总目录

小情郎

关于“坎普”的札记

缠忧的男孩

名声

正义卫士

创作危险

博洛尼亚的红窗帘

幸存者

小情郎

企鹅现代经典 第一辑

（法）弗朗索瓦丝·萨冈/著

陈剑/译

企鹅图书 | PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

New Zealand | India | South Africa | North Asia

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at:

global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

THE GIGOLO

Copyright © Editions Stock, 2009. The first edition of this work was published in 1975 by Editions

Flammarion. These stories were first published in French in the collection Des yeux de soie（1975）, which

was translated into English as Silken Eyes and Other Stories（1977）. This selection first published in 2018 in

Penguin Modern. Simplified Chinese translation copyright © 陈剑, authorized by Shanghai 99

Readers Culture Co. Ltd.（上海九久读书人文化实业有限公司）. Simplified Chinese edition copyright

© 2021 by Penguin Random House North Asia in association with CITIC Press Group. All rights reserved.

© “企鹅”及其相关标识是企鹅兰登（北京）文化发展有限公司已经注册或尚未注册的商标。

未经允许，不得擅用。

企鹅兰登电子书 | Penguin Random House eBooks

目录

小情郎

陌生人

孤独的池塘

躺着的男人

The Gigolo

The Unknown Visitor

The Lake of Loneliness

In Extremis

返回总目录

“树液，是它的元气，是活力，是激情，是‘做’的欲望：做蠢事，做爱，做工作……”

小情郎

他走在她身边，走在雨后铺满落叶的林荫道上，时不时伸手扶她，帮她避开小水洼。他微笑着，笑容无邪。她想，对任何一个年轻男人来说，在默东的林间漫步，应该都是一件苦差吧，尤其是跟她这般年纪的女人。她不算老，但已经倦了，之所以百无聊赖地在林间散步，是因为不喜欢去电影院或者太嘈杂的酒吧。

也许之前，开车上路的时候，在开得飞快的豪华跑车里，他也享受到了驾驶的快感。但是，这足够让他忍受这接下来的，在萧索秋天的林间小路上无止无休的沉默散步吗？“他一定觉得无聊，无聊得要命。”她这样想着，感到莫名的快意。她转入另一条小径，一条与归途相反的路。她的心里忐忑不安，却又怀着希望。她希望他会沉不住气，会突然跳起来反抗这种无聊，会大发脾气，撂下伤人的狠话。这样，就终于可以证明，他与她毕竟存在着二十年的代沟。

但他始终微笑着。她从未在他脸上看到烦躁或是不悦的神色。他也不像有些青春逼人的男孩子那样，会流露出带着施舍意味的轻笑。那样的轻笑是在明确地告诉你：“既然您觉得开心，就随您吧……但别忘了，我是绝对自由的。所以，别激怒我。”这种年轻男子特有的残忍笑容曾让她冷彻心扉，这样无情而伤人的笑容，曾许多次，让她终止一段关系。第一次让她大受打击的，是米歇尔，然后，其他人也一样……

他说着“当心”，伸手拉住她，怕她的丝袜或者裙子——那么合身、优雅的裙子——被荆棘丛剐坏。如果有一天，他也流露出那样的轻笑，她会不会也把他打发走呢？她觉得自己下不了这样的狠心。倒不是她对他青睐有加：她养着他，给他买衣服，给他买珠宝，只要他不拒绝。他不像其他人那样，那些人愚蠢又赤裸，当他们渴望能够得到某些东西，或者当他们觉得自己没有卖个好身价的时候，他们根深蒂固的坏脾气就发作了——其实就是：他们觉得自己屈就了。他们会大肆购买奢侈品，极尽奢华，即使他们并不想要那些东西。他们这么做，只是为了从中找回受伤的自尊。自尊这个词，让她暗暗发笑，但的确只有自尊才能解释这种行为。

尼古拉斯的迷人之处也许就在于，他真的渴望得到那些礼物。他从来不索取，而是在收到礼物的时候，表现得特别开心。他流露出的喜悦，让她觉得自己并不是一个用金钱换取年轻肉体、自己还在暗地里鄙夷这种行为的老女人，而只是一个用礼物奖赏孩子的普通女人。她连忙驱散这些念头。上帝啊！她可不想扮演这帮贪婪美少年的母亲或者保护人。她不想自欺欺人。她是个清醒的玩家。尽管不情愿，他们自己也清楚并且尊重她这点。“你付出你的身体，我付给你钱。”有些男人为此感到恼火，试图把她拉入暧昧不明的关系中，也许是为了让她投入更多。她则把他们送到别的女恩主身边去，并让他们注意自己的身份：“我看不起您，正如我也鄙视自己会跟您在一起。我只需要您晚上的两小时。”她把他们视为动物，毫不犹豫，不留情面。

尼古拉斯，他比较难办些：他对自己的牛郎职业不带任何爱憎的情感，没有埋怨，也没有自怜。他是温雅可爱的情人，也许并不讨巧，但是他热烈、温存……他成天待在她家里，躺在地毯上，漫无目的地阅读。他不会频繁要求外出，而一旦外出，他也似乎从来都不在意别人向他们投来意味深长的目光。他照样殷勤，保持微笑，仿佛走在他身边的，是他自己选择的年轻姑娘。总之，除了她态度傲慢蛮横，他们之间的关系，与普通情侣没有任何区别。

