The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  A less successful expression of my concern for my body was with diet experiments. I knew that some religious sects forbid their members to eat sour, pungent, or spicy foods, and all meat and intoxicating drink. I decided to see if these rules applied to me. Some weeks I would eat nothing but rice and fruit, while for certain periods I would eat only the forbidden foods. In neither case did I notice any significant change in my body’s sensations.

  It then occurred to me that there was no reason to reproach myself for not doing all the exercises. After all, what is their function? The exercises are a method of eliminating thought, of devoting oneself to the utmost void. But was not this the purpose that was served by my meditation on my dreams? The substitution was confirmed by what the exercise book, which Jean-Jacques lent me, recommends to the adept after the body is mastered: to be perfectly still, select a spot, and concentrate on it. This act of concentration is the real climax of the exercises. Concentration upon a particular spot rules out other thoughts; the mind is opened, and the light shines within. According to the exercise book, the concentration spot may be either a small, centrally placed part of one’s own body or a small object in one’s room. But was not this what I had been doing? I had something better than my nose or my navel, or a landscape on the wall. I had my dreams.

  I now turned back to my dreams with a new demand. If I was to concentrate on my dreams as an analogue to fasting or exercising, I wanted them to be bare and taciturn. But in this I was disappointed; they were not laconic but full of conversations. I wondered what I might do to curb the loquacity of my dreams.

  I dared to hope that one day my dreams would be altogether silent, as Jean-Jacques had once suggested. But for this large improvement, I felt I needed models. I found such a model in one of my favorite recreations, the temple of public dreams, the cinema. Films had already begun to talk at this time, but in out-of-the-way theatres I could still see old movies which were blessedly silent. The reading of medical books provided another model, in the chapters on aphasia. I wanted to emulate those who hear the voice, the sound of speech, but not the words; to an aphasiac, the words do not pronounce themselves. Though I was far from being able to put this into practice in my dreams, I came to understand that words coerce the feelings they attempt to embody. Words are not the proper vehicle for a general upheaval which destroys the old accumulation of feeling.

  I suppose I could be considered a stubborn person, but my stubbornness is not superficial or ostentatious. It lies deep down, and behaves like deference and humility. At least I was not entirely literal-minded, the most common cause of stubbornness. If I were, I would not have continued to talk with my friends.

  “Hippolyte, my dear,” Jean-Jacques said to me one early evening, as we walked along a boulevard, “you have taken a vow to be absurd. Not just one vow, even. Many vows. You make vows like a greedy pauper buying recklessly on the installment plan. You’re becoming more and more deeply in debt to yourself, and you are already bankrupt. What’s the point of encumbering yourself so?”

  I explained to Jean-Jacques how misleading was his metaphor. “I am not interested in buying or possessing anything,” I said. “I am only interested in postures.”

  “Then I tell you to break your posture and dance. You look at yourself too much. That’s the beginning of all absurdity. Look about you. The world is an interesting place.”

  I replied that I waited for my dreams to be explained to me.

  “There are no explanations,” he said, “just as there should be no vows and promises. To explain one thing is to make another thing—which only litters the world the more. What blank useless things your explanations will be when you finally settle on them!”

  “But you, Jean-Jacques, your life is filled with useless passions and contradictory pleasures.”

  “It’s not the same,” he said. “Let me tell you a story which will explain. I know two pacifists. One is a man who believes that violence is wrong and acts in a way that accords with his beliefs. He has committed himself to being a pacifist, and so he is. He acts as a pacifist because he is one.”

  “And the other?”

  “The other man abjures violence in all situations and therefore knows he is a pacifist. He is a pacifist because he acts like one. Do you see the difference?”

  I did not, and it is never my habit to claim more understanding than I have.

  “Look,” he said. “I am a writer, yes? You know that I write every day. But I might not write tomorrow, from tomorrow on I might never write again. I am a writer because I write. I do not write because I am a writer.”

  I thought I understood then, and was disheartened by the distance which Jean-Jacques was putting between us. “But you said you were going to tell me a story,” I said, pushing aside my melancholy thoughts. “You have only introduced two characters.”

