a matter of losing one's parents. Gerard de Nerval's mother died when he was a newborn, and yet he lived his whole life under the hypnotic gaze of her wonderful eyes.

Freedom does not begin where parents are rejected or buried, but where they do not exist:

Where man is brought into the world without knowing by whom.

Where man is brought into the world by an egg thrown into a forest.

Where man is spat out on the ground by the sky and puts his feet on the world without feeling gratitude.)

19

What was brought into the world during the first week of love between Jaromil and the student was Jaromil himself; he learned that he was an ephebus, that he was beautiful, that he was intelligent, and that he had imagination; he realized that the girl with glasses loved him and feared the moment when he would leave her (it was, she said, when they parted that evening in front of her house and she watched him airily leave that she had the feeling of seeing him as he really was: a man going away, getting away, vanishing . . . ). He had finally found the image he had sought so long in his two mirrors.

That first week they saw each other every day: they took four long evening walks through the city and went to the theater once (they sat in a box, kissed, and ignored the performance) and to the movies twice. On the seventh day they again went for a walk: it was freezing cold, and Jaromil was wearing only a light topcoat with nothing between his shirt and jacket (because the gray cardigan Mama told him to wear seemed to him better suited to a retired provincial), no hat or cap (because on the second day the girl with glasses had praised his hair, which he had formerly hated, by asserting that it was as untamable as he himself), and since the elastics of his knee socks had worn out and were always sliding down his calves and into his shoes, short gray socks.

They met at seven and started on a long walk through suburbs where the snow on vacant lots crunched under their feet and where they could periodically stop to kiss. What fascinated Jaromil was the docility of the girl's body. Until then his advance toward the female body had been like a long journey with one stage after another: it took time before a girl let him kiss her, it took time before he could put his hand on her breast, and when he touched her rump he thought he was already far along the way—never having gone any farther. This time, from the very first, something unexpected happened: the student was totally submissive in his arms, defenseless, ready for anything, he could touch her wherever he wanted. He considered this a great proof of love, but at the same time he was embarrassed about it because he didn't know what to do with this sudden freedom.

And that day (the seventh day) the girl told him that her parents were often away from home and that she was looking forward to inviting Jaromil to her house. The radiant explosion of these words was followed by a long silence; both of them knew what a meeting in an empty apartment would mean (let's recall that when the girl with glasses was in Jaromil's arms she didn't refuse him anything); they remained silent for quite a while, and then the girl serenely said: "I believe that when it comes to love there's no such thing as compromise. When you're in love you must give everything."

Jaromil agreed with this statement wholeheartedly because for him, too, love meant everything; but he didn't know what to say; by way of an answer he stopped, with pathos fixed his eyes on the girl (forgetting that it was night and that the pathos of a look was barely perceivable), and began to hug and kiss her frantically.

After fifteen minutes of silence, the girl resumed the conversation, telling him that he was the first man she had ever invited to her house; she said that she had many men friends, but they were only friends; they had become used to this and nicknamed her the Stone Virgin.

Jaromil was very pleased to learn that he was to be the student's first lover, but at the same time he was struck by stage fright: he had heard a lot about the act of love and he knew that defloration was generally considered a difficult matter. So he was unable to join the student in her effusiveness, finding himself beyond the present moment; in his mind he was experiencing the voluptuous pleasures and torments of that promised great day (Marx's well-known idea about mankind's leap from prehistory into history had always inspired him) when the true history of his life would begin.

Not talking much, they walked through the streets for a very long time; as the evening went on it grew colder, and Jaromil felt the cold on his thinly clad body. He suggested they find a place to sit down somewhere, but they were too far from the center of town and there was no cafe or tavern in the area. By the time he came home he was chilled to the bone (toward the end of the walk it had been an effort for him to keep her from hearing the chattering of his teeth), and when he woke up the next morning he had a sore throat. Mama took his temperature and confirmed that he had a fever.

20

Jaromil's sick body was in bed, but his soul was experiencing the long-awaited great day. His idea of this day consisted, on the one hand, of abstract happiness and, on the other, of concrete worries. For Jaromil absolutely could not imagine in precise detail what going to bed with a woman really involved; he knew only that it required preparation, skill, and knowledge; he knew that behind physical love the threatening specter of pregnancy grinned, and he also knew (it had been the subject of innumerable conversations among his classmates) that there were ways to prevent this danger. In those barbarous times men (like knights donning armor before a battle) slipped onto their love-leg a translucent sock. Theoretically Jaromil was thoroughly informed about all this. But how could he procure that sock? Jaromil would never overcome his shyness and go into a pharmacy to buy one! And how could he actually put it on without the girl seeing it? The sock seemed ridiculous to him, and he couldn't bear the idea that the girl would know about it! Could he put it on in advance, at home? Or did he have to wait until he was naked in front of the girl?

