Immortality

by Milan Kundera

  Paul knew as well as Jaromil that modernity is different tomorrow from what it is today and that for the sake of the eternal imperative of modernity one has to be ready to betray its changeable content, to betray Rimbaud's verse for the sake of his credo. In 1968, using terminology still more radical than that used by Jaromil in 1948 in Prague, Paris students rejected the world as it is, the world of superficiality, comfort, business, advertising, stupid mass culture drumming its melodramas into people's heads, the world of conventions, the world of Fathers. During that period Paul spent several nights on the barricades and spoke with the same decisive voice as had Jaromil twenty years earlier; he refused to be swayed by anything, and supported by the strong arm of the student revolt he strode out of his father's world so that at the age of thirty or thirty-five he would at last become an adult.

  But time passed, his daughter grew up, and she felt very comfortable in the world as it is, in the world of television, rock, publicity, mass culture and its melodramas, the world of singers, cars, fashions, fancy food stores, and elegant industrialists turning into TV stars. Paul was capable of stubbornly defending his opinions against judges, policemen, commissioners, and statesmen, but he was unable to defend them against his daughter, who sat in his lap and was in no hurry to leave her

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  father's world and become an adult. On the contrary, she wanted to stay at home as long as possible with her tolerant daddy, who allowed her (with an almost tender indulgence) to spend Saturday nights shut away in her room with her boyfriend.

  What does it mean to be absolutely modern when a person is no longer young and his daughter is quite different from the way he used to be in his youth? Paul easily found an answer: to be absolutely modern means in such a case to identify absolutely with one's daughter.

  I imagine Paul, sitting at supper with Agnes and Brigitte. Brigitte is sitting sideways, eating, and watching TV. All three are silent, because the volume is turned up. Paul's head is still ringing with the Bear's unhappy remark that he is the ally of his own gravediggers. He is jolted out of his thoughts by his daughter's laughter: in a TV commercial, a naked baby, hardly a year old, gets up from its pot, dragging behind it a strip of white toilet paper like a gorgeous bridal veil. At that moment Paul remembers that he recently found out to his surprise that Brigitte had never read a single poem by Rimbaud. In view of how much he had loved Rimbaud at her age, he could rightfully regard her as his grave-digger.

  It is rather melancholy for Paul to see his daughter laughing heartily at the nonsense on television and to know that she has never read his beloved poet. But then Paul asks himself: why did he actually love Rimbaud so much? how did he get to feel that way? did it start by his being enchanted with the poetry? No. In those days Rimbaud coalesced his thoughts into a single revolutionary amalgam with Trotsky, Breton, the Surrealists, Mao, and Castro. The first thing of Rimbaud's that struck him was his slogan, mouthed by everybody: changer la vie. (As if such a banal formula required a poetic genius.....) Yes, it's true that it was then he read Rimbaud's verse, learned some of it by heart, and was fond of it. But he never read all of his poems and was fond only of those his friends talked about, while they in turn talked about them only because they had been recommended by their friends. Rimbaud was therefore not his aesthetic love, and perhaps he had never had an aesthetic love. He rallied to Rimbaud, the way a person rallies to a flag, a political party, or a football team. What then did Rimbaud's poems

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  really give Paul? Only the sense of pride that he belonged among those who loved Rimbaud's poetry.

  His mind kept returning to his recent discussion with the Bear: yes, he had exaggerated, he had allowed himself to be carried away by paradox, he had provoked the Bear and everyone else, but after all, wasn't everything he'd said the truth? Isn't what the Bear so respectfully calls "culture" only a self-delusion of ours, something undoubtedly beautiful and valuable but actually with less meaning for us than we are ready to admit?

  A few days before he had exposed Brigitte to the same ideas that had shocked the Bear, and he had tried to use the same words. He had wanted to see how she would react. Not only was she not the least bit offended by his provocative formulations, but she was willing to go a lot further. This was very important to Paul, because he had doted on his daughter more and more in recent years, and whenever he was puzzled about something he sought her opinion. At first he did so for educational reasons, to make her think about important matters, but soon the roles imperceptibly reversed themselves: he no longer resembled a teacher stimulating a shy pupil with his questions, but an uncertain man come to consult a clairvoyant.

  We do not demand of a clairvoyant that she be wise (Paul did not have an exaggerated estimation of his daughter's talents or education), but that she be linked by invisible connections with some reservoir of wisdom existing outside her. When he heard Brigitte expound her views, he did not ascribe them to her personal originality, but to the great collective wisdom of youth that spoke through her mouth, and he therefore accepted them with ever greater confidence.

  Agnes rose from the table, collected the dishes, and carried them to the kitchen, Brigitte turned around to face the television, and Paul remained at the table, abandoned. He thought of the party game his parents used to play: ten people would walk in a circle around ten chairs, and at a given signal all of them had to sit down. Every chair had an inscription. And now, the one left for him was inscribed: the brilliant ally of his gravediggers. And he knows that the game is over and that he will remain in that chair forever.

