Jan arrived at the Clevises' just as the woman moderator was ending the debate, but the enthusiasm it had generated persisted in the apartment for quite a while. The Clevises were forward-looking people and therefore against tops. To them, the imposing gesture of millions of women throwing away that infamous piece of clothing as if on command symbolized humanity shaking off the bonds of slavery. Bare-breasted women paraded through the Clevises' apartment like an invisible battalion of liberators.
As I have said, the Clevises were forward-looking, and they held progressive ideas. There are many kinds of progressive ideas, and the Clevises always supported the best possible progressive ideas. The best progressive ideas are those that include a strong enough dose of provocation to make its supporters feel proud of being original, but at the same time attract so many adherents that the risk of being an isolated exception is immediately averted by the noisy approval of a triumphant crowd. If, for instance, the Clevises were not only against tops but against clothing in general, if they announced that people should walk the city streets naked, they would surely still be supporting a progressive idea, but certainly not the best possible one. That idea would be embarrassing because there is something excessive about it, it would take too much energy to defend (while the best possible progressive idea, so to speak, defends itself), and its supporters would never have the satisfaction of seeing their thor-
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being said, that absolutely unacceptable idea followed all too clearly from his spoken words and was an easy target for the fourteen-year-old.
"And what about your stomachs? What about those huge bellies you're always shamelessly parading around the beaches!"
Mama Clevis burst into laughter and applauded her daughter: "Bravo!"
Papa Clevis joined in the applause. He immediately understood that his daughter was right and that he had once again fallen victim to the unfortunate propensity for compromise his wife and daughter always reproached him for. He was a man so deeply conciliatory that he defended his moderate opinions with great moderation and immediately agreed with his extremist child. Moreover, the incriminatory words expressed not his own thinking but rather Jan's supposed viewpoint; so he could readily stand by his daughter, unhesitatingly and with paternal satisfaction.
Encouraged by her parents' applause, the girl went on: "Do you think we take off our tops to give you pleasure? We do it for ourselves, because we like it, because it feels better, because it brings our bodies nearer the sun! You're only capable of seeing us as sex objects!"
Again Papa and Mama Clevis applauded, but this time their bravos had a somewhat different tone. Their daughter's words were indeed right, but also somewhat inappropriate for a fourteen-year-old. It was like an eight-year-old boy saying: "If there's a holdup, Mama, I'll defend you." Then too the parents applaud, because
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oughly nonconformist position suddenly become everyone's position.
Listening to them fulminate against tops, Jan remembered the small wooden instrument called a level that his grandfather, a bricklayer, would place on the top layer of a wall under construction. At the center of the instrument was a glass tube of liquid with an air bubble whose position indicated whether the row of bricks was horizontal or not. The Clevis family could serve as an intellectual air bubble. Placed on some idea or other, it would indicate precisely whether or not that was the best progressive idea possible.
When the Clevises, talking all at once, had repeated to Jan the whole of the television debate, Papa Clevis leaned over to him and said banteringly: "Don't you think that, as long as the breasts are good-looking, this is a reform one can easily approve of?"
Why did Papa Clevis express his thinking in such terms? He was a perfect host and always tried to find remarks suitable to all those present. Since Jan had the reputation of a womanizer, Clevis formulated his approval of bare breasts not in terms of its right and profound meaning, that is, as an ethical enthusiasm for the abolition of an age-old servitude, but in the way of a compromise (with regard for Jan's supposed tastes and contrary to his own convictions), as an aesthetic agreement on the beauty of breasts.
At the same time, he was trying to be as precise and prudent as a diplomat: he did not dare say straight out that ugly breasts should remain hidden. Yet, without it
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their son's statement is clearly praiseworthy. But since it also shows excessive self-assurance, the praise is rightly shaded by a certain smile. With such a smile the Clevis parents had tinged their second bravos, and their daughter, who had heard that smile in their voices and did not approve of it, repeated with irritated obstinacy: "That's over and done with. I'm not anybody's sex object."
Without smiling, the parents merely nodded, not wanting to incite their daughter any further.
Jan, however, could not resist saying:
"My dear girl, if you only knew how easy it is not to be a sex object."
He uttered these words softly, but with such sincere sorrow that they resounded in the room for a long while. They were words difficult to pass over in silence, but it was not possible to respond to them either. They did not deserve approval, not being progressive, but neither did they deserve an argument, because they were not obviously against progress. They were the worst words possible, because they were situated outside the debate conducted by the spirit of the time. They were words beyond good and evil, perfectly incongruous words.
