Immortality

by Milan Kundera

  Image: Rubens has known for a long time what that means. Hiding behind the bodies of his schoolmates on the bench in front of him, he secretly drew a caricature of the teacher. Then he lifted his eyes from his drawing; the teacher's features were in constant motion and did not resemble the picture. Nevertheless, whenever the teacher disappeared from his field of vision, Rubens was unable (then and now) to imagine him in any way other than in the form of his caricature. The teacher disappeared forever behind his image.

  At an exhibition of a famous photographer's work, he saw the picture of a man with a bloody face, slowly lifting himself off the sidewalk. An unforgettable, mysterious photograph! Who was that man? What had happened to him? Probably an insignificant street accident, Rubens told himself; a wrong step, a fall, a photographer unexpectedly present. Not sensing anything unusual, the man got up, washed his face in a nearby cafe, and went home to his wife. And at the same moment, intoxicated by its birth, his image separated itself from him and walked off in the opposite direction after its own adventure, its own destiny.

  A person may conceal himself behind his image, he can disappear forever behind his image, he can be completely separated from his

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  image: a person can never be his image. It was only thanks to three mental photographs that Rubens telephoned the lute player after not having seen her for eight years. But who is the lute player in and of herself, outside her image? He doesn't know much about that and has no desire to know more. I can see their meeting after eight years: they sit facing each other in the lobby of a big Paris hotel. What do they talk about? About all sorts of things, except the life they are both leading. For if they knew each other too intimately, a barrier of useless information would pile up between them and estrange them from each other. They know only the barest minimum about each other, and they arc almost proud of having concealed their lives in the shadows so that their meetings will be lit up all the more brightly, divorced from time and circumstance.

  Full of tenderness, he gazes at the lute player, happy that though she has aged somewhat, she still closely resembles her image. With some affectionate cynicism he tells himself: the value of the physical presence of the lute player consists in her ability to continue merging with her image.

  And he looks forward to the quickly approaching moment when the lute player would lend this image her live body.

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  19

  They kept meeting again as in the old days, once, twice, three times a year. And again years passed. One day he called to tell her that he would arrive in Paris in two weeks. She told him she wouldn't have time.

  "I can postpone my trip by a week," said Rubens.

  "I won't have time then either."

  "So when will it suit you?"

  "Not now," she said, obviously embarrassed, "not for a long time___"

  "Has something happened?"

  "No, nothing's happened."

  Both were embarrassed. It seemed that the lute player never wanted to see him again and found it difficult to tell him so outright. At the same time, however, this supposition was so improbable (their meetings were always beautiful, without the least shadow) that Rubens kept asking her more questions in order to understand the reason for her rejection. But since from the very beginning their relationship had been founded on absolute mutual nonaggressiveness that also ruled out any kind of insistence, he stopped himself from bothering her any further, even if only by way of questions.

  So he ended the conversation and only added, "But may I call you?"

  "Naturally! Why not?"

  He called her a month later: "You still have no time to see me?"

  "Don't be angry with me," she said. "It's nothing to do with you."

  He asked her the same question as last time: "Has something happened?"

  "No, nothing's happened," she said.

  He fell silent. He didn't know what to say. "Too bad," he said, smiling with melancholy into the receiver.

  "It's not anything to;do with you. It really isn't. It only concerns me."

  He had the feeling that those words were opening some hope for him. "But then it's all nonsense! In that case we must see each other!"

  "No," she refused.

  "If I were certain that you don't want to see me anymore, I wouldn't say a word. But you said that this only concerns you. What's going on with you? We must see each other! I must talk to you!"

  But the moment he said it, he told himself: no, alas, it's just her considerateness that prevents her from telling him the real reason, all too simple: she no longer cares for him. She is at a loss, because she is too fine. That's why he mustn't try to win her over. She would find him unpleasant, and he would break the unwritten agreement that they should never ask anything from each other that the other does not wish.

  And so when she said once again, "Please, no..." he no longer insisted.

  He put down the receiver and suddenly recalled the Australian student with the huge tennis shoes. She, too, was rejected for reasons she couldn't understand. If she had given him the opportunity, he would have consoled her with the same words: "It really isn't aimed against you. It has nothing to do with you. It only concerns me." All at once, he grasped intuitively that the adventure with the lute player was over and he would never understand why it had ended. Just as the Australian student would never understand why her story ended. His shoes would now walk the world with somewhat greater melancholy than before. Just like the huge tennis shoes of the young Australian.

