Life Is Elsewhere (29 page)

became angry; she didn't like Jaromil to wear gym shorts, for she believed that gym shorts were not undershorts and should be worn only for sports. When Jaromil protested that the undershorts were ugly, she answered with concealed irritation that he probably didn't display himself to anyone in his underwear. So whenever Jaromil went to see the redheaded girl, he always took a pair of undershorts out of the linen drawer, hid it in one of his desk drawers, and then put on a pair of gym shorts.

But that day he had not known what the evening would bring, and he wore a pair of hideously ugly, bulky, threadbare, dirty gray undershorts!

You might say that this was just a slight complication, that he could, for example, turn off the light so as not to be seen. Alas, there was a bedside lamp with a pink shade in the room, the lamp was on and seemed impatiently waiting to illuminate the caresses of the two lovers, and Jaromil couldn't imagine what he might say to induce the young woman to turn it off.

Or you might perhaps remark that Jaromil could take off his bad-looking undershorts together with his trousers. But Jaromil didn't even think of taking off his undershorts and his trousers at the same time, because he had never undressed in this way; such a sudden leap into nakedness frightened him; he always undressed piecemeal and caressed the redhead for a long time while still in his gym shorts, which he removed only under cover of arousal.

And so he stood terrified before the large dark eyes and announced that he too had to leave.

The old poet was almost in a rage; he told Jaromil that he must not insult a woman, and he lowered his voice to depict the pleasures that awaited him; but his words merely convinced Jaromil all the more of the wretchedness of his undershorts. Looking at the wonderful dark eyes, his heart breaking, he retreated toward the door.

When he reached the street he was overcome by regret; he couldn't get rid of the image of that splendid girl. And the old poet (they had taken leave of the editor at the streetcar stop and were now walking alone through the dark streets) was tormenting him by continuing to reproach him for insulting the young woman and behaving stupidly.

Jaromil told the poet that he hadn't wanted to insult the young woman, but that he loved his girlfriend, who was madly in love with him.

You're naive, said the old poet. You're a poet, you're a lover of life, you wouldn't harm your girlfriend by going to bed with someone else; life is short, and lost opportunities don't recur.

That was painful to hear. Jaromil replied that in his opinion a single great love to which we devote everything we have within us is worth more than a thousand fleeting affairs; that having his girlfriend was having all women; that his girlfriend was so protean, her love so infinite, that he could experience with her more unexpected adventures than a Don Juan with his 1,003 women.

The old poet stopped walking; Jaromil's words had visibly touched him: "You may be right," he said. "But I'm an old man and belong to the old world. I admit that even though I'm married, I'd have loved to stay with that woman."

As Jaromil went on with his reflections on the greatness of monogamous love, the old poet tilted his head back: "Ah, you may be right, my friend, you're certainly right. Didn't I too dream about a great love? About a single, unique love? About a love as boundless as the universe? But I squandered my chance for it, my friend, because in that old world, the world of money and whores, great love was belittled."

Both of them were drunk, the old poet put his arm around the young poet's shoulders, and now they stopped in the middle of the street between the streetcar tracks. The old man raised his arms high and shouted: "Death to the old world! Long live great love!"

Jaromil found this impressive, bohemian, and poetic, and the two of them shouted long and enthusiastically in the dark streets of Prague: "Death to the old world! Long live great love!"

Then the poet knelt before Jaromil on the cobblestones and kissed his hand: "My friend, I pay homage to your youth! My age pays homage to your youth, because only youth will save the world!" He was silent for a moment, and then, his bare head touching Jaromil's knees, he added in a very melancholy voice: "And I pay homage to your great love."

They finally parted, and Jaromil soon found himself back home in his room. Before his eyes he again saw the image of the beautiful woman he had forgone. Driven by an urge for self-punishment, he looked at himself in the mirror. He took off his trousers so as to see himself in his hideous, threadbare undershorts; for a long time he contemplated his comical ugliness with hatred.

Then he realized that it was not he himself he was thinking about with hatred. He was thinking about his mother; his mother, who chose his underwear; his mother, who made him secretly put on gym shorts and hide his undershorts in his desk; he was thinking about his mother, who knew every one of his shirts and socks. He thought with hatred about his mother, who was holding him by the end of a long leash whose collar was embedded in his neck.

