Free Slowness by Milan Kundera Page A

otherwise, for instance, as Guillaume Apollinaire did: the ninth portal of your body. His poem on the nine portals of a woman’s body exists in two versions: the first he sent to his mistress Lou in a letter written from the trenches on May 11, 1915, and the other he sent from the same place to another mistress, Madeleine, on September 21 of the same year. The poems, both beautiful, differ in their imagery but are constructed in the same fashion: each stanza is devoted to one portal of the beloved’s body: one eye, the other eye, the right nostril, the left nostril, the mouth; then, in the poem for Lou, “the portal of your rump” and, finally, the ninth portal, the vulva. But in the sec-94
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    ond poem, the one for Madeleine, there occurs at the end a curious switch of portals. The vulva recedes to eighth place, and it is the ass hole, opening “between two pearly mountains,” that becomes the ninth portal: “yet more mysterious than the others,” the portal “of the sorceries one dares not speak of,” the “supreme portal.”
    I consider those four months and ten days between the two poems, four months Apollinaire spent in the trenches, deep in intense erotic reveries that brought him to that shift in perspective, to that revelation: the ass hole is the miraculous focal point for all the nuclear energy of nakedness. The vulva portal is important, of course (of course, who would deny that?), but too officially important, a registered site, classified, documented, explicated, examined, experimented on, watched, sung, celebrated. Vulva: noisy crossroads where all of chattering humankind meets, a tunnel the generations file through. Only the gullible believe in the intimacy of that site, the most public site of all. The only site that is truly intimate, whose taboo even pornographic films respect, is the hole of the ass, the supreme portal; supreme because it is the most mysterious, the most secret.
    This wisdom, which cost Apollinaire four months spent beneath a firmament of artillery shells, Vincent attained in the course of a single stroll with Julie, turned diaphanous by the light of the moon.
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    A difficult situation when all you can talk about is one thing and you’re not in a position to talk about it: the unuttered ass hole is stuck in Vincent’s mouth like a gag. He looks to heaven as if he hopes to find some help there. And heaven grants him what he needs: it sends him poetic inspiration; Vincent exclaims: “Look!” and points to the moon. “It looks like an ass hole drilled into the sky!”
    He turns his gaze on Julie. Transparent and tender, she smiles and says “Yes,” because for an hour already she has been disposed to admire any remark that comes from him.
    He hears her “yes” and still hungers for more. She has the chaste look of a fairy, and he would
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    like to hear her say “ass hole.” He wants to see her fairy mouth articulate that word, oh how he wants that! He would like to tell her: “Say it with me: ass hole, ass hole, ass hole,” but he does not dare. Instead, ensnared by his own eloquence, he gets more and more tangled up in his metaphor: “The ass hole giving off a lurid light that floods the guts of the universe!” And he stretches an arm to the moon: “Onward, into the ass hole of infinity!”
    I cannot help making a small comment on Vincent’s improvisation: by his acknowledged obsession with the ass hole, he believes he is enacting his fondness for the eighteenth century, for Sade and the whole gang of libertines; but as if he hadn’t the strength to pursue that obsession fully and to the furthest limit, another legacy—a very different, even contrary one, from the following century—hastens to his aid; in other words, he is incapable of discussing his fine libertine obsessions except by making them lyrical; by turning them into metaphors. Thus he sacrifices the spirit of lib-ertinage to the spirit of poetry. And he transfers the ass hole from a woman’s