The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  “Well, all right,” said the onlooker. “I’ll help if I can. But I don’t have much time.”

  “It will take only a moment,” said the acrobat, and turned to smile at the woman and at his companion on the floor.

  The onlooker asked what he had to do. “This,” said the acrobat, drawing a knife from the pocket of his costume. “Just stand where you are.”

  The acrobat approached the onlooker with his knife and began to do something to him. He was drawing with the knife a number of vertical and horizontal lines on the onlooker’s body and face. He drew a long line down the middle of his torso, one across the groin, another across the waist, and another across the chest. On the face he made a vertical incision from the hairline, down the nose, to the chin; and two horizontal incisions, one from the skin just above the left ear across the face just below the eyes to the top of the right ear, and another from the skin at the base of the left ear, across the face above the upper lip, to the skin at the base of the right ear.

  I watched, extremely puzzled. Not only was there no blood, but the cooperative onlooker did not utter a word of pain or reproach. Yet I could see that the acrobat was not simply drawing with his knife, or just slightly marking the skin, but cutting deeply so that the flesh separated under his stroke.

  The onlooker stood patiently while the acrobat worked silently and deftly with his knife. Having finished with the onlooker’s face, he stepped back seemingly to admire his craft. Then, swiftly, he dug his fingers into the onlooker’s face and pulled the severed and sectioned flesh away from the skull. I gasped with horror. “Won’t someone stop him?” I was about to cry. When the acrobat withdrew his fingers, the onlooker’s face fell into place, although the gaps in the face where the acrobat had made his incisions were still visible.

  “Just testing,” said the acrobat and smiled.

  Since the onlooker was so calm, it now occurred to me that perhaps no injury was being done to him. No sooner did I think this than I myself was the onlooker. I was lying face down on the floor with my eyes closed, and I felt the knife tracing horizontal and vertical lines on my back and buttocks. It was not painful. It tickled a little, and actually, at moments, it was pleasant. Some twinges and harsh sensations made me accuse myself of being hypocritical, of pretending to enjoy what in fact I found tormenting. But I don’t remember any pain.

  Perhaps I really did fear what was happening to my body more than I admitted to myself, for I did not remain long in this role. Suddenly again a bystander, I was watching the acrobat make some final incisions on the original onlooker with his knife.

  The acrobat addressed the onlooker, who was prone on his back and by this time unable to move without assistance or to speak. “There, I’m almost finished. Don’t worry, there’s only one thing more to do.”

  The onlooker seemed to understand and to take comfort in the acrobat’s assurance that his ordeal was almost over. I felt reassured too, and leaned forward as far as I could without getting in the way to watch what the acrobat did next.

  He took the body of the onlooker in his arms and stood it up, where it rested stiffly like a young tree brought to new ground to be planted. The onlooker’s body remained upright, swaying slightly. A timid, hopeful expression in his eyes was the only sign of life in the rigid body.

  “Just one thing more,” said the acrobat in his soft, reassuring tone. “Please be patient. It won’t hurt at all, and then you can go back to your friends.” With his eyes the onlooker signalled his gratitude.

  “Just one thing more,” said the acrobat. “I can’t tell you how grateful I and my colleagues are. You’ll be glad you helped us.”

  I waited, full of hope that this ominous operation would soon be over, leaving the onlooker undamaged.

  “Just one little thing more,” said the acrobat.

  Then with a rapid sure movement he grasped the sides of the onlooker’s head. With one hand he pulled violently to the left, with the other to the right. First the skull was cleft, and then the onlooker’s body, with only the faintest brief moan, barely more than a sigh, parted down the middle. The two cleanly separated halves of the body toppled stiffly to the floor.

  The fate of the onlooker filled me with indignation, anguish. The onlooker had been so trusting, so compliant. And all the time the acrobat had intended to murder him. (I vaguely understood the purpose of the murder: the acrobat needed a body to replace the damaged body of his colleague.) He cared nothing for the onlooker, only for the little troupe of which he was the head. Outsiders were ignored, except when they served the acrobats’ purposes.

  Now I was sorry I had come down into the arena. I did not want to know of such cruelty and, turning my back on the scene, I awoke.

  Never had I awakened from a dream with so great an impression of horror. For several days I inhabited the dream, and relived the feelings with which the dream had culminated. Indignation, however, was an emotion I knew to be perverse and profitless. I wanted to master my indignation. Yet I also thought that perhaps this outrage was salutary, an antidote to the phlegmatic state induced by my grief for my wife, and a necessary prelude to the calm I was seeking.

  Of course it pleased me that as the dream repeated itself in succeeding weeks, I could watch the events in the arena with less emotion. Yet I could not accept this dream. I was not sure I understood it. How could I, when my life had been dismembered by my wife’s death, just as the benevolent onlooker had been split in two by the acrobat.

  It interested me to recall that for a while in the dream I had become the onlooker, the victim. Was my refusal to remain in this role courage or stupidity? Had I resisted something which I should have resisted—like the eye operation in “the dream of the mirror” or the bather’s command to jump at the end of “the dream of the piano lesson”? Or had I misunderstood all my dreams, interpreting as persecution and betrayal what was in fact a lesson in liberation?

