Slowness

by Milan Kundera

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  nonetheless treat these remarks very seriously, because they are part of a mental procedure that requires another mental procedure in response. Conversation is not a pastime; on the contrary, conversation is what organizes time, governs it, and imposes its own laws, which must be respected.

  The end of the first stage of their night: the kiss she granted the Chevalier to keep him from feeling too vain was followed by another, the kisses “grew urgent, they cut into the conversation, they replaced it. …” But then suddenly she stands and decides to turn back.

  What stagecraft! After the initial befuddlement of the senses, it was necessary to show that love’s pleasure is not yet a ripened fruit; it was necessary to raise its price, make it more desirable; it was necessary to create a setback, a tension, a suspense. In turning back toward the chateau with the Chevalier, Madame de T. is feigning a descent into nothingness, knowing perfectly well that at the last moment she will have full power to reverse the situation and prolong the rendezvous. All it will take is a phrase, a commonplace of the sort available by the dozen in the

  age-old art of conversation. But through some unexpected concatenation, some unforeseeable failure of inspiration, she cannot think of a single one. She is like an actor who suddenly forgets his script. For, indeed, she does have to know the script; it’s not like nowadays, when a girl can say, “You want to, I want to, let’s not waste time!” For these two, such frankness still lies beyond a barrier they cannot breach, despite all their libertine convictions. If neither one of them hits on some idea in time, if they do not find some pretext for continuing their walk, they will be obliged, merely by the logic of their silence, to go back into the chateau and there take leave of each other. The more they both see the urgency to find a pretext to stop and say it aloud, the more their mouths are as if stitched closed: all the words that could bring aid elude the pair as they desperately appeal for help. This is why, reaching the chateau door, “by mutual instinct, our steps slowed.”

  Fortunately, at the last minute, as if the prompter had finally wakened, she finds her place in the script; she attacks the Chevalier: “I am quite displeased with you. …” At last, at last! Rescued! She is angry! She has found the

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  pretext for a contrived little anger that will prolong their walk: she has been frank with him, so why has he said not a word about his beloved, about the Comtesse? Quick, quick, this calls for discussion! They must talk! The conversation starts up again, and again they move off from the chateau, along a path that, this time, will lead them unobstructed to the clasp of love.

  the Comtesse, whom he must not leave. She gives him a short course in sentimental education, apprises him of her practical philosophy of love and its need to be freed from the tyranny of moral rules and protected by discretion, of all virtues the supreme virtue. And she even manages, in the most natural fashion, to instruct him how to behave the next day with her husband.

  You’re astonished: where, in that terrain so rationally organized, mapped out, delineated, calculated, measured—where is there room for spontaneity, for “madness,” where is the delirium, where is the blindness of desire, the “mad love” that the surrealists idolized, where is the forgetting of self? Where are all those virtues of unreason that have shaped our idea of love? No, they have no place here. For Madame de T. is the queen of reason. Not the pitiless reason of the Marquise de Merteuil, but a gentle, tender reason, a reason whose supreme mission is to protect love.

  I see her leading the Chevalier through the moonlit night. Now she stops and shows him the contours of a roof just visible before them in the penumbra; ah, the sensual moments it has seen, this pavilion; a pity, she says, that she hasn’t the key with her.

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  As she converses, Madame de T. maps out the territory, sets up the next phase of events, lets her partner know what he should think and how he should proceed. She does this with finesse, with elegance, and indirectly, as if she were speaking of other matters. She leads him to see the Comtesse’s self-absorbed chill, so as to liberate him from the duty of fidelity and to relax him for the nocturnal adventure she plans. She organizes not only the immediate future but the more distant future as well, by giving the Chevalier to understand that in no circumstance does she wish to compete with

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  They approach the door and (how odd! how unexpected!) the pavilion is open!

  Why did she tell him she hadn’t brought the key? Why did she not tell him right off that the pavilion was no longer kept locked? Everything is composed, confected, artificial, everything is staged, nothing is straightforward, or in other words, everything is art; in this case: the art of prolonging the suspense, better yet: the art of staying as long as possible in a state of arousal.

  range of techniques for slowing things down. She demonstrates it particularly during the second stage of the night, which is spent in the pavilion: they enter, they embrace, they fall onto a couch, they make love. But “all this had been a little hurried. We understood our error… . When we are too ardent, we are less subtle. When we rush to sensual pleasure, we blur all the delights along the way.”

  The haste that loses them that sweet slowness, both of them instantly see as an error; but I do not believe that this is any surprise to Madame de T, I think rather that she knew the error to be unavoidable, bound to occur, that she expected it, and for that reason she planned the interlude in the pavilion as a ritardando to brake, to moderate, the foreseeable and foreseen swiftness of events so that, when the third stage arrived, in a new setting, their adventure might bloom in all its splendid slowness.

