The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  If that woman was not Frau Anders then a whole stretch of my memory is wrong. But surely, it was Frau Anders, whom I had generously given over to the care of an Arab merchant many years ago. It was she who returned two years later, mutilated and pitiful, whom I attempted unsuccessfully to murder. She, ever indestructible, on whom I conferred the house. It was Frau Anders who pursued me, wanted to marry me, drove me to many, and lived for a while with me and my wife. It was Frau Anders whom I put into the house, under the very eyes of the enemy. It was she whom I joined there after my dear wife had died and the war was over, who kept me sullen company. It was the same woman, Frau Anders, whom I left in the house, subdued, lifeless, a ghost.

  It seems perfectly simple, clear. And yet, I have other memories of the house in which I was entirely alone there. Is it possible that she was never there? How could that be? My wife would know whether she had lived with us or not during the war. But my wife is dead. The other witness is Jean-Jacques. He helped me put her there. But I am ashamed to ask him. I hardly see him now. He would find me foolish and senile, my memory fading. Indeed even if he should say yes; that does not solve the mystery, but rather compounds it. For I have still other memories, which cannot be reconciled with the past I have narrated. I distinctly remember being evicted from the house—by a Frau Anders who had never lived there.

  I remember it as clearly as I remember everything else which contradicts it. I was in the room for the improvement of the senses—it was the sixth year of my tenancy—when the old woman who acted as my housekeeper came upstairs to tell me I had a visitor. (I willingly stipulate that this complaining querulous old woman cannot then have been Frau Anders. Who she was I do not know.) My housekeeper, whoever she was, could not have surprised me more if she had told me that there was a desert lion reclining on my living room carpet. I remonstrated with the old woman, for she had instructions to turn away all callers; but when I saw the malicious gleam in her eye, and learned from her that the visitor refused to leave, I decided to handle the matter myself. I went downstairs, and into the living room. Seated on a chair by the empty fireplace was a tall woman in her late fifties, tanned, wearing dark sunglasses and furs.

  “Madam,” I said. “Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing? You will excuse the bareness of my rooms, and the fact that there is no fire in the grate. I am not accustomed to receiving visitors.”

  “Don’t you recognize me?” She took off her sunglasses and I examined the ruins of a vigorous handsome face.

  “No, I don’t,” I replied irritably.

  “Well, I barely recognize you, my dear, I must confess. You have become rather stooped and faded, your hair is quite grey, and, needless to say, you are almost twenty years older.”

  “If I am twenty years older, then so are you.”

  She laughed. “You were always rather clever, I remember that, in your mild stubborn way.”

  My heart began to pound. “Are you a relative?”

  She laughed again.

  “Only a relative of mine would dare talk to me with such impertinence and affectionateness.”

  “Don’t you really know? Look at me closely. I am an old woman, though I don’t feel old at all. Look at me. Dear Hippolyte.”

  A premonition came over me, and a thrill of pleasure and anxiety.

  “You are someone who is happy.”

  “Evidently,” she said. “Look at me.”

  Looking, I could stave off the knowledge no longer. “I know you.”

  “Do you? When did you see me last?”

  “I let you precede me through a doorway.”

  “Oh,” she cried, “don’t remind me of that! I thought I should never forgive you, but I did, oh so quickly. Would I be here now if I didn’t? Come, sit down. I shan’t let you breathe a word about yourself, until I tell you all that’s happened to me.”

  I didn’t want to sit, because I didn’t really believe in her, but she insisted. I saw that she had lost none of her old commanding manner, but the girlish desire, to please which often contradicted it had gone. She told me to tell my housekeeper to bring us something to drink, and when I admitted that there were no amenities in the house, she produced a little flask of brandy from her purse. Then we began a long chat which lasted through the afternoon well into the evening.

  After an hour I was convinced that it was no imposter. Who else could it be but Frau Anders? And I listened with laughter and amazement at her adventures. She had spent more than three years with the merchant—I had been right about that, there was no young son—during which time he had abused her cruelly. His ardor thrived on her terror. He had locked her up in a room in his house, visiting her thrice weekly between the hours of one and four in the afternoon, after which he left for the mosque. When her fear subsided, however, he grew tired of her, and sold her to a camel trader who took her further south with him into the desert. The trader used to beat her regularly; in one of his beatings she almost lost her left eye. After a year of lust and abuse, the trader left her with a water carrier in a desert village, and here Frau Anders spent more than a decade, quite happily.

  At this point in her story, I interrupted. “You were happy? By what means? What had replaced ill-treatment as a source of satisfaction for you?”

  “There is a limit, Hippolyte,” she replied, “even to the wish to be used by others.” She explained that by this time, through poor diet, exposure to the desert storms, lack of baths, frequent beatings, she had begun to feel her age. She told me that she felt she had lost her sexual attractiveness, which I took to be a dignified way of telling me she had lost something of her sexual urge. She and the water-carrier, however, reached an understanding. He was an amiable and gentle man, mainly concerned with improving his lowly position in life, and Frau Anders agreed to help him.

