Immortality

by Milan Kundera

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  seconds he saw that her staring eyes had regained their normal expression and her body, which had turned to stone a moment before, was once again moving in a rhythm with a regularity that allowed him to regain his composure and assurance.

  The manner in which he escaped from that hellish predicament bordered on the unbelievable, and we have a right to wonder how the young bride could have taken seriously such a mad comedy. But let's not forget that both of them were captives of precoital thinking, which equates love with the absolute. What sort of criterion is there for love in the virginal phase? Only quantitative: love is a great, great, great feeling. False love is a small feeling, true love (die wahre Liebe!) is a great feeling. But isn't every love small when seen from the viewpoint of the absolute? Of course. That's why love, in order to prove itself true, wishes to escape the sensible, wishes to reject moderation, doesn't wish to seem probable; longs to change into the delires actifs de la passion (let's not forget Eluard!), in other words, wishes to be mad! Thus, the improbability of an exaggerated gesture can only be an advantage. To an outside observer, the way that Rubens got out of trouble seems neither elegant nor convincing, but in the situation it was his only means of avoiding catastrophe: acting like a madman, Rubens summoned the mad absolute of love, and it succeeded.

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  If Rubens, face to face with his youthful wife, once again became love's lyrical athlete, this did not mean that he had given up his erotic vices once and for all, but only that he wished to enlist even vice in the service of love. He imagined that in monogamous ecstasy he would experience more with one woman than with a hundred others. There was just one question he had to solve: what tempo should sensuous adventure follow when going along the path of love ? Because love's path was supposed to be long, as long as possible, perhaps even endless, he adopted a new principle: to slow down time and not to hurry.

  Suppose he imagined his sexual future with his beautiful bride as the ascent of a high mountain. If he were to reach the peak the very first day, what would he do then? He therefore had to plan his climb in such a way that it would fill his entire life. For this reason he made love to his young wife passionately and with physical zest, but using methods that were, so to speak, classical, free from the lasciviousness that attracted him (to her more than to any other woman) and that he postponed for future years.

  And then suddenly something unexpected happened: they stopped understanding each other, they got on each other's nerves, they began to struggle over power in domestic affairs, she claimed she needed more elbow room for her own life, he was upset that she refused to cook eggs for him, and faster than either of them realized, they found themselves divorced. The great feeling on which he had wanted to build his entire life disappeared so quickly that he began to doubt whether he had ever felt it at all. This disappearance of feeling (sudden, quick, easy!) seemed breathtaking, unbelievable! It fascinated him much more than his sudden infatuation had two years earlier.

  MILAN KUNDERA

  Emotionally but also erotically, the net balance of his marriage came to nil. Because of the slow tempo he had prescribed for himself, all he had experienced with the beautiful creature was naive lovemaking without any great excitement. Not only had he failed to take her to the top of the mountain, he hadn't even arrived at the first lookout point. He therefore tried to see her a few more times after their divorce (she had no objection: once the domestic power struggle ceased, she was happy to make love with him again), and he tried to slip in at least a few small perversions that he had been saving for future years. But he succeeded in doing almost nothing of the kind, for this time the tempo he had chosen was too fast, and the beautiful divorcee understood his impatient sensuality (which had dragged her straight into the period of obscene truth) as cynicism and lack of love, so that their postmarital contact soon came to an end.

  His short marriage was a mere parenthesis in his life, which tempts me to say that he returned precisely to the place he had been before he met his bride; but that wouldn't be true. The pumping up of amorous feeling and its incredibly undramatic and painless deflation came to him as a shocking discovery that announced he had landed irrevocably beyond the border of love.

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  he great love that had dazzled him two years earlier made him forget painting. But when he closed the parenthesis of marriage and realized with melancholy disappointment that he had landed in a realm beyond the border of love, his renunciation of painting suddenly appeared to him to be an unjustifiable capitulation.

  In his notebook he again began to make sketches for pictures he longed to paint. But he came to realize that a return to art had become impossible. When he was a student, he imagined all the painters in the world moving along the same great road; it was the royal road leading from the Gothic painters to the great Italian masters of the Renaissance, and on to the Dutch painters and to Delacroix, from Delacroix to Manet, from Manet to Monet, from Bonnard (oh, how he loved Bonnard!) to Matisse, from Ce'zanne to Picasso. The painters did not march along this road like a group of soldiers, no, each went his own way, and yet what each of them discovered served as an inspiration to the others and they all knew that they were blazing a trail into the unknown, a common goal that united them all. And then suddenly the road disappeared. It was like waking up from a beautiful dream; for a while we look for the fading images until finally we realize that dreams cannot be called back. The road had disappeared, but it remained in the souls of painters in the form of an inextinguishable desire to "go forward." But where is "forward" when there is no longer any road? In which direction is one to look for the lost "forward"? And so the desire to go forward became the painters' neurosis; each set out in a different direction and yet their tracks crisscrossed one another like a crowd milling around in the same city square. They wanted to differentiate themselves one from the other while each of them kept discovering a

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  different but already discovered discovery. Fortunately, people soon appeared (not artists but businessmen and organizers of exhibitions with their agents and publicists) who imposed order on this disorder and determined which discovery was to be rediscovered in any particular year. This reestablishment of order greatly increased the sales of contemporary paintings. They were bought by the same wealthy people who only ten years before had laughed at Picasso and Dali, thereby earning Rubens's passionate hatred. Now the wealthy buyers decided that they would be modern, and Rubens sighed with relief that he was not a painter.

