Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  Back home he asked Mama how she had come to know the filmmaker. Mama answered with whimsical coyness that she had known her for some time. Jaromil continued to question her, but Mama kept evading him; it was as if someone were questioning his lover about an intimate detail and she, to heighten his curiosity, was delaying her answer; at last she told him that this likable woman had visited her about two weeks before. She had said that she admired Jaromil's poetry and wanted to shoot some footage of him; it would be an amateur film produced under the auspices of the National Police film club, and would thus be certain to have a sizable audience.

  "Why did she come to see you? Why didn't she come to me directly?" Jaromil wondered.

  Apparently the young woman didn't want to disturb him, and she therefore wanted to learn as much as she could from her. Besides, who knows more about a son than his mother? And the young woman was so kind as to ask his mother to collaborate with her on the scenario; yes, together they had devised a scenario about the young poet.

  "Why didn't you tell me?" asked Jaromil, who was instinctively displeased by the alliance between his mother and the filmmaker.

  "We had the misfortune of running into you. We'd decided to surprise you. One fine day you would come home and find the film crew and a camera.".

  What could Jaromil do? One day he came home and shook hands with the young woman at whose place he had found himself some weeks before, and he felt as pitiable as he had that evening, even though he was now wearing red gym shorts under his trousers. After the poetry evening with the police, he had never again worn the frightful undershorts, but whenever he faced the filmmaker, there was always someone else playing their role: when he met her in the street with his mother, he thought he had his girlfriend's red hair wrapped around him like a hideous pair of undershorts; and this time the clownish undershorts were represented by Mama's coy remarks and nervous chatter.

  The filmmaker announced (no one had asked for Jaromil's opinion) that they were going to shoot documentary material, childhood photographs on which Mama would comment, because, the two women told him in passing, the entire film had been conceived as a mother's account of her poet son. He wanted to ask what Mama was going to say, but he dreaded finding out; he was blushing. Besides Jaromil and the two women, there were three men in the room, along with a camera and two big floodlights; it seemed to him that these fellows were watching him and smiling with hostility; he didn't dare speak.

  "You have marvelous childhood photos; I'd love to use them all," said the filmmaker as she leafed through the family album.

  "Will they look like anything on the screen?" asked Mama with professional interest, and the filmmaker assured her there was nothing to worry about; then she explained to Jaromil that the first sequence of the film would consist of a montage of photographs of him, with Mama reminiscing off camera. Then Mama would be seen, and only after that the poet; the poet in the house where he had lived all his life, the poet writing, the poet in the garden amid the flowers, and finally the poet out in the country, where he most liked to be; in his favorite spot there, in the middle of a vast landscape, he would recite the poem with which the film will end. ("And where exactly is this favorite spot of mine?" he asked recalcitrantly; he learned that his favorite spot was that romantic landscape on the outskirts of Prague where the rough terrain was strewn with boulders. "What? I detest that spot," he said, but no one took him seriously.)

  Jaromil didn't like the scenario and said that he wanted to work on it himself; he pointed out that there were many trite things in it (it was ridiculous to show photos of a one-year-old!); he asserted that there were more interesting problems it would probably be useful to take up; the two women asked him what he had in mind, and he answered that he couldn't say at the moment and that he would prefer that they wait a bit before starting to film.

  He wanted at all costs to postpone the shooting, but he didn't win his case. Mama put her arm around his shoulders and said to her dark-haired collaborator: "You see? That's my eternally dissatisfied boy! He's never content. ..." Then she tenderly leaned close to Jaromil's face: "Isn't that so?" Jaromil didn't answer, and she repeated: "Isn't that so, that you're my dissatisfied little boy? Say it's so!"

  The filmmaker said that dissatisfaction is a virtue in a writer, but this time it wasn't Jaromil who was the author but rather the two of them, and they were ready to take all the risks; all he had to do was let them make the film as they understood it, just as they let him write his poems as he pleased.

