Life Is Elsewhere (6 page)

And she realized that she didn't know at all whether she did or didn't want him, and it occurred to her that she was still a silly, inexperienced little girl, that if only she had suspected in the recesses of her mind that the painter was going to kiss and go to bed with her, what was happening would never have taken place. This thought provided her a reassuring excuse, for it follows that she was brought into adultery not by her sensuality but by her innocence; and the thought of innocence immediately increased her anger toward the one who perpetually kept her in a state of innocent half maturity, and this anger fell like an iron curtain in front of her thoughts so that she only heard her breath quicken and she gave up pondering what she was doing.

Then, when their breathing eased, her thoughts reawakened, and to escape them she put her head on the painter's chest; she let him caress her hair, breathed in the soothing odor of oil paints, and wondered which of them would first break the silence.

It was neither one nor the other, but the doorbell. The painter got up, quickly buttoned his trousers, and said: "Jaromil."

She was very frightened.

"Stay here and be calm," he said to her, and he caressed her hair and went out of the studio.

He greeted the boy at the front door in the other room and asked him to sit down.

"I have a visitor in the studio, so we'll stay here today. Show me what you've brought." Jaromil handed his sketchbook to the painter, the painter examined the drawings he had made at home, and then he put paints before him, gave him paper and a brush, suggested a subject, and asked him to draw.

Then he returned to the studio, where he found Mama dressed and ready to leave. "Why did you let him stay? Why didn't you send him away?"

"Are you in such a hurry to leave me?"

"This is crazy," she said, and the painter again took her in his arms; this time she neither defended herself nor yielded; she stood in his arms like a body deprived of its soul; the painter whispered into the ear of this inert body: "Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all." He sat her down on the daybed and kissed her and caressed her breasts.

Then he returned to the other room to see what Jaromil had drawn. This time the subject he had given him was not intended to exercise the boy's manual dexterity; Jaromil was to draw a scene from one of his recent dreams. The painter now talked for a long while about this work: what is most beautiful about dreams is the unlikely encounter of creatures and objects that couldn't possibly meet in everyday life; in a dream a boat can sail through a bedroom window, a woman dead twenty years might be lying in bed and yet here she is getting into the boat, which immediately changes into a coffin, and the coffin begins floating between the flowering banks of a river. He quoted Lautreamonts famous phrase about the beauty of "the encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table," and then he said: "That encounter, however, is no more beautiful than the encounter of a woman and a child in a painter's studio."

Jaromil could see that his teacher was a bit different from the way he had been before, noticing the fervor in his voice when he talked about dreams and poetry. Not' only did he like that, but he was pleased that he, Jaromil, had been the justification for such an exhilarating speech, and above all he had registered his teacher's last remark about the encounter of a child and a woman in a painter's studio. A short while before, when the painter had told him that they would stay in this room, Jaromil had surmised that there was probably a woman in the studio, and certainly not just any woman, because he was not allowed to see her. But he was still too far away from the adult world to try to clear up this puzzle; what interested him more was the fact that, with that last remark, the painter had placed him, Jaromil, on the same level as this woman who was certainly important to the painter, and the fact that Jaromil's arrival obviously made the presence of this woman still more beautiful and precious, and he concluded that the painter liked him, that he mattered in his life perhaps because of a deep and mysterious inner similarity between them that Jaromil, still a child, could not clearly discern but that the painter, a wise adult, was aware of. This thought filled him with calm enthusiasm, and when the painter gave him another subject he bent feverishly over the paper.

The painter returned to the studio and found Mama in tears.

"Please let me go home right now!"

"Go ahead, you can leave together—Jaromil will soon be finished."

"You're a devil," she said, still in tears, and the painter embraced her and covered her with kisses. Then he returned to the adjoining room, praised Jaromil's work (ah, Jaromil was very happy that day!), and sent him home. Then he returned to the studio, stretched tearful Mama out on the old paint-stained daybed, kissed her soft mouth and wet face, and again made love to her.

9

Mama and the painter's love affair never freed itself from the omens that marked its beginning: it was not a love she had long and dreamily contemplated in advance, firmly looking it in the eye; it was an unexpected love that had grabbed her by the neck from behind.

This love constantly reminded her of her unpre-paredness for love; she was inexperienced, she knew neither what to do nor what to say. Before the painter's unusual and demanding face, she was ashamed in advance of her every word and gesture; even her body was no better prepared; for the first time she bitterly regretted taking care of herself so badly after she gave birth, and she was frightened when she looked in the mirror at her belly, at its sadly hanging wrinkled skin.

Ah! She had always dreamed of a love in which her body and soul, hand in hand, would grow old together (yes, that was the love she had long contemplated in advance, looking it dreamily in the eye); but now, in this difficult liaison she was suddenly immersed in, she found her soul painfully young and her body painfully old, so that she moved forward into her adventure as if she were tremulously walking on a much-too-narrow plank, not knowing whether it was the youth of her soul or the age of her body that would cause her to fall.

The painter treated her with extravagant solicitude and tried hard to introduce her to the world of his paintings and thoughts. She was delighted by that; she saw it as proof that their first rendezvous was something other than a conspiracy of bodies taking advantage of a situation. But when love occupies both body and soul, it takes more time; Mama had to keep inventing new friends to justify (especially to Grandmama and Jaromil) her frequent absences from the house.

She would sit beside the painter as he worked, but that was not enough for him; he explained to her that painting, as he conceived it, was merely one method among others of quarrying the marvelous from life; and even a child could discover the marvelous at play or an ordinary man by recalling a dream. The painter gave Mama a sheet of paper and colored inks; she was told to make blots on the paper with the various colors and blow on them; rays ran over the paper in all directions and covered it with a multicolored web; the painter displayed Mama's output behind the glass panes of his bookcase and praised them to his guests.

