Life Is Elsewhere (17 page)

Certainty certainty I no longer move and I'm

 ready 

Certainty Compared to you beauty is nothing 

Compared to you youth is nothing 

And he wearily crosses the room, "wipes fingerprints of strangers off the table with his glove," and realizes that she had lovers, crowds of lovers who 

Squandered all the glow of her skin

 Even in the dark she is no longer beautiful

 A worthless coin worn out by fingers

And an old song clings to his soul, a forgotten song, 

my God, what is that song?

You're drifting away, you 're drifting away on the

sand of beds And your appearance is fading You 

're drifting away, you 're drifting away and of

you nothing remains But the center 

nothing but the center of you 

And she knows that she no longer has anything youthful for him. But:

In the moments of weakness that now assail me My

 fatigue my withering that process so

important and so pure 

Belong only to you 

Their wrinkled bodies touch each other with emotion, he says "little girl," she says "my darling," and they start to cry.

And there was no go-between between them Not a

 word not a gesture Nothing behind which to hide

 Nothing to disguise their misery from each other

Because it is exactly that mutual misery they seize full on the lips, they greedily drink one from the other. They caress each other's miserable bodies and already hear, under each other's skin, the engines of death softly purring. And they know that they are definitively and totally pledged to each other; that this is their last and also their greatest love, because the last love is the greatest. The man thinks:

This is love with no way out This is love like a

 wall

And the woman thinks:

Here is death distant perhaps in time but

already so near in its likeness So near in

 being so like the two of us deeply

 sunk in our armchairs Here is the goal attained 

and the legs so happy

 they no longer even try to take a step And the 

hands so certain they no longer even

seek a caress There is nothing more to do

 but wait for the 

saliva in our mouths to turn

 into dewdrops 

When Mama read this strange poem, she was as usual stunned by the precocious maturity that allowed her son to understand a time of life so far off from his own; she didn't understand that the characters in the poem had no connection with the real psychology ol old age.

No, this poem was not at all about an old man and an old woman; if Jaromil had been asked the age of the characters in the poem, he would have hesitated and then replied that they were between forty and eighty; he was unaware of old age, which to him was a distant, abstract notion; what he knew of old age was that it is a time of life where the adult age already belongs to the past; where one's destiny is already completed; where one no longer fears that terrible unknown called the future; where love, when we encounter it, is certain and final.

For Jaromil was filled with anxiety; he moved toward the undressed body of a young woman as if he were treading on thorns; he desired this body and he was afraid of it; that is why, in his poems of tenderness, he fled from the tangibility of the body to take refuge in the world of childish imagination; he deprived the body of its reality and imagined the female groin as a mechanical toy; this time, he had taken refuge on the opposite side: the side of old age; where the body is no longer proud and dangerous; where it is miserable and pitiful; the misery of a decrepit body more or less reconciled him to the pride of a youthful body that must age in its turn.

His poem was filled with naturalistic ugliness; Jaromil had forgotten neither the yellow teeth nor the pus at the corners of eyes nor the sagging belly; but behind the coarseness of these details was the touching desire to limit love to the eternal, to the indestructible, to that which can replace the motherly embrace, to that which is not subj ect to time, to that which is "the center nothing but the center," to that which can overcome the power of the body, of the perfidious body whose universe was stretched out before him like unknown territory inhabited by lions.

He wrote poems about the artificial childhood of tenderness, he wrote poems about an unreal death, he wrote poems about an unreal old age. These were the three blue flags under which he fearfully advanced toward the immensely real body of an adult woman.

23

When she arrived at his house (Mama and Grandmama were away from Prague for two days), he made sure not to turn on the lights, even though darkness was slowly falling. They finished dinner and were sitting in Jaromil's room. At about ten (that was when Mama ordinarily sent him to bed), he uttered the sentence he had mentally been repeating many times in order to be able to enunciate it easily and naturally: "What about going to bed?"

She agreed, and Jaromil turned down the bed. Yes, everything happened as he had anticipated, and everything happened without difficulty. The girl undressed in a corner and Jaromil undressed (much more hastily) in another corner; he immediately put on his pajamas (in the pocket of which he had carefully deposited the packet containing the sock), then rapidly slipped under the covers (he knew that the pajamas didn't suit him, that they were too large for him and made him look small) and gazed at the girl who had kept nothing on and came naked (ah! in the darkness she seemed to him even more beautiful than last time) to stretch out beside him.

She pressed up against him and started to kiss him furiously; after a moment Jaromil decided it was high time to open the packet. So he plunged his hand into his pocket and tried to lift it out discreetly. "What have you got there?" asked the girl. "Nothing," he answered, and he hastily placed on the student's breast the hand that was about to grasp the packet. Then he thought that he would have to excuse himself and go to the bathroom for a moment to get himself discreetly ready. But while he was considering this (the girl kept on kissing him), he noticed that the arousal he had felt at the beginning in all its physical obviousness had vanished. Noticing this threw him into a new plight, for he knew that under these conditions there was no point in opening the packet. So he tried to caress the girl with passion while he waited anxiously to regain the vanished arousal. In vain. Under his attentive gaze his body seemed to be seized with dread; rather than expand, it shrank.

The caresses and kisses no longer brought him pleasure or satisfaction; they were no more than a screen behind which the boy tormented himself and desperately demanded his body's obedience. These were interminable caresses and embraces and endless torture, torture in total silence, for Jaromil didn't know what to say and had the feeling that any word would reveal his shame; the girl was silent too, probably because she too began to suspect something shameful, without knowing exactly whether the failure was Jaromil's or hers; in any case, something was happening that she was unprepared for and that she was afraid to name.