  Mama added that Jaromil shouldn't be afraid that the film would do him harm, for both of them, Mama and the filmmaker, were creating it with the greatest affection for him; she said this so flirtatiously that it was unclear whether she was flirting with him or with her new friend.

  In any case she was flirting. Jaromil had never seen her like this; that very morning she had gone to the hairdresser and had her hair done in a youthful fashion; she talked louder than usual, laughed constantly, made use of all the witty turns of phrase she had ever learned, and enjoyed playing her role as mistress of the house, bringing cups of coffee to the men at the floodlights. She addressed the dark-eyed filmmaker with the showy familiarity of a friend (so as to put herself in the same age group) while indulgently putting her arm on Jaromil's shoulder and calling him her dissatisfied little boy (so as to send him back to his virginity, his childhood, his diapers). (Ah, what a beautiful sight, these two face to face pushing each other: she pushing him into his diapers and he pushing her into her grave, ah, what a beautiful sight these two . . . )

  Jaromil gave way; he knew that the two women were building up speed like locomotives and that he wasn't capable of resisting their eloquence; he saw the three men at the camera and floodlights as a sardonic audience ready to jeer at any false step he might take; that's why he spoke in a near whisper while the two women answered him loudly enough for the audience to hear, because the presence of the audience was an advantage to them and a disadvantage to him. And so he told them that he was submitting to them and that he wanted to leave; but they replied (again flirtatiously) that he should stay; it would give them pleasure, they said, if he observed them at work; so he spent a few minutes watching the cameraman shooting various photos from the album before leaving for his room, where he pretended to be reading or working; confused reflections filed through his mind; he tried to find an advantage in this entirely disadvantageous situation, and he thought that the filmmaker might have conceived the idea of this filming to get in touch with him; he reflected that in that case Mama was merely an obstacle to be patiently circumvented; he tried to calm himself and think of a way to utilize this ridiculous filming to his own benefit, that is, to make up for the loss that had tormented him since the night he had stupidly left the filmmaker's room; he tried to overcome his shyness and periodically went out to glance into the next room and see how the filming was going, with the hope of repeating, if only once, their reciprocal gazes, the long motionless look that had so captivated him at the filmmaker's villa apartment; but this time the filmmaker was indifferent to him and absorbed in her work, and their eyes met only rarely and fleetingly; he therefore gave up his attempts and decided to accompany the filmmaker home when she was finished working.

  When the three men were going downstairs to stow the camera and lights in their van, he came out of his room. And he heard Mama saying to the filmmaker: "Let's go out somewhere for coffee."

  During their afternoon of work together, while he had been shut away in his room, the two women had begun to use the familiar pronoun with each other!

  When he realized this, it was as if his lover had just been whisked away from under his nose. He coldly said goodbye to the filmmaker, and as soon as the two women left the house he too left and quickly and angrily headed toward the redhead's building; she wasn't home; he paced up and down in front of the building for nearly half an hour, his mood increasingly gloomy, until he saw her at last; her face expressed delighted surprise, and his expressed hars
h reproaches: Why hadn't she been home? Why hadn't she realized that he was probably coming? Where had she gone to be coming home so late?

  She had hardly closed the door when he tore off her dress; then he made love to her, imagining that the woman lying under him was the dark-eyed woman; hearing the redhead's sighs but simultaneously seeing dark eyes, he had the impression that the sighs belonged to those eyes, and this so aroused him that he made love several times in a row, but never for more than a few seconds each time. The redheaded young woman found this so peculiar that she began to laugh; but Jaromil was particularly sensitive to irony that day, and the friendly indulgence of the redhead's laughter escaped him; offended, he gave her a pair of slaps; she began to cry; for Jaromil that was like a balm; she cried, and he struck her again; the tears of a woman we have made cry are redemption; they are Jesus Christ dying for us on the cross; for some moments Jaromil enjoyed the sight of the redhead's tears, and then he kissed her face, soothed her, and went home quite serenely.

