Life Is Elsewhere (12 page)

Now she looks at herself in the mirror and notes with surprise that her face is still young, and even, it seems to her, needlessly young, as if time has mistakenly and unjustly forgotten her. Recently she had learned that someone saw her in the street with Jaromil and had taken them for brother and sister; she finds that comical. All the same it pleases her; since then it has been a still greater pleasure for her to go to the theater or a concert with her son.

Besides, what else was left to her?

Grandmama had lost much of her health, staying home to darn Jaromil's socks and iron her daughter's dresses. She was filled with regrets and caring concern. Around her she created a melancholically loving atmosphere, intensifying the feminine character of the milieu (a milieu of double widowhood) in which Jaromil lived.

3

The walls of Jaromil's room were no longer decorated by his childhood sayings (with regret, Mama put them away in a drawer), but by twenty small reproductions of cubist and surrealist paintings he had cut out of magazines and pasted on cardboard. On the wall with them was a telephone receiver with a severed end of wire coming out of it (a telephone repairman had been in the villa some time ago, and Jaromil had seen in the defective receiver the kind of object that, removed from its usual context, creates a magical impression and can rightly be called a 
surrealist object
). But the image he most often examined was in the mirror hanging on the same wall. He studied nothing more carefully than his own face, nothing that tormented him more, and nothing (even if it was at the cost of strenuous effort) in which he invested more hope:

This face resembled Mama's, but because Jaromil was a man, the delicacy of its features was more striking: he had a good-looking, narrow nose and a small, slightly receding chin. This chin worried him a lot; he had read in a famous passage by Schopenhauer that a receding chin is a particularly repulsive feature because it is precisely his prominent chin that distinguishes man from ape. But then he came across a photograph of Rilke and saw that Rilke, too, had a receding chin, and this gave him priceless comfort. He would look at himself in the mirror for a long time, deperately struggling in the immense space between ape and Rilke.

His chin in fact was only moderately receding, and Mama rightly regarded her son's face as having the charm of a child's. But that tormented Jaromil even more than his

chin: the delicacy of his features made him seem a few years younger, and because his classmates were a year older than he, the childishness of his looks was striking, obvious, and a subject daily of numerous comments Jaromil was unable to forget for even an instant.

Oh, what a burden it was to bear such a face! How heavy it was, this fine drawing of features!

(Jaromil sometimes had terrible dreams: he dreamed that he had to lift some extremely light object—a teacup, a spoon, a feather—and he couldn't do it, that the lighter the object, the weaker he became, that he sank under its lightness; he experienced his dreams as nightmares and would wake up bathed in sweat; it seems to me that these dreams were about his fragile face, patterned in needlepoint lace he tried in vain to lift off and throw away.)

4

Poets come from homes where women rule: the sister of Trakl and those of Yesenin and Mayakovsky, the aunts of Blok, the grandmother of Holderlin and that of Lermontov, the nurse of Pushkin, and above all of course, the mothers, the poets' mothers, behind whom the fathers' shadows pale. Lady Wilde and Frau Rilke dressed their sons like little girls. Are you wondering why the child looked so anxiously at himself in the mirror? "It is time to become a man,'' Jiri Orten* wrote in his diary. During his entire life the poet searches for masculinity in the features of his face.

*Czech poet who died in 1941 at the age of twenty-two.

When he looked at himself in the mirror for a very long time, he succeeded in finding what he was looking for: a hard eye or a severe line of the mouth; but to do that it was of course essential to show a certain smile, or rather a certain grin that ferociously drew back his upper lip. He also sought a way to wear his hair that would alter his features: he tried to put his hair up above his forehead so as to give the impression of a thick, wild undergrowth; but alas, his hair, which Mama so cherished that she kept a bit of it in a locket, was the worst he could imagine: yellow as the down of a newly hatched chick and fine as dandelion fluff; it was impossible to shape; Mama often stroked his head and told him he had the hair of an angel. But Jaromil hated angels and loved devils; he longed to dye his hair black, but he didn't dare do it because dyeing his hair would be even more effeminate than being blond; all he could do was let it grow very long and shaggy.