  “Oh, the story is that the man who was a pacifist because he acted like one killed his wife yesterday. I was in court this afternoon when he was arraigned.”

  “And the other?”

  He laughed. “That one, he’s still a pacifist.”

  “And you find some … beauty … in the murderer who violated his principles?” Again I was baffled.

  “No beauty. Only life. Don’t you see, that man had never acted out of principles. He had taken no vows—and neither have I. Therefore nothing I do is useless or contradictory, as you thought a moment ago. It is you who are scattered and dismembered.”

  “Language does that to me,” I murmured, half to myself. “My dreams are too talkative. Perhaps, if I didn’t speak—”

  “No, no, don’t tamper with yourself any more than you have! It’s much simpler. All you have to do is speak without trying to prolong the life of your words. For each word that is spoken, another word must die.”

  “Then I must learn to destroy.”

  “Not destroy either!” He was becoming exasperated with me. “Life will take care of itself, unless it is diluted by too much life.”

  “I want to improve the mixture, but you tell me I am brewing an acid.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “But I know it does you no good to tell you these things. Oh, I could tell you many things…. Listen, if I tell you something, will you promise not to seize on it as a candidate for your damned set of rules for yourself? Please.”

  I promised.

  “One should always be submerged. But never in one thing.” He paused. “Now, doesn’t that sound like a rule?”

  I acknowledged that it did.

  “But it isn’t, it needn’t be. Imagine that submergence is not a rule or a vow on which you act, making you diversify your tastes and affections, but something you discover each day about yourself. Each day you—rather, I—discover that I am engrossed, submerged, in something or someone.”

  “But don’t you think about what to do with your discoveries? Doesn’t it happen that one overwhelms the rest and makes you want to change your life?”

  “Why should I change my life?” he said. “Why can’t I have everything I want? You see,” he smiled roguishly, “how the bees come straight to my honey.”

  Was this another scene of seduction? Better to change the subject! “And I believe,” I spoke slowly and solemnly, “that one should always be submerged. Like you, Jean-Jacques. But the rest cannot be decided. My temperament is more serious than yours, as I think we both agree, but do not caricature me as a man who decides everything while feeling nothing. I assure you I am a man of feeling.” I thought tenderly of Frau Anders.

  “No, little Hippolyte, you do not decide anything. You linger atrociously over your dreams. You let them influence your acts, only because you have decided to be the man-who-dreams. You are like a man who discovers a log across his path, and instead of pushing aside the log he calls in a construction company to widen the entire road.

  “You will trip,” he called after me as I left him.

  SIX

  “No,” I said to myself one day. “It’s very clear, I have not yet
done with Frau Anders. I am waiting for her.”

  Frau Anders returned, strangely irritable, from accompanying her husband on the business trip which had evolved into a world tour and second honeymoon. I had never known her like this. “How dead the world is,” she cried, “how dreary the people in it! I used to be so gay, so eager for life. Now I can barely lift my head from the pillow in the morning.” I urged her to come away with me, to leave her husband and his money, her daughter, and her salon.

  Perhaps it was the intensive company of her husband with whom she had spent so little time in the past years: she agreed. Frau Anders wanted a final interview with her husband so she could denounce him for driving her by his neglect into her various adulteries, but I forbade melodrama. She would not at first be dissuaded, but I pressed the point, for I realized that if we were to live together I had to assert my authority at once. Eventually and somewhat to my surprise—she was by nature an imperious woman—she agreed to this as well. We waited until her husband left on another trip. She told her daughter she was visiting a relative in the country where she was born. Our exit from the city was clandestine. No one except Jean-Jacques knew I accompanied her.

  When we began to travel, I learned that my mistress had an unlimited capacity for boredom. She required continual entertainment, and took up cities like facial tissues, to be used once and thrown away. Her appetite for the exotic was insatiable, for her only purpose was to devour and to move on. I did my best to keep her amused, and at the same time worked at refashioning her idea of our relationship. Before her trip I had been, as I have already indicated, extremely frustrated. Frau Anders did not understand our affair, or my feeling for her. I knew that our relationship was more serious than she thought it was—and I regretted not being able to give pleasure when it cost me nothing but the truth, an easy premium. She must have been aware of my lack of romantic interest in her, but I wished she had been aware of how deeply, though impersonally, I felt her as the embodiment of my passionate relationship to my dreams. Through my willful match-making dreams, she had stirred me sexually as no woman had ever done before and, perhaps, since.

