The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  “ ‘I detest medicines,’ said the bear. ‘Perhaps it is better for me not to speak at all when I have a cold.’

  “Reluctantly she agreed, but from that moment she began to find less pleasure in her husband dressed in black.

  “ ‘I would rather hear your voice,’ she said one day to the bear, as he was embracing her roughly. ‘In fact I no longer enjoy seeing you as much as I did.’

  “Of course, the bear did not answer.

  “When the bear went away in the mid-afternoon, she determined to speak to her husband upon his return in white that evening.

  “But when he did return, she said nothing, not daring to break her promise to keep silent about the black suit. That night, however, she stole from the bed while her husband slept and went out on the mountain. Although it was black night, she could see no less well than in the white day.

  “For three nights and days, she wandered about searching for the dark cave where she supposed her husband to have found the suit. It snowed most of the time and she was very cold. Eventually she touched with her finger tips an arch of stones and felt a space before her hands which could have been the entrance to a cave. She sighed with relief.

  “ ‘I will leave a note for the true owner of the suit,’ she said, weary with cold and exhaustion but determined to complete her mission.

  “She tore off a piece of her white dress, took a pin from her hair, pricked her white skin and, using the pin as a pen and her blood as ink, wrote the following message on the cloth: ‘Do not leave your suit any more. Thank you.’ She signed it, ‘The Princess of the Mountain.’

  “Then, feeling quite ill, she wandered for several more days and nights on the mountain until she found her way home.

  “Naturally, the prince was overjoyed at the return of the princess and put her to bed immediately. He tended her faithfully, feeding her one teaspoon of sugar and a mug of cream each day. She was ill for some time, but she recovered. In the course of her illness, however, her eyesight failed even more. She was completely blind.

  “But the princess was not distressed at this result. Now there was no problem of choosing between her husband in white and her husband in black.

  “ ‘I am happy now,’ she said to her husband.

  “She heard her husband reply in his gentle voice, ‘We have always been happy.’

  “And they lived happily ever after.”

  My wife was above all obedient and uncomplaining. She was the sort of woman who would have enjoyed the mother-in-law which, alas, I could not supply her. Further, her nature was quick to generosity, to the point where she became careless of risk. When the Jewish family on the floor below was rounded up in the middle of the night by enemy soldiers to be deported to the concentration camps, she stood in the doorway and threw her bedroom slippers down the landing. Luckily I pulled her into the apartment before she was noticed by the soldiers and herself arrested. This will explain how it happened that one afternoon some weeks later, when a woman presented herself at the door while I was out, and told my wife that she was an old friend of mine, a Jew, although a convert, and in immediate danger of deportation, my wife invited her to come in and to remain with us. Within an hour the woman had brought her few bags and belongings to the apartment, and was installed in the back room. You understand, I would not want to have refused anyone who had knocked for such a reason in those dreadful times and begged for shelter. Yet I confess that when I returned home my heart sank with apprehension both for myself and my wife. For the woman was none other than Frau Anders.

  My wife hurriedly explained her presence to me. I went into the back room where I found Frau Anders sitting on a wooden chair, fenced in by a few small valises at her feet.

  “You know I wouldn’t have come,” she began in a resentful tone. “I have some pride.”

  “I know, I know,” I said reassuringly. “A great disaster cancels all private quarrels. My house is yours.”

  She laughed bitterly. “All your houses, eh? Oh, never mind…. You must let me stay a while, Hippolyte. They’re taking everyone away now. At first only a few, now everyone. No one they take ever comes back—I know it, I can feel it!”

  “Don’t explain, my dear,” I said. “And calm yourself. Did you tell anyone you were coming here?”

  “No one.”

  “Then stay as long as is necessary, or as long as you want to.”

  Frau Anders yawned and stretched. At least in the somewhat shapeless unfashionable woolen jacket she was wearing, I could detect no difference between her two arms. I did not think it the right moment, however, to ask how her cure had been proceeding in the two years since I had seen her. “I want to sleep now,” she murmured.

