For two hours I had watched as a drama woven from Greek myth unfolded before me on stage. Its protagonists, although mortal, were like Titans; one felt that here were the fairest specimens of the human race. Their fate, the passions that enflamed them, all that they felt and endured, seemed on a different scale: majestic, noble, grand. And the actors who played them also seemed, here in the bleak reality of a ‘People’s republic’, to belong to a world apart. Here were men and women of untold beauty and charismatic power, dazzling charm and crystal-clear voices. And they came from the West! From ‘bourgeois’ France, the Olympus of life and art! From the legendary Comédie Française! How talented they must be, how sensitive, how experienced, how rich in their inner life, how open to the world! And the lives of such people, their everyday, personal lives – what must they be like, over there, under the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe?
And here, watching these godlike mythic characters played by people who themselves seemed partly divine, was this rare creature, this woman who to me was like a goddess. Born of mysterious, exceptional parents, like the Rhine in the ‘holy Alps’, where ‘only the pure is forged’; handsome, quick-witted and strong-willed; sorely tried by Fate’s adversities; caught and imprisoned by the Bolshevik pygmies occupying Poland and now exerting all her cunning to find a way out of the trap. Who else in this wasteland had such strength, such beauty, such intelligence? Where was there another ‘so happily born, to remain free’?
As befitted a proud femme emancipée, she had arrived alone and at the last minute. When she left, a car with diplomatic plates was waiting, like a chariot for a goddess, to whisk her off to the dinner or banquet – at the embassy perhaps, or maybe the Hotel Bristol – for the French actors; she’d be drinking champagne, holding her own, conversing with esprit and brillant. An equal among equals. In a different dimension.
And who was I compared to this? Compared to them, compared to her? Was I not a lesser being, a ‘baser nature’? Baser even than those that come between ‘the pass and fell incensed points of mighty opposites’, for not even that small comfort had been granted me. What was my own life? A childhood in the ruins of Warsaw; the macabre world of Stalinism; a sad, poor world, crude and boorish and bleak. A pathetic round of daily rituals in a wretched conquered province, a dump in the middle of nowhere, a wasteland. A world of used goods and hand-me-downs, old, ugly, crippled. A world where you relied on ‘drops’ and parcels of frumpy cast-offs from the West and listened to Radio Free Europe. And where you constantly heard the same refrain: one day, somewhere . . . not here . . . finished, it’s finished . . . My life’s prose was indeed, as a certain poet said, lacking in syntactical beauty.
Fate is not everything, however. After all, Madame herself – although the course of her own life was rare, indeed unique – had spent many years plodding through the same wasteland. But she had something that counts just as much, perhaps more: spirit, an inner fire, a flame that burned hot and bright and strong. And I – what did I have? Where was my fire? How bright was its flame? Here again, I paled in comparison. I was stunted, a cripple. I was a good student, certainly; I could hold my own in a conversation, speak French and play the piano; I had been initiated into the arcana of chess, game of kings; I was blessed with a prodigious memory. I was good with words and could juggle them in all sorts of subtle ways. I could even speak in verse. So what? Where did any of this get me? It was all so conventional, so civilised and ‘cultured’, so polite – a game of manners, abstract and cold. It wasn’t real. There was no madness in it, no divine folly, no ecstasy. No faith except in reason, no sensibility, only sense. The mind was all, the body nothing. I preferred dress to nakedness. I would rather have semblance than truth. Enclosed within myself, inaccessible, locked in the impregnable armour of my brain, I was nothing but irony and superficial wit, the eternal court jester, the buffoon. I paled at the sight of blood. I was ashamed of my own nature. I had no access to deep feeling, for there was no form in which I could assimilate it. I could not be transported by passion, for I could not make it part of me. I could not express love.
Could a figure like this be the protagonist of a drama? Perhaps, but never a Hippolytus, never a Phaedra, never . . . an Antony. At most perhaps someone like Shakespeare’s Jaques, like Molière’s Misanthrope, like Beckett’s Hamm. A caricature or anti-hero, a negative figure embodying sickness, doubt and exile from the world.
