Immortality

by Milan Kundera

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  MILAN KUNDERA

  I take the liberty of maintaining that without the art of ambiguity there is no real eroticism, and the stronger the ambiguity, the more powerful the excitement. Who cannot recall from childhood the wonderful game of doctor! A little girl lies down on the ground and a little boy takes off her clothes under the pretense that he is her doctor. The girl is obedient, because it is not a curious little boy who examines her but a serious gentleman concerned about her health. The erotic content of this situation is enormous as well as mysterious, and the hearts of both are thumping. They are thumping all the harder because the boy mustn't stop being the doctor even for a moment, and as he pulls off the girl's panties he speaks to her in very formal language.

  The recollection of this blessed moment of childhood brings back an even more charming memory: a young Czech woman returned in 1969 to a provincial Czech town after a sojourn in Paris. She had left for France in 1967 to study, and when she came back two years later she found her country occupied by a Russian army; people seemed frightened and yearning to find themselves somewhere else. In the course of those two years of study, the young Czech woman had been attending seminars compulsory for anyone desiring to be intellectually au cou-rant, in which she learned that during infancy, even before the Oedipal stage, we all go through a period which a famous psychoanalyst called the mirror stage, meaning that before we become aware of our parents' bodies we become aware of our own. The young Czech woman decided that it was this stage that many of her fellow countrywomen had skipped in their development. Glowing with the glamour of Paris and its famous seminars, she gathered around herself a circle of young women. She expounded a theory that none of them understood and introduced practical exercises that were as simple as the theory was complex: they all undressed completely and looked at themselves in a big mirror, then they all carefully examined each other, and finally they held up small pocket mirrors to each other so that they could see parts of their own bodies they hadn't been able to see before. The instructor did not fail even for a moment to treat the group to her theoretical commentaries, whose fascinating incomprehensibility transported everyone far away from the Russian occupation, far from

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  their provincial cares, as well as giving them a certain undefined and undefinable excitement about which they were loath to talk. It is probable that in addition to having been a student of the great Lacan, the group's leader was also a lesbian, but I don't think that the group contained many confirmed lesbians. And I admit that of all those women, I dream most of all of that totally innocent girl for whom during those seances nothing in the world existed except the dark words of Lacan, poorly translated into Czech. Ah, the scholarly meetings of naked women in a house in a provincial Czech town, the streets of which were patrolled by Russian soldiers—how much more exciting than orgies in which everyone tries to do what is required, what is already agreed, and what has only one meaning, one poor meaning, and no other. But let us quickly leave the small Czech town and return to Paul's knees: Laura is sitting on one, and for the sake of experiment let's imagine the other knee occupied not by Brigitte but by her mother:

  Laura is savoring the pleasant feeling that her behind is touching the man for whom she has been secretly longing; that feeling is all the more • titillating because she is sitting on his lap not as a lover but as a sister-in-law, with the wife's full consent. Laura is the addict of ambiguity.

  Agnes finds nothing provocative in the situation, but she cannot silence the comical sentence that keeps circling through her mind: "Paul has one female buttock on each knee! Paul has one female buttock on each knee!" Agnes is the clear-minded observer of ambiguity.

  And Paul? He is noisily joking, raising first one knee, then the other, to keep the two sisters from doubting even for a moment that he is a kind and fun-loving uncle always willing to indulge in horseplay for his little niece's benefit. Paul is the simpleton of ambiguity.

  At the height of her amorous suffering, Laura would often ask him for advice, and they would meet in various cafes. Let us note that not one word was ever spoken of suicide. Laura had begged her sister not to mention her morbid ideas to anyone, and she herself had mentioned nothing of them to Paul. So the fine tissue of beautiful sorrow remained unharmed by too brutal an image of death; they would sit facing each other, and now and again they touched each other. Paul

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  would squeeze her hand or pat her on the shoulder as we do to someone whose self-confidence and strength we wish to bolster, because Laura loved Bernard and loving people deserve help.

  I am tempted to say that at these moments Paul looked into her eyes, but that would not be accurate, since during that period Laura again began to wear dark glasses; Paul knew that she did so in order to keep him from seeing her tearstained eyes. The dark glasses suddenly took on many meanings: they gave Laura an air of severe elegance and unapproachability; at the same time, however, they pointed at something very physical and sensual: an eye full of tears, an eye that had suddenly become an opening into the body, one of those nine beautiful gates into a woman's body of which Apollinaire sings in his famous poem, a moist opening covered by a fig leaf of dark glasses. On several occasions, the image of tears behind the glasses was so intense and the imagined tears so ardent that they turned into steam, which surrounded them both and deprived them of judgment and sight.

  Paul noticed the steam. But did he understand its significance? I don't think so. Imagine this situation: a little girl approaches a little boy. She starts taking off her clothes and says, "Doctor, you have to examine me." And the little boy says, "My dear little girl! I am no doctor!"

  This is exactly how Paul behaved.

