Immortality

by Milan Kundera

  Agnes tried to formulate her suspicion more carefully: "It's possible there is a gun in the house. But it is also possible that she took some barbiturates along and deliberately brought up the gun in order to confuse us. And you cannot also rule out the possibility that she has neither barbiturates nor a gun and only wants to torment us."

  "Agnes," said Paul, "you're being cruel to her."

  Paul's reproach again put her on her guard: without his realizing it, Laura had lately become more important to him than she was; he had

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  been thinking about her, occupying himself with her, worrying about her, he had been moved by her, and Agnes was suddenly forced to think that Paul was comparing her to Laura and that she was emerging from the comparison as the one with less feeling.

  She defended herself: "I am not cruel. I only want to warn you that Laura will do anything to attract attention. That's natural, because she is suffering. Everyone has a tendency to laugh at her unfortunate love affair and to shrug their shoulders. Once she has a gun in her hand, no one can laugh anymore."

  "And supposing her longing for attention leads her to take her own life? Isn't that possible?"

  "It is possible," Agnes admitted, and once again there followed a long, anxious silence.

  Then Agnes said, "I can imagine a person longing to take his life. Not being able to bear pain any longer. And the meanness of people. Wanting to get out of their sight and vanish. Everyone has the right to kill himself. That's his freedom. I have nothing against suicide as a way ofvanishing."

  She felt like stopping, but violent disapproval of her sister's behavior made her go on: "But that's not the case with her. She doesn't want to vanish. She is thinking of suicide because she sees it as a way to stay. To stay with him. To stay with us. To engrave herself forever on all our memories. To force her body into our lives. To crush us."

  "You're being unjust," said Paul. "She's suffering."

  "I know," said Agnes, and she broke into tears. She imagined her sister dead, and everything she had just said seemed petty and base and unforgivable.

  "And what if she merely wanted to lull us with her promises?" she said, and began to dial the number of the villa on Martinique; the phone kept ringing and ringing, and their foreheads began to sweat again; they knew that they would never be able to hang up and would listen endlessly to the ringing that signified Laura's death. At last they heard her voice; it sounded almost unfriendly. They asked where she'd been. "In the next room." Both of them spoke into the receiver. They spoke of their anxiety, of their need to hear her voice once more to be

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  reassured. They repeated how much they loved her and how impatiently they were looking forward to her return.

  The next morning they were both late for work and thought all day of nothing but her. In the evening they called her again; the conversation again lasted an hour and they again assured her how much they loved her and how eagerly they longed to see her again.

  A few days later she rang the doorbell. Paul was at home alone. She was standing in the doorway, and she was wearing dark glasses. She fell into his arms. They went into the living room, sat down in armchairs facing each other, but she was so nervous that she got up after a little while and began pacing the room. She talked feverishly. Then he too rose from the chair, and he too paced the room and talked.

  Paul spoke with contempt about his former student, protege, and friend. That could of course be explained by a desire to make Laura's break-up easier. But he was himself surprised that he meant everything he said, seriously and sincerely: Bernard is a spoiled child of rich parents; an arrogant, conceited person.

  Laura was leaning against the fireplace, gazing at Paul. And Paul noticed all of a sudden that she was no longer wearing dark glasses. She held them in her hand and gazed at him, her eyes swollen and moist. He realized that for quite a while she hadn't been listening to what he was saying.

  He fell silent. The room became filled with a stillness, which made him through some sort of mysterious power move closer to her. She said, "Paul, why didn't we two meet sooner? Before all the others ..."

  Those words spread out between them like a mist. Paul stepped into that mist and reached out his hand like someone who can't see and gropes his way; his hand touched Laura. Laura sighed and let Paul's hand stay touching her skin. Then she stepped aside and put her glasses back on. That gesture made the mist lift, and they were once again facing each other as brother-in-law and sister-in-law.

  A while later Agnes returned from work and walked into the room.

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  Dark glasses

  When she first saw her sister after her return from Martinique, rather than hugging her as one would a shipwrecked sailor who has just escaped death, Agnes remained surprisingly cool. She didn't see her sister, she saw only the dark glasses, that tragic mask that would dictate the tone of the next scene. Ignoring the mask, she said, "Laura, you've lost a lot of weight." It was only then that she stepped closer and lightly kissed her on both cheeks, as acquaintances always do in France.

  If we consider that these were the first words spoken after those dramatic days, we must admit they were ill chosen. They were not related to life, or death, or love, but to digestion. That in itself would not have been so bad, since Laura was fond of talking about her body and considered it a metaphor for her feelings. What was much worse was the fact that the sentence was not spoken with concern or with a melancholy admiration of the suffering that caused weight loss, but with an evident weary distaste.

  There is no doubt that Laura accurately caught the tone of her sister's voice and realized its significance. But she, too, pretended that she didn't guess what the other was thinking and said in a voice full of pain, "Yes. I lost fifteen pounds."

  Agnes felt like saying, "Enough! Enough! This has gone on far too long! Stop it!" but she controlled herself and said nothing.

