Immortality Page 4
Once Agnes had a date with a man and just as she was kissing him in the lobby of a big hotel, a bearded fellow appeared unexpectedly before her, in jeans and leather jacket, with five pouches hanging around his neck and across his shoulders. He hunched down and squinted through his camera. She began to wave her arm in front of her face, but the man laughed, jabbered something in bad English, and kept on jumping backward like a flea while clicking the shutter. It was a meaningless episode: some sort of congress was taking place in the hotel and a photographer had been hired so that the scholars who had assembled from all parts of the world would be able to buy souvenir pictures of themselves. But Agnes could not bear the idea that somewhere there remained a document testifying to her acquaintance with the man she had met there; she returned to the hotel the next day, bought up all her photos (showing her at the man's side, with one arm extended across her face), and tried to secure the negatives, too; but those had been filed away by the picture agency and were already unobtainable. Even though she wasn't in any real danger, she could not rid herself of anxiety because one second of her life, instead of dissolving into noth-
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ingness like all the other seconds of life, would remain torn out of the course of time and some stupid coincidence could make it come back to haunt her like the badly buried dead.
She picked up another magazine, more devoted to politics and culture. It contained no catastrophes or nude beaches with princesses; instead, it was full of faces, nothing but faces. Even in the back, where there were reviews of books, each article featured a photograph of the author under review. Many of the writers were unknown, and their photos could be considered useful information, but how to justify five photographs of the President of the Republic, whose chin and nose everyone knows by heart? Even the editorial had a small picture of the author over the text, evidently in the same spot every week. Articles about astronomy were illustrated by the enlarged smiles of astronomers, and even the advertisements—for typewriters, furniture, carrots—contained faces, lots and lots of faces. She looked through the magazine again, from first page to last. She counted ninety-two photographs showing nothing but a face; forty-one photographs of a face plus a figure; ninety faces in twenty-three group photographs; and only eleven photographs in which people played a secondary role or were totally absent. Altogether, the magazine contained two hundred and twenty-three faces.
Then Paul came home and Agnes told him about her numbers.
"Yes," he agreed. "The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time."
"Individualism? What does it have to do with individualism when a camera takes your picture in a moment of agony? On the contrary, it means that an individual no longer belongs to himself but becomes the property of others. You know, I remember my childhood: in those days if you wanted to take somebody's picture you asked for permission. Even when I was a child, adults would ask me: little girl, may we take your picture? And then one day they stopped asking. The right of the camera was elevated above all other rights, and that changed everything, absolutely everything."
She opened the magazine again and said, "If you put the pictures of
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two different faces side by side, your eye is struck by everything that makes one different from the other. But if you have two hundred and twenty-three faces side by side, you suddenly realize that it's all just one face in many variations and that no such thing as an individual ever existed."
"Agnes," said Paul, and his voice had suddenly become serious. "Your face does not resemble any other."
Agnes failed to notice the serious tone of Paul's voice, and smiled.
"Don't smile. I really mean it. If you love somebody you love his face and then it becomes totally different from everyone else's."
"Yes, you know me by my face, you know me as a face and you never knew me any other way. Therefore it could never occur to you that my face is not my self."
Paul answered with the patient concern of an old doctor, "Why do you think your face is not you? Who is behind your face?"
"Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you."
"Agnes," said Paul, and he rose from his armchair. He stood close to her. In his eyes she saw love, and in his features, his mother. He looked like her, just as his mother probably looked like her father, who in turn also looked like somebody. When Agnes saw Paul's mother for the first time, she found her likeness to him painfully unpleasant. Later on, when Paul and Agnes made love, some sort of spite reminded her of this likeness and there were moments when it seemed to her as if an old woman were lying on top, her face distorted with lust. But Paul had forgotten long ago that his face bore an imprint of his mother and he was convinced that it was his and no one else's.
"We got our names, too, merely by accident," she continued. "We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history, and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with
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it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration. A face is like a name. It must have happened some time toward the end of my childhood: I kept looking in the mirror for such a long time that I finally believed that what I was seeing was my self. My recollection of this period is very vague, but I know that the discovery of the self must have been intoxicating. Yet there comes a time when you stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself: this is my self? And why? Why did I want to identify with this? What do I care about this face? And at that moment everything starts to crumble. Everything starts to crumble."
"What starts to crumble? What's the matter with you, Agnes? What's the matter with you lately?"
She glanced at him, then lowered her head. He looked incorrigibly like his mother. Besides, he looked like her more and more. He looked more and more like the old woman his mother had been.
He took her in his arms and lifted her up. She looked at him and he noticed only now that her eyes were full of tears.
He pressed her to him. She understood that he loved her and this suddenly filled her with sadness. She felt sad that he loved her so much, and she felt like crying.
