The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because the price of coffee has gone up 75 centimes and the proprietress has become most unfriendly.”

  Jean-Jacques, looking especially robust that day, carried an uncut copy of his new novel which he promptly autographed and presented to me. I explained the situation at home, and begged him to pay my wife a visit.

  “I should be very angry with you, Hippolyte. You have kept me away from the princess so long! I wasn’t going to eat her, you know.”

  “True enough. But you have an unsettling effect on people, dear Jean-Jacques.”

  “And now? I still do, I hope.”

  “My wife can no longer distinguish between pleasure and over-stimulation. Do come.”

  “I shall come very late.”

  “What about the curfew?”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  I was delighted, and left him at once to return home.

  When Jean-Jacques arrived, about three in the morning, I was already dozing in the rocking-chair beside my wife’s bed, where I now regularly slept. But when I opened my eyes at the sound of his knocking, I saw she was still awake, propped up on her pillows; the tarot cards were scattered on the quilt, and she was staring feverishly, fearfully at me. “It’s a friend,” I whispered to her reassuringly. “You’ll see.”

  “She’s not sleeping,” I called to Jean-Jacques, as I pushed the coverlet from my knees. I left the bedroom and went to open the front door. Jean-Jacques, wearing the uniform of an enemy officer complete with combat ribbons and Iron Cross, bounded past me without a greeting.

  “Sing out!” he cried gaily as he entered the room. I signalled to my wife not to be afraid. She began to sing a lullaby and Jean-Jacques accompanied her by dancing around the bed, his heavy boots resounding on the floor.

  “It’s perfect,” I exclaimed; my wife agreed. “How did you know what to wear?”

  “The very image of respectability, my boy,” Jean-Jacques shouted, without interrupting his dance.

  “But did I ever tell you that my father-in-law is an army officer?”

  “What?” Jean-Jacques shouted.

  “The Army! An officer!”

  “The-very-image-of-respectability!” And with each word he stamped once from left to right.

  “Long live victory,” murmured my wife, moving further under the blankets until only her face was visible.

  “And now, little lady, we’re going to march.” He grasped me by the shoulders and we goose-stepped up and down the room. I was filled with vivacity, and at a certain moment broke away from Jean-Jacques’ powerful hold and ran to the side of the armoire.

  “I declare war,” I called out.

  “You’re dead,” said Jean-Jacques calmly.

  My wife burst into tears. I turned on him reproachfully. “Let’s not make war. It frightens her.”

  “But I want to fight with you. After all, I was once a professional boxer.”

  “I know, I know. That’s why it’s foolish for me to fight with you.” I began to feel apprehensive, for I thought Jean-Jacques might be serious.

  “First, let me take off my respectability,” he said in a determined voice, and began unbuttoning his neat olive-green shirt. My wife’s head disappeared under the covers.

  “But I’m dead. You said so yourself.”

  There was a low alarming sob from the bed.

  “That’s your advantage, Hippolyte. As having once been a boxer is mine.”

  He became impatient with the buttons, and lifted the shirt over his head. Seizing my opportunity, I reached for the chair next to the armoire, and struck him over the head with it. The moment he fell to the floor, my wife’s head emerged from the blankets, her eyes now red with weeping. “Oh, oh,” she cried.

  “That’s the penalty for impersonating an officer,” I explained, drying her face with my handkerchief. Exasperation and anger at Jean-Jacques’ eternal frivolity had left me speechless; I could not explain further, and only wanted to get him out of the apartment. “I must take him home now. I shall have to leave you for a while.”

  It would have been impossible for me to lift Jean-Jacques and carry him down the steep flight of stairs, so I went and roused our friend, the coal delivery boy, who lived in the next building. He agreed to assist me and we returned together. After I removed the incriminating costume and put Jean-Jacques into some old clothes of my own, we waited another hour until dawn. Then we brought him, still unconscious, downstairs, stuffed him into the cart which the boy used to make his coal deliveries, trundled him half across the city, and carried him up the stairs to his hotel room. I sent the boy back to the apartment to attend my wife until my return.

  I believe I could have killed Jean-Jacques as he lay there. Surely that was the reason that I did not leave until I saw him recovering. He did not regain consciousness until noon; when I saw him turning in his bed and moaning and holding his head, I slipped out the door. I was exceedingly angry with him. Stopping to buy some food, I returned home. But when I entered my wife’s bedroom, I saw to my dismay only the coal delivery boy lying, fully dressed, on the bed. He seemed frightened to see me, and blurted out that my wife seemed very ill when he came back, that he had summoned the neighbors who in turn had called an ambulance, and that she was in the city hospital. I hastened to the hospital, where the nurse confirmed the news of my wife’s serious condition. I was allowed to see her for a few minutes, but she was in a coma. Three days later, she died.

  I shall not speak, now, of my grief.

