The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  “Up to now I have not dreamt, either.”

  “But now that you have started,” he said, smiling, “you are not going about it in the right way. Your dream contains so much talk, at least as you have related it to me. If you must dream, silence is best. You must be silent if you are absorbed in anything.” He laughed. “Perhaps I myself am too talkative to dream.”

  Jean-Jacques was not only very talkative, but restless, too. He walked and moved rapidly and always seemed to want to go somewhere, yet never seemed in a hurry to be off. His manner of speaking was similar: he talked quickly, hurriedly, but with assurance and conceit. His pronunciation was, if anything, over-distinct. I wondered to myself if he did anything silently—if he wrote in silence, if he made love in silence, if he stole without words.

  We ordered two more cognacs. “Do you think I will ever explain this dream?” I asked him.

  “You can explain one dream with another,” he said thoughtfully. “But the best interpretation of your dream would be to find it in your life. You must outbid your dream.”

  Finally he reminded me that it was getting late, and that pleasure and business called him. As I paid our bill, he waved and walked away, and I saw him take a golden bracelet from his pocket and attach it to his wrist.

  This conversation with Jean-Jacques encouraged me to pursue my dream more intently. In the suspension of all preconceptions which I had adopted as my path to certitude, I could hardly ignore so singular a visitation.

  I suppose I had dreamt before my “dream of the two rooms.” Perhaps I had dreamt every night. But I did not remember my dreams. If there were shadows of people and situations in my mind when I awakened, as soon as I arose from bed and washed, the shadows vanished, and the day and its tasks appeared to be untrammelled and continuous from the night before when I had lain down. No counter-images waylaid me as I slept.

  I had often wondered why I did not dream. Perhaps my personality was assembled late. Nevertheless, the advent of my dreams did not take me completely by surprise. From books and conversations with friends, I was acquainted with the usual dream repertoire: dreams of being trapped in a fire, dreams of falling, dreams of being late, dreams of flying, dreams of being followed, dreams of one’s mother, dreams of nakedness, dreams of murdering someone, dreams of sexual conquest, dreams of being sentenced to death. Neither this dream, nor any of those which followed it, failed to include some of these standard dilemmas of dreams. What was odd, and memorable, about the dreams was not their originality but the impression they made on me. My previous dreams, if I had had any, were easily forgotten. This dream and its successors were indelible. They were written, as it were, by a firmer hand, and in a different script.

  As I have said, my first recourse was interpretation. It seems that from the beginning I did not accept the dream as a gift but as a task. The dream also provoked a certain reaction of antipathy in me. Therefore I sought to master the dream, by understanding it. The more I thought of the dream, the greater I felt the responsibility. But the various interpretations I conceived did not relieve me. These interpretations, instead of reducing the pressure of the dream on my daytime life, added to it.

  The verbosity of the dream, which Jean-Jacques had pointed out to me, alone gave it an entirely different character from what I understood dreams generally to be like. Most dreams show. This dream said.

  My vanity was not wounded because the dream, speaking in the accent of command, showed me as without force and pride. I knew that the dream was both voluntary, in that I had imagined it, and involuntary, in that it issued a command I could not understand or answer.

  I labored with my dream.

  Once, during my travels, I was staying in a mountain village and had observed a woman in difficult childbirth. One wondered how love could ever become her. She was obviously bewildered that by any act of her own she could have brought herself to such great pain. She refused all help—rather, she no longer understood what her relatives and the neighbors and the midwife wanted from her when they tried to help her. She was drowning in herself.

  Her husband approached the iron bed and tried to take her hand. She did not push him away. But her senses were turned in an inward direction; only the nerves in the interior side of her skin registered. She was alone in the crammed shell of herself.

  There was a period after this first dream when I felt as I have described this woman: weighty, interred. I did not know how to deliver myself. Interpretation was my Caesarean operation, and Jean-Jacques my complaisant physician. Most of this time, you understand, I was quite calm. I was not in pain. This dream was not a nightmare. Nevertheless, this dream changed me. The even tenor of my investigations into the world and its opinions was broken, when I turned to investigate this dream.

  The woman who suffered in childbirth had already committed an extreme act: she had slept with her husband and conceived a child. The pain she now suffered was only the logical result of that act. But I seemed to bear, fruit without planting anything. This dream was unwanted. It procreated itself.

  This dream was my first immoderate act.

  THREE

  It is hard to explain what happened in the next months. For a long time, no night passed without presenting me some variation on this original dream. Sometimes the woman surrendered to my embrace. Sometimes it was I who played the flute, and struck the bather. Sometimes the woman told me I could go, on the condition that I continued to wear the chains. Sometimes I would not dance for her. Sometimes the bather remained with the woman and made love to her before my guilty eyes. But always at the end of the dream, I wept; and always I awakened with a driving empty elation which ruled the whole of my day.

  I did not make much progress in my morning’s meditation of the dream. These generous variations on the original scenario made the task of interpretation even more difficult. I no longer knew whether I was master or slave in my dream. Too much was being given for me to understand.