“您冷吗？”他关切地看着她，仿佛她的健康真的是这个世界上他最在乎的事。她受不了他如此入戏，受不了他表现得与她十多年前对男人的期盼别无二致。她想起来，那时候，她还跟着那个有钱的丈夫，他富有却丑陋，他只关心他的生意。

她那时是多么愚蠢，不懂得利用尚未流逝的青春美貌红杏出墙。那时的她仿佛沉睡了。直到她丈夫去世，直到她与米歇尔的第一夜，她才被唤醒。一切，都从那个夜晚开始。

“我问您会不会觉得冷。”

“哦，不，不冷，而且我们就要回去了。”

“您要不要披上我的外套？”

他那件漂亮的克雷德外套……她漫不经心地瞥了它一眼，衣服是棕灰色的，尼古拉斯浓密而柔顺的头发是栗色的，与秋天的色彩融为一体。

“这么多秋色，”她喃喃自语，“您的衣服，这片树林……我的秋天……”

他没有回答。她被自己的话吓了一跳，因为她从不想提及自己的年纪。他很清楚她的年纪，他并不在乎。这片池塘，她本可以跳下去。她想象了片刻：穿着迪奥的连衣裙漂浮在水面上……多傻的念头，年轻人才会这么想。“在我这样的年纪，好死不如赖活。”她要牢牢抓住金钱带来的快乐，夜晚的欢愉；她要好好享受年轻男人伴随在侧，漫步萧瑟秋林。

“尼古拉斯，”她用沙哑而迫切的声音说，“尼古拉斯，吻我。”

一片水洼挡在他们之间。他注视了她一会儿，才跨过去。她飞快地想到：“他肯定在恨我。”而他把她拥到怀中，轻柔地托起她的下巴。

“我的年纪，”他亲吻她的时候，她想，“我的年纪，你在这一刻会忘掉我的年纪；你太年轻，还不懂得怎样控制欲火，尼古拉斯……”

“尼古拉斯！”

他看着她，微微喘着气，头发蓬乱。

“您弄疼我了。”她说，轻轻一笑。

他们继续往前走，沉默不语。她惊讶于自己加速的心跳。这个吻——这个吻是不是告诉了尼古拉斯什么？——这个吻，宛如告别之吻，充满渴求与忧伤，仿佛他正爱着她。他像空气一样自由，属于所有女人、所有奢侈品。他知道了什么？这张骤然苍白的面容……他是危险的，非常危险……他们在一起已经超过六个月了，再继续下去，一定是危险的。而且，她累了，她厌倦了巴黎，厌倦了喧闹。明天她就要前往南部。她要独自前往。

他们走到汽车旁。她转过身对着他，不由怜惜地扶住了他的手臂。她对自己说：“不管怎么说，这个男孩要失去饭碗了。即便只是暂时失业，但也实在不是件开心的事。”

“我明天出发去南部，尼古拉斯。我累了。”

“您带我一起去？”

“不，尼古拉斯，我不会带您去。”

她为此遗憾。带尼古拉斯去看海，是件有趣的事。

他也许早就见过大海，但他的脸上，总是有好奇和惊喜的神情。

“您……您厌倦我了？”

他轻声说道，垂下眼帘。他的声音因为迫切而变了声调。这令她感动。她可以预见到他今后的人生：声名狼藉的争夺、妥协与厌倦。这一切都因为他太美艳，太柔弱，而他正是某种身份某个阶层的某些女人——像她这样的女人——最理想的猎物。

“我一点儿也没有厌倦您，我的小尼古拉斯。您是那么好，那么迷人，但这不会长久，不是吗？我们已经相识超过六个月了。”

“是，”他失神地说，“第一次见到您，是在埃西尼太太家的酒会。”

她忽然想起那场热闹的鸡尾酒会，还有她第一次见到尼古拉斯的场景。当时，可怜兮兮的他正被老女人埃西尼太太紧紧地挨着说话，还冲着他痴痴地笑。尼古拉斯被冷餐台挡着，无处可逃。那样的场景先是让她觉得好笑，而后，她专注地望着尼古拉斯，欲望在心里膨胀起来。这类酒会实际上就是市场，是展销会。成熟女性们在这里仔细地挑选她们想要的年轻男子。

她正准备去向酒会女主人打招呼，经过一面镜子的时候，照见里面的自己美艳动人。尼古拉斯就在这么个愉快的当口出现，于是她情不自禁地露出了微笑，这微笑，令老女人埃西尼太太心生警惕。

埃西尼太太极不情愿地介绍了尼古拉斯。然后，他们开始客套地谈论周围的人与事。尼古拉斯似乎对八卦一无所知。一小时之后，她确定自己看上了他，并决定立刻跟他说清楚。她一贯这样。他们坐在窗边的长沙发上，他点燃一支烟，而她，清晰地叫出他的名字：

“尼古拉斯，我喜欢您。”

他把烟从嘴边移开，一动不动，看着她，没有回答。

“我住在丽池。”她淡淡地补上一句。

她非常清楚最后这句有多么重要。所有牛郎的野心都在丽池。尼古拉斯的脸上露出一丝抵抗的神色，但一句话也没有说，不知道他到底听懂了没有。她心想“算了吧”，然后站起身来：“我走了。期待再见。”

尼古拉斯也站了起来，脸色有一点苍白：

“我可以跟您走吗？”

