Immortality

by Milan Kundera

  During lovemaking, their conversation in the grammatical future became once again a promise, which, however, was never to be fulfilled: soon after, friend M completely disappeared from Rubens's horizon and the thrilling encounter of two men and a woman became an episode without sequel. Rubens kept seeing the lute player alone two or three times a year, when he had an opportunity to visit Paris. Then such opportunities stopped, and once again she almost vanished from his mind.

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  Years passed, and one day he was sitting with his friend at a cafe in the Swiss town where he lived, in the foothills of the Alps. At a nearby table he saw a girl watching him. She was attractive, with long sensuous lips (which he would have liked to compare to the mouth of a frog, if it were possible to consider frogs beautiful), and she seemed to be exactly like the woman he had always longed for. Even at a distance of three or four yards he found her body pleasant to the touch and immediately accorded it preference over all other female bodies. She kept looking at him so intensely that, swallowed up by her gaze, he didn't know what his companion was saying, and the only thing in his mind was the painful thought that in a few minutes he would leave the cafe and lose this woman forever.

  But he didn't lose her, because at the moment he paid for the two coffees, she also got up and followed the two men to the building across the street, where an art auction was about to take place. As they crossed the street she found herself so close to Rubens that it was impossible for him not to address her. She acted as if she'd been expecting it and launched into a conversation, completely ignoring his friend, who accompanied them, silent and at a loss, into the auction hall. When the session ended, they returned to the same cafe. Having less than half an hour free for each other, they hurried to tell each other all there was to say. After a while, however, it became evident that they didn't have all that much to say, and the half hour lasted longer than he had anticipated. The girl was an Australian student, she was one-quarter aboriginal (which was not apparent, though she talked about it readily), she studied the semiotics of painting with a Zurich professor, and for a time she had made a living in Australia dancing topless in a nightclub. All of this was interesting, yet at the same time it sounded quite strange to Rubens

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  (why did she dance topless in Australia? why was she studying semiotics in Switzerland? and what was semiotics, anyway?), and instead of awakening his curiosity, he was exhausted by the thought that he'd have to master all that information. He was therefore relieved when the half hour was over; at that point his initial enthusiasm returned (for he had not ceased liking her) and he arranged a date with her for the next day. That day everything went wrong: he woke up with a headache, the postman delivered two unpleasant letters, and during a phone conversation with a government office an impatient female voice refused to understand what he wanted. When the student appeared at the door, his gloomy outlook was confirmed: why was she dressed completely differently from yesterday? She wore enormous tennis shoes; above the shoes could be seen thick socks, above the socks gray linen trousers that oddly diminished her figure, above the trousers a windbreaker. Only after he scanned the jacket could his eyes finally rest with satisfaction on her froglike mouth, which was still as beautiful as before, provided he could mentally erase everything from the mouth down.

  The unattractiveness of her outfit was not a serious matter (it couldn't take anything away from the fact that she was a pretty woman); what bothered him more was that he didn't understand her: why does a young woman coming to see a man with whom she expects to make love not dress to please him? was she perhaps trying to indicate to him that clothes were something external and unimportant? or did she consider her windbreaker elegant and her enormous tennis shoes seductive? or did she simply have no consideration for the man she was seeing?

  Probably because this way he had an excuse should their encounter fail to meet his expectations, he immediately informed her that he was having a bad day, and trying to adopt a humorous tone, he recounted all the bad things that had happened to him since morning. She smiled with her beautiful, elongated lips: "Love is a remedy for all bad omens." He was intrigued by the word "love," which he had lost the habit of using. He didn't know what she meant by it. Was she thinking of the physical act of making love? Or the feeling of love? While he was pondering, she quickly undressed in a corner of the room and slipped into bed, leaving her linen trousers on the chair and under the chair the huge tennis shoes with the thick socks, which she had stuck into them, tennis shoes that

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  paused for a while in Rubens's apartment on their long pilgrimage through Australian universities and European cities.

  Their lovemaking was unbelievably calm and silent. I might say that Rubens at once returned to the phase of athletic muteness, but the word "athletic" isn't quite appropriate because he had long ago lost his youthful ambition to prove his physical and sexual prowess; the activity to which they were devoting themselves seemed to have more of a symbolic character than an athletic one. However, Rubens didn't have the slightest idea what the motions they were performing were supposed to symbolize. Tenderness? love? health? joy of life? vice? friendship? faith in God? a plea for long life? (The girl was studying the semiotics of paintings. Shouldn't she rather tell him something about the semiotics of physical love?) He was performing vacuous motions, and he realized for the first time that he didn't have any idea why he was doing it.

