Slowness

by Milan Kundera

  No, that idea is unbearable! He scorns Berck, he scorns the elegant fellow, and his scorn precedes his every judgment. Stubborn, he strains to grasp the difference that separates him from them, until he manages to see it with total clarity: like miserable flunkies, they delight in the human condition just as it is imposed on them: dancers happy to be dancers. Whereas he, even though he knows there is no way out, proclaims his disagreement with that world. Then he thinks of the answer he should have thrown in the elegant fellow’s face: “If living under cameras has become our condition, I revolt against it. I did not choose it!” That’s the answer! He leans toward Julie and without a word of explanation

  tells her: “The only thing left for us is to revolt against the human condition we did not choose!”

  Already accustomed to Vincent’s oddly timed remarks, she finds this one splendid and responds in a pugnacious tone herself: “Absolutely!” And as if the word “revolt” had filled her with a giddy energy, she says: “Let’s go up to your room, the two of us.”

  At once, again, the elegant fellow has vanished from Vincent’s head as he looks at Julie, marveling at her latest words.

  She is marveling too. Near the bar there are still a few of the people she had been standing with before Vincent spoke to her. Those people had acted as if she did not exist. She had been humiliated. Now she looks at them, regal, untouchable. They no longer impress her. She has a night of love ahead of her, and she has it through her own will, through her own courage; she feels rich, lucky, and stronger than any of those people.

  She breathes into Vincent’s ear: “They’re all a bunch of anti-cocks.” She knows that’s Vincent’s word, and she says it to show she is giving herself to him and belongs to him.

  It is as if she had put a grenade of euphoria into

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  his hand. He could go now with the beautiful bearer of the ass hole, right into his room, but, as if he were following a command issued from a distance, he feels obliged to raise some hell here before he goes. He is caught up in a drunken whirlpool where the image of the ass hole merges with the imminence of sex, the elegant fellow’s jeering voice, and the silhouette of Pontevin, who, like some Trotsky, is running a huge uprising, a great riotous mutiny, from his Paris bunker.

  “We’re going to have a swim,” he announces to Julie, and he runs down the staircase to the pool, which at the moment is empty and has the look of a theater stage to the people up above. He unbuttons his shirt. Julie runs to join him. “We’re going to have a swim,” he repeats, and tosses his trousers aside. “Take off your clothes!”

  drama playing out before their eyes. Immaculata managed to let nothing show; when Berck turned away, she moved to the staircase, climbed it, and only when she was finally alone, in the deserted corridor leading to the rooms, did she realize she was staggering.

  Half an hour later, the unsuspecting cameraman came into the room they shared and found her on the bed, lying flat on her stomach.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She does not answer.

  He sits down beside her and lays his hand on her head. She shakes it off as if a snake had touched her.

  “But what’s wrong?”

  He repeats the same question several times more, until she says: “Please go gargle, I can’t stand bad breath.”

  He did not have bad breath, he was always well scrubbed and scrupulously clean, therefore he knew she was lying, yet he goes docilely into the bathroom to do as she ordered.

  The bad-breath idea did not occur to Immaculata out of nowhere, for what inspired that mischief was a recent memory immediately

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  The dreadful speech Berck directed at Immaculata was uttered in a low, hissing voice, so the people nearby could not grasp the real nature of the

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  repressed: the memory of Berck’s bad breath. While she was listening, crushed, to his insults, she was in no state to concern herself with his exhalation, and it was an observer hidden inside her who registered the nauseating odor and added this clear-mindedly concrete commentary besides: A man whose mouth stinks has no mistress; no woman would put up with it; any woman would find a way to let him know he stinks and would force him to rid himself of that fault. While she was being bombarded with insults, she was listening to this silent commentary, which she found happy and hopeful, because it told her that, despite the specter of gorgeous women Berck cannily allows to hover around him, he has long since lost interest in romantic adventures, and that the place beside him in bed is vacant.

  As he gargles, the cameraman, a man at once romantic and practical, says to himself that the only way to change his companion’s foul mood is to make love to her as soon as possible. So in the bathroom he puts on his pajamas, and, his step tentative, he returns to sit beside her on the edge of the bed.

  Not daring to touch her, he asks again: “What’s wrong?”

  With implacable presence of mind, she responds: “If you can’t say anything but that idiotic line, I guess there’s not much to gain from a conversation with you.”

  She rises and goes to the closet; she opens it to consider the few dresses she has hung there; the dresses appeal to her; they rouse a vague but strong wish to not let herself be driven from the scene; to pass again through the precincts of her humiliation; to not consent to her defeat; and if defeat there is, to transform it into great theater, in the course of which she will set her wounded beauty shining and deploy her rebellious pride.

  “What are you doing? Where are you going?” he says.

  “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is not to stay with you.”

  “But tell me what’s wrong!”

  Immaculata gazes at her dresses and remarks: “Sixth time,” and I would point out that she is not mistaken in her count.

  “You were perfect,” says the cameraman, determined to ignore her mood. “We were right to come.

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  Your Berck project looks like a sure thing to me. I ordered up a bottle of champagne to our room.”

