The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  These are several journal entries of that period. Although I realized that, in Frau Anders’ absence, I should not neglect my sexual needs, the pleasures of spectatorship came to interest me more than my own performance. From spending only my late afternoons with Jean-Jacques, I began to accompany him on his nightly rounds. It was a mild spring and a voluptuous summer.

  We would meet at his café at aperitif time. He would have just emerged from his regimen of writing, and always greeted me with a vacant and distracted look. I soon understood that this merely signified the slow return of his attention from its lunar voyage of withdrawal. By the second vermouth he would be chatting gaily about old furniture or the opera, or I would be leading him into the maze of my latest reflection about my dreams.

  When his energies had returned, we would leave the café and go to his hotel. Jean-Jacques was permanently and comfortably installed in a large, atelier-sized room on the top floor. For a while I liked just to sit on the bed and watch him shave and dress. He was very conscious of clothes, perhaps because he was plain-faced, lean, and even a little nondescript. “I have the face of a stock broker,” I once heard him mutter to his image in the mirror. The choice of his apparel for the evening was as carefully considered as if he were an actor making-up in his dressing room, which in a way he was. Sometimes he felt boisterous, and assembled a real costume, such as the red kerchief, striped shirt, and tight black pants of an apache. Generally the choices were more delicate—it was a question of the slimness of the pants; leather jacket or turtleneck sweater, rings, military or dandyish; the boots or the pointed shoes.

  Later, when the fascination of his dressing had become more familiar to me, I used to amuse myself looking among the objects in his room. Jean-Jacques was a collector. On tables, and on the floor, under the bed and in corners of the room, were boxes of strange treasure. In one box were hundreds of turn-of-the-century picture postcards of music hall dancers. There were files of newspaper clippings about prize-fighters and wrestlers, autographed photos of film stars, and confidential police reports (I never found out how he got hold of these) on cases of armed robbery committed in the capital in the last twenty years. In other boxes there were fringed scarves, fans, seashells, feather boas, cheap jewelry, miscellaneous carved chessmen, wigs. It seemed that whenever I came he had installed something new in his room—another Epinal print, a Boy Scout hat, an art nouveau mirror with a snake design, a beaded lamp, a piece of cemetery statuary, a circus poster, a set of marionettes representing Bluebeard and eight wives, a white-and-green wool rug with the shape and design of an American dollar bill. When I tired of looking and touching, he would play records for me: an aria from an obscure melodramatic opera of the last century, or an old java. I did not share these enthusiasms. Since I knew Jean-Jacques to have the most scrupulous judgment in all the arts, his love of these exaggerated, trivial, and vulgar artifacts was a mystery to me. “My dear Hippolyte,” he would say, “you will never understand, but sometime I will explain it to you anyway.” I do not think of myself as a solemn person, but Jean-Jacques made me feel so.

  When he had finished dressing we would go down, past the deaf old concierge who never failed to shout some cheerless obscene compliment to Jean-Jacques. Once in the street, Jean-Jacques walked stealthily but steadily, and I followed at a distance. Usually he had to wait no more than an half-hour before someone, silently, joined him. If he were concerned solely for his own pleasure, it might be a truck-driver, an immaculate Italian business man, an Arab, or a student; the main requirement was that his partner be evidently manly in his appearance and tastes. For this purpose, he could venture almost anywhere in the city and might remain with whomever he found for the entire evening. But if he were out to be paid, he was confined to certain neighborhoods and cafés where he would find the confirmed homosexuals, invariably middle-aged or elderly, to whom he appealed as a rough type, and who would be eager to pay him for some minutes of his virile company. He and his companion would merely go off to the quais and disappear beneath a bridge; or if the financial prospect were more promising Jean-Jacques would take the man to his own room, and would not return to the route he patrolled until an hour or two later.

  I therefore cannot speak with much knowledge of what Jean-Jacques did for his own pleasures; on these excursions, understandably, he went alone. But on the several nights a week which he would set aside for business, I would often accompany him through the entire evening. While he was off with a client I would wait for him in various cafés which were the specialized territory of the male prostitute—of the delicate-featured young boys, the toughs and bandits like Jean-Jacques, and the transvestites. Gradually I, too, became known and came to sit at tables of the waiting, gossiping sisterhood of men, the peroxided and beringed friends of my friend. They did not talk to me much, although their regard was always amiable; polite conversation in that circle, conversation that was not about their vocation, was unthinkable. Their sentences were expletive, never expository. They had no opinions. They knew only two emotions, jealousy and love, and their talk, which was often spiteful, was only of beauty. Folles de nuit, madwomen of the nights, was what they jokingly called themselves. A genuine whore is rare; most whores are businessmen. But these whores really loved their clients. They had gone too far in demonstrating their love for the bodies of their own sex to feel the detachment which a female prostitute customarily feels toward men. They were so proud of their ability to give pleasure that they did not allow themselves to feel rejected when, after making love, their clients reviled them.

