The unbearable lightness of being (23 page)

202

when he was sent to
a new customer whose bizarre appearance struck him the moment he saw her.
Though bizarre, it was also discreet, understated, within the bounds of the
agreeably ordinary (Tomas's fascination with curiosities had nothing in common
with Fellini's fascination with monsters): she was very tall, quite a bit
taller than he was, and she had a delicate and very long nose in a face so
unusual that it was impossible to call it attractive (everyone would have
protested!), yet (in Tomas's eyes, at least) it could not be called
unattractive. She was wearing slacks and a white blouse, and looked like an
odd combination of giraffe, stork, and sensitive young boy.

She fixed him with a long, careful, searching stare that was not devoid
of irony's intelligent sparkle. "Come in, Doctor," she said.

Although he realized that she knew who he was, he did not want to show
it, and asked, "Where can I get some water?"

She opened the door to the bathroom. He saw a washbasin, bathtub, and
toilet bowl; in front of bath, basin, and bowl lay miniature pink rugs.

When the woman who looked like a giraffe and a stork smiled, her eyes
screwed up, and everything she said seemed full of irony or secret messages.

"The bathroom is all yours," she said. "You can do whatever
your heart desires in it."

"May
I have a bath?" Tomas asked.

"Do
you like baths?" she asked.

He filled his pail with warm water and went into the living room.
"Where would you like me to start?"

"It's
up to you," she said with a shrug of the shoulders.

"May
I see the windows in the other rooms?"

"So you want to have a look around?" Her smile seemed to
indicate that window washing was only a caprice that did not interest her.

203

He went into the adjoining room. It
was a bedroom with one large window, two beds pushed next to each other, and,
on the wall, an autumn landscape with birches and a setting sun.

When he came back, he found an open
bottle of wine and two glasses on the table. "How about a little something
to keep your strength up during the big job ahead?"

"I wouldn't mind a little
something, actually," said Tomas, and sat down at the table.

"You must find it interesting,
seeing how people live," she said.

"I can't complain," said Tomas. "All those
wives at home alone, waiting for you." "You mean grandmothers and
mothers-in-law." "Don't you ever miss your original profession?"
"Tell me, how did you find out about my original profession?"

"Your boss likes to boast
about you," said the stork-woman. "After all this time!" said
Tomas in amazement. "When I spoke to her on the phone about having the windows
washed, she asked whether I didn't want you. She said you were a famous surgeon
who'd been kicked out of the hospital. Well, naturally she piqued my
curiosity."

"You have a fine sense of
curiosity," he said. "Is it so obvious?" "Yes, in the way
you use your eyes." "And how do I use my eyes?" "You
squint. And then, the questions you ask." "You mean you don't like to
respond?" Thanks to her, the conversation had been delightfully flirtatious
from the outset. Nothing she said had any bearing on the outside world; it was
all directed inward, towards themselves. And because it dealt so palpably with
him and her, there was nothing simpler than to complement words with touch.
Thus,

204

when Tomas
mentioned her squinting eyes, he stroked them, and she did the same to his. It
was not a spontaneous reaction;

she seemed to be
consciously setting up a "do as I do" kind of game. And so they sat
there face to face, their hands moving in stages along each other's bodies.

Not until Tomas
reached her groin did she start resisting. He could not quite guess how
seriously she meant it. Since much time had now passed and he was due at his
next customer's in ten minutes, he stood up and told her he had to go. Her
face was red. "I have to sign the order slip," she said. "But I
haven't done a thing," he objected. "That's my fault." And then
in a soft, innocent voice she drawled, "I suppose I'll just have to order
you back and have you finish what I kept you from starting."

When Tomas
refused to hand her the slip to sign, she said to him sweetly, as if asking him
for a favor, "Give it to me. Please?" Then she squinted again and
added, "After all, I'm not paying for it, my husband is. And you're not
being paid for it, the state is. The transaction has nothing whatever to do
with the two of us."

The
odd asymmetry of the woman who looked like a giraffe and a stork continued to
excite his memory: the combination of the flirtatious and the gawky; the very
real sexual desire offset by the ironic smile; the vulgar conventionality of
the flat and the originality of its owner. What would she be like when they

205

made love? Try as
he might, he could not picture it. He thought of nothing else for several days.

The next time he answered her
summons, the wine and two glasses stood waiting on the table. And this time
everything went like clockwork. Before long, they were standing face to face in
the bedroom (where the sun was setting on the birches in the painting) and
kissing. But when he gave her his standard "Strip!" command, she not
only failed to comply but counter-commanded, "No, you first!"

Unaccustomed to such a response, he
was somewhat taken aback. She started to open his fly. After ordering
"Strip!" several more times (with comic failure), he was forced to
accept a compromise. According to the rules of the game she had set up during
his last visit ("do as I do"), she took off his trousers, he took off
her skirt, then she took off his shirt, he her blouse, until at last they stood
there naked. He placed his hand on her moist genitals, then moved his fingers
along to the anus, the spot he loved most in all women's bodies. Hers was
unusually prominent, evoking the long digestive tract that ended there with a
slight protrusion. Fingering her strong, healthy orb, that most splendid of
rings called by doctors the sphincter, he suddenly felt her fingers on the
corresponding part of his own anatomy. She was mimicking his moves with the
precision of a mirror.

Even though, as I have pointed out,
he had known approximately two hundred women (plus the considerable lot that
had accrued during his days as a window washer), he had yet to be faced with a
woman who was taller than he was, squinted at him, and fingered his anus. To
overcome his embarrassment, he forced her down on the bed.

