Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  "What was horrible?"

  "Don't ask me anything about it."

  "Why don't you want me to ask you anything about it?"

  She dissolved into tears and, still weeping, confided to him that it had been an old man in her village, that he was revolting, that she was completely in his power ("Don't ask me about it"), that she couldn't even remember him ("If you love me, never remind me of him again!").

  She wept for so long that Jaromil forgot his anger; tears are excellent stain removers.

  He caressed her: "Don't cry."

  "You're my Xavipet," she said. "You came in through the window, and you locked him into a wardrobe, and he'll be a skeleton there and you're going to take me far, far away."

  They embraced and kissed. The girl assured him that she couldn't bear anyone else's hands on her body, and he assured her that he loved her. They began to make love again; they made love tenderly, their bodies brimming with soul.

  "You're my Xavipet," she said to him afterward, caressing him.

  "Yes, I'll take you far away, where you'll be safe," he said, and he knew right away where he would take her: he had a tent for her under the blue sail of peace, a tent above which birds fly on their way to the future, fragrances flow toward the strikers of Marseilles; he had a house for her watched over by the angel of his childhood.

  "You know, I'm going to introduce you to my mama,'' he said, and his eyes were filled with tears.

  4

  The family that occupied the rooms on the ground floor of the villa could boast of the mother's protuberant belly; a third child was on the way, and the father stopped Jaromil's mama one day to tell her that it was unjust for two people to occupy the same space as five; he suggested she give up one of the three rooms on the second floor. Jaromil's mother replied that this was not possible. The tenant answered that in that case the authorities would have to see to it that the rooms in the villa were equitably redistributed. Mama asserted that her son was about to get married, and that there would soon be three and perhaps four people on the second floor.

  Thus, when Jaromil told her a few days later that he wanted to introduce his girlfriend to her, the visit seemed timely to Mama; the tenants would at least see that she hadn't lied when she spoke of her son's forthcoming marriage.

  But later, when he admitted to Mama that she already knew the girl from seeing her at the store, she was unable to hide an expression of unpleasant sur-prise.

  "I hope it doesn't embarrass you,'' he said belligerently, "that she's just a salesgirl. I've already told you that she's a working woman, a simple girl."

  It took Mama a few moments to accept the idea that the shallow, unpleasant, and unattractive girl was her son's beloved, but she was able to control herself: "It shouldn't be held against me, but it surprises me," she said, ready to endure whatever her son had in store for her.

  So the visit took place; it lasted three painful hours. All three of them had stage fright, but they underwent the ordeal to the end.

  When Jaromil was alone again with Mama, he asked her eagerly: "Well, did you like her?"

  "I liked her very much, why shouldn't I like her? " she replied, well aware that her tone of voice indicated the opposite.

  "So you didn't like her?"

  "I just told you I liked her very much."

  "No, I can tell from your tone of voice that you didn't like her. You're not saying what you think."

  During the visit the redhead had perpetrated numerous awkwardnesses (she was the first to extend her hand to Mama, she was the first to sit down at the table, she was the first to bring her cup of coffee to her lips), numerous impolitenesses (she interrupted Mama), and tactlessnesses (she asked Mama how old she was); while Mama was enumerating these faux pas she suddenly feared that she might seem small-minded to her son (Jaromil regarded excessive attachment to the rules of etiquette as petit-bourgeois), and she quickly added:

  "Of course, there's nothing incurable about it. Just keep inviting her here a bit more. In our environment she'll become refined and well mannered."

  But the thought that she would have to see this redheaded, ungainly, hostile body with some regularity again gave her an overwhelming feeling of disgust, and she said in a comforting voice: "Of course, you can't blame her for being what she is. You have to imagine the environment in which she grew up and where she works. I wouldn't want to be a salesgirl in a store like that. Everybody takes liberties with you, you have to be at everybody's disposal. If the boss wants to seduce a girl, she can't refuse him. In such an environment, of course, an affair of that kind isn't considered important."

