The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  I decided to tell him a portion of the truth. “Yes, I am concealing something. For myself, I would tell you all. But I have an idea that your wife would wish it otherwise. Else, why would she not have told you herself where she is?”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Is it your impression”—I began cautiously—“that your wife ever displayed any of the customary signs of a religious vocation?”

  “Why do you ask me that? I must believe that she did, and that I was too blind to see. Possibly you do not know that she is a convert. I would not like to have that fact broadcast about, by the way. Certainly, she was very fretful and discontented, especially in the last year or two of our life together, and that is a sure sign of being on the verge of a great decision.” His look became challenging. “Why? Do you think one can be devout, and not have a vocation for it? Is there some insincerity of which you suspect my wife? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “No,” I replied. “Not insincerity, not that at all. But I speak of certain tastes, inclinations, and ideas which perhaps you did not suspect….”

  “Speak up, man,” he shouted. “What has she done? I will not be held liable for any of her idiocies or extravagances!”

  “No, no,” I said soothingly. “You don’t understand. And how could you? I know I have not been clear. What I mean is that—”

  “If you don’t speak plainly, I’ll—” He was becoming purple in the face and gripped his hat tightly.

  “Did she tell you what kind of nunnery she had retired to?”

  “No!”

  “And how do you imagine it?” I asked cautiously.

  “I don’t imagine anything! What do you want from me?”

  “In your mind’s eye,” I continued, “do you see nuns, bare white-washed cells, crucifixes, orisons at five in the morning, a portly Mother Superior, a bell that sounds in the parlor when visitors ring to gain admittance?” He made a noise of strangled rage, so I finished quickly. “Well, it is not like that at all,” I said. “You see, Frau Anders is not particularly Catholic. If she is in a nunnery, it is one of the faith of Islam.”

  “If she is in a nunnery! Why do you speak in such a craven manner? Don’t spare me.” He took out his handkerchief. “Islam!” He breathed heavily, sank down on his haunches, and sat on the floor. “That’s incredible. Disgraceful. No wonder she didn’t dare tell me. Have you told anyone of this?”

  “No.”

  “Paganism! My God! Why isn’t atheism good enough for her? It’s good enough for everyone else! Why, she might as well have stayed a Jew!”

  I was becoming annoyed with his indignation. What a tiresome man he had revealed himself to be! Nevertheless, I felt bound to make the truth available to him, if Frau Anders wanted it so. “Shall I give you her address?” I said after a moment. “I have the address where I last saw her.”

  “I don’t know if I want it now…. Yes, give it to me. I may write her. It seems to matter much less now,” he subsided in a murmur. “If you only knew how much I admired her.”

  For all his pomposity, he did seem terribly distressed as he rose to his feet and put on his hat. I reached in my wallet, took out the address of the merchant and copied it for him.

  “One more word,” I said, as we stood at the door. “Have you been happier without her? You can speak candidly to me.”

  “Insolent man! I know what you have been to her.” He glared at me. Then he began to laugh, violently, until the tears came to his eyes. “I have never been happy. Never! Never! Never!”

  Later I heard from Lucrezia that Herr Anders had written to his wife at the address I had given him, asking for an annulment, that she had replied to him, granting it, and that soon after he indeed remarried. I often wondered if he were happy now, for I believe that there is no one who cannot be made happy by some means. Was Frau Anders happy? I inclined to think so. At least, she was alive, reasonable, and willing to stay where she was. I must confess that, knowing nothing more of her fortunes, I envied her. She had achieved her freedom, which coincided with the fulfillment of her fantasy, while I remained chained to the interpretation of mine. While Frau Anders was off in the desert disporting herself with her Moslem lover, I stayed in my room, an ear pressed to my pillow, listening to my dreams.

  Frau Anders wanted to be liberated, so I had torn her from her old life and confined her in a new one. I wanted also to be liberated by being confined. That is why I had enjoyed my work in the cinema. Acting in films gave me a sense of being absolutely used, deployed—and this I knew was the model of my salvation. But my own needs were such that an external change of life—the choice of a domineering mistress or an enslaving vocation—was not enough. The enslavement had to be an inner one. Were my dreams, then, the authority I sought? I had tried to obey them, but their demands were so contradictory.

  All around me I saw my friends expressing preferences, making choices. Even Herr Anders knew when the game was up, and how to provide for himself. I would not put myself above the chance of happiness, for which I was even prepared to sacrifice some of the demands of my dreams.