There was a pause during which Jan smiled an embarrassed smile as if to apologize for what he had said, and then Papa Clevis, past master of the art of bridging gaps between his fellow creatures, started to talk about Passer, their friend in common. They were united in their admiration for Passer: it was safe terrain. Clevis praised Passer's optimism, his steadfast love of life that no medical regimen had managed to
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stifle. And now Passer's existence was limited to a narrow strip of life without women, without food, without alcohol, without mobility, and without a future. He had recently visited them in their country house, when the actress Hanna had been there too.
Jan was very curious to see what the Clevises' level would indicate if it was placed on the actress Hanna, in whom he saw the symptoms of a nearly unbearable egocentricity. But the air bubble indicated that Jan had guessed wrong. Clevis completely approved of the way the actress had behaved with Passer. She had devoted herself only to him. It was extremely generous of her. And yet everyone knew what a tragedy she had just been living through.
"What tragedy?" asked forgetful Jan with surprise.
How's that—hadn't Jan heard? Hanna's son had run away and been gone for several days! She had a nervous breakdown! But with Passer, who is at death's door, she no longer thought of herself at all. Trying to tear him away from his cares, she cheerfully cried out: "I'd so love to go mushroom hunting! Who wants to go with me?" Passer said he would, and the others refused to accompany them because it was thought he wanted to be alone with her. They walked around in the woods for three hours before stopping in a cafe to drink red wine. Passer had been forbidden both to walk and to drink. He came back exhausted but happy. The next day he had to be taken to the hospital.
"I think it's quite serious," said Papa Clevis, and then, as if in reproach, he added: "You'd better go see him."
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skin, she would guide his hand to the right place at the right time. In a sweat, he would see the impatient expression in the young woman's eye and the feverish movements of her body, that portable apparatus for producing the little explosion which was the meaning and goal of everything.
When he was leaving her place for the very last time, Jan thought of Hertz, the opera director in the Central European city where he ha
d spent his youth. Hertz required the women singers to perform their entire roles naked for him at special stage-business rehearsals. To check the positions of their bodies, he compelled them to insert pencils into their rectums. The pencil pointed downward as an extension of the spinal column, enabling the painstaking director to control every step and movement, the entire gait and bearing of the singer's body, with scientific precision.
One day, a young soprano got into an argument with him and denounced him to the management. Hertz defended himself by saying he had never made advances to the singers, that he had never laid a hand on any of them. That was true, but it made the pencil trick seem even more depraved, and Hertz had to leave Jan's native city in disgrace.
His misfortune became famous, and because of it, Jan began as a very young man to go to the opera. Watching the women singers' affecting gestures as they tilted their heads back and opened their mouths wide, he would imagine all of them naked. The orchestra moaned, the singers grasped their left breasts, and he
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5
Jan said to himself: At the beginning of one's erotic life, there is arousal without climax, and at the end there is climax without arousal.
Arousal without climax is Daphnis. Climax without arousal is the salesgirl at the sporting goods rental shop.
A year ago, when he first met her and invited her to his place, she made an unforgettable statement: "If we make love, I'm sure it'll be very good technically, but I'm not certain about the emotional side."
He told her that as far as he was concerned, she could be absolutely sure about the emotional side, and she accepted that assurance just as she routinely accepted deposits for ski rentals at the shop, and never breathed a word about emotions again. As for the technical side, she literally wore him out.
She was an orgasm fanatic. Orgasms were a religion to her, a goal, the highest requirement of hygiene, a symbol of health, but they were also a source of pride, a means of distinguishing her from less fortunate women, like having a yacht or a famous fiance.
But it was not easy to give her one. She would shout "Faster, faster" at him, then, on the contrary, "Gently, gently," and then, again, "Harder, harder," like a coxswain shouting orders to the crew of a racing shell. Concentrating entirely on the sensitive areas of her
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would imagine the pencils sticking out of their naked rumps. His heart would pound: he was aroused by Hertz's arousal! (To this day, he is unable to see an opera in any other way, to this day, he sees it with the feelings of a very young man slipping secretly into a porn theater.)
Jan said to himself: Hertz was a sublime alchemist of vice who found the magic formula for arousal in a pencil stuck up the behind. And he felt ashamed before him: Hertz would never have let himself be constrained into the hard labor Jan had just been obediently doing on the body of the sporting goods rental shop salesgirl.