But then, when the intensity of this terrible pantomime of caresses and kisses diminished and no longer had the strength to continue, both rested their heads on pillows and tried to sleep. It's hard to say if they slept or not and for how long, but even if they didn't sleep, they pretended, so as to hide, to get away from each other.

When they got up in the morning, Jaromil was afraid to look at the student's body; she seemed painfully beautiful to him, all the more beautiful because he had not possessed her. They went into the kitchen, made breakfast, and tried to talk naturally. But then the student said: "You don't love me."

Jaromil tried to assure her that it wasn't true, but she didn't let him speak: "No, it's not worth the trouble of looking for a way to persuade me. It's stronger than you are, and it was easy to see it last night. You don't love me enough. Last night you yourself noticed quite clearly that you don't love me enough."

Jaromil wanted to explain to the girl that what happened had nothing to do with the extent of his love, but he said none of this. The girl's words had actually offered him an unexpected opportunity to hide his humiliation. It was a thousand times easier to take the reproach of not loving the girl than to admit the thought that his body was defective. He therefore didn't answer and lowered his head. And when the girl repeated the accusation, he said in a deliberately vague and unconvincing tone of voice: "Of course I love you.''

"You're lying," she said. "There's someone else in your life that you love."

That was even better. Jaromil bowed his head and sadly shrugged his shoulders, as if to acknowledge some truth to this reproach.

"It makes no sense if it isn't real love," said the student morosely. "I warned you that

I can't take these things lightly. I can't stand the thought that I'm replacing someone else for you."

The night he had just lived through had been cruel, and there was only one way out for Jaromil: to start afresh and erase his failure. He thus found himself forced to reply: "No, you're being unfair. I love you. I love you tremendously. But I did hide something. It's true that there's another woman in my life. That woman loved me, and I treated her badly. There's now a shadow over me that weighs on me and that I'm helpless against. Please understand me. It would be unfair of you not to see me anymore because of that, because I love only you, only you."

"I didn't say I didn't want to see you anymore, I only said that I can't stand the thought of another woman, even if it's just a shadow. Please understand me too, to me love is an absolute. In love I don't compromise."

Jaromil looked at the face of the girl with glasses, and his heart was wrung by the thought that he might lose her; it seemed that she was close to him, that she could understand him. But despite that, he didn't want to, he couldn't confide to her that he had to pass himself off as a man over whom a fateful shadow hung, a man torn and worthy of pity. He replied: "Doesn't absolute love mean above all that you can understand the other and love everything about him, even his shadows?"

That was well said, and the student appeared to be reflecting on it. Jaromil thought that perhaps all was not lost.

24

He had not yet shown her his poems; the painter had promised to have them published in an avant-garde magazine, and he counted on the prestige of the printed word to dazzle the girl. But now he needed his poems to come quickly to his aid. He was convinced that once the student read them (particularly the one about the old couple), she would understand and be moved. He was wrong; she thought she had to give her young friend a critical opinion, and she chilled him with the terseness of her remarks.

What had become of the marvelous mirror of her enthusiastic admiration in which he had first discovered his uniqueness? Now every mirror presented him with the grinning ugliness of his immaturity, and that was intolerable. It was then that he thought of the name of a famous poet who wore the halo of acceptance by the European avant-garde and of involvement in Prague scandals, and although he didn't know him and had never seen him, Jaromil had the same blind faith in him that a simple believer has in a high-ranking dignitary of his church. He sent him his poems along with a humble, pleading letter. He dreamed about a friendly, admiring response, and this dream spread like a balm over his dates with the student, which were getting rarer and rarer (she claimed that the approaching university exams left her little time) and sadder and sadder.

So he was back to the period (not very long ago) when any conversation with any woman was difficult for him and required preparation at home; again he experienced every date several days in advance, spending long evenings in imaginary conversations with the student. Appearing in these unspoken monologues more and more clearly (and yet mysteriously) was the other woman about whose existence the student had expressed her suspicions during breakfast at Jaromil's house; that woman gave Jaromil the glow of a past, awakening jealous interest and explaining his body's failure.

Unfortunately she appeared only in these unspoken monologues, for she had quickly and discreetly vanished from the real conversations between Jaromil and the student; the student had lost interest in her as unexpectedly as she had started talking about her existence. How disappointing this was to Jaromil! All his little allusions, his carefully calculated slips of the tongue and sudden silences designed to indicate that he was thinking of another woman went by without prompting the slightest attention.

Instead she talked to him at length (alas, very cheerfully) about the university, and she described some of her fellow students in so lively a fashion that they seemed much more real to Jaromil than he was to himself. The two of them were back to what they had been before they knew each other: the shy little boy and the Stone Virgin who carried on learned conversations. Only now and then (Jaromil greatly cherished those moments and didn't let go of them) did she suddenly fall silent or point-blank say something sad and yearning to which Jaromil tried in vain to link words of his own, for the girl's sadness was turned inward and had no wish to be in harmony with Jaromil's sadness.

What was the source of her sadness? Who knows? Maybe she missed the love she saw disappearing; maybe she was thinking about someone else whom she desired. Who knows? One day that moment of sadness was so intense (they had left a movie theater and were walking down a dark, silent street) that she put her head on his shoulder.