  It is only in this way that I can explain a relationship which I began that year with an earnest young woman named Monique. Friends had introduced us with the thought that we would be compatible, because (apart from my work in the cinema, which my friends thought, correctly, I pursued in the spirit of an amateur) I still had the undeserved reputation of a man of ideas, in short a writer who happened not to write, and Monique herself was a literate, appreciative person. I believe our friends also thought that Monique would be a good influence on me, because she had a reliable character, and a generous uncomplicated view of life. She came from a poor but decent family with many children; her father was a clerk in the Ministry of Finance and her mother was a schoolteacher; she had grown up in the capital and knew no other life than that of large boulevards, crowded apartments filled with cooking smells, first balcony seats at the theatre, offices staffed by fretful men in shirtsleeves sitting at typewriters and helpful women in heavy stockings who went back and forth from filing cabinets. By profession, she was a functionary in good causes. She had worked for several years for a small left-wing weekly. Now she was employed by an organization dedicated to the emancipation of colonial peoples, for which she wrote articles, sent out mailings, and made speeches. I noticed soon that Monique’s radical political opinions had not damaged her faith in official institutions. Marriage, the civil service, the courts, the press, the schools, the army—about none of these was she seriously disillusioned. It never occurred to her that her passion for justice could not be transmitted along the established lines of communication and through the established institutions, which she maintained were not bad but only misinformed. Since, as the reader will recall, this was a decade in which political discontent among well-meaning Europeans often took the form of much more radical commitments than they intended, it was remarkable that Monique, with her moralizing temper, did not join the Party—where, at least for a time, she would have been much happier, that is, much more thoroughly used. At first I found Monique’s intransigence charming. But I soon began to suspect that her unfashionableness was more a question of muddle than integrity. The same traits appeared in her personal habits, which were a mixture of bourgeois conscientiousness and proletarian bad taste. Her private passions were children, haute cuisine, and celebrities; and although she had had several abortions and usually served me no better fare than overseasoned meat and stale cheese when I ate at her apartment and no famous person wanted to marry her, these affections remained undiminished.

  I do not mean to sound patronizing towards Monique, for I was not nor had I the right to be. In her astounding capacity for preserving her passions and convictions intact, despite their objective fate in the world, did she not curiously, and instructively, resemble me?

  We met at a time when I was feeling rather lonely, and ill at ease with myself. Despite my apparent confidence in my own judgment and tastes and
in the meandering way of life which I had chosen for myself, I did succumb to moments of doubt, and to harsher moments when I even pitied myself for my condition of exile from the ordinary routines of the community. Here I was, after a decade of adult life, having educated myself and engaged in conversation with many interesting people; having had a mistress and learned how to make her happy, even at the price of losing her to myself; having pursued a career. Yet I knew that I had really given myself to none of these activities, that only one, which I could share with no one—my dubious pursuit of wisdom through my dreams—really mattered to me. I was experiencing the dilemmas and distractions of the utterly self-elected man. (These, if nothing else, I shared with the artist—as opposed to the professor, the politician, the general, the bureaucrat, the wife.) No one appointed me to devote myself to my dreams. And I had to bear my own doubts as to the value of my vocation, as well as the casual disapproval of my friends and relatives who thought me an eccentric wastrel. Was I even qualified? I sometimes asked myself. Was I wasting my time? Was I giving pleasure to anyone, even to myself?

  Monique, dear Monique, Monique of the large hands and un-furrowed brow, restored to me a measure of confidence in myself, although I know this was not her intention, for we quarreled often and strenuously. She was critical of the way I lived, of the bareness of my room, my lack of interest in politics, my distant relationship with my family. Through her criticisms of me, so ingenuous and self-righteous that I could take them seriously without becoming offended, I began to sort out what was necessary to my vocation of self-investigation and what was superfluous or exaggerated. I also discovered several hitherto unremarked inconsistencies in myself. For one thing I had always dressed carefully, neatly, in clothes made by a good tailor who was recommended to me by my father when I first moved to the capital. How could I reconcile my taste for clean and well-pressed grey suits, grey socks, black shoes, a foulard, and a hat (rather than sweaters, odd pants, ascots, and the like) with the sparseness of my furnishings and the austerity of my diet? I suspected that the diet and the bare room had become an affectation, and allowed myself to be persuaded by Monique to move to a furnished apartment near hers, and also to engage a maid to come in and clean for me twice a week. I, in turn, convinced Monique that she could not admire good food, and prate of the glories of the national cuisine, if she did not make an effort in her own home. Together we bought some cookbooks and spent many pleasant hours shopping for herbs and concocting provincial specialties in her kitchen which she ate with only a bit more relish than I…. My fits and starts and waverings—and, dare I say? yearnings—for a more normal life seem pathetic to me now. But I meant them sincerely, and it testifies at least to the lack of arrogance, if not to the intelligence, with which I pursued my search.

  I enjoyed my new apartment; I learned that I was not made to live in only one room. For me there was pleasure, as well as a further step in my self-elucidation, in the person of Monique. But I was never sure why Monique was drawn to me. Did she want me for myself, or for the celebrities I knew in the film world and elsewhere? She introduced me to her ex-lover, a burly African revolutionist in exile named, Tububu, and the three of us spent many evenings debating the possibility of a just revolution and the transformation of society through political means. I, in return, introduced her to Jean-Jacques, whose books were becoming well-known; she disapproved of him as reactionary and selfish, and he was amused by her. I also brought her together with Larsen, the Scandinavian film director, and observed that she would have discarded me in a moment for him, had he shown any interest in her.

