Slowness (3 page)

For instance: They are by themselves in the cafe, and Vincent asks: “What do you really think about what’s going on in Somalia?” Patiently, Pontevin gives him a whole lecture on Africa. Vincent raises objections, they argue, maybe they joke around as well, but not trying to be clever, just to allow themselves a little levity within a conversation of the utmost seriousness.

Then in comes Machu with a beautiful stranger. Vincent tries to go on with the discussion: “But tell me, Pontevin, don’t you think you’re making a mistake to claim that… ,” and he develops an interesting polemic opposing his friend’s theories.

Pontevin takes a long pause. He is the master of long pauses. He knows that only timid people fear them and that when they don’t know what to say, they rush into embarrassing remarks that

make them look ridiculous. Pontevin knows how to keep still so magisterially that the very Milky Way, impressed by his silence, eagerly awaits his reply. Without a word, he looks at Vincent who, for no reason, shyly lowers his eyes, then, smiling, he looks at the woman and turns again to Vincent, his eyes heavy with feigned solicitude: “Your insisting, in a woman’s presence, upon such excessively clever notions indicates a disturbing drop in your libido.”

Machu’s face takes on its famous idiot grin, the lovely lady passes a condescending and amused glance over Vincent, and Vincent turns bright red; he feels wounded: a friend who a minute ago was full of consideration for him is suddenly willing to plunge him into discomfort for the sole purpose of impressing a woman.

Then other friends come in, sit down, chatter; Machu tells some stories; with a few dry little remarks, Goujard displays his bookish erudition; there’s the sound of women’s laughter. Pontevin keeps silent; he waits; when he has let his silence ripen sufficiently, he says: “My girlfriend keeps wanting me to get rough with her.”

My God, he certainly knows how to put things.

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Even the people at the nearby tables fall quiet and are listening to him; laughter quivers, eager, in the air. What is so funny about the fact that his girl wants him to get rough with her? It must all lie in the magic of his voice, and Vincent cannot help but feel jealous, given that, compared with Pontevin’s, his own voice is like a flimsy fife straining to compete with a cello. Pontevin speaks softly, never forcing his voice, which nonetheless fills the whole room and makes inaudible the other sounds of the world.

He goes on: “Get rough with her … But I can’t do it! I’m not rough! I’m too nice!”

The laughter still quivers in the air, and to relish that quiver, Pontevin pauses.

Then he says: “From time to time a young typist comes to my house. One day during dictation, full of goodwill, I suddenly grab her by the hair, lift her out of her seat, and pull her over to the bed. Halfway there, I let her go and burst out laughing: ‘Oh, what a dumb lug I am, you’re not the one who wanted me to get rough. Oh, excuse me, please, mademoiselle!’”

The whole cafe laughs, even Vincent, who is back in love with his teacher.

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Still, the next day, he tells him reproachfully: “Pontevin, you’re not only the great theoretician of dancers, you’re a great dancer yourself.”

Pontevin (a little abashed): “You’re confusing concepts.”

Vincent: “When we’re together, you and I, and someone joins us, the place we’re in suddenly splits in two, the newcomer and I are down in the audience, and you, you’re dancing up there on the stage.”

Pontevin: “I tell you, you’re getting the con^-cepts confused. The term cdancer’ applies exclusively to exhibitionists in public life. And I abhor public life.”

Vincent: “You behaved in front of that woman yesterday the way Berck does in front of a camera. You wanted to draw her whole attention to yourself. You wanted to be the best, the wittiest. And you used the exhibitionists’ most vulgar judo on me.”

Pontevin: “Exhibitionists’ judo, maybe. But not moral judo! And that’s why you’re wrong to

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call me a dancer. Because the dancer wants to be more moral than anyone else. Whereas I, I wanted to look worse than you.”

Vincent: “The dancer wants to look more moral because his big audience is naive and considers moral acts beautiful. But our little audience is perverse and likes amorality. So you used amoral judo on me, and that in no way contradicts your essential nature as a dancer.”

Pontevin (suddenly in another tone, very sincerely): “If I hurt you, Vincent, forgive me.”

