Slowness
Page 8
How is it that in the privacy of their stroll together he never dared breathe a single little obscenity to her, but now, when he risks being heard by all kinds of people, he’s yelling outrageous things?
Precisely because he has imperceptibly left the zone of intimacy. A word uttered in a small enclosed space has a different meaning from the same word resonating in an amphitheater. No longer is it a word for which he holds full respon-116
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sibility and which is addressed exclusively to the partner, it is a word that other people demand to hear, people who are there, looking at them. True, the amphitheater is empty, but even though it is empty, the audience, imagined and imaginary, potential and virtual, is there, is with them.
We might wonder who makes up this audience; I do not believe that Vincent pictures the people he saw at the conference; the audience around him now is sizable, insistent, demanding, agitated, curious, but also completely unidentifiable, their features blurred; does this mean that the audience he imagines is the same one dancers dream of? the invisible audience? the one Pontevin is building his theories on? the entire world? an infinitude without faces? an abstraction? Not completely: for behind that anonymous welter a few identifiable faces show through: Pontevin and some other cronies; they are watching the whole scene with some amusement, they are watching Vincent, Julie, and even the audience of strangers surrounding them. It is for them that Vincent is shouting his words, it is their admiration, their approval, he hopes to win.
“You’re not going to bugger me!” cries Julie,
who knows nothing of Pontevin but who, she too, is uttering that line for those who are not there but could be there. Does she desire their admiration? Yes, but she desires it only to please Vincent. She wants to be applauded by an unknown and invisible audience in order to be loved by the man she has chosen for this night and—who knows?—for many more. She goes running around the swimming pool and her two breasts swing merrily to right and left.
Vincent’s words are bolder and bolder; only their metaphoric nature casts a light mist over their robust vulgarity.
“I’ll stick my cock through you and nail you to the wall!”
“You won’t nail me anywhere!”
“You’ll hang there crucified on the pool ceiling!”
“I won’t hang there crucified!”
“I’ll tear open your ass hole for the whole world to see!”
“You won’t tear it open!”
“Everybody will see your ass hole!”
“Nobody will see my ass hole!” cries Julie.
Just then, again, they hear voices, whose proximity seems to weigh down Julie’s light step, to
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hint that she should stop: she begins to scream in a strident voice like a woman who is just about to be raped. Vincent snatches her and falls with her onto the floor. Her eyes wide, she looks at him, awaiting a penetration she has decided not to resist. She spreads her legs. Closes her eyes. Turns her head slightly to one side.
tence! Excuse me! That would lay a terrific burden of guilt on me, and it would be unfair, because we live in perfect harmony, he and I, and I swear to you, we’ve never let each other down! I’ve always been proud of him and he of me!”
The member was telling the truth. And in fact, Vincent was not unduly vexed by its behavior. If his member acted that way in the privacy of his apartment, he would never forgive it. But in these circumstances, he is inclined to consider its reaction reasonable and even rather proper. He therefore decides to take matters as they are and sets about simulating coition.
Nor is Julie vexed or frustrated. Feeling Vincent’s movements on her body and feeling nothing inside her she finds strange but, all things considered, acceptable, and she responds to her lover’s thuds with movements of her own.
The voices they heard have moved away, but a new sound echoes in the resonant space of the pool area: the footfalls of a runner passing very near them.
Vincent’s panting gets faster and louder; he moans and bellows, while Julie emits whimpers and sobs, partly because Vincent’s wet body is
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The penetration did not take place. It did not take place because Vincent’s member is as small as a wilted wild strawberry, as a great-grandmother’s thimble. Why is it so small?
I put that question directly to Vincent’s member and frankly, astonished, it replies: “And why shouldn’t I be small? I saw no need to get big! Believe me, the idea really didn’t occur to me! I was not alerted. Vincent and I both watched that odd run of hers around the pool, I was eager to see what would happen next! It was a lot of fun! Now you’re going to accuse Vincent of impo-120
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hurting her as it lands on her again and again, and partly because it is her way of answering his roars.
exercises: first he runs in place, lifting his knees very high; then he stands on his hands, with his feet in the air; as a child he learned to master that gymnastic position called the handstand, and he does it as well today as he did back then; a question occurs to him: how many great French scientists can do it the way he does? and how many cabinet ministers? He pictures in sequence all the French ministers he knows by name and by photo, he tries to picture them in this position, balanced on their hands, and he is satisfied: as he sees them, they’re clumsy and weak. Having accomplished seven handstands, he lies down flat on his stomach and raises himself on his arms.
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Having spotted them only at the last moment, the Czech scientist could not avoid them. But he acts as if they are not there and tries to set his gaze elsewhere. He is nervous: he is not yet familiar with life in the West. In the Communist empire, making love on the edge of a swimming pool was impossible, like, for that matter, many other things he would now have to learn patiently. He has already reached the other side of the pool, and he gets an impulse to turn around and take at least a quick look at the copulating couple; because there’s one thing nagging at him: that man copulating, is his body in good shape? Which is more effective for bodybuilding, lovemaking or manual labor? But he restrains himself, since he does not want to be taken for a voyeur.