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  What was to be done? Nothing. Anyhow, why shouldn't a person be the ally of his gravediggers? Should he challenge them to a fight? With the result that the gravediggers would spit on his coffin?

  He heard Brigitte's laughter again, and at that moment a new definition occurred to him, the most paradoxical, the most radical of all. He liked it so much that he almost forgot his sorrow. This was the new definition: to be absolutely modern means to be the ally of one's gravediggers.

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  To be a victim of ones fame

  T.

  . elling Bernard "Marry me!" would have been a blunder in any case, but doing so after he had been declared a complete ass was a blunder as big as Mont Blanc. For we must take into account something that at first may seem hard to believe, but which is necessary to understand Bernard: other than a childhood bout with scarlet fever he had never known any illness; other than the death of his father's hunting dog he had never encountered death; and other than a few bad marks in school he had never known failure; he lived in the unquestioned conviction that he had been blessed with good fortune and that everybody had only the most favorable opinion of him. Being declared an ass was the first big shock of his life.

  It occurred in the midst of a strange series of coincidences. At about the same time, the imagologues were launching a campaign on behalf of his radio station, and huge posters of the editorial team were appearing all over France: they were pictured in white shirts with rolled-up sleeves, standing against a sky blue background, and their mouths were open: they were laughing. At first, he walked the streets of Paris filled with pride. But after a week or two of immaculate fame, the paunchy giant had paid him a call and with a smile had handed him a cardboard tube containing the diploma. If this had happened before his huge photograph was exposed to the whole world, he might have taken it somewhat better: But the fame of the photograph lent the shame of the diploma a certain resonance: it was multiplied.

  It would be one thing if Le Monde were to publish an announcement that someone named Bernard Bertrand had been declared a complete

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  ass; but if such an announcement concerned someone whose picture was on every street corner, it would be an entirely different matter. Fame adds a hundredfold echo to everything that happens to us. And it is
uncomfortable to walk the world with an echo. Bernard soon realized his vulnerability and told himself that fame was exactly what he had never cared for in the least. Certainly he wanted success, but success and fame are two quite different things. Fame means that you are known by many people whom you yourself do not know and who make a claim upon you, want to know all about you, and act as if they owned you. Actors, singers, politicians evidently feel a kind of delight in being able to give themselves to others in this way. But this was a delight for which Bernard had no desire. When he recently interviewed the actor whose son was mixed up in some painful affair, he enjoyed noticing how fame had become the actor's Achilles' heel, a weakness, a tail that Bernard could tug, twist, tie into knots. Bernard had always longed to be the one who asked questions, not the one who has to answer. Fame belongs to the one who answers, not the one who asks. The face of the answerer is lit up by a spotlight, whereas the questioner is filmed from behind. Nixon is in the limelight, not Woodward. Bernard never longed for the fame of the one in the bright lights but for the power of the one in the shadow. He longed for the strength of the hunter who kills the tiger, not for the fame of the tiger admired by those about to use him as a bedside rug.

  But fame does not belong only to the famous. Everyone lives for a moment of brief fame and experiences the same feeling as a Greta Garbo, a Nixon, or a skinned tiger. Bernard's open mouth laughed from the walls of Paris, and he felt as if he were being pilloried: he was seen, studied, and judged by everybody. When Laura told him, "Bernard, marry me!" he imagined her standing in the stocks by his side. And then he suddenly saw her (this had never happened to him before!) old, disagreeably extravagant, and mildly ridiculous.

  This was all the more foolish because he had never needed her as much as now. The love of an older woman still remained for him the most beneficial of all possible loves, providing only that this love were even more secret and the woman even wiser and more discreet. If

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  instead of making the foolish proposal of marriage Laura had decided to use their love to build an enchanted, fairy-tale castle tucked away from the social bustle, she would have been sure of keeping Bernard. But when she saw his huge photograph on every corner and linked it with his changed behavior, his silent face, and his absentmindedness, she decided without much reflection that success had brought him some new woman who was constantly on his mind. And because Laura refused to give up without a fight, she took the offensive.

  Now you can understand why Bernard began to retreat. When one side attacks, the other must retreat, that is the law. Retreat, as is generally known, is the most difficult of military maneuvers. Bernard undertook it with the precision of a mathematician: he had been used to spending up to four nights a week with Laura, now he limited his visits to two; he had been used to spending all his weekends with her, now he limited them to one in two; and he planned still other limitations for the future. He thought of himself as the pilot of a spaceship who is reentering the atmosphere and must sharply reduce his speed. He put on the brakes, carefully but resolutely, while his attractive motherly friend faded before his eyes, gradually replaced by a woman constantly quarreling with him, losing her wisdom and maturity, and brimming with unpleasant activity.

  One day, the Bear told him, "I met your fiancee."

  Bernard blushed with shame.

  The Bear continued, "She mentioned some sort of disagreement between the two of you. She is a likable woman. Be nicer to her."

