Free Slowness by Milan Kundera Page B

body up to the sky.
    Ah, this displacement is regrettable, painful to see! I dislike following Vincent along that path:
    he struggles, stuck in his metaphor like a fly in glue; he cries out: “The ass hole of the sky like the eye of God’s camera!”
    As if she sees them winding down, Julie breaks into Vincent’s poetic gyrations by pointing to the lighted lobby inside the great windows: “Almost everyone’s already left.”
    They go indoors: it’s true, only a few people are still lingering at the tables. The elegant fellow in the three-piece suit is gone. However, his absence recalls him to Vincent so powerfully that he hears that voice again, cold and spiteful, backed by his colleagues’ laughter. Again he feels shame: how could he have been so rattled by the fellow? so miserably mute? He strains to clear him from his mind, but he can’t do it, he rehears the fellow’s words: “We all of us live under the gaze of the cameras. That is part of the human condition from now on. …”
    He completely forgets about Julie, and, in amazement, he fixes on those two lines; how bizarre: the elegant fellow’s argument is almost identical to the objection Vincent himself had raised earlier with Pontevin: “If you want to step into some public dispute, call attention to some
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    horror, how can you do it nowadays without being, or looking like, a dancer?”
    Is that the reason he was so disconcerted by the elegant fellow? Was the man’s thinking too close to Vincent’s own for him to attack it? Are we all of us in the same trap, taken aback by a world that has suddenly changed under our feet into a stage set with no way out? Is there really no difference, then, between what Vincent thinks and what the elegant fellow thinks?
    No, that idea is unbearable! He scorns Berck, he scorns the elegant fellow, and his scorn precedes his every judgment. Stubborn, he strains to grasp the difference that separates him from them, until he manages to see it with total clarity: like miserable flunkies, they delight in the human condition just as it is imposed on them: dancers happy to be dancers. Whereas he, even though he knows there is no way out, proclaims his disagreement with that world. Then he thinks of the answer he should have thrown in the elegant fellow’s face: “If living under cameras has become our condition, I revolt against it. I did not choose it!” That’s the answer! He leans toward Julie and without a word of explanation
    tells her: “The only thing left for us is to revolt against the human condition we did not choose!”
    Already accustomed to Vincent’s oddly timed remarks, she finds this one splendid and responds in a pugnacious tone herself: “Absolutely!” And as if the word “revolt” had filled her with a giddy energy, she says: “Let’s go up to your room, the two of us.”
    At once, again, the elegant fellow has vanished from Vincent’s head as he looks at Julie, marveling at her latest words.
    She is marveling too. Near the bar there are still a few of the people she had been standing with before Vincent spoke to her. Those people had acted as if she did not exist. She had been humiliated. Now she looks at them, regal, untouchable. They no longer impress her. She has a night of love ahead of her, and she has it through her own will, through her own courage; she feels rich, lucky, and stronger than any of those people.
    She breathes into Vincent’s ear: “They’re all a bunch of anti-cocks.” She knows that’s Vincent’s word, and she says it to show she is giving herself to him and belongs to him.
    It is as if she had put a grenade of euphoria into
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    his hand. He could go now with the beautiful bearer of the ass hole, right into his room, but, as if he were following a command issued from a distance, he feels obliged to raise some hell here before he goes. He is caught up in a drunken whirlpool where the image of the ass hole merges with the imminence of sex, the elegant