Life Is Elsewhere (18 page)

My God! This had happened before! It had happened the evening he was walking in Stromovka Park with the girl from his dancing class! This gesture of the head, which had aroused him that evening, again had the same effect on him: he was aroused! He was immensely and conspicuously aroused! But this time he was not ashamed, on the contrary, this time he was desperately hoping that the girl would notice his arousal!

But the girls head was resting sadly on his shoulder, and God knows what she was looking at through her glasses.

Jaromil's arousal persisted, victoriously, proudly, steadily, visibly, and he wanted her to see and appreciate it! He wanted to seize the girl's hand and put it on his body, but this was only a thought that seemed crazy and impractical to him. Then he realized that if they stopped and kissed, the girl's body would feel his arousal.

But when his slowing steps made her perceive that he

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was going to stop to kiss her, she said: "No, no, please don't ..." and she said this so sadly that Jaromil silently obeyed. And that creature between his legs seemed to him to be a prancing buffoon, a clown, an enemy making fun of him. He was walking with a sad strange head on his shoulder and a strange mocking clown between his legs.

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Perhaps he imagined that sadness and the craving for consolation (the famous poet had still not answered) justified some kind of unusual gesture, so he dropped in on the painter unexpectedly. When he reached the entrance he realized from the sound of

voices that there were a number of people inside, and he tried to excuse himself and leave; but the painter cordially invited him into the studio, where he introduced him to his guests, three men and two women.

Jaromil felt his cheeks flushing under the gaze of five strangers, but at the same time he was flattered; the painter introduced him as the author of excellent poetry and spoke of him as if his guests had already heard of him. That was a pleasant feeling. As he sat in the armchair looking around, he noticed with great pleasure that the two women were prettier than his student. Such natural elegance as they crossed their legs, flicked ashes from their cigarettes into the ashtray, and combined erudite terms and obscene words into bizarre sentences! Jaromil had the impression that he was in an elevator taking him to beautiful heights where the torturing voice of the girl with glasses would not reach his ears.

One of the women turned to him and amicably asked him what kind of poetry he wrote. "Just poetry," he said, shrugging his shoulders in embarrassment. "Remarkable poetry," the painter added, and Jaromil

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lowered his head; the other woman looked at him and said in an alto voice: "Here with us, he makes me think of Rimbaud with Verlaine and his friends in the painting by Fantin-Latour. A child among men. They say that Rimbaud at eighteen looked thirteen. And you too," she said, turning to Jaromil, "look like a child."

(I can't resist observing that this woman leaned over Jaromil with the same cruel tenderness as when the sisters of Rimbaud's teacher Izambard, the famous "lice hunters," leaned over Rimbaud upon his return from one of his extended adventures and washed, cleaned, and deloused him.)

"Our friend," said the painter, "has the good fortune, which won't last long, of no longer being a child and not yet being a man."

"Puberty is the most poetic age," said the first woman.

"You'd be astonished," the painter said with a smile, "at how perfect and mature the poems of this imperfect and immature virgin are."

"That's right," one of the men agreed, showing by this that he knew Jaromil's poetry and approved of the painter's praise.

"Are you going to publish them?" the woman with the alto voice asked Jaromil.

"I doubt that the era of positive heroes and busts of Stalin is auspicious for his poetry," said the painter.

The mention of positive heroes again steered the conversation back to the course it had been on before Jaromil's arrival. Jaromil was familiar with such issues and could easily have participated in the discussion, but he was no longer listening to what they were saying. Echoing endlessly through his head was that he looked thirteen, that he was a child, that he was a virgin. He knew, of course, that no one here wished to offend him and that the painter sincerely liked his poems, but that only made things worse: at the moment his poems meant nothing to him. He'd give up their maturity a thousand times over in exchange for his own maturity. He'd give up all his poems for one single coition.

