Slowness (8 page)

The Czech scientist is plunged in melancholy, and as a sort of consolation, the idea occurs to him that from the period of his heroic labor in construction, which everyone wants to forget, he still retains a material and palpable souvenir: an excellent physique. A discreet smile of satisfaction plays over his face, for he is certain that among the people here, no one has muscles like his.

Yes, believe it or not, this seemingly laughable idea really does him good. He throws off his jacket and stretches out flat on his stomach on the floor. Then he raises himself on his arms. He repeats this movement twenty-six times, and he is proud of himself. He remembers when he and

At just about the same time, the Czech scientist has returned to his room, dejected, his soul bruised. His ears are still filled with the laughter that burst forth after Berck’s sarcasms. And he is still taken aback: can people really move so easily from veneration to contempt?

And indeed, I wondered, what did become of the kiss that the Sublime Planetary Historic News Event had planted on his brow?

This is where the courtiers of the News Event make their mistake. They do not know that the situations history stages are floodlit only for the first few minutes. No event remains news over its whole duration, merely for a quite brief span of time, at the very beginning. The dying children of Somalia whom millions of spectators used to watch avidly, aren’t they dying anymore? What has become of them? Have they grown fatter or thinner? Does Somalia still exist? And in fact did it ever exist? Could it be only the name of a mirage?

The way contemporary history is told is like a

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his mates would go swimming after work in a little pond behind the construction site. To tell the truth, he was a hundred times happier then than he is today in this chateau. The workmen used to call him Einstein, and they were fond of him.

And the idea occurs to him, a frivolous idea (he recognizes the frivolity and is even pleased by it), to go for a swim in the fine hotel pool. With a joyous and fully conscious vanity, he means to show off his body to the feeble intellectuals of this sophisticated, overcultivated, and ultimately perfidious country. Fortunately, he has brought his bathing trunks along from Prague (he takes them with him everywhere); he puts them on and looks at himself, half naked, in the mirror. He flexes his arms, and his biceps swell magnificently. “If anyone tried to deny my past, here are my muscles, irrefutable proof!” He imagines his body parading around the pool, showing the French that there exists one utterly fundamental value, bodily perfection, the perfection he personally can boast and that none of them has any idea of. Then he decides it’s a little unseemly to walk nearly naked through the hotel corridors, and he pulls on an undershirt. Now for the feet.

Leaving them bare seems to him as inappropriate as putting on shoes; so he decides to wear only socks. Thus clothed, he looks one more time in the mirror. Again his melancholy is joined by pride, and again he feels sure of himself.

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Ass hole. It could be said otherwise, for instance, as Guillaume Apollinaire did: the ninth portal of your body. His poem on the nine portals of a woman’s body exists in two versions: the first he sent to his mistress Lou in a letter written from the trenches on May 11, 1915, and the other he sent from the same place to another mistress, Madeleine, on September 21 of the same year. The poems, both beautiful, differ in their imagery but are constructed in the same fashion: each stanza is devoted to one portal of the beloved’s body: one eye, the other eye, the right nostril, the left nostril, the mouth; then, in the poem for Lou, “the portal of your rump” and, finally, the ninth portal, the vulva. But in the sec-94

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ond poem, the one for Madeleine, there occurs at the end a curious switch of portals. The vulva recedes to eighth place, and it is the ass hole, opening “between two pearly mountains,” that becomes the ninth portal: “yet more mysterious than the others,” the portal “of the sorceries one dares not speak of,” the “supreme portal.”

I consider those four months and ten days between the two poems, four months Apollinaire spent in the trenches, deep in intense erotic reveries that brought him to that shift in perspective, to that revelation: the ass hole is the miraculous focal point for all the nuclear energy of nakedness. The vulva portal is important, of course (of course, who would deny that?), but too officially important, a registered site, classified, documented, explicated, examined, experimented on, watched, sung, celebrated. Vulva: noisy crossroads where all of chattering humankind meets, a tunnel the generations file through. Only the gullible believe in the intimacy of that site, the most public site of all. The only site that is truly intimate, whose taboo even pornographic films respect, is the hole of the ass, the supreme portal; supreme because it is the most mysterious, the most secret.

