Slowness

by Milan Kundera

  “Dear sir, we cannot choose the era we are

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  All this time, from the bar in the lobby, Vincent has been watching the target of his contempt. The whole scene having taken place some ten meters away from him, he caught none of the conversation. One thing, though, seemed clear to him: Berck looked to him just as Pontevin had always described him: a mass-media clown, a ham, a show-off, a dancer. Without a doubt, it was only because of his presence that a television crew had deigned to take an interest in the entomologists! Vincent watched him attentively, studying his art at dancing: the way he never lost sight of the camera, his skill at always positioning himself in front of other people, his elegant

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  born into. And we all of us live under the gaze of the cameras. That is part of the human condition from now on. Even when we fight a war, we’re fighting it under the eye of the camera. And when we want to protest against anything, we can’t make ourselves heard without cameras. We are all dancers, as you say. I would even say: either we’re dancers or we’re deserters. You seem to regret, dear sir, that time marches on. So go on back! How about to the twelfth century, would you like that? But when you get there you’ll start protesting against the cathedrals, as some modern barbarism! So go back further still! Go back to the apes! No modernity to threaten you there, there you’ll be completely at home, in the immaculate paradise of the macaques!”

  Nothing is more humiliating than not coming up with a slashing retort to a slashing attack. In unspeakable embarrassment, amid jeering laughter, Vincent feebly withdraws. After a minute of consternation, he remembers that Julie is waiting for him; he bolts the drink he has been holding untouched in his hand; then he sets the glass on the bar and picks up two other whiskies, one for himself, the other to take to Julie.

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  The image of the man in the three-piece suit is still stuck like a splinter in his soul, he cannot rid himself of it; this is all the more painful because it comes just when he is hoping to seduce a woman. How can he seduce her if his mind is preoccupied by a painful splinter?

  She notices his mood: “Where were you all this time? I thought you weren’t coming back. That you were trying to ditch me.”

  He realizes she cares for him, and that slightly eases the pain from the splinter. He makes a fresh effort to be a charmer, but she is still mistrustful:

  “Don’t give me any stories. You’re different from before. Did you run into someone you know?”

  “No, really, no,” says Vincent.

  “Yes, really, yes. You met a woman. And please, if you want to go off with her, you can do it. Half an hour ago I didn’t know you; so I could just go on not knowing you.”

  She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.

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  “Really, no, believe me, there’s no woman. There was a nuisance, some dismal moron I had an argument with. That’s all, that’s all,” and he strokes her cheek so sincerely, so tenderly, that she drops her suspicions.

  “Still, Vincent, you’re completely transformed.”

  “Come,” he tells her, and he invites her to go with him to the bar. He wants to extirpate the splinter with a flood of whisky. The elegant fellow in the three-piece suit is still there, with some other people. There’s no woman in his vicinity, and that pleases Vincent, accompanied as he is by Julie, whom he finds prettier by the minute. He picks up another two glasses of whisky, gives her one, drinks the other down fast, then leans toward her: “Look over there, that moron in the suit, with the eyeglasses.”

  “Him? But, Vincent, he’s nothing, he’s completely nothing, how can you care about him?”

  “You’re right. He’s an underfucked loser. He’s an anti-cock. He’s a no-balls,” says Vincent, and it seems to him that Julie’s presence removes him from his defeat, because the real victory, the only one that counts, is the conquest of a woman

  picked up fast in the grimly unerotic milieu of the entomologists.

  “He’s nothing, nothing, nothing, I assure you,” Julie repeats.

  “You’re right,” says Vincent, “if I keep thinking about him I’ll become as moronic as he is,” and right there, at the bar, in front of everyone, he kisses her on the mouth.

  It is their first kiss.

  They go out into the park, stroll, stop, and kiss again. Then they find a bench on the lawn and sit down. From far away the river’s murmur reaches them. They are transported, without knowing by what; but I know: they are hearing Madame de T.‘s river, the river from her nights of love; from the well of the past, the age of pleasure is sending Vincent a quiet greeting.

