Slowness

by Milan Kundera

  My dear countryman, companion, renowned discoverer of Musca pragensis, heroic laborer on the scaffoldings, I can no longer bear to watch you standing stock-still in the water! You’re going to catch your death of cold! Friend! Brother! Stop torturing yourself! Get out! Go to

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  And the Czech scientist? His tongue stuck against the loose tooth, he says to himself: This is all that’s left of my whole life: a loose tooth and my panic at having to wear a denture. Nothing else? Nothing at all? Nothing. In a sudden flash, his whole past appears to him not as a sublime adventure, rich in dramatic and unique events, but as a minuscule segment in a jumble of events that crossed the planet at a speed that made it impossible to see their features, so much so that maybe Berck was right to take him for a Hungarian or a Pole, because maybe he really is Hungarian, Polish, or

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  bed. Be happy you’re forgotten. Snuggle into the soft shawl of universal amnesia. Stop thinking about the laughter that wounded you—it no longer exists, that laughter, it no longer exists just as your years on the scaffoldings and your glory as a victim of persecution no longer exist. The chateau is quiet, open the window and the fragrance of the trees will fill your room. Breathe. Those are three-hundred-year-old chestnuts. Their rustle is the same one Madame de T. and her Chevalier heard as they made love in the pavilion that at the time was visible from your window but that you will never see, alas, because it was destroyed fifteen years later, during the 1789 revolution, and all that remains of it is the few pages of Vivant Denon’s novella, which you have never read and, very probably, never will.

  and he too slow. He runs through the corridors and sees that she has disappeared. Not knowing how to find her room, he realizes his chances are slim, but he goes on wandering the corridors in hopes that a door will open and Julie’s voice will say: “Come, Vincent, come here.” But everyone is asleep, there is not a sound to be heard, and all the doors stay shut. He murmurs: “Julie, Julie!” He murmurs louder, he shouts his murmur, but only silence answers. He pictures her. He pictures her face turned diaphanous by the moon. He pictures her ass hole. Ah, her ass hole, which was naked right near him and which he missed, totally missed. Which he neither touched nor saw. Ah, that terrific image is back again, and his poor member awakes, rises up, oh, it rises up, uselessly, senselessly, and immensely.

  Back in his room, he slumps onto a chair and has nothing in his head but desire for Julie. He would do anything in the world to find her again, but there is nothing to be done. She will come into the dining room tomorrow morning for her breakfast, but he, alas, will already be back in his office in Paris. He does not know her address, or her last name, or where she works, anything.

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  Vincent did not find his undershorts; he slipped his trousers and shirt onto his wet body and set off running after Julie. But she was too nimble

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  He is alone with his immense despair, made real by the incongruous size of his member.

  Scarcely an hour earlier, the latter had shown laudable good sense in keeping to decent dimensions, which, in a noteworthy speech, it justified by an argument whose rationality impressed us all; but now I have some doubts as to the sanity of that same member, which at the moment has lost all good sense; on no defensible grounds, it stands up against the universe like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which, in the face of gloomy humankind, roars out its hymn to joy.

  “And that imbecile hymn to joy, besides; how can you listen to that?”

  “Forgive me. Again it’s my imagination’s fault.”

  “What do you mean, your imagination? Are you the person who wrote the Ninth Symphony? Are you starting to think you’re Beethoven now?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.”

  “That symphony has never sounded so unbearable, so out of line, so pushy, so childishly grandiloquent, so stupidly, naively vulgar. I can’t take any more. That’s really the last straw. This chateau is haunted, and I don’t want to stay here another minute. Please, let’s leave. Anyhow, the sun’s coming up.”

  And she gets out of bed.

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  Vera wakes for the second time.

  “Why do you have to play the radio at that earsplitting level? You woke me up.”

  “I’m not listening to the radio. It’s quieter here than anywhere else.”

  “No, you had the radio on, and it’s awful of you. I was sleeping.”