  I left her and returned to my wife, who was staring fixedly out her bedroom window at a military limousine filled with soldiers parked in, the street. “We have to whisper now,” she said in a low voice, looking up at me. “You’re not angry with me?”

  I implored her not to think that, ever.

  “I’ll take care of her,” she said. As if she could have taken care of anyone! I was moved to the point of tears by her goodness. My wife thought nothing of the terrible penalties for us, should we be caught by the soldiers who were constantly searching houses for just such helpless fugitives as Frau Anders. And, you understand, she knew nothing of my past relations with Frau Anders: only that we had once known each other. My own motives were more pressing. Yet to call them generosity and courage would be flattering myself. I could hardly decline to risk my own life now, when I had previously put Frau Anders’ life to the risk of enslavement and murder. And generosity seems out of the question to describe the aid given to a person to whom one has denied so much.

  My former mistress stayed with us for several months, without once leaving the apartment. My wife spent most of the days and evenings in the back room with her. Frau Anders had not lost her old trait of being a congenial companion and a good listener. I used to sit in the parlor, straining to hear the sounds of their whispering together; occasionally I would hear my wife’s youthful laughter. My wife, ordinarily so silent, seemed to flourish in this sad company; she was not, as I feared, depressed by Frau Anders’ ambiguous scars and pitiful circumstances. Frau Anders, however, I never heard laugh; she had been rendered almost mute with fear.

  Frau Anders’ being in my apartment seemed so strange to me. I had, more or less successfully, escaped all her traps until this one. I had dared to think of myself as persecuted by her, until she arrived once again on my doorstep, this time with the official badge of her own persecution. The ghost which had genteelly but irrepressibly haunted me for so long now settled in my house with a permit of entry which I could not refuse.

  Yet I avoided all opportunities to be alone with her. I could not anticipate what new demands, what new reproaches she would spring. Perhaps she would confront me as I was coming out of the W. C. with the proposal that I carry her on my back through the labyrinthine sewers of the city—to freedom. For all I knew, she might, one evening at dinner, ask me to assassinate the enemy commander of the city. Or she might direct me to summon her former husband, so that she could explain to him that she was despite all her efforts still a Jewess. None of these things happened, however. After the neighborhood had been searched several times in the middle of the night, and soldiers even entered our apartment and stood about, shouting, in the very room where Frau Anders was crouching in the linen chest, her terror overflowed the limits of our apartment, and she implored me to find her a better shelter. I did so, reluctantly—an ingenious hiding place, which I shall describe in a later chapter—and my wife and I were left alone.

  For my wife’s sake I was sorry to lose Frau Anders as a boarder. I worried sometimes that my wife must be lonely in the capital, where she had no relatives or friends. She had not seemed to be lonely. But when I saw how pleased she was in the company of Frau Anders, I knew she could be happier than she was. It occurred to me that she might want to have a child. But I didn’t th
ink she was old enough; she was still a child herself. Foolishly trusting in fate and the longevity of both of us, I thought there was plenty of time. Besides, I wished to prolong the peacefulness and purity of our relationship.

  You may imagine that since I respected my wife’s virgin nature, I still took care to satisfy myself outside the home. This was not the case. I wanted to be faithful to my wife, as I hoped she would be faithful to me. It was very convenient: in being faithful to my wife, I could at the same time be faithful to myself.

  About this time I clarified my ideas on what constitutes proper self-love.

  I beg the reader not to react disapprovingly. I do not believe there is the slightest vanity in the following reflections.

  I reasoned thus: the one criterion of love upon which all can agree is intensity. Love raises the temperature of the spirit; it is a kind of fever. Men love in order to feel alive. And not only love. This is also why they go to war. If war did not satisfy an elementary desire—not the desire to destroy, which is superficial, but the desire to be in a state of strain, to feel more intensely—the practice of war would have been tried once and abandoned. Men rightly regard their own deaths as not too large a price to pay for feeling alive.

  War does not fail. But love always does. Why? Because it is at bottom the desire for incorporation. The lover does not seek a beloved, only a bigger self. But thereby he adds to the weight of his own burden. He now carries the other person, too.

