The painter returned to the studio and found Mama in tears.
"Please let me go home right now!"
"Go ahead, you can leave together—Jaromil will soon be finished."
"You're a devil," she said, still in tears, and the painter embraced her and covered her with kisses. Then he returned to the adjoining room, praised Jaromil's work (ah, Jaromil was very happy that day!), and sent him home. Then he returned to the studio, stretched tearful Mama out on the old paint-stained daybed, kissed her soft mouth and wet face, and again made love to her.
9
Mama and the painter's love affair never freed itself from the omens that marked its beginning: it was not a love she had long and dreamily contemplated in advance, firmly looking it in the eye; it was an unexpected love that had grabbed her by the neck from behind.
This love constantly reminded her of her unpre-paredness for love; she was inexperienced, she knew neither what to do nor what to say. Before the painter's unusual and demanding face, she was ashamed in advance of her every word and gesture; even her body was no better prepared; for the first time she bitterly regretted taking care of herself so badly after she gave birth, and she was frightened when she looked in the mirror at her belly, at its sadly hanging wrinkled skin.
Ah! She had always dreamed of a love in which her body and soul, hand in hand, would grow old together (yes, that was the love she had long contemplated in advance, looking it dreamily in the eye); but now, in this difficult liaison she was suddenly immersed in, she found her soul painfully young and her body painfully old, so that she moved forward into her adventure as if she were tremulously walking on a much-too-narrow plank, not knowing whether it was the youth of her soul or the age of her body that would cause her to fall.
The painter treated her with extravagant solicitude and tried hard to introduce her to the world of his paintings and thoughts. She was delighted by that; she saw it as proof that their first rendezvous was something other than a conspiracy of bodies taking advantage of a situation. But when love occupies both body and soul, it takes more time; Mama had to keep inventing new friends to justify (especially to Grandmama and Jaromil) her frequent absences from the house.
She would sit beside the painter as he worked, but that was not enough for him; he explained to her that painting, as he conceived it, was merely one method among others of quarrying the marvelous from life; and even a child could discover the marvelous at play or an ordinary man by recalling a dream. The painter gave Mama a sheet of paper and colored inks; she was told to make blots on the paper with the various colors and blow on them; rays ran over the paper in all directions and covered it with a multicolored web; the painter displayed Mama's output behind the glass panes of his bookcase and praised them to his guests.
On one of her earliest visits, he gave her several books as she was leaving. At home she had to read them secretly because she was afraid that Jaromil would ask her where she got the books, or another member of the family might ask her the same question, and she would find it difficult to find a satisfactory lie because a glance at them was enough to show that they were very different from the ones in the libraries of their friends or parents. She therefore hid the books in the drawer under her brassieres and nightgowns and read them during the moments when she was alone. The feeling of doing something forbidden and the fear of being caught probably prevented her from concentrating on what she was reading, for she seemed not to be absorbing much of what she read, not understanding most of it even when she reread many pages two or three times in a row.
She would then return to the painter's with the anxiety of a student who was afraid of being quizzed, because the painter would begin by asking her whether she had liked a certain book, and she knew that he wanted to hear not merely a positive answer but also that for him the book was the point of departure for a conversation, and that there were observations in the book on a subject he wanted to be in alliance with her about, as if it were a matter of a truth they defended in common. Mama knew all that, but it didn't make her understand any more of what was in the book, or what in the book was so important. And so, like a cunning pupil, she came up with an excuse: she complained that she had to read the books in secret to avoid being discovered, and she therefore couldn't concentrate on them as well as she wanted to.
The painter accepted this excuse, but he found an ingenious way out: at the next lesson he spoke to Jaromil about the currents of modern art and gave him several books to read, which the boy gladly accepted. When Mama first saw these books on her son's desk and realized that this contraband literature was actually intended for her she was frightened. Until then she alone had taken on the entire burden of her adventure, but now her son (that image of purity) had become an unwitting emissary of adulterous love. But there was nothing to be done, the books were on Jaromil's desk and Mama had no choice but to leaf through them in the guise of understandable maternal concern.
One day she dared to say to the painter that the poems he had lent her seemed needlessly obscure and confused. She regretted uttering these words the moment after she said them, for the painter considered the slightest divergence from his opinions as a betrayal. Mama quickly tried to erase her blunder. As the painter, his brow wrathful, turned away toward his canvas, she rapidly slipped off her blouse and brassiere. She had pretty breasts and knew it; now she proudly displayed them (but not without a remnant of shyness) as she crossed the studio, and then, half hidden by the canvas on the easel, she planted herself in front of the painter. He continued sullenly dabbing at the canvas, several times giving her a baleful look. Then she tore the brush from the painter's hand, put it between her teeth, said a word to him she had never said to anyone, a vulgar, obscene word, repeating it in an undertone several times in a row until she saw that the painter's anger had turned into erotic desire.
