Immortality

by Milan Kundera

  Supposedly, astrology teaches us fatalism: you won't escape your fate! But in my view, astrology (please understand, astrology as a metaphor of life) says something far more subtle: you won't escape your life's theme! From this it follows, for example, that it is sheer illusion to want to start all over again, to begin "a new life" that does not resemble the preceding one, to begin, so to speak, from zero. Your life will always be built from the same materials, the same bricks, the same problems, and what will seem to you at first "a new life" will soon turn out to be just a variation of your old existence.

  A horoscope resembles a clock, and a clock is a school of finality: as soon as a hand completes its circle and returns to its starting point, one phase is finished. Nine hands turn with varying speed on the horoscope dial and constantly some phase comes to an end and another begins. When someone is young, he is not capable of conceiving of time as a circle, but thinks of it as a road leading forward to ever-new horizons; he does not yet sense that his life contains just a single theme; he will come to realize it only when his life begins to enact its first variations.

  Rubens was about fourteen years old when he was stopped in the street by a little girl roughly half his age, who asked him, "Please, sir,

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  can you tell me the time?" That was the first time a woman, a stranger, addressed him in a formal way and called him "sir." He was filled with bliss and it seemed to him that a new phase of his life was opening up. Afterward he completely forgot the episode and only recalled it when an attractive woman said to him, "When you were young, did you think..." That was the first time someone had referred to his youth as a thing of the past. At that moment he evoked the image of the little girl who had once asked him what time it was, and he realized that those two female figures belonged together. They were figures quite insignificant in themselves, met by coincidence, and yet as soon as he established a connection between them they appeared to him as two significant events on his life's dial.

  I will put it still another way. Let us imagine that the dial of Rubens's life is placed on some great medieval dock, like the one in Old Town Square in Prague, which I passed regularly for some twenty years. The clock strikes the hour and a little window above the dial opens: a marionette, a little girl of seven, comes out and asks Rubens what the time is. And then, many years later, when that same slow hand comes around to the next number, bells begin to sound, the window opens once again, and a marionette, this time a young woman, emerges and tells him, "When you were young..."

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  hen he was very young, he did not dare reveal his erotic lantasies to any woman. He believed that every bit of his erotic energy had to be converted into an astounding physical performance upon the woman's body. Besides, his youthful partners were of the same opinion. He vaguely remembers one of them, let us call her by the letter A, who in the midst of lovemaking suddenly braced herself on her elbows and heels to arch her body into a bridge, causing him to lurch and almost fall off the bed. This sporting gesture was full of passionate meanings, for which Rubens was grateful. He was living his first phase: the period of athletic muteness.

  Gradually, he lost that muteness; he felt very bold when for the first time, while making love to a young woman, he dared to say aloud the name of some sexual part of her body. But that boldness was not as great as he thought, because the expression he chose was either a gentle diminutive or a poetic paraphrase. All the same, he was enthused by his boldness (as well as surprised that the girl didn't protest), and he began to think up highly complicated metaphors in order to speak in a poetic, roundabout way about the sexual act. That was the second phase: the period of metaphors.

  At that time he was seeing girl B. After the usual verbal overture (full of metaphors), they made love. When she was approaching her climax, she blurted out a sentence in which she designated her sexual organ by an unambiguous, unmetaphoric expression. That was the first time he had ever heard that word coming from a woman's mouth (which, by the way, is also one of the famous seconds on the dial). Surprised, dazzled, he realized that this crude expression contained more charm

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  and explosive power than all the metaphors that had ever been invented.

  A short time later he was invited over by woman C. She was some fifteen years older than he. Beforehand, he recited to his friend M all the beautiful obscenities (no, no more metaphors!) he intended to say to that woman during intercourse. But he failed in an odd way: before he dared to utter these expressions to her she came out with them herself And again he was astounded. Not only had she outstripped him hi erotic daring, but, most strange: she used exactly the same words that he had been preparing for several days. The coincidence fascinated him. He ascribed it to some sort of erotic telepathy or mysterious affinity of their souls. So he was slowly entering into the third phase: the period of obscene truth.

  The fourth period was closely connected with his friend M: the period of Telephone. "Telephone" was the name of a game he used to play when he was between five and seven years old: the children sat in a row and whispered a message to one another, the first to the second, the second to the third, and so on, until the last one said it aloud and everybody laughed at the difference between the original sentence and its final version. As adults, Rubens and M played Telephone by saying cleverly formulated obscene phrases to their girlfriends, and the women, not realizing that they were involved in the game, would pass them on. And because Rubens and M had several lovers in common (or else they discreetly passed their lovers on to each other), they used them to send each other playful greetings. Once, during lovemaking, a woman used an expression that was so improbable, so oddly twisted, that he immediately recognized his friend's malicious creativity at work. Rubens was seized by an uncontrollable urge to laugh, and because the woman took his repressed giggling as a sexual climax, encouraged, she repeated the sentence once more, and then for the third time she shouted it aloud, and in his mind's eye Rubens saw the ghost of his friend guffawing over his copulating body.