  The task of making arrangements for her funeral presented somewhat of a problem to me. She would be buried in her family plot in our native city, with all the rites of the Church. But I also wanted a funeral service which would acknowledge the last years of her life in the capital with me. For this reason, without immediately wiring her family, I had her body placed in a casket and returned to our apartment. I then called on Professor Bulgaraux, to perform a private service. He agreed, on the condition that he could invite a number of colleagues and disciples. I did not invite Jean-Jacques, for I was still angry with him for the inconsiderate and emphatic way he had behaved in the last moments of my wife’s conscious life. I did invite the coal delivery boy, and some friends who were actors. Lucrezia came with a young pianist, a recent enthusiasm. Monique arrived consumed with worry for her husband, who was a prisoner of war; I was moved that she had room for my bereavement, not realizing that she had amalgamated it with her own.

  Professor Bulgaraux’s lecture, or rather sermon, from which I shall give excerpts, did not fall short of my expectations. What I give I am able to reproduce verbatim, including the peculiar style of punctuation, rather than rely on my memory, because he himself subsequently had it printed up as a pamphlet under the auspices of the Autogenist Society. It was entitled: “On the Death of a Virgin Soul.”

  He began:

  “Friends and co-believers, mourners and speculators: Death is the most interesting event in life. It is comparable only to dreams, for there is no revision of a dream—only further dreams, and the interpretation of dreams. So there is no revision of death—only further deaths, and our reflections upon them.

  “Now there are only two interesting—I might say satisfying—deaths: the death of a great criminal and the death of a virgin soul. For both deaths are the same—and bespeak that innocence to which all long to return.

  “The secret of innocence is defiance. Criminal and virgin soul. The criminal defies the order of society—the virgin soul defies the order of nature. Both surpass their bodies in favor of—the will.

  “Therefore the death of the criminal—and the death of the virgin soul—are willing deaths.

  “We who are left in the common middle ground—dare we choose one of these seeming opposites which are—I tell you—it is no secret—equivalent?

  “Each one of us lives alongside his death each day. A tape, sometimes wider, sometimes narrower, which unrolls alongside our daily actions.

  “Mo
st—ignore death. But the criminal and the virgin soul live with their deaths. They cannot surprise them.

  “The ways of disincamation are—mysterious. Intelligibility cannot be explained. A fact—is a fact. Death—death.

  “But life is—movement. Therefore—life is resurrection. Many have taught that first there is life—then death—then resurrection. I say: life—then resurrection—then death.

  “In the Gospel of Dianus it is written, ‘Live who must, die who will.’

  “To the mourners, I say: Look at the grieving husband.*

  “He does not grieve—does not condemn death. What would that avail him? Or anyone? For if we are as we are, then we cannot be other than we will be.

  “What was the life of this young woman? She was born—schooled—married. She obeyed her father and her husband. She died.

  “You must have a vocation for such a life. You cannot choose it with the mind.

  “The secret of life is vocation—which she had. It also takes a vocation to die well, which the criminal and the virgin soul possess.

  “In one of the Gospels of Dianus, a disciple inquires of his master, ‘When shall we enter the Kingdom?’

  “ ‘When shall you enter the Kingdom?’ said the Master. ‘When you make the two become one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the upper like the lower and the lower like the upper! And if you make the male and the female one, so that the male is no longer male and the female no longer female, and when you put eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in the place of a foot, and an image in the place of an image. Then you will enter the Kingdom!’

  “How shall we interpret this teaching? The inside like the outside—The outside like the inside. Oh, virgins and criminals!

  “Eye in the place of an eye—a hand in the place of a hand—a foot in the place of a foot—an image in the place of an image—

  “The meaning is this. Acts of substitution constitute a life, until we reach the final substitution—for life, death.

  “Where no more substitutions are possible—when we are pared down to our center—when we have found our beginning—there is death. Which is no death at all.

  “Seek not to decipher the end. Seek only to decipher your living selves. Death is the reward of our resurrection—death is our decipherment.

  “We begin at the end—we end at the beginning. As the Master says, ‘Blessed is the man who reaches the beginning; he will know the end, and will not taste death.’

  “You will not taste death—you will be tasted by death. You will be complete—for you will be empty. You will be extreme—for you will be perfect.

  “When one has a picture taken, the photographer says, ‘Perfect! Just as you are!’ That is death.

  “Life is a movie. Death is a photograph.”

  After the lecture Professor Bulgaraux’s disciples crowded around the coffin for a last look at my wife and to embrace me. Professor Bulgaraux having hinted to me earlier that contributions to the society’s research and publication fund had been scant lately, I gave him a check. I went out with Lucrezia and her escort for an aperitif and then returned to meditate.

  I think I understood Professor Bulgaraux’s sermon almost entirely; you might say that by now I was an adept at these ideas. But there was much that I did not agree with: not his characterization of my wife—I thought he caught her pale likeness beautifully—but the continual admonition to me not to grieve. It is too easy to be resigned to a loss borne by someone else. Besides, I had determined to allow my grief. However I did agree this much; there is a choice to be made, even in grief. I had scruples about my right to mourn. Any personal grief would have been inappropriate on my part, for my relationship in life to my wife was not a personal one, in the usual sense of the word. My relationship to her in death could hardly be different.