  Dreams of horror and protest have their place, but surely are not our goal. Nor do we seek to be entirely, or mainly (as I was in this dream), spectators to great and terrible events.

  A period of my life ended with this dream. I thought of leaving the capital. Since the war had been over, I had not once taken advantage of my freedom to travel. Jean-Jacques wrote me a friendly letter from his provincial retreat, urging me to visit him if I had nothing better to do. But I did have something better to do:

  The fact is that I had not in recent years, despite the apparent contradiction of my marriage, wavered in my predilection for solitude. No more opportune moment could be imagined for my retirement. I was thirty-eight years old, unattached, unproductive, full of prejudices and uncompanionable habits. How could I hope to make a new life for myself with another woman? I would never find anyone as compatible, as yielding to my tastes, as worthy of my affection as my deceased wife.

  But I did not want to go on living in the same apartment, which was redolent with memories of my wife and the odor of my own grief. I decided to look for more spacious quarters, in a neighborhood where I had not lived before. Then a marvellous idea occurred to me. There was that large house near the river which I had inherited from my father and furnished for Frau Anders. My former mistress had left the house shortly after I married; during the four years of the Occupation the house was requisitioned and used for billeting enemy soldiers; since the liberation, it had stood empty—or almost empty, as I shall explain—and although in a state of considerable disrepair, it was eminently habitable. All things considered, the matter was easily arranged. But I must not omit to mention that when I informed my brother that I proposed to live in the house, he was strangely unfriendly to the plan. Even now I do not understand his reason, but I remember that he not only tried to discourage me (it was impractical; the house was too large; I was irresponsible; the repairs would be too costly) but gave me to understand that if I followed my plan I would be displeasing and even provoking him. I could not see the force of his arguments, particularly the one about the house being
too large for me. (He had insisted rancorously, in a letter, that the house was large enough, counting the wings, to be used as a hospital or a school.) Counting on his not offering any legal obstacle to my plan, I decided to offend him and follow my own wishes.

  Moving was simple, since I had few belongings. The day when I took possession of my new home was a clear winter morning with a light snowfall on the ground. I walked about the house, noting which windows needed new panes, collecting the wine bottles, old boots, socks, canteens, bricks, and torn canvas cots which littered the floors, piling all this in the garden, and, after clearing away the snow, lighting a splendid bonfire. The task of cleaning up was a pleasant one. Yet I mourned for my freshly painted walls, which I had never had the pleasure of living between, but inherited when they were disfigured, discolored, scrawled over, chipped, bullet punctured, peeling.

  Once installed, I knew I had decided correctly, for I felt the peace and cheerfulness that only follows good decisions. A rigorously independent life in which I should have all the space I needed for my most extravagant and secretive projects was now possible to me. How easily the time passed, how comfortable I was in that unfurnished spaciousness after the confined and cluttered rooms of my dreams. And I had plenty to occupy me, for a period of time which lengthened from days to weeks to months to years. Six years I stayed in that house. I sewed and unsewed my ideas. I listened to my dreams. I thought of my wife. But, if I may trust my memory, I no longer lived in fear of the sudden vengeful arrival of Frau Anders.

  For Frau Anders was with me, had in fact preceded me in the house. You will remember that my wife and I had sheltered her for some months during the war; and that after soldiers had searched our building several times and once our apartment itself, she had begged me to find her a better hiding-place; and that I had done so, and promised to describe this shelter in a later chapter. Well, the refuge I had devised for her—in the best traditions of detective fiction—was none other than her own house, then being used to billet enemy troops. I remembered a windowless back room in the basement adjoining the kitchen. The door to this room was the rear wall of a closet in the kitchen, and could be opened only by a trip lock which worked by lifting a shelf in the back of the closet. Thus the room was virtually safe from discovery. I warned Frau Anders that life here would hardly be pleasant, for she would have to bear the harsh noises around her and continual darkness. Late at night she could go into the kitchen, and steal a small bit of food, but she must be careful never to take enough of anything so that its loss could be noticed; and she could dispose of her excrement at a similar hour by going into the garden and burying it in the ground. Even after I had convinced her that she would be safe there, she was terrified of being caught when we went to the house. I consulted Jean-Jacques and we worked out a simple strategy. I had watched the house for some time, to determine the stations and number of the guards; there were two in the front and one in the back. We waited until the visit to the capital of one of the enemy heads of state, a day when most of the troops of the city were on parade. Then Frau Anders, Jean-Jacques, and I came to the house. I went to the front door, and engaged the guards in conversation. I said I wished to see a certain lieutenant, and refused to believe that no one of that name was billeted there. A few minutes were taken up this way before I was knocked down with a rifle butt, kicked twice, and thrown out. Jean-Jacques took on the guard in back, with better luck; I think he ended by making a rendezvous with him. In the meantime, Frau Anders had made her way into the house; and there she remained for the rest of the war.