  A few days later the filming resumed; again the van came and three men (that hostile audience) got out, along with the beautiful girl whose sighs he had heard two evenings before at the redhead's; and of course there was also Mama, getting younger and younger, resembling a musical instrument that growled, thundered, laughed, and broke out of the orchestra to play a solo.

  This time the camera lens was to be aimed directly at Jaromil; he had to be shown in his everyday surroundings, at his desk, in the garden (for Jaromil, it seemed, loved the garden, the flower beds, the lawn, the flowers); he had to be shown with Mama, who, let's remember, had already recorded a lengthy commentary on her son. The filmmaker sat them down on a bench in the garden and compelled Jaromil to chat normally with his mother; this apprenticeship in normality lasted an hour, and Mama didn't for a moment lose her energy; she was always saying something or other (in the film nothing of what they were saying would be heard, their inaudible conversation would be accompanied by the prerecorded maternal commentary), and when she noticed that Jaromil's expression was insufficiently amiable, she began explaining to him that it wasn't easy to be the mother of a boy like him, a timid, solitary boy who always had stage fright.

  After that they shoved him into the van and took him to the romantic spot on the outskirts of Prague where Jaromil, Mama was convinced, had been conceived. She was too prudish ever to have dared tell why this landscape was so dear to her; even though she had wanted to, she hadn't told anyone, and now she told everyone, with forced ambiguity, that for her this particular landscape had always represented a sensual landscape, a landscape of love. "Look how the soil undulates, it looks like a woman, like her curves, like her maternal shapes! And look at those boulders, those blocks of gigantic boulders rising in the background! Isn't there something virile about those overhanging, steep, vertical boulders? Isn't this a landscape of man and woman? Isn't this an erotic landscape?"

  Jaromil wished to rebel; he wanted to tell them that their film was silly; he felt rising in him the pride of a man who knows what good taste means; he might have made a small and useless fuss or at least run away, as he had from the swimming place on the shore of the Vltava, but this time he couldn't; the filmmaker's dark eyes rendered him powerless; he was afraid of losing them a second time; those eyes barred his avenue of escape.

  They posed him in front of a huge boulder and told him to recite his favorite poem. Mama was at a height of excitement. It was such a long time since she had been here! Exactly at the spot where she had made love with a young engineer on a Sunday morning so many years ago, exactly here her son was now standing; as if, after so many years, he had sprung up here like a mushroom (ah, yes, as if children came to be like mushrooms exactly at the spot where their parents mingled their seed!); Mama was carried away by the sight of this strange, beautiful, impossible mushroom reciting, in a quavering voice, lines about his wish to die by fire.

  Jaromil felt that he was reciting very badly, but he couldn't help it; however much he told himself that he had no stage fright, that in the police villa the other evening he had recited masterfully and splendidly, here it was too much for him; standing in front of this absurd boulder in that absurd landscape, in a panic at the thought that someone might pass by walking his dog or strolling with his girl (you see, he had the same fears as his mother twenty years earlier!), he was unable to concentrate, and he uttered his words unnaturally and with difficulty.

  They compelled him to repeat his poem several times in succession, and finally they gave up. "He's always had stage fright!" sighed Mama. "Even in high school he trembled at every exam; often I had to drag him to school by force because of his stage fright!"

  The filmmaker said that they would dub an actor reciting the poem and that all Jaromil had to do was stand in front of the boulder and silently move his lips. That's what he did.

  "Dammit!" the filmmaker shouted impatiently. "You have to move your mouth properly, as if you were reciting your poem, not just any old way. The actor will recite the poem by following the movement of your lips!"

  And so Jaromil stood in front of the boulder, moved his lips (obediently and properly), and the camera finally hummed.

  The day before yesterday he had stood outside facing the camera in a light coat, but today he had to wear a heavy winter coat, a scarf, and a hat; it had snowed. He was meeting her in front of her building at six o'clock. But it was already six-fifteen, and the redhead had not yet turned up.

