Identity, p.1
Identity, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
About the Author
Books by Milan Kundera
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
A hotel in a small town on the Normandy coast, which they found in a guidebook. Chantal got there Friday night and would spend a night alone, without Jean-Marc, who was to join her on Saturday around noon. She left a small valise in the room, went outside, and, after a short stroll through unfamiliar streets, returned to the hotel’s own dining room. At seven-thirty, the restaurant was still empty. She sat down at a table and waited for someone to notice her. At the far side of the room, near the door to the kitchen, two waitresses were deep in discussion. Since she hated to raise her voice, Chantal got up, crossed the room, and stopped beside them; but they were too absorbed by their topic: “I’m telling you, it’s ten years already. I know them. It’s terrible. And there’s not a trace. None. It was on TV.” The other one: “What could have happened to him?” “Nobody can even imagine. And that’s what’s horrible.” “A murder?” “They looked everywhere.” “A kidnapping?” “But who would do that? And why? He wasn’t a rich guy, or important. They showed them all on TV. His children, his wife. It’s heartbreaking. Do you realize?”
Then she noticed Chantal: “You know that program on TV about people who’ve disappeared? Lost to Sight, it’s called.”
“Yes,” said Chantal.
“Maybe you saw what happened to the Bourdieu family. They’re from here.”
“Yes, it’s awful,” said Chantal, unsure how to turn talk of a tragedy to the mundane issue of food.
“You want dinner,” said the other waitress finally.
“Yes.”
“I’ll get the headwaiter. Go have a seat.”
Her colleague went on: “Can you imagine, someone you love disappears and you never find out what happened to him! It could drive you insane!”
Chantal returned to her table; it took five minutes for the headwaiter to come over; she ordered a cold meal, very simple; she didn’t like to eat alone; ah, how she hated that, eating alone!
She sliced the ham on her plate and could not still the thoughts the waitresses had stirred up in her: in a world where our every move is monitored and recorded, where in department stores cameras watch you, where people constantly jostle you, where a person cannot even make love without being quizzed the next day by researchers and poll-takers (“Where do you make love?” “How many times a week?” “With or without a condom?”), how is it possible that someone could slip out of surveillance and disappear without a trace? Yes, she certainly does know that program with its terrifying title, Lost to Sight, the only program that undoes her with its genuineness, its sadness, as if an intervention from some other realm has forced television to give up all its frivolity; in grave tones, the host appeals to the audience to come forward with any evidence that could help find the missing person. At the end of the program they show pictures, one after the other, of all the Lost to Sight people discussed in previous programs; some have been unfindable for as long as eleven years.
She imagines losing Jean-Marc that way someday. Never knowing, reduced to imagining anything and everything. She could not even kill herself, because suicide would be a betrayal, a refusal to wait, a loss of patience. She would be condemned to live until the end of her days in unrelenting horror.
2
She went up to her room, fell asleep with difficulty, and woke in the middle of the night after a long dream. It was populated exclusively by figures from her past: her mother (long dead) and, mainly, her former husband (she had not seen him for years, and he looked different, as if the director of the dream had made a bad casting choice); he was there with his overbearing, energetic sister and with his new wife (Chantal had never seen her; nonetheless, in the dream, she had no doubt about her identity); at the end, he made Chantal some vague erotic propositions, and his new wife kissed her hard on the mouth and tried to slip her tongue between Chantal’s lips. Tongues licking each other had always disgusted her. In fact, that kiss was what woke her up.
Her discomfort from the dream was so extreme that she went to some effort to figure out the reason for it. What troubled her so, she thinks, is the dream’s effect of nullifying the present. For she is passionately attached to her present; nothing in the world would induce her to trade it for the past or the future. That is why she dislikes dreams: they impose an unacceptable equivalence among the various periods of the same life, a leveling contemporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced; they discredit the present by denying it its privileged status. As in that night’s dream: it obliterated a whole chunk of her life: Jean-Marc, their shared apartment, all the years they’ve spent together; in its place the past came lumbering in, people she broke off with long ago and who tried to capture her in the net of a banal sexual seduction. She felt on her mouth the wet lips of a woman (not an ugly woman—the dream’s director had been fairly demanding in his choice of actress), and the sensation was so disagreeable that in the middle of the night she went to the bathroom to gargle and wash out her mouth for a long time.
3
F. was a very old friend of Jean-Marc’s, they had known each other since high school; they had the same opinions, they got along well, and they stayed in touch until the day, several years back, when Jean-Marc suddenly and definitively turned against him and stopped seeing him. When he learned that F. was very ill in a hospital in Brussels, he had no wish to visit him, but Chantal insisted he go.