An animated debate ensued, and Jaromil wanted to leave. But he felt so weighed down he had trouble finding the words to announce his departure. He was afraid to hear his own voice; he was afraid that it would shake or crack and once more expose his childish immaturity to the light of day. He wanted to become invisible, to tiptoe far away and disappear, to doze off and sleep a long time and wake up dozens of years later, when his face had aged and would be showing masculine creases.

The woman with the alto voice again turned to him: "Why are you so quiet, my child?"

He mumbled that he preferred listening to talking (though he hadn't been listening at all), and he thought that it was impossible for him to escape the sentence the student had passed on him and that the verdict of virginity rendered against him, which he bore like a mark (my God, just looking at him everyone could see that he'd never had a woman!), had been confirmed once more.

And because he knew that everyone was looking at him, he was bitterly aware of his face and felt, nearly with dread, that on that face was his Manias smile! He clearly recognized that delicate, bitter smile, he felt it stuck on his lips and he had no way to get rid of it. He felt that Mama was glued on his face, that she swathed him as a chrysalis swathes a larva, denying it the right to its own look.

There he was, among adults and inside Mama's chrysalis, and Mama was holding him tight in her arms, pulling him away from a world he wanted to belong to and that behaved kindly toward him and yet as one behaves toward someone who still has no place in that world. This situation was so intolerable that Jaromil gathered all his strength to throw off the mother mask, to escape it; he tried hard to listen to the debate.

It focused on an issue that at the time was being passionately debated by all artists. In Bohemia modern art had always called for a Communist revolution; but when the revolution came, it had proclaimed a program of unconditional adherence to a popular realism comprehensible to everyone and had rejected modern art as a monstrous manifestation of bourgeois decadence. "That's our dilemma," said one of the painter's guests. "Should we betray the modern art we grew up with or the revolution we called for?"

"The question is badly put," said the painter. "A revolution that resurrects academic art and manufactures thousands of copies of politicians' busts betrays not only modern art but first of all betrays itself. Such a revolution doesn't want to change the world, but rather the contrary: it wants to preserve the most reactionary spirit of history, the spirit of fanaticism, discipline, dogmatism, faith, and conventionality. For us there's no dilemma. As true revolutionaries we cannot agree to this betrayal of the revolution."

Jaromil would not have found it difficult to elaborate on the painters idea, the logic of which he knew very well, but he was loath to appear here in the role of the touching pupil, the obedient, praiseworthy boy. He was overcome by the desire to rebel, and turning to the painter, he said:

"You're always quoting Rimbaud: 'It is necessary to be absolutely modern.' I agree completely. But the absolutely modern isn't what we've been anticipating for fifty years, but, on the contrary, what shocks and surprises us. The absolutely modern isn't surrealism, which has been around for a quarter of a century, but the revolution that's taking place at the moment under our eyes. The very fact that you don't understand this is quite simply proof that it's really new."

Someone interrupted him: "Modern art was a movement directed against the bourgeoisie and against its world."

"Yes," said Jaromil, "but if it had really been logical in its negation of the contemporary world, it would have had to reckon with its own disappearance. It would have had to know—and it would have had to wish—that the revolution would create a totally new kind of art, an art in its own image."

"So you approve," said the woman with the alto voice, "of pulping Baudelaire's poetry, prohibiting all modern literature, and shoving the cubist paintings in the National Gallery into the cellar?"

"A revolution is an act of violence," said Jaromil, "that's well known, and surrealism itself knew very well that old-timers have to be brutally kicked off the stage, but it didn't suspect that it was one of them."

In a fury of humiliation, he expressed his ideas, as he himself was aware, precisely and spitefully. Only one thing unsettled him from his very first words on: once again he was hearing the painter's distinctive, authoritative tone in his own voice, and he was unable to prevent his right hand from describing in the air the painter's characteristic gestures. It was actually a strange debate between the painter and the painter, between the man painter and the child painter, between the painter and his rebellious shadow. Jaromil was aware of this, and he felt even more humiliated; thus his formulations became more and more harsh, so as to revenge himself on the painter, who had imprisoned him in his gestures and his voice.