Vincent (immediately moved by Pontevin’s apology): “I have nothing to forgive you for. I know you were joking.”

It is no mere chance that their meeting place is the Cafe Gascon. Among their patron saints, the greatest is d’Artagnan: the patron saint of friendship, the single value they hold sacred.

Pontevin continues: “In the very broad sense of the term (and in fact, there you have a point), there’s certainly some dancer in every one of us, and I grant you that I, when I see a woman coming, I’m a good ten times more dancer than other people are. What can I do about it? It’s too much for me.”

Vincent laughs genially, more and more moved, and Pontevin goes on in a penitential tone: “And besides, if I am the great theoretician of dancers, as you’ve just acknowledged, there must be something they and I have in common, or I couldn’t understand them. Yes, I grant you that, Vincent.”

At this point, Pontevin turns from repentant friend back into theoretician: “But only some very small something, because in the particular sense I mean the concept, I’m nothing like the dancer. I think it not only possible but probable that a true dancer, a Berck, a Duberques, would in the presence of a woman be devoid of any desire to show off and seduce. It would never occur to him to tell a story about a typist he’d dragged by the hair to his bed because he had got her mixed up with someone else. Because the audience he’s looking to seduce is not a few specific and visible women, it’s the great throng of invisible people! Listen, that’s another chapter to be developed in the dancer theory: the invisibility of his audience! That’s what makes for the terrifying modernity of this character! He’s showing off not for you or for me but for the whole world. And what is the whole world? An infinity with no faces! An abstraction.”

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In the midst of their conversation, Goujard comes in with Machu, who from the doorway says to Vincent: “You told me you were invited to the big entomologists’ conference. I have news for you! Berck is going to be there.”

Pontevin: “Him again? He turns up everywhere!”

Vincent: “What in God’s name would he be doing there?”

Machu: “You’re an entomologist, you should know.”

Goujard: “For a year while he was a student he spent some time at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Entomologiques. At this conference they’re going to name him an honorary entomologist.”

And Pontevin: “We’ve got to go there and raise some hell!” then, turning to Vincent: “You’re going to sneak us all in!”

out of the chateau into the night, that unforgettable three-stage excursion.

First stage: they stroll with arms linked, they converse, they find a bench on the lawn and sit down, still arm in arm, still conversing. The night is moonlit, the garden descends in a series of terraces toward the Seine, whose murmur blends with the murmur of the trees. Let us try to catch a few fragments of the conversation. The Chevalier asks for a kiss. Madame de T. answers: “I’m quite willing: you would be too vain if I refused. Your self-regard would lead you to think I’m afraid of you.”

Everything Madame de T. says is the fruit of an art, the art of conversation, which lets no gesture pass without comment and works over its meaning; here, for instance, she grants the Chevalier the kiss he asks, but after having imposed her own interpretation on her consent: she may be permitting the embrace, but only in order to bring the Chevalier’s pride back within proper bounds.

When by an intellectual maneuver she transforms a kiss into an act of resistance, no one is fooled, not even the Chevalier, but he must

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Vera is already asleep; I open the window onto the park and consider the excursion Madame de T. and her young Chevalier took when they went

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nonetheless treat these remarks very seriously, because they are part of a mental procedure that requires another mental procedure in response. Conversation is not a pastime; on the contrary, conversation is what organizes time, governs it, and imposes its own laws, which must be respected.

The end of the first stage of their night: the kiss she granted the Chevalier to keep him from feeling too vain was followed by another, the kisses “grew urgent, they cut into the conversation, they replaced it. …” But then suddenly she stands and decides to turn back.

