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Authors: Milan Kundera

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BOOK: Slowness
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is the only other person who can do such long and effective pauses; then, in a low voice:] … in revolt against the human condition we did not choose.”

Revolt against the human condition we did not choose. That last line, the flower of his improvisation, surprises even him; a really beautiful line, actually; it suddenly carries him far beyond the preachings of politicians and puts him in communion with the greatest minds of his land: Camus might have written such a line, Malraux too, or Sartre.

Happy, Immaculata signals the cameraman, and the camera stops.

That’s when the Czech scientist approaches Berck and says: “That was very beautiful, really, very beautiful, but permit me to tell you that Mickiewicz was not …”

After his public performances, Berck always seems a little drunk; his voice firm, derisive, and loud, he interrupts the Czech scientist: “I know, my dear colleague, I know just as well as you do that Mickiewicz was not an entomologist. In fact, very rarely are poets entomologists. But despite this handicap, they are the pride of the entire

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human race, of which, if you’ll allow me, entomologists, yourself included, are a part.”

A great liberating laugh bursts out like a head of steam too long confined; indeed, ever since they realized that this gentleman so moved by himself had forgotten to read his paper, the entomologists have all been dying to laugh. Berck’s impertinent remarks have finally freed them of their scruples, and they roar without bothering to hide their delight.

The Czech scientist is taken aback: what has happened to the respect his colleagues were showing him only ten minutes earlier? How is it possible that they are laughing, that they are permitting themselves to laugh? Can people move so easily from veneration to contempt? (Oh yes, dear fellow, oh yes.) Is goodwill so fragile, so precarious a thing, then? (Of course, dear fellow, of course.)

At that same moment Immaculata comes up to Berck. Her voice is loud and sounds tipsy: “Berck, Berck, you’re magnificent! It’s absolutely you! Oh, I adore your irony! You’ve certainly used it on me! Remember back in school? Berck, Berck, remember how you used to call me Immaculata? The bird of night that kept you

from sleeping! That troubled your dreams! We’ve got to make a film together, a portrait of you. You really have to agree I’m the only one who has the right to do it.”

The laughter the entomologists awarded him for the licking he gave the Czech scientist still echoes in Berck’s head, intoxicating him; at moments like this, an enormous self-satisfaction fills him and makes him capable of recklessly frank behavior that often scares even him. So let us forgive him in advance for what he is about to do. He takes Immaculata by the arm, pulls her aside to shield himself from prying ears, and then in a low voice tells her: “Go fuck yourself, you old slut, with your sick neighbors, go fuck yourself, bird of night, night scarecrow, nightmare, reminder of my stupidity, monument of my idiocy, sewage of my memories, stinking piss of my youth …”

She listens to him and cannot believe she is really hearing what she is hearing. She thinks he is saying these hideous words for someone else, to cover his tracks, to fool the people around them, she thinks these words are just a trick she doesn’t get; so she asks, softly and unaffectedly: “Why are

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you saying all this to me? Why? How am I supposed to take it?”

“You’re supposed to take it just exactly the way I’m saying it! Literally! Completely literally! Slut as slut, pain in the ass as pain in the ass, nightmare as nightmare, piss as piss!”

style of making some hand gesture to draw attention to himself. When Berck takes Immaculata by the arm, he can bear it no longer, and he cries out: “Look at him, the only thing he cares about is the woman from the television! He didn’t take his foreign colleague by the arm, he doesn’t give a damn about his colleagues, especially if they’re foreigners, the television is his only master, his only mistress, his only concubine, because I bet he hasn’t got any others, because I bet he’s the biggest no-balls in the world!”