  She watched her son's face and saw it flush; a scalding wave of jealousy filled Jaromil's body, and Mama herself seemed to feel that same heat (yes, it was actually the same scalding wave she had felt a few hours ago when she had seen the redhead for the first time, so I might say that they now stood face to face like two communicating vessels through which the same acid flowed). Her son's face was again childlike and submissive; suddenly she was no longer facing a strange, independent man but her suffering beloved child, a child who not long ago would run to her for refuge and whom she would console. She couldn't tear her eyes away from this splendid spectacle.

  Jaromil left for his own room, and she surprised herself (after some moments alone) by beating her head with her fists and reprimanding herself in an undertone: "Stop it, stop it, don't be jealous; stop it, don't be jealous.''

  Nevertheless the deed had been done. The tent stitched up out of airy blue sails, the tent of harmony watched over by the angel of childhood, was in tatters.

  For mother and son the era of jealousy was beginning.

  Mama's words about affairs that aren't considered important kept resounding in Jaromil's head. He imagined the redhead's fellow workers at the store telling dirty jokes, he imagined the lewd moment of contact established between listener and narrator, and he was horribly tormented. He imagined the store owner rubbing up against her body, surreptitiously touching her breasts or slapping her buttocks, and he was made furious by the thought that such contact wasn't considered important, whereas for him it meant everything. One day when he was at her place, he noticed that she had forgotten to close the toilet door behind her. He made a scene about it, for he immediately imagined her in the toilet at the store and a man inadvertently surprising her sitting on the bowl.

  When he revealed his jealousy to the redhead, she managed to calm him with tenderness and pledges of love; but as soon as he found himself alone in his childhood room, the thought recurred that there was no guarantee that the redhead's assurances were true. Besides, wasn't he himself forcing her to lie to him? By reacting so violently to the idea of an insignificant medical consultation, hadn't he prevented her, once and for all, from telling him what she was thinking?

  They were over, the happy early days of their love, when the caresses were cheerful and he was full of gratitude to her for having led him with such spontaneous assurance out of the labyrinth of virginity. He was now submitting what he had been so grateful for to a harsh analysis; again and again he evoked the shameless touch of the girl's hand that had so wonderfully aroused him the first time he went to her place; he was now scrutinizing it with suspicion: it wasn't possible, he thought, that he, Jaromil, was the first man she had ever touched that way; if she had dared to employ such a shameless gesture half an hour after meeting him, this gesture must have been totally ordinary and mechanical for her.

  What a terrible thought! He had of course already accepted the idea that she'd had another man before him, but only because the girl's words had presented the picture of a liaison that from beginning to end had been bitter and painful, with herself nothing but an exploited victim; that awakened pity in him, and pity diluted his jealousy somewhat. But if the girl had learned that shameful gesture during the liaison, it couldn t have been a total disaster. There was too much joy in that gesture; in that gesture there was an entire little erotic history!

  The subje
ct was too painful for him to muster the courage to talk about, for the mere mention of the lover who had preceded him caused him great torment. Nevertheless he tried in a roundabout way to find the origin of the gesture he constantly thought about (and continued to experience, for the redhead delighted in it), and finally he put his mind at ease with the idea that a great love, which abruptly arrives like a lightning bolt, frees a woman at one stroke from all shame and inhibition, and she, just because she is pure and innocent, gives herself to her lover just as quickly as a loose woman; better still: love frees in her suph a powerful source of unexpected inspiration that her spontaneous behavior can resemble the expert procedures of a depraved woman. The genius of love instantaneously replaces every experience. This conclusion seemed beautiful and shrewd to him; in its light his girlfriend became a saint of love.

  Then one day a fellow student said to him: "Tell me, who was that I saw you with yesterday? She was no beauty!"