  When I was not sitting in such cafés the nights of that summer I too walked the streets—observing further how men employ themselves for their pleasure. I frequented the other public stations of this transient lust, where I learned to recognize the more disguised homosexuals who sought each other in the urinals and the back rows of cinemas. I cannot think of a more perfect example of understanding without words than these faultless encounters. Not a word was exchanged, but some mysterious chemistry of attraction drew them together to grasp each other in public places—they never seemed to make a mistake—and to consummate the sexual act with such swiftness that it was as if each man worked singly at a task which could only be performed alone, the other invisibly assisting.

  Once I came upon such a scene already in process, among a number of men in a pissoir. There was perfect silence. A tall Arab in an ill-fitting blue suit had seized the member of the man urinating beside him. That man seized that of his neighbor, and so on down a line of men, none of them in the least effeminate-looking, all responding as though to a prearranged signal. It was like a dream, in that the strange had become easy, the willed merely necessary. And then, as quickly, the line was broken, the dancers abandoned the rhythm; it was over and the men walked out, hitching up their pants.

  Another time, in a Metro lavatory, I witnessed the scene from the beginning. It started with jokes, and a fight between an African and a dark well-dressed man over an insult which I had not heard. They began to grapple with each other and others gathered around shouting words of encouragement, until the fight—which I soon realized was a delicate pretext—spread to the spectators and each man was pushing and shoving his neighbor, calling out obscene insults. One cried, “You wouldn’t dare!” and another, “I challenge you to repeat that outside!” and another, “Let me out of here!” But no one left. The shoving and shouting continued at the same level—the African and the businessman were already on their knees—and I joined in, taking care neither to exceed nor to fall short of my neighbors in vehemence. I wondered why the shouting prolonged itself since it was so repetitive, and they seemed to be growing less rather than more angry. Then another man dropped to his knees, then another. Now the spirit of the encounter had taken over, flushing away the dark uncertain scraps of each man’s personality. Silence came to each in turn, like the serial extinguishing of candles. And on the cold tile floor the act of love was performed in haste but dexterously, with economy and profe
ssionalism.

  When I began to acompany my friend the writer, I had no opinions about his activities, and even if I had felt licensed to urge him to a less perverse and promiscuous life, I would have held my tongue. Jean-Jacques, however, would not allow my silence. Though I did not attack him, he was resolute and ingenious in his own defense, or rather the defense of the pleasures of disguises, secrecy, entrapments, and being-what-one-is-not.

  Several times that summer, he tried to overturn my unspoken objections. “Don’t be so solemn, Hippolyte. You are worse than a moralist.” While I could not help regarding this world of illicit lust as a dream, skillful but also weighty and dangerous, he saw it simply as theatre. “Why should we all not exchange our masks—once a night, once a month, once a year?” he said. “The masks of one’s job, one’s class, one’s citizenship, one’s opinions. The masks of husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave. Even the masks of the body—male and female, ugly and beautiful, old and young. Most men, without resisting, put them on and wear them all their lives. But the men around you in this café do not. Homosexuality, you see, is a kind of playfulness with masks. Try it and you will see how it induces a welcome detachment from yourself.”

  But I did not want to be detached from myself, but rather in myself.

  “What is a revolutionary act in our time?” he asked me, rhetorically, at another meeting. “To overturn a convention is like answering a question. He who asks a question already excludes so much that he may be said to give the answer at the same time. At least he marks off a zone, the zone of legitimate answers to his question. You understand?”

  “Yes, I understand. But not what bearing it has—”

  “Look, Hippolyte. You know how little audacity is required today to be unconventional. The sexual and social conventions of our time prescribe the homosexual parody.”

  I could not agree. “It takes courage to parody the normal,” I said. “Courage and a great capacity for guilt. I don’t see the humor in these proceedings that you do, my friend. Surely it would be easier for them—I exclude you, Jean-Jacques, because you’re not like the others—if things were as you say.”

  “You’re wrong,” he replied. “The price is not as exacting as you think.”

  “Doesn’t the transvestite who roams the streets yearn for his family whom he can no longer face because he has plucked his eyebrows?”

  “Hippolyte,” he said in an exasperated tone. “I am very angry that you speak of them—and exclude me. And thus you try to please me!”

  “But you aren’t like them, Jean-Jacques. You choose. They are obsessed.”

  “So much the worse for me,” he said. “No,” he continued, “to pretend one thing is only not to pretend something else. But to be obsessed is not to pretend at all. The sun does not play at rising every morning. Do you know why? Because the sun is obsessed with its tasks. All that we admire in nature under the name of order, and the basis of the confidence we repose in her regular movements, is obsession.”

  The idea struck me as true. “Then obsession, not virtue, is the only sensible ground for trust.”

  “Right,” he said. “Which is why I trust you.”

  Then I thought, that is why I cannot trust you, Jean-Jacques. But this I did not say.

  You see, even if I did not trust Jean-Jacques I honored and admired him as a mentor and companion in the search for the self. But so much of taste and habits of character separated us. Because he was absolutely committed to his work, writing, he could afford to be unreliable in every other way—and to ornament his life with games, strategies, and artifacts. These strange rites he practiced with himself were not mine.

  “You and I are very much alike,” he explained to me on another evening of that ambulatory summer.

  I expressed surprise.

