Chapter 3 Immortal (3)

7 Agnes sat in an armchair and waited for Paul.Their next program is what the French call a diner en ville ②.She hadn't eaten all day and felt a little tired, so she casually flipped through a thick magazine and took a rest.She didn't have the energy to read the article, she just browsed through the pictures, the pages and pages of color photos.The magazine's center page reported a tragedy at an air show.A plane caught fire and crashed into the auditorium.The photos are huge, each taking up an entire page.The people in the photos are terrified, fleeing in all directions, with burnt clothes, burnt skin, and flames rising from the human body; Agnes can't help staring at these photos, imagining what kind of ecstasy the photographer would have, the mediocre landscape of everyday life Depressed him, but suddenly, he saw his luck descending from the sky with this fire-breathing plane!

Turning over a few more pages, she saw naked people on the naked beach, and a headline read: These photos cannot be included in the album of Buckingham Palace!There's a short text below, and it's final sentence reads "...the photographer is there. With her horrible eyes and ears, the princess once again finds herself center stage." The photographer is there.In fact, photographers are everywhere.The photographer hides in the bushes, the photographer disguises himself as a lame beggar.Peeping eyes everywhere.There are shots everywhere. Aronis recalls a puzzling thought as a child that God could see her and was watching her all the time, and perhaps, this was the first time she experienced a thrill, a feeling when people feel Surveillance, you can't hide from it, even in the most secret moments. The surveillance eyes give you the strange joy you feel when you are in trouble.Her mother believed it, telling her, "God is watching you," when she was told not to lie, to bite her nails, or to pick her nose.But this had another effect: it was precisely at these moments, when she indulged in these bad habits, or touched the privacy of her flesh, that Agnes remembered God and did His will.

She thought of the queen's sister and realized that the eyes of God are replaced by video cameras today.The prying eye of one has been replaced by the eye of many, and life has become one gigantic carnival in which everyone takes part.Everyone can see a British princess celebrating her birthday naked on a subtropical beach.On the surface, the camera seems to only love celebrities, but when a jet plane crashes next to you and your shirt catches fire, then in an instant you are also named Yang Tiantian, and you are pulled into this carnival of universal celebration. Carnival does not give people joy, it only sends a solemn warning to everyone that there is nowhere to hide, everyone is under the control of others.

Once, Alonis was dating a man in the foyer of a big hotel. She was about to kiss him when a guy with a mustache under his chin appeared in front of him. He was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. , with five bags on his neck and shoulders.He bowed his waist, squinted his eyes and looked at the camera in his hand.She hastily waved her hands to cover her face, but the man laughed loudly, uttering a dubious English sentence; he jumped back a few times like a flea, and clicked the shutter.It was an unintentional episode: an annual academic meeting was being held in the hotel, and they hired a photographer to take pictures, so that scholars from all over the world could order their own pictures as souvenirs.But Agnes couldn't stand the fact that somewhere in the world there was some document proving that she had met the man there; so she went to the restaurant the next day and bought all her pictures (where she stood Beside the man, stretching out an arm to cover her face), she also asked about the whereabouts of the negatives, but the negatives had been deposited in the photography agency and could not be retrieved.Although it poses no real danger to her, she can't shake the anxiety in her heart, because this second hand of her life does not disappear into nothingness like other minutes, but is pulled out of it. The progress of time, if something bad happens in the future, it will be awakened, and it will act like a dead body that has not been buried.

She changed a magazine.This book focuses on politics and culture, and there are neither tragedies, disasters, naked beaches or princesses in it.Magazines are full of faces, nothing but faces.Even for the book reviews published at the back of the book, each article is accompanied by a photo of the author being reviewed.Many writers are little known, and photographs can be useful information about them, but why are there five photographs of the President of the Republic?The shape of his jaw and nose are familiar to everyone.Even the editorial has a small photo of the author at the top of the article, apparently in the same place every week.Articles on astronomy were accompanied by blown-up photographs of smiling astronomers, and even advertisements—of typewriters, furniture, carrots—had human faces, and countless human faces.She turned it over again, from the first page to the last.She found that ninety-two of them were photos of a single face; forty-one were a face with something else added; In this photo, the person is in a lesser position or disappears completely.Added together, there are a total of 223 faces in this magazine.

