Life Is Elsewhere (5 page)

Yes, these incomplete confidences attracted her like a sin, and she was aware of it. When Jaromil once suddenly said to her: "Mama, I'm not so little, I understand you," she was almost frightened. Naturally the boy hadn't surmised anything precise, he only wanted to suggest to Mama that he was able to share her sorrows, whatever they might be, but what he had said was fraught with meaning, and Mama saw his words as an abyss that had suddenly opened: an abyss of illicit intimacy and forbidden understanding.

7

And how did Jaromil's inner world continue to expand?

Not much; the schoolwork that had come so easily to him in the elementary grades became much more difficult in high school, and in that dullness the glory of the inner world disappeared. The teacher spoke of pessimistic books that saw the here and now merely as misery and ruin, which made his maxim that life is like weeds seem shamefully trite. Jaromil was no longer at all convinced that everything he thought and felt was solely his, as if all ideas had always existed in a definitive form and could only be borrowed as from a public library. But who then was he? What could his own self really consist of? He bent over that self in order to peer into it, but all he could find was the reflection of himself bending over himself to peer into that self. . . .

And so he began to yearn for the man who, two years before, had first talked about his inner originality; and since his art grades were barely average (in his water-colors the paint always strayed beyond the penciled outline sketches), Mama decided to accede to her son's request, find the painter, and arrange for private lessons to remedy Jaromil's inadequacies, which were spoiling his report cards.

So one fine day Jaromil went to the painter's apartment. It was a converted attic consisting of two rooms; the first contained a big collection of books; in the second, windowless but with a large skylight in the slanting roof, there were easels holding unfinished canvases, a long table with sheets of paper and small bottles of colored ink scattered on it, and on the wall strange black faces the painter said were copies of African masks; a dog (the one Jaromil already knew) lay motionless on the corner of the daybed watching the visitor.

The painter seated Jaromil at the long table and began to leaf through his sketchbook. "They're all the same," he finally said. "They don't take you anywhere."

Jaromil wanted to reply that these were exactly the figures with dogs' heads that had captivated the painter and that he had drawn them for him and because of him, but he was so disappointed and upset he couldn't say anything. The painter set a blank sheet of paper in front of him, opened a bottle of India ink, and put a brush in his hand. "Now draw whatever comes to mind, don't think about it much and just draw." Jaromil was so frightened that he had absolutely no idea what to draw, but since the painter insisted, he again, dying a thousand deaths, fell back on the head of a dog on top of an ill-formed body. The painter was dissatisfied, and Jaromil, embarrassed, said that he would like to learn how to paint with watercolors, because in class the colors always overflowed his outlines.

"So your mother said," said the painter. "But forget about it for now, and forget about dogs too." He set a big book in front of Jaromil and showed him pages where awkward black lines wiggled whimsically over a colored background, evoking in Jaromil's mind images of centipedes, starfish, beetles, stars, and moons. The painter wanted the boy to use his imagination and draw something comparable. "But what should I draw?" he asked, and the painter replied: "Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it's not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper." And Jaromil drew lines he didn't like at all, covering sheet after sheet with them and finally, according to Mama's instructions, giving the painter a banknote and going home.

The visit had thus been different from what he had expected, not having led to the rediscovery of his lost inner world but rather the contrary: it had deprived Jaromil of the only thing that belonged to him alone, the soccer players and soldiers with dogs' heads. And yet, when Mama asked if the lesson had been interesting, he talked about it enthusiastically; he was being sincere: the visit had not validated his inner world, but he had found an unusual outer world that was not accessible to just anyone and had instantly granted him some small privileges: he had seen strange paintings that had bewildered him but offered the advantage (he understood immediately that it was an advantage!) of having nothing in common with the still lifes and landscapes hanging on the walls of his parents' villa; he had also heard some strange remarks that he appropriated without delay: for example, he understood that the word "bourgeois" was an insult; bourgeois are people who want paintings to be lifelike, to imitate nature; but we can laugh at the bourgeois because (and Jaromil was delighted by this idea!) they were long since dead and did not know it.