  He once visited New York's Museum of Modern Art. On the first floor he saw Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Miro, Dali, and Ernst, and he was happy. The brushstrokes on the canvas expressed wild relish. Reality was being magnificently violated like a woman raped by a faun, or it battled with the painter like a bull with a toreador. But on the next floor, reserved for contemporary paintings, he found himself in a desert: no trace of dashing brushstrokes on canvas; no trace of relish; both bull and toreador had disappeared; the paintings had expelled reality altogether, or else they imitated it with cynical, obtuse literal-ness. Between the two floors flowed the river Lethe, the river of death and forgetting. He told himself at that time that his renunciation of painting might have had a deeper significance than lack of talent or stubbornness: midnight had struck on the dial of European art.

  If an alchemist of genius were transplanted into the nineteenth century, what would his occupation be? What would become of Christopher Columbus today, when there are a thousand shipping companies? What would Shakespeare write when theater did not exist or had ceased to exist?

  These are not rhetorical questions. When a person has talent for an activity that has passed its midnight (or has not yet reached its first hour), what happens to his gift? Does it change? Adapt? Would Christopher Columbus become director of a shipping line? Would Shakespeare write scripts for Hollywood? Would Picasso
produce cartoon shows? Or would all these great talents step aside, retreat, so to speak, to the cloister of history, full of cosmic disappointment that they had

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  been born at the wrong time, outside their own era, outside the dial, the time they'd been created for? Would they abandon their untimely talents as Rimbaud abandoned poetry at the age of nineteen?

  Of course, there is no answer to these questions, neither for me, nor for you, nor for Rubens. Did the Rubens of my novel have the unrealized potential of a great painter? Or did he lack talent altogether? Did he abandon painting from lack of strength or, on the contrary, from the strength that saw clearly the vanity of painting? Naturally, he often thought of Rimbaud and compared himself to him (even though hesi-tantly and with irony). Not only did Rimbaud renounce poetry radically and without regrets, but the activity to which he subsequently devoted himself was a mocking denial of poetry: it is said that in Africa he trafficked in weapons and even in slaves. The latter assertion is probably lust a slanderous legend, yet as hyperbole it is a good expression of the self-destructive violence, passion, fury, that separated Rimbaud from his own past as an artist. Rubens may have been increasingly attracted by the world of finance and the stock market because that activity (rightly or wrongly) seemed to him the antithesis of his dreams of an artistic career. One day, when his school friend N had become famous, Rubens sold a painting that N had once given him. Thanks to this sale he not only gained quite a bit of money, but he discovered a way to make a living in the future: he would sell to the rich (for whom he felt con-tempt) paintings by contemporary artists (whom he disdained).

  There are surely many people in the world who make a living through the sale of paintings and to whom it never occurs in their wildest dreams to feel ashamed of their occupation. After all, weren't Velasquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt also dealers in pictures? Rubens of course knew that. But though he was capable of comparing himself to Rimbaud, a slave trader, he would never compare himself to the great painters who dealt in pictures. Not for an instant would he cease believing in his occupation's total uselessness. At first this made him sad and he blamed himself for his amorality. But then he told himself: what does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the turn of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: the highest morality consists in being useless.

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  e had been divorced for some twelve years when F came to sec him. She told him how a certain man had recently invited her to his house and then let her wait at least ten minutes in the living room, telling her that he had to finish an important telephone conversation in the adjoining room. Actually, he had probably only pretended to be talking on the phone, to give her time to look over the pornographic magazines lying on the coffee table. F concluded her story with this remark: "If I had been younger, he would have succeeded. If I had been seventeen. That's the age of the craziest fantasies, when you can't resist anything...."

  Rubens listened to F rather distractedly, until her last words jolted him out of his indifference. This would be his fate from now on: somebody would say something that would strike him as a reproach; it would remind him of something in his life that he had missed, allowed to slip by, irremediably wasted. When F talked of the time when she was seventeen, when she was unable to resist any kind of seduction, he recalled his wife, who was also seventeen at the time he met her. He pictured the provincial hotel where they spent some time before their marriage. They made love while, in the next-door room, a friend ot theirs was getting ready for bed. Rubens's young bride whispered to him several times, "He will hear us!" Only now (facing F, who was telling him about her temptations as a seventeen-year-old) did he realize that at that time his bride had gasped more loudly than ever, that she had even shouted, and that she must have shouted on purpose so that their friend would hear. In the following days she kept referring to that night, asking, "Do you really think he didn't hear us?" At the time, he interpreted her question as an expression of alarmed modesty and he

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  reassured his bride (now, looking at F, the idea of his youthful stupidity made him blush up to his ears!) that their friend was known as a deep sleeper.