  One possible solution to love is hate. In hating, we push the burden aside. But then we are left diminished, weighing half the amount we have become accustomed to.

  The better solution is detachment—neither loving nor hating others, neither assuming burdens nor laying them down. The only proper object of both love and hate is oneself. Then we can be confident that we are not mistaken in paying the tribute of our feelings. We can be sure the object will not flee, or change, or die. Only in this way are we satisfied.

  To this line of reasoning, I will append an anecdote.

  One afternoon, some months after the departure of Frau Anders, my wife and I were sitting at a window of our apartment. Across the courtyard a neighbor was doing her laundry. We were entranced by the motions of her stout red arms plunging in and out of the tin tub.

  When she had finished and pinned up her wash, she went in, without removing the tub. Then we saw the wash flutter as if the wind were moving it. From behind a large white sheet emerged a dark figure wearing a cap. It was the strapping adolescent boy who delivered our coal. He gazed up at our window. For a long time he stood there staring, and then began to move slowly backwards. He did not see the tub of suds behind him, bumped against it, lost his balance, and fell, knocking it over. My wife sighed and smiled.

  The boy sat in a puddle of warm water, which had streaked the coaldust on his handsome face and work-clothes, and began to curse. Then he rose and leaned against the wall, half-sitting on the yellow bicycle propped up there which belonged to my wife. He picked his nose and gazed at our window. Once he went away, but came back shortly, chewing on something, and stood there in the twilight.

  When it became dark, I told my wife to go out and invite him to have supper with us. She prepared a simple meal of bread, boiled potatoes, radishes, and cheese, which I ate heartily. The boy stared intently at my wife and she refused his glance by looking into her lap.

  It was the coal delivery boy to whom I commended my wife, praising her charms not the least of which was her purity. Neither of them replied to my eloquence. I announced that I was going out for a walk, possibly to see a film, and invited him to stay for the evening. When I returned at midnight, the boy was gone, my wife in her bed asleep. The next morning, as she did not bring up the previous evening, neither did I; and I abstained from examining the sheets for traces of the coal-boy’s water-streaked grime.

  My second line of reasoning on the topic of self-love will be shorter than the first.

  Every change of emotion we experience as a momentary invigoration. But this flush of feeling is deceptive. It is the prelude to a tapering off of vigor, which sets in when we realize the dependence of our feeling upon something or someone external to ourselves. True vigor results only from the knowledge of separateness.

  Community, friendship, love are makeshift expedients, devised because men cannot bear to be separated. Above all, it is love which impedes our ability to remain separate. Yet love cannot be denied. How then reconcile love and separateness? Self-love.

  To this second line of reasoning, I will append a second, shorter story.

  One day I was standing before my mirror naked.

  For some time, I had been schooling myself to remove my clothes during the day. For while clothed I am tranquil and undifferentiated, my mirror confronts me with the taste of myself which is sharp and saline.

  When my wife entered the room, my first impulse was to cover my nakedness. But I conquered my sense of discomfort, for I was always entirely honest with her, and proceeded to touch my sex. She moved about the room, humming quietly to herself.

  I thought of three things: the egg, the butterfly, and the rain.

  When I reached the climax of my meditation, my wife came and dried me with a towel.

  This was my third line of reasoning.

  I think best when I think one thing, feel most deeply when I feel one thing. If I could redesign my body it would be celestially large, so that the cities of men would appear as a single speck to me. Or else I would make it so tiny, that I could only see a single blade of grass. How lovingly I would examine that blade of grass! I would caress its blunt fringe, peer into its dark crease, hurl myself against its green wall.

  There are two great passions in my nature. I like to concentrate on some small problem, and I like to be surprised. But nobody is as small as I. And nobody surprises me as much as I do myself.

  My third story:

  Frau Anders had left. I was immensely, selfishly relieved that she had to hide but I was safe, that she was in flight, but not from me. I walked the streets boldly each afternoon and evening until curfew, glorying in the absence of something to hide.

  Then, in the vacancy of my wit, I struck a passing beggar. He had done me no injury; I didn’t know him. Whom did he resemble? I don’t know.