What stagecraft! After the initial befuddlement of the senses, it was necessary to show that love’s pleasure is not yet a ripened fruit; it was necessary to raise its price, make it more desirable; it was necessary to create a setback, a tension, a suspense. In turning back toward the chateau with the Chevalier, Madame de T. is feigning a descent into nothingness, knowing perfectly well that at the last moment she will have full power to reverse the situation and prolong the rendezvous. All it will take is a phrase, a commonplace of the sort available by the dozen in the

age-old art of conversation. But through some unexpected concatenation, some unforeseeable failure of inspiration, she cannot think of a single one. She is like an actor who suddenly forgets his script. For, indeed, she does have to know the script; it’s not like nowadays, when a girl can say, “You want to, I want to, let’s not waste time!” For these two, such frankness still lies beyond a barrier they cannot breach, despite all their libertine convictions. If neither one of them hits on some idea in time, if they do not find some pretext for continuing their walk, they will be obliged, merely by the logic of their silence, to go back into the chateau and there take leave of each other. The more they both see the urgency to find a pretext to stop and say it aloud, the more their mouths are as if stitched closed: all the words that could bring aid elude the pair as they desperately appeal for help. This is why, reaching the chateau door, “by mutual instinct, our steps slowed.”

Fortunately, at the last minute, as if the prompter had finally wakened, she finds her place in the script; she attacks the Chevalier: “I am quite displeased with you. …” At last, at last! Rescued! She is angry! She has found the

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pretext for a contrived little anger that will prolong their walk: she has been frank with him, so why has he said not a word about his beloved, about the Comtesse? Quick, quick, this calls for discussion! They must talk! The conversation starts up again, and again they move off from the chateau, along a path that, this time, will lead them unobstructed to the clasp of love.

the Comtesse, whom he must not leave. She gives him a short course in sentimental education, apprises him of her practical philosophy of love and its need to be freed from the tyranny of moral rules and protected by discretion, of all virtues the supreme virtue. And she even manages, in the most natural fashion, to instruct him how to behave the next day with her husband.

You’re astonished: where, in that terrain so rationally organized, mapped out, delineated, calculated, measured—where is there room for spontaneity, for “madness,” where is the delirium, where is the blindness of desire, the “mad love” that the surrealists idolized, where is the forgetting of self? Where are all those virtues of unreason that have shaped our idea of love? No, they have no place here. For Madame de T. is the queen of reason. Not the pitiless reason of the Marquise de Merteuil, but a gentle, tender reason, a reason whose supreme mission is to protect love.

I see her leading the Chevalier through the moonlit night. Now she stops and shows him the contours of a roof just visible before them in the penumbra; ah, the sensual moments it has seen, this pavilion; a pity, she says, that she hasn’t the key with her.

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As she converses, Madame de T. maps out the territory, sets up the next phase of events, lets her partner know what he should think and how he should proceed. She does this with finesse, with elegance, and indirectly, as if she were speaking of other matters. She leads him to see the Comtesse’s self-absorbed chill, so as to liberate him from the duty of fidelity and to relax him for the nocturnal adventure she plans. She organizes not only the immediate future but the more distant future as well, by giving the Chevalier to understand that in no circumstance does she wish to compete with

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They approach the door and (how odd! how unexpected!) the pavilion is open!

Why did she tell him she hadn’t brought the key? Why did she not tell him right off that the pavilion was no longer kept locked? Everything is composed, confected, artificial, everything is staged, nothing is straightforward, or in other words, everything is art; in this case: the art of prolonging the suspense, better yet: the art of staying as long as possible in a state of arousal.

range of techniques for slowing things down. She demonstrates it particularly during the second stage of the night, which is spent in the pavilion: they enter, they embrace, they fall onto a couch, they make love. But “all this had been a little hurried. We understood our error… . When we are too ardent, we are less subtle. When we rush to sensual pleasure, we blur all the delights along the way.”

The haste that loses them that sweet slowness, both of them instantly see as an error; but I do not believe that this is any surprise to Madame de T, I think rather that she knew the error to be unavoidable, bound to occur, that she expected it, and for that reason she planned the interlude in the pavilion as a ritardando to brake, to moderate, the foreseeable and foreseen swiftness of events so that, when the third stage arrived, in a new setting, their adventure might bloom in all its splendid slowness.

She breaks off the lovemaking in the pavilion, emerges with the Chevalier, walks with him some more, sits on the bench in the middle of the lawn, takes up the conversation again, and leads him thereafter to the chateau and into a secret chamber adjoining her apartment; it was her husband