  “I swear!”

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  It’s early morning. I am thinking about the last scene in Vivant Denon’s novella. The night of love in the chateau’s secret chamber has come to a close with the arrival of the chambermaid, the confidante, who tells the lovers day is breaking.

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  The Chevalier dresses at high speed, leaves the room, but loses his way in the chateau corridors. Fearing discovery, he decides to go in the park and pretend to be walking about like someone who is up very early after a good night’s sleep. His head still spinning, he tries to figure out the meaning of his adventure: has Madame de T. broken with her lover the Marquis? is she in the process of doing so? or was she only trying to punish him? what is to follow the night that just ended?

  Lost in such questions, he suddenly sees before him the Marquis, Madame de T.‘s lover. The man has just arrived, and he hurries up to the Chevalier. “How did it go?” he asks eagerly.

  The dialogue that follows will finally show the Chevalier what prompted his adventure: the husband’s attention had to be drawn off to a false lover, and that role fell to the Chevalier. Not a pretty role, a rather ridiculous role, the Marquis concedes with a laugh. And as if to reward the Chevalier for his sacrifice, he confides a few secrets: Madame de T. is an adorable woman and above all a woman of matchless fidelity. She has only one single failing: her physical coldness.

  The two men return to the chateau to pay the

  husband their respects. The latter is cordial with the Marquis but disdainful toward the Chevalier: he suggests that the young man leave as soon as possible, whereupon the genial Marquis offers him his chaise.

  Then the Marquis and the Chevalier go to call on Madame de T. At the end of the conversation, at the door, she manages to say a few affectionate words to the Chevalier; these are the last lines as the novella reports them: “Now your love is drawing you back; she who is the object of that love is worthy of it. … Farewell, yet again. You are charming … Do not set the Comtesse against me.”

  “Do not set the Comtesse against me”: those are Madame de T.‘s last words to her lover.

  Immediately thereafter, the very last words of the novella: “I climbed into the chaise that stood waiting. I hunted for the moral of that whole adventure, and … I found none.”

  Yet the moral is there: Madame de T. embodies it: she lied to her husband, she lied to her lover the Marquis, she lied to the young Chevalier. It is she who is the true disciple of Epicurus. Lovable lover of pleasure. Gentle protective liar. Guardian of happiness.

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  wit, managing to keep the situation in hand. But how did he really feel? And how will he feel as he leaves the chateau? What will he be thinking about? The pleasure he experienced, or his reputation as a ludicrous whelp? Will he feel like the victor or the vanquished? Happy or unhappy?

  In other words: is it possible to live in pleasure and for pleasure and be happy? Can the ideal of hedonism be realized? Does that hope exist? Or at least some feeble gleam of that hope?

  The story of the novella is told in the first person by the Chevalier. He has no idea what Madame de T. really thinks, and he is himself fairly frugal in speaking of his own feelings and thoughts. The inner world of the two characters remains hidden or half hidden.

  When, in the early morning, the Marquis spoke of his mistress’s frigidity, the Chevalier could laugh up his sleeve, because she had just proved the opposite to him. But apart from that one certainty
he has no other. What Madame de T. did with him—was that routine for her, or was it a rare, even thoroughly unique adventure? Was her heart touched, or is it still intact? Has her night of love made her jealous of the Comtesse? Her final words commending the Comtesse to the Chevalier—were they sincere, or were they simply impelled by a concern for safety? Will the Chevalier’s absence make her nostalgic, or will it leave her indifferent?

  And as for himself: when early that morning the Marquis had taunted him, he replied with

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  He is tired to death. He longs to stretch out on the bed and sleep, but he cannot risk not waking up in time. He must leave in an hour, no later. Seated on the chair, he jams the motorcycle helmet down on his head with the idea that its weight will keep him from dozing off. But sitting with a helmet on one’s head and being unable to sleep makes no sense. He rises, determined to leave.