These were questions he couldn't answer. Jaromil had no trial (training) sock, but he decided to get one at all costs and practice putting it on. He thought that speed and dexterity played a decisive role in this area, and that these couldn't be acquired without training.

But other things, too, tormented him: What exactly was the act of love? What did it feel like? What happened in your body? Was the pleasure so great that you started to scream and lose control of yourself? Didn't screaming make you look ridiculous? How long did the whole thing actually take? Ah, my God, was it even possible to embark on something like that without preparing for it?

Until then Jaromil had never masturbated. He had considered this activity to be something shameful, which a real man should guard against; it was a great love he felt destined for, not onanism. But how do you achieve a great love without some preparation? Jaromil realized that masturbation was indispensable to such preparation, and he abandoned his principled feeling of hostility toward it: it was no longer a wretched substitute for physical love but a necessary step toward it; it was not a confession of poverty but a rung on the ladder to riches.

And so he performed (with a fever of thirty-eight and two tenths) his first imitation of the act of love, which surprised him by its extreme brevity and by its inability to induce screams of sensual pleasure. Thus he was both disappointed and reassured: during the next few days he repeated the experiment several times, learning nothing new; but he was convinced that he was becoming increasingly seasoned in this way, and that he would be able to face his beloved without fear.

He had been in bed for three days with compresses around his neck when Grandmama rushed into the room in the morning and said: "Jaromil! Everybody's in a panic downstairs!" "What's happened?" he asked her, and Grandmama explained that they were listening to the radio at his aunt's downstairs, and there had been a revolution. Jaromil jumped out of bed and ran into the next room. He turned on the radio and heard the voice of Klement Gottwald.

He quickly understood what was going on, for in the past few days he had heard talk (though the matter didn't interest him much, for—as we have just seen—he had more serious worries) that the non-Communist ministers had threatened the Communist prime minister Gottwald that they would resign. And now he heard Gottwald addressing a crowd in Old Town Square, denouncing the traitors who were plotting to oust the Communist Party from the government and obstruct the people's march to socialism; Gottwald called on the people to insist on and accept the ministers' resignations and to set up everywhere new, revolutionary organs of power under the leadership of the Communist Party.

Static crackled on the old radio, mingling Gottwald's words with the tumult of the crowd, which inflamed Jaromil and filled him with enthusiasm. He was in his pajamas with a towel around his neck, standing in Grandmama's room and shouting: "At last! It had to come! At last!"

Grandmama was not quite sure that Jaromil's enthusiasm was justified. "Do you really think this is good?" she asked him anxiously. "Yes, Grandmama, it's good.

It's even excellent!" He took her into his arms; then he started to pace vigorously up and down the room; he reflected that the crowd gathered in Old Town Square had launched today's date into the skies, where it would shine like a star for centuries; and then that it was really a shame to be spending such a great day at home with his grandmother instead of being in the streets with the crowd. Before he had time to think this through, the door opened and his uncle came in, flushed and furious, shouting: "Do you hear them? The scum! The scum! It's a putsch!"

Jaromil looked at his uncle, whom along with his wife and their conceited son he had always hated, and he thought that his moment to defeat the man had finally come. They stood face to face: the uncle had the door at his back, and at Jaromil's back was the radio, which made him feel linked to a crowd of a hundred thousand people, and he now spoke to his uncle like a hundred thousand people speaking to one man: "It's not a putsch, it's a revolution," he said.

"Fuck off with your revolution," the uncle said. "It's easy to make a revolution when you've got the army and the police and a certain big country behind you."

When he heard his uncle's self-assured voice talking to him as if he were a stupid kid, Jaromil's hatred went to his head: "The army and the police are trying to prevent a handful of hooligans from oppressing us again."

"You little moron," said the uncle. "The Communists had most of the power already, and they made this putsch so they could have all of it. I always knew you were a little idiot."

"And I always knew that you were an exploiter and that the working class would wring your neck."

Jaromil made this assertion in a fit of anger, in fact without much thought; all the same, it's worth our attention for a moment: he used words frequently seen in the Communist press and heard in the speeches of Communist orators, but he had been rather repelled by them, just as he was repelled by all stereotypical language. He always considered himself a poet first, and so, even though he made revolutionary speeches, he was unwilling to abandon his own language. And yet he had said: "The working class will wring your neck."