  When they paused in their lovemaking (it occurred to Rubens that her semiotics professor undoubtedly also took a ten-minute pause in the middle of his two-hour seminar), the girl said (still in the same calm, even voice) a sentence in which the incomprehensible word "love" once again appeared. Rubens had a fantasy: beautiful female specimens arrive on Earth from the depths of the universe. Their bodies look like those of terrestrial women, but they are quite perfect, because on the planet they come from disease is unknown and their bodies arc free from any malfunction or blemish. However, terrestrial men who meet them know nothing of their extraterrestrial past and thus cannot understand them at all; they can never predict the women's reactions to their words and actions; they can never know what feelings are concealed behind their beautiful faces. It would be impossible to make love with such unknown women, Rubens thought. Then he corrected himself: perhaps our sexuality has indeed become so automatized that it would enable us to make love even with extraterrestrial women, but it would be lovemaking without any excitement, an act of love turned into mere physical exercise devoid of feeling or vice.

  The intermission was over, the second half of the amorous seminar was about to begin at any moment, and he was eager to say something, something outrageous that would break her composure, but he knew he couldn't bring himself to do it. He felt like a foreigner involved in an

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  argument, who must use a language over which he has poor command; he can't even shout an insult, for his opponent would ask him innocently, "What did you mean by that, sir? I did not understand you!" And so he uttered nothing outrageous and made love to her once again in silent composure.

  Then he saw her to the door (he didn't know whether she was satisfied or disappointed, though she looked rather satisfied) and was determined never to see her again; he knew that this would hurt her, because she would interpret his sudden loss of interest (surely she remembered how bewitched he'd been by her only yesterday!) as a defeat all the more painful since it was incomprehensible. He knew that he was to blame if her tennis shoes would now walk through the world with a step more melancholy than before. He said good-bye to her, and as she disappeared around the corner of the street he was seized by a strong, tormenting nostalgia for the women of his past. It was as brutal and unexpected as a disease that breaks out in one second, without warning.

  He slowly began to realize what it was about. The hand on the dial had touched a new number. He heard th
e clock strike, saw the little window open, and thanks to the mysterious medieval mechanism, a woman in huge tennis shoes came out. Her appearance meant that his longing made a volte-face; he would no longer yearn for new women; he would yearn only for women he had already had; from now on, his longing would be an obsession with the past.

  He saw beautiful women walking down the street and was startled that he paid no attention to them. I even believe that they noticed him, and he didn't know it. Before he had yearned only for new women. He had yearned for them to such a degree that with some of them he had made love only once and no more. As if he were now destined to atone for his obsession with the new, his indifference to everything lasting and stable, his foolish impatience that drove him forward, he now wished to turn himself around, to find the women of his past, to repeat their lovemaking, to carry it further, to make it yield all that had been left unexploited. He realized that from now on great excitements were to be found only behind him, and if he wanted to find new excitements, he would have to turn to his past.

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  hen he was very young, he was shy and wanted to make love in the dark. Yet he kept his eyes wide open in the dark, so that thanks to the weak rays that penetrated the drawn curtains he could see at least a little.

  Then he not only got used to the light but demanded it. When he found that his partner had her eyes shut, he urged her to open them.

  And then one day he found to his surprise that he was making love in the light, but with his eyes shut. He was making love while remembering.

  Darkness with eyes open.

  Light with eyes open.

  Light with eyes shut.

  The dial of life.

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  HE sat down with a sheet of paper and tried to make a list of the

  women in his life. Right from the start he met with defeat. In very few cases did he recall both names, and occasionally not even one. The women had become (quietly, imperceptibly) women without names. Perhaps if he had corresponded with them more often their names might have stuck in his memory because he would have had to write them on envelopes, but "beyond the border of love" no amorous correspondence is carried out. Perhaps if he had been in the habit of calling them by their first names he would have remembered them, but ever since the unhappy incident on his wedding night he had decided to call all women only by tender, banal nicknames that any of them could at any time regard as her own.

  He filled up half a page (the experiment did not require that the list be complete), replacing a number of the forgotten names by some characteristic feature ("freckled," or "schoolteacher," and so on), and he tried to recall in each case the woman's curriculum vitae. This was a still worse defeat! He knew absolutely nothing about their lives! He therefore simplified his task and limited himself to just one question: who were their parents? With the exception of a single case (he had known the father before he met the daughter) he didn't have the slightest idea. And yet in the life of each of them parents must have played an enormous part! Surely they must have told him a lot about them! What value, then, did he place on the lives of his women friends, if he wasn't ready to remember even the most basic facts about

  them?

  He admitted (not without some embarrassment) that women had

  meant nothing to him except as erotic experiences. He tried recalling

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  these experiences at least. Randomly, he paused at the woman (nameless) he had designated as "doctor." What was their first lovemaking like? He pictured his apartment at the time. They entered and she immediately looked for the phone; in Rubens's presence she proceeded to tell someone at the other end that she unexpectedly had to take care of a certain obligation and could not come. They laughed at this and then made love. Strangely enough, he could still hear this laugh but could recall nothing of the lovemaking. Where did it take place? on the carpet? in bed? on the couch? What was she like between the sheets? How many times had they met since then? Three times, or thirty times? Why did he stop seeing her? Did he remember a single fragment of their conversations, which must surely have filled a space of at least twenty hours, perhaps as many as a hundred? He vaguely recalled that she had often spoken to him of her fiance (he had of course forgotten the gist of this information). A strange thing: what stuck in his memory was the fiance and nothing else. The act of love was less important to him than the flattering and silly detail that on his account she had deceived someone else.