  The dream of my imprisonment in the two rooms narrowed my life, so that I thought more, and went out less. Thus, when my father visited the capital again for a few days I forgot to go to see him. Of this absorption by the dream, I do not complain: blessed is the mind with more to occupy it than its own dissatisfactions. But the mind needs the occasional reward of understanding. I was exhausted by my futile efforts to understand the dream, and wondered if I would even know how to act once I did understand. Finally, I began to take seriously the advice of Jean-Jacques, and thought less of how the dream might be interpreted and more of what I should do with it. Since the dream haunted me, I would now haunt the dream. I considered the exercises and prohibitions commanded in the dream. I bought a black bathing suit, and a flute which I painted the color of copper. I walked around the bedroom barefoot. I learned the tango and the foxtrot. I conquered the affections of several reluctant women.

  The bridge which I built between my dream and my daytime occupations was my first taste of an inner life. I was not surprised to discover that the claims of an inner life modify one’s attitudes to the world, and particularly to other people. The small gallery of characters in my dream now took their place alongside my relatives and my friends. They were perhaps more like the members of my family, whom I no longer saw but whose image I still carried in my head, than my friends in the capital. (For do not the personages of the past have a status similar to the personages of one’s dreams? That they existed is confirmed only by turning inward, or by consulting a photograph album or looking at old letters. This autobiographical narrative serves the functions of a photograph album or a collection of letters: already I reread what I have written, and only so far as I confirm by memory that I dreamed these dreams do I recognize what I wrote as constituting my past.) But even the people I knew in the present took on another, aspect. I saw them superimposed upon the personages of my dream, or I superimposed the man in the black bathing suit or the woman in white upon them.

  Then, one weekend at Frau Anders’, the elderly conductor who
came there sporadically to visit the daughter of the house, invited me to spend a fortnight with him in the city where he had his post with the municipal orchestra. I accepted the invitation, for it occurred to me that a change—I had not been out of the capital for months—might provide the stimulus that would crown my efforts of self-mimicry and even dispel the dream. Later I learned that the Maestro had extended this invitation at Frau Anders’ request. She was distressed by the mood of thoughtfulness (which she took to be melancholy) I could not conceal during my recent visits and by my increasing abstention from that large ration of shameless flattery which it was necessary at all times to supply her with.

  We went by train. When we arrived at his house, the housekeeper showed me to my room; then she served tea and the Maestro, after the most elegant apologies, left for a rehearsal, which I imagine he expected me to ask his permission to attend.

  I spent the evening playing records and looking at scores. Although I do not have that facility with a score which allows me to hear with my inner ear the full orchestration as I read, I was sufficiently entertained, and not at all bored.

  I went to sleep early, and was rewarded with a new dream.

  I dreamed that I was in a crowded city street, hurrying toward some appointment. I was anxious not to be late, but was not sure of my destination. I was not discouraged, though: I thought that if I continued with sufficient energy and display of certitude, I would recognize the place I was to go. Then there was a man walking beside me and I asked him politely for directions.

  “Follow him,” he said.

  The voice was familiar. I turned to inspect my companion and recognized the flute-player in the black bathing suit from my other dream. In exasperation I struck him with what, I believe, was his own flute. He groaned and fell, and rolled down the steps of a Metro entrance. Then I remembered he was lame and regretted my fury, for I could not claim that this time he had menaced me or seemed to intend me any harm.

  Fearful that he would emerge, brandishing his flute in anger, and pursue me, I began to run. At first I had to exert myself, but soon the running became easier. My panic subsided, for it was as if someone were helping me. I was running on a large black disc, which was revolving faster than I could run, so that I was losing time. I felt my hair becoming stiff and heavy on my scalp. I jumped off the disc, and stood in the street again. At first I was extremely dizzy; then I felt quite calm. I must have had, at this point, that semi-awareness of the dream-state itself, common in dreams, which inspires a complacent passivity before events. At the same time that I stood in the street looking for an address which I had forgotten, I saw myself very clearly further down the conveyor belt of the dream, safely at my destination.

  At some point in this part of the dream I bought some cigarettes. I remember that the brand I requested was “face cigarettes,” and that the proprietress of the tabac told me she had only “musical cigarettes.” I assured her that these would be equally satisfactory, and paid for them with some warm unfamiliar coins which I had in my pocket.

  Then I was arriving somewhere, a large atelier where a rowdy party was in progress. The red tile floor was littered with still burning cigarettes. I stepped carefully for fear of burning myself. I was barefoot.

  The hostess was Frau Anders, who was sitting on a stool and leaning with her elbows on a slanted drawing board. She was overseeing the party, and did not seem to mind that some of her guests were breaking glasses and others scribbling on the walls with lipstick and pieces of charcoal. She did not see me come in and I avoided meeting her eyes, for I owed her some debt which I was afraid she might confront me with and demand that I pay. Someone proposed a game, and I accepted with the idea that by joining the game I should show myself cooperative and of good character and at the same time be more inconspicuous.