The sight of the old friend was shattering: he still remembered him as he had been in high school, a delicate boy, always perfectly turned out, endowed with a natural refinement beside which Jean-Marc felt like a rhinoceros. The subtle, effeminate features that used to make F. look younger than his age now made him look older: his face seemed grotesquely small, shriveled, wrinkled, like the mummified head of an Egyptian princess dead four thousand years; Jean-Marc looked at his arms: one was immobilized, with a needle slipped into the vein, the other was gesturing broadly to emphasize his words. In the past, looking at him gesticulate, Jean-Marc always had the impression that in relation to his little body F.’s arms were littler still, utterly minuscule, the arms of a marionette. The impression was even stronger that day because his baby gestures were so ill suited to the gravity of his talk: F. was describing the coma that had lasted several days before the doctors brought him back to life: “You know all those accounts by people who’ve survived death: the tunnel with a light at the end of it. The beauty of the beyond drawing them on. Well, I swear to you, there’s no light. And what’s worse, no unconsciousness. You know everything, you hear everything, but they—the doctors—don’t realize it, and they say everything in front of you, even things you shouldn’t hear. That you’re done for. That your brain is finished.”
He was silent for a moment. Then: “I’m not saying my mind was completely clear. I was conscious of everything but everything was slightly distorted, like in a dream. From time to time the dream would turn into a nightmare. Only, in real life, a nightmare is over soon, you start yelling and you wake up, but I couldn’t yell. And that was the worst of it: not being able to yell. Being incapable of yelling in the midst of a nightmare.”
He was silent again. Then: “I never used to be afraid of dying. Now, yes. I can’t shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare. But that’s enough. Enough. Let’s talk about something else.”
Before his arrival at the hospital, Jean-Marc had been sure that neither of them would be able to dodge the memory of their break, and that he would have to offer F. a few insincere words of reconciliation. But his fears were needless: the thought of death had made all other subjects meaningless. However much F. might want to move on to something else, he continued to talk about his suffering body. The account plunged Jean-Marc into depression but stirred no affection in him.
4
Is he really so cold, so unfeeling? One day, some years back, he learned that F. had betrayed him; ah, the term is far too romantic, certainly exaggerated. All the same, he was upset by it: at a meeting held while Jean-Marc was
F. was just finishing the report on his miseries when, after another moment of silence, his little mummified-princess face brightened: “You remember our conversations in high school?”
“Not really,” said Jean-Marc.
“I would always listen to you as my authority when you talked about girls.”
Jean-Marc tried to recall, but his memory yielded no trace of the long-ago conversations: “What could I have had to say about girls? I was a sixteen-year-old twerp.”
“I can see myself standing there in front of you,” F. went on, “saying something about girls. You remember, it always used to shock me that a beautiful body could be a secretion machine; I told you I could hardly stand to see a girl wipe her nose. And I can see you now; you stopped, you looked at me hard, and you said in an oddly experienced tone, sincere, firm: ‘Wipe her nose? For me all it takes is seeing how her eye blinks, seeing that movement of the eyelid over the cornea, and I feel a disgust I can barely control.’ You remember that?”
“No,” answered Jean-Marc.
“How could you forget? The movement of the eyelid. Such a strange idea!”
But Jean-Marc was telling the truth; he did not remember. Besides, he was not even trying to search his memory. He was thinking about something else: this is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.
“The eyelid. You really don’t remember that?”
“No,” said Jean-Marc, and then to himself, silently: so you just won’t understand that I don’t give a damn about the mirror you’re holding out to me?
Fatigue had come over F., who fell silent as if the eyelid memory had exhausted him.
“You should sleep,” said Jean-Marc, and he stood up.
As he left the hospital, he felt an irresistible yearning to be with Chantal. If he had not been so worn out he would have left on the spot. On his way to Brussels, he had imagined having an elaborate breakfast the next morning and getting on the road when he felt like it, in no rush. But after the encounter with F., he set his travel clock for five A.M.