在汽车里，他用手臂搂着她的肩膀，激动地问了她一大堆关于发动机、加速器的细节问题。到了她的房间，她先吻了他，然后他紧紧地将她拥在怀中，有一点颤抖，混合着粗暴与温柔。黎明时分，他沉沉地睡着，像个孩子。而她起身走到窗前，凝望旺多姆广场的日出。

接下来，是独自坐在地毯上玩牌的尼古拉斯，是跟在她身边逛街购物的尼古拉斯，是收到她送的金色香烟盒时难掩兴奋的尼古拉斯，是在某次晚宴上突然抓起她的手亲吻的尼古拉斯。而如今，她将要离开这个尼古拉斯了。而他，什么也没有说，他还没有回过神来……

她上了车，把头向后一仰，忽然觉得非常疲倦。尼古拉斯坐在她的身旁，发动了引擎。

一路上，她偶尔将目光投向他，投向他那专注却又遥远的侧影。她情不自禁地想，如果自己还是二十岁，将会怎样疯狂地迷恋上他；整个人生，也许只是一团无法理清的乱麻。在快到意大利门的时候，尼古拉斯转头问她：

“我们去哪里？”

“去‘乔尼之家’，”她说，“我和埃西尼太太约了七点钟在那里见。”

埃西尼太太一如既往地守时。这是她屈指可数的优点之一。尼古拉斯神情恍惚地与这位年老的女士握了握手。

她看着他们。脑中闪过一个愉快的念头：

“对了，我明天出发去南部，不能参加十六号你家的鸡尾酒会了，好遗憾。”

埃西尼太太望着她与尼古拉斯，故作感动地说：

“真是两个幸福的人儿。享受那里的阳光……”

“我不会去。”尼古拉斯简短地说。

一阵沉默。两个女人的目光同时聚焦在尼古拉斯的身上。埃西尼太太的尤为刺眼。

“那就应该来参加我的酒会啊。您不想一个人在巴黎待着吧，那多寂寞啊。”

“好主意。”她接上话。

埃西尼太太已经伸出了手，按在尼古拉斯的衣袖上，一副非我莫属的架势。尼古拉斯出人意料地做出了反抗。他猝然起身，径直走了出去。她追到停车的地方才赶上他。

“尼古拉斯，这是干什么？可怜的埃西尼是性急了点儿，但她的确喜欢您很久了，这不是件坏事。”

尼古拉斯立在车旁，一言不发，呼吸急促。她不禁怜惜起来：

“上车吧。回家您再与我解释整件事。”

但他没有沉住气。一路上，他絮絮叨叨地对她说，他不是宠物，他自己一个人也可以活得很好，他受不了她随随便便就把他丢给老秃鹫埃西尼。他完全没法接受这个女人，她太老了……

“不，尼古拉斯，她跟我一般年纪。”

车开到了家门口。尼古拉斯转身面对着她，突然用手捧住她的脸庞。他近距离地凝视着她，而她徒劳地想要挣脱。她知道，她的妆一定在路上就花了。

“您，您是不同的，”尼古拉斯用低沉的声音说，“您……我喜欢您。我爱您的面容。您怎么能……”

他的声音因为绝望而变了调。他松开了她。而她，怔在那里。

“怎么能，什么？”

“怎么能把我双手奉送给那个女人？我不是和你在一起六个月了吗？你就从没想到过我已经离不开你了吗？没想过我会爱上你吗？……”

她骤然转过身去。

“你骗人，”她低声说，“我，我不想被欺骗。我已不能承受欺骗。您走吧。”

她上了楼，注视着镜中的自己。她已经无可挽回地老去了。她已经六十多岁，她的眼睛里满是泪水。她胡乱地理了理行李，然后独自躺倒在空荡荡的大床上。她哭了许久才沉沉睡去，她说自己真是疯了。

陌生人

她开足马力转了个弯，利索地把车停在屋前。她总是在抵达的时候按喇叭示意。不知道为什么，每一次抵达时，她都会用喇叭提醒她的丈夫达维德，她到了。这一天，她也问自己，她是为何，又是如何建立起这样一个习惯的。不管怎么说，如今他们已经结婚十年了，在雷丁乡间这座怡人的别墅里也住了有十年，似乎她并无必要在每一次回家时都以这种方式通报丈夫，两个孩子的父亲，她的法定监护人。

“他上哪儿去了？”她没有听到回应，于是下了车，迈着她打高尔夫球时的大步子向屋子走去，后面跟着老朋友琳达。

琳达·福斯曼是个不太走运的女人，三十二岁时不幸离婚，之后就一直独身——经常有人追，但还是独身。米莉森特不得不出尽百宝给她解闷，比如，星期天陪她打一整天高尔夫球。琳达这个人不哀不怨，但漫不经心得可怕。她观望那些男人（独身男人，当然），他们也回应她的目光，然后，事情似乎就止于此。在米莉森特这样一个生气勃勃、长着俏皮雀斑的女人看来，琳达的个性根本就是个谜。有时候，达维德带着他那惯有的玩世不恭的态度做出评论。“她渴望男人，”他说，“她就和其他所有正常女人一样，渴望抓住一个可以让她欲仙欲死的男人。”但事实才不是这样，达维德的话也太露骨了点儿。在米莉森特看来，琳达只是在傻傻地等待某个人来爱她，爱她这个人，爱她的漫不经心，懂得宠爱她、照顾她。