And so he gladly went to the painter's, passionately hoping to repeat the success he had gained in the past with his dog-headed people; but in vain: the doodles that were meant to be variations on Miro's paintings were forced and entirely lacking the charm of childlike playfulness; the drawings of African masks remained clumsy imitations of their models and failed to stimulate the boy's own imagination, as the painter had hoped. And since Jaromil found it unbearable to have been at the painter's so many times without hearing a word of praise, he made a decision: he would bring him his secret sketchbook of female nudes.

His models for most of these drawings were photographs of statues he had seen in illustrated books from Grandpapa's library; in the initial pages of the sketchbook they were therefore of sturdy mature women in the lofty poses of the previous century's allegories. Then there was a page with something more interesting: a drawing of a headless woman; better still: the paper had been slit at the level of her neck, so that it looked as if the woman's head had been chopped off and that the paper still bore the mark of an imaginary ax. The slit in the paper had been made by Jaromil's pocketknife; there was a girl in his class he liked very much, and he often gazed at her, wishing to see her naked. To fulfill this wish he obtained a photograph of her and cut the head out; he inserted it into the slit.

That is why all the women in the following drawings were also decapitated and bore the same mark of an imaginary ax; some of them were in very strange posi-tions— for example, in a squatting posture depicting urination; at a flaming stake, like Joan of Arc; that execution scene, which I could explain (and perhaps excuse) as a historical reference, inaugurated a long series: sketches of a headless woman impaled on a sharpened pole, a headless woman with a leg cut off, a woman with an amputated arm, and other situations it is better to be silent about.

Of course Jaromil couldn't be certain whether these drawings would please the painter; in no way did they resemble the pictures he saw in his big books or on the canvases on the easels in his studio; even so it seemed to Jaromil that there was something about the drawings in his secret sketchbook that was close to his teacher's work: their aura of something forbidden; their originality, as compared to the paintings at home; the disapproval his drawings of nude women would provoke, much as the painter's incomprehensible canvases would if they were submitted to a jury consisting of Jaromil's family and their friends.

The painter leafed through the sketchbook and then, without a word, handed Jaromil a big book. He sat down some distance away and began drawing on sheets of paper while Jaromil went through the book, seeing a naked man with buttocks so extended they had to be supported by a wooden crutch; an egg hatching a flower; a face covered with ants; a man whose hand was turning into a rock.

Coming over to Jaromil, the painter said: "Notice what a wonderful draftsman Salvador Dali is," and then he placed a plaster statuette of a naked woman in front of him: "We've been neglecting draftsmanship, and that's a mistake. We need to start by getting to know the world as it is before we can go about radically transforming it," he said, and Jaromil's sketchbook was soon filled with female bodies whose proportions the painter had corrected and modified with strokes of his pencil.

8

When a woman doesn't live sufficiently through her body, she comes to see the body as an enemy. Mama didn't much like the strange scrawls her son brought back from his drawing lessons, but when she examined the drawings of naked women the painter had corrected, she felt intense disgust. Looking out of the window a few days later, she saw Jaromil down in the garden holding the ladder for the maid, Magda, who was picking cherries while he gazed attentively under her skirt. Feeling herself assailed on all sides by battalions of bare bottoms, she decided to wait no longer. That day Jaromil was supposed to have his drawing lesson as usual; Mama dressed quickly and got there ahead of him.

"I'm not a prude," she said, having seated herself in one of the studio's armchairs, "but you know that Jaromil is entering the awkward age."

She had carefully prepared everything she wanted to say to the painter, but now she was at a loss. She had gone over her sentences in familiar surroundings where a window looked out onto the garden's peaceful greenery, which silently applauded her every thought. But there was no greenery here, there were only bizarre canvases on easels and on the daybed a dog with its head between its paws examining her with the fixed gaze of a distrustful sphinx.