  After some months of hasty expensive touring Frau Anders was sufficiently appeased and confident in me to rest for a while. We settled in a small island, where I spent the days near the boats talking with the fishermen and sponge-gatherers and swimming in the warm blue sea. I am very fond of islanders, who have a dignity which city-dwellers have lost and a cosmopolitanism that country-dwellers can never achieve. In the late afternoon, I returned to the house we had rented to take the waning sun with my mistress. In the evenings we sat by the dock, at one of the three cafés on the island, drinking absinthe and exchanging comments with the other foreign residents about the splendor of visiting yachts. Occasionally a police man, wearing his cape and patent-leather cockade hat, strutted past, and the foreigners’ conversation halted in order to admire his vanity. My senses became very acute on the island, with this reliable diet of sun, water, sex, and empty talk. My palate, for instance: the evening meal, soaked in olive oil and crushed garlic, came to have an exquisitely varied tang and odor. And my hearing, too. When at ten o’clock the island’s electricity was turned off and kerosene lamps were lit, I could distinguish at a distance of many miles the sounds of the different bells, the heavier bell worn by the donkey from the shriller ring of the goat bell. At midnight, at the final tolling of the monastery bell from the hill behind the town, we would retire.

  Away from the ingenious conversation of her guests in the capital, and discovering (and at first resisting) my own need for solitude, Frau Anders was openly bored. I suggested that she try to meditate, now that there was silence. The idea seemed to revive her spirits. But a few days later she confessed to me that the effort was not bearing fruit, and begged my leave to write. Reluctantly I agreed. I say reluctantly because I had little confidence in Frau Anders’ mind, and considered that her best qualities—her sweetness, her stubbornness—flourished only because they had escaped her own detection. I feared that the effort of assuming the identity of a writer might deprive her of the scant realism about herself which she possessed. “No poetry,” I said firmly. “Of course not,” she replied, offended at my insinuation. “It is philosophy alone which claims my interest.” She decided to communicate her insights to the world in the form of letters to her daughter who, at the time we left the capital, had discarded the elderly conductor for the middle-aged physicist.

  “Dear Lucrezia,” she would sigh on the veranda as we lay sunbathing. This was the signal that her epistolary efforts were about to resume. She would go indoors to take up her scented note paper and fountain pen with red ink, and set down several pages of her reflections. Upon finishing she would come outside again and read the letter aloud to me. Generally she refused all my sincere efforts at emendation.

  “Dear Lucrezia,” began one letter I remember. “Have you ever noticed that men feel called on to prove that they are men, while women do not have to assert their femininity in order to be counted as women? Do you know why this is so? Permit me, with a mother’s and a woman’s wisdom, to instruct you. To be a woman is to be as human beings were meant to be, full of love and serenity”—here she stroked my thick hair consolingly—“while to be a man is to attempt something unnatural, something that nature never intended. The task of being a man overstrains the machine”—I beg the reader to note how she confounded the natural and mechanical metaphors—“which is continually breaking down. The violence and rashness and schemes, all pathetic pretenses, by which a man persists in his vain enterprise of proving himself are known and esteemed as ‘acts of manliness.’ Without them he is not a man. Of course not!”

  I will admit that if I am to be patronized as a man, I would rather it were by Jean-Jacques, whose haughtiness was at least tempered by the habit of irony that is second nature to all who play games with their sexual identity. Yet how could I be angry with Frau Anders? Her impudence was so naive, so endearing, so funny. And even if I had been angry I would have foreborne, thinking I had no right to judge this woman, having never known my own mother.