其实，仔细想想，达维德说起琳达时总是轻蔑又尖酸，他对他们的大多数朋友，都是这样的态度。她觉得有必要跟他谈谈。他就是不肯看到别人的好，比如，对那个笨头笨脑，但其实心地善良的杰克·哈里斯。没错，那人是迟钝，但是特别宽厚、慷慨，有种骨子里的温良。达维德却总是习惯性地说：

“那是个好色的家伙，要是少了女人……”每次，他都会乐得哈哈大笑，仿佛他的插科打诨比萧伯纳或是奥斯卡·王尔德的原创还要精彩。

她推开门，还未踏入客厅，就愣在了原地。满地都是烟蒂和空酒瓶，两件睡袍胡乱地散落在客厅一角：一件是她的，一件是达维德的。她迅速缓过神来，恨不能立刻转身离开现场，什么都没有看到。她后悔没有事先打个电话，通知他她会提前回来：不是星期一早上，而是星期天的晚上。可惜琳达此刻就站在她的身后，脸色苍白，瞪大了双眼，呼吸急促。她必须赶紧应付一下琳达，再处理眼前这件已经无可挽回地发生在自家屋檐下的事。等等，她的家？……他们的家？……十年来，她总是说“我们的家”，而达维德则总是说“我们的房子”。十年来，她跟他说起过在家种树，种栀子花，造个暖房，修个小花园，但十年来，达维德始终无动于衷。

“究竟，”琳达尖利的嗓音让米莉森特冷不丁打了个寒战，“究竟发生了什么事？达维德趁你不在家的时候开狂欢派对？”

她笑了。她似乎把这件事看得太轻巧了。的确，很可能达维德真的是在前天去了利物浦，然后又神速归来，在这里过了一夜，现在出门去俱乐部吃晚饭了，刚刚离开。只是，这里留下了两件睡袍，两片令人绝望的锦缎，两面仿佛写着“通奸”二字的旗帜。而她，吃惊于自己竟然会惊讶。毕竟，达维德是个相当出众的美男子。他身材挺拔，头发乌黑，剑眉星目，而且风趣幽默。然而，她从来没有想过，更从来没有发现过任何蛛丝马迹，让她觉得他渴望拥有除了她之外的任何女人。这一点，说起来很模糊，却又确凿无疑，她对此很清楚。她确信：达维德从来不会看除了她之外的任何女人一眼。

她打起精神，穿过房间，捡起角落里那两件伤风败俗的睡袍，把它们丢到厨房去。动作很快，但还是看到了餐桌上的两只茶杯和茶碟上留下的一点儿黄油。她匆匆关上门，仿佛刚刚目击了一场犯罪。她一边清理烟灰缸和酒瓶，一边开着玩笑，试图打消琳达刚才的好奇。她让琳达坐下来。

“可气，”她说，“估计清洁女工上个周末就没来打扫过。坐下来，亲爱的。我去给你泡杯茶，要不要？”

琳达坐下来，面色憔悴，手放在两膝之间，指尖钩着手袋。

“茶就不用了，”她说，“我想喝点更浓的。今天这场高尔夫让我筋疲力尽……”

于是，米莉森特回到厨房，目光避开那两只杯子，抓起一瓶白兰地和几块冰块，全部拿去给琳达。她们面对面坐在客厅里，这间漂亮的客厅里都是竹制家具，配以印染的彩色织物，也不知是达维德从哪里带回来的。这间屋子至少带有一种英国布尔乔亚式的气息，如果算不上有人情味的话。从落地玻璃窗望出去，可以看到一排榆树在大风中摇曳。一个小时前，正是因为起风，她们才离开了高尔夫球场。

“达维德在利物浦。”米莉森特说道。她发现自己用了不容置疑的语气，仿佛可怜的琳达会反驳她似的。

“当然，”琳达附和着她，“我知道，你跟我说过嘛。”

说完，她俩齐齐望向窗外，然后盯着脚上的鞋子看，再然后，看向对方的眼睛。

某些东西开始侵入米莉森特的心。像是狼，又像是狐狸，总之，是一头野兽，一头伤害她的野兽。痛苦在侵蚀着她。她猛地喝下一大口白兰地，试图让自己平静下来，然后又一次看向琳达的眼睛。“很好，”她对自己说，“不管怎么说，照我的判断，照任何一个有逻辑的人来判断，都不可能会是琳达。整个周末我们都在一起，她跟我一样被吓坏了，而且，很奇怪，她甚至比我还要恐慌。”因为，在她看来，达维德把一个女人带回家来这回事，且不论孩子们在不在，达维德带回一个女人，并且让这个女人穿上她的睡袍，这回事本来就是天方夜谭。达维德根本看都不看一眼其他女人。不仅如此，达维德看都不看任何人。“任何人”这个字眼，突然令她轰然一震。的确，他的眼中没有任何人，也没有她。达维德生来俊美，目中无人。

当然，十年过去了，很自然甚至是很合理地，他们之间的性生活几乎缩减为零。而且，这么些年过去了，他当然不再是她当年认识的那个血气方刚、不安于室的年轻男人。然而，这个英俊的丈夫，这个如此迷人的“盲人”，还是有些让她想不透的地方……

“米莉森特，”琳达问，“你怎么想？”她抬手指着面前的这一片狼藉。

“你希望我怎么想？”米莉森特说，“要么是管家布里格斯太太星期一就没来整理过屋子，要么是达维德和某个荡妇在这里度了周末。”