He never lost an opportunity to check and correct his appearance; he never passed a shop window without a glance at himself. But the more he watched over his appearance, the more he became aware of it and the more troubling and painful it seemed. For example:

He is coming home from high school. The street is deserted, but far off he catches sight of a young woman coming toward him. They are unavoidably nearing each other. Jaromil is thinking about his face because he has seen that the woman is beautiful. He tries to put on his well-prepared tough-guy smile, but he senses that he won't manage it. He can think only of his face, whose childish femininity makes him ridiculous in the eyes of women, he is completely incarnated in that pathetic, sweet facelet, which stiffens, petrifies, and (calamity!) blushes! So he quickens his pace to reduce the risk of the woman casting her eyes on him, for if he were to allow a pretty woman to surprise him the moment he blushes, the shame would be unbearable!

5

The hours spent in front of the mirror made him touch the depths of despair; fortunately there was another mirror that took him to the stars. That exalting mirror was his poetry; he yearned for the poems he had not yet written, and those he had already written he remembered with the delectation men get from remembering women; he was not only the poems' author but also their theoretician and historian; he wrote reflections on what he had written, and he divided his output into different periods to which he gave names, so that in the course of two or three years he came to regard his poetic works as a historical process worthy of a historian's efforts.

This gave him solace:
down below
, where he lived his everyday life, where he went to his classes, where he had lunch with Mama and Grandmama, an unarticulated emptiness stretched out before him; but
up above
, in his poems, he showed the way, installing inscribed signposts; there time was articulated and differentiated; he went from one poetic period to another, enabling him (looking out of the corner of his eye at the appalling, uneventful stagnation down below) to anticipate, with exalted ecstasy, the advent of a new era that would open his imagination to undreamed-of horizons.

And he was also firmly and quietly confident that, despite the insignificance of his face (and of his life), he had within him exceptional riches; in other words, confidence in becoming one of the 
elect.

Let's stop at this word:

Jaromil continued to see the painter, not very often of course, because Mama was unenthusiastic about these visits; he had long since stopped drawing, but one day he gathered enough courage to show the painter some of his poems and after that brought him the rest. The painter read them with ardent interest and sometimes kept them to show his friends, which thrilled Jaromil because the painter, who had once showed such skepticism about his drawings, remained for Jaromil a steadfast authority; Jaromil was convinced that there exists an objective criterion (carefully maintained in the minds of initiates) for evaluating artistic values (just as the Sevres museum maintains a platinum standard meter), and that the painter knew what that criterion was.

But all the same there was something irritating about this: Jaromil had never been able to discern beforehand what the painter would like in his poems and what he would dislike; he would sometimes praise poems Jaromil had written in haste, and at other times he would sullenly dismiss poems Jaromil had great regard for. What did this mean? If Jaromil himself was incapable of understanding the value of what he had written, didn't he have to conclude that he was creating values mechanically, fortuitously, unknowingly, and unwittingly, and thus with no merit attached to it (just as he had once charmed the painter with a world of dog-headed people he had discovered quite by chance)?

"Surely you believe, don't you," the painter said to him one day when they had touched on this subject, "that a fantastic image you've put into your poem is the result of rational thought. Not so: it came to you out of nowhere; suddenly; unexpectedly; the author of that image is not you but rather someone inside you, someone who wrote your poem inside you. And that someone who wrote your poem is the omnipotent stream of the unconscious that flows through each of us; it's not due to your merits that this stream, to which we're all the same, has chosen to make you its violin.''

The painter thought of these words as a lesson in modesty, but they instantly kindled Jaromil's pride; all right then, it wasn't he who had created the images in his poem; but it was something mysterious that had chosen precisely his writing hand; he could thus take pride in something greater than merit; he could take pride in being 
elected.