The painter refuted Mama's objections with a few sentences, then he went on: he frankly admitted that he had no interest at all in the good grades Jaromil might receive in art classes that do nothing but kill children's pictorial sense. What interested him in her son's drawings was his original, nearly mad imagination.

"Notice the strange happenstance. The drawings you showed me some time ago depicted people with dogs' heads. The drawings your son showed me recently depicted naked women, but all of them headless. Don't you find it significant, this stubborn refusal to acknowledge man's human face, to acknowledge man's human nature?"

Mama was bold enough to reply that her son was surely not so pessimistic as to deny man's human nature.

"Of course his drawings don't come from some pessimistic logic," said the painter. "Art arises from sources other than logic. Jaromil spontaneously had the idea of drawing people with dogs' heads and women without heads, not knowing how or why. It was his unconscious that dictated these strange but not absurd images to him. Don't you feel there's some kind of link between your son's vision and the war that shakes us every hour of our lives? Hasn't the war deprived man of his face and head? Aren't we living in a world where headless men only desire decapitated women? Isn't a realistic vision of the world the emptiest of illusions ? Aren't your son's childish drawings much more truthful?"

She had come here to rebuke the painter, and now she was as shy as a little girl afraid of being scolded; she didn't know what to say.

The painter got up from his armchair and headed for a corner of the studio where unframed canvases were leaning against the wall. He picked one up, turned it face out, took a few steps back, squatted down, and looked at it. "Come here," he said, and when she (obediently) came near him he put his hand on her hip and drew her toward him, so that now they were squatting side by side and Mama was examining a curious assemblage of browns and reds making up a kind of charred and deserted landscape filled with dying flames that could also be taken for steaming blood; and scraped into the landscape with a palette knife was a strange human figure that seemed to be made of white string

(the whiteness was the bared canvas) and seemed to be floating rather than walking and more diaphanous than substantial.

Mama still didn't know what to say, but the painter kept on talking, talking about the phantasmagoria of war, which by far surpasses, he said, the fantasies of modern paintings, talking about the ghastly image presented by a tree among whose leaves scraps of human bodies are entangled, a tree with fingers and an eye looking down from the tip of a branch. Then he said that in a time like this he was no longer interested in anything but war and love; a love that appears behind the blood-soaked world like the figure Mama saw on the canvas. (For the first time in the conversation she felt that she understood the painter, for she too had seen a kind of battlefield on the canvas and had perceived a human figure there.) The painter recalled for her the path along the river where they had first seen each other and then met so often, and he told her that she had suddenly appeared before him out of a fog of fire and blood like the shy white body of love.

Then he turned the squatting Mama's face toward him and kissed her. He kissed her before she knew what was happening. It was, moreover, characteristic of everything about this meeting: events were catching her off guard, running ahead of her imagination and her thinking; the kiss was a fait accompli before she had the time to reflect on it, and any further reflection couldn't change what was happening, for she had barely the time to tell herself quickly that something was happening that should not be happening; but she was not even quite certain about that, which is why she left for later the response to that debatable question and concentrated all her attention on what was, on taking things as they were.

She felt the painter's tongue in her mouth and in a fraction of a second realized that her own tongue was timidly sluggish and that it must feel to the painter like a wet rag; she was ashamed and quickly thought, almost angrily, that it was no surprise her tongue was a rag after all that kissless time; she hastened to respond to the painter's tongue with the point of her own tongue, and he lifted her up from the floor, led her to the daybed (the dog, whose eyes had been fixed on them, jumped off and lay down near the door), set her down on it, started to caress her breasts, and she felt satisfaction and pride; the painter's face looked young and eager, and she thought how long it had been since she had been young and eager, and, afraid of being inca-pable of it, she urged herself to behave like a young and eager woman, and suddenly (this time again, the event occurred before she had time to think) she realized that inside her body she was feeling the third man ever to enter it.