说着她大笑起来。她感觉轻松了很多。既然问题已经摆上台面，事情就简单多了。她完全可以与闺密一起为这样的事实大笑，笑自己被背叛，笑自己突然发现这样的事实是因为老天起风让她们提前离开高尔夫球场。

“可是，”琳达问（她也笑了起来），“你的意思是，某个荡妇？达维德的时间全都是和你，和孩子们，还有你们的朋友们在一起，他哪儿还有时间去找一个真正的荡妇？”

“呵，”米莉森特笑得更欢了——的确，她感觉轻松了好多，也不知道为什么，“也许是帕梅拉，或者埃丝特，又或者是珍妮……很快就会知道了。”

“我不觉得他会喜欢她们中的任何一个。”琳达的语气竟有些忧伤。她猛地想站起身来，让米莉森特吓了一跳。

“你看，琳达，”她说，“即使我们抓到奸情，你也很清楚，我们不可能让事情严重化。你看，我们已经结婚十年了，达维德和我，我们各自都有过一些机会……但最后什么都没有发生……”

“我知道，”琳达说，“这一切都没什么了不起的。我很明白，不过我想我该走了。我想回伦敦去了。”

“你不太喜欢达维德，对吗？”

琳达的眼睛里闪过一丝错愕，然后又很快变得亲热而温柔。

“不，不，我很喜欢达维德。我五岁时就认识他了，他是我哥哥最好的朋友，那时他们在伊顿公学读书……”

说出这句没头没脑的话后，她牢牢盯住了米莉森特的眼睛，似乎刚才她向她吐露了某件最关键的事。

“很好，”米莉森特说，“不过我不明白为什么你不能够原谅这件事，连我都准备原谅他了。家里的确是一团乱，但我宁可留在这里，也不想带着这一团要命的乱麻回伦敦去。”

琳达抓过那瓶白兰地，给自己灌了满满一大杯。至少在米莉森特看来，她喝得也太多了点儿。

“达维德对你非常好。”她说。

“的确是这样。”米莉森特说的是实话。

没错，他是个亲和、殷勤、会照顾人的男人，有时候充满了想象力，但不幸的是，他非常容易神经衰弱。但是这一点，她不会告诉琳达。她不会告诉她，达维德在伦敦时整天都躺在长沙发上，眯着眼睛，拒绝出门。她不会告诉她，达维德会做那些可怕的噩梦。她不会告诉她，达维德像是有强迫症似的，老在跟一个生意人打电话，她甚至记不起那个男人的名字。她不会告诉她，当哪个孩子考了糟糕的分数时，达维德是怎样地暴跳如雷。她也不会告诉琳达，只要一涉及家具，涉及画，他会变得多么面目可憎；不会告诉她，这个看上去殷勤和气的达维德，有时候会把跟别人的约会忘得一干二净，包括和她的；更不会告诉她，他有时回到家时的样子。她同样也不可能告诉琳达，有一次，她从镜子里偷看到他背部的疤痕……单是想到这件事，她的心里就七上八下：作为一个英国女人，一个体面的女人，她开始怀疑——终于她想要去了解了。“你觉得是埃丝特还是帕梅拉？”因为毕竟，他的确没有时间去见她们之外的其他女人。那些女人，哪怕是放荡不羁的女人，也会要求所爱的男人有时间陪她们。达维德的风流韵事，如果存在的话，也只能是冲动、意外的短暂关系，比如和妓女的那档子事。可是，怎能想象，达维德这样一个高傲又挑剔的人，会是一个色情狂呢？

琳达的声音仿佛从很远很远的地方飘来。

“你为什么会觉得是帕梅拉或者埃丝特？她们都是那么苛刻的人……”

“你说得对。”米莉森特说。

她站起身，径直走到客厅的镜子前，盯着自己看。她依然很美，别人总是不厌其烦地告诉她这一点，有时候，甚至还向她大献殷勤。而她的丈夫，则是朋友圈里最有魅力、最有才能的男人。可是为什么，当面对镜中的自己，她觉得看到的只是一具没有血肉的骷髅？

“我觉得很可惜，”她说（她已经不太分得清自己是在跟谁说话），“很可惜达维德都没有什么要好的同性朋友。你注意到没有？”

“我从来没留意过。”琳达坐在那里，幽幽地答道。米莉森特看不到她的脸，她就像是嵌在长沙发里的一片剪影。她知道？她知道什么？那个女人的名字吗？为什么她不告诉自己那个女人的名字？琳达是出于善意还是出于恶意——在这种情况下，谁说得清——才不肯吐露出那个女人的名字？那又是为什么，在这样一个七月的夜晚，穿着一袭寂寥的浅色长裙的她，脸上会有一种受惊女人的神色？必须让一切水落石出。如果这是真的，那就要接受达维德在外面有女人的事实，不管是某个朋友，还是某个妓女。不要把事情搞得太难看。也许，过些时日，她可以满面笑容地报复那个名叫蓓西或者其他什么名字的女人。一切要做得不着痕迹。于是，她站起身，高傲地掸了掸沙发上的灰，用女王般的语气宣布：“听着，亲爱的，不管怎么说，今晚我们睡在这里。我会上楼去，看看房间变成什么样了。如果我那亲爱的丈夫把狂欢派对也开到了那里，我会打电话给布里格斯太太，她就住在两公里外，她会过来帮我们。你看怎么样？”

