Chapter 8 Chapter Three The Poet's Self-blasphemy (1) (2)

One day, after class, the classmates gathered in front of the classroom, and Jaromil felt that his time had come; he walked unobtrusively towards the girl who was sitting alone at the table; Often eye-eyed; now he sat down beside her.Seeing the two of them huddled together, those noisy classmates deliberately played a prank; they whispered in whispers, giggled a little, quietly walked out of the classroom, and locked the door. As long as there were other classmates around, Jaromil felt unobtrusive and at ease, but as soon as he found himself alone with the girl in the empty classroom, he felt as if he were sitting on a brightly lit stage.Attempting to disguise his flusteredness with humorous talk (now that he has learned not to rely entirely on prepared anecdotes), he said that the behavior of his classmates proved the failure of their plans: yes. Bad for the pranksters, who are kept out and their curiosity unsatisfied, but good for the supposed victim, who are left alone together as they wish .The girl agreed and said they should make the most of the situation.A kiss hangs in the air.He just needs to get closer.But he seemed to feel that the journey to her lips was long and difficult.He talked and talked, without kissing her.

The bell rang, which meant that the teacher was coming back, and ordered the group of students gathered outside to open the door.The ringing of the bell awakened the pair inside.The best way to get revenge on your classmates, Jaromil says, is to make them jealous.He touched the girl's lips with his fingertips (where did he have the courage?) and said with a smile that a kiss on such beautifully painted lips would definitely leave an indelible mark on his face.They didn't kiss each other, she agreed; it was a pity.The teacher's angry voice was already audible in the hallway. Jaromil said it would be too bad if teachers and classmates couldn't see the kiss marks on his face.He tried to get closer again, but her lips seemed as far away as the Eiffel Mountains again.

"Come on, let's really make them jealous".said the girl.She took out lipstick and a handkerchief from her schoolbag, and dabbed some bright red on Jaromil's face. The door opened, and the students in the class rushed in, with the angry teacher at the front.Jaromil and the girl stood up suddenly, as well-behaved students should stand up when their teacher comes in.They stood alone in the middle of rows of empty seats, facing a large audience, their eyes fixed on the beautiful red spot on Jaromil's face.He is happy and proud. Maman was courted by a colleague in Maman's office, who was married, in an attempt to persuade Maman to invite him to her house.

She was anxious to know what attitude Jaromil would take towards her sexual freedom.She told him carefully and obliquely about widows who had lost their men in the war, and about the difficulties they had in starting a new life. "What do you mean, new life?" he whispered. "You mean life with another man?" "Oh, of course, that's also an aspect. Life has to go on, Jaromil, life has its needs..." A woman's fidelity to a dead hero is one of the most sacred words in Jaromil's heart.It can prove that the absolute power of love is not only imagined by poets, but has real value worth living for.

"How can a woman who has experienced a great love indulge in bedtime with another man?" he scolded the unfaithful widows. "How can they allow themselves to touch other men when they remember their husbands who were tortured and killed? How can they torture their husbands in the grave and kill him again?" The past is wrapped in colorful moire silk.Maman politely rejects her likable colleague, and once again her entire past takes on a completely different hue. In fact she had not turned her back on the painter for her husband; it was for Jaromil.She always wanted to maintain a decent home for her son!If her nudity disturbed her to this day, it was because Jaromil had damaged her belly forever.Because of her insistence on bringing Jaromil into this world, she even lost her husband's love.

It was from the very beginning that he took everything from her! Once (by this time he had experienced many kisses) he was walking along a deserted path in Sturmwick Park with a girl he had met from a dance class.The pauses in their conversation became longer and longer, until at last the only sound they heard was their own footsteps, their common footsteps, which made them aware of something they had dared not look at before: their Constantly dating.And if they're dating, they must like each other.The sound of their footsteps confirmed this idea, and their pace became slower and slower, until at last the girl suddenly rested her head on Jaromil's shoulder.

It was a very beautiful moment, but before Jaromil had time to savor its charm, he felt himself getting excited in a way that anyone could easily understand.He tried to control his body in order to end this shameful display immediately, but the more he tried the less successful he was.He was terrified at the thought that the girl's eyes might move to his lower body and find out the signs of his body.He tried to draw her attention by talking about clouds and birds in the treetops. The walk was blissful (no woman had ever laid her head on his shoulder before, a gesture he regarded as a promise for life and death) but at the same time, the outing had made him utterly ashamed.He feared his body would repeat the painful indiscretion.After some deliberation, he retrieved a long, wide strap from Mama's underwear closet and arranged it under his trousers for his next date, until he was sure his excited signaling mechanism would stay tethered. on his lap.

