The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  My father had two only sons. How delightful it was to be one’s father’s only son, however belatedly!

  I stayed with my father three months, during which his physical condition remained unchanged. His illness seemed to be arrested and the doctors said he might live for several years, but he was sure he would die before the year was out. “Go away,” he said to me, “I don’t want you to see me die.”

  “I’ll read you more novels,” I replied.

  “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “I’ll go to the National Library, and find a flower that begins with Q. I’ll send for a seedling, from no matter how far.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Go back to your woman, and try to be happy.”

  I bid him a loving and painful farewell, and returned to the capital. As soon as I had unpacked, I went to Monique’s apartment, eager to see her after our long separation. It was a weekday, and mid-afternoon, so I assumed she would be at work, but I was going to wait for her and then take her to dinner. I let myself in with my key, and discovered her there with a man in his underwear who was bent over a typewriter.

  She was very calm, much calmer than I; and the man even calmer than she. He sat there during our halting tearful conversation, aimlessly fingering the typewriter keys. Occasionally he struck one by accident; then he cursed, took a typing eraser from one of the desk drawers, and neatly erased the errant letter from the first page and each of the carbons. He seemed anxious to resume the typing which I had interrupted. Monique ignored him, stricken with a shame which I did not attempt to relieve. I, I felt no shame at all for my intrusion, but a little embarrassment, yes.

  Have I made it perfectly clear? Monique had married. The typist in his underwear was a translator from obscure Slavic languages, possessing the most admirable political sentiments. Together they would translate the whole world into their wholesome, hopeful idiom. I congratulated them. Monique kissed me on the mouth. The young husband rose gravely and shook my hand. I let myself quietly out of the apartment and waited on the next landing until I heard the sound of the typewriter again. I did not have to wait long.

  I returned to my solitude, and to my dreams. Poor Hippolyte! I had been rejected in the circumstances in which rejection hurts most, thinking it would be I who would do the rejecting, lacking even the distractions of an unrequited love to console me. For the first time in my life, I felt painfully alone. All I had to do was what I had judged impossible for Frau Anders: to begin a new life. It was not so easy. Yet I believed my case was different. After all I was hale and fit, only a little past thirty. If one could not begin anew at my age, when was it possible?

  Only, you see, I kept dreaming my “dream of the piano lesson.” I kept dreaming of a commanding woman who ordered my life, and of a man in a black bathing suit who urged me to jump. I had killed the woman, I had jumped. But, as in the dream, bitter were my feelings as I fell.

  The first time that Frau Anders had left my life, I had felt relieved of a great burden. Now there was only a space, the space further enlarged by the absence of my well-intentioned Monique. If this were a dream, I thought, I would summon Frau Anders back. I would explain to her why I had killed her. I might even ask her permission. A failure of nerve? Perhaps.

  But as it turned out, all this was unnecessary. The murder of Frau Anders was not a dream, although for all purposes it might just as well have been. For one day she simply appeared. It was a dreary spring day, still cold with winter. I was sitting in a café, indoors and in back where it was warm, cupping a brandy with both hands, when I saw a face pressed against the window pane. I had just exchanged a few words with the waiter, who had gone away. And then there was this face, a strange ravaged face that seemed all a blur to me because of the pane of glass and the dim interior of the café that separated us. It was a face I remembered, and it was all faces that peer and scrutinize and judge. I picked up my newspaper, and put that between us as well. Then I looked again. The face was still there. It was smiling, or making a spiteful expression; but the expression was either not well defined or unsuccessful. Then a hand reached up to rub the pane of glass where the face’s breath had clouded it. The face was clearer then, but still not clear.

  When you want to determine whether or not someone is dead, I know, you put a mirror or any piece of glass to the mouth, and see if the glass records a blotch of moisture from the breath. To breathe on glass is the signature of life, in the appearance of death. Then I knew. It was a resurrection. It was Frau Anders.

  She entered the café and walked determinedly to my table. I had a moment’s impulse to call for the waiter or to fling myself under the table.

  “Don’t run,” she said sternly, seating herself. “I want to talk to you.”

  “It’s a dream,” I whispered to her.

  “Don’t be an ass, Hippolyte! No one is more real than I.”

  “That’s true,” I said, in bewilderment. “How indestructible you are.”

  “No thanks to you! I suspected you’d do something like that. I was watching you all the time, and slipped out the back door, stepping right over your clumsy bundles of kerosene-soaked rags, while you were busily touching a match to the front of the house. My dear, you’re no better as a murderer than as a white-slaver.”

  “What have you been doing all this while?” I murmured.

  “I’m not answering any more of your questions. I’m here simply to inspire remorse in you. But you may tell me what you are doing. What, for example, were you doing the very moment I caught sight of you?”

  “I’m waiting for my father to die,” I said, sadly.

  “I hope you are not helping him in this final project of his,” she said, in a tone of severity.

  “What do you take me for, a parricide?” I replied indignantly. And I told her briefly about the three months which I had spent nursing the old man.

  “Well,” she said. “I shan’t ask you to nurse me. I’m doing very well, thank you.”