He stops on the opposite edge and starts to do
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Neither Julie nor Vincent bothers with what is going on around them. They are not exhibitionists, they do not seek to arouse themselves by other people’s gaze, to attract that gaze, to watch the person watching them; this is not an orgy they’re conducting, it is a show, and during a
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performance actors try not to meet the audience’s eyes. Even more than Vincent, Julie is determined to see nothing; however, the gaze that has just come to rest on her face is too heavy for her not to feel it.
She raises her eyes and sees her: the woman is wearing a gorgeous white dress and is staring at her fixedly; her gaze is strange, remote, and yet heavy, terribly heavy; heavy like despair, heavy like I-don’t-know-what-to-do, and beneath this weight, Julie feels almost paralyzed. Her movements slow, falter, cease; a few more whimpers and she is silent.
The woman in white is battling an enormous urge to howl. She cannot free herself of that urge, which is all the stronger for the fact that the man she wants to howl for will not hear her. Suddenly, no longer able to hold on, she emits a cry, a shrill, terrible cry.
Julie thereupon wakes from her stupor, stands, picks up her underpants, puts them on, rapidly covers herself with her disordered clothes, and takes off at a run.
Vincent is slower. He collects his shirt, his trousers, but cannot see his undershorts anywhere.
A few steps back, a man in pajamas stands stock-still; no one sees him nor does he see anyone else, focused as he is on the woman in white.
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Unable to resign herself to the idea that Berck has rejected her, she had this insane idea to go provoke him, to parade before him in all her white beauty (wouldn’t an immaculate’s beauty be white?), but her passage through the corrido
rs and lobbies of the chateau went badly: Berck was gone, and the cameraman followed her not silently, like a humble mutt, but talking at her in a loud, unpleasant voice. She succeeded in drawing attention, but a nasty, sneering attention, so she quickened her pace; thus, in flight, she reached the edge of the pool, where she ran into a couple copulating and emitted her cry.
That cry has roused her: now she suddenly sees with utter clarity the snare closing around her: her pursuer behind, the water ahead. She understands clearly that this encirclement affords no
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way out; that the only way out available to her is a crazy way out; that the only reasonable action left for her is an insane action; so with the full power of her will she chooses madness: she takes two steps forward and leaps into the water.
The way she has leapt is rather curious: unlike Julie, she knows very well how to dive; and yet she has gone into the water feetfirst, her arms stuck out gracelessly.
Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel. When someone jumps into the water fully clothed, it is another thing entirely: the only person who jumps into the water fully clothed is a person trying to drown; and a person trying to drown does not dive headfirst; he lets himself fall: thus speaks the immemorial language of gestures. That is why, though an excellent swimmer, Immaculata in her beautiful dress could only jump into the water in a hideous way. For no reasonable reason she now finds herself
in the water; she is there under the rule of her gesture, whose meaning is little by little filling her soul; she senses that she is living out her suicide, her drowning, and anything she does from now on will only be a ballet, a pantomime through which her tragic gesture will extend its unspoken statement:
After her fall into the water, she stands upright. The pool is not very deep at that spot, the water reaches to her waist; she stays thus for a few moments, her head high, her torso arched. Then she lets herself fall again. A scarf from her dress works free and floats behind her the way memories float behind the dead. Again she stands up, her head tipped back slightly, her arms spread; as if to run, she moves forward a few steps, where the pool floor slants down, then she goes under again. Thus she proceeds, like some aquatic animal, a mythological duck letting its head vanish beneath the surface and then raising it, tipping it upward. These movements sing the yearning to live in the heights or else perish in the watery deep.
The man in pajamas drops suddenly to his knees and sobs: “Come back, come back, I’m a criminal, I’m a criminal, come back!”
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and she keeps coming upright again. He is witnessing a suicide such as he could never have imagined. The woman is sick or wounded or hunted down, again and again she stands upright and vanishes beneath the surface, she must surely not know how to swim; as she proceeds along the pool’s incline she ducks deeper each time, so that soon the water will cover her completely and she will die beneath the passive gaze of a man in pajamas kneeling at the edge of the pool, who is watching her and weeping.
The Czech scientist can hesitate no longer: he rises, bends forward over the water, legs flexed, arms stretched behind him.
The man in pajamas no longer sees the woman, fascinated as he is by the figure of an unknown man—tall, strong, strangely misshapen—directly across from him, some fifteen meters away, who is preparing to intervene in a drama that has nothing to do with him, a drama that the man in pajamas reserves jealously to himself and the woman he loves. For there’s no doubt about it, he does love her, his hatred was only transitory; he is incapable of detesting her truly and lastingly even if she does make him suffer. He knows she is act-From the other end of the pool, over where the water is deep, the Czech scientist doing push-ups watches in total astonishment: at first he thought the newly arrived couple had come to join the copulating couple and that he was finally going to see one of those legendary orgies he used to hear so much about when he was working on the scaffoldings of the puritan Communist empire. Out of delicacy, he even thought that in such circumstances of collective coition he ought to quit the pool area and go to his room. Then that cry stabbed his ears, and, his arms braced, he stayed that way as if petrified, unable to go on with his exercises even though he had done only eighteen push-ups. Before his eyes, the woman in the white dress fell into the water, and a scarf began floating behind her, along with a few tiny artificial flowers, blue and pink.
