Immortality

by Milan Kundera

  When she reached the swinging door leading to the locker rooms, something unexpected happened: she suddenly turned her head toward our table and lifted her arm in the air in a movement so light, so graceful, so fluent, that it seemed to us a golden ball had risen from her fingertips and remained poised above the doorway.

  Suddenly there was a smile on Paul's face, and he grasped Avenarius firmly by the hand: "Did you see? Did you see that gesture?"

  "Yes," said Avenarius, and stared as Paul and I did at the golden ball that shone below the ceiling as a souvenir of Laura.

  It was quite clear to me that the gesture wasn't meant for her drunken husband. It was not an automatic gesture of everyday leave-taking, it was an exceptional gesture, full of significance. It could only have been meant for Avenarius.

  Of course, Paul did not suspect a thing. As if by a miracle, the years kept dropping off him and he turned once again into an attractive fifty-year-old proud of his shock of gray hair. He kept on gazing toward the door where the golden ball was shining, and he repeated, "Ah,

  Immortality

  Laura! That's just like her! Ah, that gesture! That's Laura!" And then he told us, his voice full of emotion, "The first time she waved to me like that was when I took her to the maternity ward. She had gone through two operations earlier, hoping to have a baby. We were all scared when her time came. To save me worry she forbade me to go inside the hospital. I stood by the car and she walked alone to the entrance, and when she was on the threshold she suddenly turned her head, just as she did a moment ago, and waved to me. When I returned home, I felt terribly sad, I missed her, and to bring her closer I tried to imitate for myself that beautiful gesture that had so bewitched me. If anyone had seen me they would have had to laugh. I stood with my back to a mirror, lifted my arm in the air, and smiled over my shoulder at myself in the mirror. I did that about thirty or forty times and thought of her. I was at one and the same time Laura greeting me and myself watching Laura greeting me. But one thing was peculiar: that gesture didn't fit me. I was hopelessly clumsy and ridiculous in that gesture."

  He rose and stood with his back to us. Then he lifted his arm in the air and looked at us over his shoulder. Yes, he was right: he was comical. We laughed. Our laughter encouraged him to repeat the gesture a few more times. It was more and more comical.

  Then he said, "You know, it's not a man's gesture, it's a woman's gesture. By this gesture a woman invites us: come, follow me, and you don't know where she is inviting you to go and she doesn't know either, but she invites you in the conviction that it's worth going where she is inviting you. That's why I tell you: either woman will become man's future or mankind will perish, because only woman is capable of nourishing within her an unsubstantiated hope and inviting us to a doubtful future, which we would have long ceased to believe in were it not for women. All my life I've been willing to follow their voice, even though that voice is mad, and whatever else I may be I am not a madman. But nothing is more beautiful than when someone who isn't mad goes into the unknown, led by a mad voice!" And once again he solemnly repeated a German sentence: ""Das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan! The eternal feminine draws us on!"

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  Goethe's verse, like a proud white goose, flapped its wings beneath the vault of the swimming pool, and Paul, reflected in the triple mirrors, walked to the swinging doors where the golden ball was still shining. It was the first time I had ever seen him sincerely cheerful. He took a few steps, turned his head over his shoulder toward us, and lifted his arm in the air. He laughed. He turned once more, and once again he waved. Then, for the last time, he performed for us that clumsy male imitation of a beautiful female gesture and disappeared through the doorway.

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  said, "He spoke very well about that gesture. But I think he was wrong. Laura was not luring anyone into the future, she wanted to let you know that she was here and that she was here for you." Avenarius was silent, his face blank. I said reproachfully, "Don't you feel sorry for him?" "I do," said Avenarius. "I genuinely like him. He is intelligent. He is witty. He is complicated. He is sad. And especially: he helped me! Let's not forget that!" Then he leaned toward me, as if he didn't want to leave my tacit reproach unanswered: "I told you about my proposal to offer the public a choice: who would like to sleep secretly with Rita Hayworth or Greta Garbo, and who would rather show himself with her in public. The results are quite clear in advance: everyone, including the worst wretches, would maintain that they would rather sleep with her. Because all of them would want to appear to themselves, to their wives, and even to the bald official conducting the poll as hedonists. This, however, is a self-delusion. Their comedy act. Nowadays hedonists no longer exist." He pronounced the last sentence with great emphasis and then added with a smile, "Except for me." And he went on, "No matter what they say, if they had a real choice to make, all of them, I repeat, all of them would prefer to stroll with her down the avenue. Because all of them are eager for admiration and not for pleasure. For appearance and not for reality. Reality no longer means anything to anyone. To anyone. To my lawyer it means nothing at all." Then he added with a sort of tenderness, "And that's why I can solemnly promise you that he will not be hurt. The horns that he is wearing will remain invisible. In fine weather they will have a sky blue color, and they will be gray when it rains." Then he added, "Anyway,

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  no man will suspect someone known to rape women at knifepoint to be the lover of his wife. Those two images don't go together."

  "Wait a minute," I said. "He really thinks that you wanted to rape women?"

  "I told you about that."

  "I thought you were joking."

  "Surely I wouldn't reveal my secret!" And he added, "Anyway, even if I had told him the truth he wouldn't have believed me. And even if he had believed me, he would have immediately lost interest in my case. I was valuable to him only as a rapist. He developed that incomprehensible love for me that great lawyers seem to feel toward great criminals."

  "So then how did you explain everything?"

  "I didn't explain a thing. They let me go for lack of evidence."

  "What do you mean, lack of evidence? What about the knife?"

  "I don't deny that it was tricky," Avenarius said, and I realized that I wouldn't learn anything further from him.

  I kept silent for a while and then said, "You wouldn't have admitted the business with the tires under any circumstance?"

  He shook his head.

  I was strangely moved. "You were ready to go to jail as a rapist, in order not to betray the game...."

  And at that moment I understood him at last. If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy. Avenarius is playing a game, and for him the game is the only thing of importance in a world without importance. But he knows that his game will not make anyone laugh. When he outlined his proposal to the ecologists, he had no intention of amusing anyone. He only wished to amuse himself.

  I said, "You play with the world like a melancholy child who has no little brother."

  Yes, that's the right metaphor for Avenarius! I've been looking for it ever since I've known him. At last!

  Avenarius smiled like a melancholy child. Then he said, "I don't have a little brother, but I have you."

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  He got up, I got up too, and it seemed that after Avenarius's last words we would have no choice but to embrace. But then we realized we were in swimming trunks and we were frightened by the idea of our bare bellies in intimate contact. We laughed it off and went to the locker room. It resounded with a high-pitched female voice accompanied by guitars, so we lost the taste for more conversation. We got into the elevator. Avenarius was going t
o the basement, where he had parked his Mercedes, and I left him on the ground floor. Five different faces with similarly bared teeth laughed at me from five posters hanging in the lobby. I was afraid they might bite me, and I quickly went out into the street.

  The roadway was filled with cars honking incessantly. Motorcycles drove up on the sidewalk and snaked their way between pedestrians. I thought of Agnes. It was precisely two years ago that I had first imagined her, while reclining in a deck chair upstairs in the health club, waiting for Avenarius. That was the reason why today I had ordered a bottle of wine. I had finished the novel and I wanted to celebrate it in the place where the first idea for it was born.

  The cars were honking their horns, and I heard the shouts of angry people. It was in such circumstances that Agnes longed to buy a forget-me-not, a single forget-me-not stem; she longed to hold it before her eyes as a last, scarcely visible trace of beauty.

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