The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  When I returned to Monique’s arms the following evening, I averted my face, my gaze was troubled. I did not know if I embraced my confessor, my judge, or my next victim.

  “Did you keep your rendezvous?” she inquired icily.

  “I did.”

  “Is this woman very important to you? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “She is my shadow. Or else, I am hers. It doesn’t matter. In either case, one of us doesn’t really exist.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to find out which one of you it is that exists?”

  “That’s exactly what I have done,” I replied. “You are embracing the victor at this moment.”

  “God be praised for that,” she said sarcastically. “Are you sure?”

  “I have made sure, quite sure.” I put my arms around her and pressed her to me more closely. Desire, mixed with an obscure resentment, moved me. Monique sighed and lay still, her head in the hollow of my shoulder.

  “You don’t want to see her again?” she murmured.

  “No.”

  “Then we can be happy. I feel it. Don’t you?” I shook my head. She sat upright suddenly, looked at me sharply, and then buried her face in her hands.

  I stroked her back, and spoke as gently as I could. “Don’t suffer, my dear one. I cannot yet be reconciled to happiness. A fierce irony has me by the throat. It invades my dreams. It drives me to terrible, useless acts. It makes me take myself too seriously, and ends by preventing me from taking anyone else seriously—except the accomplices and mentors of my dreams.”

  “That woman—” she sobbed. “Is she one of your … accomplices?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I am even less real to you than her?” she cried. Her eyes became wide and unseeing. I saw the dull look of fantasy capture her features. “And if I took a lover? If I made you jealous?” By this time she was on her feet, and pacing before the foot of the bed. “I hate you,” she said finally, drying her eyes. “I want you to leave me.”

  Obediently I rose and dressed. I had never felt more warmly toward my poor red-eyed mistress, more willing to please her; yet I was incapable of doing so. When I tried to embrace her, she pushed me away.

  “Perhaps you’re doing the right thing,” I said sadly. “Would it console you to learn that the lover you are rejecting is a murderer?”

  “I don’t believe you. Just get out.”

  “How do you know I’m not a murderer? I know it doesn’t show, but I assure you—”

  “How do I know?” Her look hardened. “If you mean that you have killed my love for you, you’re right …”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean real murder. The opposite of procreation. The coming together of two people, with the result that there is one left, not three.”

  “Get out,” she said again, sullenly.

  I had no choice but to leave, and return to my own apartment. The next evening, when I called on Monique, she refused to let me in, but slipped a note under the door informing me that we needed a separation of some time. I was to return only when I had changed. This proposal did not give me hope, for I doubted if there would ever be any greater change than had already taken place. A few days before I was not a murderer, now I was. What greater difference in myself than that could I ever aspire to?

  Still, I persisted. For several weeks I visited Monique daily. Sometimes she let me in, but she never allowed our quarrels to have their natural terminus in bed. Sometimes she even forgave me, but with the same acrimony that she condemned me for my heartlessness. I know I should not have let things come to this pass. But, I was under the impression that love was necessary, and if not love, then at least the appearance of it. Why else would it be that all the time I spent with Monique—or with anyone else—I had to look at her and she at me, and neither of us could look at ourselves. Since this was the case, our eyes not being planted on the near side of a screen projecting from our foreheads so that we could gaze at our own faces, but instead set in our heads so that we were condemned to look outwards—from this anatomical fact, I concluded that human beings were designed for love. The only exception to this design is dreaming. In a dream we do look at ourselves, we project ourselves on our own screen; we are actor, director, and spectator all at once. But of this privileged exception, I did not inform Monique.

  Perhaps this is why our affair failed, and why we did not become reconciled. I had never dreamt of Monique, and I had never told her about my dreams. Neither could I bring myself to tell her of that act of murder, which seemed more and more like a dream—all throbbing image, no consequences.

  This brief period of renewed solitude was interspersed with variations of my “dream of the piano lesson” in which sometimes, to my confusion and dismay, I did not kill the Mother Superior; and a new interest in the game of chess. I tried not to question the means by which I had dismantled the dream—acting it out.

  I thought then that I knew what my dreams were about.

  Rather, the problem of interpreting my dreams had been replaced with another topic—why I was preoccupied with them. I concluded that the dreams were perhaps a pretext for my attention. Very well, then, the more enigmatic the better.

  I became interested in the form of my attention, and in attention itself.

  Why not take the dreams at face value? Perhaps I did not need to “interpret” my dreams at all. As it had become obvious to me in this most recent dream that, in order to profit from the Mother Superior’s instructions, it was better never to have learned to play the piano, so it occurred to me that in order to extract the most from my dreams, it was better never to have learned to interpret them. I wanted to enact my dreams, not simply observe them. And that was what I had done.

  A total attention was all that was required. In a state of total attention, there are no dark corners, no sensations or shapes that repel, nothing that seems soiled. In a state of total attention, there is no place for interpretation or self-justification or propaganda on behalf of the self and its revolutions. In a state of total attention, there is no need to convince anyone of anything. There is no need to share, to persuade, or to claim. In a state of total attention, there is silence. And, sometimes, murder.