  “Money, dear Lucrezia, clogs the spirit. False values begin with the worship of things. It is the same with reputation. What should we ask of society more than indifference, more than the freedom to pursue our pleasures?” This was the theme of another letter, which charmed me by its attempt to emulate my own indifference to possessions and reputation, which I had by this time often demonstrated to Frau Anders.

  “Do not be afraid of your body, dear Lucrezia, the loveliest body in all the world. Dare to cast aside all false prudery and seize your pleasures as your wise mother counsels you. Oh, that mothers always instructed their daughters thus! What a garden the world would be, what a paradise. Do not let the dead hand of religion inhibit your sensations. Take, and it will be given to you. Disregard all those around you who measure themselves out, saving and spending! Dare to ask for more.”

  As she read these lines to me, I recalled that placid blonde girl whom her mother imagined as a great courtesan. I felt sorry for Lucrezia, and angry at her mother for continuing at a distance to play the procuress for her, if only with theories. But in this quick judgment I was subsequently to be corrected, for in later years I learned that Lucrezia had never been an innocent girl corrupted by a worldly mother. If anything, as Lucrezia later explained to me, it was the other way around: it was the daughter’s libertine adolescence which had incited her more affectionate, innocent mother into her own career of erotic freedom. At the time about which I write, however, I saw Lucrezia only through the eyes of her mother’s hectic admonitions, as before I had seen her through the elderly conductor’s desire. I judged her accordingly, as the victim of both.

  “There is only one communion, dear Lucrezia, the communion of instinct. For two thousand years instinct has labored under the pretentious dictates of the spirit, but I see emerging a new nakedness which will free us of the old chains of legality and convention. Our senses
are numbed by the heavy weight of civilization. The dark people of the world know this wisdom; our pale race is finished. Man with his machines, his intellect, his science, his technology will give way before the intuition of women and the sensuous power and cruelty of black men.”

  But enough—I shall not tire the reader further. And I do not wish to give the impression that my feeling for Frau Anders was totally dissipated by our living together in greedy proximity. In the privacy of the bedroom I tested her theories and found her more compliant than ever. I was a vigorous lover (despite my pale flesh) though, as I have said, I found her ardors too easily satisfied. I began to complicate our relationship. There was a young fisherman on the island who followed my mistress around like a lost dog, and I made my absence of jealousy very clear to her. Once she began to doubt her hold over me she doubled her solicitude, and I basked in the peace of the flesh if not of the spirit.

  After one winter on the island, I proposed one day that we decamp. Soon we headed further south to the exotic lands Frau Anders professed to admire. Along the way there were many purchases of “native goods,” but I wanted to travel as much as possible unencumbered by baggage, and suggested that they be mailed to my rooms back in the capital. I took these packages, elaborately wrapped by Frau Anders, to the post office myself, and sent them to a non-existent address.

  One day we arrived in a city of Arabs, and on my urging prepared to settle there for a time. We toured the native quarter with a fourteen-year-old boy who had accosted us outside our hotel. It was in the annual month of abstinence prescribed by their religion, during which all believers are required to be sexually continent and to fast between sunrise and sunset. The boy watched without expression as we drank glasses of delicious mint tea in the sultan’s palace (now open to tourists) and consumed the sticky honey cakes sold in the market place. Frau Anders tried, unsuccessfully, to coax the boy into eating them. To divert her attention from this impiety, I suggested that she get the boy to give us a prohibited pleasure, since he would not allow us to give him one. She asked him where we might procure some of the narcotics for which the city was noted. He looked cheerful for the first moment since we had engaged him, and led us to the native equivalent of a pharmacist’s shop where we purchased two clay pipes and five packets of coarse green powder, which we took back to the hotel and sampled. I do not approve of narcotics—at least I have not known the need for them, never having appraised my senses as jaded—but I was curious to see what effect they would have on my mistress. Promptly she lay down on the bed and began to giggle. The sexual invitation was unmistakable. But I wanted to see something new and, seizing her by the arm, I told her that we must go out, that the city would be her lover tonight, that it would appear to us distended, in slow motion, more sensuous than any city she had known. She allowed me to raise her from the bed. After putting on her best frock and fussing over my tie, she went slowly, partly leaning on me to steady herself, to the elevator.