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house when she was receiving. Barbara's house is famous for its collective sex entertainments. Jan dreads malicious gossip and has rejected her invitations for years. But this time he smiles and says: "Yes, I'll be glad to come." He knows he will never return to that town again, so discretion no longer matters. He imagines Barbara's house, filled with cheerful naked people, and says to himself that it would, after all, not be such a bad way to celebrate his departure.
For Jan is about to go. In a few months he will be crossing the border. And when he thinks of that, the word "border" in its common geographical sense reminds him of another border, an intangible and immaterial border he has been thinking of more and more for some time now.
What border is that?
The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her "I want to live" was spun from the threads of a spiderweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything—love, convictions, faith, history—no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.
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6
Just as the blackbird invasion took place on the reverse side of Europe's history, so my story takes place on the reverse side of Jan's life. I am putting it together from isolated events Jan probably did not pay particular attention to, because the obverse side of his life at the time was taken up by other events and worries: the offer of a new position in the United States, feverish professional work, preparations for departure.
Recently he ran into Barbara on the street. She asked him reproachfully why he never came to her
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He always knew how to strike a spark swiftly between himself and any woman. But this time he had the unpleasant feeling of sounding like someone in the personnel department interviewing a woman applying for a job.
He stopped talking. He reopened his book and tried to read, but felt he was being observed by an invisible board of examiners who had his complete file and were always watching him. He stared reluctantly at the pages with no idea of what was on them, knowing that the board was patiently noting the number of minutes he kept silent as part of its calculation of his final grade.
Again he closed the book and again he tried to start a conversation with the young woman, this time in a lighter manner, and again he realized that it was getting him nowhere.
Which led him to think that his failure was caused by the compartment's lack of privacy. So he invited the young woman to join him in the dining car, where they found a table for two. He talked with greater ease there; but there too he was unable to strike a spark.
They went back to the compartment. He reopened his book, but just as before, he had no idea what was in it.
For a while the young woman remained seated opposite him, then she got up and went into the corridor to look out the window.
He was terribly annoyed. He liked the young woman, and her departure was merely an unspoken summons.
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7
Every man has two erotic biographies. The first is the one people mainly talk about, the one consisting of a list of affairs and passing amours.
The other biography is undoubtedly more interesting: the procession of women we wanted to have but who eluded us, the painful history of unrealized possibilities.
But there is also a third, a mysterious and disturbing category of women. These are women we liked and were liked by, but women we quickly saw we would never have, because in relation to them we were on the other side of the border.
Jan was on a train, reading. A young, beautiful woman he did not know sat down in his compartment (the only vacant seat was just opposite him) and nodded to him. He nodded back, trying to remember where he knew her from. Then he returned to his book, but could hardly read it. He felt the young woman gazing at him curiously and expectantly.
He closed his book: "Where do I know you from?"
It was no place special. They had met, she told him, five years before, in the company of mutual acquaintances. Recalling that time, he asked her some questions: what exactly had she been doing then, who had her friends been, where was she working now, was her work interesting?
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At the last possible moment, he tried one more time to save the situation. He went out into the corridor and stood next to her. He told her he had probably not recognized her because she had changed her hairstyle. He pushed the hair back from her brow and gazed at her suddenly different face.
"Yes, now I recognize you," he said. Of course, he didn't recognize her. But that wasn't what mattered. W
hat he wanted was to press his hand firmly against the top of her skull, gently push her head back, and then gaze into her eyes.
How many times in his life had he put his hand on a woman's head and said: "Let's see how you'd look like this"? That imperious touch and sovereign gaze would at once reverse an entire situation. It was as if they contained in germ (and retrieved from the future) the great scene of his full possession of her.
But this time his gesture had no effect. His own gaze was much weaker than the gaze he felt on him, the dubious gaze of the board of examiners, which knew full well that he was repeating himself and informed him that all repetition was mere imitation and all imitation was worthless. Jan suddenly saw himself through the young woman's eyes. He saw the pitiful pantomime of his gaze and gesture, that stereotyped gesticulation emptied of all meaning by years of repetition. Having lost its spontaneity, its natural, immediate meaning, his gesture suddenly made him unbearably weary, as if six-kilo weights had been attached to his wrists. The young woman's gaze cre-
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ated an odd field around him, increasing the weight tenfold.
He had no way of continuing. He let go of the young woman's head and looked out the window at the gardens passing by.
The train reached its destination. As they were leaving the railroad station, she told Jan she lived nearby and invited him over.
He refused.
And then he thought about it for weeks: how could he have turned down a woman he liked?
In his relation to her he was on the other side of the border.