  Jean-Jacques said to me one day, “To be an individual, that’s the only task.”

  There was no one in whom I could confide now, not even Jean-Jacques. I could tell him only in the most indirect ways about myself. Still, our conversations held great interest for me.

  “To be an individual,” he repeated. “But do you know, Hippolyte, you’ve made me realize that there are two entirely opposite ways of becoming an individual?”

  I asked him to explain.

  “One way,” he said, “is through accretion, composition, fabrication, creation. The other way—your way—is through dissolution, unravelling, interment.”

  I think I understood. “And you think your way,” I said, “is the way of the artist?”

  “I’ll say yes. Then what?”

  “To be an individual,” I replied, “does not interest me. I am not in your sense interested in a distinguished or artful life.”

  “Neither am I,” he protested. “What do you take me for?”

  “You spend so much time, Jean-Jacques,” I said, warming myself to my argument, “protesting against banality. Your life is a museum of counter-banalities. But what’s so wrong with banality?”

  “Really …”

  “Look,” I said, “do you grant me that art doesn’t consist primarily in creation but in destruction?”

  “If so, then …?”

  “Then mine is the greater art, the more intense individuality, since I’m learning not what to collect but what to destroy.”

  “And what will be left of you?” he smiled.

  “Your smile,” I said. “If I have not offended you already.”

  “No, of course not, mon vieux.”

  “Your smile. And my peace.”

  He smiled again.

>   “Let me tell you something,” I said, somewhat embarrassed as I recalled the incident but encouraged by his seriousness. “You asked me before how I’ve occupied myself this week. I’ll tell you. I have been attending the national chess tournament which is being played at the Palais de ——. There I have seen the greatest artist in our country, a boy of only sixteen. His game is a revelation to me. He plays so relentlessly that his game seems—no, is—entirely mechanical and without thought. He marches the pawns over the board, the horse jumps to the attack, his bishops close in like pincers, his castles move like tractors, his queen is a bloodthirsty despot.”

  “What did you decide about your despotic queen?” asked Jean-Jacques.

  “I am not talking about Frau Anders,” I replied coldly. “I am not talking about the willfullness of justice, but about the mechanism of perfect play. I’m talking about the game of a champion.”

  My friend allowed his curiosity to be thwarted. “His game overwhelms you because you don’t play chess as well as he,” said Jean-Jacques.

  “No,” I exclaimed. “That’s not important, for I understand the secret of his game, even though I can’t anticipate his moves. The secret of his game is that he is entirely destructive. Each day I have gone to watch him, and only him.”

  “I’ll go with you tomorrow,” said Jean-Jacques.

  “No. I am not going tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because today he looked at me. Every day I have sat in the spectator’s gallery and watched his pale, relaxed face. He never looks up, but today he did, he looked directly at me. I tried to hold my gaze, to answer his. But I couldn’t. His look was too destructive, and I lowered my eyes in shame.”

  What did I read in the boy’s eyes? Contempt as well as indifference, perfect attention, an energy which burned away all words. I had met my master in crime. But all this would have been exceedingly difficult to explain to Jean-Jacques who, I thought, would probably want to explain my fascination with the chess player as the heat of sexual attraction.

  “Don’t say it,” I said to Jean-Jacques sharply.

  “I won’t!” He was annoyed at being the one whose mind was read. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t lust which you felt for this … champion?”

  “No,” I said. “Lust and awe are incompatible. I can only desire what I can imagine myself possessing, or at least imagine can be possessed.”

  “You know what you discovered in your chess player, Hippolyte?” Jean-Jacques sat far back in his chair. “Another blank soul. Rather, a mirror for your own blankness.”

  “And yesterday the mirror looked back,” I mused somberly.

  “Precisely. And that’s against the rules of the game.” He stared at me a moment, as if he understood something I was not telling him. It was a long, inquisitive stare, speckled with disbelief. Then he shook his head and grinned at me in the old teasing way. “But come, I’m being too cooperative. You don’t need me to explain you to yourself. Let’s play chess ourselves. Or we might pick up a shopgirl for you to dally with, unless you’re being faithful to that dreary lady agitator of yours. I know! Have you seen that charming American film about the ape-man that’s showing on the boulevard? You must see it.”

  Jean-Jacques was suddenly so boyish and ebullient in his little projects for amusement that I could not refuse him. I liked him better as a playmate than as a mentor. So we strolled along for an hour, with Jean-Jacques stopping many times to greet people and then amuse me with brutal gossip about them after we had passed on. Eventually we went to the film.

  One day I received a letter from my father, which indicated that his health was failing and that he would like to see me while still in the full possession of his faculties. I made the trip home immediately, relieved to have an excuse for leaving the city. I had been waiting to flee, but no one pursued me. To be summoned away at least gave me a sense of activity. I left without telling my concierge or Jean-Jacques or Monique, so that I might enjoy the semblance of flight.

