by Jerzy Pilch
And when I woke up, and when, as usual, before getting out of bed I checked to see whether anyone had left some desperate message in the night, on the screen of my phone I found letters tapped out with the thumb of an angel: “I’m sorry that I disappeared so quickly, but I had to. In any case, I say yes. I say yes. Yes to the next installment of our conversation about life.” I got up, put on Vivaldi’s First Violin Concerto full blast and wrote back: “I say yes to our life.” “To our life together?” she replied three seconds later. “Yes,” I replied. “Do you think we will be happy?” she replied. “Yes,” I replied.
IV
I am writing the first bedroom scene of my life, and here I commit the classic debutant’s error: instead of getting right down to business, instead of beginning right off the bat and describing the body of The Most Beautiful Woman in the World as it evaporates like a cloud, I enter upon intricate preambles and digressions. But once you have The Most Beautiful Woman in the World in your bed, you feel so intellectually energized that you think you have the right to formulate fundamental theses. You have the right to pose and to settle key questions. And so, I pose (and also immediately settle) the following key question: What, namely, is the key question in sex? I answer: The key question in sex is the opening position. Oh, of course, it isn’t a matter of any opening position in bed. I’m not providing pitiful technical counseling here—where to place the feet, under what to place the pillow, etc. I’m concerned with the opening position in the fundamental sense, about the first—I use this term in the classical philosophical sense—position.***
To find the place to occupy the first position, and subsequently to occupy the first position—that is the fundamental question in sex. Fundamental, because it is the first. Without it, there are no further installments, and even if there are, they are chaotic and unharmonious. And chaos and lack of harmony are the extermination of sex. In short, it is a matter of sitting down in the proper place. The first position is always a sitting position. Schemes of the sort that would have us walk up to the window together, and at that window, or on the way back, have me embrace her; or the complete catastrophe that would have me lie in ambush for her on her return from the bathroom, and then romantically jump on her back—such schemes are disastrous because they are doomed to briefness. Just how long are you going to stand with her at that window? Just how long will the two of you rock back and forth in an amatory frenzy by the bathroom? Sooner or later you will have to loosen the passionate hold, and everything starts again from the beginning. Unless—God forbid!—seized by panic in such an ill-fated moment, you pick up the pace, thereby making matters worse. It is quite another matter that then at least you’ve gotten the thing over with. You’ve succumbed. You’re dead. Don’t try to tell me that death has only its bad sides.
It is my deepest conviction that the thing to do is to sit down next to the woman, to sit down properly next to the woman, to sit down next to the woman in the appropriate place—this is the essence of the art of love. He who has grasped the simplicity of this craft has learned much. He who has not grasped it will achieve little.
For various reasons, mankind has suffered amatory fiascos. It has suffered them because it was timid, because it didn’t have the proper conditions, because the hour had gotten late, because it was too early, because she wasn’t ready yet, because he was ashamed, because she became paralyzed with fear, because he got drunk, because she undressed too soon, because he said something stupid, because she suddenly remembered that she had to call her sister, because he didn’t take off his socks, because she spent half the night in the bathroom, because he had such an attack of nerves that he was constantly running to the can, because she, out of habit, addressed him as she did her husband—shnooky-lumps, because he, while sitting on the edge of the bed, began to reply to an SMS, because she suddenly broke down in tears, because he suddenly broke out laughing, because she cleared her throat significantly the whole time, because when he asked with a muffled voice, “When did you last fall in love?” she replied with hasty frankness, “Yesterday,” etc., etc. Mankind has suffered amatory disasters for a billion reasons. Mankind has suffered disaster a billion times, a billion times it came to nothing, because he didn’t know how to move from the armchair to the couch. A billion disasters—or perhaps a billion billions—derived from the fact that he didn’t know how to take up the first position. It’s quite another matter that, if you have a small apartment, then this is a genuine tragedy. That’s right—a small one. It’s worse in a small one than in a large one. After all, you’re not going to pile on next to her on the sofa bed, just as soon as she sits down, on account of the cramped quarters. Contrary to appearances, in a small apartment—stricter rules apply.