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  20

  THE period of athletic muteness, the period of metaphors, the period of obscene truth, the period of Telephone, the mystical period, all this was far behind him. The hands on the dial had brought his sexual life full circle. He found himself outside the dial's time. To find oneself outside the dial's time does not mean the end, nor does it mean death. On the dial of European painting midnight had struck, too, and yet painters continue to paint. To be outside the dial's time simply means that no longer will anything new or important happen. Rubens continued to see women, but they were of no importance to him. The one he saw most often was G, a young woman whose main characteristic was a propensity to use coarse words in conversation. Many women did that. It was trendy. They said shit, fuck, asshole, and made it clear in this way that they did not belong to the old generation and its conservative manners; that they were liberated, emancipated, modern. And yet as soon as he touched her, G fixed her eyes on the ceiling and changed into a silent saint. Making love to her was always long and almost endless, because she only reached orgasm, for which she eagerly longed, after great effort. She lay on her back, closed her eyes, and worked, perspiring all over. This is more or less how Rubens imagined the death agony: we burn with fever and long only for the end, which refuses to come. During their first two or three encounters he tried to bring the end closer by whispering some obscene word to her, but because she always reacted by turning away her face, as if in protest, he remained silent from then on. She, however, after some twenty or thirty minutes of lovemaking always said (and Rubens found her voice dissatisfied and impatient), "Harder! Harder! More! More!" and at that point he always discovered that he couldn't go on, that he had been

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  making love too long and at too fast a tempo to be able to thrust any harder; he would therefore slide off her and resort to a method that he considered both a capitulation and a piece of technical virtuosity worthy of a patent: he stuck his hand inside her and moved his fingers powerfully upward; a geyser erupted, everything was wet, she embraced him and showered him with tender words.

  It was astonishing how unable they were to synchronize their intimate clocks: when he was capable of tenderness, she talked coarsely; when he longed to talk coarsely, she kept stubbornly silent; when he felt like keeping still and going to sleep, she suddenly became talk-atively tender.

  She was prett
y and so much younger than he! Rubens assumed (modestly) that it was merely his manual dexterity that enticed G to come to him whenever he called her. He was grateful to her for allowing him, during those long intervals of silence and perspiration spent on top of her body, to dream with his eyes shut.

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  R

  Ubens came upon an old collection of photographs of President John Kennedy: the photos were in color, there were at least fifty of them, and on all of them (all, without exception!) the President was laughing. Not smiling, laughing! His mouth was open, his teeth bared. There was nothing remarkable about it, that's what contemporary photos are like, but the fact that Kennedy laughed in all of them, that not a single one showed him with his lips closed, gave Rubens pause. A few days later he found himself in Florence. He stood in front of Michelangelo's David and tried to imagine that marble face laughing like Kennedy. David, that paradigm of male beauty, suddenly looked like an imbecile! Since then, he had often tried in his imagination to retouch figures in famous paintings to give them a laughing mouth; it was an interesting experiment: the grimace of laughter could ruin every painting! Imagine Mona Lisa as her barely perceptible smile turns into a laugh that reveals her teeth and gums!

  Even though he spent so much of his time in galleries, it took Kennedy's photographs to make Rubens realize this simple fact: the great painters and sculptors from classical days to Raphael and perhaps even to Ingres avoided portraying laughter, even smiles. Of course, the figures of Etruscan sculpture all have smiles, but this smile isn't a response to some particular, momentary situation but a permanent state of the face, expressing eternal bliss. For classical sculptors as well as for painters of later periods a beautiful face was imaginable only in its immobility.

  Faces lost their immobility, mouths became open, only when the painter wished to express evil. Either the evil of pain: the faces of women bent over the body of Jesus; the open mouth of the mother in

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  Poussin's Slaughter of the Innocents. Or the evil of vice: Holbein's Adam and Eve. Eve has a bland face and a half-open mouth revealing teeth that have just bitten into the apple. Alongside, Adam is a man still before sin: he is beautiful, his face is calm, and his mouth is closed. In Correggio's Allegories of Sin everyone is smiling! In order to express vice, the painter must move the innocent calm of the face, to spread the mouth, to deform the features with a smile. There is only one laughing figure in the picture: a child! But it is not a laugh of happiness, the way children are portrayed in advertisements for diapers or chocolate! The child is laughing because it's been corrupted!

  Only with the Dutch painters does laughter become innocent: Hals's Clown or his Gypsy. That's because the Dutch genre painters are the first photographers. The faces they paint are beyond ugliness or beauty. As he walked through the Dutch gallery, Rubens thought of the lute player: she was not a model for Hals; the lute player was a model for painters who looked for beauty in the immovable surface of features. Then some visitors jostled him; all museums are filled with crowds of sightseers as zoos once used to be; tourists hungry for attractions stared at the pictures as if they were caged animals. Painting, thought Rubens, does not feel at home in this century, and neither does the lute player; the lute player belongs to a world vanished long ago, in which beauty did not laugh.

  But how can we explain why great painters ruled laughter out of the realm of beauty? Rubens tells himself: undoubtedly, a face is beautiful because it reveals the presence of thought, whereas at the moment of laughter man does not think. But is that really true? Is not laughter a lightning thought that has just grasped the comical? No, thinks Rubens; in the instant that he grasps the comical, man does not laugh; laughter follows afterward as a physical reaction, as a convulsion no longer containing any thought. Laughter is a convulsion of the face, and a convulsed person does not rule himself, he is ruled by something that is neither will nor reason. And that is why the classical sculptor did not express laughter. A human being who does not rule himself (a human being beyond reason, beyond will) cannot be considered beautiful.

