The unbearable lightness of being (10 page)

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Near the mirror
stood a wig stand with an old black bowler hat on it. She bent over, picked up
the hat, and put it on her head. The image in the mirror was instantaneously
transformed: suddenly it was a woman in her undergarments, a beautiful,
distant, indifferent woman with a terribly out-of-place bowler hat on her head,
holding the hand of a man in a gray suit and a tie.

Again he had to smile at how poorly
he understood his mistress. When she took her clothes off, it wasn't so much
erotic provocation as an odd little caper, a happening a deux. His smile beamed
understanding and consent.

He waited for his mistress to
respond in kind, but she did not. Without letting go of his hand, she stood
staring into the mirror, first at herself, then at him.

The time for the happening had come
and gone. Franz was beginning to feel that the caper (which, in and of itself,
he was happy to think of as charming) had dragged on too long. So he gently
took the brim of the bowler hat between two fingers, lifted it off Sabina's
head with a smile, and laid it back on the wig stand. It was as though he were
erasing the mustache a naughty child had drawn on a picture of the Virgin Mary.

For several more seconds she
remained motionless, staring at herself in the mirror. Then Franz covered her
with tender kisses and asked her once more to go with him in ten days to
Palermo. This time she said yes unquestioningly, and he left.

He was in an excellent mood again.
Geneva, which he had cursed all his life as the metropolis of boredom, now
seemed beautiful and full of adventure. Outside in the street, he looked back
up at the studio's broad window. It was late spring and hot. All the windows
were shaded with striped awnings. Franz walked to the park. At its far end, the
golden cupolas of the Orthodox church rose up like two gilded cannonballs kept
from imminent collapse and suspended in the air by some invisible Power.
Everything was beautiful. Then he went down to the

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embankment and took the public transport boat
to the north bank of the lake, where he lived.

Sabina
was now by herself. She went back to the mirror, still in her underwear. She
put the bowler hat back on her head and had a long look at herself. She was
amazed at the number of years she had spent pursuing one lost moment.

Once, during a visit to her studio
many years before, the bowler hat had caught Tomas's fancy. He had set it on
his head and looked at himself in the large mirror which, as in the Geneva
studio, leaned against the wall. He wanted to see what he would have looked
like as a nineteenth-century mayor. When Sabina started undressing, he put the
hat on her head. There they stood in front of the mirror (they always stood in
front of the mirror while she undressed), watching themselves. She stripped to
her underwear, but still had the hat on her head. And all at once she realized
they were both excited by what they saw in the mirror.

What could have excited them so? A
moment before, the hat on her head had seemed nothing but a joke. Was excitement
really a mere step away from laughter?

Yes. When they looked at each other
in the mirror that time, all she saw for the first few seconds was a comic
situation. But suddenly the comic became veiled by excitement: the bowler hat
no longer signified a joke; it signified violence; violence against Sabina,
against her dignity as a woman. She saw

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her
bare legs and thin panties with her pubic triangle showing through. The
lingerie enhanced the charm of her femininity, while the hard masculine hat
denied it, violated and ridiculed it. The fact that Tomas stood beside her
fully dressed meant that the essence of what they both saw was far from good
clean fun (if it had been fun he was after, he, too, would have had to strip
and don a bowler hat); it was humiliation. But instead of spurning it, she
proudly, provocatively played it for all it was worth, as if submitting of her
own will to public rape; and suddenly, unable to wait any longer, she pulled
Tomas down to the floor. The bowler hat rolled under the table, and they began
thrashing about on the rug at the foot of the mirror.

But
let us return to the bowler hat:

First, it was a
vague reminder of a forgotten grandfather, the mayor of a small Bohemian town
during the nineteenth century.

Second, it was a
memento of her father. After the funeral her brother appropriated all their
parents' property, and she, refusing out of sovereign contempt to fight for her
rights, announced sarcastically that she was taking the bowler hat as her sole
inheritance.

Third,
it was a prop for her love games with Tomas.

Fourth, it was a
sign of her originality, which she consciously cultivated. She could not take
much with her when she emigrated, and taking this bulky, impractical thing
meant giving
up
other, more
practical ones.

Fifth, now that
she was abroad, the hat was a sentimental object. When she went to visit Tomas
in Zurich, she took it along and had it on her head when he opened the
hotel-room door. But then something she had not reckoned with happened: the
hat, no longer jaunty or sexy, turned into a monument to time past. They were
both touched. They made love as they never had before. This was no occasion for
obscene

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games.
For this meeting was not a continuation of their erotic rendezvous, each of
which had been an opportunity to think up some new little vice; it was a
recapitulation of time, a hymn to their common past, a sentimental summary of
an unsentimental story that was disappearing in the distance.

The bowler hat was a motif in the
musical composition that was Sabina's life. It returned again and again, each
time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler
hat like water through a riverbed. I might call it Heraclitus' ("You can't
step twice into the same river") riverbed: the bowler hat was a bed
through which each time Sabina saw another river flow, another
semantic
river:
each time the same object would give rise to a new meaning, though
all former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echoes)
together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each time
enriching the harmony. The reason why Tomas and Sabina were touched by the
sight of the bowler hat in a Zurich hotel and made love almost in tears was
that its black presence was not merely a reminder of their love games but also
a memento of Sabina's father and of her grandfather, who lived in a century
without airplanes and cars.