I had a small apartment. The Most Beautiful Woman in the World sat on the couch, I, on the other side of a small coffee table, on the arm chair. Seven mountains, seven rivers, seven seas, and seven infinities separated me from the first position. And that was terrible. But I already had scores of mountains, rivers, seas, infinities behind me. And that was good. Although incomprehensible. All the more incomprehensible in that, basically, it was not so much that I myself had overcome all those obstacles, as that The Most Beautiful Woman in the world had transported me across them. I didn’t have to make my way across scores of rivers in order to ask her to go to a bar, because right away she said: OK. I didn’t have to climb scores of mountains with the goal of taking her to the movies, because right away she said: OK. I didn’t have to sail across scores of oceans in order to go with her for a walk, because right away she said: OK. Whatever I said, she said OK. To each and every of my propositions—OK. And I, instead of taking a moment to give it some thought—that something isn’t OK here, because everything was too much OK—was in permanent euphoria over the fact that it’s OK. Oh f… ! OK! Oh f… ! OK! Oh f… ! OK! Oh God! OK! She is eating dinner with me! Oh God! OK! She is with me in the Saxon Garden! Oh God! OK! She allows me to be with her when she walks the dog! Oh God! OK! She is holding my hand! Oh God! OK! She is kissing me at the gate! Oh f… ! OK! Oh God! OK!
It was the second half of July. The sky over a deserted Warsaw shimmered like a field of lime. We sat in Yellow Dream on Marszałkowska Street, in Modulor at the Square of the Three Crosses, in Tam Tam on Foksal Street, in Antykwariat on Żurawia Street. We went to the Iluzjon to see Dolce Vita, to the Rejs to see Seven Seals, to the Kinoteka to see Other Torments.
In the Atlantic, at Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World cried with delight. I skillfully pretended that I shared her emotion. It came easily to me, because in my euphoria I shared all her emotions and said OK to everything.
I said OK to her conception of life on earth; it was grounded—as you will recall—in finding the appropriate proportion between work and relaxation. I said OK to her conception of life beyond the grave: after death, the soul goes to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory; but if it doesn’t want to, it doesn’t have to; it can enter into another body—whether human, animal, or vegetable depends upon the deceased’s Zodiac sign when he was alive. I even said OK to her literary hierarchies: she adored Wharton and Coelho. It didn’t come easy—but I said OK. My God! Deny a detail like literary taste for the sake of such a beauty? No problem. I said OK. We strolled around deserted Chmielna, Krucza, Wspólna, Hoża, and Wilcza Streets, and I constantly shared her emotions, and I constantly said OK. The empty city ennobled her gibberish. The burning-hot cement center of the city was dead, as if the world had ceased to exist. Even the few specters of dying drug addicts, drunken beggars, and municipal watch guards, all tormented by the sweltering heat, had disappeared somewhere. We were the last people on earth, and the last people on earth have the right to talk nonsense.
“Drop by my place,” I said. We were standing in front of her building. Her dog, in whose evening pissing I had once again had the honor to participate, looked at me with hostility.
“OK,” she said. “I’ll be there at six.”
Everything was clear. A pure love united us, but the time for getting dirty was drawing near. I had fears, premonitions. I foresaw a catastrophe. After all, at some point she would have to stop saying OK. And when she stops saying OK, she will say No. And most certainly she will say No at that point when they all say No.
I sat across from her as if on red-hot coals. I was a million light years away from the first position, and I knew that as soon as I should make even one move to approach her, as soon as, with even one reckless gesture, I should signal my wish to move from the armchair to the couch, I would hear the word No. Basically, I couldn’t move at all, because in my panic I became hysterical at the thought that, as soon as I make any move at all, I would hear No. And I couldn’t let this happen. True, women often say No, and sometimes—as is well known—this doesn’t mean very much. But if a woman who says OK all the time says No even once, this can have far-reaching—and catastrophic—significance. Still, one way or the other, sooner or later, I would have to make my move. And so I moved. I moved because the telephone rang. As soon as I heard the ring, I knew right away—by the very sound of the tone, so to speak, I recognized that it was the Lord God who was calling me. I was absolutely certain that when I lifted the receiver I would hear the voice of the Lord God. And I was not mistaken. I lifted the receiver, and I heard:
“Hey. Did you read what that cretin wrote?” the Lord God spoke in the voice of my friend Mariusz Z.
“Of course I read it. You bet I read it!” my voice shook with joy—I was saved, I was delivered. The Lord God Himself was leading me to the first position.
“Actually, it’s odd that you’ve read it. It’s basically unreadable. The typical class dunce’s composition.”
“Something bad has happened to him. He’s lost control of his thought.”
