Life Is Elsewhere (7 page)

She noticed that in a collection of poems by Eluard he had underlined some lines in pencil: To be asleep, the moon in one eye and the sun in the other. "What do you find so beautiful about that? Why should I sleep with the moon in one eye?" Legs of stone in stockings of sand. "How can stockings be made of sand?" Jaromil thought that Mama was not only making fun of the poem but that she thought him too young to understand it, and he responded brusquely to her.

My God, she couldn't even stand up to a child of thirteen! When she went to the painter's that day, her state of mind was that of a spy wearing the uniform of a foreign army; she was afraid of being unmasked. Her behavior had lost the last vestige of spontaneity, and everything she said and did resembled the performance of an amateur who, paralyzed by stage fright, recites her lines in fear of being booed.

It was at about that time that the painter discovered the charm of the camera; he showed Mama his first photographs, still lifes made up of an odd assortment of objects, bizarre views of forgotten and abandoned things; then he led her under the luminous skylight and started to photograph her. At first it made her feel a kind of relief, for there was no need to talk; she only had to stand or sit or smile or listen to the painter's instructions and to the compliments he from time to time bestowed on her face.

The painter's eyes suddenly lit up; he grabbed a brush, dipped it in black paint, gently turned Mama's head, and made two oblique lines on her face. "I've crossed you out! I've destroyed God's work!" he said laughing, and he set about photographing her with the two thick lines crossing on her nose. Then he led her to the bathroom, washed her face, and dried it with a towel.

"I crossed you out in order to create you all over again now," he said, again taking up the brush and starting to draw on her. This time it was circles and lines resembling ancient ideographic writings. "A face-message, a face-letter," said the painter, and he took her back under the bright skylight and began again to photograph her.

Then he had her lie down on the floor and beside her head placed a plaster cast of the head of an antique statue on whose face he drew the same lines she had on hers, then photographed these two heads, the living and the lifeless, and then washed the lines off Mama's face, painted other lines on it, photographed her again, had her lie down on the daybed, and began to undress Mama, who, fearing that he would paint on her breasts and legs, even risked a joking remark intended to make him realize that he should not paint her body (it took courage for her to risk a joke, for she was always afraid that her jokes would misfire and make her look foolish), but the painter was tired of painting, and instead of painting he made love to her and, at the same time, he held her head between his two hands, her head covered with his designs, as if he were particularly aroused by the thought of making love to a woman who was his own creation, his own fantasy, his own image, as if he were God lying down with a woman he had just created for himself.

Mama really was at that moment nothing but his invention, one of his paintings. She knew it, and she marshaled all her forces to keep him from seeing that she was not at all the painter's partner, his miraculous counterpart, a creature worthy of love, but merely a lifeless reflection, a mirror proffered with docility, a passive surface on which the painter projected the image of his desire. And in fact she passed the test, the painter had his rapture and blissfully withdrew from her body. But then, once she was home, she felt as if she had undergone a great struggle, and that evening she wept before she fell asleep.

When she returned to the studio some days later, the painting and picture taking resumed. This time the painter bared her breasts and painted on their beautiful contours. But when he tried to undress her completely, for the first time she denied her lover something.

It's hard to conceive of the skill, even the trickery, she employed, during all her erotic games with the painter, to hide her belly! She would keep on her garter-belt, implying that such seminakedness was more arousing; she would get him to make love in semidarkness instead of in full light; she would gently remove the painter's caressing hands from her belly and set them on her breasts; and when she had exhausted all her tricks, she would invoke her shyness, a trait the painter was familiar with and adored (he often told her that she was the incarnation of the color white, and that he had expressed his first thoughts of her in a painting by scraping white lines with a palette knife).

But now she had to stand in the middle of the studio like a living statue in the grip of the painter's eyes and brush. She resisted, and when she told him, as she had during her first visit, that what he wanted from her was crazy, he answered, as he did then: "Yes, love is crazy," and tore off the rest of her clothes.