  Bernard grew pale with fury. He knew that the Bear had a big mouth and that by now everybody in broadcasting knew all about his lover. He thought of an affair with an older woman as a charming and almost daring perversion, but now he was sure that his colleagues would sec his choice as nothing but new proof of his assininity.

  "Why do you go and complain about me to strangers?"

  "What strangers?"

  "The Bear."

  "I thought he was your friend."

  "Even if he was, why do you discuss our private life with him?"

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  She said sadly, "I don't hide my love for you. Or am I forbidden to talk about it? Are you by any chance ashamed of me?"

  Bernard kept silent. Yes, he was ashamed of her. He was ashamed of her, even though she made him happy. But she made him happy only at those times when he forgot that he was ashamed of her.

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  Fighting

  L

  aura was highly distressed when she felt the spaceship of love slowing down in flight.

  "What's the matter with you!"

  "Nothing is the matter with me."

  "You've changed."

  "I simply need to be alone."

  "Is anything the matter with you?"

  "I have a lot of worries."

  "If something is worrying you, you shouldn't be alone. When people have worries they should share them with each other."

  On Friday he left for his house in the country without asking her to come along. She followed him there on Saturday, uninvited. She knew that she shouldn't have done this, but she had long been in the habit of doing what she shouldn't and was actually proud of it, because this was precisely why men admired her, and Bernard more than all the others. If she didn't like a concert or a play, she would get up in protest in the middle of the performance and walk out with an ostentatious fuss that would have the audience buzzing with disapproval. One day when Bernard sent the daughter of the concierge to her shop to deliver a letter she had been anxiously waiting for, Laura reached in a drawer, pulled out a fur hat worth at least two thousand francs, and as a token of her joy handed it to the sixteen-year-old girl. Another time she went with him on a two-day holiday to a rented seaside villa, and because she felt like punishing him for something or other, she spent the whole day playing with the twelve-year-old son of a local fisherman as if she had completely forgotten her lover's presence. Oddly enough, even though he felt hurt, he came to see her behavior as an example of bewitching

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  spontaneity ("That boy made me forget the whole world!"), combined with something disarmingly feminine (wasn't she maternally moved by a child?), and all his anger instantly vanished when the next day she proceeded to devote herself not to the fisherman's son but to him. Her capricious notions thrived happily in his loving, admiring eyes, one could even say that they flowered like roses; as for her, she saw her inappropriate behavior and rash words as marks of her personality, as the charm of her self, and she was happy.

  As soon as Bernard began to pull away from her, her extravagant behavior did not alter but quickly lost both its happy character and its naturalness. The day she decided to follow him uninvited, she knew she wouldn't arouse any admiration, and she entered his house with a sense of anxiety that caused the brashness of her action, a brashness formerly innocent and even attractive, to become aggressive and forced. She was aware of that, and she resented him for having deprived her of the delight she had felt in her own self, a pleasure that was now shown to have been quite fragile, rootless, and entirely dependent on him, on his love and admiration. Yet something urged her all the more to continue acting eccentrically and foolishly and to provoke him into spitefulness; she felt like causing an explosion in the secret, vague hope that after the storm the clouds would disappear and everything would be as before.

  "Here I am. I hope you're pleased," she said with a laugh.

  "Yes, I'm pleased. But I came here to work."

  "I won't bother you while you're working. I don't want anything from you. I just want to be with you. Have I ever bothered you during your work?"

  He didn't answer.

  "After all, we've often gone to the country together and you've prepared your broadcasts there. Have I ever bothered you?"

  He didn't answer.

  "Have I bothered you?"

  There was no helping it. He had to answer, "No."

  "So how is it that I'm bo
thering you now?"

  "You're not bothering me."

  "Don't lie to me! Act like a man and at least have the courage to tell

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  me straight out that you're angry with me for coming on my own. I can't stand cowardly men. I'd rather you told me to pack up this minute and go away. So tell me!"

  He was at a loss. He shrugged,

  "Why are you so cowardly?"

  He shrugged again.

  "Stop shrugging your shoulders!"

  He felt like shrugging a third time, but controlled himself.

  "Explain to me what's the matter with you."

  "Nothing's the matter."

  "You've changed."

  He raised his voice. "Laura, I have a lot of worries!"

  She also raised her voice. "I have worries, too!"

  He realized that he was behaving foolishly, like a child pestered by his mother, and he hated her for it. He didn't know what to do. He knew how to be pleasant to women, amusing, perhaps even seductive, but he didn't know how to be unkind, nobody had taught him that; on the contrary, everybody had drummed into his head that he must never be unkind to them. How is a man to act toward a woman who comes to his house uninvited? In what university do they teach you that sort of thing?

  He stopped answering her and went into the next room. He lay down on the couch and picked up the first book he saw lying nearby. It was a paperback detective novel. He lay down on his back, held the book at arm's length, and pretended to read. A minute or two went by, and she followed him. She sat down in an armchair facing him. She looked at the color illustration on the book cover and said, "How can you read such things?"