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  If our era, against the spirit of the great painters, has made laughter the privileged expression of the human face, it means that an absence of will and reason has become the ideal human state. The objection could be raised that the convulsion shown on photographic portraits is simulated and therefore subject to reason and will: laughing into the camera lens, Kennedy is not reacting to a comic situation but quite consciously opening his mouth and showing his teeth. But this only proves that the convulsion of laughter (a state beyond reason and will) has been raised by contemporary people into an ideal image behind which they have decided to conceal themselves.

  Rubens tells himself: laughter is the most democratic of all the facial expressions: we differ from one another by our immovable features, but in convulsion we are all the same.

  A bust of a laughing Julius Caesar is unthinkable. But American presidents depart for eternity concealed behind the democratic convulsion of laughter.

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  E returned once again to Rome. He spent a long time in the hall of a gallery containing Gothic paintings. One of them made him stop, fascinated. It was a Crucifixion. What did he see? In place of Jesus he saw a woman who had just been crucified. Like Christ, she was wearing only a piece of white cloth wrapped around her hips. The soles of her feet were braced against a wooden plank, while executioners were tying her ankles to the beam with strong ropes. The cross was situated at the top of a hill and was visible from far and wide. It was surrounded by a crowd of soldiers, local people, onlookers, all of whom watched the woman exposed to their gaze. It was the lute player. She felt their gaze and covered her breasts with her hands. On each side of her were two other crosses with a criminal tied to each. The first leaned over toward her, took her hand, pulled it away from her breast, and extended her arm in such a way that the back of her hand touched the horizontal beam of the cross. The other malefactor grasped her other hand and pulled it the same way, so that both of the lute player's arms were extended. Her face continued to remain immobile. Her eyes stared into the distance. But Rubens knew that she wasn't looking into the distance but into a huge imaginary mirror, placed before her between earth and sky. She saw her own image, the image of a woman on a cross with extended arms and bare breasts, she was exposed to the immense, shouting, bestial crowd, and along with the crowd she gazed, excited, at herself.

  Rubens couldn't tear his eyes away from this spectacle. And when he did so at last, he told himself: this moment should be inscribed into the history of religion under the title Rubens's Vision in Rome. This mystic moment continued to affect him until evening. He had not called the

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  lute player for four years, but that day he was unable to control himself. He dialed her number as soon as he returned to the hotel. At the other end he heard an unfamiliar feminine voice.

  He said uncertainly, "May I speak to Madame ... ?" calling her by her husband's name.

  "Yes, that's me," said the voice at the other end.

  He pronounced the lute player's first name, and the woman's voice answered that the lady he was calling was dead.

  "Dead?" he gasped.

  "Yes, Agnes died. Who is calling?"

  "I am a friend of hers."

  "May I know your name?**

  "No," he said, and hung up.

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  When someone dies on the screen, elegiac music immediately comes on, but when someone dies whom we knew in real life, we don*t hear any music. There are only a very few deaths capable of shaking us deeply, two or three in a lifetime, no more. The death of a woman who was only an episode surprised and saddened Rubens but was not able to shake him, especially as she had already departed from his life four years earlier and he had had to come to terms with it t
hen.

  Though she didn't become any more absent from his life than she had been before, her death changed everything. Every time he remembered her he was forced to imagine what had become of her body. Did they lower it into the ground in a coffin? Or did they have it burned? He visualized her immobile face observing her self in an imaginary mirror with her eyes wide open. He saw the lids of those eyes slowly closing, and suddenly the face went dead. Just because that face was so calm, the transition from life to nonlife was fluent, harmonious, beautiful. But then he began to imagine what happened to the face afterward. And that was terrible.

  G came to see him. As usual, they launched into long, silent love-making, and as usual during those interminable moments he pictured the lute player in his mind: as always she was standing bare breasted in front of a mirror, looking straight ahead with a fixed gaze. At that moment Rubens thought to himself that for all he knew she might have been dead some two or three years; that her hair had already dropped off her scalp and her eyes had vanished from their sockets. He wanted to get rid of this image quickly, because he knew that otherwise he would not be able to continue making love. He drove the thoughts of the lute player from his mind and forced himself to concentrate on G,

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  on her quickened breathing, but his mind was disobedient and spitefully fed him images he didn't want to see. And when at last his mind was ready to obey him and stop showing him the lute player in her coffin, it showed her in flames, just as he had once heard it described: the burning body (through some physical force that he didn't understand) raised itself, so that the lute player sat up in the furnace. And in the midst of this vision of a sitting, burning body he suddenly heard a dissatisfied, urging voice: "Harder! Harder! More! More!" He had to stop the lovemaking. He excused himself to G, saying that he was in bad shape.

  Then he told himself: after everything I've lived through all I have left is a single photograph. It seems to contain whatever was most intimate and deeply concealed in my erotic life, its very essence. Perhaps I only made love in recent years so as to make that photograph come to life in my mind. And now that photograph is in flames and the beautiful, immobile face is twisting, shrinking, turning black, and falling at last into ashes.