Oddly, despite its unpleasant weakness, for once his voice is perfectly audible. Indeed, there is one circumstance in which even the weakest voice can be heard. That is when it is putting forth ideas that irritate us. Vincent goes on to develop his thoughts, he is witty, he is incisive, he talks about dancers and the deal they have struck with the Angel, and increasingly gratified by his eloquence, he climbs his hyperboles as one climbs the steps of a stairway to heaven. A young man in eyeglasses, wearing a three-piece suit, watches and listens to him patiently, like a predator lying in wait. Then, when Vincent has exhausted his eloquence, he says:

“Dear sir, we cannot choose the era we are

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All this time, from the bar in the lobby, Vincent has been watching the target of his contempt. The whole scene having taken place some ten meters away from him, he caught none of the conversation. One thing, though, seemed clear to him: Berck looked to him just as Pontevin had always described him: a mass-media clown, a ham, a show-off, a dancer. Without a doubt, it was only because of his presence that a television crew had deigned to take an interest in the entomologists! Vincent watched him attentively, studying his art at dancing: the way he never lost sight of the camera, his skill at always positioning himself in front of other people, his elegant

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born into. And we all of us live under the gaze of the cameras. That is part of the human condition from now on. Even when we fight a war, we’re fighting it under the eye of the camera. And when we want to protest against anything, we can’t make ourselves heard without cameras. We are all dancers, as you say. I would even say: either we’re dancers or we’re deserters. You seem to regret, dear sir, that time marches on. So go on back! How about to the twelfth century, would you like that? But when you get there you’ll start protesting against the cathedrals, as some modern barbarism! So go back further still! Go back to the apes! No modernity to threaten you there, there you’ll be completely at home, in the immaculate paradise of the macaques!”

Nothing is more humiliating than not coming up with a slashing retort to a slashing attack. In unspeakable embarrassment, amid jeering laughter, Vincent feebly withdraws. After a minute of consternation, he remembers that Julie is waiting for him; he bolts the drink he has been holding untouched in his hand; then he sets the glass on the bar and picks up two other whiskies, one for himself, the other to take to Julie.

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The image of the man in the three-piece suit is still stuck like a splinter in his soul, he cannot rid himself of it; this is all the more painful because it comes just when he is hoping to seduce a woman. How can he seduce her if his mind is preoccupied by a painful splinter?

She notices his mood: “Where were you all this time? I thought you weren’t coming back. That you were trying to ditch me.”

He realizes she cares for him, and that slightly eases the pain from the splinter. He makes a fresh effort to be a charmer, but she is still mistrustful:

“Don’t give me any stories. You’re different from before. Did you run into someone you know?”

“No, really, no,” says Vincent.

“Yes, really, yes. You met a woman. And please, if you want to go off with her, you can do it. Half an hour ago I didn’t know you; so I could just go on not knowing you.”

She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.

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“Really, no, believe me, there’s no woman. There was a nuisance, some dismal moron I had an argument with. That’s all, that’s all,” and he strokes her cheek so sincerely, so tenderly, that she drops her suspicions.

“Still, Vincent, you’re completely transformed.”

“Come,” he tells her, and he invites her to go with him to the bar. He wants to extirpate the splinter with a flood of whisky. The elegant fellow in the three-piece suit is still there, with some other people. There’s no woman in his vicinity, and that pleases Vincent, accompanied as he is by Julie, whom he finds prettier by the minute. He picks up another two glasses of whisky, gives her one, drinks the other down fast, then leans toward her: “Look over there, that moron in the suit, with the eyeglasses.”

“Him? But, Vincent, he’s nothing, he’s completely nothing, how can you care about him?”

“You’re right. He’s an underfucked loser. He’s an anti-cock. He’s a no-balls,” says Vincent, and it seems to him that Julie’s presence removes him from his defeat, because the real victory, the only one that counts, is the conquest of a woman

picked up fast in the grimly unerotic milieu of the entomologists.

“He’s nothing, nothing, nothing, I assure you,” Julie repeats.

“You’re right,” says Vincent, “if I keep thinking about him I’ll become as moronic as he is,” and right there, at the bar, in front of everyone, he kisses her on the mouth.

It is their first kiss.

They go out into the park, stroll, stop, and kiss again. Then they find a bench on the lawn and sit down. From far away the river’s murmur reaches them. They are transported, without knowing by what; but I know: they are hearing Madame de T.‘s river, the river from her nights of love; from the well of the past, the age of pleasure is sending Vincent a quiet greeting.