Paul returns home and Agnes tells him the number. "Yeah," he said, "the more indifferent people are to politics, to other people's interests, the more obsessed they are with their own faces. It's the individualism of our time." "Individualism? What does it have to do with a camera taking a picture of you when you're in extreme pain? On the contrary, it means that the individual ceases to be his own and becomes someone else's property. You know , I remember my childhood: Back then, if you wanted to take someone’s picture, you had to ask permission. Even when I was a kid, adults would ask me: Girl, can we take a picture of you? At some point, they were no longer different. The power of the camera overwhelmed all other powers, and that changed everything, everything."

She opened the magazine again and said: "If you put two pictures of different faces together, your eyes can immediately feel the difference between them. But if you put two hundred and twenty faces together, you Suddenly it feels like these are many variations of the same face, and there was no such thing as an individual at all." "Agnes," Paul said, suddenly serious, "you have a face like no one else." Agnes didn't notice the seriousness in Paul's tone, so Wool smiled. "Whoever smiles at you, I mean it. If you love a man, and you love his face, his face is different from anyone else's."

"Yes, you know me because of my face, you know me as a face, and you will never know me any other way. Therefore, it will never occur to you that my face may not be my own .” Paul answered patiently like an old doctor: "Why do you think your face is not you? And who is behind your face?" "Imagine a world without mirrors. You dream of seeing your face and imagine it as your inner appearance. One day, when you were forty, someone put a mirror in front of you for the first time, Think how frightened you will be! You will see a stranger's face, and you will understand clearly what was previously incomprehensible: your face is not you."

"Agnes," Paul said, rising from the armchair, and he leaned so close that she saw love in his eyes, his mother in his features.He was like her, just as his mother was likely to be like her father, who would be like someone else.When Agnes meets Paul's mother for the first time, she finds her resemblance to him uncomfortable.Later, when Paul and Agnes made love, some resentment brought back the resemblance to her, and for a few moments it seemed to her that an old woman was pressing on top of her, her face distorted by lust.But Paul had long forgotten that he was like his mother, and he firmly believed that it was his own face, not someone else's.

"Our names, too, are purely coincidental," she went on. "We don't know when ours came into being, or how some distant ancestor got it. We don't understand our names at all, we don't know Its history, but we use it with such fidelity, we become one with it, we love it, it's absurd that we should be so proud of it, as if it was something we came up with. The face is the same as the name. It must have happened towards the end of my childhood that I looked in the mirror for so long that I finally believed that what I saw was really me. My memory of this period is hazy, but I You know, finding yourself is intoxicating. But when you stand in front of the mirror, you ask yourself: Is this me? Why? Why should I identify with this? What does this face have to do with me? That's when everything will fall apart. Everything will fall apart."