  He denied her as Peter denied Christ; he claimed she was a casual acquaintance; he spoke of her with disdain. But just as Peter remained faithful to Christ, Jaromil deep down remained faithful to his girlfriend. He did restrict their walks together through the streets, and he was glad when no one he knew saw her with him, but at the same time he actually disagreed with the student and detested him. And he was at once moved by the thought that his girlfriend wore cheap, unattractive dresses, seeing in this not only her charm (the charm of simplicity and poverty) but also and above all the charm of his own love: he reflected that it was not difficult to love someone dazzling, perfect, elegant: such love was a meaningless reflex automatically aroused in us by the accident of beauty; but a great love wishes to create a beloved being precisely out of an imperfect creature, a creature all the more human for her imperfection.

  One day as he was once again declaring his love for her (probably after an exhausting quarrel), she said:

  "Anyway, I don't know what you see in me. There are so many girls more beautiful than me."

  He explained indignantly that beauty had nothing to do with love. He asserted that he loved in her what everyone else found ugly; in a kind of delirium he even began to enumerate: he told her she had meager, sad little breasts with big, wrinkled nipples that aroused pity rather than enthusiasm; he said that she had freckles and red hair and that her body was skinny, and all of that was precisely why he loved her.

  The redhead burst into tears because she understood the reality (the meager breasts, the red hair) all too well and the idea not at all.

  Jaromil, on the other hand, was carried away by his idea; the tears of the girl, who suffered from not being beautiful, warmed him in his loneliness and inspired him; he thought that he would devote his entire life to making her forget these tears and to convincing her of his love. In this rush of emotion, the redheads first lover was no more than one of the uglinesses he loved in her. That was a truly remarkable feat of will and of thought; he realized this and began to write a poem:

  "Tell me about her I ceaselessly think of, / tell me how she ages [he wanted to possess her completely anew, with all her human eternity], / tell me what she was like as a child [he wanted her not only with her future but also with her past], / give me a drink of the waters she wept [and above all of her sadness, which relieved him of his], / tell me about the lovers who stole her youth; / about all those who pawed her / all those who mocked her / all of that I will love; . . . [and a bit further on]: there is nothing in her soul, in her body / not even the putridity of her old lovers / that I will not drink to intoxication. ... "

  Jaromil was enthusiastic about what he had written, for in place of the great sky blue tent of harmony, in place of the artificial space where all contradictions are abolished, where mother and son and daughter-in-law sit at a common peace table, he had found another dwelling house of the absolute, an absolute more harsh and genuine. For if the absolute of purity and peace does not exist, there does exist an absolute of infinite feeling in which, as in a chemical solution, everything impure and foreign is dissolved.

  He was enthusiastic about this poem, even though he knew that no newspaper would publish it, for it had nothing to do with the cheerful era of socialism; but he had written it for himself and the redhead. When he read it to her she was moved to tears, but at the same time she was frightened once again by the allusions to her ugliness, to her being groped, to the coming of old age.

  The girl's misgivings didn't bother Jaromil. On the contrary, he liked and savored them; he liked to dwell on them and refute them at length. But the worst was that the girl didn't wish to spend much time discussing the poem, and she changed the subject.

  He forgave her her pathetic breasts and the hands of the strangers who had touched them, but there was one thing he couldn't forgive: her endless chatter. Look, he had just read her something that was entirely himself, containing his passion, his sensitivity, his blood, and after a few minutes she began to talk gaily about something else!

  Yes, he was ready to make all her faults vanish in the all-forgiving solvent of his love, but only under one condition: that she obediently immerse herself in that solvent, that she never be anywhere else but in that bathtub of love, that she never try, not even in a single thought, to leave that tub, that she be entirely submerged below the surface of Jaromils words and thoughts, that she be submerged in his world and that the least particle of her body or mind not spend a moment in another world.