  The imminence of departure reminds him of Pontevin. Ah, Pontevin! Pontevin will quiz him.

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  What should he tell him? If he tells everything that happened, Pontevin will be amused, that’s for sure, and so will the rest of the crowd. Because it’s always funny when a narrator plays a comic role in his own story. In fact, nobody does that better than Pontevin. For instance, when he tells about his experience with the typist he dragged around by the hair because he had got her mixed up with another woman. But watch it! Pontevin is shrewd! Everyone assumes his comic tale is a cover for a truth that is far more flattering. The listeners envy him his girlfriend with her demands for rough treatment, and they jealously imagine a pretty typist he does God knows what with. Whereas if Vincent tells the story of the fake copulation at the edge of the swimming pool, everyone will believe him and laugh at him and his fiasco.

  He paces back and forth in the room and tries to edit his story a little, reshape it, add a few touches. The first thing he has to do is transform the simulated coition into a real coition. He imagines the people coming down to the pool, stunned and charmed by the pair’s amorous embrace; all undress hastily, some watching them and others

  imitating them, and when Vincent and Julie see a magnificent collective copulation fully deployed around them, with a fine sense of stagecraft they rise, gaze again for a few seconds upon the romping couples, and then, like demiurges withdrawing after creating the world, they depart. They depart as they came together, in separate directions, never to meet again.

  No sooner do those terrible words “never to meet again” go through his head than his member reawakens; and Vincent wants to bang his head against the wall.

  Here’s a curious thing: while he was inventing the orgy scene, his dreadful arousal had gone away; by contrast, when he evokes the absent real Julie, he is madly aroused again. Therefore he clings to his orgy story, imagines it and tells it to himself over and over: they make love, the couples turn up, watch them, undress, and soon around the swimming pool there is nothing but the heaving of multiple copulation. Finally, after several reruns of this little pornographic film, he feels better, his member is behaving again, nearly calm.

  He imagines the Cafe Gascon, his cronies all listening to him. Pontevin, and Machu grinning

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  his appealing idiot grin, Goujard putting in his erudite remarks, and the others. As a closer, he’ll tell them: “I fucked for you, boys, your cocks were all there with me in that gorgeous orgy, I was your proxy, I was your ambassador, your deputy fucker, your cock for hire, I was a plural cock!”

  He strides the room and repeats the last phrase several times aloud. Plural cock, what a great find! Then (the disagreeable arousal has already totally vanished) he picks up his bag and leaves.

  some ten hours later, the Chevalier emerges, alone now, with no one for company.

  When the door of Madame de T.‘s apartment had closed behind him, he heard the Marquis’s laughter, soon joined by another laugh, a woman’s. For a moment his steps slowed: why are they laughing? are they making fun of him? Then he does not want to hear another thing, and without delay he heads for the exit; yet in his soul he still hears that laughter; he cannot rid himself of it. He remembers the Marquis’s remark: “So you don’t see how very comical your role is?” When, early that morning, the Marquis asked him that malicious question, he did not blink. He knew the Marquis was cuckolded, and he cheerfully told himself that either Madame de T. was about to leave the Marquis, and so he himself was sure to see her again, or else that she was taking revenge, and so he was likely to see her again (because a person who takes revenge today will take it tomorrow too). That is what he could think just an hour earlier. But now, after Madame de T.‘s final words, everything has become clear: the night would have no sequel. No tomorrow.

  He leaves the chateau in the chill morning

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  Vera has gone to pay at the desk, and I carry a little valise down to our car in the courtyard. Regretting that the vulgar Ninth Symphony should have kept my wife from sleeping and precipitated our departure from this place where I was so content, I take a wistful look around me. The chateau’s front steps. It was there that the husband, courteous and icy, came to greet his wife, accompanied by the young Chevalier, when the carriage pulled up as the night began. There,

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  emptiness; he tells himself that nothing is left to him of the night he has just lived through, nothing but that laughter: the anecdote will get around, and he will become a joke figure. It is a well-known fact that no woman desires a man who is a joke. Without asking his leave, they have put a jester’s cap on his head, and he does not feel up to wearing it. In his soul he hears the voice of revolt urging him to tell his story, to tell it the way it happened, tell it openly and to everyone.

