G was supposed to visit him again in a week, and Rubens was afraid in advance of the images that would trouble him during lovemaking. Wanting to get the lute player off his mind, he sat down at the table once again, his head resting on his palm, and searched his memory for other photographs remaining from his erotic life that might help him replace the image of the lute player. He managed to find a few and was happily surprised that they were still so beautiful and exciting. But in the depths of his soul he was certain that once he started making love to G, his memory would refuse to show them to him and would substitute for them, in the way of a bad, macabre joke, the image of the lute player sitting in the flames. He was not wrong. Once again, he had to excuse himself in the middle of lovemaking.
Then he told himself that there would be no harm in taking a brief pause in his relations with women. Until next time, as they say. But this pause kept getting longer week by week, month by month. One day he realized that there would be no "next time."
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The celebration
I
IN the health club, the movement of arms and legs has for many years been reflected by mirrors; six months ago, at the insistence of the imagologues, mirrors even invaded the swimming pool; we became surrounded by mirrors on three sides, with the fourth side consisting of a single huge window looking out on the roofs of Paris. We sat in our swimming trunks at a table by the edge of the pool, which was full of swimmers puffing and blowing up and down. A bottle of wine, which I had ordered to celebrate an anniversary, stood in the middle of the table.
Avenarius didn't even bother to ask me what I was celebrating, because he was struck by a new idea: "Imagine that you are given the choice of two possibilities: to spend a night of love with a world-famous beauty, let's say Brigitte Bardot or Greta Garbo, but on condition that nobody must know about it. Or to stroll down the main avenue of the city with your arm wrapped intimately around her shoulder, but on condition that you must never sleep with her. I'd love to know exactly what percentage of people would choose the one or the other of these possibilities. That would require statistical analysis. I therefore approached several companies conducting public opinion polls, but all of them turned me down."
"I can never quite understand to what extent one should take your projects seriously."
"Everything I do should be taken absolutely seriously."
I continued, "For example, I try to imagine you lecturing ecologists about your plan to destroy cars. Surely you didn't expect them to approve it!"
I paused. Avenarius kept silent.
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"Or did you by any chance think they would burst into applause?"
"No," said Avenarius, "I didn't."
"Then why did you make the proposal? In order to unmask them? To prove to them that in spite of all their nonconformist gesticulations they are in reality a part of what you call Diabolum?"
'There is nothing more useless," Avenarius said, "than trying to prove something to idiots."
"Then there is only one explanation: you wanted to have some fun. But even in that case your behavior seems illogical to me. Surely you didn't expect that any of them would understand you and laugh!"
Avenarius shook his head and said rather sadly, "No, I didn't expect that. Diabolum is characterized by the total lack of a sense of humor. The comical, even if it still exists, has become invisible. Joking no longer makes sense." Then he added, 'This world takes everything seriously. Even me. And that's the limit."
"I should rather think that nobody takes anything seriously! They all just want to amuse themselves!"
"That comes to the same thing. When that complete ass is forced to announce on his news program that an atomic war has broken out or that Paris has been devastated by an earthquake, he will certainly try to be amusing. Perhaps he is already preparing some witticisms for such occasions. But this has nothing to do with a sense of the comic. Because whoever is comical in such a case is someone looking for a witticism to announce an earthquake. And someone looking for a witticism to announce an earthquake takes his activity absolutely seriously and it would never occur to him that he is being comical. Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable."
I know my friend well, and I often amuse myself by imitating his way of talking and by adopting his thoughts and ideas; and yet there is something about him that always eludes me. I like the way he acts, it attracts me, but I cannot say that I fully understand him. Some time ago I explained to him that the essence of an individual can only be expressed by means of metaphor. By the revealing lightning of metaphor.
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But as long as I've known him, I have never been able to find a metaphor that would explain Avenarius and let me understand him.
"Well, if it wasn't for the sake of fun, why did you submit that plan? Why?"
Before he could answer me, a surprised shout interrupted us: "Professor Avenarius! Is it possible?"
An attractive man in swimming trunks, between fifty and sixty, was walking toward us from the entrance. Avenarius rose to his feet. Both men seemed moved and kept shaking hands for a long time.
Then Avenarius introduced us. I realized that I was standing face to face with Paul.
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He joined us at the table, and Avenarius made a broad gesture in my direction: "You don't know his novels? Life Is Elsewhere! You've got to read it! My wife claims that it's outstanding!"
I realized with sudden clarity that Avenarius had never read my novel; when he urged me some time ago to bring him a copy, it was only because his insomniac wife needed to consume mountains of books in bed. It made me sad.
"I just came to sober up in the water," said Paul. Then he saw the wine on the table and at once forgot about the water. "What are you drinking?" He picked up the bottle and carefully examined the label. Then he added, 'Today I've been drinking since morning."
Yes, it showed, and I was surprised. I had never imagined him as a drunk. I called to the waiter to bring us another glass.