  She breaks off the lovemaking in the pavilion, emerges with the Chevalier, walks with him some more, sits on the bench in the middle of the lawn, takes up the conversation again, and leads him thereafter to the chateau and into a secret chamber adjoining her apartment; it was her husband

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  Denon gives no description of Madame de T.‘s physical appearance; but one thing seems to me certain: she cannot be thin; I imagine her to have “a round and supple waist” (these are the words Laclos uses to characterize the most coveted female body in Les Liaisons dangereuses), and that bodily roundness gives rise to a roundness and slowness of movements and gestures. A gentle indolence emanates from her. She possesses the wisdom of slowness and deploys the whole

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  who, in other times, had set this up as a magic temple of love. The Chevalier stops, dazzled, at the door: the mirrors covering all the walls mul^ tiply their reflections in such a way that suddenly an endless procession of couples are embracing all around them. But that is not where they make love; as if Madame de T. meant to head off a too powerful explosion of the senses and prolong the period of arousal as much as possible, she draws him toward the room next door, a grotto deep in darkness and all tufted in cushions; only there do they make love, lengthily and slowly, until the break of day.

  By slowing the course of their night, by dividing it into different stages, each separate from the next, Madame de T. has succeeded in giving the small span of time accorded them the semblance of a marvelous little architecture, of a form. Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty demands, but so does memory. For what is formless cannot be grasped, or committed to memory. Conceiving their encounter as a form was especially precious for them, since their night was to have no tomorrow and could be repeated only through recollection.

  There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

  In existential mathematics,
that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

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  Through Vivant Denon’s lifetime, probably only a small group of intimates knew he was the author of Point de lendemain; and the mystery was put to rest, for everyone and (probably) definitively, only

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  a very long time after his death. The work’s own history thus bears an odd resemblance to the story it tells: it was veiled by the penumbra of secrecy, of discretion, of mystification, of anonymity.

  Engraver, draftsman, diplomat, traveler, art connoisseur, sorcerer of the salons, a man with a remarkable career, Denon never laid claim to artistic ownership of the novella. Not that he rejected fame, but fame meant something different in his time; I imagine the audience that he cared about, that he hoped to beguile, was not the mass of strangers today’s writer covets but the little company of people he might know personally and respect. The pleasure he derived from success among his readers was not very different from the sort he might experience among the few listeners gathered around him in a salon where he was scintillating.

  There was one kind of fame from before the invention of photography, and another kind thereafter. The Czech king Wenceslaus, in the fourteenth century, liked to visit the Prague inns and chat incognito with the common folk. He had power, fame, liberty. Prince Charles of England

  has no power, no freedom, but enormous fame: neither in the virgin forest nor in his bathtub hidden away in a bunker seventeen stories underground can he escape the eyes that pursue and recognize him. Fame has devoured all his liberty, and now he knows: that only totally unconscious people could willingly consent these days to trail the pots and pans of celebrity along behind them. You say that though the nature of fame changes, this still concerns only a few privileged persons. You’re mistaken. For fame concerns not only the famous people, it concerns everyone. These days, famous people are in magazines, on television screens, they invade everyone’s imagination. And everyone considers the possibility, be it only in dreams, of becoming the object of such fame (not the fame of King Wenceslaus who went visiting taverns but that of Prince Charles hidden away in his bathtub seventeen stories underground). The possibility shadows every single person and changes the nature of his life; for (and this is another well-known axiom of existential mathematics) any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

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  His silence upset her, and in the next letter she reminded him of the astounding number of love notes he had written her. In one of them he had called her “bird of night that troubles my dreams.” That line, since forgotten, struck him as unbearably stupid, and he thought it discourteous of her to remind him of it. Later, according to rumors reaching him, he understood that each time he appeared on television, that woman he had never managed to stain was babbling at dinner somewhere about the innocent love of the famous Berck, who once upon a time couldn’t sleep because she troubled his dreams. He felt naked and defenseless. For the first time in his life, he felt an intense desire for anonymity.

  In a third letter, she asked him a favor; not for herself but for her neighbor, a poor woman who had got very bad care in a hospital; not only had she nearly died from a mishandled anesthesia, but she was being refused the slightest compensation. If Berck went to such pains for African children, let him prove he could take some interest in ordinary people in his own country, even if they didn’t give him an opportunity for strutting on television.

  Then the woman herself wrote him, using

  Pontevin might be less harsh about Berck if he were aware of the troubles the intellectual recently had to endure from a certain Immaculata, an old schoolmate, whom, as a kid, he used to covet in

  vain.

  One day some twenty years later, Immaculata saw Berck on the television screen, shooing flies from the face of a little black girl; the sight hit her as a kind of illumination. She instantly understood that she had always loved him. That very day, she wrote him a letter in which she recalled their “innocent love” of long ago. But Berck remembered perfectly that, far from being innocent, his love had been whoppingly lustful and that he had felt humiliated when she ruthlessly rejected him. This was in fact the reason why, inspired by the slightly comical name of his parents’ Portuguese maid, he had at the time given her the nickname, at once sardonic and rueful, of Immaculata, the Unstained. He reacted badly to her letter (a curious thing: after twenty years he had still not fully digested his old defeat), and he did not answer it.