No, she had never before behaved this way, and she was nervous and strained; but she had realized from the beginning of their intimacy that the painter demanded from her free and astonishing types of erotic expression, that he wanted her to feel entirely free with him, released from everything, from all convention, from all shame, from all inhibition; he liked to say to her: "I don't want anything except that you give me your freedom, the totality of your freedom!" and he wanted at every moment to be convinced of this freedom. Mama had more or less come to understand that such uninhibited behavior was probably something beautiful, but she was all the more afraid that she would never be capable of it. And the harder she tried to know her freedom, the more this freedom became an arduous task, an obligation, something she had to prepare for at home (to consider what word, what desire, what gesture she was going to surprise the painter with to show him her spontaneity), so that she sagged under the imperative of freedom as if under a heavy burden.
"The worst thing isn't that the world isn't free, but that people have unlearned their freedom," the painter told her, and this remark seemed deliberately directed at her belonging so completely to that old world that the painter maintained had to be totally rejected. "If we can't change the world, let's at least change our own lives and live them freely," he said. "If every life is unique, let's draw the conclusion; let's reject everything that isn't new." And then, quoting Rimbaud: "It is necessary to be absolutely modern," and she listened to him religiously, full of trust in his words and full of mistrust toward herself.
It occurred to her that the love the painter felt for her could only be the result of a misunderstanding, and she sometimes asked him why exactly he loved her. He would answer that he loved her as a prizefighter loves a fragile forget-me-not, as a singer loves silence, as an outlaw loves a village schoolteacher; he would tell her that he loved her as a butcher loves the timorous eyes of a heifer or lightning the idyll of rooftops; he would tell her that he loved her as a beloved woman stolen away from a stupid habitat.
She listened to him enraptured and went to see him whenever she could spare a moment. She felt like a tourist who has before her th
e most beautiful landscapes but is too worn out to perceive their beauty; she gained no joy from her love, but she knew that it was grand and beautiful and that she must not lose it.
And Jaromil? He was proud that the painter lent him books from his library (the painter had told him more than once that he had never lent anyone books, that Jaromil was the only one with that privilege), and since he had a lot of free time, he dreamily lingered over their pages. At that time, modern art had not yet become the property of the bourgeois multitude, retaining the spellbinding allure of a sect, that allure so easily understood by a child still at an age when one dreams of the romance of clans and brotherhoods. Jaromil felt that allure deeply, and he read the books in a way entirely different from that of Mama, who read them from A to Z like textbooks on which she would be examined. Jaromil, who ran no risk of being examined, never really read the painter's books; he scanned them, strolled through them, leafed through them, lingered over a page, and stopped at one line of verse or another, unconcerned whether or not the poem as a whole had something to say to him. A single line of verse or a single paragraph of prose was enough to make him happy, not only because of their beauty but above all because they provided entry into the realm of the elect who knew how to perceive what for others remained hidden.
Mama knew that her son was not content to be a mere emissary and that he read with interest the books that were only apparently meant for him; she thus began to discuss with him what they had both read, and she asked him questions she didn't dare ask the painter. She then was terrified to learn that her son defended the borrowed books with more implacable stubbornness than did the painter.
She noticed that in a collection of poems by Eluard he had underlined some lines in pencil: To be asleep, the moon in one eye and the sun in the other. "What do you find so beautiful about that? Why should I sleep with the moon in one eye?" Legs of stone in stockings of sand. "How can stockings be made of sand?" Jaromil thought that Mama was not only making fun of the poem but that she thought him too young to understand it, and he responded brusquely to her.
My God, she couldn't even stand up to a child of thirteen! When she went to the painter's that day, her state of mind was that of a spy wearing the uniform of a foreign army; she was afraid of being unmasked. Her behavior had lost the last vestige of spontaneity, and everything she said and did resembled the performance of an amateur who, paralyzed by stage fright, recites her lines in fear of being booed.
It was at about that time that the painter discovered the charm of the camera; he showed Mama his first photographs, still lifes made up of an odd assortment of objects, bizarre views of forgotten and abandoned things; then he led her under the luminous skylight and started to photograph her. At first it made her feel a kind of relief, for there was no need to talk; she only had to stand or sit or smile or listen to the painter's instructions and to the compliments he from time to time bestowed on her face.
The painter's eyes suddenly lit up; he grabbed a brush, dipped it in black paint, gently turned Mama's head, and made two oblique lines on her face. "I've crossed you out! I've destroyed God's work!" he said laughing, and he set about photographing her with the two thick lines crossing on her nose. Then he led her to the bathroom, washed her face, and dried it with a towel.