We have selected this passage from among many episodes in order to illustrate that the culmination of happiness that Jaromil has experienced so far has been nothing more than resting a girl's head on his shoulder. The girl's head meant more to him than the girl's body.He doesn't know much about a woman's body (what do beautiful thighs look like? How do you judge a buttock?), but he is very confident in judging a face. In his eyes, a face can judge a woman's cuteness or not. We do not want to say that Jaromil is not interested in the beauty of the body.But the thought of the girl naked made him dizzy.Let's point out this subtle difference:

He does not yearn for the girl's naked body; he yearns for the girl's face illuminated by it. He didn't want the girl's body; he wanted the face of a girl who would give herself to him as proof of her love. The body was beyond the reach of his experience, and it was for this reason that it was the subject of countless poems. How many times did the word "uterus" appear in his poetry from that period?But, through the magic of poetry (the magic of the inexperienced), Jaromil transforms the organs of copulation and reproduction into a non-existent idea in a dream. In one poem, he writes that there is a ticking clock in the center of the girl's body.

In another poem, he imagines that the girl's genitals are invisible. Then he became obsessed with the image of a ring, seeing himself as a child's marbles falling through a hole until finally it was him falling through her body. In another poem, the girl's legs become two converging rivers; at their confluence, he imagines a mysterious mountain, which he calls after its biblical-sounding name, Mount Halab. . Another poem deals with the long excursions of a cyclist (the word "bicycle" to him is as beautiful as a sunset) who wearily pedals through a landscape.The landscape is the body of a girl, and the two bales of hay on which he longs to rest are her breasts.