  And as if he could see it, Vincent says: “In olden times, in these chateaux, there used to be orgies. The eighteenth century, you know. Sade. The Marquis de Sade. La Philosophie dans le boudoir. You know that book?”

  “No.”

  “You should read it. I’ll lend it to you. It’s a

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  conversation between two men and two women in the middle of an orgy.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “All four of them are naked, making love, all together.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. But that “I don’t know” is not a refusal, it is the touching candor of an ideal modesty.

  A splinter is not so easily extirpated. It is possible to master the pain, repress it, pretend to forget about it, but that pretense is a strain. Vincent is speaking so passionately of Sade and his orgies less because he hopes to corrupt Julie than because he is trying to forget the insult dealt him by the elegant fellow in the three-piece suit.

  “Sure you do,” he says, “you know very well you would,” and he wraps her in his arms and kisses her. “You know very well you’d like that.” And he yearns to quote her dozens of lines, describe scores of situations he knows from that fantastic book called La Philosophie dans le boudoir.

  Then they rise and continue their stroll. The full moon emerges from the foliage. Vincent looks at Julie and suddenly he is bewitched: the white light has endowed the girl with the beauty of a fairy, a beauty that surprises him, new beauty he did not see in her before, a fine, fragile, chaste, inaccessible beauty. And suddenly, he cannot even tell how it happened, he imagines the hole of her ass. Abruptly, unexpectedly, that image is there, and he will never be rid of it.

  Ah, the liberating ass hole! Thanks to it, the elegant fellow in the three-piece suit (at last, at last!) has completely vanished. What several glasses of whisky could not accomplish, an ass hole has achieved in a single second! Vincent winds Julie in his arms, kisses her, strokes her breasts, gazes on her delicate fairylike beauty, and all this time, constantly, he is picturing her ass hole. He has an enormous desire to tell her: “I’m stroking your breasts, but all I’m thinking about is your ass hole.” But he cannot do it, the words will not come out of his mouth. The more he thinks about her ass hole, the more Julie is white, diaphanous, and angelic, such that it is impossible for him to pronounce the words aloud.

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  “As if your dreams are a wastebasket where I toss pages that are too stupid.”

  “What are you inventing? A novel?” she asks, in anguish.

  I bow my head.

  “You’ve often told me you wanted to write a novel someday with not a single serious word in it. A Big Piece of Nonsense for Your Own Pleasure. I’m frightened the time may have come. I just want to warn you: be careful.”

  I bow my head still lower.

  “You remember what your mother used to tell you? I can hear her voice as if it were yesterday: ‘Milanku, stop making jokes. No one will understand you. You will offend everyone, and everyone will end up hating you.’ Remember?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I’m warning you. Seriousness kept you safe. The lack
of seriousness will leave you naked to the wolves. And you know they’re waiting for you, the wolves are.”

  And after that terrible prophecy, she goes back to sleep.

  Vera is sleeping, and I, standing at the open window, I am watching two people strolling in the chateau’s park by the light of the moon.

  Suddenly I hear Vera’s breathing grow rapid, I turn toward her bed and I realize that in another moment she will start to scream. I’ve never known her to have nightmares! What goes on in this chateau?

  I wake her and she stares at me, her eyes wide, full of fear. Then she speaks pell-mell, as if in a fit of fever: “I was in a very long corridor in this hotel. All of a sudden, from far off, a man appeared and ran toward me. When he got within ten meters, he started to shout. And, imagine, he was speaking Czech! Completely demented things: ‘Mickiewicz is not Czech! Mickiewicz is Polish!’ Then he came a few steps from me, threatening, and that’s when you woke me up.”

  “Forgive me,” I say, “you’re the victim of my crazy imagination.”

  “How do you mean?”