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  Immaculata as her reference: “… you remember, monsieur, the young girl whom you wrote that she was your immaculate virgin who troubled your nights.” Was it possible? Was it possible? Dashing from one end of his apartment to the other, Berck howled and raged. He tore up the letter, spat on it, and flung it into the garbage.

  One day, he learned from the chief of a television channel that a woman producer wanted to do a profile of him. With irritation, he then remembered the ironical remark about his interest in strutting on television, for the producer who wanted to film him was the bird of night herself, Immaculata in person! A vexing situation: in principle, he considered the proposal to do a film on him an excellent thing because he had always hoped to transform his life into a work of art; but until that moment it had never occurred to him that such a work could be a comedy! With that danger suddenly revealed, he determined to keep Immaculata as far away as possible from his life and begged the chief (who was thoroughly astounded by his modesty) to put off the project, as it was premature for someone so young and unimportant as himself.

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  This story reminds me of another I happen to know, because of the library that covers every wall of Goujard’s apartment. Once, when I was venting my spleen to him, he showed me a shelf bearing a sign in his own hand: “Masterpieces of Unintentional Humor,” and with an evil smile, he pulled out a book a woman journalist had published, in 1972, on her love for Kissinger, if you still recall the name of the most famous political figure of that time, adviser to President Nixon and architect of the peace between the United States and Vietnam.

  This is the story: she meets with Kissinger in Washington to interview him, first for a magazine, then for television. They have several sessions but never breach the bounds of strictly professional relations: one or two dinners to prepare the broadcast, a few visits to his office in the White House and to his home, alone and then surrounded by a crew, and so on. Bit by bit, Kissinger takes a dislike to her. He’s no fool, he knows what’s going on, and to keep her at a dis-44

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  tance he offers a few eloquent observations on how women are drawn to power and on how his position requires him to forgo any personal life. With touching sincerity, she reports all these evasions, which, by the way, do not discourage her, given her unshakable conviction that the two of them are meant for each other. Does he seem guarded and mistrustful? that does not surprise her: she has strong views on the horrible women he has known before; she is sure that once he understands how much she loves him, he will forget his worries, relax his guard. Ah, she is so sure of the purity of her love! She could swear to it: there is absolutely no question of erotic obsession on her part. “Sexually, he left me cold,” she writes, and several times she repeats (with an odd motherly sadism) that he dresses badly; that he is not handsome; that he has poor taste in women; “he must be a poor lover,” she adjudges, even as she proclaims she loves him all the more for that. She has two children, so does he, she lays plans—he has no idea—for joint vacations on the Cote d’Azur and is delighted that the two little Kissingers can thus learn French in a pleasant way.

  One day, she sends her camera crew to shoot Kissinger’s apartment, and no longer able to contain himself, he sends them p
acking like a bunch of trespassers. On another occasion, he calls her into his office and, his voice exceptionally stern and chill, tells her he will no longer stand for her ambiguous behavior with him. At first she is in deep despair. But very soon she begins to say to herself: no doubt about it, she is considered politically dangerous and Kissinger has been told by counterespionage to stop seeing her; the office where they meet is bristling with microphones and he knows it; his so astoundingly cruel remarks are meant not for her but for the invisible cops monitoring them. She gazes at him with an understanding and melancholy smile; the scene seems to her lit by tragic (the adjective she uses constantly) beauty: he is forced to deal her these blows, and meanwhile his gaze speaks to her of love.

  Goujard is laughing, but I tell him: the obvious truth of the actual situation visible through the woman’s fantasy is less important than he thinks; that’s just a paltry, literal truth, it pales in the face of another one, which is loftier and timeless:

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  the truth of the Book. Even in her first encounter with her idol, this book was sitting in majesty, invisible, on a little table between them, being from that moment forward the unacknowledged and unconscious objective of her whole adventure. Book? What for? To lay out a portrait of Kissinger? Not at all, she had absolutely nothing to say about him! What fascinated her was her own truth about herself. She did not want Kissinger, still less his body (“he must be a poor lover”); she wanted to amplify her self, bring it out of the narrow circle of her life, make it blaze, turn it into light. Kissinger was for her a mythological steed, a winged horse that her self would mount for her great flight across the sky.

  “She was a fool,” Goujard concludes curtly, scoffing at my fancy analyses.

  “No, no,” I say, “witnesses attest to her intelligence. It’s something different from stupidity. She was convinced she was among the elect.”

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  Being among the elect is a theological notion that means: not as a matter of merit but by a supernatural judgment, a free, even capricious, determination of God, a person is chosen for something exceptional and extraordinary. From such a conviction the saints drew the strength to withstand the most dreadful tortures. Like parodies of themselves, theological notions are reflected in the triviality of our lives; each of us suffers (more or less) from the baseness of his too commonplace life and yearns to escape it and rise to a higher level. All of us have known the illusion (more or less strong) that we are worthy of that higher level, that we are predestined and chosen for it.