  Love-making with Monique was athletic, unsubtle, and bare of fantasy. Though I felt no desire to inform her about the cinema of my inner life, I became quite fond of her. Some of my emotion was a brotherly tenderness, aroused by our mutual efforts at self-improvement; some of it was a lover’s feeling, more selfish and mercurial. I felt unmistakable pangs of jealousy in the presence of Tububu, whom otherwise I liked, and when I realized she aspired to a romance with the happily-married Larsen. But I could not bring myself to reproach Monique for her emotional unfaithfulness to me. The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons. Monique did not reject me as such. It was simply that I did not rank as high as others on the gauge of fame.

  Our conversations with Tububu clarified my ideas about revolutionary acts, which had begun to form themselves during the talks I had had with Jean-Jacques. For, as I have intimated, I sometimes fancied myself as an agent in a revolution not yet named, and I was eager to match my non-political ideas against any political ones.

  “You are finished, you white people,” exclaimed Tububu. “You have the capacity neither for conscienceless violence nor for change.” I could not help staring at the deep symmetrical scars slashed on his black cheeks, as if these proved he knew something I could never know.

  Monique protested gallantly. “I know your peoples’ grievances are just,” she said, “but surely the country which gave birth to the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity cannot long remain an oppressor.”

  Perhaps Tububu was right. Certainly Monique was being naive. In darker countries, justice may be secured by communal violence; where the oppressor is a foreigner, violence is at least plausible. But other things than political justice are in store for Europe, and here violence is a form of ineffectual suicide. Look at the history of my country in the last two centuries. First there was a revolution which overthrew the Church and invented a new cult, the worship of Reason personified by a goddess. There have been other revolutions since. Only last year petitions were signed, newspapers confiscated, a general strike called. Students scribbled slogans on the walls, the police marched on the parliament screaming anti-Semitic slogans, two cabinet ministers took refuge in a foreign embassy, the paratroopers came from the south. You know how little resulted from all this commotion. New textbooks were issued in the schools, new faces appear in the newspapers. Several cafés, the meeting-places of subversive elements, have been closed. There are more frequent street-checks of identity cards by the police. Otherwise things remain much the same.

  In Europe such public upheavals no longer change anything, however much the revolutionary option in its political form may still hold among darker peoples. We may look forward to more appropriate, and more dangerous, revolutions than political ones. Perhaps the revolutions of the future will all be revolutions of single persons, exemplifying not the cult of reason but the cult of privacy whose worship is personified by a puppet…. Needless to say, I could not win Monique over to my ideas. The acts of the private self did not seem important to her, except as she might measure them by public standards—even as the charm of the private person needed the public certificate of fame to affect her.

  An incident I might tell illustrates this difference between us. We were on our way to her apartment one afternoon: someone spat from a window above us, and the gob of spittle landed on the sidewalk a step ahead of our feet. Our reactions contrasted nicely. “How can people do things like that!” exclaimed Monique. “Thank you,” I called upwards.

  “What do you mean?” she said to me, indignantly. “That man has no consideration for other people, and this is the source of all unfairness.”

  “Nonsense,” I said, “he has just distributed a precious part of the very substance of his body, and thereby rearranged, however trivially, the order of the universe. He has made something happen, with the greatest economy and the smallest possible means. For that model act, we must be grateful, not squeamish.”

  “I still think it’s disgusting.” Monique never really listened.

  “That’s the trouble with those revolutions you and your colleagues are fomenting. Too lavish an expenditure of means, too gross an effect.”

  My point was confirmed when, shortly after this incident, Monique became pregnant. I urged her to have the child, and assured her I would support it. Such a large outc
ome—another human being to walk this earth—from so small an act as our hygienic sexual unions seemed somehow appropriate. But Monique wanted to continue to devote herself to larger causes, she told me, and with a rather severe air, rejected my proposal.

  One day Monique announced to me that she had received a letter. “A very odd, abstract letter,” she said coldly. “It’s from a woman who claims that you are in debt to her, and also that she owes you something.”

  “The postmark of the letter?” I asked, nervously.

  “Why, here. In the city,” she replied. “Who is she?” When I didn’t answer, she pouted, “Is there someone else?” she cried. “Are you trifling with my affections? It isn’t fair!”

  There could be no point in explaining to Monique, if the woman was who I thought she was. I asked to see the letter, which read as follows:

  “My dear young woman,” it began. “You are at present engaged in a liaison with a young friend and protégé of mine, who is considerably in my debt for my patronage and my love. But I too am in debt to him, which he will understand when you tell him of this letter. You must understand that I don’t write him directly because I would not interfere with the love he feels for you. Love is all we women have. But I appeal to you to ask him to see me for an hour. I have something to show him, myself.” Then followed an address in the city, a time the following evening for the proposed appointment, and the signature, “A Ghost.”

  I trembled, I must confess, at this missive, and at the sight of that familiar yet distorted handwriting; it was an unconvincing scrawl, like the look of distress on a face stiff with powder, rouge, and mascara; the same handwriting as in the letter to Lucrezia. I cannot bear scenes or reproaches. But I consoled myself that the letter was mild in tone, and by degrees brought myself to look forward to the appointment.