"We should be getting dressed, we'll have to leave soon," he said. She slipped out of his arms, and ran off to the bathroom.
8
I
wrIte about Agnes, I try to imagine her, I let her sit on a bench in the sauna, walk around Paris, leaf through a magazine, talk with her husband, but the thing that started it all, the gesture of a woman waving to a lifeguard by the side of a pool, it must seem as if I had forgotten that. Does Agnes any longer wave to anyone in this manner? No. Strange as it seems, I believe that she has not done so for many years. Long ago, when she was very young, yes, in those days she used to wave like that.
At that time she was still living in a Swiss town surrounded by mountaintops silhouetted in the distance. She was sixteen and went to the movies with a school friend. The instant the lights went out he took her hand. Soon their palms became sticky, but the boy did not dare let go of the hand he had so daringly grasped, for that would have meant admitting that he was perspiring and ashamed of it. And so they sat with clammy hands for an hour and a half, and let go only when the lights came back on.
He tried to prolong the date, leading her down the streets of the old part of town and then uphill to the courtyard of an old cloister teeming with tourists. He obviously had thought out everything in advance, because he led her quite briskly to a deserted passage, under the rather trite pretense that
he wanted to show her a certain painting. They reached the end of the passage, but instead of a picture there was only a dark brown door, marked with the letters WC. The boy had not noticed the sign and stopped. She knew perfectly well that he was not very interested in paintings and that he was only looking for a secluded place where he could kiss her. Poor boy, he had found nothing better than a dirty corner next to a lavatory! She burst out laughing, and to
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make it clear that she wasn't laughing at him she pointed out the sign. He laughed, too, but he was seized by hopelessness. It was impossible to hug and kiss her with those letters in the background (all the more since this was to be their first, and thus an unforgettable, kiss), and so he had no choice but to turn back with a bitter sense of capitulation.
They walked silently, and Agnes was angry: why didn't he simply kiss her in the middle of the street? Why did he have to lead her instead down an obscure passage to a lavatory where generations of old and ugly and smelly monks had been relieving themselves? His embarrassment flattered her, because it was a sign of his bewildered love, but it irritated her even more, because it testified to his immaturity; going with a boy the same age seemed like lowering oneself: she was only interested in older boys. But perhaps because she thus was secretly rejecting him and yet knew at the same time that he was in love with her, a sense of justice prompted her to help him in his amorous efforts, to support him, to rid him of childish embarrassment. She resolved that if he couldn't find the necessary courage, she would.
He was walking her home, and she planned that the moment they reached the gate of her house, she would throw her arms around him and kiss him, which would no doubt make him stand stock-still, completely flabbergasted. But at the last moment she lost the desire to do so, because his face was not merely sad but forbidding, even hostile. And so they merely shook hands and she walked off down the garden path to her door. She sensed that the boy remained standing motionless, gazing after her. She felt sorry for him once more; she felt for him the compassion of an older sister, and at that point she did something quite unpremeditated: as she kept on walking she turned her head back toward him, smiled, and lifted her right arm in the air, easily, flowingly, as if she were tossing a brightly colored ball.
That instant when Agnes suddenly, without preparation, lifted her arm in a flowing, easy motion was miraculous. How was it possible that in a single fraction of a second, and for the very first time, she discovered a motion of the arm and body so perfect and polished that it resembled a finished work of art?
In those days a woman of about forty used to come to see Father.
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She was the departmental secretary, and she would bring papers for him to sign and take other papers back with her. Even though these visits had no special significance, they were accompanied by a mysterious tension (Mother would always turn silent), arousing Agnes's curiosity. Whenever the secretary was leaving, Agnes ran to the window to watch her inconspicuously. Once, as she was heading toward the gate (thus walking in a direction opposite to that which Agnes was to take somewhat later, followed by the gaze of her unfortunate school friend), the secretary turned, smiled, and lifted her arm in the air in an unexpected gesture, easy and flowing. It was an unforgettable moment: the sandy path sparkled in the rays of the sun like a golden stream, and on both sides of the gate jasmine bushes were blooming. It was as if the upward gesture wished to show this golden piece of earth the direction of flight, while the white jasmine bushes were already beginning to turn into wings. Father was not visible, but the woman's gesture indicated that he was standing in the doorway of the villa, gazing after her.
That gesture was so unexpected and beautiful that it remained in Agnes's memory like the imprint of a lightning bolt; it invited her into the depths of space and time and awakened in the sixteen-year-old girl a vague and immense longing. At the moment when she suddenly needed to say something important to her school friend and had no words for it, that gesture came to life and said on her behalf what she herself was unable to say.