We started to talk about all sorts of things. Avenarius referred a few more times to my novels, which he had not read, and so provoked Paul to make a remark whose rudeness astonished me: "I don't read novels. Memoirs are much more amusing and instructive for me. Or biographies. Recently I've been reading books about Salinger, Rodin, and the loves of Franz Kafka. And a marvelous biography of Hemingway. What a fraud. What a liar. What a megalomaniac." Paul laughed happily. "What an impotent. What a sadist. What a macho. What an erotomaniac. What a misogynist."
"If you're ready, as a lawyer, to defend even murderers, why don't you come to the defense of writers who have committed no wrong except for writing books?" I asked.
"Because they get on my nerves," Paul retorted cheerfully, and poured some wine into the glass the waiter had just placed before him.
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"My wife adores Mahler," he continued. "She told me that two weeks before the premiere of his Seventh Symphony he locked himself up in a noisy hotel room and spent the whole night rewriting the orchestration."
"Yes," I agreed, "it was in Prague, in 1906. The name of the hotel was the Blue Star."
"I visualize him sitting in the hotel room, surrounded by manuscript paper," Paul continued, refusing to let himself be interrupted. "He was convinced that his whole work would be ruined if the melody were played by a clarinet instead of an oboe during the second movement."
"That's precisely so," I said, thinking of my novel.
Paul continued, "I wish that someday this symphony could be played before an audience consisting of the best musical experts, first with the corrections made in those last two weeks, and then without the corrections. I guarantee that nobody would be able to tell one version from the other. Don't get me wrong: it is certainly r
emarkable that the motif played in the second movement by the violin is picked up in the last movement by the flute. Everything is worked through, thought through, felt through, nothing has been left to chance, but that enormous perfection overwhelms us, it surpasses the capacity of our memory, our ability to concentrate, so that even the most fanatically attentive listener will grasp no more than one-hundredth of the symphony, and certainly it will be this one-hundredth that Mahler cared about the least."
His idea, so obviously correct, cheered him up, whereas I was becoming sadder and sadder: if a reader skips a single sentence of my novel he won't be able to understand it, and yet where in the world will you find a reader who never skips a line? Am I not myself the greatest skipper of lines and pages?
"I don't deny those symphonies their perfection," continued Paul. "I only deny the importance of that perfection. Those super-sublime symphonies are nothing but cathedrals of the useless. They are inaccessible to man. They are inhuman. We exaggerated their significance. They made us feel inferior. Europe reduced Europe to fifty works of genius that it never understood. Just think of this outrageous inequal-
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ity: millions of Europeans signifying nothing, against fifty names signifying everything! Class inequality is but an insignificant shortcoming compared to this insulting metaphysical inequality, which turns some into grains of sand while endowing others with the meaning of being!"
The bottle was empty. I called the waiter to bring us another. This caused Paul to lose the thread.
"You spoke about biographies," I prompted him.
"Ah... yes," he recalled.
"You were happy that you can at last read the intimate correspondence of the dead."
"I know, I know," said Paul, as if he wanted to counter in advance any objections from the other side. "I assure you that rifling through someone's intimate correspondence, interrogating his former mistresses, talking doctors into betraying professional confidences, that's rotten. Authors of biographies are riffraff, and I would never sit at the same table with them as I do with you. Robespierre, too, would never have sat down with the riffraff that had collective orgasms at the spectacle of public executions. But he knew that he couldn't do without them. The riffraff is an instrument of just revolutionary hatred."
"What is revolutionary about hatred for Hemingway?" I asked.
"I'm not talking about hatred for Hemingway! I'm talking about his work I'm talking about their work! It was necessary to say out loud at last that reading about Hemingway is a thousand times more amusing and instructive than reading Hemingway. It was necessary to show that Hemingway's work is but a coded form of Hemingway's life and that this life was just as poor and meaningless as all our lives. It was necessary to cut Mahler's symphony into little pieces and use it as background music for toilet-paper ads. It was necessary at last to end the terror of the immortals. To overthrow the arrogant power of the Ninth Symphonies and the Fausts!"
Drunk on his own words, he got up and raised his glass high: "I drink to the end of the old days!"
3
In the mirrors that reflected one another, Paul was multiplied twenty-seven times, and people at the next table watched his upraised arm and its glass with curiosity. Two fat men emerging from the Jacuzzi also stopped and stared at Paul's twenty-seven arms fixed in the air. At first I thought that he had frozen in this gesture in order to add dramatic pathos to his words, but then I noticed a woman in a swimsuit who had just entered the room, a fortyish woman with a pretty face, well-formed though rather short legs, and an expressive though rather hefty behind that pointed toward the ground like a thick arrow. That arrow made me recognize her immediately.
She didn't see us at first and walked straight toward the pool. But our eyes were fixed on her with such intensity that they at last attracted her gaze toward us. She blushed. It is a beautiful thing when a woman blushes; at that instant her body no longer belongs to her; she doesn't control it; she is at its mercy; oh, can there be anything more beautiful than the sight of a woman violated by her own body! I began to understand Avenarius's weakness for Laura. I turned my eyes toward him: his face remained perfectly immobile. This self-control seemed to betray him even more than Laura was betrayed by her blushing.
She collected herself, smiled sociably, and approached our table. We rose, and Paul introduced us to his wife. I kept on watching Avenarius. Was he aware that Laura was Paul's wife? I didn't think so. But I wasn't certain, and in fact I wasn't certain of anything. As he shook Laura's hand he bowed, as if seeing her for the first time in his life. Laura took her leave (a bit too quickly, I thought) and jumped into the pool.
All of Paul's euphoria suddenly left him. "I'm glad that you've met her," he said with melancholy. "She is, as they say, the woman of my
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life. I should congratulate myself. Life is short and most people never find the woman of their life."
The waiter brought another bottle, opened it in front of us, and filled all the glasses, and Paul again lost his thread.
"You were talking about the woman of your life," I prompted after the waiter had gone.
"Yes," he said. "We have a little girl, three months old. I also have a daughter from my first marriage. A year ago she left home. Without saying good-bye. I was unhappy, because I am very fond of her. For a long time I had no news of her. Two days ago she came back because her boyfriend had dropped her, but not before he had given her a child, a little girl. My friends, I have a grandchild! I am now surrounded by four women!" The idea of four women seemed to fill him with energy. "That's the reason I've been drinking since morning! I drink to the reunion! I drink to the health of my daughter and my granddaughter!"
Below us in the pool, Laura was splashing along with two other swimmers, and Paul smiled. It was a peculiar, tired smile, which made me feel sorry for him. It seemed to me that he had suddenly grown older. His mighty shock of gray hair had suddenly turned into the coiffiire of an old lady. As if he wished to counter an attack of weakness by exerting his willpower, he rose once again, glass in hand.
In the meantime we could hear from below the sound of arms striking the water. Keeping her head above the water, Laura swam the crawl, clumsily but all the more passionately and with a sort of anger.
It seemed to me that each stroke was falling on Paul's head like successive years: his face was visibly aging before our eyes. Already he was seventy and a moment later eighty, and still he stood there holding his glass in front of him as if he wished to stop the avalanche of years hurtling toward him. "I recall a famous phrase from my youth," he said in a voice that suddenly lost all its resonance: "Woman is the future of man. Who actually said that? I forget. Lenin? Kennedy? No, no. It was some poet."
"Aragon," I prompted.
Avenarius said crossly, "What does that mean, woman is the future of man? That men will turn into women? I don't understand that stupid phrase!"
"It's not a stupid phrase! It's a poetic phrase!" Paul protested.
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"Literature will die out, and stupid poetic phrases will remain to drift over the world," I remarked.
Paul ignored me. He had just noticed his image, multiplied twenty-seven times in the mirrors, and couldn't tear his eyes away. He turned, back and forth, to each of his mirrored faces, and spoke with the high, feeble voice of an old lady: "Woman is the future of man. That means that the world that was once formed in man's image will now be transformed into the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweibliche, the eternally feminine!"
As if these prophetic words had completely exhausted him, Paul was suddenly older by another ten years, he was a weak, completely enfeebled ol
d man, between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and fifty years old. He was not even able to hold his glass. He crumpled into his chair. Then he said, sincerely and sadly, "She came back without a word. And she hates Laura. And Laura hates her. Maternity has made both of them more pugnacious. Once again, Mahler blares from one room and rock from the other. Once again they want me to take sides, once again they're giving me ultimatums. They have started to fight. And once women start to fight they don't stop." Then, with a confidential air, he leaned toward us: "Don't take me seriously, friends. What I am about to tell you is not true." He lowered his voice, as if he were about to impart a great secret: "It has been extremely lucky that up to now wars have been fought only by men. If they had been fought by women, they would have been so consistently cruel that today there wouldn't be a single human being left on the planet." And as if he wanted us to forget immediately what he had just said, he pounded the table with his fist and raised his voice: "Friends, I wish music would cease to exist. I wish Mahler's father had caught his son masturbating and given him such a blow on the ear that little Gustav became stone-deaf for life, unable to tell a drum from a violin. And I wish that the electric current could be shut off from guitars and instead connected to chairs to which I would personally tie all guitarists." And then he added very quietly, "Friends, I wish I were ten times more drunk than I am."
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He sat at the table, crestfallen, and it was so sad that we couldn't bear watching him any longer. We rose, clustered around him, and patted him on the back. And as we were patting him, we suddenly noticed that his wife had climbed out of the water and strode right past us toward the exit. She pretended we didn't exist.
Was she so angry with Paul that she didn't even want to see his face? Or was she embarrassed by the unexpected meeting with Avenarius? Whatever the case may have been, her stride as she passed us had something so powerful and attractive about it that we stopped patting Paul and all three of us gazed after her.
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