  But he knows he will not be able to do that. Becoming a boor is even worse than being ludicrous. He cannot betray Madame de T., and he will not betray her.

  ably heartbreaking memory of Julie. He knows that only the invented story can make him forget what really happened. He wants to tell that new story openly and soon, transform it into a ceremonial trumpet fanfare that will render null and void the wretched counterfeit coition that caused him to lose Julie.

  “I was a plural cock,” he repeats to himself, and in answer he hears Pontevin’s conspiratorial laughter, he sees that appealing grin on Machu, who will say: “You’re a plural cock, and we’ll never call you anything else but Plural Cock.” He likes that idea, and he smiles.

  As he walks toward his motorcycle, where it is parked at the far end of the courtyard, he sees a man a little younger than he, dressed up in an outfit from long ago and coming toward him. Vincent stares at him, stupefied. Oh, he must be really knocked out after that insane night: he can’t come up with any sensible explanation for this apparition. Is it an actor wearing a historical costume? Maybe connected to that television woman? Maybe somebody was shooting some commercial here at the chateau yesterday? But when their eyes meet he sees in the young man’s

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  By another door, a more discreet one near the reception desk, Vincent goes out into the courtyard. He keeps making himself retell the story of the orgy beside the swimming pool, no longer for its anti-arousal effect (he is already very far from any arousal) but in order to blot out the unbear-148

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  look an astonishment so authentic that no actor would ever have been capable of it.

  court without knowing France. It is that intonation, that unbelievable pronunciation, which made the Chevalier think this man really might belong to some other period.

  “Yes, and you?” he asks.

  “Me? The twentieth.” Then he adds: “The end of the twentieth.” And he adds further: “I’ve just spent a marvelous night.”

  The remark strikes the Chevalier. “So have I,” he says.

  He pictures Madame de T. and is suddenly overcome by a wave of gratitude. My God, how could he pay such mind to the Marquis’s laughter? As if the most important thing w
ere not the beauty of the night he had just spent, the beauty that still grips him in such intoxication that he is seeing phantoms, confusing dreams with reality, feeling himself flung out of time.

  And the man in the helmet, with his strange intonation, repeats: “I’ve just spent a completely marvelous night.”

  The Chevalier nods as if to say, Yes, I know what you mean, friend, who could understand you better than I? And then he thinks about it: he has promised discretion, so he can never tell

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  The young Chevalier looks at the stranger. It is the headgear in particular that catches his attention. Two or three centuries before, chevaliers were supposed to go into battle in helmets like that. But no less surprising than the helmet is the man’s inelegance. Long, full, utterly shapeless trousers, the sort only poor peasants might wear. Or monks, maybe.

  He feels weary, drained, nearly ill. Perhaps he is asleep, perhaps he is dreaming, perhaps he is delirious. Finally, the man is right in front of him; he opens his mouth and utters a question that confirms the Chevalier in his astonishment: “You’re from the eighteenth century?”

  The question is peculiar, absurd, but the way the man asks it is even more so, with a strange intonation, as if he were a messenger come from a foreign kingdom and had learned his French at

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  anyone what he has experienced. But is an indiscretion still an indiscretion after two hundred years? He has the sense that the god of the libertines has sent him this man just so he can talk to him; so he can be indiscreet while still keeping to his promise of discretion; so he can set down a moment of his life somewhere in the future; project it into eternity; transform it into glory.

  “Are you really from the twentieth century?”

  “I certainly am, old man. There are amazing things happening in this century. Moral liberation. I tell you, I’ve just spent a terrific night.”