Now, perhaps, we are in a better
position to understand the abyss separating Sabina and Franz: he listened
eagerly to the story of her life and she was equally eager to hear the story of
his, but although they had a clear understanding of the logical meaning of the
words they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river
flowing through them.

And so when she put on the bowler
hat in his presence, Franz felt uncomfortable, as if someone had spoken to him
in a language he did not know. It was neither obscene nor sentimental, merely
an incomprehensible gesture. What made him feel uncomfortable was its very lack
of meaning.

While people are fairly young and
the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can
go about

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writing
it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif
of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and
Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif,
every object, every word means something different to each of them.

If I were to
make a record of all Sabina and Franz's conversations, I could compile a long
lexicon of their misunderstandings. Let us be content, instead, with a short
dictionary.

A Short
Dictionary of Misunderstood Words

WOMAN

Being
a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot
consider either our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had to
assume the correct attitude to her unchosen fate. To rebel against being born a
woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.

During one of
their first times together, Franz announced to her, in an oddly emphatic way,
"Sabina, you are a
woman."
She could not understand why he
accentuated the obvious with the solemnity of a Columbus who has just sighted
land. Not until later did she understand that the word "woman," on
which he had placed such uncommon emphasis, did not, in his eyes, signify one
of the two human sexes; it represented a
value.
Not every woman was
worthy of being called a woman.

But if Sabina
was, in Franz's eyes, a
woman,
then what was his wife, Marie-Claude?
More than twenty years earlier, several months after Franz met Marie-Claude,
she had threatened to

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take
her life if he abandoned her. Franz was bewitched by the threat. He was not
particularly fond of Marie-Claude, but he was very much taken with her love. He
felt himself unworthy of so great a love, and felt he owed her a low bow.

He bowed so low that he married
her. And even though Marie-Claude never recaptured the emotional intensity that
accompanied her suicide threat, in his heart he kept its memory alive with the
thought that he must never hurt her and always respect the woman in her.

It is an interesting formulation.
Not "respect Marie-Claude," but "respect the woman in
Marie-Claude."

But if Marie-Claude is herself a
woman, then who is that other woman hiding in her, the one he must always
respect? The Platonic ideal of a woman, perhaps?

No. His mother. It never would have
occurred to him to say he respected the woman in his mother. He worshipped his
mother and not some woman inside her. His mother and the Platonic ideal of
womanhood were one and the same.

When he was twelve, she suddenly
found herself alone, abandoned by Franz's father. The boy suspected something
serious had happened, but his mother muted the drama with mild, insipid words
so as not to upset him. The day his father left, Franz and his mother went into
town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that her shoes did not
match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out her mistake, but was afraid
he would hurt her. So during the two hours they spent walking through the city
together he kept his eyes fixed on her feet. It was then he had his first
inkling of what it means to suffer.

FIDELITY AND
BETRAYAL

He
loved her from the time he was a child until the time he accompanied her to the
cemetery; he loved her in his memories

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as
well. That is what made him feel that fidelity deserved pride of place among
the virtues: fidelity gave a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into
thousands of split-second impressions.

Franz often spoke about his mother
to Sabina, perhaps even with a certain unconscious ulterior motive: he assumed
that Sabina would be charmed by his ability to be faithful, that it would win
her over.

What he did not know was that
Sabina was charmed more by betrayal than by fidelity. The word
"fidelity" reminded her of her father, a small-town puritan, who
spent his Sundays painting away at canvases of woodland sunsets and roses in
vases. Thanks to him, she started drawing as a child. When she was fourteen,
she fell in love with a boy her age. Her father was so frightened that he would
not let her out of the house by herself for a year. One day, he showed her some
Picasso reproductions and made fun of them. If she couldn't love her fourteen-year-old
schoolboy, she could at least love cubism. After completing school, she went
off to Prague with the euphoric feeling that now at last she could betray her
home.

Betrayal. From tender youth we are
told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense
imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means
breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more
magnificent than going off into the unknown.

Though a student at the Academy of
Fine Arts, she was not allowed to paint like Picasso. It was the period when
so-called socialist realism was prescribed and the school manufactured
Portraits of Communist statesmen. Her longing to betray her rather remained
unsatisfied: Communism was merely another rather, a father equally strict and
limited, a father who forbade her love (the times were puritanical) and
Picasso, too. And if

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she
married a second-rate actor, it was only because he had a reputation for being
eccentric and was unacceptable to both fathers.

Then her mother died. The day
following her return to Prague from the funeral, she received a telegram saying
that her father had taken his life out of grief.

Suddenly she felt pangs of
conscience: Was it really so terrible that her father had painted vases filled
with roses and hated Picasso? Was it really so reprehensible that he was afraid
of his fourteen-year-old daughter's coming home pregnant? Was it really so
laughable that he could not go on living without his wife?

And again she felt a longing to
betray: betray her own betrayal. She announced to her husband (whom she now considered
a difficult drunk rather than an eccentric) that she was leaving him.

But if we betray B., for whom we
betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A. The life
of a divorcee-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents
she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain
reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away
from the point of our original betrayal.

music

For
Franz music was the art that comes closest to Dionysian beauty in the sense of
intoxication. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can
help getting drunk on Beethoven's Ninth, Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and
Percussion, or the Beatles' White Album? Franz made no distinction between
"classical" music and "pop." He found the distinction
old-fashioned and hypocritical. He loved rock as much as Mozart.

He
considered music a liberating force: it liberated him