  He looked at F and realized that he had no desire to make love to her in the presence of another woman or another man. But why is it that the memory of his wife, who fourteen years earlier had gasped loudly, even shouted, when she thought of a man on the other side of a thin wall, why is it that this memory made his heart beat faster?

  An idea occurred to him: making love in a threesome, a foursome, can be exciting only in the presence of a beloved woman. Only if there is love can the sight of a woman's body in the arms of another man arouse amazement and exciting terror. The old moralizing truth that sex has no meaning without love was suddenly vindicated and gained new significance.

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  ON THE following day, he flew to Rome on a business trip. By four o'clock he was free. He was filled with ineradicable sadness: he thought of his wife, and not only of her; all the women he had ever known filed past his eyes, and it seemed that he had missed them all, that he had experienced much less than he could have and should have. He wanted to shake this sadness, this dissatisfaction, and so he visited the picture gallery in the Barberini Palace (he went to picture galleries in every town he visited), then set out for the Spanish Steps and climbed the broad staircase to the park of the Villa Borghese. Long rows of marble busts of famous Italians, standing on pedestals, lined the avenues of trees. Their faces, frozen in terminal grimaces, were exposed like resumes of their lives. Rubens was always sensitive to the comical aspects of monuments. He smiled. He remembered a childhood fairy tale: a sorcerer casts a spell over guests at a feast; they all remain frozen in time, with open mouths, faces distorted with food, their hands clutching half-gnawed bones. Another memory: people fleeing from Sodom were forbidden to look back lest they turn into pillars of salt. That biblical story clearly indicates that there is no greater horror, no greater punishment, than turning a second into eternity, tearing someone out of the flow of time, stopping him in the midst of his natural motion. Immersed in these thoughts (which he forgot a second later!), he suddenly saw her in front of him. No, it wasn't his wife (the one who kept gasping loudly because she knew that a friend was listening in the next room), it was someone else.

  Everything was decided in a fraction of a second. He recognized her only at the moment when they were side by side and another step would part them irrevocably. He had to find within himself the

  decisiveness and speed to stop, turn (she immediately reacted to his movement), and address her.

  He felt as if it was for her he'd been longing all these years, as if he'd been searching for her all over the world. Some hundred yards away there was a cafe", with tables under the trees and an incredibly blue sky. They sat down facing each other.

  She was wearing dark glasses. He took them between his fingertips, carefully removed them from her face, and laid them on the table. She did not resist.

  He said, "Because of those glasses I almost didn't recognize you."

  They sipped mineral water and couldn't take their eyes off each other. She was in Rome with her husband and had only an hour to spare. He knew that if it had been possible they would have made love that very day, that very second.

  What was her name? What was her first name? He had forgotten, and it was impossible to ask her. He told her (and meant it quite sincerely) that all the time they hadn't seen each other he had had the feeling that he was waiting for her. How could he admit at the same time that he didn't know her name?

  He said, "Do you know what we used to call you?'*

  "No, I don't."

  'The lute player."

  "Lute player?"

  "Because you were as tender as a lute. It was I who thought up this nickname for yo
u."

  Yes, he had thought it up. Not years ago, during their brief acquaintance, but now in the park of the Villa Borghese, because he needed to address her with a name; and because she seemed to him as elegant and tender as a lute.

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  hat did he know about her? Not much. He vaguely recalled that he had known her by sight from the tennis courts (he must have been around twenty-seven, and she some ten years younger) and that he had once invited her to a nightclub. In those days a certain dance was popular, in which the man and woman faced each other about a step apart, twisted their hips, and alternately reached out one arm and then the other toward the partner. It was this motion of hers that imprinted her in his memory. What was so special about her? First of all, she never even looked at Rubens. Where was she looking? Into empty space. All the dancers had their arms bent at the elbow, and they pumped them alternately back and forth. She, too, made these motions, but just a little differently: as she moved her arms forward, her right forearm described a small circle to the left, while at the same time her left forearm described a circle to the right. It was as if these circular motions were meant to hide her face. As if she wanted to erase it. At the time, this dance was considered somewhat indecent, and it was as if the girl wished to dance indecently and yet at the same time erase the indecency. Rubens was enchanted! As if until then he had never seen anything more tender, beautiful, more exciting. Then the music changed to a tango and the couples held each other tight. He couldn't resist a sudden impulse and put his hand on the girl's breast. He himself became frightened at this move. What would the girl do? She did nothing. She kept on dancing, with his hand on her breast, and looked straight ahead. He asked her, and his voice was almost trembling, "Has anyone ever touched your breast?" And she answered in the same tremulous voice (truly, it sounded as if someone had lightly touched the strings of a lute), "No." And he kept his hand on her breast and the