9

From that evening on he became still more cruel to the redheaded girl; it was, of course, cruelty ceremoniously cloaked in love: How can she not understand what is preoccupying him just now? How can she not know what mood he is in? Has she become such a stranger that she has no idea what is happening to him deep down? If she really loves him, as he loves her, she should at least be able to guess! How can she be interested in things that don't interest him? How can she always be talking about her brother and still another brother and about a sister and still another sister? Isn't she aware that Jaromil has serious worries, that he needs her involvement and understanding instead of this eternal egocentric chatter?

Of course, the girl defended herself. Why, for example, can't she talk about her family? Doesn't Jaromil talk about his? Is her mother worse than Jaromil's? And she reminded him (for the first time since that day) that his mother had barged into Jaromil's room and shoved a sugar cube with drops on it into her mouth.

Jaromil loved and hated his mother; confronting the redhead, he quickly came to her defense: Had Mama harmed her by wanting to take care of her? That only showed how much she liked her, that she had accepted her as a member of the family!

The redhead laughed: Jaromil's mother wasn't so stupid as to confuse the moans of love with the groans of someone with an upset stomach! Jaromil was offended, fell into silence, and the girl had to ask his forgiveness.

As he and the redhead walked down the street one day, arm in arm and stubbornly silent (when they weren't reproaching each other they were silent, and when they weren't silent they were reproaching each other), Jaromil suddenly noticed two good-looking women coming toward them. One was younger, the other older; the younger one was prettier and more elegant, but (to Jaromil's great surprise) the older one too was very elegant and amazingly pretty. Jaromil knew them both: the younger one was the filmmaker and the older one was his mama.

He blushed and greeted them. Both women returned the greeting (Mama with conspicuous gaiety), and for Jaromil being seen with this unattractive girl was as if the beautiful filmmaker had surprised him in his hideous undershorts.

Back home he asked Mama how she had come to know the filmmaker. Mama answered with whimsical coyness that she had known her for some time. Jaromil continued to question her, but Mama kept evading him; it was as if someone were questioning his lover about an intimate detail and she, to heighten his curiosity, was delaying her answer; at last she told him that this likable woman had visited her about two weeks before. She had said that she admired Jaromil's poetry and wanted to shoot some footage of him; it would be an amateur film produced under the auspices of the National Police film club, and would thus be certain to have a sizable audience.

"Why did she come to see you? Why didn't she come to me directly?" Jaromil wondered.

Apparently the young woman didn't want to disturb him, and she therefore wanted to learn as much as she could from her. Besides, who knows more about a son than his mother? And the young woman was so kind as to ask his mother to collaborate with her on the scenario; yes, together they had devised a scenario about the young poet.

"Why didn't you tell me?" asked Jaromil, who was instinctively displeased by the alliance between his mother and the filmmaker.

"We had the misfortune of running into you. We'd decided to surprise you. One fine day you would come home and find the film crew and a camera.".

What could Jaromil do? One day he came home and shook hands with the young woman at whose place he had found himself some weeks before, and he felt as pitiable as he had that evening, even though he was now wearing red gym shorts under his trousers. After the poetry evening with the police, he had never again worn the frightful undershorts, but whenever he faced the filmmaker, there was always someone else playing their role: when he met her in the street with his mother, he thought he had his girlfriend's red hair wrapped around him like a hideous pair of undershorts; and this time the clownish undershorts were represented by Mama's coy remarks and nervous chatter.

The filmmaker announced (no one had asked for Jaromil's opinion) that they were going to shoot documentary material, childhood photographs on which Mama would comment, because, the two women told him in passing, the entire film had been conceived as a mother's account of her poet son. He wanted to ask what Mama was going to say, but he dreaded finding out; he was blushing. Besides Jaromil and the two women, there were three men in the room, along with a camera and two big floodlights; it seemed to him that these fellows were watching him and smiling with hostility; he didn't dare speak.

"You have marvelous childhood photos; I'd love to use them all," said the filmmaker as she leafed through the family album.

