The Pole and Other Stories, page 9
She does not believe in life after death, except in the most metaphorical of senses. When she is dead her children will remember her and reminisce about her, fondly or not so fondly. They might also pick her to pieces with their psychoanalysts (Was she a good mother? Was she a bad mother?). As long as they go on doing so she will enjoy a flickering kind of life. But with the passing of their generation she will be tossed into a dusty archive, there to be shut out from the light of day for ever and ever. Such constitutes her belief, her mature, adult belief; and she does the Pole the credit of accepting that, when he was not absorbed in his music and his poetry, he shared it too—that he did not really believe there would be another life in another world where the two of them would find each other and enjoy the happiness that chance had withheld from them in their first incarnation.
So why write—and commit to her—these poems from his last months in which he looks forward so confidently to seeing her again, poems that steadfastly avoid the questions that dog any theory of the afterlife? Questions such as: Will the beloved not arrive attended by a host of spouses and lovers all looking forward to spending the afterlife by her side and in her bed? Will there be no jealousy in the afterlife? No boredom? No hunger? No bowel movements? What about clothes? Will we all have to wear shapeless smocks down to our ankles? And underwear—will a touch of lace be permitted or will everything have to be very plain, very puritan?
Heaven: a vast ante-room full of souls milling about in their uniform smocks, searching anxiously for their other halves.
17. It is not entirely true that he dodges the question of physical appearance. In one of his afterworld poems he writes that he and she will meet naked, and then confesses that in the present world—he must be referring to Mallorca—it was a matter of shame to him that he could bring to the table of love nothing but his ugly old male body.
18. Why is she so hard on him? Why does she hover over his poetic legacy with a scalpel at the ready? Answer: because she was hoping for more. It is hard to admit to, but she was hoping that the man who loved her would have used that love, that energy, that eros, to bring her to life better than he has managed to do. Vanity on her part? Yes, perhaps. But the Pole thought of himself as an artist in the grand old sense, a maestro, and an artist in the grand old sense (Dante!) would have given her a new life that was believable, that was proof against her own easy mockery. For the lover the desired body is a soul. The Pole loved her body. The Pole loves her soul (so he says). But where in the poems does she see body transfigured into soul?
Señora Weisz’s son thought the poems weak, and in most cases she agrees. Did the Pole see their weakness too? Did he see it, yet proceed nevertheless with his scribbling, keeping himself busy so that he would not have to see death sidling up to him?
With the whole of his pathetic project laid out before her on her desk, his project of resurrecting and perfecting a love that was never firmly founded, she is overcome with exasperation but also with pity. The picture grows clearer and clearer before her eyes: the old man at his typewriter in his ugly apartment, trying to force into life his dream of love, using an art that he was not master of.
I should never have encouraged him, she thinks. I should have nipped the whole thing in the bud. But I did not see where it was leading. I did not see it was going to end up like this.
She puts the translations back in their folder. Who else but she would ever want to read this stuff? All for nothing, all that patient labour, all that packing of one brick on top of another. There is not even a museum of bad poetry where it can be stored away, along with the rest of the lifeless verbiage that emerges from the hands of men like him, men who lack the art that quickens the word. Poor old fellow! she thinks. Poor old guy!
19. Did it occur to him that they might fail to meet in the afterlife not because there is no afterlife but because fate will have consigned him to the basement realm while she floats above in Paradise, eternally unattainable?
20. Or the reverse?
SIX
Dear Witold,
Thank you for the book of poems. You won’t believe what a roundabout road they have taken, but at last they have arrived in a version I can read.
Natán, the son of my translator, a nice young man, though a bit forward, told me he liked the Aphrodite poem best, the one in which you sink to the bottom of the sea and meet Aphrodite in the form of a marble statue.
If Aphrodite is supposed to stand for me, if I am supposed to be Aphrodite, you have made a mistake. I am not that particular goddess. In fact I am not a goddess at all.
Ditto if I am supposed to be Beatrice.
You complain that the undersea Aphrodite looked straight through you without noticing you. For my part, I thought I saw you pretty well—saw you for what you were and accepted you. But perhaps you wanted more. Perhaps you wanted me to see a god in you, which I never did. My apologies.
A poem that touched me particularly was the one about yourself as a little boy receiving a lesson in anatomy from your mother. During all the time I knew you, I confess, I never once thought of you as a little boy. I treated you as a rational grown-up and expected you to treat me in the same way. That may have been another mistake. If we had dropped the adult masks and approached each other as child to child we might have done better. But of course, becoming a child is not as easy as it looks.
You made one or two proposals to me that I found disconcerting—for example that I run away with you to Brazil—but you never actually wooed me. Nor in the end did you seduce me. No seduction took place, as I think you will agree.
I would have liked to be wooed. I would have liked to be seduced. I would have liked to have been paid the sweet compliments and told the flattering lies that men tell the women they want to sleep with. Why? I don’t know and don’t care to know. A womanly longing, forgivable.