"I crossed you out in order to create you all over again now," he said, again taking up the brush and starting to draw on her. This time it was circles and lines resembling ancient ideographic writings. "A face-message, a face-letter," said the painter, and he took her back under the bright skylight and began again to photograph her.
Then he had her lie down on the floor and beside her head placed a plaster cast of the head of an antique statue on whose face he drew the same lines she had on hers, then photographed these two heads, the living and the lifeless, and then washed the lines off Mama's face, painted other lines on it, photographed her again, had her lie down on the daybed, and began to undress Mama, who, fearing that he would paint on her breasts and legs, even risked a joking remark intended to make him realize that he should not paint her body (it took courage for her to risk a joke, for she was always afraid that her jokes would misfire and make her look foolish), but the painter was tired of painting, and instead of painting he made love to her and, at the same time, he held her head between his two hands, her head covered with his designs, as if he were particularly aroused by the thought of making love to a woman who was his own creation, his own fantasy, his own image, as if he were God lying down with a woman he had just created for himself.
Mama really was at that moment nothing but his invention, one of his paintings. She knew it, and she marshaled all her forces to keep him from seeing that she was not at all the painter's partner, his miraculous counterpart, a creature worthy of love, but merely a lifeless reflection, a mirror proffered with docility, a passive surface on which the painter projected the image of his desire. And in fact she passed the test, the painter had his rapture and blissfully withdrew from her body. But then, once she was home, she felt as if she had undergone a great struggle, and that evening she wept before she fell asleep.
When she returned to the studio some days later, the painting and picture taking resumed. This time the painter bared her breasts and painted on their beautiful contours. But when he tried to undress her completely, for the first time she denied her lover something.
It's hard to conceive of the skill, even the trickery, she employed, during all her erotic games with the painter, to hide her belly! She would keep on her garter-belt, implying that such seminakedness was more arousing; she would get him to make love in semidarkness instead of in full light; she would gently remove the painter's caressing hands from her belly and set them on her breasts; and when she had exhausted all her tricks, she would invoke her shyness, a trait the painter was familiar with and adored (he often told her that she was the incarnation of the color white, and that he had expressed his first thoughts of her in a painting by scraping white lines with a palette knife).
But now she had to stand in the middle of the studio like a living statue in the grip of the painter's eyes and brush. She resisted, and when she told him, as she had during her first visit, that what he wanted from her was crazy, he answered, as he did then: "Yes, love is crazy," and tore off the rest of her clothes.
And so she stood in the middle of the studio thinking only of her belly; she was afraid to look down at it, but it was before her eyes as she knew it from having despairingly looked at it a thousand times in the mirror; it seemed to her that she was nothing but a belly, nothing but ugly wrinkled skin, it seemed to her that she was a woman on an operating table, a woman who must not think about anything, who must yield herself up and simply believe that all this was temporary, that the operation and the pain would come to an end and that meanwhile there was only one thing to do: hang on.
The painter picked up a brush, dipped it in black paint, and applied it to her shoulder, her navel, her legs, stepped back and picked up the camera; then he led her to the bathroom, where he had her lie down in the empty bathtub and, placing across her body the metal snake with its perforated head, told her that this metal snake didn't spray water but a deadly gas and that it was now lying on her body like the body of war on the body of love; and then he led her out to another spot and photographed her there too, and she went obediently, no longer trying to hide her belly, but she always had it before her eyes, and she saw the painter's eyes and her belly, her belly and the painter's eyes . . .
And then, when she lay stretched out on the rug, all covered with paint, and he made love to her beside the cool, beautiful antique head, she couldn't hang on any longer and began sobbing in his arms, but he probably failed to grasp the meaning of these sobs, for he was convinced that his ferocious bewitchment, transformed into steady, pounding, beautiful movement, could evoke no response other than tears of rapture and bliss.
Mama realized that the painter had not guessed the cause of her sobs, so she controlled herself and st
opped crying. But when she got home she was overcome by vertigo on the stairs; she fell and scraped her knee. Frightened, Grandmama led her to her room, put a hand on her brow, and stuck a thermometer in her armpit.
Mama had a fever. Mama had a nervous breakdown.
10
A few days later, Czech parachutists sent from England killed the German ruler of Bohemia; martial law was declared, and long lists of those who had been shot in reprisal appeared on the street corners. Mama was confined to her bed, and the doctor came every day to stick a needle into her bottom. Her husband would come to sit at her bedside, grip her hand, and gaze into her eyes; she knew that he attributed her nervous collapse to History's horrors, and she thought with shame that she had deceived him while he, in this difficult time, was being good to her and trying to be her friend.
Life Is Elsewhere Page 5