The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Page 6
Marketa let herself be made love to by this mechanical male body, then watched that body flinging itself between Eva's legs, but she tried not to see the face, so as to think of it as a stranger's body. It was a masked ball. Karel had put a mask of Nora on Eva and put a child's mask on himself, and Marketa had removed the head from his body. He was a man's body without a head. Karel disappeared and a miracle occurred: Marketa was free and joyous!
Am I trying in this way to confirm Karel's suspicion, his belief that for Marketa their little domestic orgies
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had up until now amounted only to self-sacrifice and suffering?
No, that would be an oversimplification. Marketa really desired, with both her body and her senses, the women she considered Karel's mistresses. And she also desired them with her head: fulfilling the prophecy of her old math teacher, she wanted—at least to the limits of the disastrous contract—to show herself enterprising and playful, and to astonish Karel.
But as soon as she found herself naked with them on the wide daybed, the sensual wanderings immediately vanished from her mind, and seeing her husband was enough to return her to her role, the role of the better one, the one who is wronged. Even when she was with Eva, whom she loved very much and of whom she was not jealous, the presence of the man she loved too well weighed heavy on her, stifling the pleasure of the senses.
The moment she removed his head from the body, she felt the strange and intoxicating touch of freedom. That anonymity of the body was a suddenly discovered paradise. With an odd delight, she expelled her wounded and too vigilant soul and was transformed into a simple body without past or memory, but all the more eager and receptive. She tenderly caressed Eva's face, while the headless body moved vigorously on top of her.
But here the headless body interrupted his movements and, in a voice that reminded her unpleasantly of Karel's, uttered unbelievably idiotic words: "I'm Bobby Fischer! I'm Bobby Fischer!"
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It was like being awakened from a dream. And just then, as she lay snuggled against Eva (as the awakening sleeper snuggles against his pillow to hide from the dim first light of day), Eva had asked her, "All right?" and she had consented with a sign, pressing her lips against Eva's. She had always loved her, but today for the first time she loved her with all her senses, for herself, for her body, and for her skin, becoming intoxicated with this fleshly love as with a sudden revelation.
Afterward, while they lay side by side on their stomachs, with their buttocks slightly raised, Marketa could feel on her skin that the infinitely efficient body was again fixing its eyes on hers and at any moment was going to start again making love to them. She tried to ignore the voice talking about seeing beautiful Mrs. Nora, tried simply to be a body hearing nothing while lying pressed between a very soft-skinned girlfriend and some headless man.
When it was all over, her girlfriend fell asleep in a moment. Marketa envied her animal sleep, wanting to inhale that sleep from her lips, to doze off to its rhythm. She pressed herself against Eva and closed her eyes to fool Karel, who, thinking both women had fallen asleep, soon went to bed in the next room.
At four-thirty in the morning, she opened the door to his room. He looked up at her sleepily.
"Go back to sleep, I'll take care of Eva," she said, kissing him tenderly. He turned over and immediately was asleep again.
In the car, Eva again asked: "Is it all right?"
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Marketa was no longer as determined as she had been the evening before. Yes, she would be quite will-ing to trespass against their old unwritten agreements. But how to do it without destroying love? How to do it when she continued to love Karel so much?
"Don't worry," said Eva. "He won't notice anything. Between the two of you, it's been established once and for all that it's you and not he who has the suspicions. You really have no reason to fear he suspects anything."
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Eva dozes in the jolting compartment. Marketa has returned from the railroad station and is already back asleep (she will have to get up again in an hour to prepare for work), and now it is Karel's turn to take Mama to the station. It's train day. Some hours later (by then both husband and wife will already be at work), their son will step onto the station platform to bring this story to an end.
Karel is still filled with the night's beauty. He knows full well that of his two or three thousand acts of love (how many times had he made love in his life?), no more than two or three are really essential and unforgettable, while the others are merely recurrences, imitations, repetitions, or evocations. And Karel knows
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that yesterday's lovemaking is one of those two or three important acts of love, and he has a feeling of immense gratitude.
As he is driving her to the railroad station, Mama does not stop talking.
What does she say?
First she thanks him: she's had a very good time at her son and daughter-in-law's.
Then she reproaches him: they had done her many wrongs. When he and Marketa were still living with her, he had been impatient with Mama, often even rude and inconsiderate, and she had suffered greatly because of it. Yes, she admits, this time they'd been very nice, different from before. Yes, they had changed. But why had they waited so long?
Karel listens to this long litany of blame (he knows it by heart) but is not in the least irritated. He looks at Mama out of the corner of his eye, again surprised by how little she is. As if all of her life has been a slow process of shrinkage.
But just what is that shrinkage?
Is it the real shrinkage of a person abandoning his adult dimensions and starting on the long journey through old age and death toward distances where there is only a nothingness without dimensions?