  “You can’t imagine how enterprising I had become, Hippolyte,” she said at this point. “You have no idea how it fortifies one’s character to have to be concerned only with problems of survival.”

  “I do understand,” I said with feeling.

  “No, you don’t. You can’t. What does one worry about in this city, in any city? Psychological survival? But that’s nothing. I mean real survival. In the face of marauders, starvation, jackals, cholera.”

  “You seem very well,” I ventured.

  “I am, I am,” she said.

  She continued her story. It was at this point that she had written to her husband and daughter, and received money from them and a formal quittance from her responsibilities to them. With the aid of the water-carrier, she took a survey of the village in which she resided. It was a community of some four thousand souls, consisting of shepherds, traders, and thieves. There was no farming, for it was the desert. Armed with her money, she offered the villagers material prosperity if they would crown her queen. They were sceptical at first, and explained to her that it was also against their traditions to be ruled by a woman. Woman is made for man’s pleasure, man is made to govern and make war. While she waited for the village to concede authority to her, she set herself up in a little but as a midwife and dream-interpreter.

  “I’m a dream-interpreter, too,” I interjected.

  She ignored my remark and continued without pause. “You know. I told the village chief that his dream of seven camels meant seven years of drought. Unless they acknowledged me. They’re remarkably credulous people, quite tractable under their manner of fierceness.”

  Finally she prevailed, and was crowned with all ceremony. Her birthday was made an annual feast of the village. After a year the water-carrier lost his position as chief consort, and was followed by a succession of dark young boys, but he, and each of her ex-lovers, was rewarded with a post in the village government. She negotiated with the government for an irrigation project, which brought farming to the village. The people prospered and looked upon her as a miracle-worker. The only price she exacted was reverence and obedience. Drawing on their obedience, she designed a model community: day nurseries to free
mothers to work in the fields, a house of prostitution, a law-court, a theatre, a small army which she drilled herself. Under her direction, the village spent the war years pilfering from military installations.

  “Catherine the Great,” I murmured.

  “Yes, I learned to respect Western comforts. There’s nothing beautiful in dirt or poverty or disease. I’ve lost my ideals, Hippolyte,” she said, “and good riddance. Life is simply a matter of survival. I’m not romantic anymore.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “One can’t remain a queen forever. To retain one’s authority one must abdicate or be martyred. I chose the former. That’s why I am here. I have decided to spend the rest of my days here in the capital. And I have come straight to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t be afraid, Hippolyte. I’m not going to rape you. My sexual days are over, as are my days of administration. Now I shall at last cultivate my spirit. But let me warn you, I am accustomed to being obeyed.”

  “By whom?”

  “Why, by everyone,” she said. “But I’ll start with you. First of all, I want this house.”

  “My house?”

  “I’ve checked with your brother. He agrees with me. It isn’t good for you to remain here. It’s too big for you.”

  “And not for you?”

  “You’ll see. I have more to fill it with.”

  “But I like it here. I am learning to be alone.”

  “Well, you’ll have to be alone somewhere else. And besides, you’re not alone. You have that hideous old woman, and she’ll have to go.”

  “She’s not with me. She’s just here, too … What if I won’t give you the house?”

  “This will please you, I think. Jean-Jacques has given me a copy of the original plans which you drew up for the furnishing and disposition of the rooms. I see that you have never carried them out?” She looked around the modest and conventional decor of the room in which we sat.

  I felt obliged to explain. “I had not the inclination. Besides, many other people occupied it. There were enemy soldiers here.”

  “Well, all that will be changed. You don’t know it, but it was for me that you designed this house. For the last stage of my education.”

  “I repeat,” I said angrily, “what if I don’t give you the house? I happen to like it here. It’s my home.”

  “You have to give it up. I have the plans.” She reached in her purse, and produced them for my inspection.

  “Would you throw me out on the street?”

  “Nonsense! I’ll give you time to find another place. Good heavens, I’ll even help you. I have plenty of time, and much good will toward you, dear Hippolyte.”

  With these words Frau Anders stood up, gravely kissed me on both cheeks and made her way out of the house without letting me show her to the door. I remained in the room, dumbstruck, gazing around at my castle. Was it possible that she could deprive me of all this, my home, my refuge. I would act immediately. I would go to my brother, who, as the head of the family now, might speak with more authority than I. I would explain to him how necessary the house was to me, how I had just begun to know myself here, and that he must prevent Frau Anders from dispossessing me.

  She had insinuated that I did not take proper care of the house. I thought desperately of painting it immediately; I would buy new furniture; every night there would be a fire in the grate. I rose from the chair in which I was sitting, caressed its back with the thrill of loss, and walked into the hallway, in time to see my old housekeeper darting down the stairs. She had apparently been eavesdropping.

  Frau Anders returned the next morning. She brought groceries, and was accompanied by a Zulu whom she introduced as her masseur, and a darkskinned young lady with a shaved head whom she called her private secretary. To them, and to a carpenter who was also in attendance, she gave instructions for the repair and furnishing of the house. To me she gave a week to find a new place to live.