  “But your wounds,” I exclaimed.

  “Look to your own. I can take care of mine.”

  “And where do you live?” I asked, humbly. She paused, and looked into my face. “I’m not asking you to tell me your address,” I added quickly.

  “If you must know, I rent a portion of the apartment of an impecunious titled lady. I have the ballroom and several antechambers. There are many mirrors in these rooms, but I don’t mind. I am learning to be brave.”

  “Do you see other people?”

  “Why do you ask me so many questions? Haven’t you asked enough? … I see mainly doctors. At a certain clinic I am recovering the use of my right arm.”

  “And Lucrezia? Do you see her?”

  “That frivolous child? Never! She would despise me.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said gently. “I’ll help you. I promise. I’ll devote myself entirely to your welfare, without imposing on you in the least.” She regarded me suspiciously. “It will take a little planning, but when I am finished, I shall present you with a great surprise.” A marvellous idea had occurred to me. I began to talk more rapidly. “Within a year, after certain things have happened which will free me to pursue your welfare and give me the means to do it, I shall be able to present you with something that you will have for your whole life. A life,” I concluded, “which I shall do everything in my power to make as long as possible.”

  “You’re going to give me something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something I want? Something I will have by my side, something I can keep all my life?”

  “Yes. You will keep it, and it will keep you.”

  She smiled. “I think I know what it is.”

  “Do you? I wonder how. I myself just thought of this solution.”

  “Women are very intuitive, you know,” she said archly. “How long must I wait?”

  “Oh, it might be a year or more. It partly depends on my raising a certain sum of money.”

  “I have money,” she s
aid eagerly. “That needn’t stand in our way.”

  “No,” I replied firmly. “It must be my money. You believe that women have a monopoly of intuitiveness. Surely you will accede to the equally conventional pride that a man feels in being the one who dispenses the money.” She sighed. “Will you wait?” I asked.

  She nodded. But then she added, “I’m a trifle afraid of you.”

  “And I of you,” I said. “But in this meeting of fears, I also love you.”

  “How strange,” she murmured. “When I came in the door of this café, I hated you so much. No, it was worse than hatred. I felt contempt for you. And now your imperturbability quite seduces me. I think you do love me, in your own impossible way.”

  “To be entirely candid,” I replied, “I may be simply mistaking fear for love. This is an error I often make in my dreams.”

  “Why should you be afraid of me?”

  “Because you are there,” I answered curtly.

  You may wonder what present I had in mind for Frau Anders. It was this. As she had been sitting across from me in the café I reflected that I had twice over made her homeless—first, by being the agency of her leaving her husband and daughter; and second, by burning down the poor house in which she recently lived. What better recompense could I offer than a house in which she could live undisturbed by me or anyone else. All that I needed was the means which I would acquire upon my father’s death.

  The painful news came the following January when I had just turned thirty-one: my father died, and I came into my inheritance. Not wishing to be encumbered by the things I might be tempted to buy, I arranged to dispose of the cash and negotiable securities. My father’s lawyers were instructed to divide the sum between two persons who were to remain ignorant of the identity of the donor. Half was to go to Jean-Jacques; the other half to a young poet just done with his military service whose first book I had read and admired greatly. Why did I give the money anonymously? Because, with Jean-Jacques, I did not want our friendship to be disfigured by either gratitude or resentment; and, with the ex-soldier whom I had never met, I felt it would be inauspicious to begin an acquaintanceship with an act of benefaction. You must understand, the giving away of my legacy was no great sacrifice. I still had the monthly income from shares in the family business on which I had lived ever since I came of age and left home. What mattered to me in my inheritance was the house my father bequeathed to me, as he had promised. He had acquired it some years before with the intention, never carried out, of having a residence in the capital several months during the year.

  I did not immediately install Frau Anders in the house, for I intended to remodel it and furnish it for her use. I have always had an interest in architecture that expresses the most intimate longings of its inhabitants. While I vowed to keep my fancies within bounds, I could not resist an almost voluptuous feeling of anticipation when I had determined on this project. Such were the pleasures of my idle life, and the ease with which I assuaged my guilt.

  I remember the building project which hitherto had given me the most pleasure, although I had nothing to do with it. There lived, year round, on the island where Frau Anders and I had stayed for the winter on our trip south, an elderly English spinster. She had a small immaculate white house, just outside town overlooking the sea. One day, as she was walking the stony road into town, she saw a woodcutter ferociously beating his horse which was lying prostrate on the ground. The old lady attacked him with the grey silk parasol which she always carried. Imagine her horror when she learned that the flogging was only preparatory to shooting the horse, which had stumbled and broken two of its legs. The old lady, not in the least inured to the cruelty with which the islanders habitually treat their animals, immediately offered to buy the horse. Too astonished by the absurdity of such a transaction to be in form for protracted bargaining, the woodcutter settled quickly for a price twice what he had paid for the horse, and went away, hauling his cart himself, to get drunk in the port and relate the story to his friends.

