Immortality

by Milan Kundera

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  word "no" sounded like the most beautiful word in the world; he was carried away; it seemed to him that he was seeing shame from close up; he saw shame as it is; it was possible to touch her shame (he was actually touching it because her shame had gone to her breast, it dwelt in her breast, it had become her breast).

  Why had he not seen her again? He didn't know, no matter how hard he thought about it. He no longer remembered.

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  rthur Schnitzler, the turn-of-the-century Viennese writer, wrote a beautiful novella cntiAcdMiss Elsa. The heroine is a pure young woman whose father is deep in debt and threatened by ruin. His creditor has promised to forgive the father's debt provided his daughter will show herself to him in the nude. After a lengthy inner struggle, Elsa agrees but is so ashamed by the exhibition of her nudity that she goes mad and dies. Don't misunderstand: this is not a moralistic tale intended to denounce the evil, depraved rich! No, it is an erotic novella that leaves you breathless: it lets you understand the power that nudity once had: it meant an enormous sum of money for the creditor and for the girl infinite shame leading to an excitement bordering on death.

  Schnitzler's story marks a significant moment on Europe's dial: at the end of the puritanical nineteenth century, erotic taboos were still powerful, but the loosening of morals awoke an equally powerful longing to overstep those taboos. Shame and shamelessness transected each other at the point where both had equal force. That was a moment of extraordinary erotic tension. Vienna encountered it at the turn of the century. That moment will never return.

  Shame means that we resist what we desire and feel ashamed that we desire what we resist. Rubens belonged to the last European generation that grew up knowing shame. That's why he was so excited when he placed his hand on the girl's breast and set in motion her shame. Once, while still at school, he had crept into a hallway from whose window he could observe his female schoolmates stripped to the waist, waiting for chest X-rays. One of them saw him and started shouting. The others threw their coats over their shoulders, ran out shouting into the hallway, and started to chase him. Rubens experienced a moment of

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  fear; they suddenly ceased to be schoolmates, colleagues, comrades willing to joke and flirt. Their faces were full of real anger, a collective linger determined to hound him. He escaped, but they continued in their chase and lodged a complaint with the headmaster. Rubens was reprimanded in front of the class. The headmaster, his voice expressing genuine contempt, called him a voyeur.

  By the time he was forty, women would leave their brassieres in the drawer and lounge on beaches showing their breasts to the entire world. He walked along the shore, and his eyes tried to avoid their unexpected nakedness, because the old imperative was still firmly anchored inside him: not to violate feminine shame! When he met an acquaintance who was bare breasted, such as the wife of a friend or a colleague, he was surprised to find that it was he who felt ashamed rather than she. He was embarrassed and didn't know where to turn his eyes. He tried to avoid looking at the breasts, but that wasn't possible, for bare breasts are visible even when a man looks at a woman's hands or into her eyes. And so he tried to look at breasts with the same naturalness as if he were looking at a woman's knees or forehead. But that wasn't easy, precisely because breasts are neither knees nor foreheads. No matter what he did, it seemed to him that those bare breasts accused him of not being in sufficient accord with their nakedness. And he had the strong feeling that the women he met at the beach were the same as those who twenty years earlier had denounced him to the headmaster for voyeurism: just as angry and united, demanding with the same aggression, multiplied by their numbers, that he recognize their right to show themselves in the nude.

  In the end, he more or less came to terms with bare breasts, but he could not escape the impression that something serious had once again happened: on Europe's dial, another hour had struck; shame had disappeared. Not only had it disappeared, but it had disappeared so easily, almost overnight, that it seemed as if it had never existed. That it had been only an invention of men when they stood face to face with a woman. That shame had been their illusion. Their erotic dream.

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  When Rubens was divorced, he found himself, as I said, once and for all "beyond the border of love." He liked that phrase. He often repeated it to himself (sometimes sadly, sometimes cheerfully): I will live my life "beyond the border of love."

  But the realm that he called "beyond the border of love" was not the shady, neglected courtyard of a great, beautiful palace (the palace of love), no, the realm was spacious, rich, beautiful, endlessly varied, and perhaps much bigger and more beautiful than the palace of love itself. This realm was alive with all sorts of women; some of them left him indifferent, others amused him, but with some others he was in love. It is necessary to understand this apparent contradiction: beyond the border of love there is love.

  For what pushed Rubens's amorous adventures "beyond the border of love" was not a lack of feelings, but the desire to restrict them to the erotic sphere and to deprive them of any influence whatever on the course of his life. No matter how we define love, the definition will always suggest that love is something substantial, that it turns life into fate: events that take place "beyond the border of love," no matter how beautiful they may be, are therefore necessarily episodic.