  Instead she went on talking, and not only talking but talking about her family! Now, her family was what Jaromil disliked most about her, because he didn't know how to object to it (it was a perfectly innocent family, and moreover a proletarian family, a family of the crowd), but he wanted to object to it because when she thought of her family the redhead was constantly escaping from the bathtub he had prepared for her and filled with the solvent of his love.

  Thus he had to listen yet again to stories about her father (an old peasant worn out in harness), about her brothers and sisters (it wasn't a family but a rabbit hutch, Jaromil thought: two sisters and four broth ers!), and especially about one of her brothers (his name was Jan, and he must have been an oddball-before 1948 he had been the chauffeur for an anti-Communist cabinet minister): no, it was not just a family, it was primarily an alien milieu he was hostile to, a milieu whose cocoon still stuck to the redhead's skin, a cocoon that estranged her from him and kept her from being totally and absolutely his; and that brother Jan was not so much the redhead's brother but primarily a man who had seen her up close for all of her eighteen years, a man who knew dozens of intimate little details about her, a man with whom she had shared a bathroom (how many times had she forgotten to bolt the door?), a man who recalled the time when she became a woman, a man who had surely seen her naked many times . . .

  "You must be mine to die upon the rack if I want you," the ill and jealous Keats wrote to his Fanny, and Jaromil, back home again in his childhood room, was writing a poem to calm himself. He thought about death, that great embrace that soothes everything; he thought about the death of hard men, great revolutionaries, and he thought that he wanted to write the words for a Communist funeral song.

  Death; it too, in that time of compulsory jubilation, was among the nearly forbidden subjects, but Jaromil thought that he would be able (he had already written beautiful poetry about death; in his own way he was an expert on the beauty of death) to find a particular view-point that would strip death of its customary morbidity; he felt that he would be able to write socialist poetry of death; he thought of the death of a great revolutionary:

  "Like the sun setting behind a mountain, the fighter dies. ..."

  and he wrote a poem called "Epitaph": "If I must die, let it be with you, my love, and only by fire turn into heat and light. ..."

  5

  Poetry is a domain in which all assertions become true. Yesterday the poet said: "Life is as useless as tears," today he says: "Life is as joyous as laughter," and he is right both times. Today he says: "Everything en
ds and gives way to silence," and tomorrow he will say: "Nothing ends and everything eternally resounds," and both are true. The poet has no need to prove anything; the only proof lies in the intensity of his emotion.

  The genius of lyricism is the genius of inexperience. The poet knows little about the world, but the words that burst forth from him form beautiful patterns that are as definitive as crystal; the poet is immature, yet his verse has the finality of a prophecy by which he himself is dumbfounded.

  "Ah, my aquatic love!" When Mama read JarormTs first poem, she thought (almost with shame) that her son knew more about love than she did; she didn't suspect anything about Magda being seen through the keyhole, for Mama "aquatic love" represented something more general, a mysterious, rather incomprehensible category of love whose meaning could only be guessed at, like those of sibylline pronouncements.

  We can laugh at the poet's immaturity, but we must also marvel at it: in his words there is a droplet that has come from the heart and gives his verse the radiance of beauty. But this droplet has no need for a real experience to draw it out of the poet's heart, and it seems to me rather that the poet himself sometimes squeezes his heart like a cook squeezing a lemon over the salad. To tell the truth, Jaromil didn't much care about the striking workers in Marseilles, but when he wrote a poem about the love he bore them, he was truly moved, and he generously sprayed that emotion over his words, which thus became a flesh-and-blood reality.

  With his poems the poet paints his self-portrait; but since no portrait is faithful, I can also say that with his poems he touches up his face.

  Touches up? Yes, he makes it more expressive, for the imprecision of his own features torments him; he finds himself blurred, insignificant, nondescript; he is looking for a form for himself; he wants the photographic chemical of his poems to firm up the design of his features.

  And he makes it more dramatic, for his life is uneventful. The world of his feelings and dreams, materialized in his poems, often looks turbulent and replaces the actions and adventures that are denied him.