Immobile, his torso raised, the Czech scientist eventually understands that this woman is bent on drowning: she is trying to hold her head underwater but her will is not strong enough,
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ing under the diktat of her irrational, ungovernable sensitivity, that miraculous sensitivity of hers which he cannot comprehend and which he reveres. Even though he has just heaped abuse on her, in his heart he is convinced that she is innocent and that someone else is really to blame for their unexpected discord. He doesn’t know who it is, doesn’t know where to find him, but he is set to tear him apart. In that state of mind, he looks at the man leaning athletically out over the water; as if hypnotized, he looks at the man’s body, strong, thick-muscled, and oddly ill-proportioned, with broad womanish thighs and heavy unintelligent calves, a body as absurd as injustice incarnate. He knows nothing about this man, has no reason to mistrust him, but, blinded by his suffering, he sees in this monument of ugliness the image of his own inexplicable misery and is gripped by an invincible hatred for the man.
The Czech scientist dives and, in a few powerful strokes, draws close to the woman.
“Leave her alone!” shouts the man in pajamas, and he too jumps into the water.
The scientist is only two meters away from the woman; his feet are already touching bottom.
The man in pajamas is swimming toward him and yelling again: “Leave her alone! Don’t touch her!”
The Czech scientist stretches an arm beneath the body of the woman as she crumples with a long sigh.
The man in pajamas has got to them now: “Drop her or I kill you!”
Through his tears, he sees nothing before him, nothing but a misshapen silhouette. He grabs it by one shoulder and shakes it violently. The scientist capsizes, the woman falls from his arms. Neither man gives her another thought; she swims to the ladder and climbs up it. The scientist looks at the hate-filled eyes of the man in pajamas, and his own eyes flare with the same hatred.
The man in pajamas holds back no more, and he strikes.
The scientist feels a pain in the mouth. With his tongue he explores a front tooth and discovers that it is loose. This is a false tooth very laboriously screwed into the root by a Prague dentist who had fitted other false teeth around it; the dentist had explained emphatically that this tooth would be serving as a support to the others
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and that if he should someday lose it, he would be doomed to a denture, a thing the Czech scientist regards with unspeakable horror. His tongue probes the loose tooth and he turns pale, first from anguish and then from rage. His whole life rises before him, and for the second time that day, tears flood his eyes; yes, he is weeping, and from the depth of those tears an idea rises to his head: he has lost everything, all he has left is his muscles; but those muscles, those wretched muscles, what good do they do him? Like a spring, the question sets his right arm into terrible motion: from it comes a punch, a punch as huge as the sorrow of a denture, huge as a half century of wild fucking at the edges of all the swimming pools of France. The man in pajamas vanishes beneath the water.
His collapse is so swift, so thorough, that the Czech scientist thinks he has killed him; after a moment of stupefaction, he bends, lifts him up, gives him a few light taps on the face; the man opens his eyes, his vacant gaze falls o
n the misshapen apparition, then he frees himself and swims toward the ladder to rejoin the woman.
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Crouched on the edge of the pool, she has been attentively watching the man in pajamas, his battle and his collapse. Once he has climbed onto the tiled edge of the pool, she stands up and walks toward the staircase, without looking back but slowly enough for him to follow. Thus, without a word, superbly drenched, they cross the lobby (long since deserted) and take the corridors to their room. Their clothing drips, they tremble with cold, they must change.
And then?
What do you mean, “then”? They will make love, what did you think? That night they will be silent, she will only moan a bit, like a person who has been wronged. Thus everything can go on and the play they just performed tonight for the first time will be repeated in the days and weeks to come. To demonstrate that she is above all vulgarity, above the ordinary world she disdains, she will force him to his knees again, he will blame himself, will weep, she will be all the nastier, she will cuckold him, parade her infidelity,
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make him suffer, he will fight back, be crude, threatening, determined to do something unmentionable, he will smash a vase, yell hideous insults, whereupon she will feign fear, will accuse him of being a rapist and aggressor, he will refall to his knees, recry, redeclare himself guilty, then she will let him sleep with her and so on and so forth for weeks, months, years, for eternity.
maybe Turkish, Russian, or even a dying child in Somalia. When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.
When I described Madame de T.‘s night, I recalled the well-known equation from one of the first chapters of the textbook of existential mathematics: the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting. From that equation we can deduce various corollaries, for instance this one: our period is given over to the demon of speed, and that is the reason it so easily forgets its own self. Now I would reverse that statement and say: our period is obsessed by the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered; that it is tired of itself; sick of itself; that it wants to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory.