The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  Close to midnight the next evening I presented myself at the address in the letter, a dingy wooden house near a railway station on the outskirts of the city. A woman opened the door, wearing a loose-fitting greyish Arab garment which covered her completely, except for the familiar large brown eyes with their alternately docile and imperious expression.

  “Come in, my knight of the sad countenance,” she said.

  “Don’t mock me,” I said resentfully. “Tell me how you are, and what I may do for you.”

  “Would you like to see me?” she asked.

  “That was always a pleasure,” I replied, the wish to conciliate getting the better of my usual candor.

  She turned her back on me and walked to the other side of the room, did something to her garment, and then uncovered to my gaze a misshapen scarred arm. “Did you notice my handwriting?” I nodded, without speaking. “There’s more,” she said, and opened the front of her clothes to let me see, briefly, the scars and ravagements of her torso. “And more.” She took off the hood, and I saw that one half of her face was slanted in a painful derisive grin.

  “What can I say?” I murmured. “Were you ever happy, before these calamities befell you?”

  “Why yes,” she replied, adjusting her garments, “I was. The man to whom you abandoned me was a gentle lover. He used to visit me three times a week between two and four in the afternoon before leaving for the mosque. I was confined in a small room, and not allowed to talk with anyone else in the house. I was terribly afraid of him. But when finally my fear gave way to pleasure, he tired of me and sold me to a trader who carried me into the desert. It was there that I was chastised in so visible a manner for my uncooperativeness, and my unfitness to survive.”

  “Tell me what I must do,” I said. “Now it’s your turn to command, mine to obey.”

  “Why, do with me what you will,” she cried sternly. “Only remember that I am yours, yours to dispose of. I warn you, I shall be rather hard to dispose of. Women are quite durable, you know.”

  “What would be fair?” I said half to myself.

  “Fair?” she exclaimed. “I’ve never heard you talk like that!”

  I explained that it was perhaps the influence of the young woman who was my companion at the moment, and was gently, if coarsely, guiding me towards normalcy.

  “I don’t believe you will do anything that is fair,” she said. “In fact, I am counting on that. But I expect you to do something poetic, gorgeous, my Hippolyte. Surprise me, confound me, stir my senses.” The seductive look in her eyes at that moment alarmed me, for I thought of the face beneath.

  “I can’t think so quickly,” I said finally. “Give me forty-eight hours, and I will give you my decision.” She started to entreat me to stay, but I would not listen.

  “Remember me,” she said sadly as I went out the door.

  I did not go back to Monique afterwards, for I knew she would be of no help with my problem. Returning to my own apartment, I spent a sleepless dreamless night; and the next afternoon sought out Jean-Jacques in his usual café.

  “I have a problem,” I said.

  “Impossible!” he said sarcastically. “How can you ever have problems, Hippolyte? Everything you do, you think you are bound to do—because you draw your motives from your dreams.”

  “Be serious,” I answered. “Suppose you have a friend—”

  “A friend,” he echoed.

  “Listen to me!” I said, in exasperation. “You have a friend who has the possibility of living several lives. I mean consecutively. Not side by side, the day and the night, as you do.”

  “A friend,” he repeated.

  “And this friend,” I continued, deciding to ignore the way he was baiting me, “asks you to inaugurate a new life for her, because you have brought to a close the old one. Would you do it? Or would you consider her as dead?”

  “Be careful of Frau Anders,” said Jean-Jacques. “You’ll have a hard time settling with her.”

  “Have you no more to say to me than that?” I replied, disappointed in him. “I did not mention her name, deliberately. Not because I wished to conceal her identity from you, but because I wished you to treat my problem seriously, generically.”

  “I have just told you what you don’t know, which is the only advice of value.”

  “What don’t I know?”

  “That you won’t get rid of her,” he shouted.

  There was a moment of silence. Then I remarked, “There is someone who shouts at me in my dreams. And to him I said, shouting has never made me understand anything.”

  We did not, understandably, part that day as friends. I had learned that I was truly alone in this problem, alone except for the counsel of my dreams. In this city what life could Frau Anders possibly live, with her damaged body and used-up past? Yet I could hardly order her to return to the Arabs, to suffer more. Luckily, that night, a dream came to my aid. For you must know that, by this time, I had learned to place great confidence in my dreams.

  I was walking on a snowy plain, in the company of a bearded monk. I asked him to teach me how to bear the cold without feeling it.

  “That is no art,” he replied. “You must learn to feel the cold without bearing it.”

  He grabbed my sex with his hand. I pulled away indignantly, and told him it was my feet which were cold.

  “Did you feel that?” he asked. I realized that he had no intention of helping me, and asked him to take me to the head of the monastery. He was wearing white boots. I thought of this as explaining why he had not been able to teach my feet not to be cold. But on looking closer I saw they were not boots, but thick bandages. Then I was surprised he did not limp.

  He brought me to the entrance of a building made of blocks of snow, like the dwellings of the Eskimos. There was a woman there, dressed entirely in white, whom he addressed as Mother Superior.

  I seem to have been taken to some room of my own, for I remember being brought a meal on a tray. I remember, too, thinking that I should begin to meditate, but I could not help looking out the window high on the wall of the room and wanting to get out.

  Next I was in a sort of park behind the house. It was warm and sunny. The Mother Superior was there, seated at a grand piano under a cypress tree. She was conducting a music class. We were each to come to the piano and play for a few moments. I said I didn’t know how to play, and others said the same, but she insisted that that did not matter. Then someone came forward to take his turn, with great reluctance and embarrassment, and picked out the national anthem with the index finger of his right hand. A second volunteer shyly played a hymn that was all chords. I thought these performances singularly inept, but I was beginning to understand that here ineptness was a talent. Then it was my turn. I knew I could not play a march or a hymn or a lullaby, even badly, so I just stood before the piano, and struck several groups of keys with my fists. Then I kicked the piano, turned, bowed, and returned to where I had been sitting on the grass.

  “Now,” the Mother Superior said, pointing in my direction in a way that disconcerted me, “you have learned the first lesson. And what is that?”

  “That everything is good?” I murmured.

  “Right,” she said.

  In the next part of the dream I was alone in the park. Snow had begun to fall on the green lawn; I found this peculiar, and tried to remember if it were winter or summer. I was hoping to encounter the Mother Superior again, for I was displeased with my own forwardness and troubled that I had not expressed my real feelings. I knew I had not been, consciously, insincere. I had believed what I had impulsively declared to her. But now I no longer believed it. The statement “Everything is good” did not seem right. I tried “Nothing is good.” That seemed a little better, but still not right. Then I thought of “Some things are good.” But this was even worse, in fact, impossible.

  The snow was so deep now that my foot sank into it up to the ankle. The others had taken shelter on the verandah of the house, and I decided t
o go indoors myself. I came upon them jumping from foot to foot to shake the moisture out of their clothing. It looked like a sort of dance. I was also aware of a certain smell, besides the sour odor of wet woolen clothing, something like the mixed odor of antiseptic and disinfectant that one finds in the corridors of public hospitals.

  Amidst the din the Mother Superior reconvened the class and called for the next performer. I took another turn, though I had already had one. To be more like my dancing fellow-students, I hopped and stamped and shook as I moved to the piano. But once there, I did not know what to do, so I climbed into the piano, pulled the stick that supports the lid, and closed myself inside.

  “We are now in a position to use the full resources of the piano,” I heard the Mother Superior say as I groped in the dark for a comfortable position among the wires and felt pads. I heard her giving instructions to someone else, telling him to use the right and the left and the center of the piano, all at the same time. Her voice became fainter, as I crawled further into the piano. Then I saw, crouching in a corner, a pale young man with a tiny moustache who asked me what day it was. When I told him it was Sunday, he began to cry. “All right, let it be any day you like,” I said. And attempting to cajole him, as one would a child, I showed him a hole in the floor of the box, and urged him to explore it with me.

  He told me he was too afraid. Then there was a tremendous barrage of noise about us: all the pupils, having climbed on top of the piano, were playing it with their feet. Frightened, I tried to push him down the hole. But he could not be budged, just whimpered and kicked at me whatever I did.

  There were several more bangs, and the sound of splintering wood. I could not believe that the teacher would allow it, yet when I saw the rim of an axe blade appear above my head, there could be no doubt my shelter was being attacked. Furious, I resolved to make a stand here, instead of retreating into the hole. Revolver in hand, I settled in a corner and waited for the first face.

  The banging and splintering sounds continued, but the piano did not give way. This gift of time inspired me to construct some defenses. With one sweep of my hand I wrenched away the piano wires and clasped them to my body as a kind of armor. Now I could almost stand in the box. I decided to fire one shot, as a warning that I intended to defend myself. The pistol shot sounded muffled and low, like a cannon.

  “Bravo!” I heard the Mother Superior’s voice. “Five tones lower than the lowest note on the keyboard. The most beautiful sound of all.” Then there was silence.

  The next moment I was out of the piano. She was angry. “Where is he?” she demanded. “He is hiding. He must be punished.” I pretended not to know whom she meant, for fear she intended to send me back into the piano to retrieve my companion. But it turned out that she had given orders to the maid that the piano be bandaged. “Now he won’t get out!” she said nastily.

  I felt sorry for my frightened companion, who would surely suffocate. But despite my protests, the piano was bandaged and carried away. I started to run after it, when I had an idea. I would kill this despotic woman. She was standing with her back to me, conversing with some students. Holding the gun with both hands, for I feared that now it would not go off, I aimed at her back with care, and pressed the trigger.

  “Bravo,” said one of the students, and smiled at me approvingly. I shot him, too. Pulling the trigger was so easy that I shot them all. Knowing they were all on her side, I congratulated myself on my perspicacity and wondered why such a solution had not occurred to me before.

  The next thing I remember is being in a tree. I’m not sure whether I was hiding, or celebrating my daring crime; or perhaps, this part of the dream had nothing to do with what went before.

  “Come down,” called the man in the black bathing suit. He was standing on the ground, and seized my arm without pulling it.

  I protested that it was too high, but he insisted that I jump. When I told him that I would hurt myself, once more he ordered me to jump.

  “All right, all right,” I said. “But don’t make me.” I realized that I would have to jump, but wanted to do it myself. What I didn’t want was to be coerced.

  “Jump!” he cried angrily.

  “Let me do it my way,” I pleaded. “Look, I’m about to jump.”

  “Jump!”

  I made no answer though, knowing I had to comply, I was genuinely readying my body for the jump. But the next moment he pulled on the arm which he had been holding firmly all the time, and tumbled me toward the ground. I would have jumped myself. Bitter were my feelings as I fell.

  The day following the advent of a new dream had become a sort of holiday for me, in which I cancelled all regular obligations to give myself fully to reflecting on my new acquisition. How welcome this dream sabbath was to me now, after my “dream of the piano lesson,” when I was faced with a pressing personal problem as well, the disposal of Frau Anders. My former mistress would be expecting me in less than twenty-four hours.

  But it took a while to extract the sense of the dream. At first what preoccupied me was the way in which this dream was like the others. Again, confinement. Again, someone tried to teach me something. Again, the exacting presence of the man in the black bathing suit. And once again, the familiar emotions. Surprise, the sense of humiliation, and the desire to please are three emotions which occurred continually in my dreams; while in my daytime life I am much more independent. To my dismay I discovered myself in this dream again deferring to the opinions of other people. I refer to the moment when I told the Mother Superior that “Everything is good.”

  Yet this dream was not simply like the others. I wondered if the piano lesson might be interpreted as a gloss to the ancient heresies espoused by Professor Bulgaraux. To say that everything is good is one way of freeing the spirit from what makes it heavy. But perhaps I take too seriously the utterances in the dream. The doctrine “Everything is good” may possess a certain therapeutic value, but no greater than the doctrine “Nothing is good.” All acts of disburdenment are equivalent, including the dreams themselves.

  And later that morning I realized that I had underestimated the rebelliousness I had displayed in the dream. To be sure, I had deferred to the Mother Superior. But then I had killed her. I had killed them all. If one believes that “Everything is good,” that, too, must be thought of as good.

  I must add that the Mother Superior somewhat resembled in size and coloring Frau Anders, though the figure in the dream lacked my former mistress’ regrettable disfigurements. However, as befitting a nun, and as Frau Anders had been the day before, she was almost completely hidden in her garments. And had not Herr Anders been under the impression that his wife was in a nunnery? I concluded that this was a dream about Frau Anders and about the fate which I was to provide for her.

  But you must understand that in the events of the next twenty-four hours, though I acted on my dream, it was not in the same spirit as I had acted in the dream. I was not resentful, I did not feel oppressed. It was a decision ratified by thought, though prompted by the teaching of the dream. I put it to myself in this way: Frau Anders wanted a new life—even as I, with my earnest liaison with Monique, was searching for a new life. For some perverse reason, she had come to me as her arbiter. I was indeed, as Herr Anders had said, though I had not understood it at the time, her trustee in the world, the executor of her mundane estate. Well, so be it. I would not shirk my responsibility, though I did wish she had simply left me alone. I had to act, for having acted once—having sold her into slavery—I had become bound to the unknown consequences of this act. Frau Anders’ demanding reappearance was this unforseen consequence which I now had to face. I would have to be bold, I knew. A new life? What life could Frau Anders possibly live with her abused body? There seemed only one solution: to end this life which had already ended, and wished greedily to prolong itself.

  That afternoon I busied myself with careful preparations. I bought several litres of kerosene and some bundles of old rags. At midnight, exactly f
orty-eight hours after I had seen Frau Anders, I arrived again at her house. I counted on her being at home, awaiting my arrival; for she knew that I was punctual and always demanded punctuality herself. Along the base of the small dwelling I laid a thick rope of rags which I drenched with kerosene and then ignited at one spot; the flames travelled like a spark along a fuse and encircled the house with fire. I watched at some distance from the house while neighbors ran into the street, and the firemen were summoned.

  The firemen entered the building several times, after consulting with neighbors and bystanders, including myself, as to whether anyone was inside. A distraught woman, who said she owned the property, reported that a foreign woman had moved in there a few weeks ago; and that the new tenant rarely went out, and had had only one visitor, two days before, whom she had glimpsed entering and leaving but had not really seen. There were no anguished faces at charred windows or screams of distress. The firemen could find no survivors before the building collapsed. I went home feeling assured that Frau Anders had perished in the flames.

  TEN

  Imagine to yourself, reader, that you are a murderer. What is it that makes a murderer? Is it the bloodstained weapon, the scratches inflicted on one’s face by the struggling victim, the guilty heart, the inexorable police inspector, the bad dreams? No, it is not necessarily any of these. All these conditions can be absent. The murder may be colorless, bloodless, conscienceless, unpunished. All that is needed is that one has committed the act of murder. It is nothing in the present, only something in the past that makes one a murderer.

  Still, I looked for consequences; for how else can we assure ourselves of the reality of the past. Upon awakening, I examined my sleep for a dream. I scanned the morning paper, and found a paragraph on page eleven reporting the fire. But there was no mention of Frau Anders, and of course no obituary. I wondered if there were someone who would come to apprehend me. No one appeared.

  You must not imagine that I felt guilty, or craved punishment. But I should have liked some token from my life to register this act. I considered a confession, but felt it would surely lack credibility. What could I say? That I had murdered a woman that I had two years before abandoned into slavery, who had returned to the city clandestinely, who had been recognized by no one? How would I convince anyone that Frau Anders had returned at all? The only person who had any evidence of her presence was Monique. Would I say: I have set fire to the house and thereby to the woman who sent you that letter? Would we visit the ruins of the house and poke among the ashes? Would Monique demand that I surrender myself to the police? Perhaps she would merely admonish me that I had been unfair.