Life Is Elsewhere (21 page)

The poet shouted that freedom was poetry's duty, and that even a metaphor was worth fighting for. He shouted that he would go on hitching a cat to a horse and modern art to socialism, and if this was quixotic he wanted to be a Don Quixote, because for him socialism was an era of freedom and joy, and he rejected any other kind of socialism.

The old scholar was watching the noisy young people around him, and it suddenly occurred to him that he was the only one in the whole audience who had the privilege of freedom, for he was old; when he is old a man is no longer obliged to care about his group's opinions, about the public, and about the future. He is alone with approaching death, and death has neither eyes nor ears, he has no need to please death; he can do and say what he pleases.

And they whistled and demanded the floor in order to answer him. Jaromil got up in his turn; he had black before his eyes and the crowd behind him; he said that only the revolution was modern and that decadent eroticism and unintelligible images were musty old poetizing that meant nothing to the people. "What's really modern," he asked the famous poet, "your unintelligible poems, or we who are building a new world? The only thing that's absolutely modern," he said, answering himself, "is the people building socialism.'' Thunderous applause greeted these words.

The applause was still ringing as the old scholar departed through the corridors of the Sorbonne, reading the inscriptions on the walls:
Be realistic, demand the impossible.
And a bit farther on:
The emancipation of man will either be total or nothing at all.
And a bit farther still:
Above all, no remorse.

16

The seats in the large classroom have been pushed against the walls and brushes and paint pots and long streamers strewn across the floor, where several political science students are painting slogans for the May Day procession. Jaromil, the author and editor of the slogans, is standing behind them and consulting a notebook.

What is this? Have we got the wrong year? The slogans he is dictating to his fellow students are exactly the same as those the old scholar who was jeered at read a moment ago on the walls of the insurgent Sorbonne. No, we're not wrong; the slogans Jaromil is having inscribed on the streamers are exactly the same as those the French students scrawled twenty years later on the walls of the Sorbonne, the walls of Nanterre, the walls of Censier.

He gives the order to write on a streamer:
Dream is reality.,
on another one:
Be realistic, demand the impossible
; and nearby:
We decree a state of permanent happiness;
and a bit farther:
Cancel churches
(he is particularly pleased with this slogan, consisting of two words and rejecting two millennia of history); and more:
No freedom for freedom's enemies;
and still another:
Power to the imagination!
And then:
Death to the lukewarm!
And:
Revolution in politics, in the family, in love!

The students paint the letters and Jaromil proudly goes from one to the other like a field marshal of words. He is happy to be useful, happy that his gift for language has found a use. He knows that poetry is dead (for
Art is dead
, a Sorbonne wall proclaims), but it died in order to rise again from its grave and become the art of propaganda and slogans inscribed on streamers and on the walls of cities (for
Poetry is in the street
, proclaims a wall of the Odeon).

"Don't you read the newspaper? On the front page of
Rude Pravo
there was a list of a hundred slogans for May Day. It was drawn up by the propaganda section of the Party Central Committee. Couldn't you find one to suit you?"

Jaromil was facing a plump young fellow from the Party District Committee, who introduced himself as chairman of the university committee in charge of organizing the festivities for May 1, 1949.

"'Dream is reality.' That's idealism of the crudest kind. 'Cancel churches.' I agree with you, comrade. But for the moment that conflicts with the Party's policy on religion. 'Death to the lukewarm.' Since when do we threaten people with death? 'Power to the imagination,' what would that be like? 'Revolution in love.' Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?"

Jaromil asserted that the revolution would transform all aspects of life, including love and the family, or it would not be a revolution.

"That might well be so," the plump young fellow admitted. "But it can be put much better: 'For a socialist politics, for a socialist family!' You see, and it's one of the
Rude Pravo
slogans. There was no need to rack your brains over it!"

18

Life is elsewhere,
the students have written on the walls of the Sorbonne. Yes, he knows that very well, it is why he is leaving London for Ireland, where the people are rebelling. His name is Percy Bysshe Shelley, he is twenty years old, he is a poet, and he is bringing with him hundreds of copies of leaflets and proclamations that are to serve him as visas for entry into real life.

Because real life is elsewhere. The students are tearing up the cobblestones, overturning cars, building barricades; their irruption into the world is beautiful and noisy, illuminated by flames and greeted by explosions of tear-gas grenades. How much more painful was the lot of Rimbaud, who dreamed about the barricades of the Paris Commune and never got to it from Charleville. But in 1968 thousands of Rimbauds have their own barricades, behind which they stand and refuse any compromise with the former masters of the world. The emancipation of mankind will be total, or it will not exist.

But only a kilometer from there, on the other bank of the Seine, the former masters of the world continue to live their lives, and the din of the Latin Quarter reaches them as something far away
Dream is reality,
the students wrote on the walls, but it seems that the opposite was true: that reality (the barricades, the trees cut down, the red flags) was a dream.

19

But we never know at the present moment whether reality is a dream or a dream is reality.; the students who lined up with their placards at the university came gladly, but they also knew that they risked trouble if they stayed away. In Prague the year 1949 marked for Czech students a curious transition during which a dream was already no longer only a dream; their shouts of jubilation were still voluntary but already compulsory.

The procession marched through the streets with Jaromil alongside it; he was responsible not only for the slogans inscribed on the streamers but also for the rhythmic shouting of his comrades; this time he no longer invented beautiful provocative aphorisms but merely copied into a notebook some slogans recommended by the central propaganda section. He shouted them out loudly, like a priest leading a procession, and his comrades repeated them after him.