  The old woman had the horse carried to her house. She sent for the local veterinarian, who bound the animal’s legs in splints and prescribed some medicines for its fever. Not content with these ministrations, she then called a veterinarian from the mainland, who pronounced the animal a hopeless cripple.

  Now comes the part of the story which I like best. The horse was quartered in a small wooden shed behind the house. The old lady fed it every day herself, massaged its legs, and gave it its medicines. Gradually its fever subsided, and it began to stagger about in a determined but helpless way. The old lady had no thought of challenging the doctor’s prognosis. She was delighted that the horse could walk in any fashion at all, and she now set about to construct a permanent residence for her companion. The bare rectangular shed in which he lived did not seem a happy enough place for a horse who would forever be deprived of the pleasures of walking, cantering, and pulling a woodcutter’s cart. “Horses like views,” she told the people in town, who had nothing to reply to such a singular assertion. She then proceeded to hire masons and bricklayers, and had built a small tower, about six meters in height on the other side of the garden. Around the tower was a spiral ramp which led to a comfortably-sized room at the top. The horse went to live in this room. In the morning she would bring it down, and tie it to the fence; in the heat of the mid-day sun she would return it to the tower; and at tea time she would lead it down again to stand or lie beside her while she rested in her hammock in the garden. Soon the horse’s way of dragging itself about became stronger and more surefooted, so that it could negotiate the ramp by itself. It would clamber up and down from its tower at all hours, without ever straying from the old lady’s property.

  After some months of life in the tower, watching the blue sea, the horse’s wretched gait could actually be described as a walk, albeit with a severe limp, and the old lady began to lead it by the bridle back and forth with her into town when she went to market. Everyone laughed at her amiable folly, and no one noticed that the horse’s limp was steadily diminishing. One day, an occasion which I was lucky enough to witness, she made an appearance in town riding sidesaddle. The horse bore her calmly through the port streets without the trace of a limp. Whether it was the fine view of the sea which was its privilege, or its gratitude to the old lady, the truth was that the horse was entirely cured. In fact, both the foreign residents and the islanders said its legs had never been so slim and straight in its previous existence as a woodcutter’s drayhorse. Such are the curative powers of the right dwelling, with the appropriate architecture.

  I thought a great deal about this story, when I undertook the architectural commission for Frau Anders. I believe I was undertaking to build her a house in the same spirit as the old lady built a tower for the horse. I thought how this house might open new vistas for Frau Anders. Why, she might recover her health entirely, find love and happiness, abandon her rights to beauty, prosperity and acclaim, under the impulse of a novel architecture. Thus, far more acutely than when I plotted to murder her, I experienced the sensation of power—such as a magician must feel when he is beginning his exorcism, or a doctor when he starts a delicate operation, or an artist when he faces the nude canvas. I imagined the house enclosing Frau Anders, transforming her, allowing her to enact her secret fancies, whatever they might be.

  You see my weakness, my vice, of that period (I freely confess it): I could not help wanting to aid others, but I know it appeared as an outrageous tampering with their lives. Others saw this more clearly than I did. I remember, for instance, Jean-Jacques’ reaction when I told him of this new project, without mentioning the double injury which I had caused to Frau Anders of which the house was the merest gesture of restitution. I did, however, tell him that Frau Anders was not well, and that I hoped the house would cheer, perhaps heal, and, at the very least, shield her. I also related the story of the old lady, the horse, and the tower. At first he laughed, I thought approvingly, but then he said, “Hippolyte, you are
laboring under the friendliest but least plausible of all delusions, that everybody is like you.”

  “No,” I replied firmly.

  “Now I understand,” he continued. “This is why you don’t suffer.”

  I don’t know what I said to him in reply, but I remember that I thought: It’s not true. I don’t consider anyone like myself. Neither you, Jean-Jacques, nor Frau Anders, nor my father and brother, nor Monique. I want to let them be what they want to be. How could Jean-Jacques be right? Why, I don’t even think I am like myself, much less do I think other people are like me. Though I try to be like myself—and for this reason pay so much attention to my dreams.

  ELEVEN

  During the time of my work on the house, Frau Anders and I met once a week, usually at the Zoological Gardens. My old friend was extremely changeable in mood, sometimes reproachful, sometimes quite gay and charming. The worst moments followed greater intervals in our meetings, when I had not seen her for perhaps a month, which meant that she had been in the clinic and had undergone some plastic surgery. Even at her most fretful, though, the sight of the caged animals never failed to soothe her.

  “I feel at peace with the animals,” she confided to me one afternoon. I had noted that her preferences were for the larger animals: the lion, the elephant, the gorilla. “I never appreciated them,” she continued, “until—you know.” How could I reply? For I understood that she was referring to her own captivity.

  My own feelings toward her were tender but timid. I suspected her warmth toward me; I could not understand why she was not more angry. I dreaded this anger, which I always expected to break forth. Yet I would have preferred it to this inexplicable mildness and serenity. When the animals were pacing or scratching themselves or being fed through the bars, she was most affectionate. She would slip her good arm in mine, and we would silently promenade before the cages. That was when I felt most uneasy, when I felt—dare I confess it?—that she was courting me.