  A delay of fifteen minutes was certainly not serious; but Jaromil, after all the humiliations he had undergone the last few days, was unable to bear the merest slight; he had to pace up and down in front of the building in a street full of people who could see that he was waiting for someone in no hurry to join him, thus making his failure public.

  He didn't dare look at his watch, fearing that this ail-too eloquent gesture would reveal him in the eyes of everyone on the street as a lover waiting in vain; he pulled up the sleeve of his overcoat slightly and slipped its edge under his watchband so as to be able to keep glancing inconspicuously at the time; when he saw that it was six-twenty, he nearly went into a frenzy: Why was he always a few minutes early, and why did she, so stupid and ugly, always turn up late?

  She finally turned up and saw Jaromil's stony face. They went into her room, sat down, and the girl apologized: she had been with a young woman friend. She couldn't have found a worse thing to say. Of course nothing could have absolved her, especially not a young woman friend who to Jaromil was the very essence of insignificance. He told the redhead that he was well aware of the importance of her diversions with her friend; that is why he suggested that she turn around and go right back to her friend's place.

  The girl realized that things were going badly; she told him that she and her friend had spoken of very serious matters; the friend was about to break up with her boyfriend; the friend seemed to be very sad, she was weeping, the redhead wanted to calm her, and she couldn't leave before she had comforted her.

  Jaromil said that it was very generous of her to have dried her friends tears. But who was going to dry the redheaded girl's tears when Jaromil broke up with her because he refused to continue seeing a girl to whom a friend's stupid tears meant more than he did?

  The girl realized that things were going from bad to worse; she apologized again, said she was sorry, and asked his forgiveness.

  But this was too little for his humiliation's insatiable appetite; he replied that her excuses made no difference to his conviction: what the redheaded girl called love was not love at all; no, he said, anticipating her objections, it wasn't pettiness that caused him to draw extreme conclusions from an apparently ordinary episode; it was in fact such small details that revealed the basis of the redhead's feelings toward Jaromil; that intolerable flightiness, that typical heedlessness with which she treated Jaromil, just as if he were a woman friend, a customer in the store, a passerby on the street!

  She must never again have the gall to tell him that she loved hi
m! Her love was only a paltry imitation of love!

  The girl realized that things couldn't possibly get worse. She tried to break into Jaromil's malicious sadness with a kiss; he pushed her away almost brutally; she took advantage of this to fall to her knees and press her head against his stomach; he hesitated for a moment, but then he lifted her up and coldly asked her not to touch him.

  The hatred that went to his head like alcohol was beautiful and fascinating; it fascinated him all the more in that it echoed back to him from the young woman and wounded him in turn; it was a self-destructive anger, for he knew very well that by driving the redheaded girl away he was driving away the only woman he had; he sensed that his anger was unjustified and that he was unjust to the girl, but knowing this was probably what made him still more cruel, for what attracted him was the abyss; the abyss of solitude, the abyss of self-condemnation; he knew that he would be unhappy without his girlfriend (he would be alone) and dissatisfied with himself (he was aware that he had been unjust), but this knowledge was powerless against the splendid intoxication of anger. He told her that what he had just said was not only for now but forever: he never wanted to be touched by her hand again.

  This was not the first time the girl had encountered Jaromil's anger and jealousy; but this time she perceived an almost frantic obstinacy in his voice; she felt that Jaromil was capable of doing anything to satisfy his incomprehensible fury. Nearly at the last moment, nearly at the edge of the abyss, she said: "I beg you, don't be angry; I lied to you. I wasn't at a friend's."

  He was bewildered: "Where were you then?"

  "You'll be furious, you don't like him, I can't help it, but I had to go see him." "Well, who were you with?"

  "With my brother. The one who stayed at my place."

  He was outraged: "Why do you always need to be with him?"

  "Don't get mad; I don't care about him. Compared to you he means nothing at all to me, but you have to understand that he's my brother, after all; we grew up together for fifteen years. He's going away. For a long time. I had to say goodbye to him."