And so she stood in the middle of the studio thinking only of her belly; she was afraid to look down at it, but it was before her eyes as she knew it from having despairingly looked at it a thousand times in the mirror; it seemed to her that she was nothing but a belly, nothing but ugly wrinkled skin, it seemed to her that she was a woman on an operating table, a woman who must not think about anything, who must yield herself up and simply believe that all this was temporary, that the operation and the pain would come to an end and that meanwhile there was only one thing to do: hang on.

The painter picked up a brush, dipped it in black paint, and applied it to her shoulder, her navel, her legs, stepped back and picked up the camera; then he led her to the bathroom, where he had her lie down in the empty bathtub and, placing across her body the metal snake with its perforated head, told her that this metal snake didn't spray water but a deadly gas and that it was now lying on her body like the body of war on the body of love; and then he led her out to another spot and photographed her there too, and she went obediently, no longer trying to hide her belly, but she always had it before her eyes, and she saw the painter's eyes and her belly, her belly and the painter's eyes . . .

And then, when she lay stretched out on the rug, all covered with paint, and he made love to her beside the cool, beautiful antique head, she couldn't hang on any longer and began sobbing in his arms, but he probably failed to grasp the meaning of these sobs, for he was convinced that his ferocious bewitchment, transformed into steady, pounding, beautiful movement, could evoke no response other than tears of rapture and bliss.

Mama realized that the painter had not guessed the cause of her sobs, so she controlled herself and stopped crying. But when she got home she was overcome by vertigo on the stairs; she fell and scraped her knee. Frightened, Grandmama led her to her room, put a hand on her brow, and stuck a thermometer in her armpit.

Mama had a fever. Mama had a nervous breakdown.

10

A few days later, Czech parachutists sent from England killed the German ruler of Bohemia; martial law was declared, and long lists of those who had been shot in reprisal appeared on the street corners. Mama was confined to her bed, and the doctor came every day to stick a needle into her bottom. Her husband would come to sit at her bedside, grip her hand, and gaze into her eyes; she knew that he attributed her nervous collapse to History's horrors, and she thought with shame that she had deceived him while he, in this difficult time, was being good to her and trying to be her friend.

As for Magda—the maid who had been living in the villa for several years and about whom Grandmama, respectful of a sturdy democratic tradition, would say that she considered her more a member of the family than an employee—she came in weeping one day because her fiance had been arrested by the Gestapo. And a few days later the fiances name appeared in black letters oh a dark red poster among the names of others who had been shot, and Magda was given a few days off.

When she came back, she said that her fiance's parents had been unable to obtain his ashes and that they would probably never know the location of their son's remains. She dissolved in tears and continued to weep almost every day. She wept most often in her small room, where her sobs were muffled by the wall, but sometimes she would suddenly begin to weep during lunch; since her misfortune the family had allowed her to eat with them at their table (before that she had eaten alone in

the kitchen), and the exceptional nature of this favor reminded her at noon, day after day, that she was in mourning and being pitied, and her eyes would redden and a tear emerge and fall on the dumplings; she did her best to hide her tears and the redness of her eyes, lowering her head, hoping not to be seen, but they were noticed all the more, and someone was always ready to utter a comforting word, to which she would reply with great sobs.

Jaromil watched all this as an exhilarating show; he looked forward to seeing a tear in the girl's eye, to seeing the girl's shyness as she tried to suppress sorrow and how sorrow would triumph over shyness and allow a tear to fall. His eyes drank in that face (surreptitiously, for he had the sense of doing something forbidden), he felt himself invaded by a warm excitement and by the desire to cover that face with affection, to caress it and console it. At night, when he was alone and curled up under the covers, he imagined Magda's face with her big brown eyes, imagined caressing it and saying, "Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry,'' because he could find no other words to say.

