8
The gaze of a man has often been described. It seems to fasten coldly on the woman, as if it were measuring, weighing, evaluating, choosing her, as if, in other words, it were turning her into a thing.
Less well known is that a woman is not entirely defenseless against that gaze. If she is turned into a thing, then she watches the man with the gaze of a thing. It is as if a hammer suddenly had eyes and watched the carpenter grip it to drive in a nail. Seeing
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the hammer's malicious gaze, the carpenter loses his self-confidence and hits his thumb.
The carpenter is the hammer's master, yet it is the hammer that has the advantage over the carpenter, because a tool knows exactly how it should be handled, while the one who handles it can only know approximately how.
The ability to gaze turns the hammer into a living being, but a good carpenter must bear its insolent gaze and, with a firm hand, turn it back into a thing. It would seem then that a woman undergoes a cosmic movement upward and then downward: the flight of a thing mutating into a creature and the fall of a creature mutating into a thing.
But it happened to Jan more and more frequently that the carpenter-hammer game was no longer playable. Women gazed badly. They spoiled the game. Was it because at this time they had begun to organize and resolve to transform women's age-old condition? Or was it because Jan was getting older and seeing women and their gaze differently? Was the world changing or was he?
It was hard to say. The fact remains that the young woman on the train looked him up and down with eyes filled with distrust and doubt, and that he let go of the hammer without taking the time even to raise it.
Recently he had run into Pascal, who complained to him about Barbara. Barbara had invited him over. He found two girls there he did not know. They chatted for a while, and then Barbara abruptly went into the kitchen and brought back a big tin-plated old alarm
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clock. Without a word she started to undress, and the two girls did the same.
Pascal moaned: "You have to realize they undressed nonchalantly, indifferently, as if I were just a dog or a flowerpot."
Then Barbara had ordered him to get undressed too. Not wanting to lose the opportunity to make love to two new girls, he obeyed. When he was naked, Barbara held up the alarm clock: "Look at the second hand. If you don't get a hard-on within a minute, you'll have to leave!"
"They stared at my crotch, and while the seconds ticked away, they started laughing! And then they threw me out!"
It was a case of the hammer deciding to castrate the carpenter.
"You know Pascal's a boor, and I secretly sympathized with Barbara's punitive commandos," Jan told Edwige. "Besides, Pascal and his pals have done things to girls much like what Barbara did to him. Once, a girl went to his place ready to make love, and they undressed her and tied her to the bed. She didn't mind being tied up, that was part of the game. What's scandalous is that they didn't do anything to her, didn't even touch her, they just examined her from every angle. The girl felt she had been raped."
"That's quite understandable," said Edwige.
"But I can easily imagine those two girls getting aroused by being bound up and eyed. In a similar situation, Pascal wasn't aroused. He was castrated."
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It was late in the evening, they were at Edwige's, and a half-empty whisky bottle was on the coffee table in front of them. "What do you mean by that?" she asked.
"What I mean," said Jan, "is that when a man and a woman do the same thing, it's not the same thing. The man rapes, the woman castrates."
"What you mean is that it's vile to castrate a man but a fine thing to rape a woman."
"All I mean," replied Jan, "is that rape is part of eroticism, but castration is its negation."
Edwige emptied her glass in one gulp and responded angrily: "If rape is part of eroticism, then eroticism as a whole is directed against women and it's necessary to invent another kind."
Jan took a sip, was silent for a moment, and then went on: "Many years ago, in my former country, some friends and I put together an anthology of things our mistresses said while making love. Do you know what word came up most often?"
Edwige did not know.
"The word 'no.' The word 'no' repeated in succession: 'No, no, no, no, no, no, no . . .' The girl arrives to make love, but when the boy takes her in his arms, she pushes him away and says 'No,' giving the act of love the red glow of that most beautiful word and turning it into a miniature imitation rape. Even when they're approaching climax, they say 'No, no, no, no, no,' and many of them shout 'No' in the midst of it. Since then, 'no' has been a royal word for me. And what about you, were you in the habit of saying 'No'?"
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Edwige replied that she never said "No." Why say something she didn't mean? '"When a woman says "No," she really means "Yes."' That male aphorism has always outraged me. It's as stupid as all human history." "But that history is inside us, and we can't escape it," replied Jan. "A woman fleeing and defending herself. A woman giving herself, a man taking. A woman veiling herself, a man tearing off her clothes. These are age-old images we carry within us!"
"Age-old and idiotic! As idiotic as the holy images! And what if women are starting to be fed up with having to behave according to that pattern? What if that eternal repetition nauseates them? What if they want to invent other images and another game?"
"Yes, they're stupid images stupidly repeated. You're entirely right. But what if our desire for the female body depends on precisely those stupid images and on them alone? If those stupid old images were to be destroyed in us, would men still be able to make love to women?" Edwige broke into laughter: "I don't think you need to worry."