"Will they look like anything on the screen?" asked Mama with professional interest, and the filmmaker assured her there was nothing to worry about; then she explained to Jaromil that the first sequence of the film would consist of a montage of photographs of him, with Mama reminiscing off camera. Then Mama would be seen, and only after that the poet; the poet in the house where he had lived all his life, the poet writing, the poet in the garden amid the flowers, and finally the poet out in the country, where he most liked to be; in his favorite spot there, in the middle of a vast landscape, he would recite the poem with which the film will end. ("And where exactly is this favorite spot of mine?" he asked recalcitrantly; he learned that his favorite spot was that romantic landscape on the outskirts of Prague where the rough terrain was strewn with boulders. "What? I detest that spot," he said, but no one took him seriously.)

Jaromil didn't like the scenario and said that he wanted to work on it himself; he pointed out that there were many trite things in it (it was ridiculous to show photos of a one-year-old!); he asserted that there were more interesting problems it would probably be useful to take up; the two women asked him what he had in mind, and he answered that he couldn't say at the moment and that he would prefer that they wait a bit before starting to film.

He wanted at all costs to postpone the shooting, but he didn't win his case. Mama put her arm around his shoulders and said to her dark-haired collaborator: "You see? That's my eternally dissatisfied boy! He's never content. ..." Then she tenderly leaned close to Jaromil's face: "Isn't that so?" Jaromil didn't answer, and she repeated: "Isn't that so, that you're my dissatisfied little boy? Say it's so!"

The filmmaker said that dissatisfaction is a virtue in a writer, but this time it wasn't Jaromil who was the author but rather the two of them, and they were ready to take all the risks; all he had to do was let them make the film as they understood it, just as they let him write his poems as he pleased.

Mama added that Jaromil shouldn't be afraid that the film would do him harm, for both of them, Mama and the filmmaker, were creating it with the greatest affection for him; she said this so flirtatiously that it was unclear whether she was flirting with him or with her new friend.

In any case she was flirting. Jaromil had never seen her like this; that very morning she had gone to the hairdresser and had her hair done in a youthful fashion; she talked louder than usual, laughed constantly, made use of all the witty turns of phrase she had ever learned, and enjoyed playing her role as mistress of the house, bringing cups of coffee to the men at the floodlights. She addressed the dark-eyed filmmaker with the showy familiarity of a friend (so as to put herself in the same age group) while indulgently putting her arm on Jaromil's shoulder and calling him her dissatisfied little boy (so as to send him back to his virginity, his childhood, his diapers). (Ah, what a beautiful sight, these two face to face pushing each other: she pushing him into his diapers and he pushing her into her grave, ah, what a beautiful sight these two . . . )

Jaromil gave way; he knew that the two women were building up speed like locomotives and that he wasn't capable of resisting their eloquence; he saw the three men at the camera and floodlights as a sardonic audience ready to jeer at any false step he might take; that's why he spoke in a near whisper while the two women answered him loudly enough for the audience to hear, because the presence of the audience was an advantage to them and a disadvantage to him. And so he told them that he was submitting to them and that he wanted to leave; but they replied (again flirtatiously) that he should stay; it would give them pleasure, they said, if he observed them at work; so he spent a few minutes watching the cameraman shooting various photos from the album before leaving for his room, where he pretended to be reading or working; confused reflections filed through his mind; he tried to find an advantage in this entirely disadvantageous situation, and he thought that the filmmaker might have conceived the idea of this filming to get in touch with him; he reflected that in that case Mama was merely an obstacle to be patiently circumvented; he tried to calm himself and think of a way to utilize this ridiculous filming to his own benefit, that is, to make up for the loss that had tormented him since the night he had stupidly left the filmmaker's room; he tried to overcome his shyness and periodically went out to glance into the next room and see how the filming was going, with the hope of repeating, if only once, their reciprocal gazes, the long motionless look that had so captivated him at the filmmaker's villa apartment; but this time the filmmaker was indifferent to him and absorbed in her work, and their eyes met only rarely and fleetingly; he therefore gave up his attempts and decided to accompany the filmmaker home when she was finished working.