  The horse butcher, rushing from his shop, seized me by the ear. Curses fell like droppings from the golden horse’s head. A crowd of shopkeepers and marketing housewives gathered. A policeman came with his stick.

  Someone in the crowd offered me a revolver, and told me to run. But I did not wish the death of the world, or indeed of any person in it.

  Therefore I went along with the policeman, was fingerprinted, interviewed, locked up for the night, and released the next morning.

  My fourth and last line of reasoning follows:

  Man strives to be good; being bad is just the name for some people’s goodness. The essence of goodness is monotony. Note, please, that I say monotony—not consistency, which so many incorrectly hold to be the sine qua non of good character.

  From monotony comes purity. This is why marriage to one woman is better, purer than polygamy. But monogamy is polygamous, when matched against the purity of self-love.

  What is more monotonous than the self?

  A little story:

  The night Frau Anders left I dreamed the same dream three times. In this dream I walked on a frozen sea.

  FOURTEEN

  In this fashion my wife and I lived without discord for several years. I had no particular desire to travel and, except for one trip to visit our families, we did not leave the capital. But then my felicity was brought to a swift and cruel end.

  One day my wife told me that she had been feeling ill. I had already suspected something was wrong, by her drowsiness in recent weeks, and by the unusual pallor of her face and certain patches of white which had appeared on her arms and legs. She had always been an extraordinarily even-tempered person; cold and dull, some might say, though I did not find her s
o. But lately her habitual manner had taken on the unmistakable aspect of debility and sluggishness. Even in telling me how ill she felt, she minimized it—as if it were too great an effort for her to be alarmed. Despite her protests that it would be a waste of time and that any doctor would tell her she suffered from a liver complaint, I hastened to procure medical advice. She was of course justified in anticipating this diagnosis—which is the beneficent myth of the national medical profession, and has cured many patients by distracting their attention from real ailments to imaginary ones. Would that she could have been made well by such a diagnosis!

  In disease, the imagination is everything. Proper appeal to it cures, though the imagination also kills. But the body’s imagination is usually prosaic, even literal-minded. Dreams are the poetry, disease the prose of the imagination. I knew an incessant chatterer who died of a ailment which began in the ear, and a cousin of mine, a trial lawyer, given to very expressive arm gestures, who was stricken with paralysis. There are fashions in diseases, too. In simpler societies than our own, illness, like everything else, has a collective or communal character: the typical form of disease is the plague. In our society illness is a private matter; the modern diseases are not infectious. Disease attacks each man alone. It is individually elected, in the organ or part of the body that he has either unduly neglected or excessively cultivated. It is now an individual judgment, rather than a pollution. Therefore it must be endured with greater resignation, for it cannot be passed on to anyone else.

  My wife’s illness, as the doctor explained to me—for she was, alas, seriously ill—had this modern character. It was not communicable, so I was in no danger. And it was incurable. Already she was afflicted with a dropsical tendency, denoted by a phlegmatic condition of the body, known as leucophlegmacy, and an abnormal whitening of some parts of the body, leucosis. But these were only ornaments to the fatal complaint which was leukemia, an excess of white corpuscles in the blood.

  My wife received the news from me bravely. As there was no cure, there was nothing for her to do but to go to bed and await the illness’ development. Together we decided that she should remain at home rather than go to a hospital, and the task of nursing her became my sole and willing occupation. I brewed her tea and sponged her frail limbs; for hours at a time I sat by her bed, joining her in songs and prayers, and playing tarot. I believe I have not mentioned that my wife was devoted to the astrologer’s arts. During her illness she taught me to read the cards, and prophesied a long life for me, which, in the circumstances, added to my melancholy. She was unenthusiastic about my proposal that her family be summoned, though she agreed that it would be appropriate at the end. Wishing nonetheless to provide her with a little more entertainment, I decided to invite Jean-Jacques to our rooms. I went out one afternoon, after alerting a neighbor that I would be absent for several hours, and found my old friend no longer at his usual café but at the one next door.