This wisdom, which cost Apollinaire four months spent beneath a firmament of artillery shells, Vincent attained in the course of a single stroll with Julie, turned diaphanous by the light of the moon.

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A difficult situation when all you can talk about is one thing and you’re not in a position to talk about it: the unuttered ass hole is stuck in Vincent’s mouth like a gag. He looks to heaven as if he hopes to find some help there. And heaven grants him what he needs: it sends him poetic inspiration; Vincent exclaims: “Look!” and points to the moon. “It looks like an ass hole drilled into the sky!”

He turns his gaze on Julie. Transparent and tender, she smiles and says “Yes,” because for an hour already she has been disposed to admire any remark that comes from him.

He hears her “yes” and still hungers for more. She has the chaste look of a fairy, and he would

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like to hear her say “ass hole.” He wants to see her fairy mouth articulate that word, oh how he wants that! He would like to tell her: “Say it with me: ass hole, ass hole, ass hole,” but he does not dare. Instead, ensnared by his own eloquence, he gets more and more tangled up in his metaphor: “The ass hole giving off a lurid light that floods the guts of the universe!” And he stretches an arm to the moon: “Onward, into the ass hole of infinity!”

I cannot help making a small comment on Vincent’s improvisation: by his acknowledged obsession with the ass hole, he believes he is enacting his fondness for the eighteenth century, for Sade and the whole gang of libertines; but as if he hadn’t the strength to pursue that obsession fully and to the furthest limit, another legacy—a very different, even contrary one, from the following century—hastens to his aid; in other words, he is incapable of discussing his fine libertine obsessions except by making them lyrical; by turning them into metaphors. Thus he sacrifices the spirit of lib-ertinage to the spirit of poetry. And he transfers the ass hole from a woman’s body up to the sky.

Ah, this displacement is regrettable, painful to see! I dislike following Vincent along that path:

he struggles, stuck in his metaphor like a fly in glue; he cries out: “The ass hole of the sky like the eye of God’s camera!”

As if she sees them winding down, Julie breaks into Vincent’s poetic gyrations by pointing to the lighted lobby inside the great windows: “Almost everyone’s already left.”

They go indoors: it’s true, only a few people are still lingering at the tables. The elegant fellow in the three-piece suit is gone. However, his absence recalls him to Vincent so powerfully that he hears that voice again, cold and spiteful, backed by his colleagues’ laughter. Again he feels shame: how could he have been so rattled by the fellow? so miserably mute? He strains to clear him from his mind, but he can’t do it, he rehears the fellow’s words: “We all of us live under the gaze of the cameras. That is part of the human condition from now on. …”

He completely forgets about Julie, and, in amazement, he fixes on those two lines; how bizarre: the elegant fellow’s argument is almost identical to the objection Vincent himself had raised earlier with Pontevin: “If you want to step into some public dispute, call attention to some

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horror, how can you do it nowadays without being, or looking like, a dancer?”

Is that the reason he was so disconcerted by the elegant fellow? Was the man’s thinking too close to Vincent’s own for him to attack it? Are we all of us in the same trap, taken aback by a world that has suddenly changed under our feet into a stage set with no way out? Is there really no difference, then, between what Vincent thinks and what the elegant fellow thinks?

No, that idea is unbearable! He scorns Berck, he scorns the elegant fellow, and his scorn precedes his every judgment. Stubborn, he strains to grasp the difference that separates him from them, until he manages to see it with total clarity: like miserable flunkies, they delight in the human condition just as it is imposed on them: dancers happy to be dancers. Whereas he, even though he knows there is no way out, proclaims his disagreement with that world. Then he thinks of the answer he should have thrown in the elegant fellow’s face: “If living under cameras has become our condition, I revolt against it. I did not choose it!” That’s the answer! He leans toward Julie and without a word of explanation

tells her: “The only thing left for us is to revolt against the human condition we did not choose!”