  Laura lifted her arm: "Look at this, can this be my arm, this stick-----

  I can't wear a single skirt. They all slip down to my knees. And my nose

  keeps bleeding___" As if to demonstrate the truth of what she had just

  said, she tipped her head back and blew loudly through her nose.

  Agnes watched the thin body with uncontrolled distaste, and this idea occurred to her: what happened to those fifteen pounds that

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  Laura lost? Did they disperse into the blue like used-up energy? Or did they follow her excrement into the sewer? What happened to the fifteen pounds of Laura's irreplaceable body?

  In the meantime Laura took off her dark glasses and put them down on the mantelpiece of the fireplace she was leaning against. She turned her swollen eyelids toward her sister, as she had turned them a moment earlier toward Paul.

  When she took off her glasses, it was like stripping her face bare. As if she were undressing. But not in the way a woman undresses before a lover; rather in the way she undresses before a doctor, relinquishing all responsibility for her body.

  Agnes was unable to dismiss the words that buzzed in her head and said aloud, "Enough! Enough! We're all at the end of our tether. You'll break up with Bernard just as millions of women have already broken up with millions of men, without threatening to commit suicide."

  We might think that after weeks of endless conversation during which Agnes kept assuring her of her sisterly love, Laura must have been surprised by this outburst, but oddly enough she was not surprised; Laura reacted to Agnes's words as if she had been expecting them for a long time. She said with utter calm, "Let me tell you what I think: you don't know what love is all about, you never did and you never will. Love was never your strong point."

  Laura knew just where her sister was most vulnerable, and Agnes was worried; she realized that Laura was saying these things now only because Paul was listening. It suddenly became clear to her that it was no longer a question of B
ernard: that entire suicidal drama had nothing to do with him; most probably he would never find out about it; that drama was intended only for Paul and for Agnes. And it occurred to her, too, that when someone begins to fight, a force is let loose that does not stop at the first objective, and that beyond Laura's first target, which was Bernard, there were others also.

  It was no longer possible to avoid a fight. Agnes said, "If you lost fifteen pounds because of him, that's material proof of a love which cannot be denied. Still, there is something I don't understand. When I love someone, I want only good things to happen to him. When I hate

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  someone, I wish bad things on him. And in recent months you've been tormenting Bernard and us as well. What does that have to do with love? Nothing."

  Now, let's imagine the living room as a stage: to the far right there is a fireplace; opposite, a bookcase on the edge of the stage. In the background, the center of the stage is taken up by a couch, a coffee table, and two armchairs. Paul is standing in the middle of the room; Laura is by the fireplace keeping her eyes fixed upon Agnes, who is standing only a few steps away. Laura's swollen eyes are accusing her sister of cruelty, insensitivity, and coldheartedness. While Agnes was speaking, Laura kept retreating backward to the middle of the room toward Paul, as if trying to express by this movement her astonished alarm at her sister's unfair attack.

  When she came within a step or two of Paul, she stopped and repeated, "You don't know what love is all about."

  Agnes stepped forward and took up her sister's former position at the fireplace. She said, "I understand love perfectly well. In love the most important thing is the other person, the one we love. That's what it's all about, and nothing else. And I ask myself: what does love mean to a person who is capable of seeing nothing but herself? In other words, what does love mean to an absolutely egocentric woman."

  "To ask what love means makes no sense, my dear sister," said Laura. "Love is something you've either experienced or you haven't. Love is love, that's all you can say about it. It's a pair of wings beating in my heart and driving me to do things that seem unwise to you. And that's precisely what you have never experienced. You said I was incapable of seeing anybody but myself. But I see you, and I see right through you. When you kept assuring me of your love during these last few weeks, I knew perfectly well that coming out of your mouth that word has no meaning. It was just a trick. An argument to mollify me. To keep me from disturbing your tranquillity. I know you, sister, you've been living your whole life on the other side of love. Totally on the other side. Beyond the border of love."

  Both women talked of love, while snapping hatefully at each other. And the man who was with them despaired. He wanted to say some-

  Immortality

  thing to ease the unbearable tension: "We're all tired, the three of us. Excited. We need to get away somewhere and forget all about Bernard."

  But Bernard had long been forgotten, and all that Paul's intervention accomplished was that the sisters' verbal contest was replaced by a silence without an ounce of kindness, without any reconciling mem-ory, without the slightest hint of family solidarity.

  Let's not lose sight of the scene as a whole: to the right, leaning against the fireplace, stood Agnes; in the middle of the room, facing her sister, stood Laura, with Paul two steps to the left. And now Paul shrugged in despair at his inability to prevent the senseless hatred that had broken out between the two women he loved. As if wishing to show his protest by getting as far away from them as possible, he turned and stepped toward the bookcase. He leaned back against it, turned his head to the window, and tried not to see them.

  Agnes saw the dark glasses lying on the mantelpiece and absentmind-edly picked them up. She glanced at them with hatred, as if she were holding in her hand a pair of her sister's dark tears. She found everything that came from her sister's body distasteful, and those big glass tears seemed to her like one of its excretions.