  In that connection he remembered girl B, who at the end of the period of metaphors suddenly said an obscene word during lovemak-ing. Only now, after the lapse of time, did he pose himself the

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  question: was that the first time she had ever said that word? He had never doubted it at the time. He thought she was in love with him, he suspected her of wanting to marry him, he was sure there was no one else in her life. Only now did he realize that somebody else must have taught her (or, I might say, trained her) to say that word aloud before she'd been able to say it to Rubens. Yes, only many years later, thanks to the experience of Telephone, did he realize that at the time she was swearing her faithfulness to him, B undoubtedly had another lover.

  The experience of Telephone changed him: he was losing the feeling (to which we are all subject) that the act of physical love is a moment of Absolute intimacy, when the world around us changes into an endless desert in the middle of which two isolated bodies press against each other. Now he suddenly realized that the moment of lovemaking yields no intimate isolation. One is more intimately isolated walking down the crowded Champs-Elysees than in the arms of the most secretive of mistresses. For the period of Telephone is the social period of love: thanks to a few words, everyone takes part in embracing apparently isolated beings; society continually restocks the market of indecent fantasies and facilitates their distribution and circulation. Rubens coined this definition of a nation: a community of individuals, whose erotic life is united by the same game of Telephone.

  But then he met girl D, who was the most verbal of all the women he'd ever known. During their second meeting she confided to him that she was a fanatical masturbator and that she achieved sexual climax by telling herself fairy tales. "Fairy tales? What fairy tales? Tell me!" He began to make love to her, while she narrated: bathhouse,
cabin, holes dulled in wooden walls, eyes fixed on her as she is undressing, a door that suddenly opens and four men enter, and so on and so on; the fairy tale was beautiful, it was banal, and he was highly pleased with D.

  But a peculiar thing began happening to him from then on: when he was with other women, he found in their fantasies fragments of the long stories told to him by D during their lovemaking. He often encountered the same word, the same verbal construction, even though the word or construction sounded quite uncommon. D's monologue was a mirror in which he recognized all the women he knew, it was an

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  enormous encyclopedia, an eight-volume Larousse of erotic phrases and fantasies. At first he thought of her great monologue according to the principles of Telephone: via hundreds of lovers, an entire nation was gathering indecent fantasies in every corner of the country and putting them into her head, as into a beehive. But later he found out that this explanation was unlikely. He encountered fragments of D's monologue even in women he knew with certainty could not have had any indirect contact with D, for there was no common lover who could have played the role of messenger.

  Then he remembered his experience with C: he had prepared indecent sentences to say during intercourse, and she had beaten him to it. At the time he believed it was telepathy. But had she really been able to read sentences from inside his head? More likely, those sentences had already been present inside her own head long before she had met him. But how was it that they both had the same sentences in their heads? Clearly, there must have been some common source. And then it occurred to him that one and the same stream runs through all men and women, a single, common river of erotic fantasies. An individual does not receive a share of indecent fantasy from a lover by means of Telephone but by means of this impersonal (or superpersonal or sub-personal) stream. To say that this river that runs through us is impersonal means that it does not belong to us but to him who created us and made it flow within us; in other words, that it belongs to God or even that it is God or one of his incarnations. When Rubens first formulatal this idea for himself it seemed to him blasphemous, but then the sense of blasphemy receded and he immersed himself in the underground river with a certain religious humility: he knew that this stream unites us all, not as a nation, but as God's children; every time he immersed himself in the stream he experienced the feeling of merging with God in a kind of mystic rite. Yes, the fifth phase was the mystical period.

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  But is the story of Rubens's life nothing but a story of physical

  love?

  It is possible to think of it that way, and the moment when it revealed itself as such was also a significant event on the dial.

  While still at school, Rubens spent many hours in museums looking at paintings, he painted hundreds of gouache pictures and was famous among his school friends for his caricatures of teachers. He drew them in pencil for a school newspaper, and between classes he drew them in chalk on the blackboard, to the great amusement of his fellow students. That period enabled him to feel what fame was all about: the whole school knew him and admired him, and everybody jokingly called him Rubens. As a souvenir of those beautiful years (his only years of fame), he kept that nickname all his life and insisted (with surprising naivete) that all his friends call him by it.

  This glory came to an end after school. He applied to the School of Fine Arts but failed to pass the examination. Was he worse than others? Or did he have bad luck? Oddly enough, I don't know how to answer this simple question.

  With indifference he began to study law, and blamed the narrow-mindedness of his native Switzerland for his unsuccessful start. He hoped that he would fulfill his artistic vocation elsewhere and tried his luck twice more: first, when he applied to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and failed the exam, and then when he offered his drawings to several journals. Why did they reject the drawings? Were they bad? Or were the people who judged them idiots? Or had drawings gone out of

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  fashion? I must repeat once again that I have no answers to these questions.