  We had one more conversation of interest, in which Frau Anders allayed any suspicions which I had that she was evicting me in the spirit of revenge. As I had once dealt with her with a certain freedom, disposing of her for her own good, she explained, she now dealt with me in the same way for my own good. As I was right then, so she was right now.

  I was not altogether convinced that she was right, but I trusted her sincerity. The only thing that took me aback was that she spoke of love as her motive, self-love and love for me.

  “I’ve learned to love myself, Hippolyte,” she said. “I love my powdery smooth wrinkled flesh, my sagging breasts, my veined feet, the smell of my armpits. Every time I look into the mirror, I can’t tell you how delighted I am that someone looks back, smiling, and that that someone is me. I want to embrace everyone, even beggars and school teachers. I love myself so much that I even love you, you strange brittle man.”

  “You won’t live forever,” I muttered glumly.

  “Wait,” she said. “Who can tell? I feel younger than ever. I shall die a baby, which is no death at all.”

  This was not self-love as I had understood it. No, I didn’t understand her motives, but I knew she was sincere. This helped me to become resigned to her intervention in my life. And besides: she would use the house as I had not. It was made for her. She had always been a more worldly person than I; her retirement would therefore be more populated than mine, and need bigger living quarters.

  SEVENTEEN

  Voila que j’ai touché l’automne des idées.

  Now I live in more modest quarters again. I no longer require the great number of rooms provided by the house from which I was either evicted or left voluntarily. It is some years since I left the house to the mistress of my youth—I trust it has done her as much good as it did me—and moved to where I have resided ever since, in order to lead the life which I described to you at the commencement of this narrative.

  I receive friends occasionally. I still don’t go out often. Yet I am not unaware of the life around me, nor incapable of assessing people correctly. The following anecdote will illustrate the change in me, as well as the fact that my seclusion is not as total as the reader may think, and that I have not failed to remain in touch with the principal events of our times.

  Last Thursday I went out as I sometimes do to buy my evening meal. I bought a carp, and when I returned home and opened my damp package, I saw that the newspaper the fish-monger had wrapped the fish in had a picture of Jean-Jacques. My friend had been elected to the Académie, no less; he was one of the immortals! The article which accompanied his picture contained an account of his extremely controversial election to the Académie. It seemed that some members objected to his dubious political past, and of these a few even dared to try to revive the charges of collaboration which were bruited about, briefly, after the war—just before he prudently left for an extended residence in the south. But these voices were silenced by others, who instanced the austerity of his life, the versatility of his multiple careers, and the uncompromising courage of his art. Of such elements is literary immortality composed in our time!

  I studied his picture in the paper for a long time. In the picture he was grizzled, well-dressed, and puffy eyed. I confess that I hardly recognized him. Not that we are not still friends. I had seen him only a year before, at a cocktail party given for him by his publisher, to which he had begged me to come. But I know that when I see him in the flesh, it is with the eyes of the past. Only in a photograph can I see him as he is in the present. And when I study the picture I ask myself, where is he? the great bully, the charming liar, the inconstant friend, the unprincipled coquette who amused and taunted me in my younger days, the frivolous Vergil who watched me descend into the inferno of my dreams. He is gone: aged, transfixed by the great stare of the public eye, frozen. Now he is utterly famous. Everyone laughs at his mockery, he can offend no one. His acts have been transformed into postures, but not out of his own will and in the privacy of his intimate life.

  I suspect
that when we see each other he barely recognizes me, too. For I have changed no less than he. But I and I alone have worked these changes in myself, a deeper change than any possible through the mere attainment of one’s ambition. The greatest miracles of change are attained by the contracting of one’s ambitions, as I learned in Frau Anders’ house. There is a better method of changing the inferno into paradise than clambering laboriously up the rim. One can also climb down, climb into the devil’s mouth, past the mangled bodies of traitors, through the gullet and into the devil’s bowels themselves. The devil’s asshole is the backdoor to paradise—if you will permit the indelicacy. In Frau Anders’ house I was in the devil’s asshole, a strait corner despite the apparent spaciousness of my residence. But one becomes easily habituated to a diet of excrement, to not complaining, and to standing still. The results were remarkable, as I have testified several times in this book. I emerged from that house—albeit that my emergence appears to me alternately as a rescue and as a cruel eviction—a new man, cleansed and purged of my dreams.

  Now I am in a position to be able to help others again, though in an entirely different way than before, for now I am not interested in the inner but only in the outer man. I devote two days a week as an unpaid volunteer in a pauper’s hospital, doing the work of an orderly and nurse. I am not sorry that I never adopted a profession, yet I regret the selfish employment of my time in my youth. My work in the hospital allows me to feel that I am making some recompense for my former idleness. Of course, compared with nursing as generally practiced by women, the tasks of a male nurse are less sentimental, more physical, sometimes janitorial. This is good work, requiring a nice mixture of improvisation, when one converses with the patients, and absolutely fixed routine, when one attends their bodies. And I have found, happily, few claims upon my pity, for the patients in this hospital, being destitute, really enjoy being ill, lying in warm beds, being cared for, shaved, and fed.