  “Only,” he continued, “you will not succeed and I will. I am prepared to carry out my character to the extreme—”

  “So am I,” I interrupted.

  “I am prepared to carry out my character to the extreme, which is a variety of character. You know nothing of varying yourself. You wish your character to be concentrated and clear, but you will find that when you have boiled away the water you have reduced yourself to an acid that is too strong for your own nostrils, not to speak of the world’s. You will burn away, while I—I am diluted through and through.”

  Of course I protested.

  “I know,” he went on, “that you think my life adventurous. How little you know of risk! You are the adventurer, the one taking risks, because you are not clear about what territory you are surveying, your body or your mind. If you mistake one for the other, you will stumble.”

  I listened intently. Although not a vain person, I enjoy hearing my friends talk about me.

  “My life is bizarre but tractable,” he went on. “Yours is too resolute and full of dangers…. It’s well to be serious, but not to understand seriousness as making a demand on you.”

  “If you mean,” I replied, “that I do not have your catholicity of taste, that is true.”

  “There are many demands,” he said. “Seriousness is only one of them. But I like you, Hippolyte,” he added, smiling, and put his arm around me. “You have character, like an American temperance tract or the great unfinished cathedral in Barcelona. Everything you do is you. You are incapable of being otherwise. That is why I … collect you.”

  Whatever I wanted from Jean-Jacques, it was not for him to find me merely amusing. I suppose this was the first moment I resented him.

  “I want to be myself, more than anyone else in the world,” I declared firmly.

  “And so you are, dear Hippolyte,” he said, smiling and propelling me toward the door of the crowded café where we sat that August evening. And just to show me that he could act out of character, that he could surprise me as I could never surprise him, that night he took me home with him to bed.

  This impromptu sexual encounter did not change our relationship. We parted as friends. But although the experiment was never repeated, I was dismayed at Jean-Jacques’ flippancy and vowed to be more on guard against him.

  I was never tempted to discuss Frau Anders with my friend, but then it is natural for me to be discreet. Jean-Jacques, however, was most indiscreet with me. He always had a new story to tell me about his latest conquest, or his latest enthusiasm. He discussed his sexual escapades—as well as his impoverished childhood, his boxing career, his thefts, everything except his writing—prodigally, without reserve; and I learned to my surprise that he was often impotent. Throughout these confidences I forebore remonstrating with him about his unnatural tastes and exaggerated life, for while I did not agree with Jean-Jacques’ curious theory that homosexuality was both guilt and humor, revolt and convention, it has never been my aim to interfere with other people’s happiness. This, you will remember, was one of the maxims I had decided upon early in my intellectual adventures. And Jean-Jacques seemed to me a happy man.

  Perhaps though I should have guessed that his cynical virility was partly sham. There was something in Jean-Jacques’ small eyes and high forehead, a look of ill health—but no, this was misleading. He was in perfect health. I, in contrast, have the look of good health that derives from a well-fed childhood, and the reliable body that makes the appearance true. The reader may have gathered that I do not experience difficulties of Jean-Jacques’ sort, however bizarre the situation, though I would not be surprised to learn that I miss certain peaks of satisfaction in the course of my unruffled potency.

  Neither have I ever suffered during long periods of sexual abstinence. In Frau Anders’ absence, I busied myself with reading and correspondence, with an occasional participation in the life of Jean-Jacques’ night, and in continued meditation on my dreams.

  I made an inventory of my possessions. I had a modest acceptable wardrobe—nothing to pare away there. I thought of selling my books, but I had not freed myself from the habit of reading a good part of each day. The furniture was another matte
r. All but the most necessary furniture—a bed, a chest of drawers, bookshelves—I gave away to student friends. Even the chair went, for I could sit on the bed. I also disposed of the few paintings which I owned, and the flute which I had purchased after my first dream. Eventually I got rid of the bed, too, and slept on a mat which I rolled up and put in the closet in the daytime.

  I was also concerned with the proper maintenance of my body, which I do not neglect and am never tempted to despise. Then I liked to take long walks, and found that any change of scene revived my too easily depleted energies. To supplement my walks, Jean-Jacques suggested a program of exercises of the type practiced in the Orient which I could do in my own rooms. The purpose of these exercises had nothing to do with the vain purpose of strengthening the body. They had nothing to do with the body, apart from the aim of reaching perfect control over it. They aimed, through the body, straight to the mind, to produce an alertness without content, a state of shimmering weightlessness. But it was mainly the idea of the exercises which attracted me; perhaps this is why I did not become proficient at them. I never did succeed in attaining control over my digestion and anal sphincter, so that I could vomit, excrete, and increte at will. Even after I stopped doing the exercises, however, I often imagined myself doing them, wearing a close-fitting bathing costume of black wool.

  I did practice regularly one less strenuous exercise, of my own invention, in which I performed on an invisible electronic instrument. I sat very still, trying to find the right posture, the right disposition of my arms and legs—in order to touch all the invisible nodes and start the current flowing. Sometimes it was not an electronic instrument which I played but an impalpable wind instrument, such as a flute: then I had to search for where I was to put my mouth, where the stops were, and what to play.