The painter twice replied to Jaromil with rather lengthy explanations, but the third time he remained silent. He merely looked at him with severity, and Jaromil knew that he would never again enter his studio. Everyone was silent until the woman with the alto voice (this time she no longer spoke leaning over him tenderly like Izambard's sister leaning over Rimbaud's deloused head, but on the contrary seeming to withdraw from him sadly and with surprise): "I don't know your poetry, but from what I've heard about it, it might be difficult to publish under the regime you've just defended with such vehemence."

Jaromil thought of his latest poem, about the two old people and their last love; he was aware that this poem, which he liked immensely, could never by published in this era of optimistic slogans and propaganda poems, and that by renouncing it now he would be renouncing what he held most dear, renouncing his only riches, without which he would be all alone.

But there was something more precious than his poems; something far away he didn't yet possess and longed for—manliness; he knew that it could only be attained by action and courage; and if courage meant courage to be rejected, rejected by everything, by the beloved woman, by the painter, and even by his own poems—so be it: he wanted to have that courage. And so he said:

"Yes, I know that the revolution has no need for my poems. I regret that, because I like them. But unfortunately my regret is no argument against their uselessness.

Again there was silence, and then one of the men said: "This is dreadful,'' and he actually shuddered as if a chill had run down his spine. Jaromil felt the horror his words had produced in everyone there, that they were seeing in him the living disappearance of everything they loved, everything that made life worthwhile.

It was sad but also beautiful: within the space of an instant, Jaromil lost the feeling of being a child.

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Mama read the poems Jaromil silently put on her table and tried to read the life of her son between the lines. If only the poems were written in plain language! Their sincerity was deceptive; they were full of puzzles and hints; Mama knew that her son's head was full of women, but she knew nothing about what he did with them.

So she ended up opening Jaromil's desk drawer and rummaging in it for his diary. She knelt on the floor and leafed through it emotionally; the entries were terse, but even so she could discern that her son was in love; because he designated his beloved only with an initial, Mama was unable to tell who the woman was; on the other hand, with a passion for detail Mama found repugnant, he gave the date of their first kiss and the dates when he first touched her breasts and her buttocks.

Then she came to a date written in red and decorated with numerous exclamation marks; the entry read: "Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Ah, dear bald-headed old Jaromil, when you read this many years from now, remember that on this day began the real history of your life!"

Thinking quickly, she recalled that this was the day she had left Prague with Grandmama; and she recalled that on her return she had found her precious little perfume bottle unstoppered in the bathroom; she had asked Jaromil what he had been doing with her perfume, and he answered, embarrassed: "I was playing with ..." Oh, how stupid she had been! She remembered that when Jaromil was small he wanted to be an inventor of perfumes, and this memory was touching. Therefore she merely said: "You're a bit too big to be playing such games!" But now everything was clear: a woman had been in the bathroom, the woman with whom Jaromil had spent that night in the villa and with whom he had lost his virginity.

She imagined his naked body; she imagined next to this body the naked body of a woman, she imagined that this female body was perfumed with her perfume and that therefore the woman's odor was the same as her own; that disgusted her. She looked again at the diary and noticed that the entries ceased after the date with the exclamation marks. There it is, it's all over for a man after he goes to bed with a woman for the first time, she thought bitterly, and her son seemed contemptible to her.

For a few days she avoided him. Then she observed that he was pale and had lost weight; because of too much lovemaking, she was sure.

A few days later she noticed not only fatigue but also sadness in her son's dejection. That reconciled her somewhat with him and gave her hope: she told herself that girlfriends wound and mothers comfort; she told herself that girlfriends are many and a mother is one and only. I must fight for him, I must fight for him, she repeated, and from that moment on she began circling him like a vigilant, compassionate tigress.