And Madame, whoever she really was – the Ice Queen, the Rhine, Lena or a femme fatale – must have sensed this. And since she did, she could never be drawn to me; she could only be repelled. If like me she was cold, overly proud, caught in the coils of her own reason and shame, someone like me could only intimidate, even paralyse her, as might an image in a distorting mirror. If underneath that icy mask was a young woman of courage and determination, fighting to escape from her cage, then someone like me was of no use to her: she needed a Heyst, a Captain – a man, not a confused, insecure boy, with an inferiority complex and chasing after will-o’-the-wisps. And if, finally, she was a Helen or a Cleopatra, a contessa, a lioness of the salons, then someone like me simply did not exist for her: I was like an irritating, buzzing insect, or at best an unnoticed extra in a crowd.
This conclusion, in all its layered complexity, was an oppressive burden. In an effort to dispel the cloud of apathy threatening to envelop me, I took up the programme and looked inside.
The back cover was taken up by a picture of Racine, a black-and-white reproduction of a portrait attributed to François de Troy. It showed him as a fairly young man, still in his thirties. His gaze is fixed longingly on something off to the side; his almond eyes seem to be looking at someone sitting next to me, on my right, and he has a sad, almost imperceptible smile.
He’s looking at her, not at me, I thought bitterly – at the figure, not the background. For him I am merely . . . an empty place.
I turned over a page, looking for Freddy’s name. I soon found it, above a title – ‘A Genius’ – and a dense column of text. It was a profile of Racine, written with great gusto and enthusiasm, interwoven with biographical details, and depicting an artist full of inner contradictions.
In this pious, solid, worthy citizen, his spiritual upbringing shaped by a reclusive life at the Port Royal, by the Jansenists’ rigorous asceticism and firm belief in the doctrine of divine Grace, breathed the spirit of genius. His talent, under his burgher’s cloak, was diabolical. This much by way of introduction. But there was more: in this poor orphan from the provinces, kindly, well meaning and shy, smouldered a dark hunger, a lust for fame and success, a greed for worldly things; within the iceberg of logic steamed a volcano of passion. In the cool follower of Apollo, Dionysus ran riot, performing acts of unbridled debauchery; within this bright, open Christian soul, full of hope and serenity, lurked the gloomy depths of an unbounded pessimism.
The fruit is according to the seed; as is the soil, so is the harvest. In every aspect of the writer’s life and work the contradictions of his nature were glaringly evident. It was a strangely torn life, full of deep conflicts and sharp, jarring dissonances. The first nineteen years were a model of propriety: an angelic childhood and exemplary youth devoted to prayer and study (albeit sometimes betrayed in favour of titillating romances read furtively under the school desk). Then came the age of manhood, and with it sin and lust, illicit love, the fever of desire, the passions of the flesh; flights of genius, royal favours, a spectacular career and not a few diableries. Within ten years he produced seven tragedies, each one better than the last; he shone in high society and dazzled at court. He sought and won the hearts of beautiful actresses. He was scaling great – and lucrative – heights: fame, riches and prestige lay before him. He was in sight of the summit. And then it stopped. Suddenly, when he was barely thirty-seven, he broke with the theatre and the life of the libertine, that ‘gross illusion and marketplace of vanity’. Like the prodigal son he returned to the bosom of the Port Royal; in an act of contrition, he burned all his n
otes for further plays, and proceeded to wed a dull and worthy townswoman, the quiet, pious daughter of a prosperous notary. She never read a single line of any of his plays. They had seven children, five daughters and two sons, in whom he did his best to inculcate a loathing of literature. Twenty-three years of this upright life turned him into an adept courtier with a tendency to bigotry.
And yet even then his extraordinary genius would out. This is what happened. Mme de Maintenon, the pious and no longer youthful morganatic wife of King Louis XIV, had under her patronage a well-known boarding school for the daughters of the less wealthy nobility. Here the dramatic arts, for the girls’ elocution and the perfection of elegant manners, were among those encouraged. Plays were carefully chosen; a high standard of suitability was required. It was decided that the ‘golden syllables’ of the author of Bérénice would do very well.
No one could have foreseen the consequences of this decision. The girls acted too well, awesomely well – with such fire and passion that their God-fearing patron stopped the rehearsals. Loath to squander an opportunity, however, and eager to put this extraordinary pen to some use of her own, she commissioned Racine to produce a new play just for her – for the school in Saint-Cyr. But it must be a ‘moral’ play, ‘with songs’, and no hidden ‘dangers for the soul’. The poet at first refused: for twelve years now he had kept unswervingly to the path of virtue, and he saw all theatre as the work of the devil. But then he wavered. Finally, tempted by the prospect of labouring for the greater glory of God, he agreed.
Esther was duly written. Its effects were astonishing. The tragedy was based on Holy Scripture, but despite its lofty themes and utter lack of anything impure to which blame might be attached, it awakened an unhealthy excitement among the girls. The atmosphere became heated: intrigues and rivalries flourished, ambitions collided and a fever of agitation broke out. Then, when society began to gather to see the play, the school, that strict bastion of chastity and propriety, became a veritable salon. The temple of the Vestal Virgins was transformed into a den of depravity. Emotions burst through, passions were aroused, coquetry and undesirable intimacies were indulged in. The poet, too, felt the old spirit stirring within him. As in the days when he had lived and breathed the theatre, attending scrupulously to every line, every accent and word uttered by his actress-mistresses, he began to scrutinise the interpretation of his text in minute detail. This so absorbed him that when the girl playing Eliza stumbled in her soliloquy he was moved to cry out in anguish, ‘Girl, you are killing my play!’ and stop the performance. She, frightened and abashed, disintegrated into loud sobs; he was at once contrite and rushed to wipe away her tears. One thing led to another: begging her forgiveness, he tried to calm her – and himself. His lips sought hers. Thus were they reconciled.
And thus again – yet again! and in what circumstances! – did frenzied Dionysus triumph over cool Apollo; again, quite unintentionally, indeed despite the efforts of everyone concerned, art had kindled fire. The power of its godless beauty was infinite. Which was why, when the poet wrote Athalie, another biblical play (to be hailed years later as one of the great masterpieces of French theatre), for Mme de Maintenon, her wards at Saint-Cyr were permitted to perform it only once, before the King, and attired in everyday dress.
On the bottom of the page where this sketch ended was a reproduction of another portrait of Racine, this one by Charon, painted from the imagination almost a century after the poet’s death. It depicted him in the act of reading his Britannicus to the Roi Soleil. The poet (foreground, left) sits in an armchair, holding before him a book, open somewhere roughly in the middle, at which he gazes with an expression of bliss. The King (a touch deeper in the background, right), stretched out on a sofa, his head on one hand, is watching him pensively and approvingly, as if to say, How nicely you write, Racine, and you read quite nicely, too.
This little scene gave me pause, and caused me to resume my interrupted analysis of my own life.
If one is not a king, I thought wistfully, but with a tiny, flickering flame of hope, if one is not even cut out to be a hero, and yet is not content with mere daily bread, ‘the common round, the simple task’, if one dreams and longs for inexpressible things, and constantly plays the clown because one cannot express emotion in a normal way – then the only form of fulfilment, the one consolation, is to become an artist – a pupil of the world, a magus.
I saw myself then through the eyes of my imagination, saw myself sitting all day long at a desk in a room, writing, with a pen or a typewriter, filling page after page with characters, gradually turning each from white to black. I saw myself weaving fascinating tales, drawn from reality but so much better, so much more attractive and enticing than reality itself, composing them like music, extracting their rhythm, making my words, read aloud, sound like a poem. Choosing a word, selecting a phrase, constructing a sentence, until there, at last, was a paragraph, pure and clear and perfectly formed. And then I would go for a walk, to think about the next.
This, I whispered to myself, this will be my life. And I put away the programme.
On Monday, after school, I went to the library and took out Racine’s tragedies in French. Then, trying them out, as it were, I carefully copied out Hippolytus’s monologue and Phaedra’s ‘aria’ into my Cahier. After reading them through several times I knew them both by heart.
A Man and a Woman
Since the day she had sent me to fetch the exercise book from her office, Madame seemed to have warmed to me; indeed she was more gracious with every lesson. She not only acknowledged my presence but paid me more attention than she ever had before. The harsh, mocking tone was gone; she spoke to me politely, and more often than to any of the others, usually when someone didn’t know the answer to something or had made a mistake. She would look at me and ask, ‘Well, what do you think?’ or ‘Was that correct?’ as if I were the ultimate arbiter; then, ‘Well, then, what is the right answer?’ When I gave it she uttered an appreciative ‘Voilà!’ and resumed the exercise where she had interrupted it.
She treated me like a teacher’s pet: the infallible, exemplary pupil. I can’t say that the role appealed to me much, but I bore it with good grace for the sake of the special and quite unexpected favours that came with it.
She began to use me as her assistant at the blackboard. She would catch my eye and say (in Polish), ‘Come here; you can help me,’ and hand me the chalk. Or she would have me read some passage from a newspaper, with a ‘would you be so kind’ or a ‘would you, please?’. And during dictations or written verb exercises, when she was in the habit of strolling among the desks, she would come up and say to me in an undertone, ‘You don’t have to bother with that.’ Once – but only once – she even spoke my name, and she used the familiar, abbreviated form.
I was at a loss to understand this change. What had caused it? What was behind it? Had she met up with Freddy, had he said something to her? Had she been warned that a visit from the French inspection committee was imminent, and was she merely trying to smooth my feathers in preparation for it? Or perhaps there was no special reason? Perhaps it was just a whim, a desire to play games with me? Whatever her motives, I decided that the best response to this ‘opening’ was to stay calm and wait. Or, in the language of chess, to ‘refuse her gambit’, just as she had refused mine.
Let her develop her game, I thought to myself; I’ll hold off until her strategy becomes clear. Before I make my move I should know what she’s aiming for, and why. That’s what theory tells you to do, if you don’t want to be slaughtered. The Caro-Kann defence. Keep quiet and go with the game. She wants me to play the teacher’s pet? Fine. To be her errand-boy? No discussion, just do it. Am I to sit there, then, listening to her wheedling, almost wooing tones, executing her errands and her suggestive-sounding wishes, hearing her call me – amazingly! – by the familiar version of my own name, and not react at all? Not the least bit? Yes. Too bad. I’ll just have to grit my teeth and wait, wait for the hour to
strike. Who knows, perhaps it will be soon . . . at the Skarb Cinema on Traugutt Street, at an invitation-only screening . . .
The twenty-seventh of January. A Friday. Eight o’clock in the evening.
It was her birthday, a fact I remembered only when I was leaving the house and a fragment of Mozart’s Requiem (the Dies Irae) came on the radio. And in the bus another thought occurred to me. Just as I had been travelling in the wrong direction, like Columbus, when going ‘west’ to the French Embassy, so now, in terms of time as measured by the order of the days of the week, I seemed to be going backwards. The Picasso opening had been on a Sunday. I had seen Phèdre on a Saturday. And here I was, going to see A Man and a Woman on a Friday . . .
I wonder where I’ll get if I keep going in reverse like this? he thought, amused. Perhaps this way I’ll be able to make up some of my fatal tardiness in coming into this world, and the holy moment will finally be granted me?
This time his secret investigator’s equipment consisted, in addition to the opera glasses (which since the evening at the theatre he was never without), of a pair of sunglasses and an old issue of L’Humanité to serve as cover if necessary. He also had in his possession a complete set of documents – his carte d’entrée, his school and Marymont chess club IDs, the monthly bus pass. In the left pocket of his trousers was a serious amount of money: seventy-five zlotys (three twenties and a further fifteen in change); the right contained a clean handkerchief and the two invaluable, ever-present safety-pins.
He got off at the corner of Traugutt and the Krakowskie Przedmiescie, in front of the building which now housed the university’s Philosophy Department but which, before the war, had been the Zygmunt Wielopolski high school (numbering among its pupils the writer Gombrowicz and also the prototype of Tadzio in Death in Venice). He passed the church of the Holy Cross and turned into a gate next to the Classics Department. The gate led into a wide courtyard, through which the approach to the Skarb Cinema was more pleasant than from the street side.
Madame Page 35