“这样很好，”琳达在黑暗中说，“这样很好，就按你说的办吧。”

米莉森特起身走上楼梯。家里挂满了两个儿子的照片，她心不在焉地冲他们微笑。他们也到了去伊顿公学读书的年纪了，就像当年的达维德，和那个谁？哦，对了，琳达的哥哥。她吃惊自己居然需要扶住栏杆才能走上楼梯。她的腿仿佛被砍断了一般，不是因为高尔夫，也不是因为那个可能存在的淫妇。任何人都可以面对被背叛的事实，也必须去面对。这不是大哭大闹寻死觅活的理由。总之，对她米莉森特来说不是。她走进了“他们”的卧室，“他们家”的卧室，看到眼前的床是令人脸红心跳的狼藉，翻云覆雨后的混乱，似乎从她与达维德结婚以来，都从来没有乱成这样过。第二件让她注意到的东西，是搁在床头柜上的一块手表，就放在她那一边的床头柜上。那是一款防水手表，一块硕大的男士手表。她用指尖挑起它掂了掂分量，怔了好一会儿，才终于明白过来：是另一个男人把它留在了这里。她全明白了。楼下，是忧心忡忡的琳达，在黑暗当中，越来越惊慌的琳达。米莉森特下了楼，很奇怪地，她竟带着一丝怜悯看着同样知情的琳达。

“哦，我亲爱的，”她说，“恐怕被你说中了。睡房里有一件肉红色香艳透顶的情趣内衣呢。”

孤独的池塘

普鲁登斯[1]——这是她的名字，可惜，这名字实在与她不相称。普鲁登斯·德尔沃在特拉普镇附近的一条林间小路上停了车，心不在焉地，在十一月冰冷潮湿的风中漫无目的地走着。此时是傍晚五点，暮色降临。这是个伤感的时间，尤其在这样伤感的月份和伤感的景色里。但她还是轻轻地吹起口哨，时不时弯下腰捡起一颗栗子或一枚红叶，她喜欢那样的颜色。她自嘲地问自己究竟在这里干什么，以及为什么在和她可爱的情人在可爱的朋友们家里过完一个可爱的周末之后，她会突如其来地感到自己需要停下来，迫不及待地停下她的菲亚特，走出来，走入有着缤纷落叶的令人忧伤的秋天里，无法抑制地，渴望独自一个人走走路。

她穿着一件优雅的罗登呢大衣，大衣正是落叶的色调，颈上围一条真丝方巾，她今年三十岁。脚上一双大方得体的长靴，让走路都变成一种享受。一只乌鸦划过长空，发出嘶哑的叫声，很快，一整群乌鸦跟上它，弥漫了整个天际。很奇怪地，这叫声虽然熟悉，但骤然飞起的乌鸦令她心跳加速，一股莫名的恐惧袭来。普鲁登斯不惧怕流浪汉，不惧怕寒冷，不惧怕刮风，亦不惧怕生活本身。她的朋友们甚至一叫她的名字就忍不住哈哈大笑。他们说，这个名字配上她本人，是个活生生的悖论。只是，她讨厌她不了解的东西，也许那才是唯一令她害怕的：不明白自己身上会发生什么。这时候，她突然不得不停下来，深吸一口气。

她仿佛置身勃鲁盖尔的风景画中。她喜欢勃鲁盖尔的画。她喜欢热腾腾等候着她的汽车，和车子里她将打开的音乐。她喜欢想象在今晚八点，和那个爱着她、她也爱着的男人相聚，他的名字叫让-弗朗索瓦。她也喜欢想象他们共度良宵之后，她打着哈欠起床，一口喝下他或者她自己为“对方”煮好的咖啡。还有，她想到明天将回到自己的办公室里，跟马克谈广告的事情。马克是个出色的朋友，她跟他共事已超过五年。他们嬉笑着说，要让某个牌子的洗衣粉卖得好，最好的方式是证明这款洗衣粉能把衣服洗得更灰，因为人们更需要的是灰色而不是白色，是灰暗而不是耀眼，是喜新厌旧而不是经久耐用。

她喜欢这一切。事实上，她挺喜欢自己的生活：很多的朋友，很多的情人，一份有趣的工作，甚至一个自己的孩子，还有对音乐、书籍、鲜花和炉火的喜好。但是当那只乌鸦飞过天空，后面跟着铺天盖地的鸦群，那一刻，她的心也被某种东西划破了。她无法描摹它，也无法向任何人解释它，任何人，甚至（而这正是最严重的）她自己。

前方向右分出一条岔路，那里立着一块告示牌，表明前方是“荷兰池塘”。想到落日余晖下的一泓池水，芦苇依依，荆豆殷红，也许还有几只野鸭在游弋，她立刻被这想象中的场景引诱得加快了脚步。的确，池塘就在那里，几步就到了。池水灰蓝，虽然没有满池野鸭（甚至连一只野鸭的影子都没有），但水面铺满了落叶，它们彼此簇拥着，徐徐沉入池塘。所有的落叶旋转着坠落的姿态，仿佛在做最后的、无望的求助。每一片落叶都带着奥菲莉娅式的神情。她发现了一段树干，也许是哪个粗心的伐木工人遗忘在这里的，于是她坐了上去。她越来越强烈地质问自己，究竟在这里干吗。她肯定要迟到了，让-弗朗索瓦会担心的，让-弗朗索瓦会发火的，让-弗朗索瓦是有道理的。当你身在福中的时候，你可以做让自己开心（同时也让别人开心）的事，但你不能在一个以前闻所未闻的池塘边流连，独自一个人，坐在废弃的树干上，吹着冷风。她可没有“神经病”。别人都这样称呼那些不幸的人——总之，说的就是那些活不下去的人。