It's all so ecstatic, this travel in a woman, an invisible, unrecognizable, unreal body, without blemish, defect or disease, a body that's utterly singular -- an idyllic Like a playground! The uterus and breasts are wonderfully written with the tone of a fairy tale told to children.Yes, Jaromil lives in the land of frailty, the land of artificial childhood.We say "artificial" because real childhood is by no means a paradise, nor is it particularly effeminate. When life suddenly kicks a man and pushes him towards the threshold of adulthood, he feels vulnerable.All the goodness of childhood dawned on him with disquieting apprehension.And as a child, he never realized it. Weak and afraid of maturity. It is an attempt to create a small artificial space where it is accepted that we should treat other people as children. Weakness is also afraid of carnal love, which tries to take love out of the adult realm (where love is obligated, unreliable. Full of duty and carnality), and sees woman as a child. Her tongue is a joyous beating heart, says one line of his poem.To him, her tongue, her little finger, her breasts, her navel were separate beings speaking with inaudible voices.In his view, the girl's body contained thousands of such beings, and to love this body meant to listen to the multitude of beings, to hear her breasts whisper in code. She tortured herself with memories.But at last, as she contemplated the past, she glimpsed the paradise in which she had lived with the baby Jaromil, and she changed her mind.No, in fact Jaromil didn't take everything from her; on the contrary, he gave her more than anyone else.many.He gave her a life untainted by lies.No Jew from a concentration camp can dismiss this happiness as hypocrisy and emptiness.Yes.This piece of heaven was her only reality. And so the past (like a kaleidoscope of ever-changing patterns) looks different again: Jaromil never takes anything of value from her, he just pulls back the golden curtain to reveal lies and hypocrisy.Even before he was born, he helped her discover that her husband didn't love her.Thirteen years later, he rescued her again from a wild adventure that only brought her new sorrows. She often said to herself that her childhood bond with Jaromil was a guarantee and a sacred contract between them.However, she felt more and more that her son was breaking this contract.When she talked to him, she found that he was hardly listening, his mind full of thoughts he would not share with her.She learned that he was ashamed to tell her his little secrets, those secrets of body and mind, that he was hiding himself behind her impenetrable mask. She is in pain, she is angry.That sacred pact they had made in his infancy—didn't it guarantee that he would always trust her and confide in her without shame? She longed to regain the authenticity they had enjoyed in their life together.As she had done when he was a child, she would tell him what to wear every morning, and by choosing shorts and undershirts for him, she could symbolically be by his side all day long.When she sensed that Jaromil was unhappy about it, she retaliated by scolding him for getting a little dirty on his underwear.She liked to punish his exasperating shyness by staying in his room while he was dressing and undressing. "Jaromil, come here, let me see what you look like!" she called to him once when the guests were present.When she noticed her son's carefully tousled hair, she exclaimed, "My God, you look so weird!" She fetched a comb and brushed his hair as she continued talking to her guest.The great poet, with his diabolical fantasies and a face like Rilke's in meditation - flushed with anger - is at Mamen's mercy.The only signs of defiance were a rigidity on his face and a cruel sneer (a sneer he had practiced for years). Maman stepped back, surveyed the effect of her barbering skills, and then turned to her guest. "Who will tell me where this boy of mine got all these grotesques?" Jaromil swore an eternity of allegiance to fundamental changes to the world. When he arrived, the debate was already in full swing.They're debating the definition of progress, and whether such a thing as progress really exists.Looking around, he saw that the young Marxist circle was composed of typical Prague secondary school students, and that one of his classmates had invited him to their meeting.The atmosphere here seemed more serious than the debates the Czech teacher led at the school, but even such rallies had their share of troublemakers.One of them held a wilted lily, sniffed it now and then, and there was so much giggling that the man with the short black hair—in whose room they were meeting— Eventually the flower had to be taken from his hand. Then Jaromil pricked up his ears, because at this moment someone declared that one cannot speak of the progress of art, and no one can say that Shakespeare is inferior to contemporary playwrights.Jaromil wanted to join the debate, but he found it difficult to speak to people he didn't know well.He was afraid that everyone would be staring at his face, which would turn red, and stare at his hands, which would make awkward gestures.But he desperately wanted to join this small circle, and he knew that he had to talk to join in. For courage he thought of the painter, that authority he had never doubted, and reminded himself that he was his friend and pupil.This cheered him up, and he finally ventured into the discussion, repeating what he had heard from the painter.What's notable this time isn't that he doesn't speak his mind, but that he doesn't even use his own voice.He himself was startled to hear the sound that came out of his mouth, like that of a painter, and it affected his hands, too, which began to imitate the painter's gesture. Progress, too, Jaromil argues, has indisputably occurred in art: modern trends embody all radical revolutions in the development of art over the millennia.Art has finally been liberated from the responsibility of propagating political and philosophical views and imitating reality, so much so that one could even say that the real history of art begins only now. At this moment, several people wanted to interrupt, but Jaromil was not willing to give up speaking.At first it was unpleasant for him to hear the painter's words and tones coming from his own mouth, but after a while he felt that this other I was a source of safety and security; it concealed him like a shield.He is no longer nervous and shy.He liked the tone of his voice, so he went on: He quoted Marx's point of view, so far, human beings have been living in the prehistoric period, and its real history only begins with the proletarian revolution, which is a leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.A similar decisive turning point in the history of art was the moment when André Breton and other Surrealist artists discovered the writing of the unconscious, revealing the hidden treasure of the human subconscious.It is very symbolic that it happened at about the same time as the Russian Socialist