So precipitous was his move that he
caught her off guard. As her towering frame fell on its back, he caught among
the red blotches on her face the frightened expression of equilibrium lost. Now
that he was standing over her, he grabbed her under

206

the knees and
lifted her slightly parted legs in the air, so that they suddenly looked like
the raised arms of a soldier surrendering to a gun pointed at him.

Clumsiness
combined with ardor, ardor with clumsiness— they excited Tomas utterly. He made
love to her for a very long time, constantly scanning her red-blotched face for
that frightened expression of a woman whom someone has tripped and who is
falling, the inimitable expression that moments earlier had conveyed excitement
to his brain.

Then he went to
wash in the bathroom. She followed him in and gave him long-drawn-out
explanations of where the soap was and where the sponge was and how to turn on
the hot water. He was surprised that she went into such detail over such simple
matters. At last he had to tell her that he understood everything perfectly,
and motioned to her to leave him alone in the bathroom.

"Won't you let
me stay and watch?" she begged.

At last he
managed to get her out. As he washed and urinated into the washbasin (standard
procedure among Czech doctors), he had the feeling she was running back and
forth outside the bathroom, looking for a way to break in. When he turned off
the water and the flat was suddenly silent, he felt he was being watched. He
was nearly certain that there was a peephole somewhere in the bathroom door and
that her beautiful eye was squinting through it.

He went
off
in the best of moods, trying to fix her essence in his memory, to reduce that
memory to a chemical formula capable of defining her uniqueness (her millionth
part dissimilarity). The result was a formula consisting of three givens:

1)
clumsiness with ardor,

2) the
frightened face of one who has lost her equilibrium and is falling, and

3) legs raised
in the air like the arms of a soldier surrendering to a pointed gun.

207

Going over them, he felt the joy of
having acquired yet another piece of the world, of having taken his imaginary
scalpel and snipped yet another strip off the infinite canvas of the universe.

12

At about the same
time, he had the following experience: He had been meeting a young woman in a
room that an old friend put at his disposal every day until midnight. After a
month or two, she reminded him of one of their early encounters: they had made
love on a rug under the window while it was thundering and lightning outside;
they had made love for the length of the storm; it had been unforgettably
beautiful!

Tomas was appalled. Yes, he
remembered making love to her on the rug (his friend slept on a narrow couch
that Tomas found uncomfortable), but he had completely forgotten the storm! It
was odd. He could recall each of their times together;

he had even kept
close track of the ways they made love (she refused to be entered from behind);
he remembered several of the things she had said during intercourse (she would
ask him to squeeze her hips and to stop looking at her all the time); he even
remembered the cut of her lingerie; but the storm had left no trace.

Of each erotic
experience his memory recorded only the steep and narrow path of sexual
conquest: the first piece of verbal aggression, the first touch, the first
obscenity he said to her and she to him, the minor perversions he could make
her acquiesce in and the ones she held out against. All else he excluded
(almost

208

pedantically)
from his memory. He even forgot where he had first seen one or another woman,
if that event occurred before his sexual offensive began.

The young woman smiled dreamily as she went on about the storm, and he
looked at her in amazement and something akin to shame: she had experienced
something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways
in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and
nonlove.

By the word
"nonlove" I do not wish to imply that he took a cynical attitude to
the young woman, that, as present-day parlance has it, he looked upon her as a
sex object; on the contrary, he was quite fond of her, valued her character and
intelligence, and was willing to come to her aid if ever she needed him. He was
not the one who behaved shamefully towards her; it was his memory, for it was
his memory that, unbeknown to him, had excluded her from the sphere of love.

The brain
appears to possess a special area which we might call
poetic memory
and
which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives
beautiful. From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the
slightest impression on that part of his brain.

Tereza occupied
his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women.
That was unfair, because the young woman he made love to on the rug during the
storm was not a bit less worthy of poetry than Tereza. She shouted, "Close
your eyes! Squeeze my hips! Hold me tight!"; she could not stand it that
when Tomas made love he kept his eyes open, focused and observant, his body
ever so slightly arched above her, never pressing against her skin. She did not
want him to study her. She wanted to draw him into the magic stream that may be
entered only with closed eyes. The reason she refused to get down on all fours was
that in that position their bodies did not touch at all and he could observe
her from a distance of

209

several feet. She
hated that distance. She wanted to merge with him. That is why, looking him
straight in the eye, she insisted she had not had an orgasm even though the rug
was fairly dripping with it. "It's not sensual pleasure I'm after,"
she would say, "it's happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not
pleasure." In other words, she was pounding on the gate of his poetic
memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory.
There was room for her only on the rug.

His adventure with Tereza began at
the exact point where his adventures with other women left off. It took place
on the other side of the imperative that pushed him into conquest after
conquest. He had no desire to uncover anything in Tereza. She had come to him
uncovered. He had made love to her before he could grab for the imaginary
scalpel he used to open the prostrate body of the world. Before he could start
wondering what she would be like when they made love, he loved her.

Their love story did not begin
until afterward: she fell ill and he was unable to send her home as he had the
others. Kneeling by her as she lay sleeping in his bed, he realized that someone
had sent her downstream in a bulrush basket. I have said before that metaphors
are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the
point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Recently
she had made another entry into his mind. Returning home with the milk one
morning as usual, she stood in the doorway with a crow wrapped in her red scarf
and pressed