为了让自己安下心，她从大衣口袋里掏出一支烟，同时很欣慰地在另一个口袋里摸到一只“克里凯”瑞典打火机，点了烟。烟雾温暖辛辣，香烟的味道令她觉得陌生。可是十年来，她抽的都是同一个牌子的烟。

“真的，”她自言自语道，“也许我只不过是需要一点儿孤独？也许我太久没有一个人待着了？也许这个池塘具有某种魔力？也许并不是偶然，而是命运把我带到这个岸边？也许有一连串的巫术包围着荷兰池塘……既然名字这么叫……”

她把手垫在屁股下，撑在树干上。手掌接触到木头的质地，凹凸不平的表面，却被磨损得光滑，也许，是因为雨水，也因为孤独。（还有什么能比一棵死去的、被砍断、被遗弃的树，一棵已经百无一用——不能生火，不能变成木板，也不能做成一把情人靠椅——的树，更孤独、更悲哀呢？）手掌与木头的接触，在她的心中唤起一股柔情。令她自己都吓一跳的是，泪水竟然涌上她的眼眶。她仔细地观察木头的纹理，尽管它的纹理已经很难辨认——灰，近乎白色——因为这段木头也已经变灰、变白。（“真像，”她自言自语道，“像老年人的血管。你看不到血液在其中流动，你知道它在里面，但你听不到，也看不到。”）这棵树也是一样。它的树液已经不在了。树液，是它的元气，是活力，是激情，是“做”的欲望：做蠢事，做爱，做工作……是去行动，是无论做点儿什么……

所有这些念头像过山车一样闪过脑海，这时候，她已经弄不清楚自己是谁。她忽然想好好看一看她自己，而之前的她，被生活填得满满的她，从未审视过自己，也从未试图审视自己。她突然看到这样一个女人，穿着罗登呢大衣，在一潭死水的池塘边，坐在一段枯木上，抽着烟。身体内有一个她，百分百想要立刻逃离这个地方，回到她的汽车上，打开车里的音乐，立即上路。她有千百种办法逃避死神，一个灵活的驾车人自会有千百种招数避免事故，那个她，急切地想要回到让-弗朗索瓦的怀里，回到巴黎的咖啡馆里，回到诗人纪尧姆·阿波利奈尔所挚爱的“杜松子酒、茨冈人、虹吸管与电灯光”当中去。但身体里有另外一个她，一个她不认识的人——或者说，是在此之前她从来不曾去了解的人——那个她，想要看着夜幕降临，看着池塘隐没在黑暗中，感受手掌下的木头变得冰冷。也许，为什么不呢？……然后，她想要走向这潭水，先是冷，然后隐没、消失在水中，直到池塘的最深处。那里是金色和蓝色的沙地，铺满了白天从水面陷落的枯叶。在那个地方，躺在枯叶上，周围环绕着温柔的鱼群，那个她终于彻彻底底地松弛下来，回到摇篮，回到真正的生活，也就是：死亡。

“我疯了。”她想。而一个声音在她耳畔低语道：“我向你保证，这才是真相，这才是真实的你。”这似乎是来自童年的声音。而另一个声音，成熟的声音，穿过三十年的幸福人生，那个声音对她说：“我的小姑娘，你必须回去，吃些维生素B和维生素C。你身上有些东西不太对头。”

当然，第二个声音占了上风。普鲁登斯·德尔沃站起身，放弃了枯木、池塘、落叶和生活。她返回巴黎，返回她的长沙发上，返回酒吧，返回人们所谓的存在中。她回到那个名叫让-弗朗索瓦的情人身边。

她打开车里的音乐，格外小心地开着车，她甚至为刚才那半个小时的犯痴而微笑起来。但她花了两个月的时间去忘记荷兰池塘。足足两个月。总之，她自始至终没有对让-弗朗索瓦提起它。

躺着的男人

他裹在毯子里，像陷在沙漠中。他挣扎着又翻了一次身，惊恐地闻到自己身上的气味。他曾经那么喜欢这气味，在那些清晨时分，在那些女人的身体上，闻到它。在那些不眠之夜后的巴黎清晨，在陌生的身体旁沉沉睡去的时刻，在半梦半醒中起身，匆忙离去的早晨。匆忙，他曾是一个匆忙的人。但如今，在这个春日的下午，他躺在床上，濒临死亡。死亡是一个稀罕的词。对于他而言，这个荒诞的事实似乎并不是按常理那样一步一步地逼近，而是突如其来。比如，在滑雪的时候突然摔断腿。“为什么是我，为什么是今天，为什么？”

“我肯定会好起来。”他大声说。

窗前，逆光而坐的那个人影忽然微微惊动了一下。他把她给忘了，他总是把她忘到九霄云外。他记得当他发现她与让的私情时，他曾有多惊讶。对于那个人来说，她是个活生生的女人，有着美丽的容颜和肉体。他的脸上浮上一丝笑，原本微弱的心跳加快起来。