  This was my first time home, since I left to take up residence in the capital a decade before. My father was not in bed, but he was confined in a wheelchair in which he moved himself about vigorously. His character had changed since his enforced retirement, I noticed. I remembered him as a robust, matter-of-fact, and jovial man; he was now querulous and easily distracted. His illness moved me to pity, and I agreed to a prolonged visit. My brother, busy with the new responsibilities of totally managing the factory, was happy not to have to spend so much time with the old man and account to him continually. His wife Amelie was plainly exasperated with the chores of nursing the invalid, preferring to devote herself to her children. They were delighted to turn him over to my custody.

  At first I found the company of the old man tedious. I had little sympathy with his fear of dying, and did not understand what he, had become. My duties were simple. For several hours a day I read to him, within the limits of his now highly specialized taste, for he liked only novels which took place in the future. I must have read him a dozen. I imagine that they gave him a taste of immortality—and, at the same time, comforted him by their grim prognostications: it would not be so bad a thing to miss that future which they described.

  One afternoon, while I was reading from a novel about life in the thirtieth century, a time when according to this author cities will be built of glass and the people in them fashioned from plants by priest-artisans, he interrupted me. “Boy,” he said, brandishing the walking stick which he kept on his knees, “what would you like to inherit from me?”

  The question was painful to me, not because I found the idea of losing my father insupportable, but because I dreaded the railing against death which would inevitably follow my answer.

  “If you would continue the support which you have given me, Father,” I answered, “I would be more than pleased.”

  “I own some property in the capital, you know. A house.”

  I did not reply.

  He then questioned me, as to how I had used my income, how I justified even this amount of support. I decided not to embellish my life in the capital with a false luster of activity, and explained the modest preoccupations which filled my day.

  “And women?” he said, nudging me with his stick.

  “There is a young woman, Father, who now refuses to see me, because I did not assure her we were happy.”

  “Give her up.”

  “She has given me up, Father.”

  “Then win her back, when you return to the city, and then give her up.”

  “I couldn’t do that, Father. I bear her no malice, and her betrayal would not relieve me.”

  He made no answer to this, and motioned me to continue reading. After some more pages, which related how the dictator of Nova Europa orders all children between the ages of twelve and fourteen tattooed and sent to colonize an abandoned continent, it was I who interrupted. “Father, what is your opinion of murder?”

  “Depends who you murder,” he said. “Don’t know whether I’d rather be murdered, or just get old and ill and die. Best thing would be to be murdered when you’re already dying.”

  “What about being murdered when you’re already dead?” I inquired cautiously, hoping I would not be asked to explain.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “Continue reading. I like the part where the moon pauses and Europe is submerged in water.”

  I read to him long after my voice was tired, for he insisted I finish the book. Then I took him in his wheelchair about the estate as I did every day at this hour. The garden was no longer unkempt and luxuriant as I remembered it from my childhood, but was strictly arranged so that he could check daily on the conscientiousness of the gardener’s ministrations. “I like order, my boy,” he said to me the first day we had made the tour. “I’d like to put order into everything in this house, but they won’t let me. Outdoors I am master, though. You’ll see what I’ve done to this—jungle.” I saw indeed. The year
before, when he first became ill, the whole garden had been replanted under his instructions. It was now an alphabetical garden, for him; though for me, it was still a chronology of my evacuated childhood. Nearest the house were the anemones, then came the buttercups, then the carnations; here I had spied on the maid and the butler embracing in the kitchen. Marching round the sides of the arbor were an equal number of rows of daffodils, eglantine, foxglove, and gardenias. Then came the hyacinths, irises—halted by the pagoda where I used to set up my lead soldiers. Then the jasmine, knotweed. There were lotuses in the old well, and on the far side of that, marigolds. In the little pond where I sailed my toy boats, narcissuses. Then came the orchids, and a small square bed of poppies. “Had to stop here,” he muttered. “No flower that begins with the letter Q.” I think that tears came to my eyes at this moment, on the first day. I do not know whether I wept for the failure of my father’s absurd, endearing project, for the lack of flowers to complete the alphabet, or for the pangs of remembering my childhood in the company of my childish father.

  Did I say that I found that his character had changed? Perhaps you will see that I have understated the matter. I discovered with a shock of pleasure that my father had become eccentric, willful in his sickness and old age. He waved the walking stick which he kept across his knees at his grandchildren as if he longed to maim them. He screamed at my brother and his wife that he was disinheriting them, spat out the food which was served to him, and dismissed all the servants each Sunday after they returned from mass. But he treated me affectionately. His behavior toward me when I was a child was tolerably severe. Now it was real affection which I received from him, and not just because I was his son, but because he liked me. If my older brother fulfilled my father’s expectations when my father was mature, hale, and active, I was my father’s heir in his old age. We had much in common now.