Then she fixed her motherly look on him: "And you shouldn't imagine all men are like you. How can you know what men are like when they're alone with a woman?"
Jan really didn't know what men were like when they were alone with a woman. In the ensuing silence Edwige's face took on the blissful smile that indicated it was getting late, that the time was coming for Jan to unwind the empty film reel on her body.
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After an instant's reflection, she added: "Ultimately, making love isn't that important."
Jan's ears pricked up: "You don't think making love is that important?"
She smiled at him tenderly: "No, making love is not that important."
In a moment, he completely forgot what they had been discussing, because he had just learned something that mattered much more: for Edwige, physical love was merely a sign, merely a symbolic act that confirms friendship.
That evening he dared for the first time to say he was tired. He lay down on the bed next to her like a chaste friend, letting the reel remain motionless. As he caressed her hair, he saw a reassuring rainbow of peace arching over their future together.
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a moment. Soon Jan had to get up, come over to her, give her a kiss, and lift her into his arms.
Then he would release her from his embrace and they would separate a bit and hastily start to undress. Jan threw his jacket on a chair. She pulled off her sweater and put it over the back of the chair. He unbuttoned his trousers and let them drop. She leaned forward and began to remove her panty hose. They were in a hurry. They stood face to face, leaning forward, Jan lifting one and then the other foot out of his trousers (he would raise his legs very high, like a parading soldier), she bending to gather the panty hose at her ankles, then as she extricated her legs raising them toward the ceiling, just as he did.
It was the same each time, but one day a tiny, insignificant event occurred that he never forgot: She looked at him and was unable to hold back a smile. It was a nearly tender smile, filled with fondness and understanding, a s
hy smile that sought to forgive itself, but a smile unquestionably created by the glare of ridiculousness that had suddenly flooded the entire scene. He had great difficulty restraining himself from returning that smile. For he too saw, emerging from the shadow of habit, the unexpected ridiculousness of two people facing each other and with odd haste raising their legs very high. He realized he was only a hairsbreadth from bursting into laughter. But he knew that if he did, they would no longer be able to make love. Laughter was there like an enormous trap waiting patiently in the room, hidden behind a thin, invis-
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9
Ten years earlier, Jan had received visits from a married woman. They had known each other for years but very rarely saw each other because the woman had a job, and even when she freed herself to see him, they had no time to lose. She would first sit down in an armchair and they would chat for a moment, but only
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ible partition. Only a few millimeters separated physical love from laughter, and he dreaded crossing over them. Only a few millimeters separated him from the other side of the border, where things no longer have meaning.
He restrained himself. He held back the smile, dropped his trousers, and quickly moved toward his lover, to touch the body whose warmth would drive away the devil of laughter.
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his fist as his huge eyes gleamed with endless enthusiasm. Now he spoke not about the hopes of humanity but about the hopes of his body. The doctors maintained that if he got through the next two weeks of intensive injections and great pain, he would beat the disease. As he said that, his fist pounded the table and his eyes gleamed. His enthusiastic account of the hopes of the body was a melancholy echo of his account of the hopes of humanity. Both enthusiasms were equally illusory, and Passer's gleaming eyes shed an equally magical light on both.
Then he started to talk about Hanna the actress. With shy masculine modesty, he confessed to Jan that for one last time he had gone totally mad. Mad over a madly beautiful woman, knowing all along that it was the most insane of all possible lunacies. Eyes gleaming, he talked about walking in the woods with her and hunting for mushrooms as if they were hunting for treasure, and about the cafe where they stopped to drink red wine.
"Hanna was incredible! You see, she didn't play the bustling nurse, she didn't give me compassionate looks to remind me of my illness and my feebleness, no, she laughed and drank with me. We downed a liter of wine! I felt eighteen again! I was in my seat on the direct line to death, and I wanted to sing!"
Passer pounded his fist on the table and looked at Jan with his gleaming eyes, above which the vanished shock of hair was delineated by three remaining silvery strands.
Jan said that we are all seated on the direct line to death. That the whole world, which is being assailed by
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10
Passer's condition, he learned, had gotten worse. Only morphine injections were keeping him going, and he felt well only a few hours a day. Jan took a train to visit him at the faraway clinic, reproaching himself during the journey for having gone so seldom. It was frightening to see how Passer had aged. A few silvery strands delineated on top of his skull the same wavy curve delineated not so long ago by his thick brown hair. His face was only a memory of his former face.
Passer greeted him with his usual exuberance. He took him by the arm and energetically steered him into his room, where they sat down on either side of a table.