  The day the capital was liberated, I went to the house. It was with some difficulty that I finally got Frau Anders to answer, and it proved even harder to persuade her to emerge. She was a piteous sight. She had been in that dark room over two years without talking to a single person. Her voice was barely audible, her gaze unsteady, and she had lost all her teeth. She didn’t seem surprised that the war was over; she said she always expected it would end some time. But when I invited her to come with me and stay at my place until she found one of her own, she refused. She said she was ashamed of appearing in the street without any teeth. I then suggested that she live in the house for a while, until she got used to a greater degree of freedom, and that I would come often and also send friends to visit her so that she would gradually become reaccustomed to human society. I followed this program faithfully, calling on her once a week. At my request Jean-Jacques went a few times, too; but then refused to go any more because, he said, she was hopeless and depressing. Still hopeful of her emergence, I took a dentist to the house who fitted her with a set of false teeth. But gradually I realized that she intended to stay where she was, if I would let her (and of course I had no intention of dispossessing her); she declared she was too old to live outside.

  It was Frau Anders then, who lived in the house when I moved there, whose presence makes it not quite accurate to say that I was entirely alone in the succeeding six years. Nevertheless we rarely saw each other, for she lived in the basement and I in the upper two stories. She performed some elementary housekeeping duties for me, and had become sufficiently emancipated to go out and buy food or a newspaper. But other than the necessary conversations relating to the management of the house, in which at times she could become rather shrewish, we exchanged few words.

  I do not want to give the impression that I had abandoned myself to the luxuries of melancholy and misanthropy. Perhaps it was melancholy which drove me into this spacious retirement. But once inside my castle, my melancholy lifted and was replaced by the vivacity which accompanies the assumption of any worthwhile task. Genuine isolation does not come easily to anyone, even to the most willing; I pursued my isolation rigorously. I wanted to learn if one could be really alone, and what was essential to remaining human. (Certainly I did not want to lose my humanity, my ability to be not alone, to go out when I wanted to—as poor Frau Anders had done.) I wanted a theatre in which I could imitate the singularity of my dreams.

  Although I could have gone out, then, for the most part I did not. Frau Anders would market and run errands for me, if I was peremptory enough. When I did go out, it was not to be somewhere else. My occasional walks, for purposes of exercise, were entirely voluntary; I had shed all my roles except the biological one. It is the possession of a role which provides the impetus to go out in the world, to act at all. The more numerous roles, the greater the number of excursions. (In this way I understood Jean-Jacques’ nightly wanderings, his agile transformations.) When I had learned to move with even greater agility, it did not seem necessary to move at all. For as any role can be condensed into an attitude, any act may be condensed into a posture. That is what I learned to do—to transform every act into a posture, and to link the postures with a subtle blankness.

  I realize this thought is unclear but it is hard to explain an idea which is really a dance rather than a sequence of sentences. Take murder, for example. It now seems to me that Jean-Jacques murdered my wife. He did it with a dance, with a posture, with the mock threat to my own person. Since my wife’s life depended on mine, seeing me about to be killed in a game, she playfully died with me. But her resources for surviving the game in order to play again were less than mine. And so she really died, while I did not.

  SIXTEEN

  I am not altogether sure of the sequence of events during the period in which I lived in that large house, and must rely partly on undated notes and letters and the journals which I kept then. I have had to arrange these in what seems the most likely order (my memory is not always of help), grouping together as belonging to the same period all documents written in blue ink, and to a later period those written in red. Several of the notebooks I have assumed to have been written consecutively.

  The notebook which I have before me now is bound in leather and has a lion embossed on the front cover. It contains a series of numbered jottings written in red ink of which I will give just a few.

  1. The dreams make me see myself as someone
alien.

  2. There is no knowledge of one’s inner feelings, as there is of the outer world.

  3. Despite the force with which I press myself against the line, I cannot jump outside the circle of my consciousness. But I can step further inside. I can find a smaller circle within the larger circle, and climb into that.

  4. If I cannot be outside myself, I will be inside. I will look out at myself as my own landscape.

  9. If I give a serious answer, the question becomes serious.

  10. The only interesting answers are those which destroy the question.

  13. When I destroy the dreams, do I destroy myself?

  16. I do not want to be appeased. I do not want to be comforted.

  18. Oh, the great simplifiers!

  21. Now I understand the mystery of the will. What is pain but the failure of will?

  24. I don’t want to have any convictions. If I am (or believe) something, I want to discover it through my acts; I don’t want to act in the way I do because it accords with what I believe or what I am.

  25. You do not decide anything. It decides you. You may act so as to provoke contempt. You may dehumanize yourself. But you may not decide these things, for then (despite all your efforts at abasement) you will not feel yourself an object of contempt and you will not be, what you desire, less human.

  27. The first rule of the ascetic life is to appear comical. If only I were a hunchback!

  31. The dreams which I now honor I first held in indifference and contempt.

  32. I remain unfelt by myself, except in my terrible dreams.

  33. My dreams will expel my character.

  35. There are emotions which are still unnamed. I shall call them X, Y, Z.

  39. My body failed me in my dreams.