Or is that shrinkage only an optical illusion, owing to the fact that Mama is going away, that she is elsewhere, that he is seeing her from afar, that she looks to him like a lamb, a doll, a butterfly?
When Mama pauses for a moment in her litany of
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blame, Karel asks her: "What's become of Mrs. Nora?"
"She's an old woman now, you know. She's nearly blind."
"Do you ever see her?"
"Don't you know?" says Mama, offended. The two women had stopped seeing each other a long time ago, falling out with a bitter quarrel and never reconciling. Karel should have remembered that.
"Do you know where we went on vacation with her when I was little?"
"Of course I do!" says Mama, naming a spa in Bohemia. Karel knows it well but never realized the women's changing room there was where he had seen Mrs. Nora naked.
Now he pictured the gently rolling landscape surrounding the town, the spa building with its peristyle of carved wooden columns, the hilly meadows where grazing sheep made themselves heard by the tinkling of their little bells. He imagined putting into this landscape (like a collage artist sticking into a print a piece of another one) Mrs. Nora's naked body, and the thought then came to him that beauty is a spark that Hashes when, suddenly, across the distance of years, two ages meet. That beauty is an abolition of chronology and a rebellion against time.
And he is overflowing with beauty and with gratitude for it. Then he says, point-blank: "Mama, we're wondering, Marketa and I, whether you might want to come live with us. It wouldn't be hard for us to get a slightly bigger apartment."
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Mama caresses his hand. "You're very nice, Karel. Very nice. I'm glad to hear you say that. But you know, my poodle is used to things at home. And I've become friends with women in the neighborhood."
Then they board the train and Karel is trying to find a compartment for Mama. They are all crowded and uncomfortable. Finally he seats her in a first-class compartment and runs off to
look for the conductor and pay the additional fare. And his wallet still in his hand, he takes out a hundred-crown bill and puts it in Mama's hand as if Mama were a little girl being sent off far away into the world, and Mama accepts the bill without surprise, quite naturally, like a schoolgirl used to adults now and then slipping her a bit of money.
And later, Mama is at the window as the train starts up, and Karel on the platform waves at her for a long, long time, until the very last moment.
PART THREE
The Angels
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Rhinoceros is a play by Eugene Ionesco in which the characters, possessed by a desire to be similar to one another, one by one turn into rhinoceroses. Gabrielle and Michelle, two American girls, were studying the play at a summer course for foreign students in a small French town on the Mediterranean coast. They were I Fie favorite students of Madame Raphael, their teacher, because they always gazed attentively at her and carefully wrote down every one of her remarks. Today she had asked the two of them to prepare a talk together on the play for the next class session.
"I don't really get what it means, that they all turn into rhinoceroses," said Gabrielle.
"You have to see it as a symbol," Michelle explained.
"That's right," said Gabrielle. "Literature is made up of signs."
"The rhinoceros is mainly a sign," said Michelle.
"Yes, but even if you assume they don't really turn into rhinoceroses, but only into signs, why do they become just that sign and not another one?"
"Yes, it's obviously a problem," said Michelle sadly, arid the two girls, who were on their way back to their student residence hall, walked for a long while in silence.
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It was Gabrielle who broke it: "Don't you think it's a phallic symbol?"
"What?" asked Michelle.
"The horn," said Gabrielle.
"That's right!" Michelle cried out, but then she hesitated. "Only, why does everybody turn into phallic symbols? Women just as well as men?"
The two girls heading rapidly toward the student residence hall were silent again.
"I've got an idea," Michelle said suddenly.
"What is it?" Gabrielle asked with interest.
"Besides, it's something Madame Raphael sort of implied," said Michelle, piquing Gabrielle's curiosity.
"So what is it? Tell me," Gabrielle insisted impatiently.
"The author wanted to create a comic effect!"
Her friend's idea so captivated Gabrielle that, concentrating entirely on what was going on in her head, she disregarded her legs and slowed her pace. The two girls came to a halt.
"Do you think the symbol of the rhinoceros is there to create a comic effect?" Gabrielle asked.
"Yes," said Michelle, smiling the proud smile of someone who has found the truth.
"You're right," said Gabrielle.
Pleased with their own boldness, the two girls looked at each other, and the corners of their mouths quivered with pride. Then, all of a sudden, they emitted short, shrill, spasmodic sounds very difficult to describe in words.
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2
"Laughter? Do people ever care about laughter? I mean real laughter, beyond joking, mockery, ridicule. Laughter, an immense and delicious sensual pleasure, wholly sensual pleasure . . .