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  huge concert where they present all of Beethoven’s one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each. If the same concert were given again in ten years, only the first note of each piece would be played, thus one hundred thirty-eight notes for the whole concert, presented as one continuous melody. And in twenty years, the whole of Beethoven’s music would be summed up in a single very long buzzing tone, like the endless sound he heard the first day of his deafness.

  The Czech scientist is plunged in melancholy, and as a sort of consolation, the idea occurs to him that from the period of his heroic labor in construction, which everyone wants to forget, he still retains a material and palpable souvenir: an excellent physique. A discreet smile of satisfaction plays over his face, for he is certain that among the people here, no one has muscles like his.

  Yes, believe it or not, this seemingly laughable idea really does him good. He throws off his jacket and stretches out flat on his stomach on the floor. Then he raises himself on his arms. He repeats this movement twenty-six times, and he is proud of himself. He remembers when he and

  At just about the same time, the Czech scientist has returned to his room, dejected, his soul bruised. His ears are still filled with the laughter that burst forth after Berck’s sarcasms. And he is still taken aback: can people really move so easily from veneration to contempt?

  And indeed, I wondered, what did become of the kiss that the Sublime Planetary Historic News Event had planted on his brow?

  This is where the courtiers of the News Event make their mistake. They do not know that the situations history stages are floodlit only for the first few minutes. No event remains news over its whole duration, merely for a quite brief span of time, at the very beginning. The dying children of Somalia whom millions of spectators used to watch avidly, aren’t they dying anymore? What has become of them? Have they grown fatter or thinner? Does Somalia still exist? And in fact did it ever exist? Could it be only the name of a mirage?

  The way contemporary history is told is like a

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  his mates would go swimming after work in a little pond behind the construction site. To tell the truth, he was a hundred times happier then than he is today in this chateau. The workmen used to call him Einstein, and they were fond of him.

  And the idea occurs to him, a frivolous idea (he recognizes the frivolity and is even pleased by it), to go for a swim in the fine hotel pool. With a joyous and fully conscious vanity, he means to show off his body to the feeble intellectuals of this sophisticated, overcultivated, and ultimately perfidious country. Fortunately, he has brought his bathing trunks along from Prague (he takes them with him everywhere); he puts them on and looks at himself, half naked, in the mirror. He flexes his arms, and his biceps swell magnificently. “If anyone tried to deny my past, here are my muscles, irrefutable proof!” He imagines his body parading around the pool, showing the French that there exists one utterly fundamental value, bodily perfection, the perfection he personally can boast and that none of them has any idea of. Then he decides it’s a little unseemly to walk nearly naked through the hotel corridors, and he pulls on an undershirt. Now for the feet.

  Leaving them bare seems to him as inappropriate as putting on shoes; so he decides to wear only socks. Thus clothed, he looks one more time in the mirror. Again his melancholy is joined by pride, and again he feels sure of himself.

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  Ass hole. It could be said otherwise, for instance, as Guillaume Apollinaire did: the ninth portal of your body. His poem on the nine portals of a woman’s body exists in two versions: the first he sent to his mistress Lou in a letter written from the trenches on May 11, 1915, and the other he sent from the same place to another mistress, Madeleine, on September 21 of the same year. The poems, both beautiful, differ in their imagery but are constructed in the same fashion: each stanza is devoted to one portal of the beloved’s body: one eye, the other eye, the right nostril, the left nostril, the mouth; then, in the poem for Lou, “the portal of your rump” and, finally, the ninth portal, the vulva. But in the sec-94

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  ond poem, the one for Madeleine, there occurs at the end a curious switch of portals. The vulva recedes to eighth place, and it is the ass hole, opening “between two pearly mountains,” that becomes the ninth portal: “yet more mysterious than the others,” the portal “of the sorceries one dares not speak of,” the “supreme portal.”