When Jan long ago first met him, Passer had spoken about humanity's great hopes, pounding the table with
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violence, cruelty, barbarism, was seated on that line. He said it because he loved Passer and was outraged that this man so splendidly pounding his fist on the table was dying ahead of a world so undeserving of love. He was trying hard to make the end of the world seem nearer than it was in order to make Passer's death more bearable to him. But Passer refused to accept the end of the world, he pounded his fist on the table and again began to speak about the hopes of humanity. He said that we were living in a time of great changes.
Jan had never shared Passer's admiration for things changing, but he liked his desire for change, seeing it as mankind's oldest desire, humanity's most conservative conservatism. Yet even though he liked that desire, he hoped to take it away from him, now that Passer was seated on the direct line to death. He was trying to tarnish the future in his eyes, to make him regret a little less the life he was losing.
He said to him: "Everyone says we're living in a great epoch. Clevis talks about the end of the Judeo-Christian era, others about world revolution and communism, but that's all nonsense. If our epoch is a turning point, it's for an entirely different reason."
Passer stared at him with his gleaming eyes, above which the memory of his shock of hair was delineated by three remaining silvery strands.
Jan went on: "Do you know the joke about the English lord?"
Passer pounded his fist on the table and said he didn't.
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"The morning after their wedding night, he says to his bride: 'I do hope, my dear, that you are now with child. I wouldn't wish to be forced to repeat those ridiculous motions.'"
Passer smiled, but without pounding his fist on the table. It was not the kind of story that kindled his enthusiasm.
Jan went on: "Talk about world revolution! We're living in the historic epoch when the sexual act is being definitively transformed into ridiculous motions."
A delicate trace of a smile appeared on Passer's face. Jan knew that smile well. It was not a joyous or an approving smile, but a smile of tolerance. They had always been far apart in their views, and in the rare moments when their differences became too visible, they would smile that smile to assure each other that their friendship was not in danger.
11
Why does the image of the border continually occur to him?
He tells himself it is because he is getting old: When things are repeated, they lose a fraction of their meaning. Or more exactly, they lose, drop by drop, the vital
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strength that gives them their illusory meaning. For Jan, therefore, the border is the maximum acceptable dose of repetitions.
Once, he attended a show where, right in the middle of things, a very gifted comic actor began just like that to count very slowly and with extreme concentration: "One, two, three, four . . . ," pronouncing each of the numbers with great absorption, as if they had escaped and he was engrossed in getting them back: "five, six, seven, eight..." At "fifteen," the audience started to laugh, and when, slowly and with greater and greater concentration, he reached "one hundred," people were falling off their seats.
At another performance, the same actor sat down at the piano and began to play a waltz rhythm with his left hand: oom-pa-pa, oom-pa-pa. His right hand hung in the air, so there was no melody, only the same oom-pa-pa, oom-pa-pa over and over again, and he looked eloquently at the audience as if that waltz accompaniment were splendid music worthy of emotion, applause, enthusiasm. He played it again and again, twenty times, thirty times, fifty times, one hundred times the same oom-pa-pa, oom-pa-pa, and the audience was choking with laughter.
Yes, when you cross the border, laughter fatefully rings out. But what if you go still farther, go beyond laughter?
Jan imagines that the Greek gods at first passionately participated in the adventures of humans. Then they settled in on Olympus to look down and have a
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good laugh. And by now they have been asleep for a long time.
In my opinion, however, Jan is mistaken in thinking that the border is a line that crosses a man's life at a specific point, that it marks a break in time, a particular second on the clock of a human life. No. I am certain, on the contrary, t
hat the border is constantly with us, irrespective of time and our stage of life, that it is omnipresent, even though circumstances might make it more or less visible.
The woman Jan had loved most was right to say she held on to life by a spider thread. It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense.
Jan had friends who like him had left their old homeland and who devoted all their time to the struggle for its lost freedom. All of them had sometimes felt that the bond tying them to their country was just an illusion and that only enduring habit kept them prepared to die for something they did not care about. They all knew that feeling and at the same time were afraid of knowing it; they turned their heads away for fear of seeing the border and stumbling (lured by vertigo as by an abyss) across it to the other side, where the language of their tortured people makes a noise as trivial as the twittering of birds.
Since Jan defines the border for himself as the maximum acceptable dose of repetitions, I am obliged to
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correct him: the border is not a product of repetition. Repetition is only one of the ways of making the border visible. The borderline is covered with dust, and repetition is like a hand whisking away dust.
I would like to remind Jan of a striking experience from his childhood: He was about thirteen at the time. All the talk about life on other planets led him to play with the idea that nonterrestrial creatures had more erotic areas on their bodies than we terrestrials. The thirteen-year-old, secretly arousing himself in front of a stolen photo of a naked dancer, had arrived at the feeling that terrestrial women, endowed with the overly simple trinity of one sex organ and two breasts, were erotically deprived. He dreamed of a creature with a body offering ten or twenty erotic areas instead of that impoverished triangle, a body offering the eye totally inexhaustible sources of arousal.