Why did you obey so meekly when I told you to leave and go back to Valldemossa? Why did you not bombard me with pleas? I cannot live without you!—why did you never utter those words?
Theatrics, Witold—have you never heard of theatrics? Listen to Chopin. Listen to the Ballades. Forget about your own tight little readings. Open your ears, for a change, to the real Chopin performers, the enthusiasts who revel in the theatrics of his music and don’t mind hitting a wrong key now and then.
And why did you not write to me, or call me, when you knew you were dying? It would have been so easy—so much easier than writing poems. Your neighbour says you did nothing in your last years but labour on your poems. She says you gave up music. Why? Did you lose faith?
If you were Dante, I would go down in history as your inspiration, your Muse. But you are not Dante. The evidence is before us. You are not a great poet. No one is going to want to read about your love for me, and—on mature consideration—I am glad about that, glad and relieved. I never asked to be written about, by you or by anyone else.
In case you have forgotten it, here is the poem I was referring to, in its new Spanish guise (no rhymes).
POEM 20
‘Have you got one?’ I asked my mother
as she dried me after my bath.
‘No,’ said my mother, ‘I am the woman,
the one built to receive,
while you, my young man,
are the one built to give.
Your pipi is for giving—never forget that.’
‘Give what, Mama?’
‘Give joy. Give illumination. Give seed
so that again and again
season after season
the new crop will burst forth.’
Give seed—what did that mean?
I saw only darkly
As for illumination
I saw it not at all
not until she came to shine her light on my path Beatrice.
Yet what did I give her
entering her body
the body of all women
the body of the goddess?
dead seed or no seed
no joy
no light
Courage, said Mama.
Like the serpent swallowing its tail
time has no end.
Always there is a new time
a new life
una vita nuova.
But now
my little prince
it is time for bed.
A nice poem, I am sure you will agree.
Yours,
Beatriz
Dear Witold,
A second letter. Don’t worry, there won’t be too many. I don’t want to turn you into my secret friend, my phantom companion, my phantom limb.
To begin with, apologies for yesterday’s rant. I don’t know what got into me. You may not be Dante but your poems mean a great deal to me. Thank you for them.
I am writing to say I hope you didn’t have too painful an end. When I visited the apartment in Warsaw I came across your ashes in a jar. Your daughter had forgotten to take them, or else they were delivered too late, after she had gone back to Berlin. The neglect of your remains strikes me as a bit casual, even by contemporary standards, if you don’t mind my saying so. Surely there is a Heroes’ Acre in Warsaw, or something like it, where you could be fittingly interred.
Both your daughter and your friend Madame Jabloṅska, who when I last heard was in Łodz visiting her family, have been discreet about the manner of your passing.
I raise the matter because of the handwritten words in the margin of the second-last poem, poem 83. I took the words to be part of the poem, but my translator disagrees. She points out that they don’t fit anywhere, and furthermore are in neither Polish nor Italian but English. She calls them ‘extra-poetic’. The words in question are: ‘Save me, my Beatrice.’
If the words belong in the poem and ‘Beatrice’ is the heavenly being you have adopted from your friend and mentor Dante, well and good, I say no more. But if Beatrice is me, and if when you wrote those words you were pleading with me to save you—to come and save you from death—I must tell you, first, that the message did not reach me, telepathically or otherwise, and, second, that even if it had reached me I would probably not have come. I would not have come to you in Warsaw just as I would not run away with you to Brazil. I was fond of you (let me use that word), but not so extravagantly fond that I would have given up everything for you. You were in love with me—I have no doubt about that—and love is by nature extravagant. As for me, however, my feelings were more shaded, more complex.
That may seem a heartless thing to say at a time when you are defenceless, but it is not so intended. You had the whole creaking philosophical edifice of romantic love behind you, into which you slotted me as your donna and saviour. I had no such resources, apart from what I regard as a saving scepticism about schemes of thought that crush and annihilate living beings.
We can be honest with each other—can’t we?—now that you are dead. What would be the point of pretending? Let us resolve to be honest yet never cruel.
In a spirit of honesty, I am not going to pretend that I like the very first poem in the series, and the coarse way in which you describe our physical relations. I suspect that your daughter got to see the poem, and that it coloured her attitude towards me. She treated me as if I were your whore.
Nor am I impressed by the second poem. I don’t in general like men who stare at women. I don’t find being stared at seductive—not in the slightest. And what is chyme (the translator’s word)? The dictionary says it is a bodily fluid, but what is the sense of it?
POEM 2
Above all he craved to look on her,
he the old master, then a young buck.
Because he could not have her
(bared throat, flurry of skirts, unimaginable)
all the erotic charge ascended from his loins,
ascended through the blood, through the chyme,
to suffuse his living gaze.
Staring at her was his way of possessing her.
In public gatherings he would choose at random some attractive girl
set her in his line of sight, seem to be sending her looks
(he called her his screen)
while secretly it was the farther one he was devouring,
his Beatrice
his quarry
la modesta, the modest one.