Revolution.The liberation of the human imagination is like liberation from economic slavery.There is also a need to leap to the realm of freedom. At this moment, the dark-haired man joined the debate.He praised Jaromil for defending the principles of progress, but doubted whether Surrealism could be so closely linked to the proletarian revolution.He stated his point of view that modern art is decadent, and that the art most in line with the era of proletarian revolution is socialist realism.Not André Breton, but Isi Volker - the founder of Czech socialist poetry - must be our model! Jaromil had heard such views before.In fact, the painter had described these views to him in a mocking tone.Jaromil now also tries to reply with a sneer that from an artistic point of view socialist realism is nothing new, but merely a reproduction of the old bourgeois "bad art".The dark-haired man retorted that the only modern art was art that would contribute to the struggle to build a new world.It can never be surrealism, because surrealism is incomprehensible to the masses. This discussion is very interesting.The dark-haired man delivered his objections convincingly, without the slightest bit of dogmatism, so the debate didn't turn into a quarrel - although Jaromil was a little carried away by being the center of attention, occasionally resorting to overly biting sarcasm Attitude.The results were inconclusive.Others spoke.The question Jaromil discussed was quickly overshadowed by others. But does it really matter whether there is progress, whether Surrealism is a bourgeois or revolutionary movement?Does it really matter who is right, him or them?What really matters to Jaromil is that he is now connected to them.He argued with them, but he had great sympathy for the group.He didn't even listen anymore, his heart was filled with happiness that he had found a group of people among whom he was no longer his mother's son, or a student in his class, but himself.It occurred to him that a man can be himself only when he is completely among others. The dark-haired man stood up, and they all realized it was time to leave, because their leader had deliberately vaguely mentioned that he had work to do, which gave him a sense that he was important.When they were gathered at the entrance of the passage and were about to leave, a girl with glasses walked up to Jaromil.We should point out that throughout the meeting Jaromil paid no attention to the girl.Anyway, she was unremarkable at all, but indescribable—not ugly, just a little pudgy.Her hair was slicked over her forehead, and she had no particular style, no make-up, and she wore a worn-out dress that barely covered her body. "What you just said was very interesting," she said to him, "and I'd love to discuss it with you again." There is a park not far from the black-haired man's apartment.They walked there, talking warmly.Jaromil learned that the girl was a college student, two years older than him (which made him proud).They walked along the circular path, and the girl's speech was well-bred, and Jaromil also spoke in a weighty way.They are eager to let each other know what they think, what they believe in, and what kind of people they are (girls focus on science; Jaromil focuses on art).They listed all the great names they admired, and the girl repeated that she was attracted by Jaromil's unconventional views.She was silent for a moment, and then called him an Iphibes; yes, she thought him like an enchanting Iphibes the moment he entered the room. Jaromil didn't know the exact meaning of the word, but it seemed good to have a special name—and a Greek name at that, which he felt had something to do with youth; it was not the one he knew from personal experience. A clumsy, humble youth, but a strong and enviable youth.Thus the female student alludes to his immaturity, but at the same time deprives this immaturity of its painful quality and makes it a virtue.When they were walking around the park for the sixth time, Jaromil made a bold move, which he had planned from the beginning, but which required courage; he took the girl's arm. "Takes the girl's arm" is not entirely accurate, but rather he "puts his hand carefully between her hip and upper arm." Nor would she have noticed, indeed, that she was so unresponsive to his movements that his hand was stuck precariously to hers like an extraneous object, a handbag or parcel which she had forgotten and was about to drop. body.But then the hand suddenly felt the arm it was clinging to aware of its presence.His legs began to feel the girl's pace gradually slowing down.He had had moments in the past when he knew something inescapable hung in the air.As usually happens, when some inevitability approaches, people speed up the inevitability, at least for a second or two (perhaps to prove that they have at least some free will).In any case, Jaromil's hand, which had been weak just now, became alive and pressed tightly on the girl's arm.At this moment, the girl stopped suddenly, raised her bespectacled face towards him, and threw her schoolbag on the ground. This gesture surprised Jaromil.In the first place, in his state of ecstasy, he was not aware of what the girl had brought.So the schoolbag is dropped in this scene like a revelation from heaven.Secondly, Jaromil realized that the girl had come directly from the university to participate in the Marxist discussion, so the bag probably contained higher academic materials and pamphlets of scholars, and he was completely intoxicated.It seemed to him that she had dropped all the sciences and humanities on the ground just to be able to hold him with her empty arms. The drop of the schoolbag was indeed dramatic, and they started kissing furiously, and the kiss went on for a long time, and finally when they were exhausted, they didn't know what to do next, and she leaned the bespectacled face towards him, she "I'm sure you think I'm like other women! But I'm telling you, I'm not like them! I'm not like them." These words seemed to contain more moving power than the dropping of the schoolbag, and Jaromil realized with amazement that he was with a woman who loved him, a woman who miraculously fell in love with him at first sight without any effort on his part.He was quick to notice (on the fringes of his consciousness, and to relive it again and again) the fact that she thought he had enough experience to cause pain to any woman who loved him. He assured her that he didn't see her like other women.She picked up her schoolbag (now Jaromil was finally able to look at it carefully: it was indeed heavy, had an impressive appearance, and was full of books), and they started walking around the park for the seventh time.When they stopped to kiss again, they suddenly found a bright light shooting them.Two police officers confronted them and demanded their ID cards. Two embarrassed lovers fumble for ID cards in their pockets.With trembling fingers, they handed their IDs to the cops, who were either trying to track down whores or just have fun on