Already accustomed to Vincent’s oddly timed remarks, she finds this one splendid and responds in a pugnacious tone herself: “Absolutely!” And as if the word “revolt” had filled her with a giddy energy, she says: “Let’s go up to your room, the two of us.”

At once, again, the elegant fellow has vanished from Vincent’s head as he looks at Julie, marveling at her latest words.

She is marveling too. Near the bar there are still a few of the people she had been standing with before Vincent spoke to her. Those people had acted as if she did not exist. She had been humiliated. Now she looks at them, regal, untouchable. They no longer impress her. She has a night of love ahead of her, and she has it through her own will, through her own courage; she feels rich, lucky, and stronger than any of those people.

She breathes into Vincent’s ear: “They’re all a bunch of anti-cocks.” She knows that’s Vincent’s word, and she says it to show she is giving herself to him and belongs to him.

It is as if she had put a grenade of euphoria into

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his hand. He could go now with the beautiful bearer of the ass hole, right into his room, but, as if he were following a command issued from a distance, he feels obliged to raise some hell here before he goes. He is caught up in a drunken whirlpool where the image of the ass hole merges with the imminence of sex, the elegant fellow’s jeering voice, and the silhouette of Pontevin, who, like some Trotsky, is running a huge uprising, a great riotous mutiny, from his Paris bunker.

“We’re going to have a swim,” he announces to Julie, and he runs down the staircase to the pool, which at the moment is empty and has the look of a theater stage to the people up above. He unbuttons his shirt. Julie runs to join him. “We’re going to have a swim,” he repeats, and tosses his trousers aside. “Take off your clothes!”

drama playing out before their eyes. Immaculata managed to let nothing show; when Berck turned away, she moved to the staircase, climbed it, and only when she was finally alone, in the deserted corridor leading to the rooms, did she realize she was staggering.

Half an hour later, the unsuspecting cameraman came into the room they shared and found her on the bed, lying flat on her stomach.

“What’s wrong?”

She does not answer.

He sits down beside her and lays his hand on her head. She shakes it off as if a snake had touched her.

“But what’s wrong?”

He repeats the same question several times more, until she says: “Please go gargle, I can’t stand bad breath.”

He did not have bad breath, he was always well scrubbed and scrupulously clean, therefore he knew she was lying, yet he goes docilely into the bathroom to do as she ordered.

The bad-breath idea did not occur to Immaculata out of nowhere, for what inspired that mischief was a recent memory immediately

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The dreadful speech Berck directed at Immaculata was uttered in a low, hissing voice, so the people nearby could not grasp the real nature of the

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repressed: the memory of Berck’s bad breath. While she was listening, crushed, to his insults, she was in no state to concern herself with his exhalation, and it was an observer hidden inside her who registered the nauseating odor and added this clear-mindedly concrete commentary besides: A man whose mouth stinks has no mistress; no woman would put up with it; any woman would find a way to let him know he stinks and would force him to rid himself of that fault. While she was being bombarded with insults, she was listening to this silent commentary, which she found happy and hopeful, because it told her that, despite the specter of gorgeous women Berck cannily allows to hover around him, he has long since lost interest in romantic adventures, and that the place beside him in bed is vacant.

As he gargles, the cameraman, a man at once romantic and practical, says to himself that the only way to change his companion’s foul mood is to make love to her as soon as possible. So in the bathroom he puts on his pajamas, and, his step tentative, he returns to sit beside her on the edge of the bed.

Not daring to touch her, he asks again: “What’s wrong?”

With implacable presence of mind, she responds: “If you can’t say anything but that idiotic line, I guess there’s not much to gain from a conversation with you.”

She rises and goes to the closet; she opens it to consider the few dresses she has hung there; the dresses appeal to her; they rouse a vague but strong wish to not let herself be driven from the scene; to pass again through the precincts of her humiliation; to not consent to her defeat; and if defeat there is, to transform it into great theater, in the course of which she will set her wounded beauty shining and deploy her rebellious pride.