It was therefore only out of my most sincere love for him that I dreamed up someone at his side who interested him very much (in case you have forgotten, let me remind you that Goethe was fascinated by America throughout his life!), someone who wasn't like the band of pale-faced Romantics that came to dominate Germany toward the end of his lite.
MILAN KUNDERA
"You know, Johann," said Hemingway, "it's a stroke of luck that I can be with you. You make everybody tremble with respect, and so all my wives as well as old Gertrude Stein are giving me a wide berth." Then he burst out laughing: "Unless of course it is on account of that unbelievable scarecrow getup of yours!"
In order to make Hemingway's remark intelligible, I have to explain that immortals on their walks in the other world can choose to look the way they did at any time in their lives. And Goethe chose the private look of his last years; nobody except those closest to him knew him in that guise: because his eyes were sensitive to light, he wore a green eyeshade attached to his forehead by a piece of string; he had slippers on his feet; and a heavy, stripy wool scarf was tied around his neck, because he was afraid of catching cold.
The remark about his unbelievable scarecrow getup made Goethe laugh happily, as if Hemingway had just said some words of great praise. He leaned close to him and said softly, "I put on this getup mainly because of Bettina. Wherever she goes, she talks of her great love for me. So I want people to witness the object of that love. Whenever she sees me, she runs for her life. And I know she stamps her feet in fury because I parade around this way: toothless, bald, and with this ridiculous gadget over my eyes."
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PART THREE
Fighting
The sisters
T
he radio station I listen to is state owned, so it is free of advertising, and news programs alternate with the latest hit songs. The next station on the dial is privately owned; there is advertising instead of music, but the ads resemble the latest hits to such an extent that I never know what station I am listening to, and as I doze off again and again, I know it even less. In my drowsy state I learn that since the war two million people have been killed on the roads of Europe; in France alone, highway accidents have caused on average ten thousand deaths and three hundred thousand injuries per year, a whole army of the legless, handless, earless, eyeless. Deputy Bertrand Bertrand (a name as beautiful as a lullaby), incensed by these terrible statistics, did something remarkable, but at that point I fell asleep and learned the story only half an hour later, when the same news item was repeated: Deputy Bertrand Bertrand, a name as beautiful as a lullaby, proposed in Parliament that beer advertising should be banned. This caused a great uproar in the National Assembly; many deputies opposed the idea, supported by representatives of the radio and TV, who would lose money as a result. Then came the voice of Bertrand Bertrand himself: he talked of the fight against death, the fight for life. During his short speech the word "fight" was repeated at least five times, and this immediately reminded me of my native land, of Prague, of banners, |x)sters, the fight for peace, the fight for happiness, the fight for justice, the fight for the future, the fight for peace; a fight for peace that ends with the destruction of everybody by everybody, the Czech people wisely add. But now I am asleep again (every time somebody pronounces the name Bertrand Bertrand I fall into a deep slumber), and when I wake up I hear some comments about gardening, so I quickly
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turn the dial to the next station. I hear a report about Deputy Bertrand Bertrand and about the proposed ban on beer advertising. Slowly I begin to grasp the logical connections: people are killed on highways as if they were on a battlefield, but it is impossible to ban cars because they are the pride of modern man; a certain percentage of accidents is caused by drunken drivers, but wine cannot be banned, for it is the time-honored glory of France; a certain percentage of drunkenness is caused by beer, but beer, too, cannot be banned, because it would violate all the international free-trade agreements; a certain percentage of people who drink beer are motivated to drink by advertising, and here is the enemy's Achilles' heel, here is the point where the brave deputy decided to strike! Long live Bertrand Bertrand, I tell myself, but because that name affects me like a lullaby, I fall asleep at once until I am awakened by a seductive, velvet voice, yes, it is Bernard the announcer, and as if all the news concerned nothing but highway accidents, he reports the following: last night a girl sat down on a highway, with her back to the oncoming traffic. Three cars, one after the other, managed to swerve-aside at the last moment and ended up in the ditch, all smashed up, with a number of dead and injured. The suicidal girl herself, when she-realized her lack of success, slipped from the scene, and only the mutually consistent testimony of the injured bore witness to her existence. That report strikes me as so horrible that I cannot go back to sleep. There is nothing to do but get up, have some breakfast, and sit down at my writing desk. But for a long while I simply couldn't concentrate, I saw that girl sitting on the dark highway, hunched down, her forehead pressed to her knees, and I heard the screams rising from the ditch. I had to force myself to get rid of this image in order to be able to continue with my novel, which if you remember began with my waiting at the swimming pool for Professor Avenarius and seeing an unknown woman wave to the lifeguard. We saw that gesture again when Agnes was standing in front of her house saying good-bye to her shy school friend. Agnes continued to use that gesture whenever a boy took her home after a date and walked her to the garden gate. Her little sister, Laura, would hide behind a bush and wait for Agnes to return home; she wanted to see the kiss and to watch her sister walk to the
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front door. She waited for the moment when Agnes turned around and lifted her arm in the air. This movement conjured up a misty idea of love, which Laura knew nothing about but which would always remain eonnected in her mind with the image of her attractive, gentle sister.