Besides, he had never forgotten what the lady in the little spa had said: "This child has a great future ahead of him." He believed these words as if they were prophecies. The future consisted of unknown distances in which a vague image of revolution (the painter often spoke of its inevitability) merged with a vague image of the bohemian freedom of poets; he knew that he would fill that future with his glory, and this knowledge gave him the certainty that (free and independent) lived in him alongside the uncertainties that tormented him.

6

Ah, the long misery of afternoons when Jaromil is shut up in his room and looking, one after the other, into his two mirrors!

How is it possible? He has read everywhere that youth is the most plentiful period of life! Where then does such nothingness, such dispersal of living matter come from? Where does such emptiness come from?

That word was as unpleasant as the word "failure." And there were other words not to be said in his presence (at least in the house, that metropolis of emptiness). For example, the word "love" or the word "girls." How he hated the three people who lived on the villa's ground floor! They often had guests who stayed late into the night, and one could hear drunken voices, among them the shrill ones of women, that tore

at Jaromil's soul as he lay huddled under his blanket, unable to sleep. His cousin was only two years older than he, but those two years stood between them like Pyrenees separating one century from another; his cousin, a university student, brought pretty girls to the villa (with the amused complicity of his parents) and was vaguely contemptuous of Jaromil; his uncle was seldom there (he was absorbed in the shops he had inherited), but his aunt's voice thundered through the house; whenever she met Jaromil, she asked him her stereotypical question: "So, how's it going with the girls?" Jaromil wanted to spit in her face, because her condescendingly jovial question completely bared his misery. Not that he didn't go out with girls, but his dates were so rare that they were as far apart as the stars in the universe. The word "girls" sounded as sad to his ear as the word "yearning" and the word "failure."

Though his time was scarcely taken up by dates with girls, it was entirely occupied with the anticipation of dates, an anticipation that was no mere contemplation of the future but rather preparation and study. Jaromil was convinced that, for a date to succeed, it was essential not to fall into embarrassed silence, essential to know how to speak. A date with a girl was first of all the art of conversation. He therefore kept a special notebook in which he wrote down stories worth telling; not jokes, because they don't reveal anything personal about the teller. He wrote down his own adventures; but since he had not had any, he made them up; in this he showed good taste; the adventures he made up (or remembered reading or hearing about) and of which he was the hero didn't show him in a heroic light but only conveyed him delicately, almost imperceptibly, from the world of stagnation and emptiness into the world of activity and adventure.

He also wrote down quotations from various poems (incidentally, not poems he himself admired), in which the poets dealt with feminine beauty and that could pass for spontaneous repartee. For example, he wrote down in his notebook the line: "On your face, components of a tricolor: your eyes, your mouth, your hair ..." Of course he had to free the line of its rhythmic devices and say it to the girl as if it were a sudden and natural idea, a compliment both spontaneous and witty: "Your face has a tricolor on it! Eyes, mouth, hair. It's the only flag I'm going to honor!"

On every date Jaromil thinks about his prepared lines, worrying that his voice will seem unnatural, that his words will sound as if they were learned by heart and that his expression will be that of a talentless amateur. So he doesn't dare use them, but because they preoccupy him, he has nothing else to say. The date passes in painful silence. Jaromil senses the irony in the girl's look, and when they part he leaves with a feeling of failure.

When he gets home he angrily sits down at his desk and writes rapidly and with hatred: "Looks run out of your eyes like urine / I fire my rifle at those scared sparrows, your idiot thoughts / Between your legs, a pond jumping with armies of toads ... "

He writes on and on, and then reads his lines several times over, greatly satisfied with his fantasy, which seems to him marvelously diabolical.

I'm a poet, I'm a great poet, he tells himself, and then writes it down in his diary. "I am a great poet, I have a diabolical imagination, I feel what others do not feel ..."