  I consider those four months and ten days between the two poems, four months Apollinaire spent in the trenches, deep in intense erotic reveries that brought him to that shift in perspective, to that revelation: the ass hole is the miraculous focal point for all the nuclear energy of nakedness. The vulva portal is important, of course (of course, who would deny that?), but too officially important, a registered site, classified, documented, explicated, examined, experimented on, watched, sung, celebrated. Vulva: noisy crossroads where all of chattering humankind meets, a tunnel the generations file through. Only the gullible believe in the intimacy of that site, the most public site of all. The only site that is truly intimate, whose taboo even pornographic films respect, is the hole of the ass, the supreme portal; supreme because it is the most mysterious, the most secret.

  This wisdom, which cost Apollinaire four months spent beneath a firmament of artillery shells, Vincent attained in the course of a single stroll with Julie, turned diaphanous by the light of the moon.

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  A difficult situation when all you can talk about is one thing and you’re not in a position to talk about it: the unuttered ass hole is stuck in Vincent’s mouth like a gag. He looks to heaven as if he hopes to find some help there. And heaven grants him what he needs: it sends him poetic inspiration; Vincent exclaims: “Look!” and points to the moon. “It looks like an ass hole drilled into the sky!”

  He turns his gaze on Julie. Transparent and tender, she smiles and says “Yes,” because for an hour already she has been disposed to admire any remark that comes from him.

  He hears her “yes” and still hungers for more. She has the chaste look of a fairy, and he would

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  like to hear her say “ass hole.” He wants to see her fairy mouth articulate that word, oh how he wants that! He would like to tell her: “Say it with me: ass hole, ass hole, ass hole,” but he does not dare. Instead, ensnared by his own eloquence, he gets more and more tangled up in his metaphor: “The ass hole giving off a lurid light that floods the guts of the universe!” And he stretches an arm to the moon: “Onward, into the ass hole of infinity!”

  I cannot help making a small comment on Vincent’s improvisation: by his acknowledged obsession with the ass hole, he believes he is enacting his fondness for the eighteenth century, for Sade and the whole gang of libertines; but as if he hadn’t the
strength to pursue that obsession fully and to the furthest limit, another legacy—a very different, even contrary one, from the following century—hastens to his aid; in other words, he is incapable of discussing his fine libertine obsessions except by making them lyrical; by turning them into metaphors. Thus he sacrifices the spirit of lib-ertinage to the spirit of poetry. And he transfers the ass hole from a woman’s body up to the sky.

  Ah, this displacement is regrettable, painful to see! I dislike following Vincent along that path:

  he struggles, stuck in his metaphor like a fly in glue; he cries out: “The ass hole of the sky like the eye of God’s camera!”

  As if she sees them winding down, Julie breaks into Vincent’s poetic gyrations by pointing to the lighted lobby inside the great windows: “Almost everyone’s already left.”

  They go indoors: it’s true, only a few people are still lingering at the tables. The elegant fellow in the three-piece suit is gone. However, his absence recalls him to Vincent so powerfully that he hears that voice again, cold and spiteful, backed by his colleagues’ laughter. Again he feels shame: how could he have been so rattled by the fellow? so miserably mute? He strains to clear him from his mind, but he can’t do it, he rehears the fellow’s words: “We all of us live under the gaze of the cameras. That is part of the human condition from now on. …”

  He completely forgets about Julie, and, in amazement, he fixes on those two lines; how bizarre: the elegant fellow’s argument is almost identical to the objection Vincent himself had raised earlier with Pontevin: “If you want to step into some public dispute, call attention to some

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  horror, how can you do it nowadays without being, or looking like, a dancer?”

  Is that the reason he was so disconcerted by the elegant fellow? Was the man’s thinking too close to Vincent’s own for him to attack it? Are we all of us in the same trap, taken aback by a world that has suddenly changed under our feet into a stage set with no way out? Is there really no difference, then, between what Vincent thinks and what the elegant fellow thinks?