  I understood we were going to play charades. But all we were asked to do was to bend over from the waist and touch the floor with our hands, “making an inverted U,” as the leader of the game described it. Vaguely indecent thoughts passed through my mind—rising to a definite state of sexual excitement—but I could find no grounds for legitimate embarrassment, since I saw that all around me the other guests had already assumed the difficult posture, and were playfully chatting with each other between their legs.

  There was a concert going on in the next room, and I was saying something about it to my neighbor in the game, the Negro ballet dancer. As we were talking, he began to spread, to unfold until he was prone upon the floor. He closed his eyes and sighed. Others near me followed suit, sliding to the floor, their bodies touching and overlapping, everyone sighing; they all looked so happy, I felt suddenly peaceful and happy myself. A feeling of great lightness maintained my body above the others.

  “Hippolyte can hold the position longest,” I heard Frau Anders declare. “Hippolyte has won the game.” Her voice interrupted my mood of tranquillity, and for a moment I was annoyed. I did not see why in so pleasant a game anyone need be designated as the winner. This seemed to me just the virtue of the game, that there were neither rules nor goal. But after all, if it is a game, it must end, I then thought, and was pleased that, still somehow in keeping with the spirit of this mysterious and delightful game, I had won inadvertently, without striving. So warm a feeling of love did I feel for my prostrate companions on the floor that I was not embarrased over my winning and their losing, nor did I fear that they would think I had not deserved to win. I felt quite clearly that they all wished me to win, or at least—since their eyes were closed and they did not register any awareness of Frau Anders’ announcement—that they wished to be where they were. Their heavy contented position on the floor was as apt and desired by them as my weightless approval, suspended above them, was by me.

  Of course, I had thus attracted Frau Anders’ attention despite my efforts to avoid it. But now, I knew, she would be pleased with me. And so she was. She put her arm under my stomach to raise me to a standing position, led me to a couch, and then sat on my lap.

  “Frau Anders,” I said into the space between her heavy breasts. “Frau Anders, I love you.” She embraced me tightly. “Let those mock who will,” I cried, caught up in a mounting enthusiasm. “I am not like the others, who accept your hospitality only for the celebrities whom they can meet at your house, for I am not ambitious. I do not care for your money, for I am rich. I will not touch your daughter, for I have you. Come away with me.”

  She held my neck more tightly. “Tell me you will always love me,” I said, forcing her to look at me. “Tell me that you will do all that I wish.”

  “Now,” she whispered.

  “Not in front of all your guests!” I replied. I could hardly believe that I had aroused this proud woman so quickly, or that she could be so thoughtless of her duties as a hostess.

  She pointed to the drawing board. We tiptoed across the floor. She leaned backwards on the hard table. For a moment I was numb with embarrassment. “Draw me,” she whispered, pulling my head toward hers. Then I recovered myself, and told her it could not be done here. I told her we would go to my room. I had only to find my shoes.

  We both squatted and began to search for them on the floor among the bodies of the guests. We did not find them. I now regretted that I had placed any conditions upon this happy sexual encounter which had been so imminent only a moment before, and began looking for my shoes less conscientiously, as if by this means the search might be abandoned without regret. But now it was Frau Anders who insisted, crawling on the floor, that I must have them.

  “Look,” she said. “I have found some of your hair.” In her right hand she held a piece of my black hair which seemed congealed and shiny. I begged her not to distract herself with that.

  “And here is another piece,” she said loudly, lifting up a larger tuft. Again I implored her not to concern herself about my hair. At the same time, I did not believe it was mine. I felt my head. Everything seemed perfectly normal.

  But when she told me that it couldn’t have
come from any of the other guests, because no one had hair as black as mine, I thought she might be right. And since she insisted that she would not have this mess on her floor, I had to help her. Still squatting in the middle of the floor, we collected a small pile of it, she remarking continually at the blackness and quantity of my hair in a way which conveyed an unmistakable tone of disgust.

  “You have spoiled everything,” I shouted, feeling my cheeks flush with shame. I decided not to stay in this place another minute, clambered to my feet, ran to the door, and awoke.

  When I awoke from my dream, my room was still dark, and the black sky outside my window just starting to purple. Nevertheless I dressed and went downstairs where I saw a light under the door of the conductor’s study. Emboldened by the bizarre liberations I had lived through in my dream, I knocked without hesitating and found the Maestro at his desk.

  “Come in, Hippolyte,” he said cordially, removing his spectacles. “I am not working, only writing a letter since I cannot sleep.”

  “Perhaps the rehearsal has overstimulated you,” I ventured politely.

  He ignored my comment and said, “Hippolyte, will you give me your opinion, as a friend and as a younger man to one much older? Do you feel that a great difference in age between two people who love each other is important? You no doubt know,” he continued, “of my attachment to young Lucrezia Anders, and you may have guessed—if you are indeed as sensitive as I believe you to be—that it is to her that I am writing.”

  I sensed that I had the Maestro’s permission to pause lengthily before making my reply, and that any answer, however wise, if delivered quickly, would be offensive to him. I paused, thinking of how I should reply.