I don't know how long she kept using it (or, more precisely, how long it kept using her), but surely up to the day when she noticed her sister, younger by eight years, tossing up her arm while saying goodbye to a girlfriend. When she saw her gesture performed by a sister who had been admiring and imitating her from earliest childhood, she felt a certain unease: the adult gesture did not fit an eleven-year-old child. But more important, she realized that the gesture was available to all and thus did not really belong to her: when she waved her arm, she was actually committing theft or forgery. From that time on she began to avoid that gesture (it is not easy to break the habit of gestures that have become used to us), and she developed a distrust of gestures
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altogether. She tried to limit herself to the most important ones (to nod "yes" or shake her head "no," to point at an object her companion had failed to see), to use only gestures that did not pretend to be her original expression. And so it came to be that the bewitching gesture of Father's secretary walking down the golden path (which bewitched me when I saw the woman in the swimsuit take leave of the lifeguard) had completely gone to sleep in her.
And then one day it awoke. It happened before Mother's death, when she was staying two weeks in the villa with her sick father. As she was saying good-bye to him on the last day, she knew that they wouldn't see each other again for a long time. Mother wasn't at home and Father wanted to see her to her car, which was parked in the street. She forbade him to accompany her beyond the door, and walked alone over the golden sand past the flower beds to the gate. She had a lump in her throat and an enormous yearning to say something beautiful to Father, something that could not be expressed by words, and so without quite knowing how it happened she suddenly turned her head and with a smile tossed her arm in the air, easily, flowingly, as if to tell him they still had a long life ahead of them and would still see each other many more times. An instant later she recalled the forty-year-old woman who twenty-five years earlier had stood in the same place and had waved at Father in the same way. That upset and confused her. It was as if two distant times had suddenly met in a single second and two different women in a single gesture. The thought passed through her head that those two women might have been the only ones he had ever loved.
9
In the salon where they were all sitting after dinner over glasses of brandy and half-finished cups of coffee, the first courageous guest rose to his feet and bowed with a smile to the lady of the house. The others decided to take it as a signal and along with Paul and Agnes jumped out of their armchairs and hurried to their cars. Paul drove; Agnes sat next to him and absorbed the incessant movement of traffic, the blinking of the lights, the pointless agitation of a metropolitan night. And she once again had the strong, peculiar feeling that was coming over her more and more often: the feeling that she had nothing in common with those two-legged creatures with a head on their shoulders and a mouth in their face. There was a time when she was interested in their politics, their science, their inventions, when she considered herself a small part of their great adventure, until one day the feeling was born in her that she did not belong among them. That feeling was strange, she resisted it, she knew that it was absurd as well as amoral, but in the end she told herself that she could not command her feelings: she was no longer able to torment herself with thoughts of their wars nor to enjoy their celebrations, because she was filled with the conviction that none of it was her concern.
Did it mean that she was coldhearted? No, it had nothing to do with the heart. Anyway, nobody handed out as much money to beggars as she. She could never ignore them as she passed them on the street, and they, as if they sensed it, turned to her, picking her out at once from a throng of a hundred other pedestrians as the one who saw and heard them. —Yes, it is true, but I must add the following: even her handouts to beggars were based on negation: she gave them money not bec
ause beggars, too, belonged to mankind but because they did not belong to
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it, because they were excluded from it and probably, like her, felt no solidarity with mankind.
No solidarity with mankind: that was her attitude. Only one thing could wrench her out of it: concrete love toward a concrete person. If she truly loved someone, she could not be indifferent to the fate of other people, because her beloved would be dependent on that fate, he would be part of it, and she could no longer feel that mankind's torments, its wars and holidays, were none of her concern.
She was frightened by that last thought. Was it true that she didn't love anyone? And what about Paul?
She thought of the moment a few hours earlier, before they had left for dinner, when he had taken her in his arms. Yes, something was going on inside her: recently she was pursued by the idea that her love for Paul was merely a matter of will, merely the will to love him; merely the will to have a happy marriage. If she eased up on this will for just a moment, love would fly away like a bird released from its cage.
It is one o'clock at night: Agnes and Paul are undressing. If they were asked to describe their partner's motions at such times, they would be embarrassed. For a long time now they haven't been looking at each other. Disconnected, their instrument of memory fails to record anything of those common nighttime moments that precede lying down in the marital bed.
The marital bed: the altar of marriage; and when one says altar, one implies sacrifice. Here one of them sacrifices for the other: both have trouble falling asleep, and their partner's noisy breathing wakes them; so they wriggle toward the edge of the bed, leaving a broad space down the middle; they pretend to be sound asleep in the hope of making sleep easier for their partner, who will then be able to turn from side to side without disturbing the other. Unfortunately, the partner does not make use of this opportunity because he too (and for the same reason) pretends to be asleep and fears to budge.