"What's going to collapse? What's the matter with you, Agnes? What's the matter with you lately?" She glanced at him, bowed her head in silence.He and his mother couldn't be more alike.And it's getting more and more like that.She looks more and more like that old woman. He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up.She looked at him, and only then did he realize that her eyes were full of tears. He hugged her tightly.She knew he loved her, but this suddenly made her sad.She was sad that he loved her so much, she wanted to cry. "We have to get dressed and go," he said.She slowly got out of his arms and ran to the bathroom. ②French: go out for dinner. 8 When I write about Agnes, I try to imagine her.I had her sit on a wooden bench in the sauna, wander around Paris, read magazines, talk to my husband, but the gesture of a woman waving to the lifeguard by the swimming pool that produced it all seemed to be forgotten.Would Agnes still wave to others in this gesture?Won't.It's a bit odd, but I'm sure she hasn't been like this for years.A long time ago, when she was young, she must have been like this, and she waved like this all the time. At that time, she lived in a small town in Switzerland, surrounded by mountains, whose outlines could be seen in the distance.When she was sixteen, she went to the movies with a friend from school.As soon as the lights dimmed, he took her hand.After a while, the palms of both of them were a little sticky, but the boy didn't dare to let go. He mustered up the courage to hold his hands. Once he let go, it meant that he admitted that he was nervous and sweating, and that he felt ashamed.So they sat holding hands for an hour and a half, and they didn't let go until the lights came back on. To prolong the appointment, he led her through the streets of the old city and up the hill to an old monastery full of tourists.He must have planned it, for he quickly led her down a secluded passage for the simple reason that he wanted her to see a painting.They walked to the end of the passage, there was no painting at all, only a dark brown door with the word toilet written on it.The boy must have missed the sign before, so he stopped.She knew that he was not interested in painting at all, he just wanted to find a secluded place to kiss her.This poor thing found a dirty corner next to the toilet!She chuckled, and to show that she wasn't laughing at him, she pointed her finger.He laughed too, but suddenly he realized that it was all over, that he couldn't hug and kiss her with those two words in the background (besides it was their first kiss, a kiss they would never forget).He had no choice but to turn back, and he was bitter that he had given up on his original intention. They walked in silence, and Agnes was furious: why didn't he just kiss her in the middle of the street?Why did he insist on taking her along a remote passage to a toilet, to this place where generation after generation of old, ugly, smelly monks relieved their deer?His embarrassment flattered her, because it was a sign of his love-disturbed madness; but his embarrassment annoyed her the more, because it just proved his childishness; She is only interested in boys who are bigger than herself.She did reject him in her heart, but she knew that he loved her very much. Perhaps because of this reason, a sense of justice drove her to give him a hand.Give him a little support in his love story, and help him get rid of his childishness and embarrassment.She secretly made up her mind that if he didn't have enough courage, then she would take the initiative. He accompanied her home.She made up her mind that when they got to the door she would put her arms around him and kiss him, which would surprise him and make him dumbfounded.But at the last moment she lost the will to do so, for his face was no longer mournful, but impassable, even hostile.In the end, they just shook hands, and she walked down the garden path to the door of the house.She felt that the boy was watching her back, motionless.Again she felt sorry for him; she felt it was a sisterly pity.But at this moment, she did something she hadn't expected in advance: while walking forward, she turned her head and smiled at him, and waved her right hand in the air, so light and elegant, as if throwing a Only five colored balls. The moment when Agnes raised her hand suddenly without any preparation, it was really indescribably wonderful. In an instant, for the first time in her life, she discovered that the movements of her body and arms were so perfect that they could be called masterpieces of art. how can that be possible? At that time, a woman in her forties often visited her father.She is the secretary of the department.She sent her homework to her father for correction, and took the corrected ones back home.Although these visits had no particular significance, the atmosphere would become mysteriously tense (Mother always became silent), which surprised Agnes.Whenever she was gone, Agnes would run to the window and peek in.Once, as the secretary walked toward the gate (here, some days later, Agnes came in the opposite direction, with the gaze of the unfortunate male classmate behind her), she turned, smiled, and unexpectedly Raise your arms, so light and elegant.It was a moment never to be forgotten: the sun shone golden on the gravel path, and the jasmine bushes on either side of the gate were in full bloom.This upward swaying movement seems to indicate the direction of take-off for this golden land, and this jasmine bush has obviously spread its wings.The father was not there, but the woman's gestures showed that he was standing at the door of the villa watching her back. The gesture was so sudden and graceful that it entered Agnes's memory like a bolt of lightning; it transported her into the depths of time and space, and aroused in a sixteen-year-old girl a vague longing.At the moment when she suddenly felt that she had something very important to tell her classmates, but she couldn't express it, this gesture was revived and said what she couldn't say for her. I don't know how long she's been using this gesture (or rather, how long she's been using it), but I'm sure she's been using it until the day she finds her sister who's eight years her junior waving goodbye to her girlfriend .Her younger sister had admired her and imitated her since she was a child; but when she saw her sister use her gestures, she felt a little uncomfortable: adult gestures were not suitable for an eleven-year-old.More importantly, she realized that gestures are available to everyone, not hers.When she waved her arms, she was stealing or forging herself.Since then, she began to deliberately avoid the gesture (once the gesture has adapted to us, it is not easy to change the habit), and developed an aversion to the gesture.She used only the most important ones (nodding yes, shaking her head no, pointing out things to her partner that he didn't see), and gestures that she didn't think were her own.And so the bewitching gestures of my father's secretary as she strolled down the golden path (I was fascinated when I saw the woman in the bathing suit bid farewell to the lifeguard) completely dormant in her. But one day, it woke up.That was before her mother died, and she stayed home with her sick father for two weeks.On the last day she was ready to say goodbye to her father, knowing that they would not see each other again for a long time.My mother was not at home that day, and my father wanted to send her to the car, which was parked on the street.She insisted not to let him send him out of the house, and walked alone along the golden gravel road, passed the flower bed, and walked to the gate.She only felt that her throat was congested, and she desperately wanted to say something to her father that was the most beautiful and beyond words, but it turned out.She herself didn't know why this happened, she turned her head suddenly, smiled, and waved her arms in the air, so light and elegant, as if telling him that the future would be long and they would have many opportunities to meet. A woman in her forties was standing in the same place twenty-five years ago, waving at her father in the same way.It made her uneasy.It puzzled her again.It is as if two distant moments suddenly meet at a certain second, two very different women suddenly overlap at a certain gesture.A thought flashed through her mind that these two women might be the only women he ever loved in his life.