  “You can drink what you want with whoever you want.”

  “But what’s wrong?”

  “Seventh time. It’s finished with you. For good. I’ve had enough of the smell that comes out of your mouth. You’re my nightmare. My bad dream. My failure. My shame. My humiliation. My disgust. I have to tell you this. Brutally. No more dragging out my hesitation. No more dragging out my nightmare. No more dragging out this business that’s stopped making any sense.”

  She is standing with her face to the open closet, her back to the cameraman, she is speaking calmly, with composure, her voice low, hissing. Then she begins to undress.

  presence here before me has no, absolutely no, importance; your presence is equivalent to that of a dog or a mouse. Your gaze will not stir a single cell of my body. I could do anything at all in front of you, the most offensive acts, I could vomit in front of you, wash my ears or my crotch, masturbate, piss. You are a non-eye, a non-ear, a non-head. My proud disregard is a cloak that lets me move about before you with complete freedom and complete immodesty.

  The cameraman sees his mistress’s body change utterly before his eyes: this body which hitherto would give itself to him promptly and simply now rises up in front of him like a Greek statue set on a pedestal a hundred meters high. He is mad with desire, and it is a strange desire, which does not express itself sensually but fills his head and only his head, desire as cerebral fascination, as idee fixe, mystical madness, the certainty that this body, and no other, is the one fated to fulfill his life, his entire life.

  She feels that fascination, that devotion, adhere to her skin, and a wave of cold rises to her head. She is surprised at this herself, she has never experienced this sort of wave. It is a wave

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  This is the first time she has undressed before him with such absence of modesty, with such pointed disregard. This undressing signifies: your

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  of cold as there are waves of passion, of heat, or of anger. For that cold really is a passion; as if the cameraman’s absolute devotion and Berck’s absolute rejection were two faces of the same curse she is fighting off; as if Berck’s rebuff were intended to thrust her back into the arms of her commonplace lover and the only way to parry the rebuff were absolute hatred of that lover. This is why she is rejecting him so furiously and wants to turn him into a mouse, that mouse into a spider, and that spider into a fly devoured by another spider.

  She is already dressed again, in a white dress, determined to go downstairs and display herself to Berck and all the others. She is pleased to have brought a dress that is white, the color of marriage, for she feels as if this is the day of a wedding, a reverse wedding, a tragic wedding without a groom. Beneath her white dress she bears the wound of an injustice, and she feels she is made greater by that injustice, made more beautiful by it as characters in tragedies are made more beautiful by their suffering. She approaches the door, knowing that the man, in his pajamas, will follow on her heels and will

  stick behind her like an adoring dog, and she wants them to go through the chateau like that, a tragi-grotesque couple, a queen with a mutt following behind her.

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  But the man she has relegated to canine status surprises her. He is standing in the doorway and his face is furious. His will to submit has suddenly run out. He is filled with the desperate desire to stand up to this beauty who is humiliating him unjustly. He cannot muster the courage to slap her, beat her, throw her onto the bed and rape her, but he feels all the greater need to do something irreparable, something immensely vulgar and aggressive.

  She is forced to stop at the door. “Let me by.”

  “I won’t let you by,” he tells her.

  “You no longer exist for me.”

  “What do you mean, I no longer exist?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  He laughs tensely: “You don’t know me?” He

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  raises his voice: “We fucked just this morning!”

  “I forbid you to talk to me that way! Not with those words!”

  “Just this morning you said those words to me yourself, you said, ‘Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!”’

  “That was when I still loved you,” she said, slightly uncomfortable, “but now those words are nothing but obscenities.”

  He shouts: “We did fuck, though!”

  “I forbid you!”

  “And last night we fucked, we fucked, we fucked!”

  “Stop it!”

  “How come you can stand my body in the morning and not in the evening?”

  “You know I detest vulgarity!”

  “I don’t give a damn what you detest! You’re a slut!”

  Ah, he should not have used that word, the same one Berck had flung at her. She shouts: “Vulgarity disgusts me and you disgust me!”

  He shouts too: “So you fucked a person who disgusts you! But a woman who fucks someone who disgusts her is exactly that, a slut, a slut, a slut!”

  The cameraman’s talk is coarser by the minute, and fear grows on Immaculata’s face.

  Fear? Is she really afraid of him? I don’t believe that: she knows quite well, in her inmost heart, that it doesn’t do to exaggerate the significance of this rebellion. She knows the cameraman’s submissiveness and is still confident of it. She knows he is insulting her because he wants to be heard, seen, considered. He is insulting her because he is weak and because all he has in the way of strength is his coarseness, his aggressive talk. If she loved him, even just a tiny bit, she would have to be touched by that explosion of desperate powerlessness. But instead of being touched, she feels an uncontrollable drive to hurt him. And for that very reason she decides to treat his words literally, to believe his insults, to fear them. And that is why she stares at him with eyes that mean to look frightened.