When Agnes caught Laura borrowing her gesture in order to wave to her friends, it upset her, and, as we know, ever since then she took leave of her lovers soberly and without outward display. In this short history of a gesture we can recognize the mechanism determining the relationship of the two sisters: the younger one imitated the elder, reached out her arm toward her, but at the last moment Agnes would always escape.
After she left the lycee, Agnes moved to Paris to study at the univer-sity. Laura reproached her sister for having left their beloved country-side, but after graduation she, too, went to Paris to study. Agnes took up mathematics. After she had received her degree everyone predicted a great scholarly career for her, but instead of continuing her research she married Paul and took a well-paid yet commonplace job without any prospects of glory. Laura regretted that, and when she herself entered the Paris Conservatoire, she determined to make up for her sister's lack of success and become glorious in her stead.
One day Agnes introduced her to Paul. At the very first sight of him Laura heard an invisible someone saying to her: "There is a man! A real man. The only man. No other exists." Who was that invisible person? Was it perhaps Agnes herself? Yes. It was she, pointing out the way to her sister and yet at the same time claiming that way for herself.
Agnes and Paul were kind to Laura and took such good care of her that she felt as much at home in Paris as she had in her hometown. Yet the happy sense of staying within the family embrace was darkened by the melancholy knowledge that the only man she could ever have loved was at the same time the only man she must never try to win. When she spent time with the couple, moods of happiness alternated with bouts of sorrow. She would grow silent, gaze into space, and Agnes would take her by the hand and say, "What's the matter, Laura? What's the matter, my little sister?" Sometimes, in the same situation and moved by a similar motive, Paul, too, took her by the hand and all three would
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happily plunge into a voluptuous hot bath fed by
many streams of feeling: sisterly and amorous, compassionate and sensual.
Then she married. Agnes's daughter, Brigitte, was ten years old when Laura decided to give her a present of a small cousin. She begged her husband to make her pregnant, which was readily accomplished but ended in grief: Laura had a miscarriage, and the doctors told her that she could never have a child without undergoing serious surgery.
Dark glasses
A,
gnes grew fond of dark glasses while she was still at the lyce'e. It wasn't really because they protected her eyes against the sun, but because wearing them made her feel pretty and mysterious. Dark glasses became her hobby: just as some men have a closetful of ties, just as some women buy dozens of rings, Agnes had a collection of dark glasses.
In Laura's life, dark glasses came to play an important role after her miscarriage. She wore them almost constantly and apologized to friends: "Excuse the glasses, but I've been doing a lot of crying and I can't show my face to people without them." From that time on dark glasses became her badge of sorrow. She put them on not to hide her weeping but to let people know that she wept. The glasses became a substitute for tears and in contrast to real tears had the advantage that they didn't sting the eyelids, didn't make them red or swollen, and actually looked becoming.
Laura's fondness for dark glasses was, once again, as so many times before, inspired by her sister. But the story of the glasses also shows that the relationship of the sisters cannot be reduced to the mere statement that the younger imitated the elder. Yes, she imitated, but at the same time she corrected: she gave dark glasses a deeper significance, a more weighty significance, so that the glasses of Agnes had to blush before those of Laura for their frivolity. Every time Laura appeared with them on, it meant that she was suffering, and Agnes had the feeling that out of tact and modesty she ought to take her own glasses off.
There is still something else that is revealed by the story of the dark glasses: Agnes appears as the one favored by fate, and Laura as the one
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unloved by fate. Both sisters came to believe that face-to-face with fortune they were not equal, and Agnes probably bore this even harder than Laura. "I have a dear sister who loves me and has had nothing but bad luck in life," she would say. That's why she was so happy to welcome Laura to Paris; that's why she introduced her to Paul and begged him to treat her kindly; that's why she took it upon herself to find her a pleasant apartment, and to invite her to her own house whenever she suspected that Laura was unhappy. But no matter what Agnes did, she remained the one unjustly favored by fate and Laura remained the one fortune ignored.
Laura had a great talent for music; she was an excellent pianist, yet at the Conservatoire she took it into her head to study singing. "When I play the piano I sit facing a foreign, unfriendly object. The music doesn't belong to me, it belongs to that black instrument facing me. But when I sing, my own body changes into a piano and I turn into music." It wasn't her fault that she had a voice so weak it ruined everything: she failed to become a soloist, and all that remained of her musical career for the rest of her life was participation in an amateur choir that she attended twice a week for rehearsals and joined a few times a year for concerts.
After six years her marriage ended in ruin, too, in spite of all the goodwill she had poured into it. It is true that her very wealthy husband had to leave her a beautiful apartment and to pay her a large amount of alimony, so that she was able to set up a stylish fur shop, which she ran with a talent for business that surprised everyone; however, this pedestrian, all too materialistic success was not capable of rectifying the wrong that had been done to her on a higher, spiritual and emotional plane.
Laura, the divorcee, went through many men; she had the reputation of being a passionate lover and pretended that these loves were a cross she carried through life. "I have known many men," she would often say, in such a melancholy and pathetic way that it sounded like a complaint against fate.
"I envy you," Agnes would answer, and Laura would put on her dark glasses as a badge of sorrow.
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The admiration Laura felt in her distant childhood whenever she watched Agnes saying good-bye to a boy at the garden gate had never left her, and when she finally came to realize that her sister was not going to have a dazzling scholarly career, she could not hide her disappointment.
"How can you criticize me?" Agnes defended herself. "You arc selling fur coats instead of singing opera, and I, instead of attending international conferences, have a pleasantly meaningless job in a computer company."
"Yes, but I did everything possible to become a singer. You left the scholarly life of your own free will. I was defeated. You gave up."
"And why must I have a career?"
"Agnes! We only have one life! You have to fill it! After all, we want to leave something behind!"
Agnes was surprised. "Leave something behind?" she said with skeptical astonishment.
Laura reacted in a voice of almost pained disagreement: "Agnes, you're being negative!"
This was a reproach that Laura often addressed to her sister, but only silently. She said it aloud only two or three times. The last time was after her mother's death, when she saw her father sitting at the table tearing up photographs. What her father was doing seemed totally unacceptable to her: he was destroying a piece of life, a piece of shared life, his and her mother's; he was tearing up pictures, tearing up memories that were not only his but belonged to the whole family, especially the daughters; he was doing something he had no right to do. She started shouting at him, and Agnes came to her father's defense. When they were alone, the two sisters quarreled for the first time in their life, passionately and cruelly. "You're being negative! You're being negative!" Laura shouted at Agnes. Then she put on her dark glasses and left, sobbing and infuriated.
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The body
W
hen they were already quite old, the famous painter Salvador Dali and his wife, Gala, had a pet rabbit, who lived with them and followed them around everywhere, and of whom they were very fond. Once, they were about to embark on a long trip, and they debated long into the night what to do with the rabbit. It would have been difficult to take him along and equally difficult to entrust him to somebody else, because the rabbit was uneasy with strangers. The next day Gala prepared lunch and Dali enjoyed the excellent food until he realized he was eating rabbit meat. He got up from the table and ran to the bathroom, where he vomited up his beloved pet, the faithful friend of his waning days. Gala, on the other hand, was happy that the one she loved had passed into her guts, caressing them and becoming the body of his mistress. For her there existed no more perfect fulfillment of love than eating the beloved. Compared to this merging of bodies, the sexual act seemed to her no more than ludicrous tickling.
Laura was like Gala. Agnes was like Dali. She was fond of many people, men and women, but if because of some bizarre agreement it had been stipulated as a precondition of friendship that she would have to take care of their noses and wipe them regularly, she would have preferred to live without friends. Laura, who was aware of her sister's queasiness, berated her: "What does it mean when somebody attracts you? How can you exclude the body from such a feeling? Does a person whose body you erase still remain a person?"
Yes, Laura was like Gala: perfectly identified with her body, in which she felt at home as in a well-furnished house. And the body was more than what is visible in a mirror; the most valuable part was inside. That's why references to the body's organs and functions became a
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favorite part of her vocabulary. If she wanted to express that her lover had driven her to desperation the night before, she would say, 'The moment he left I had to throw up." Even though she often talked of vomiting, Agnes wasn't sure whether her sister had ever actually done so. Vomiting was not Laura's truth but her poetry: a metaphor, a lyrical
image of pain and disgust.
Once, when the sisters went shopping at a lingerie shop, Agnes saw Laura gently stroking a brassiere that the saleswoman was showing her. That was one of those moments when Agnes realized the difference between her sister and herself: for Agnes, the brassiere belonged in the category of objects designed to correct some bodily defect, such as a bandage, a prosthetic device, glasses, or the collar people wear after injuries to the neck. A brassiere is supposed to support something that because of faulty design is heavier than it should be and therefore must be shored up, perhaps like the balcony of a poorly constructed building that must be provided with pillars and supports to keep it from collapsing. In other words, a brassiere reveals the technical nature of the female body.
Agnes envied Paul for being able to live without constant awareness of his body. He inhaled, exhaled, his lungs worked like a big automatic bellows, and that's how he perceived his body: he gladly forgot it. Nor did he ever talk about his physical problems; this did not stem from modesty but rather from some vain longing for elegance, since disease was an imperfection of which he was ashamed. He suffered for many years from stomach ulcers, but Agnes didn't find out about it until the day an ambulance rushed him to the hospital after a terrible attack that seized him as soon as he had concluded a dramatic defense plea in the courtroom. This vanity of his was certainly ridiculous, but Agnes found it rather touching and almost envied Paul for it.
Agnes told herself that even though Paul was probably exceptionally vain, his attitude revealed the difference between the male and female lot in life: a woman spends much more time on discussions of her physical problems; she was not fated to forget about her body in a carefree way. It starts with the shock of the first bleeding; the body is suddenly present and she stands facing it like a poor mechanic ordered
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