At about that time Mama ended her medical treatments (she had cured herself with a week of sleep therapy) and began again to do the housekeeping and shopping even while constantly complaining of headaches and palpitations. One day she sat down and began to write a letter. The very first sentence made her realize that the painter would find her silly and sentimental, and she was afraid of his verdict; but she soon put herself at ease: she told herself that these words, the last she would ever address to him, required no answer, and this thought gave her the courage to continue; with relief (and a strange feeling of rebellion) she created sentences that were entirely herself, that were entirely as she had been before she knew him. She wrote that she loved him and that she would never forget the miraculous time she had spent with him, but that the moment had come to tell him the truth: she was different, completely different from what the painter imagined, she was really just an ordinary, old-fashioned woman afraid that some day she would be unable to look her innocent son in the eye.

Had she therefore decided to tell him the truth? Ah, not at all! She didn't tell him that what she called the bliss of love had been for her a taxing effort, she didn't tell him how ashamed she had been of her marred belly or about her scraped knee, her nervous breakdown, or her having to sleep for a week. She didn't tell him anything of the kind because such sincerity was contrary to her nature and because she finally wanted again to be herself and she could be herself only in insincerity; because if she had confided everything to him sincerely, it would have been like lying down naked before him with the stretch marks on her belly showing. No, she no longer wanted to show him either her inside or her outside; she wanted to regain the protection of her modesty, and therefore to be insincere and write only about her child and her sacred duties as a mother. By the time she finished the letter she had persuaded herself that it was neither her belly nor her exhausting efforts to follow the painter's ideas that had provoked her nervous breakdown, but her great maternal feelings that had rebelled against her great but guilty love.

At that moment she felt not only boundlessly sad but also noble, tragic, and strong; that she had depicted with grand words the sadness that a few days before had made her suffer now brought her a soothing joy; it was a beautiful sadness and she saw herself, illuminated by its melancholy light, as sadly beautiful.

What a strange coincidence! Jaromil, who at that time spent entire days spying on Magda's weeping eye, was well acquainted with the beauty of sadness and had fully immersed himself in it. He again leafed through the book the painter had lent him, reading and endlessly rereading Eluard's poems and falling under the spell of certain lines: "She has in the tranquillity of her body / A small snowball the color of an eye"; or: "Distant the sea that bathes your eye"; and: "Good morning, sadness / You're inscribed on the eyes I love." Eluard had become the poet of Magda's calm body and of her eyes bathed by a sea of tears; her entire life seemed to him to be contained in a single line: "Sadness-beautiful face." Yes, that was Magda: sadness-beautiful face.

One evening the rest of the family went out to the theater, and he was alone with her in the villa; aware of the habits of the household, he knew that Magda would be taking her Saturday bath. Since his parents and grandmother had arranged their outing to the theater a week in advance, that morning he had pushed aside the keyhole cover on the bathroom door and glued it in place with a wad of moistened bread; to provide a clear view, he took the key out of the door. Then he hid it carefully.

The house was quiet and empty, and Jaromil's heart was pounding. He sat upstairs in his room with a book as if someone might suddenly turn up and ask him what he was doing, but he was not reading, he was only listening. At last he heard the sound of water rushing through the plumbing and the flow hitting the bottom of the bathtub. He turned off the light at the top of the stairs and tiptoed down; he was in luck; the keyhole was still open, and when he pressed his eye against it he saw Magda leaning over the bathtub, her breasts bare, with nothing on but her underpants. His heart was pounding violently, for he was seeing what he had never seen before, would soon see still more, and no one could prevent it. Magda straightened up, went over to the mirror (he saw her in profile), looked at herself for some moments, then turned (he saw her facing him) and headed toward the bathtub; she stopped, took off her underpants, threw them aside (he still saw her facing him), then climbed into the bathtub.

When she was immersed in the bathtub, Jaromil went on watching her through the keyhole, but since the water was up to her shoulders, she once again was nothing but a face., the same familiar sad face with eyes bathed by a sea of tears but at the same time a completely different face: a face to which he had to add (now, in the future, and forever) bare breasts, a belly, thighs, a rump; it was a face illuminated by the body's nakedness; it still elicited tenderness from him, but this tenderness was different because it echoed the rapid pounding of his heart.