tiresome patrols.Anyway, it was a memorable event for the young couple: for the rest of the evening (Jaromil walked the girl home), they discussed prejudice, narrow worldly morals, stupid police , an older generation, outdated laws; and the plight of true love threatened by the corrupt state of the entire world. It was a beautiful day and a beautiful night, but when Jaromil finally got home, it was almost midnight, and Maman was walking anxiously from room to room. "I'm sick! Where have you been? You don't think about me at all!" Jaromil, still immersed in his extraordinary experience, answered Mamen in the same way he did in Marxist circles, imitating the painter's confident voice. Maman recognized it immediately.She heard her son speaking to her in the voice of her former lover.She saw a face that didn't belong to her, heard a voice that didn't belong to her.Her son stood before her like a symbol of double negation.She found it intolerable. "You're going to piss me off! You're going to piss me off!" she yelled hysterically, running into the next room. Jaromil was still standing there, terrified, and a deep sense of guilt spread through his body. (Oh, dear Jaromil, you will never get rid of this feeling! You are guilty, you are guilty! Whenever you leave this house, you will order you back with a look of accusation: you will be like a A dog on a long leash walks the world! Even when you go far, far; you still feel the collar on your neck! Even when you are with women, even when you lie in bed with them, A long leash will also be around your neck, and in a far, far away place, Maman's hand will grasp the end of the leash, and feel the shameful movement of your body from its shaking!) "Maman, please don't be angry. Please forgive me!" He knelt beside her bed anxiously, stroking her wet cheek. (Charles Baudelaire, you are still afraid of her at forty, your mother!) Mama took a long time to forgive him in order to feel the touch of his fingers on her face for as long as possible. (For Xavier, this never happens, because Xavier has neither mother nor father, and the absence of parents is the first prerequisite for freedom. But know that it's not a matter of losing one's parents.Her mother died when Gerald Nerval was a baby, but he lived his life under the hypnotic gaze of her beautiful eyes. Freedom does not begin when parents are abandoned or buried; freedom dies when parents are born. He who does not realize his origin is free. He who is born from an egg that falls in the woods is free. He who falls from the sky and touches the ground without a pang of gratitude is free. ) During the first week of his love affair with the college girl, Jaromil felt reborn.He heard himself described as an Iphibes, and he was told he was handsome, clever, and visionary.He found that the girl with glasses loved him and was afraid that he would leave her (she told him that after they said goodbye that night, she watched him walk briskly away, and she saw him for what he really was: a leaving, Go away, the man who disappeared...).At last he found his true likeness, the one he had been looking for so long in his mirror. For the first week, they saw each other every day.They spent three nights on long walks all over the city, one night they went to the theater (where they sat in a box, kissing, not paying attention to the performance), and two nights they went to the cinema.On the seventh day they went out for a walk again.It was bitterly cold outside, and he was wearing a light overcoat with no sweater under it (the knitted gray vest that Maman urged him to wear seemed to be only for bumpkins) and no hat (the girl once praised his tousled hair, saying His hair is as unruly as himself).Since the elastic bands of the stockings kept slipping down his calves, he wore a pair of gray socks (he ignored the incongruity between the socks and trousers, since he had not yet learned elegance). They met around seven o'clock and began walking slowly towards the outskirts of the city.Snow crunched under their feet through suburban clearings; every now and then they stopped to kiss.The submissiveness of her body made a considerable impression on him.Up to that point his relations with the girls had been a dreary climb, a slow climb from one step to the next: a long wait before the girl let him kiss her, and a long wait before the girl let him kiss her. Let him put his hands on her breasts, and when he finally manages to touch her ass, he thinks he's come a long way—after all, he never goes any further.However, this relationship was different from the beginning.The girl fell limply in his arms, defenseless and submissive, he could touch her wherever he wanted.He took it as a gesture of love, but at the same time he was embarrassed because he didn't quite know how to use this unexpected privilege. That day (the seventh), the girl told him that her parents were often away and that she would like to invite Jaromil to her house.The sudden utterance of these bewildering words was followed by a long silence; they both realized what it meant to have a tryst in a deserted house (let us recall that the young girl was in Jaromil's arms defenseless).There was a long silence between them, and then the girl said in a calm voice, "I believe that, as far as the heart is concerned, there is no compromise. Love is when you give everything to each other." Jaromil agrees very much, because he also believes that love is everything.But he didn't know what to say, so he stopped, gazed at the girl with pity (forgetting that it was night, and pity was hard to see in the dark), and began hugging and kissing her passionately. After a quarter of an hour's silence, the girl resumed her eloquence, telling him that he was the first man she had invited to her house.She said she had many boyfriends, but they were just friends.They got used to this and jokingly called her the stone girl. Jaromil was very happy to learn that he was the stone girl's first lover, but at the same time he felt stage fright.He had heard all kinds of stories about acts of love, and knew that it was generally considered quite difficult to devirtuous a girl.He found his mind wandering, and it was difficult to join the girl's conversation.He was basking in the joy and uneasiness of the promised event that would mark the true end of his life's history (it occurred to him that the idea was very similar to Marx's famous assertion of man's flight from prehistory to history). Although they didn't talk much, they took a long walk around the city.The night was getting late, and the weather was getting colder and colder. Jaromil felt the cold through his thinly dressed body.He suggested finding a place to warm up, but they were too far from the city center to see a hotel or other public place in sight.When he finally got home, he was freezing all over (he had to fight to keep his teeth from chattering towards the end of the walk).When he woke up the next morning, he had a terrible sore throat.Maman brought a thermometer and diagnosed him with a fever.