5
Tired after a bad night, Chantal left the hotel. On her way toward the shore, she kept coming across weekend tourists. Every cluster of them presented the same pattern: the man was pushing a stroller with a baby in it, the woman was walking beside him; the man’s expression was meek, solicitous, smiling, a bit embarrassed, and endlessly willing to bend over the child, wipe its nose, soothe its cries; the woman’s expression was blasé, distant, smug, sometimes even (inexplicably) spiteful. This pattern Chantal saw repeated in several variants: the man alongside a woman was pushing the stroller and also carrying another baby on his back, in a specially made sack; the man alongside a woman was pushing the stroller, carrying one baby on his shoulders and another in a belly carrier; the man alongside a woman had no stroller but was holding one child by the hand and carrying three others, on his back, his belly, and his shoulders. Then, finally, with no man, a woman was pushing the stroller; she was doing it with a force unseen in the men, such that Chantal, walking on the same sidewalk, had to leap out of her way at the last moment.
Chantal thinks: men have daddified themselves. They aren’t fathers, they’re just daddies, which means: fathers without a father’s authority. She imagines trying to flirt with a daddy pushing a stroller with one baby inside it and carrying another two babies on his back and belly. Taking advantage of a moment when the wife stopped at a shop window, she would whisper an invitation to the husband. What would he do? Could the man transformed into a baby-tree still turn to look at a strange woman? Wouldn’t the babies hanging off his back and his belly start howling about their carrier’s disturbing movement? The idea strikes Chantal funny and puts her in a good mood. She thinks to herself: I live in a world where men will never turn to look at me again.
Then, along with a few morning strollers, she found herself on the seawall: the tide was out; before her the sandy plain stretched away over a kilometer. It was a long time since she had come to the Normandy coast, and she was unfamiliar with the activities in fashion there now: kites and sail-cars. The kite: a colored fabric stretched over a formidably tough frame, let loose into the wind; with the help of two lines, one in each hand, a person forces different directions on it, so that it climbs and drops, twists, emits a dreadful noise like a gigantic horsefly and, from time to time, nose first, falls into the sand like an airplane crashing. She was surprised to see that the owners were neither children nor adolescents but adults, almost all of them. And never women, always men. In fact, they were the daddies! The daddies without their children, the daddies who had managed to escape their wives! They didn’t run off to mistresses, they ran off to the beach, to play!
Again the notion of a treacherous seduction struck her: she would come up behind the man holding the two lines and watching the noisy flight of his toy with his head thrown back; into his ear she would whisper an erotic invitation in the lewdest words. His reaction? She hadn’t a doubt: without glancing at her, he would hiss: “Leave me alone, I’m busy!”
Ah, no, men will never turn to look at her again.
She returned to the hotel. But in the parking lot outside the lobby, she spotted Jean-Marc’s car. At the desk, she learned that he had arrived at least a half-hour before. The receptionist handed her a message: “I got here early. I’m going out to look for you. J.-M.”
“He’s gone to look for me,” Chantal murmured. “But where?”
“The gentleman said you were sure to be on the beach.”
6
Walking toward the beach, Jean-Marc passed a bus stop. The only person there was a girl in jeans and a T-shirt; without much ardor but quite unmistakably, she was writhing her hips as if she were dancing. When he was very close, he saw her gaping mouth: she was yawning lengthily, insatiably; the great open hole was rocking gently atop the mechanically dancing body. Jean-Marc thought: she’s dancing and she’s bored.
He reached the seawall; down below, on the beach, he saw men with their heads thrown back releasing kites into the air. They were doing it with passion, and Jean-Marc recalled his old theory: there are three kinds of boredom: passive boredom: the girl dancing and yawning; active boredom: kite-lovers; and rebellious boredom: young people burning cars and smashing shop windows.
Farther along the beach, children twelve to fourteen years old, their small bodies buckling beneath big colored helmets, were clustered around some odd vehicles: on a cross formed by two metal bars are set one wheel in front and two behind; in the center is a long low box for a body to slide into and stretch out; above it rises a mast with a sail. Why are the children helmeted? It must mean the sport is dangerous. Yet, Jean-Marc thinks, it’s mainly the strollers who are in danger from the vehicles driven by children; why doesn’t someone offer them helmets? Because people who decline organized leisure activities are deserters from the great common struggle against boredom, and they deserve neither attention nor helmets.
He went down the staircase to the beach and looked carefully along the ebbing waterline; among the distant silhouettes he strained to make out Chantal; finally he recognized her; she had just stopped to gaze at the waves, the sailboats, the clouds.
He walked past children whom an instructor was seating in the sailcars, which then started to circle slowly. Other sailcars were speeding in all directions around them. There’s only the sail with its guide rope to keep the vehicle straight and dodge pedestrians by swerving aside. But can a clumsy amateur really control the sail? And is the vehicle really infallible at responding to the pilot’s will?