  Laura looked at Agnes and saw her glasses in her sister's hands. She suddenly felt a need for them. She felt a need for a shield, a veil that would cover her face from her sister's hatred. Yet she couldn't make herself take the three or four steps needed to reach her sister-enemy and take the glasses out of her hands. She was scared of her. And so she savored, with a kind of masochistic passion, the vulnerable nakedness of her face, marked with the traces of her suffering. She knew perfectly well that Agnes couldn't bear Laura's body, her speeches about her body and about the fifteen pounds she had lost, she knew it by feeling and intuition, and perhaps it was precisely for this reason, out of spite, that she now wanted to be as much of a body as possible, an abandoned, discarded body. She wanted to place that body in the middle of their living room and leave it there. To let it lie there, heavy and motionless. And if they didn't want it there, to force them to pick up that body, her body, to force one of them to take it, one by the arms,

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  the other by the feet, carry it outside, and drop it behind the house the way people secretly dispose of useless old mattresses late at night.

  Agnes stood by the fireplace, holding the dark glasses in her hand. Laura was in the middle of the living room, moving away from her sister with small backward steps. Then she took one last step backward and the back of her body pressed against Paul, hard, very hard, for behind Paul was the bookcase, and he had no room to get out of the way. Laura straightened her arms and pressed both palms firmly against Paul's thighs. She leaned back her head, too, so that it touched Paul's chest.

  Agnes is on one side of the room, holding Laura's dark glasses; facing her on the other side, like a pair of statues, Laura is standing pressed against Paul. Both of them are motionless, as if made of stone. Nobody says a word. After a few moments, Agnes moves her index finger away from her thumb. The dark glasses, symbol of her sister's sorrow, those metamorphosed tears, drop to the tiled floor in front of the fireplace, and break.

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  PART FOUR

  Homo sentimentalis

  I

  When Goethe faced the eternal trial, countless accusations and testimonies relating to the case of Bettina were brought up against him. Not to bore the reader with many insignificant matters, I will limit myself to three depositions that seem to be of primary importance.

  First: the testimony of Rainer Maria Rilke, the greatest German poet since Goethe.

  Second: the testimony of Romain Rolland, who in the 1920s and 1930s was the most widely read novelist from the Urals to the Atlantic, and who in addition enjoyed a great reputation as a progressive, antifascist, humanist, pacifist, and friend of revolution.

  Third: the testimony of the poet Paul Eluard, the brilliant member of what used to be called the avant-garde, a singer of love, or to use his own words, a singer of l'amour-poesie, love-poetry, for he considered these two concepts to merge into one (as we can see in one of his most beautiful collections of verse, L'Amour la poesie).

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  2

  AS A witness called before the eternal trial, Rilke used exactly the same words he had written in his most famous prose work, published in 1910, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, in which he addressed Bettina by means of this long apostrophe:

  "How is it possible that everyone does not still speak of your love? What has happened since then that was more remarkable? What is it that occupies people? You yourself knew the worth of your love; you spoke about it to your greatest poet, so that he should make it human; for it was still but a natural element. But he, in writing to you, dissuaded people from it. They have all read his answers and believe them, because the poet is more comprehensible to them than nature. But perhaps someday it will become clear that here was the limit of his greatness. That lover was bestowed upon him [auferlegt] and he was unequal to her [er hat sic nicht bestanden—i.e., he failed to pass the test Bettina represented]. What does it signify that he could not reciprocate [erwidern]? Such love needs no recip
rocity, it contains within itself both the challenge [Lockruf] and the response; it answers its own prayer. But he should have humbled himself in all his dignity before this love and written what she dictated, with both hands, kneeling, like John on Patmos. There was no choice for him before this voice that 'fulfilled the angels' ministry' [die dasAtnt derEngel verrichtete]; which had come to enfold him and carry him off into eternity. Here was a chariot for his fiery ascension. Here was a dark myth for his death, which he left unfulfilled."

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  3

  The testimony of Romain Rolland dealt with the relationship between Goethe, Beethoven, and Bettina. The novelist explained it in detail in his book Goethe and Beethoven, published in Paris in 1930. Even though he expressed his viewpoint in terms of fine distinctions, he made no secret of the fact that his strongest sympathies were with Bettina: he explained events in approximately the same terms as she. He did not begrudge Goethe his greatness, but he regretted his political and aesthetic cautiousness, so unbecoming to genius. And Christiane? Alas, better pass her over in silence, she was nullite d'esprit, a spiritual zero.

  I must emphasize again that this viewpoint was expressed with delicacy and a sense of proportion. Epigones are always more radical than their inspirers. For example, I am reading a very thorough French biography of Beethoven published in the 1960s. There the author speaks directly of Goethe's "cowardice," his "servility," his "senile fear of everything new in literature and aesthetics," etc., etc. Bettina, on the other hand, is endowed with "clairvoyance and prophetic ability, which almost give her the stature of a genius." And Christiane, as usual, is no more than a poor volumineuse Spouse, a corpulent wife.

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  4

  Though Rilke and Rolland took Bcttina's part, they speak of Goethe with respect. Paul Eluard, in his Les Sentiers et les routes de la poesie (let's be fair to him, it was written in 1949, during the worst stage of his career, when he was an enthusiastic admirer of Stalin), as a true Saint-Just of love-poetry, chose much harsher words: