Slowness

by Milan Kundera

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  The French children rushing to help their little African friends always remind me of the face of the intellectual Berck. Those were his glory days. As is often the case with glory, his was instigated by a defeat: let’s remember: in the eighties of our century, the world was struck by the epidemic of a disease called AIDS, which was transmitted during sexual contact and which, early on, rampaged mainly among homosexuals. To stand up against the fanatics who saw the epidemic as a

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  would be worth the risk; but in the third phase, an idea stopped him in his course toward the seropositive mouth: if he kissed a sick man too, that would not make him Duberques’s match; quite the opposite, he would be reduced to the level of a copycat, a follower, a minion even, who by this hasty imitation would add still greater luster to the other man’s glory. So he settled for staying put and smiling inanely. But those few seconds of hesitation cost him dearly, because the camera was there and, on the nightly news, the whole of France read on his face the three phases of his uncertainty, and snickered. Thus the children collecting bags of rice for Somalia came to his rescue at exactly the right moment. He took every opportunity to pelt the public with the fine dictum “Only the children are living in truth!,” then took off for Africa and got himself photographed alongside a little dying black girl whose face was covered with flies. The photo became famous the world over, much more famous than the one of Duberques kissing an AIDS patient, because a dying child counts more than a dying adult, an obvious fact that at the time still escaped Duberques. But the man did not

  consider himself beaten, and a few days later he appeared on television; a practicing Christian, he knew Berck to be an atheist, which gave him the idea of bringing along a candle, a weapon before which even the most obdurate unbelievers bow their heads; during the interview he pulled it from his pocket and lit it; with the perfidious purpose of casting discredit on Berck’s concern for exotic lands, he talked about our own poor children, in our villages, in our outer suburbs, and invited his fellow citizens to come down into the street, each carrying a candle, for a grand march through Paris as a sign of solidarity with the suffering children; then (suppressing his mirth) he issued a specific invitation to Berck to come join him at the head of the procession. Berck had a choice: either participate in the march, carrying a candle as if he were Duberques’s choirboy, or else dodge it and risk the blame. It was a snare he had to escape by some bold and unexpected act: he decided to fly off straightaway to an Asian country where the people were in revolt, and there shout out loud and clear his support for the oppressed; alas, geography was never his strong suit; for him the world divided into France and

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  Not-France, with its obscure provinces he always mixed up; so he stepped off the plane in some other, tiresomely peaceful country, whose mountain airport was frozen and underserviced; he had to stay there eight days waiting for a plane to take him home, famished and flu-ridden, to Paris.

  “Berck is the martyr-king of the dancers,” commented Pontevin.

  The dancer concept is known only to a small circle of Pontevin’s friends. It is his great invention, and perhaps regrettably, he never developed it into a book or made it a subject for international symposia. But he doesn’t care about public renown, for which reason his friends listen to him with all the greater amused attention.

  not power but glory; his desire is not to impose this or that social scheme on the world (he couldn’t care less about that) but to take over the stage so as to beam forth his self.

  Taking over the stage requires keeping other people off it. Which supposes special battle tactics. The battle the dancer fights, Pontevin calls ““moral judo”; the dancer throws down the gauntlet to the whole world: who can appear more moral (more courageous, more decent, more sincere, more self-sacrificing, more truthful) than he? And he utilizes every hold that lets him put the other person in a morally inferior situation.

  If a dancer does get the opportunity to enter the political game, he will showily refuse all secret deals (which have always been the playing field of real politics) while denouncing them as deceitful, dishonest, hypocritical, dirty; he will lay out his own proposals publicly, up on a platform, singing and dancing, and will call on the others by name to do the same; I stress: not quietly (which would give the other person the time to consider, to discuss counterproposals) but publicly, and if possible by surprise: “Are you prepared right now (as I am) to give up your

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  All politicians nowadays, Pontevin says, have a bit of the dancer in them, and all dancers are involved in politics, which however should not lead us to mistake the one for the other. The dancer differs from the politician in that he seeks

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  April salary for the sake of the children of Somalia?” Taken by surprise, people have only two choices: either refuse and discredit themselves as enemies of children, or else say “yes” with terrific uneasiness, which the camera is sure to display maliciously, the way it displayed poor Berck’s hesitations at the close of the lunch for the people with AIDS. “Why are you silent, Doctor H., while human rights are being trampled in your country?” Doctor H. was asked that question at a moment—in the midst of operating on a patient—when he could not respond; but when he had stitched up the open belly, he was overcome by such shame for his silence that he blurted forth everything one could want to hear from him and then some; after which the dancer who had harangued him (and here’s another grip in moral judo, a specially powerful one) snapped: “Finally. Even if it does come a little late. …”

  Situations can arise (under dictatorships, for instance) where it is dangerous to take a public position; for the dancer a little less dangerous than for others, because, having stepped into the spotlight, visible from all angles, he is protected by the world’s attention; but he has his anonymous admirers who respond to his splendid yet thoughtless exhortation by signing petitions, attending forbidden meetings, demonstrating in the streets; those people will be treated ruthlessly, and the dancer will never yield to the sentimental temptation to blame himself for having brought trouble on them, knowing that a noble cause counts for more than this or that individual.

  Vincent raises an objection to Pontevin: “Everyone knows you loathe Berck, and we’re with you on that. Still, even if he is a jackass, he’s supported causes we consider good ones ourselves, or, if you insist, his vanity has supported them. And I ask you: if you want to step into some public dispute, call attention to some horror, help someone being persecuted, how can you do it nowadays without being, or looking like, a dancer?”

  To which the mysterious Pontevin replies: “You’re wrong if you think I meant to attack dancers. I defend them. Anyone who dislikes dancers and wants to denigrate them is always going to come up against an insuperable obstacle: their decency; because with his constant exposure to the public, the dancer condemns himself to

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  being irreproachable; he hasn’t made a pact with the Devil like Faust, he’s made one with the Angel: he seeks to make his life a work of art, and that’s the job the Angel helps him with; because don’t forget, dancing is an art! That obsession with seeing his own life as containing the stuff of art is where you find the true essence of the dancer; he doesn’t preach morality, he dances it! He hopes to move and dazzle the world with the beauty of his life! He is in love with his life the way a sculptor might be in love with the statue he is carving.”

  who aspire to change the world. Change the world! In Pontevin’s view, what a monstrous goal! Not because the world is so admirable as it is but because any change leads inevitably to something worse. And because, from a more selfish standpoint, any idea made public will sooner or later turn on its author and confiscate the pleasure he got from thinking it. For Pontevin is one of the great disciples of Epicurus: he invents and develops his ideas simply because it gives him pleasure. He does not despise mankind,
which is for him an inexhaustible source of merrily malicious reflections, but he feels not the faintest desire to come into too close contact with it. He is surrounded by a gang of cronies who get together at the Cafe Gascon, and this little sample of mankind is enough for him.

  Of those cronies, Vincent is the most innocent and the most touching. I like him, and my only reproach (tinged with envy, it is true) is for the childlike, and to my mind excessive, adoration he devotes to Pontevin. But even that friendship has something touching about it. Because they discuss a lot of subjects that captivate him—philosophy, politics, books—Vincent is happy to be

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  I wonder why Pontevin does not make his very interesting ideas public. After all, he hasn’t got such a lot to do, this Ph.D. historian sitting bored in his office at the Bibliotheque Nationale. He doesn’t care about making his theories known? That’s an understatement: he detests the idea. A person who makes his ideas public does risk persuading others of his viewpoint, influencing them, and thus winding up in the role of those

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  alone with Pontevin; Vincent brims over with odd, provocative ideas, and Pontevin, who is captivated too, straightens out his disciple, inspires him, encourages him. But all it takes is a third person turning up for Vincent to become unhappy, because Pontevin changes instantly: he talks louder and becomes entertaining, too entertaining for Vincent’s taste.

  For instance: They are by themselves in the cafe, and Vincent asks: “What do you really think about what’s going on in Somalia?” Patiently, Pontevin gives him a whole lecture on Africa. Vincent raises objections, they argue, maybe they joke around as well, but not trying to be clever, just to allow themselves a little levity within a conversation of the utmost seriousness.

  Then in comes Machu with a beautiful stranger. Vincent tries to go on with the discussion: “But tell me, Pontevin, don’t you think you’re making a mistake to claim that… ,” and he develops an interesting polemic opposing his friend’s theories.

  Pontevin takes a long pause. He is the master of long pauses. He knows that only timid people fear them and that when they don’t know what to say, they rush into embarrassing remarks that

  make them look ridiculous. Pontevin knows how to keep still so magisterially that the very Milky Way, impressed by his silence, eagerly awaits his reply. Without a word, he looks at Vincent who, for no reason, shyly lowers his eyes, then, smiling, he looks at the woman and turns again to Vincent, his eyes heavy with feigned solicitude: “Your insisting, in a woman’s presence, upon such excessively clever notions indicates a disturbing drop in your libido.”

  Machu’s face takes on its famous idiot grin, the lovely lady passes a condescending and amused glance over Vincent, and Vincent turns bright red; he feels wounded: a friend who a minute ago was full of consideration for him is suddenly willing to plunge him into discomfort for the sole purpose of impressing a woman.

  Then other friends come in, sit down, chatter; Machu tells some stories; with a few dry little remarks, Goujard displays his bookish erudition; there’s the sound of women’s laughter. Pontevin keeps silent; he waits; when he has let his silence ripen sufficiently, he says: “My girlfriend keeps wanting me to get rough with her.”

  My God, he certainly knows how to put things.

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  Even the people at the nearby tables fall quiet and are listening to him; laughter quivers, eager, in the air. What is so funny about the fact that his girl wants him to get rough with her? It must all lie in the magic of his voice, and Vincent cannot help but feel jealous, given that, compared with Pontevin’s, his own voice is like a flimsy fife straining to compete with a cello. Pontevin speaks softly, never forcing his voice, which nonetheless fills the whole room and makes inaudible the other sounds of the world.

  He goes on: “Get rough with her … But I can’t do it! I’m not rough! I’m too nice!”

  The laughter still quivers in the air, and to relish that quiver, Pontevin pauses.

  Then he says: “From time to time a young typist comes to my house. One day during dictation, full of goodwill, I suddenly grab her by the hair, lift her out of her seat, and pull her over to the bed. Halfway there, I let her go and burst out laughing: ‘Oh, what a dumb lug I am, you’re not the one who wanted me to get rough. Oh, excuse me, please, mademoiselle!’”

  The whole cafe laughs, even Vincent, who is back in love with his teacher.

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  Still, the next day, he tells him reproachfully: “Pontevin, you’re not only the great theoretician of dancers, you’re a great dancer yourself.”

  Pontevin (a little abashed): “You’re confusing concepts.”

  Vincent: “When we’re together, you and I, and someone joins us, the place we’re in suddenly splits in two, the newcomer and I are down in the audience, and you, you’re dancing up there on the stage.”

  Pontevin: “I tell you, you’re getting the con^-cepts confused. The term cdancer’ applies exclusively to exhibitionists in public life. And I abhor public life.”

  Vincent: “You behaved in front of that woman yesterday the way Berck does in front of a camera. You wanted to draw her whole attention to yourself. You wanted to be the best, the wittiest. And you used the exhibitionists’ most vulgar judo on me.”

  Pontevin: “Exhibitionists’ judo, maybe. But not moral judo! And that’s why you’re wrong to

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  call me a dancer. Because the dancer wants to be more moral than anyone else. Whereas I, I wanted to look worse than you.”

  Vincent: “The dancer wants to look more moral because his big audience is naive and considers moral acts beautiful. But our little audience is perverse and likes amorality. So you used amoral judo on me, and that in no way contradicts your essential nature as a dancer.”

  Pontevin (suddenly in another tone, very sincerely): “If I hurt you, Vincent, forgive me.”

  Vincent (immediately moved by Pontevin’s apology): “I have nothing to forgive you for. I know you were joking.”

  It is no mere chance that their meeting place is the Cafe Gascon. Among their patron saints, the greatest is d’Artagnan: the patron saint of friendship, the single value they hold sacred.

  Pontevin continues: “In the very broad sense of the term (and in fact, there you have a point), there’s certainly some dancer in every one of us, and I grant you that I, when I see a woman coming, I’m a good ten times more dancer than other people are. What can I do about it? It’s too much for me.”

  Vincent laughs genially, more and more moved, and Pontevin goes on in a penitential tone: “And besides, if I am the great theoretician of dancers, as you’ve just acknowledged, there must be something they and I have in common, or I couldn’t understand them. Yes, I grant you that, Vincent.”

  At this point, Pontevin turns from repentant friend back into theoretician: “But only some very small something, because in the particular sense I mean the concept, I’m nothing like the dancer. I think it not only possible but probable that a true dancer, a Berck, a Duberques, would in the presence of a woman be devoid of any desire to show off and seduce. It would never occur to him to tell a story about a typist he’d dragged by the hair to his bed because he had got her mixed up with someone else. Because the audience he’s looking to seduce is not a few specific and visible women, it’s the great throng of invisible people! Listen, that’s another chapter to be developed in the dancer theory: the invisibility of his audience! That’s what makes for the terrifying modernity of this character! He’s showing off not for you or for me but for the whole world. And what is the whole world? An infinity with no faces! An abstraction.”

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  In the midst of their conversation, Goujard comes in with Machu, who from the doorway says to Vincent: “You told me you were invited to the big entomologists’ conference. I have news for you! Berck is going to be there.”

  Pontevin: “Him again? He turns up
everywhere!”

  Vincent: “What in God’s name would he be doing there?”

  Machu: “You’re an entomologist, you should know.”

  Goujard: “For a year while he was a student he spent some time at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Entomologiques. At this conference they’re going to name him an honorary entomologist.”

  And Pontevin: “We’ve got to go there and raise some hell!” then, turning to Vincent: “You’re going to sneak us all in!”

  out of the chateau into the night, that unforgettable three-stage excursion.

  First stage: they stroll with arms linked, they converse, they find a bench on the lawn and sit down, still arm in arm, still conversing. The night is moonlit, the garden descends in a series of terraces toward the Seine, whose murmur blends with the murmur of the trees. Let us try to catch a few fragments of the conversation. The Chevalier asks for a kiss. Madame de T. answers: “I’m quite willing: you would be too vain if I refused. Your self-regard would lead you to think I’m afraid of you.”

  Everything Madame de T. says is the fruit of an art, the art of conversation, which lets no gesture pass without comment and works over its meaning; here, for instance, she grants the Chevalier the kiss he asks, but after having imposed her own interpretation on her consent: she may be permitting the embrace, but only in order to bring the Chevalier’s pride back within proper bounds.

  When by an intellectual maneuver she transforms a kiss into an act of resistance, no one is fooled, not even the Chevalier, but he must

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  Vera is already asleep; I open the window onto the park and consider the excursion Madame de T. and her young Chevalier took when they went