Free Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera

because if she had confided everything to him sincerely, it would have been like lying down naked before him with the stretch marks on her belly showing. No, she no longer wanted to show him either her inside or her outside; she wanted to regain the protection of her modesty, and therefore to be insincere and write only about her child and her sacred duties as a mother. By the time she finished the letter she had persuaded herself that it was neither her belly nor her exhausting efforts to follow the painter's ideas that had provoked her nervous breakdown, but her great maternal feelings that had rebelled against her great but guilty love.
    At that moment she felt not only boundlessly sad but also noble, tragic, and strong; that she had depicted with grand words the sadness that a few days before had made her suffer now brought her a soothing joy; it was a beautiful sadness and she saw herself, illuminated by its melancholy light, as sadly beautiful.
    What a strange coincidence! Jaromil, who at that time spent entire days spying on Magda's weeping eye, was well acquainted with the beauty of sadness and had fully immersed himself in it. He again leafed through the book the painter had lent him, reading and endlessly rereading Eluard's poems and falling under the spell of certain lines: "She has in the tranquillity of her body / A small snowball the color of an eye"; or: "Distant the sea that bathes your eye"; and: "Good morning, sadness / You're inscribed on the eyes I love." Eluard had become the poet of Magda's calm body and of her eyes bathed by a sea of tears; her entire life seemed to him to be contained in a single line: "Sadness-beautiful face." Yes, that was Magda: sadness-beautiful face.
    One evening the rest of the family went out to the theater, and he was alone with her in the villa; aware of the habits of the household, he knew that Magda would be taking her Saturday bath. Since his parents and grandmother had arranged their outing to the theater a week in advance, that morning he had pushed aside the keyhole cover on the bathroom door and glued it in place with a wad of moistened bread; to provide a clear view, he took the key out of the door. Then he hid it carefully.
    The house was quiet and empty, and Jaromil's heart was pounding. He sat upstairs in his room with a book as if someone might suddenly turn up and ask him what he was doing, but he was not reading, he was only listening. At last he heard the sound of water rushing through the plumbing and the flow hitting the bottom of the bathtub. He turned off the light at the top of the stairs and tiptoed down; he was in luck; the keyhole was still open, and when he pressed his eye against it he saw Magda leaning over the bathtub, her breasts bare, with nothing on but her underpants. His heart was pounding violently, for he was seeing what he had never seen before, would soon see still more, and no one could prevent it. Magda straightened up, went over to the mirror (he saw her in profile), looked at herself for some moments, then turned (he saw her facing him) and headed toward the bathtub; she stopped, took off her underpants, threw them aside (he still saw her facing him), then climbed into the bathtub.
    When she was immersed in the bathtub, Jaromil went on watching her through the keyhole, but since the water was up to her shoulders, she once again was nothing but a face., the same familiar sad face with eyes bathed by a sea of tears but at the same time a completely different face: a face to which he had to add (now, in the future, and forever) bare breasts, a belly, thighs, a rump; it was a face illuminated by the body's nakedness; it still elicited tenderness from him, but this tenderness was different because it echoed the rapid pounding of his heart.
    And then he suddenly noticed that Magda was gazing right at him. He was afraid he had been discovered. Her eyes were fixed on the keyhole and she was smiling sweetly (a smile at once embarrassed and