  But I repeat: even though they were expelled "beyond the border of love" into the territory of the episodic, among Rubens's women there were some for whom he felt tenderness, whom he thought about obsessively, who caused him pain when they eluded him or jealousy when they preferred someone else. In other words, even beyond the border of love there existed loves, and since the word "love" was forbidden, they were all secret loves and thus all the more attractive.

  As he sat in the garden cafe of the park of the Villa Borghese facing

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  the woman he called "the lute player," he immediately realized that she would become "beloved beyond the border of love." He knew that he would not be interested in her life, her marriage, her cares, he knew that they would see each other only rarely, but he also knew that he would feel an extraordinary tenderness toward her.

  "I recall still another name I gave you," he said to her. "I called you a Gothic maiden."

  "Me? A Gothic maiden?"

  He had never called her that. These words had occurred to him a moment earlier, as they were walking down the avenue toward the cafe Her walk made him think of the Gothic pictures he had been looking at that afternoon at the Barberini Palace.

  He continued, "Women in Gothic paintings walk with their bellies sticking out. And with their heads bowed toward the ground. Your walk is that of a Gothic maiden. A lute player in an angelic orchestra. Your breasts are turned toward heaven, your belly is turned toward heaven, but your head, which realizes the vanity of everything, looks into the dust."

  They walked back down the same statue-lined avenue where they had met. The severed heads of the famous dead, resting on their pedestals, looked extremely proud.

  At the park exit she said good-bye. They agreed that he would come to see her in Paris. She gave him her name (the name of her husband) and telephone number, and told him the times when she was sure to be at home alone. Then she lifted her dark glasses with a smile: "May I, now?"

  "Yes," said Rubens, and for a long while he watched her as she walked away.

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  All the painful longing that came over him at the thought of

  having forever missed his wife was transformed into an obsession with the lute player. For the next few days he thought of her almost constantly. He again tried to recall everything that remained of her in his memory, but he found only that one evening in the nightclub. For the hundredth time, the same image came to his mind: they were among a crowd of dancing couples, and she was just a step away
from him. She looked past him, into empty space. As if she didn't want to see anything of the outside world but rather concentrate on herself. As if it wasn't he who was a step away from her but a huge mirror in which she watched herself. She observed her hips alternately twisting back and forth, she watched her arms describing circles in front of her breasts and face as if she wanted to hide them, as if she wanted to erase them. As if she kept erasing them and then kept letting them appear again, while at the same time observing herself in an imaginary mirror, excited by her shame. Her dance was a pantomime of shame: a constant suggestion of concealed nakedness.

  A week after their meeting in Rome they met in the lobby of a large Parisian hotel full of Japanese, whose presence gave them a sense of pleasant anonymity and roodessness. When he closed the door of the hotel room behind them, he approached her and put his hand on her breast: "This is how I touched you when we danced together," he said. wDo you remember?"

  "Yes," she said, sounding as if someone had lightly tapped the body

  of a lute.

  Was she ashamed as she had been fifteen years earlier? And had she been ashamed fifteen years earlier? Was Bettina ashamed when Goethe

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  touched her breast in the Teplitz spa? Or was Bettina's shame merely Goethe's dream? Was the lute player's shame onlyRubens's dream? No matter what the truth may have been, that shame, even if it was only an illusion of shame, even if it was only a memory of an illusion of shame, that shame was present, it was with them in the small hotel room, it intoxicated them with its magic and gave everything meaning. He undressed her and felt as if he had just brought her back from the nightclub of their youth. They made love and he saw her dancing: she hid her face behind circling movements of her arms, while observing herself in an imaginary mirror.

  Eagerly, they let themselves be carried away by that stream that flows through all women and all men, that mystic stream of obscene images where every woman resembles every other woman and yet a different

  face gives the same images and words a different power and enchantment. He listened to what the lute player was saying, he listened to what he said himself, he gazed at the tender face of a Gothic maiden, at the tender lips pronouncing coarse words, and he felt more and more intoxicated.

  The grammatical tense of their obscene dreams was the future: next time you will do this or that, we will stage such and such a situation... This grammatical future converts dreaming into a constant promise (a promise that loses its validity at the moment of sobriety but, since it is never forgotten, becomes a promise again and again). So it was bound to happen that one day he met her in the hotel with his friend M. The three of them went upstairs to the room, drank, and chatted, and then the men began to undress her. When they took off her brassiere, she put her hands over her breasts, trying to cover them completely with her palms. Then they led her (she was dressed only in panties) to a mirror (a chipped mirror on the door of the dresser) and she just stood there between the two of them, left hand on left breast and right hand on right, gazing in fascination into the mirror. Rubens noticed quite clearly that while the two of them were looking at her (at her face and at her hands over her breasts), she did not see them. As if hypnotized, she observed only her self.