  When, however, I accompanied my wife’s body back to our native city, and stood in the cemetery with her family and mine, I shared fully in the communal grief. A provincial funeral is a more leisurely and weighty event than a funeral in the city.

  My brother was unpleasantly distant to me, and I did not feel welcome in his house. Neither did I feel like accepting my in-laws’ invitation to visit with them for a time. So in a few days I returned to the capital.

  I said I would speak of my mourning, difficult as it is.

  My grief expressed itself in many ways. I felt as if I had gotten loose in my skin. My armholes, the legholes, the hole for my head, eluded me.

  I made a list of ways of dying. I got this far. Death by hanging, death by guillotine, death by peas up the nose, icicles through the groin, falling down an elevator shaft, crucifixion, the parachute that doesn’t open, gangrene, jumping out of the dentist’s window, arsenic in the onion soup, being run over by a trolley car, snake bite, the hydrogen bomb, Scylla and/or Charybdis, a broken heart, the stake, Russian roulette, syphilis, being tossed out of a roller-coaster, careless surgery, drowning, an airplane crash, sleeping pills, automobile fumes, boredom, tightrope walking, hara-kiri, rape by a shark, lynching, ultimatums, hunger, flying without wings, flying with wings (without a plane)—

  Oh, how frail we are.

  A childhood memory. I was three years old, still with long hair and wearing a white dress, playing with a hoop on the lawn in front of my house. Sunning herself on the lawn in front of the next house, which was separated from ours by a line of rose bushes, was our neighbor who was (as I had heard my mother say) a widow. I approached the bushes and stared at her. When she turned to look at me I asked, “How did your husband die?” In tones of unforgettable sweetness she answered, “His eyes closed.”

  That, reader, is grief. Such incoherence. You will understand why I do not continue further.

  My business now was to reconstruct my life. But death, like violence, is an insidious example—hard to shake off.

  I had formed more solitary habits in the months of caring for my wife. Her death did not seem sufficient reason to discontinue them.

  It is remarkable that our way of living is not designed to respect a strong emotion or a single-minded idea, unless it takes the form of action. For, despite my avowed wish to be left alone, the callers continued to come, intent on their missions of consolation; not many, but enough. Monique was my principal visitor. Her widow’s dress and veil (for she had just been notified that her husband had died in prison camp) matched my own black—though, sooner than she did, I returned to my habitual attire.

  I soon tired of her company. I was impatient with the tender messages left under the door, with the dinners she prepared, with her way of tiptoeing loudly about the apartment. Neither her spasms of mourning—nor her jubilation when, that summer, the capital was liberated—were feelings I could share.

  “How did your husband die, Monique?” I asked her when she hinted at staying the night with me.

  “Oh, he was so good,” she whispered, and began to sob.

  When I challenged the sincerity of her grief, she became so indignant and abusive that I had to tell her to leave.

  I do not think we greatly helped each other. She was both too sad and not sad enough to be good company for me. Monique was coarsely woven, and nearly indestructible, while my own fabric was becoming ever more tightly stretched. I remember that this image of myself became very important to me. When I resumed my old physical exercises, it was with this desperate image in mind. No longer idly solicitous for the good maintenance of my body, I now had a more pressing aim in view. I felt I had to keep myself limber or I would break. I urged my body to modify, to loosen, the expectant tautness of my mind. But the very veins in my arms and legs seemed clogged with grief.

  Luckily for me, Monique soon busied herself in one of the many post-war committees for the restitution of injustices and the improvement of everything which were then springing up. Her calls became less frequent, and they usually entailed securing my signature for some petition or manifesto. I always sig
ned, for despite the luxury of mockery which I allowed myself with Monique, her political sentiments (if one is to have political sentiments) were irreproachable.

  Besides Monique, there were other friends whom I saw who were a little more skillful in their consolations. And there were several cold meetings between Jean-Jacques and myself, full of long silences. It is strange how little people mattered to me at that time, for my inner life was equally depopulated; even my dreams had deserted me. But I was used to being patient with myself, perhaps too patient. I played chess alone. My sexual pleasures were mostly solitary ones, with or without the aid of a mirror. I went to an occasional silent film. I waited for a dream.

  FIFTEEN

  Jean-Jacques had changed, there was no doubt about it. I don’t know whether it was fame, middle-age, or financial stability which had altered his character. In any case he presented a decidedly lax, complacent appearance to me.

  His complacency even extended to the rather grave political charges of collaboration with the enemy which, some people rumored, might be brought against him. It was thought that the selection of his last novel for the most exclusive of the yearly literary prizes, whose jury included a number of veterans of the Resistance, would do much to clear his name. But the charges continued to be voiced, and Jean-Jacques was twice called up for vague inconclusive questioning by the prefect of police, an ominous sign.