(Modesty high among her virtues: modesty, grace, goodness.)
As for me, I had no luck,
came too late, lived too far away
had only her image to close my eyes on
poor fluttering little thing in the chambers of memory.
I find it a difficult poem—too difficult for me. I hope the translation does justice to it. You will be the best judge. The translator was not a professional.
La modesta. Thank you for that. Thank you for your high opinion of me. I will try to live up to it.
But it is getting late. Good night, my prince—time for bed. Sleep well. Sweet dreams.
Yours,
Beatriz
P.S. I will write again.
2022
SHE is visiting her daughter in Nice, her first visit in years. Her son will fly out from the United States and spend a few days with them on the way to some conference or other. It interests her, this confluence of dates. She wonders whether there has not been some collusion, whether the two of them do not have some plan, some proposal to put to her of the kind that children put to a parent when they feel she can no longer look after herself. So obstinate, they will have said to each other: so obstinate, so stubborn, so self-willed—how will we get past that obstinacy of hers except by working together?
They love her, of course, otherwise they would not be cooking up plans for her. Nevertheless, she does feel like one of those Roman aristocrats waiting to be handed the fatal draught, waiting to be told in the most confiding, the most sympathetic of ways that for the general good one should drink it down without a fuss.
Her children are and always have been good, dutiful, as children go. Whether as a mother she has been equally good and dutiful is another matter. But in this life we do not always get what we deserve. Her children will have to wait for another life, another incarnation, if they want the score to be evened.
Her daughter runs an art gallery in Nice. Her daughter is by now, for all practical purposes, French. Her son, with his American wife and American children, will soon, for all practical purposes, be American. So, having flown the nest, they have flown far. One might even think, did one not know better, that they have flown far to get away from her.
Whatever proposal it is they have to put to her, it is sure to be full of ambivalence: love and solicitude on the one hand, brisk heartlessness on the other, and a wish to see the end of her. Well, ambivalence should not disconcert her. She has made a living out of ambivalence. Where would the art of fiction be if there were no double meanings? What would life itself be if there were only heads or tails, with nothing in between?
‘What I find unsettling, as I grow older,’ she tells her son, ‘is that I hear issuing from my lips words I once upon a time used to hear from old people and swore I would never say myself: What is the world coming to! for example. Thus: No one seems any longer to be aware that the verb may has a past tense—what is the world coming to! People stroll down the street eating pizza and talking into a telephone—what is the world coming to!’
It is his first day in Nice, her third: a clear, warm June day, the kind of day that brought idle, well-to-do people from England to this stretch of coast in the first place. And behold, here they are, the two of them, strolling down the Promenade des Anglais just as the English did a hundred years ago with their parasols and their boaters, deploring Mr Hardy’s latest effort, deploring the Boers.
‘Deplore,’ she says: ‘a word one does not hear much nowadays. No one with any sense deplores, not unless they want to become a figure of fun. An interdicted word, an interdicted activity. So what is one to do? Does one keep them all pent up, one’s deplorations, until one is alone with other old folk and free to spill them out?’
‘You can deplore to me as much as you like, Mother,’ says John, her good and dutiful son. ‘I will nod sympathetically and not make fun of you. What else would you like to deplore today besides pizza?’
‘It is not pizza that I deplore, pizza is well and good in its place, it is walking and eating and talking all at the same time that I find so rude.’
‘I agree, it is rude or at least unrefined. What else?’
‘That’s enough. What I deplore is in itself of no interest. What is of interest is that I vowed years ago I would never do it, and here I am doing it. Why have I succumbed? I deplore what the world is coming to. I deplore the course of history. From my heart I deplore it. Yet when I listen to myself, what do I hear? I hear my mother deploring the miniskirt, deploring the electric guitar. And I remember my exasperation. “Yes, Mother,” I would say, and grind my teeth and pray for her to shut up. And so…’
‘And so you think I am grinding my teeth and praying for you to shut up.’
‘Yes.’
‘I am not. It is perfectly acceptable to deplore what the world is coming to. I deplore it myself, in private.’
‘But the detail, John, the detail! It is not just the grand sweep of history that I deplore, it is the detail—bad manners, bad grammar, loudness! It is the details that exasperate me, and it is the kind of detail that exasperates me, that drives me to despair. So unimportant! Do you understand? But of course you do not. You think I am making fun of myself when I am not making fun of myself. It is all serious! Do you understand that it could all be serious?’
‘Of course I understand. You express yourself with great clarity.’
‘But I do not! I do not! I express myself in words, and we are all sick of words by now. The only way left to prove you are serious is to do away with yourself. Fall on your sword. Blow your brains out. Yet as soon as I say those words you have to hide a smile. I know. Because I am not serious, not fully serious—I am too old to be serious. Kill yourself at twenty and it is a tragic loss. Kill yourself at forty and it is a sobering comment on the times. But kill yourself at seventy and people say, “What a shame, she must have had cancer.”’