On one of her earliest visits, he gave her several books as she was leaving. At home she had to read them secretly because she was afraid that Jaromil would ask her where she got the books, or another member of the family might ask her the same question, and she would find it difficult to find a satisfactory lie because a glance at them was enough to show that they were very different from the ones in the libraries of their friends or parents. She therefore hid the books in the drawer under her brassieres and nightgowns and read them during the moments when she was alone. The feeling of doing something forbidden and the fear of being caught probably prevented her from concentrating on what she was reading, for she seemed not to be absorbing much of what she read, not understanding most of it even when she reread many pages two or three times in a row.

She would then return to the painter's with the anxiety of a student who was afraid of being quizzed, because the painter would begin by asking her whether she had liked a certain book, and she knew that he wanted to hear not merely a positive answer but also that for him the book was the point of departure for a conversation, and that there were observations in the book on a subject he wanted to be in alliance with her about, as if it were a matter of a truth they defended in common. Mama knew all that, but it didn't make her understand any more of what was in the book, or what in the book was so important. And so, like a cunning pupil, she came up with an excuse: she complained that she had to read the books in secret to avoid being discovered, and she therefore couldn't concentrate on them as well as she wanted to.

The painter accepted this excuse, but he found an ingenious way out: at the next lesson he spoke to Jaromil about the currents of modern art and gave him several books to read, which the boy gladly accepted. When Mama first saw these books on her son's desk and realized that this contraband literature was actually intended for her she was frightened. Until then she alone had taken on the entire burden of her adventure, but now her son (that image of purity) had become an unwitting emissary of adulterous love. But there was nothing to be done, the books were on Jaromil's desk and Mama had no choice but to leaf through them in the guise of understandable maternal concern.

One day she dared to say to the painter that the poems he had lent her seemed needlessly obscure and confused. She regretted uttering these words the moment after she said them, for the painter considered the slightest divergence from his opinions as a betrayal. Mama quickly tried to erase her blunder. As the painter, his brow wrathful, turned away toward his canvas, she rapidly slipped off her blouse and brassiere. She had pretty breasts and knew it; now she proudly displayed them (but not without a remnant of shyness) as she crossed the studio, and then, half hidden by the canvas on the easel, she planted herself in front of the painter. He continued sullenly dabbing at the canvas, several times giving her a baleful look. Then she tore the brush from the painter's hand, put it between her teeth, said a word to him she had never said to anyone, a vulgar, obscene word, repeating it in an undertone several times in a row until she saw that the painter's anger had turned into erotic desire.

No, she had never before behaved this way, and she was nervous and strained; but she had realized from the beginning of their intimacy that the painter demanded from her free and astonishing types of erotic expression, that he wanted her to feel entirely free with him, released from everything, from all convention, from all shame, from all inhibition; he liked to say to her: "I don't want anything except that you give me your freedom, the totality of your freedom!" and he wanted at every moment to be convinced of this freedom. Mama had more or less come to understand that such uninhibited behavior was probably something beautiful, but she was all the more afraid that she would never be capable of it. And the harder she tried to know her freedom, the more this freedom became an arduous task, an obligation, something she had to prepare for at home (to consider what word, what desire, what gesture she was going to surprise the painter with to show him her spontaneity), so that she sagged under the imperative of freedom as if under a heavy burden.

"The worst thing isn't that the world isn't free, but that people have unlearned their freedom," the painter told her, and this remark seemed deliberately directed at her belonging so completely to that old world that the painter maintained had to be totally rejected. "If we can't change the world, let's at least change our own lives and live them freely," he said. "If every life is unique, let's draw the conclusion; let's reject everything that isn't new." And then, quoting Rimbaud: "It is necessary to be absolutely modern," and she listened to him religiously, full of trust in his words and full of mistrust toward herself.

It occurred to her that the love the painter felt for her could only be the result of a misunderstanding, and she sometimes asked him why exactly he loved her. He would answer that he loved her as a prizefighter loves a fragile forget-me-not, as a singer loves silence, as an outlaw loves a village schoolteacher; he would tell her that he loved her as a butcher loves the timorous eyes of a heifer or lightning the idyll of rooftops; he would tell her that he loved her as a beloved woman stolen away from a stupid habitat.

She listened to him enraptured and went to see him whenever she could spare a moment. She felt like a tourist who has before her the most beautiful landscapes but is too worn out to perceive their beauty; she gained no joy from her love, but she knew that it was grand and beautiful and that she must not lose it.

And Jaromil? He was proud that the painter lent him books from his library (the painter had told him more than once that he had never lent anyone books, that Jaromil was the only one with that privilege), and since he had a lot of free time, he dreamily lingered over their pages. At that time, modern art had not yet become the property of the bourgeois multitude, retaining the spellbinding allure of a sect, that allure so easily understood by a child still at an age when one dreams of the romance of clans and brotherhoods. Jaromil felt that allure deeply, and he read the books in a way entirely different from that of Mama, who read them from A to Z like textbooks on which she would be examined. Jaromil, who ran no risk of being examined, never really read the painter's books; he scanned them, strolled through them, leafed through them, lingered over a page, and stopped at one line of verse or another, unconcerned whether or not the poem as a whole had something to say to him. A single line of verse or a single paragraph of prose was enough to make him happy, not only because of their beauty but above all because they provided entry into the realm of the elect who knew how to perceive what for others remained hidden.

Mama knew that her son was not content to be a mere emissary and that he read with interest the books that were only apparently meant for him; she thus began to discuss with him what they had both read, and she asked him questions she didn't dare ask the painter. She then was terrified to learn that her son defended the borrowed books with more implacable stubbornness than did the painter.