“What thought? There isn’t a trace of thought there. That is a piece by a guy who has lost control—not of his thought, but of his urine.”
“However you look at it, it’s a downhill slide. There was a time when what he wrote still made sense.”
“Rubbish. It never made sense. I always said he was a graphomaniac.”
“At the beginning at least he was humble.”
“Every graphomaniac is humble at the beginning. Him too. He used to be a humble graphomaniac, but now he is a brazen and impudent graphomaniac.”
“It’s quite another matter that they print this blather. This basically belongs in the editor’s waste bin.”
“Why are you surprised that they print the stuff? After all, they’re all imbeciles.”
I chatted eagerly with my friend, the well-known literary critic Mariusz Z. With expert knowledge and taste, we discussed in great detail an article (or perhaps a book, today I no longer remember) by one of our mutual friends. With the receiver on my ear I circled about the room. I took turns feigning this and that: first complete immersion in the deep substance of the conversation, then I would make conspiratorial glances and apologetic gestures in the direction of The Most Beautiful Woman in the World. I was in ecstasy. God was reaching out to me. I jabbered with absolute inspiration, I made my analysis, I interpreted, and I summed up. I circled—just as in the embassy gardens—in ever tighter orbits. And when, from behind the voice of my friend, I heard in the depths of the receiver the true voice of God, Who, in the language that today fulfills the function of Latin, called out to me—Now! Man! Boy! It’s time!—I feigned total immersion in the conversation, together with total separation from reality, and in this immersion and separation I made yet another circle around the room, and I began the next, and half way through the next—in complete fervor, trance, and reverie—I sat down next to her on the couch. I didn’t, however, pay the least attention to her, as if I didn’t know where I had happened to sit down. I jabbered away, I jabbered a good two, three minutes more, and when I had finally finished, when I put the receiver down, and when God, seeing that I had occupied the first position for good, withdrew and grew silent, I looked around. And I saw not only that I was occupying the first position; I saw that slowly the first position was being occupied by… that toward the first position slowly glided the hand of The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.
V
Everything fell into place. My fingers skillfully unbuttoned her blouse, and my fingers were pleasing to the buttons of her blouse. And her blouse was pleased that it was slipping from her shoulders, and her shoulders were pleased that slipping from them was her blouse. The clasp of her bra probably felt unsatisfied by the fact that my fingers were occupied with it so briefly, but my fingers were proud of themselves. Her jeans, which I grasped at the height of her hips, were pleased by the strength of my hands, and they were pleased by the fact that I compelled The Most Beautiful Woman in the World to stand for a moment. Her jeans knew that they look best on straightened legs, and they knew perfectly well that, if they were to slip from her hips, then it certainly wouldn’t happen sitting down. And they slipped away like an ocean wave revealing the thighs of Aphrodite. And that was all. The Most Beautiful Woman in the World as a general rule—as she put it—didn’t wear panties, and not only during heat waves.
You can’t please everybody. We closed the Venetian blinds, which didn’t please the light of day very much, for only its remnants passed through the slits, but the sweltering dusk eagerly embraced us. Not to cast aspersions, but The Most Beautiful Woman in the World was about to turn forty—and with this age, which is most correctly seen as the apogee of feminity, comes the unconscious reflex of turning down the lights. It was, however, a luminous July dusk, and it was, in spite of the Venetian blinds, sufficiently light that I could appreciate, not only by touch, the artistry of her depilation, the simplicity and modesty of the coiffure under her belly button—thin like a watch band; the full moon of the evenly tanned breasts; the sternum between them, unsymmetrically wide and bumpy; the back, endlessly perfect and—as is usual with backs—marked with endless sadness.