  He sees fear in Immaculata’s face and feels encouraged: he is usually the one who’s frightened, who gives way, who apologizes, and suddenly, because he showed his strength, his rage, it’s she who is trembling. Thinking that she is acknowledging her weakness, capitulating, he

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  raises his voice and continues to spout his aggressive and impotent cretinisms. Poor fellow, he does not know that it’s still her game he is playing, that he is still a manipulated thing even at the moment he believes he has found power and freedom in his anger.

  She tells him: “You scare me. You’re odious, you’re violent,” and he, poor fellow, does not know this is an indictment that will never be quashed and that he, this little scrap of goodness and submissiveness, will thus become now and forever a rapist and an aggressor.

  “You scare me,” she says again, and she moves him aside so she can leave the room.

  He lets her pass and follows her like a mutt following behind a queen.

  asked to underline the ones that fascinated them, that appealed to them, that they found attractive and congenial; a few years earlier, the same poll had been taken: back then, of the same two hundred ten words there were eighteen on which left-wingers agreed and which thereby confirmed the existence of a shared sensibility. In 1993, the beloved words were down to three. Only three words that the left can agree on? What a decline! What a collapse! And what three words are they? Listen to this: “revolt”; “red”; “nudity.” “Revolt” and “red,” those are obvious. But that, aside from those two words, only “nudity” quickens the heart of left-wingers, that only nudity still stands as their shared symbolic legacy, is astounding. Is this our total inheritance from the magnificent two-hundred-year history solemnly launched by the French Revolution, is this the legacy of Robespierre, Danton, Jaures, Rosa Luxemburg, of Lenin, Gramsci, Aragon, Che Guevara? Nudity? The naked belly, naked balls, naked buttocks? Is that the last flag under which the final brigades of the left simulate their grand march through the centuries?

  But why nudity, exactly? What is the meaning

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  Nudity. I still have a clipping from an October 1993 Nouvel Observateur, an opinion poll: twelve hundred people describing themselves as on the left were sent a list of two hundred ten words and

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  for people on the left of this word they underlined in the list sent them by a polling agency?

  I recall the procession of German leftists in the seventies who were registering their anger against something or other (a nuclear power station, a war, the power of money, I don’t remember what) by taking off their clothes and marching, naked and howling, through the streets of a big German city.

  What was their nudity supposed to express?

  First Hypothesis: To them it represented the most cherished of all freedoms, the value most in danger. The German leftists crossed the city showing their naked genitals the way persecuted Christians went to their deaths carrying a wooden cross on their shoulders.

  Second Hypothesis: The German leftists were seeking not to display the symbol of a particular value, but simply to shock a detested audience. Shock it, frighten it, infuriate it. Bombard it with elephant dung. Dump the sewage of the universe on it.

  A curious dilemma: does nudity symbolize the greatest of all values, or the greatest filth to be pitched like an excrement bomb onto a crowd of enemies?

  And then what does it mean for Vincent when he tells Julie again: “Take off your clothes,” and adds: “A huge happening right under the eyes of those underfucked losers!”

  And what does it mean for Julie, who, compliant and even rather enthusiastic, says: “Why not?” and unbuttons her dress.

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  He is naked. He’s a little astonished at the fact, and laughs a throat-clearing laugh directed more to himself than to her, because being naked like this in this huge glassed-in space is so unaccustomed for him that all he can think of is the weirdness of the situation. She has already thrown off her brassiere, then
her underpants, but Vincent is not really seeing her: he registers that she is naked but without knowing what she is like, naked. Let’s remember, only a few minutes earlier he was obsessed by the image of her ass hole; is he still thinking about it now that the hole is freed from the silk of her underpants? No.

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  The ass hole has evaporated from his head. Instead of attentively considering the body that bared itself in his presence, instead of drawing near to it, of slowly apprehending it, perhaps touching it, he turns away and dives.

  An odd youngster, this Vincent. He rails against dancers, he raves on about the moon, and underneath it all he is a jock. He dives into the water and swims. He immediately forgets about his own nakedness, forgets about Julie’s, and thinks of nothing but his crawl. Behind him, Julie, who doesn’t know how to dive, makes her way cautiously down the ladder. And Vincent does not even turn his head to look at her! That’s his loss: for she is lovely, very lovely, Julie. Her body seems to glow; not from her modesty, but from something just as fine: from the awkwardness that comes of solitary privacy, for as Vincent has his head underwater, she is confident that no one is looking at her; the water reaches to her pubic thatch and feels cold; she would love to get all the way in but she hasn’t the nerve. She stops and lingers; then, cautiously, she steps down another rung so that the water rises to her navel; she dips her hand and, caressing, she cools her

  breasts. It is truly beautiful to watch her. The simplehearted Vincent has no idea, but what I myself see here, at last, is a nudity that represents nothing at all, neither freedom nor filth, a nudity divested of all meaning, nudity denuded, just that, pure, and bewitching to a man.

  Finally, she starts to swim. She swims much more slowly than Vincent, her head lifted clumsily above the water; Vincent has already done three fifteen-meter laps when she heads for the ladder to climb out. He hurries after her. They are up on the edge when they hear voices from above.

  Spurred by the proximity of invisible strangers, Vincent starts shouting: “I’m going to bugger you!” and grinning like a satyr, he lunges at her.