20

The processions had already passed the reviewing stand in Wenceslas Square, improvised bands had appeared on the street corners, and blue-shirted young people were starting to dance. Everyone was fraternizing here with both friends and strangers, but Percy Shelley is unhappy, the poet Shelley is alone.

He's been in Dublin for several weeks, he's passed out hundreds of leaflets, the police already know him well, but he hasn't succeeded in befriending a single Irish person. Life is elsewhere, or it is nowhere.

If only there were barricades and the sound of gunfire! Jaromil thinks that formal processions are merely ephemeral imitations of great revolutionary demonstrations, that they lack substance, that they slip through your fingers.

And suddenly he imagines the girl imprisoned in the cashier's cage, and he is assailed by a horrible longing; he sees himself breaking the store window with a hammer, pushing away the women shoppers, opening the cashier's cage, and carrying off the liberated dark-haired girl under the amazed eyes of the gawking onlookers.

And then he imagines that they are walking side by side through crowded streets, lovingly pressed against each other. And all at once the dance whirling around them is no longer a dance but barricades yet again, we are in 1848 and in 1870 and in 1945, and we are in Paris, Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, and Vienna, and these yet again are the eternal crowds crossing through history, leaping from one barricade to another, and he leaps with them, holding the beloved woman by the hand. . . .

He was feeling the young woman's warm hand in his palm when he suddenly saw him. The man was coming toward him, broad-shouldered and sturdy, and a young woman was walking at his side; she was not wearing a blue shirt like most of the girls who were dancing alongside the streetcar tracks; she was as elegant as a fashion-show sylph.

The sturdy man was absentmindedly looking around and acknowledging peoples greetings; when he was a few steps away from Jaromil, their eyes met and in a sudden instant of confusion (and following the example of the other people who had recognized and greeted the famous man) Jaromil nodded and the man greeted him in turn, but with an absent look (as we greet someone we don't know) and the woman gave him a distant nod.

Ah, that woman was immensely beautiful! And she was completely real! And the girl from the cashier's cage and the bathtub, who until just a moment ago had been pressed against Jaromil, began to fade away in the radiant light cast by that real body, and then she vanished.

He stood on the sidewalk in his ignominious solitude, turned around, and threw a look of hatred at the couple; yes, it was he, the "dear master," the recipient of the twenty telephone receivers.

22

Dusk was slowly falling on the city, and Jaromil wanted to meet the dark-haired cashier. He followed several women who looked like her from the back. He found it beautiful to devote himself completely to the fruitless pursuit of a woman lost in a multitude of human beings. Then he decided to pace up and down in front of the building he had once seen her enter. There was little chance of meeting her, but he didn't want to go home before Mama went to bed. (The family home was bearable only at night, when Mama was asleep and his father's photograph awakened.)

And so he went back and forth on the deserted suburban street on which the flags and flowers of May Day had left no trace of gaiety. Lights began to go on in the building windows. Then a light went on in a basement window above sidewalk level. Inside he saw a girl who looked familiar!

No, it wasn't the dark-haired cashier. It was her friend, the skinny redhead; she was on her way to the window to lower the shade.

He couldn't bear the bitterness of this disappointment, and he realized that he had been seen; he blushed and he did just what he did the day the sad, beautiful maid looked up from the bathtub toward the keyhole:

He ran away.

23

It was six o'clock in the evening on May 2, 1949; the salesgirls hurriedly left the store, and something unexpected happened: the redhead left alone.

He tried to hide around the corner, but it was too late. The redhead saw him and came toward him: "Don't you know, sir, that it's not polite to spy on people through the window in the evening?'

He blushed and tried to cut the conversation short; he was afraid that the presence of the redhead might again spoil his chances when her dark-haired friend left the store. But the redhead was very talkative and didn't intend to leave Jaromil; she even suggested that he accompany her home (it's much more appropriate, she said, to accompany a girl home than to watch her through the window).

Jaromil looked desperately at the door of the store. "Where's your friend?" he finally asked.

"Wake up. She's been gone for days.''

They walked together to the building, and Jaromil learned that the two girls had come from the country, got work in the store, and shared the room; but the dark-haired girl had left Prague to get married.

When they stopped in front of the building, the girl said: "Do you want to come in for a moment?"

Surprised and confused, he went into her small room. And then, without knowing how it happened, they were embracing and kissing, and a moment later they were sitting on the bed.

It was all so quick and simple! Without allowing him the time to think that he was about to undertake a difficult and decisive task, the redhead put her hand between his legs, and he experienced wild joy, for his body reacted in the most normal way.

24

"You're terrific, you're terrific," the redhead whispered into his ear as he was lying beside her, his head buried in the pillow; he was filled with fantastic joy; after a moment of silence he heard: "How many women have you had before me?"

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled enigmatically.

"You won't say?"

"Guess."

"I'd say between five and ten," she said knowledge-ably.

He was filled with comforting pride; it seemed to him that he had just made love not only with her but also with the five or ten other women she attributed to him. She not only relieved him of his virginity, she suddenly brought him far into his adulthood.

He looked at her gratefully, and her nakedness filled him with enthusiasm. How could he have considered her unattractive? Weren't there two entirely unquestionable breasts on her chest and an entirely unquestionable cluster of hair on her lower belly?

"You're a hundred times more beautiful naked than dressed," he told her, and he went on praising her beauty.

"Have you wanted me for a long time?" she asked him.

"Yes, you know very well I wanted you."

"Yes, I know it. I noticed it when you came to the store. I know that you waited for me outside."

"Yes."

"You didn't dare talk to me, because I was never alone. But I knew that someday you'd be here with me. Because I wanted you too."