The sheet beneath us was intoxicated with our sweat. The light of day withdrew from between the Venetian blinds. Her skin was created for my hands. God had created her ribs and sides thinking about my arms. Her thighs were fantastic, but only once they were intertwined with mine did they form an absolute whole. We crooned a great love song in two-part harmony. We blurted out fiery filth in two whispers. The specters of my solitude left me once and for all. The superstition that you had to have intellectual communication with a woman fell to dust. I knew, I knew without a doubt that I had finally met someone (“someone,” my God!), with whom I would spend the rest of my life, who would give me strength, who would watch over me, and over whom I would watch. I had finally met someone with whom I would live in a house eternally buried in snow, feed the dogs and cats, watch films on HBO in the evenings, and drink tea with raspberry juice. I knew this without a doubt, and I immediately decided to share my new knowledge with The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (by now also The Only Woman in the World): “I will spend the rest of my life with you,” I whispered into her ear. “That’s impossible,” she replied with an unexpectedly strong voice. “Why?” I touched her wet hair with my lips. “Because I love my husband.” I don’t know whether she said this in a whisper or out loud. I don’t remember. I do remember the catastrophic silence that set in over the bed sheet, over us, and over the whole deserted city. Somewhere you could hear the sound of a child crying on a balcony, the far-off siren of an ambulance, a radio playing in a window, the rumble of a train leaving Central Station, then a sudden and interrupted car alarm. “I love my husband,” she repeated after some delay, or perhaps because of the sleepiness that slowly, after the amatory frenzy, had taken her in its grasp. “I love him. He just came back from Paris. That’s why I could come to you. Because today was his day to walk the dog. That’s how we arranged it.”
VI
Life consists in establishing the appropriate proportion between work and relaxation. After three weeks of relaxation, and real relaxation at that, even—I would say—extreme
relaxation, after three weeks of complete rest from the world, after three weeks of truancy and absence from the world, I came back and got down to work. I wrapped my Spanish rifle in black plastic, I put a box of Diabolo Boxer sharp shot in my pocket, and an hour before the zero hour I set off in the obvious direction. The air rifle wrapped in black plastic looked, under my arm, like a curtain rod or some element of some piece of furniture. The dead expression on my face said nothing to anyone.
Across from the gate in which I had madly kissed the divine lips of The Most Beautiful Woman in the World—several times goodbye, and twice in greeting; across from this gate, on the other side of the street, rose the two-story building of an elementary school. It was already the end of August, and from all sides feverish repair work was underway. Even now plasterers were bustling about before the front wall. In the back, however, on the side of the school playground, there wasn’t a soul. Emptiness and stillness, and heaping stacks of broken objects, up which I easily climbed onto the roof.
With a couple lightning fast bounds, worthy of the special forces, I reached the opposite edge and lay down on my belly in the classic position of the sharpshooter. I removed the air rifle from the plastic, loaded it, and waited. I had about thirty minutes to wait. The roof under me had heated up like a pond toward the end of summer. Three red Fiats drove by below. A Fiat Seicento, a Fiat Brava, and a Fiat Punto. Along the sidewalk went a woman with a yellow plastic shopping bag, a bald guy in black, two workers carried a mirror that was turned in my direction. I hid in fear that they would catch sight of the reflection of my head. After a moment I looked out again—now there went a redheaded girl in a jean-shirt, after her another, black-haired in a black T-shirt and red slacks, then a guy with a black plastic shopping bag, and just when it seemed that black was beginning to predominate, again there appeared three red Fiats. My head was spinning. I was on the roof of a two-story pavilion, but my fear of heights bordered on insanity. Three red Fiats drove around my skull. I turned over on my back and looked up at the sky. When was the last time I had lain on a heated surface, on warm grass or on hot sand, and looked at the sky? Into space that became, supposedly, ever colder and darker? Forty years ago? The sun was shining, clouds scudded by. I half-shut my eyes, and I guess I fell asleep, for when I again opened my eyes, the air was one degree darker, and The Most Beautiful Woman in the World—I knew it without looking—was already standing by the gate. I turned over on my belly. At least you, my intuition, hadn’t let me down. There she was. In a white blouse, gray slacks, she stood in her full beauty and surrendered herself to thought. The dog, just like all living creatures, fawned at her feet. Calmly, I raised the weapon to my eye. I had one last minute, but a good full one. I knew quite well that The Most Beautiful Woman in the World would ponder for at least a minute whether to go left or go right. The dog sat motionless and frozen, as if in a canine presentiment of its final hour. I had him in my sights. From down below you could hear the even murmur of the engines of three red Fiats. In a moment the live round of Diabolo Boxer would pierce dog skin, dog muscles, and dog guts, and a terrible squeal would resound. I unlocked the safety, and I delicately touched the trigger, and I knew that I wouldn’t pull it. Genuine life was insuperable and impenetrable. And I raised the oxidized barrel of my air rifle, beautiful as a dream, and I guided it carefully upward in the direction of an analogous beauty. I passed by the thighs, belly, heart, and when I was at the height of the neck, I took aim very precisely. I could shoot with a clean conscience and without any fear that blood would flow—I had before me Beauty, as perfect as geometry and as permeable as air.