  The clairvoyant

  I

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  n his discussion with the Bear, Paul tried to act like the brilliant champion of frivolity, and yet with the pair of sisters on his knees he was anything but frivolous. How is this possible? Here is the explanation: he saw frivolity as a beneficent enema with which he would treat culture, public life, art, politics; an enema for Goethe and Napoleon. But beware: it was not the right prescription for Laura and Bernard! Paul's deep distrust of a Beethoven or Rimbaud was redeemed by his immeasurable faith in love.

  The concept of love was linked in his mind with the image of the sea, that stormiest of all elements. When he and Agnes went on vacation, he used to leave the hotel window wide open at night, so that the sound of the pounding surf penetrated their lovemaking and they could merge with this great voice. He loved his wife and was happy with her; and yet in the depths of his soul there was a whisper of timid disappointment that their love never expressed itself in a more dramatic manner. He almost envied Laura for the obstacles that stood in her way, because only obstacles, Paul thought, were capable of turning love into a love story. He felt a bond of sympathetic solidarity with his sister-in-law, and her amorous troubles tormented him as if they were his own.

  One day Laura telephoned to tell him that Bernard had left for a few days' vacation at the family villa on Martinique, and that she was ready to follow him there against his will. If she found him there with another woman, so be it. At least everything would be clear.

  He tried to talk her out of this decision, to save her from unnecessary conflicts. But the discussion became interminable: she kept repeating the same arguments over and over, and Paul had already made peace with the thought that in the end he would say to her, no matter how

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  unwillingly, "If you're really so sure that your decision is right, then don't hesitate, go!" But just as he was about to say this, Laura said, 'There is only one thing that could persuade me to drop this trip: if you were to forbid me from going."

  She was thus quite clearly pointing out to Paul what he was to do in order to keep her from going, and yet at the same time to enable her to preserve, before herself and before
him, the dignity of a woman determined to see her desperation and her struggle to the very end. Let's recall that when Laura first set eyes on Paul, she heard in her mind precisely the same words that Napoleon once said about Goethe: "There is a man!" If Paul had really been a man, he would have decisively forbidden her to go on the trip. But alas, he was not a man but a man of principle: he had long ago dropped the word "forbid" from his vocabulary, and he was proud of it. He bristled: "You know that I never forbid anyone anything."

  Laura insisted: "I want you to forbid me things and to give me orders. You know that nobody has that right except you. I'll do whatever you tell me."

  Paul was perplexed: he had already been explaining to her for an hour that she shouldn't go after Bernard, and for an hour she kept arguing with him. Why, if she hadn't been persuaded by his arguments, did she want to obey his order? He fell silent.

  "Are you afraid?" she asked.

  "Of what?"

  "Of forcing your will upon me."

  "If I couldn't convince you, I have no right to order you."

  'That's what I meant: you're afraid."

  "I wanted to convince you through reason."

  She laughed: "You're hiding behind reason, because you're afraid of forcing your will on me. You're scared of me!"

  Her laughter threw him into still deeper perplexity, and so he said, just to end the conversation, "I'll think about it."

  Later, he asked Agnes for her opinion.

  She said, "She mustn't follow him. That would be a terrible mistake. If you see her, do everything you can to talk her out of it!"

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  Agnes's opinion did not mean very much, however, for Paul's chief adviser was Brigitte.

  After he explained her aunt's situation to her, Brigitte reacted immediately: "Why shouldn't she go there? People should always do what they feel like doing."

  "But just imagine," Paul objected, "if she finds Bernard's lover there! That would mean an enormous scandal!"

  "Did he tell her by any chance that he would be there with another woman?"

  "No."

  "Then he should have told her. If he didn't, he's a coward and there's no sense in coddling him. What can Laura lose? Nothing."

  We can ask why Brigitte gave Paul this particular answer and not another. Out of solidarity with Laura? No. Laura often behaved as if she were Paul's daughter, and Brigitte found this ridiculous and unpleasant. She didn't have the slightest desire for solidarity with her aunt; she was only concerned about one thing: pleasing her father. She sensed that Paul turned to her as he would to a clairvoyant, and she wished to strengthen her magical authority. Guessing correctly that her mother was opposed to Laura's trip, Brigitte decided to take precisely the opposite attitude, to let the voice of youth seduce her father with a gesture of rash daring.

  She shook her head with short horizontal motions, lifting her shoulders and eyebrows, and Paul again had that marvelous feeling that his daughter was a generator charging him with energy. Perhaps he would have been happier if Agnes had pursued him everywhere he went, rushing to catch planes to search distant islands for his lovers. All his life he had wished that his beloved would be capable, for his sake, of beating her head against the wall, screaming in despair, or jumping for joy all over the room. He told himself that Laura and Brigitte were on the side of daring and madness and that without a kernel of madness life would not be worth living. Let Laura follow the voice of her heart! Why should all our actions be flipped in the skillet of reason like a crepe?

  Nevertheless, he still objected: "Just remember that Laura is a sensitive woman. Such a trip could cause her a lot of pain."

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  "If I were in her place, I would go and nobody in the world could stop me," Brigitte concluded the conversation.

  Then Laura telephoned. To avoid a long discussion, he said as soon as he heard her voice, "I've thought the whole thing over and I want to tell you that you should do exactly what you feel like doing. If something is drawing you there, then go!"

  "I had already decided not to go. You had such doubts about my trip. But since you approve it, I'll fly out tomorrow."

  Paul felt as if he'd been drenched by a cold shower. He realized that without his express encouragement Laura would not fly to Martinique. But he was not capable of saying anything; the conversation was finished. Tomorrow a plane would jet her across the Atlantic, and Paul knew that he was personally responsible for this trip, a trip that in the depths of his soul he, like Agnes, considered totally nonsensical.

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  T

  wo days had passed since she boarded the plane. At six in the morning the telephone rang. It was Laura. She announced to her sister and brother-in-law that on Martinique it was exactly midnight. Her voice was unnaturally cheerful, which made Agnes conclude at once that things were turning out badly.

  She was not mistaken: when Bernard saw Laura walking down the palm-lined avenue leading to the villa in which he lived, he went white with anger and said to her severely, "I asked you not to come here." She began to say something in explanation, but without another word he threw a few of his things into a suitcase, got into the car, and drove off. She remained alone and wandered around the house; in one of the closets she discovered her red swimsuit, which she had left there during a previous stay.

  "No one was waiting for me. Only this swimsuit," she said, and passed from laughter to tears. Sobbing, she continued, "It was disgusting, what he did. I threw up. And then I decided to stay. Everything will come to an end in this villa. When Bernard comes back he will find me here in this swimsuit."

  Laura's voice echoed through the room; both of them heard it, but they had only one receiver and passed it back and forth.

  "For heaven's sake," said Agnes, "calm down, just calm down. Try to be cool and sensible."

  Now Laura was laughing once again: "Just imagine, before the trip I got hold of twenty tubes of barbiturates, and I left them all in Paris. That's how nervous I was."

  "Oh, that's good, that's good," said Agnes, and indeed she felt somewhat relieved.

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  "But I found a gun in one of the drawers," Laura continued, and again she laughed. "Bernard is obviously afraid for his life! He is afraid he'll be waylaid by some blacks! I see it as a sign!"

  "What sort of sign?"

  "That he left the gun for me!"

  "You're crazy! He did no such thing! He didn't even know that you were coming!"

  "Of course he didn't leave it intentionally. But he bought a gun that no one but me would ever use. Therefore he left it for me."

  Agnes again felt a sense of desperate powerlessness. She said, "Please, put the gun back where it was."

  "I don't know how to handle it. But Paul... you hear me, Paul?"

  Paul took the receiver: "Yes."

  "Paul, I am so glad to hear your voice."

  "So am I, Laura, but I beg you ..."

  "I know, Paul, but I can't go on anymore..." and she began to sob.

  There was a moment of silence.

  Then Laura said, "That gun is lying in front of me. I can't take my eyes off it."

  "So put it back where it was," said Paul.

  "Paul, you were in the army, weren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "You were an officer?"

  "A lieutenant."

  "That means you know how to shoot a gun?"

  Paul hesitated. But he had to say, "Yes."

  "How does one know that a gun is loaded?"

  "If it goes off, it's loaded."

  "If I press the trigger will it go off?"

  "It might."

  "What do you mean, it might?"

  "If the safety catch is off, the gun will fire."

  "And how do you know the catch is off?"

  "Come on now, you're not going to explain to her how to kill herself!" shouted Agnes, and she tore the receiver
from Paul's hand.

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  Laura continued, "I only want to know how to handle it. After all, that's something I should know, how one handles a gun. What does it mean when the catch is off? How do you turn it off?"

  "That's enough," said Agnes. "Not another word about guns. Put it back where it was. We've had enough of this joking."

  Laura's voice suddenly became quite different, serious: "Agnes! I am not joking!" and once again she started to cry.

  The conversation was endless, Agnes and Paul kept repeating the same sentences, they assured Laura of their love, they begged her to stay with them, not to leave them, until she finally promised to return the gun to the drawer and go to sleep.

  When they put down the receiver they were so exhausted that for quite some time they were unable to say a single word.

  Agnes said at last, "Why is she doing this! Why is she doing this!"

  And Paul said, "It's my fault. I sent her there."

  "She would have gone in any case."

  Paul shook his head. "No. She was ready to stay. I did the stupidest thing of my life."

  Agnes did not want Paul to suffer from a sense of guilt. Not out of compassion for him, but rather out of jealousy: she didn't want him to feel so responsible for Laura, to be so tied to her in his thoughts. That's why she said, "How can you be so sure that she actually found a gun?"

  At first, Paul had no idea what she meant: "What are you trying to say?"

  "That there may not be any gun there at all."

  "Agnes! She is not putting on an act! That's obvious!"