  He thought enviously of Casanova. Not of his erotic achievements, which after all could be accomplished by most men, but of his incomparable memory. Some one hundred and thirty women saved from oblivion, with their names, their faces, their gestures, their statements! Casanova: Utopia of memory. In comparison, how poor were Rubens's achievements! At one time, at the beginning of adulthood when he had renounced painting, Rubens had consoled himself with the thought that learning about life was more important to him than the struggle for power. The life of his colleagues chasing after success seemed to him not only aggressive but monotonous and empty. He believed that erotic adventures would lead him straight to the heart of life, a full, real, rich, and mysterious life, the bewitching and concrete life he longed to embrace. And now suddenly he saw that he had been mistaken: in spite of all his amorous adventures, his knowledge of people was exactly the same as it had been at the age of fifteen. All this time he had been coddling himself with the certainty that he had a rich life behind him; but the words "a rich life" were merely an abstract formula; when he

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  tried to discover what this richness actually contained, he found nothing but a windswept desert.

  The hand on the dial let him know that from now on he would be obsessed only with the past. But how is one to be obsessed with the past when one sees in it only a desert over which the wind blows a few fragments of memories? Does that mean he would become obsessed with those few fragments? Yes. One can be obsessed even with a few fragments. Anyhow, let's not exaggerate: even though he couldn't remember anything substantial about the young doctor, other women emerged in his mind with urgent intensity.

  When I say they emerged in his mind, how do I imagine this emergence? Rubens discovered a peculiar thing: memory does not make films, it makes photographs. What he recalled from any of the women were at most a few mental photographs. He didn't recall their coherent motions; he visualized even their short gestures not in all their fluent fullness, but only in the rigidity of a single second. His erotic memory provided him with a small album of pornographic pictures but no pornographic film. And when I say an album of pictures, that is an exaggeration, for all he had was some seven or eight photographs. These photos were beautiful, they fascinated him, but their number was after all depressingly limited: seven, eight fragments of less than a second each, that's what remained in his memory of his entire erotic life, to which he had once decided to devote all his strength and talent.

  I see Rubens sitting at a table with his head supported on the palm of his hand, looking like Rodin's Thinker. What is he thinking about? If he has made peace with the idea that his life has narrowed down to sexual experiences and these again to only seven still pictures, seven photographs, he would at least like to hope that in some corner of his memory there may be concealed some eighth, ninth, or tenth photograph. That's why he is sitting with his head leaning on the palm of his hand. He is once again trying to evoke individual women and find some forgotten photograph for each one of them.

  This leads him to another interesting observation: some of his lovers were especially adventurous in their erotic initiative and also quite striking in appearance; and yet they made hardly any mark on his soul

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  and left no exciting photographs. He was much more intrigued by his memory of women whose erotic initiative was muffled and whose appearance was unremarkable; those whom he tended to underrate. As if memory (as well as forgetting) brought ab
out a radical revaluation of all values; whatever was willed, intentional, ostentatious, planned in his erotic life lost value, while adventures that happened unexpectedly, that did not announce themselves as something extraordinary, became in memory invaluable.

  He thought of the women raised in value by memory: one of them had surely passed the age when he would still wish to meet her; others lived in circumstances that would make a meeting highly difficult. But then there was the lute player. He had not seen her for eight years. Three mental pictures came to his mind. In the first, she was standing a step away from him; her arm was fixed in front of her face in the middle of a motion by which she seemed to be erasing her features. The second photograph captured the moment when he asked her, with his hand on her breast, whether anyone had ever touched her this way before and she answered "No!" in a quiet voice, her eyes looking straight ahead. And finally he saw her (that photograph was the most captivating of all) standing in front of the mirror flanked by two men, with her palms covering her bare breasts. It was odd that in all three photographs her beautiful, motionless face had the same appearance, looking straight ahead, past Rubens.

  He immediately looked up her phone number, which at one time he knew by heart. She spoke to him as if they had parted only yesterday. He flew to Paris to see her (this time he needed no special occasion; he came solely because of her) and met her in the same hotel where many years ago she had stood in front of the mirror flanked by two men, and covered her breasts with her hands.

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  he lute player still had the same figure, the same charming motions, and her features had lost nothing of their nobility. Only one thing had changed: from close up, her skin no longer looked fresh. Rubens could not help noticing; oddly enough, however, the moments he became aware of it were uncommonly brief, lasting hardly a few seconds; the lute player quickly turned back into her image, as drawn long ago in Rubens's memory: she concealed herself behind her image.