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  In Aristotle's Poetics, the episode is an important concept. Aristotle did not like episodes. According to him, an episode, from the point of view of poetry, is the worst possible type of event. It is neither an unavoidable consequence of preceding action nor the cause of what is to follow: it is outside the causal chain of events that is the story. It is merely a sterile accident that can be left out without making the story lose its intelligible continuity and is incapable of making a permanent mark upon the life of the characters. You take the Metro to meet that woman in your life, and a moment before you arrive at your station a girl you don't know and haven't noticed before (after all, you have a date with that woman in your life and are oblivious to everything else) suddenly feels faint and is about to collapse. Because you are standing right next to her, you catch her and hold her in your arms for a few moments until she opens her eyes. You help her sit down in a seat someone has vacated for her, and because at that point the train suddenly slows down, you free yourself from her with an almost impatient movement so that you can get off and rush after that woman in your life. At that instant, the girl whom you held in your arms just a moment earlier is completely forgotten. This event is a typical episode. Life is as stuffed with episodes as a mattress is with horsehair, but a poet (according to Aristotle) is not an upholsterer and must remove all stuffing from his story, even though real life consists of nothing but precisely such stuffing.

  For Goethe, meeting Bettina was an insignificant episode; from a quantitative viewpoint, she took up only a tiny interval of his lifetime, and moreover Goethe tried as hard as he could to prevent her from ever playing a causal role in his life, assiduously keeping her outside his biography. But it is precisely here that we realize the relativity of the concept of the episode, a relativity Aristotle did not think through: for nobody can guarantee that some totally episodic event may not contain

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  within itself a power that someday could unexpectedly turn it into a cause of further events. When I say someday, it can even be after death; this was precisely Bettina's triumph, for she became part of Goethe's life story when he was no longer alive.

  We can thus complete Aristotle's definition of the episode and state: no episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you. You may be walking down the street and from the opposite direction will come a woman who, while still far away, will look straight into your eyes with a gaze that will seem rather crazy to you. As she comes closer, she slows down, stops, and says, "Is that really you? I've been looking for you for such a long time!" and throws her arms around your neck. It is the same girl who fainted and fell into your arms as you were taking the Metro to see the woman in your life, who in the meantime has become your wife and given you a child. But the girl who encountered you unexpectedly in the street has decided to fall in love with her savior and to regard your chance meeting as an intimation of fate. She will phone you five times a day, write you letters, visit your wife and keep explaining to her that she loves you and has a right to you until that woman in your life loses her patience, spitefully goes to bed with the garbage man, and then runs away from home, taking the child with her. And in order to escape from the lovesick girl who has in the meantime transferred all the contents of her closets into your apartment, you flee across the ocean, where you die in hopelessness and misery. If our lives were endless, like the lives of the gods of antiquity, the concept of episode would lose its meaning, for in infinity every event, no matter how trivial, would meet up with its consequence and unfold into a story. The lute player with whom he had danced when he was twenty-seven years old was for Rubens nothing but an episode, an archepisode, an episode through and through, until the moment when he accidentally met her, fifteen years later, in a Roman park. Then the forgotten episode suddenly turned into a small story, but even that story remained

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  completely episodic in relation to Rubens's life. It did not have the smallest chance of turning into a part of what we might call his biography.

  Biography: sequence of events that we consider important to our life. However, what is important and what isn't? Because we ourselves don't know (and never even think of putting such a silly question to ourselves), we accept as important whatever is accepted by others, for example by our employer, whose questionnaire we fill out: date of birth, parents' occupati
on, schooling, changes of occupation, domicile, marriages, divorces, births of children, serious diseases. It is deplorable, but it is a fact: we have learned to see our own lives through the eyes of business or government questionnaires. To include in our biography a woman other than a legal wife already represents a small act of rebel- lion, and even this sort of exception can be allowed only if this woman played an especially dramatic role in our life, a statement that Rubens certainly could not make with regard to the lute player. Besides, in her appearance and behavior the lute player fitted exactly the idea of the woman-episode: she was elegant yet not ostentatious, beautiful without being dazzling, ready for physical love and yet shy; she never bothered Rubens with confessions about her private life, and yet she never dramatized her discreet silence or tried to convert it into disquieting mystery. She was a real princess of episode.

  The lute player's encounter with two men in the Paris hotel was thrilling. Did the three of them make love to one another? Let's not forget that for Rubens the lute player had become "beloved beyond the border of love"; the old imperative, to slow down the course of events so that the sexual charge of love would not be too quickly exhausted, reawoke. Just before he led her naked to the bed, he motioned to his friend to leave the room quietly.