"I said to my sister, or she said to me, come over, shall we play laughter? We stretched out side by side on a bed and began. By pretending, of course. Forced laughter. Laughable laughter. Laughter so laughable it made us laugh. Then it came, real laughter, total laughter, taking us into its immense tide. Bursts of repeated, rushing, unleashed laughter, magnificent laughter, sumptuous and mad. . . . And we laugh our laughter to the infinity of laughter. . . . O laughter! Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter; to laugh is to live profoundly."
This quotation is from a book called Parole de femme (Woman's Word). It was published in 1976 by one of the passionate feminists who have made a dis-tinctive mark on the climate of our time. It is a mystical manifesto of joy. To oppose male sexual desire, which is devoted to the fleeting moments of erection and thus fatally engaged with violence, annihilation, and extinction, the author exalts, as its antipode, female jouissance—gentle, pervasive, and continuing sensual pleasure. For a woman who is not alienated from her own essence, "eating, drinking, urinating,
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defecating, touching, hearing, or even just being here" are all sensual pleasures. Such enumeration of pleasures extends through the book like a beautiful litany. "Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying." And coition is beautiful because it is the sum of "all of life's possible sensual pleasures: touching, seeing, hearing, talking, feeling, as well as drinking, eating, defecating, knowing, dancing." Breast-feeding too is a joy, even giving birth a sensual pleasure and menstruating a delight, with that "warm saliva, that dark milk, that warm, syrupy blood flow, that pain with the scalding taste of happiness."
Only a fool could laugh at this manifesto of joy. All mysticism is excessive. The mystic must not be afraid of ridicule if he wants to go to the limits, the limits of humility or the limits of sensual pleasure. Just as Saint Theresa smiled in her agony, so Saint Annie Leclerc (the author of the book I have been quoting) maintains that death is a part of joy and dreaded only by the male, who is wretchedly attached "to his petty self and petty power."
Up above, as the vault of this temple of pleasure, is the sound of laughter, "that delightful trance of happiness, that utmost height of sensual pleasure. Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter." Unquestionably, such laughter is "beyond joking, mockery, ridicule." The two sisters stretched out on their bed are not laughing about anything in particular,
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their laughter has no object, it is the expression of being rejoicing in being. Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and without desire, for he is emitting his shout into the world's present moment and wishes to know only that.
You certainly remember this scene from dozens of had films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running, and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theaters: "We're happy, we're glad to be in the world, we're in agreement with being!" It's a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter "beyond joking."
All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on the billboards adver-tising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder.
Michelle and Gabrielle's laughter is precisely that kind of laughter. Hand in hand, they are emerging from a stationery store, and in her free hand each one is swinging a small bag of colored paper, glue, and rubber bands.
"You'll see, Madame Raphael will be just wild about it," says Gabrielle, and emits shrill, spasmodic sounds.
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Michelle nods in agreement and then makes just about the same noise.
The Angels
case I have little to hide.) Shy, subtle, and intelligent, she was an editor at a mass-circulation magazine for young people. Since the magazine at the time was obliged to publish an unbelievable number of indigestible political articles singing the praises of the fraternal Russian people, the editorial board was always looking for new ways to attract the readers' attention. So they decided to make an exception an
d depart from Marxist ideological purity by starting an astrology column.
During those years of exclusion, I had cast thousands of horoscopes. If the great Jaroslav Hasek could be a dog dealer (selling many stolen dogs and passing mutts off as pedigreed), why couldn't I be an astrologer? Friends in Paris had sent me all the astrological trea-tises of Andre Barbault, whose name on the title pages was proudly followed by ''''President du Centre internal tional d'astrologie," to which, disguising my handwriting, I added in pen and ink: "A Milan Kundera avec admiration, Andre Barbault." I unobtrusively laid out these signed copies on a table, explaining to my sur-prised Prague clients that once for several months I had been the illustrious Barbault's assistant.
When R. asked me to write an astrology column for the weekly in secret, I of course reacted enthusiastically and advised her to tell the editorial board that the writer would be a brilliant nuclear physicist who did not want his name revealed for fear of being made fun of by his colleagues. Our undertaking seemed to me doubly shielded: by the nonexistent scientist and by his pseudonym.
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Soon after the Russians occupied my country in 1968, I was driven from my job (like thousands upon thousands of other Czechs), and no one had the right to give me another. Some young friends too young to be on the Russians' lists and thus still working in editorial offices, schools, and film studios would come to see me. Hoping to help me earn a living, these good young friends, whom I will never betray, proposed plays, radio and television dramas, articles, reportage, film scripts, for me to write under their names. I did accept a few such offers, but more often I rejected them, because I could not have managed to handle everything that was proposed, and also because it was dangerous. Not for me, but for them. The secret police wanted to starve us, reduce us to poverty, force us to capitulate and make public retractions. And so they vigilantly kept an eye on the pitiful emergency exits we used in our attempts to avoid encirclement, and harshly punished those who donated their names.