And as if he could see it, Vincent says: “In olden times, in these chateaux, there used to be orgies. The eighteenth century, you know. Sade. The Marquis de Sade. La Philosophie dans le boudoir. You know that book?”

“No.”

“You should read it. I’ll lend it to you. It’s a

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conversation between two men and two women in the middle of an orgy.”

“Yes,” she says.

“All four of them are naked, making love, all together.”

“Yes.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” she says. But that “I don’t know” is not a refusal, it is the touching candor of an ideal modesty.

A splinter is not so easily extirpated. It is possible to master the pain, repress it, pretend to forget about it, but that pretense is a strain. Vincent is speaking so passionately of Sade and his orgies less because he hopes to corrupt Julie than because he is trying to forget the insult dealt him by the elegant fellow in the three-piece suit.

“Sure you do,” he says, “you know very well you would,” and he wraps her in his arms and kisses her. “You know very well you’d like that.” And he yearns to quote her dozens of lines, describe scores of situations he knows from that fantastic book called La Philosophie dans le boudoir.

Then they rise and continue their stroll. The full moon emerges from the foliage. Vincent looks at Julie and suddenly he is bewitched: the white light has endowed the girl with the beauty of a fairy, a beauty that surprises him, new beauty he did not see in her before, a fine, fragile, chaste, inaccessible beauty. And suddenly, he cannot even tell how it happened, he imagines the hole of her ass. Abruptly, unexpectedly, that image is there, and he will never be rid of it.

Ah, the liberating ass hole! Thanks to it, the elegant fellow in the three-piece suit (at last, at last!) has completely vanished. What several glasses of whisky could not accomplish, an ass hole has achieved in a single second! Vincent winds Julie in his arms, kisses her, strokes her breasts, gazes on her delicate fairylike beauty, and all this time, constantly, he is picturing her ass hole. He has an enormous desire to tell her: “I’m stroking your breasts, but all I’m thinking about is your ass hole.” But he cannot do it, the words will not come out of his mouth. The more he thinks about her ass hole, the more Julie is white, diaphanous, and angelic, such that it is impossible for him to pronounce the words aloud.

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“As if your dreams are a wastebasket where I toss pages that are too stupid.”

“What are you inventing? A novel?” she asks, in anguish.

I bow my head.

“You’ve often told me you wanted to write a novel someday with not a single serious word in it. A Big Piece of Nonsense for Your Own Pleasure. I’m frightened the time may have come. I just want to warn you: be careful.”

I bow my head still lower.

“You remember what your mother used to tell you? I can hear her voice as if it were yesterday: ‘Milanku, stop making jokes. No one will understand you. You will offend everyone, and everyone will end up hating you.’ Remember?”

“Yes,” I say.

“I’m warning you. Seriousness kept you safe. The lack of seriousness will leave you naked to the wolves. And you know they’re waiting for you, the wolves are.”

And after that terrible prophecy, she goes back to sleep.

Vera is sleeping, and I, standing at the open window, I am watching two people strolling in the chateau’s park by the light of the moon.

Suddenly I hear Vera’s breathing grow rapid, I turn toward her bed and I realize that in another moment she will start to scream. I’ve never known her to have nightmares! What goes on in this chateau?

I wake her and she stares at me, her eyes wide, full of fear. Then she speaks pell-mell, as if in a fit of fever: “I was in a very long corridor in this hotel. All of a sudden, from far off, a man appeared and ran toward me. When he got within ten meters, he started to shout. And, imagine, he was speaking Czech! Completely demented things: ‘Mickiewicz is not Czech! Mickiewicz is Polish!’ Then he came a few steps from me, threatening, and that’s when you woke me up.”

“Forgive me,” I say, “you’re the victim of my crazy imagination.”

“How do you mean?”

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huge concert where they present all of Beethoven’s one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each. If the same concert were given again in ten years, only the first note of each piece would be played, thus one hundred thirty-eight notes for the whole concert, presented as one continuous melody. And in twenty years, the whole of Beethoven’s music would be summed up in a single very long buzzing tone, like the endless sound he heard the first day of his deafness.

BOOK: Slowness
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