  Exhausted by his lack of success, he gave up further attempts. This meant, of course (as he was fully aware), that his passion for drawing and painting was weaker than he had thought, and therefore that he was not destined for the artistic career he had assumed in his student days. At first he was disappointed by this realization, and then a stubborn defense of his own resignation began to resound inside him: why should he have a passion for painting? what is so praiseworthy about passion? isn't the cause of most bad paintings and bad novels simply the fact that artists consider their passion for art something holy, some sort of mission if not duty (duty to oneself, even to mankind)? Under the influence of his own resignation he began to see artists and writers as people possessed by ambition rather than gifted with creativity, and he avoided their company.

  His greatest rival, N, who was his age, came from the same town, and graduated from the same school, was not only accepted by the Ecole des Beaux Arts but soon after gained remarkable success. During their school days everyone considered Rubens much more talented than N. Does that mean that they were all mistaken? Or that talent is something that can get lost along the way? As we can guess, there is no answer to these questions. Anyway, another circumstance arose: at a time when his failures induced him to give up painting once and for all (at the same time that N was celebrating his first success), Rubens was seeing a very beautiful young girl, whereas his rival had married a woman from a rich family, a woman so ugly that one look at her made Rubens speechless. It seemed to him that by means of this conjunction of circumstances, fate was trying to show him where his life's center of gravity really lay: not in public life but in private, not in the pursuit of professional success but in success with women. And suddenly what only yesterday had seemed like a defeat now revealed itself as a surprising victory: yes, he would give up fame, the struggle for recognition (a vain and sad struggle), in order to devote himself to life itself. He didn't even bother to ask himself exactly why women represented "life itself." That seemed to him self-evident and clear beyond all doubt. He was

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  certain that he had chosen a better way than his rival, wedded to a rich hag. In these circumstances his young beauty meant not only a promise of happiness, but above all a triumph and a source of pride. In order to consolidate his unexpected victory and to give it a seal of irrevocability he married the beautiful woman, convinced that the whole world would envy him.

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  /omen meant "life itself" to Rubens and yet he proceeded to marry a beautiful woman and thus give up women. He acted illogically, but quite normally. Rubens was twenty-four years old. He had thus just entered the period of obscene truth (in other words, it was shortly after he had met girl B and woman C), but his new experiences changed nothing about his certainty that there was something far higher than sex: love, great love, life's supreme value, about which he had heard much, read much, sensed much, and knew nothing. He had no doubt that love was the crown of life (of "life itself," to which he gave preference over his career), and that therefore he had to welcome it with open arms and without any compromise.

  As I mentioned, the hands on the sexual dial pointed to the hour of obscene truth, but as soon as he fell in love there occurred an immediate regression into the earlier phases: in bed he was either silent or spoke only gentle metaphors to his future bride, convinced that obscenity would expel both of them from the domain of love.

  I'll say it in other words: his love for the beautiful woman brought him back to a state of virginity, because as I mentioned earlier, on pronouncing the word "love" every European is transported on wings of enthusiasm into a precoital (or extracoital) realm of thought and feeling, exactly where young Werther suffered and where Fromentin's Dominique almost fell off his horse. After meeting his beautiful woma
n, Rubens was therefore ready to put the hot pot of his feelings on the fire and wait for the boiling point at which feeling would turn into passion. There was one complication: he had at this time a mistress in another town (let's designate her by the letter E), three years older than he, whom he had been seeing long before he met his future bride,

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  and for several months afterward. He stopped seeing her only on the day he decided to get married. The separation was not due to a spontaneous cooling of affection for E (we will soon see that he was much too fond of her), but rather to the realization that he was entering a great and solemn period of life when it was necessary to sanctify great love through fidelity. However, a week before his wedding day (whose necessity he doubted in his heart of hearts), he was overtaken by an unbearable longing for E, whom he had abandoned without the least explanation. Because he had never called their relationship love, he was surprised that he yearned for her so much with his body, heart, and soul. He was unable to control himself and went off to see her. For a whole week he humbled himself before her, begged her to let him make love to her, besieged her with tenderness, sorrow, insistence, but she granted him nothing but the view of her grief-stricken face; he was not permitted so much as to touch her body.

  Dissatisfied and depressed, he returned home on the morning of the wedding day. He got drunk during the wedding feast and in the evening took his bride to their new apartment. Blinded by wine and sorrow, in the middle of lovemaking he called her by the name of his former lover. What a catastrophe! He would never forget the huge eyes that looked at him in terrible amazement! At that instant, when everything had collapsed, it occurred to him that his rejected lover was taking her revenge and that on the very day he entered into wedlock, her name forever undermined his marriage. And perhaps in that brief moment he also realized the improbability of what had happened, the grotesque stupidity of his slip of the tongue, a stupidity that made the unavoidable collapse of his marriage even more unbearable. For three or four terrible seconds he didn't know what to do, and then he suddenly began to shout, "Eva! Elizabeth! Heidi!" He couldn't think of any other girls' names at the moment, and so he repeated, "Heidi! Elizabeth! Yes, you have become every woman for me! All the women in the whole world! Eva! Klara! Julie! You are all women! You arc woman in the plural! Heidi, Gretchen, all the women in the whole world are in you, you possess all their names!..." And he made love to her with the speed and dexterity of a true sexual athlete; after a few