他快死了。此时此刻，他很清楚，他快死了。他的身体正在被撕扯。然而，她弯下身，扶起他的肩膀。他感觉到自己的肩胛骨，瘦削得滑稽的肩胛骨，在妻子温柔的手中颤抖。滑稽。对，正是这个会要了他的命。滑稽地死去。有没有哪种病可以让人死得漂亮一点？显然没有。人唯一的美感，也许只是在往来世纵身一跃的那一刹。不过，他平静了下来，她俯身把他的头放在枕上，阳光掠过她的脸庞，他看到她的脸。她有一张美丽的脸，二十年前，正是因为这容颜，他娶了她。但她脸上的神情激怒了他。这是一张忧虑的、心不在焉的面庞。她一定是在想着让。

“我是说，我也许会好起来的。”

“当然会。”她说。

很可笑。她是真的不爱他了。她清楚地知道，她将失去他。不过，她很早以前就已经失去了他。“当我们失去一个人，那就意味着永远地失去。”他在哪儿读过这句话来着？是真的吗？总之，她再也看不到他走进家门，读报纸，或者说话。不，她不爱他了。如果她仍然爱他，她一定会对他说：“哦，不，亲爱的，你就要死了。”她会抓住他的手，那张光洁的脸庞紧绷着，陷入死一般的沉默。这种沉默，只有当我们面对着所爱的人，面对所爱之人垂死的时刻，才会这样……

“别激动。”她说。

“我没激动，我只是挪一挪。激动，我已经不行了。”

他用了开玩笑的口气。“不管怎么说，我要死了。”他想：“也许我应该好好跟她谈一谈？可是谈什么？谈我们？我们之间没话可说了。”然而，一想到自己的机会所剩无几，他又焦虑起来。

“我拖累你了，”他说，“我很抱歉。”

他缓缓地，默默地，抓住了她的手。上一次这样做，是在两年前，在布洛涅森林：他跟一个傻乎乎的小姑娘坐在长凳上。当时，为了不要吓到她，他也做了这样一个静默的动作。其实没有必要，一个小时后，她就跟着他回家了。但他仍然记得，他的手，为了触摸到对方发烫的手指，所要跨过的辽远距离……那些时刻……

“你的手很美。”他说。

她没有回答。他吃力地看着她。他很想叫她打开百叶窗，但又觉得，昏暗的光线可能更适合这最后的一出戏。戏？他怎么会想到这个字眼？这里没有人在演戏。但是，他已经在试图开场了。

“今天星期四，”他叹着气，“我小时候，一直盼望一周真的会有四个星期四[2]。现在也这么想：那样的话我就能再活三天了。”

“别说蠢话。”她耸耸肩。

“哦，不！”他忽然狂躁起来，挣扎着要起身。

“你不能抹去我的死！你很清楚我马上就要死了。”她看着他，轻轻地笑了。

“你笑什么？”他的声音软下来。

“我想起一句话。你肯定忘记了，是十五年前的事。那天我们在法尔托尼家。当时，我并不知道你欺骗了我，但还是起了疑心……”

他感到一股久违的满足感，但很快抑制了下去。现在的局面还不够荒诞吗！

“然后呢？”

“那天晚上，我终于明白，你是妮科尔·法尔托尼的情人。她的丈夫当时不在家，你把我送回家后，跟我说你还要回办公室去，你说有什么东西还没做完……”

她一字一句，缓缓地说着。而他，他想起了妮科尔。她是个温柔的、有点爱抱怨的金发女人。

“于是，我对你说我想要你回来，我说我希望这样。我不敢告诉你我知道了，你总是说善妒的女人有多愚蠢，而我害怕……”

她的语气越来越柔和，仿佛在自言自语，仿佛只是在柔情地讲述难过的童年往事。他恼火起来。

“那，我当时也跟你说我要死了吗？”

“不，但你用了类似的句式。你对我说……哦，不！”她一边说着，一边大笑起来，笑得厉害……

他也笑了，但并不起劲。不管怎么说，这不是笑的时候，尤其轮不到她笑——只有他才有权力这样肆无忌惮地笑。

“然后呢？继续说。”

“然后你对我说：‘你不能剥夺我的女人，你知道我想要她。’”

“哦。”他说（他觉得失望，他原本还期待着会听到什么佳句），“这一点儿都不好笑。”

“不，”她说，“好笑的只是，当你那样跟我说的时候，脸上那确凿的神情……”

她又笑出声来，但收敛了一些，似乎感觉到他生气了。

但此刻，他在倾听自己的心跳。可怜巴巴的心跳声，轻得几乎听不见。“我们之间真的没话可说。”他苦涩地想。他觉得倦了。二十岁就知道的事，却花了一辈子来证实。爱情，正如死亡，不由分说。

“说吧。”他闭上眼睛，这样心情会舒服点儿。

“什么？”她说。

他看着她。真是奇怪，自己留在她心中的，竟然是那些细枝末节的往事。那个在二十岁时那么温柔无邪的人，已经变得让他认不出了。他已认不出她。玛尔特……她变成了怎样的一个人？

“你爱他吗，”他说，“那个让？”

她回答他，但他没有在听。他又一次试着去数天花板上光影的条数。阳光留下的，流转不定的光影。未来的地中海，仍会如此湛蓝吗？有人在院子里唱歌。他这辈子，曾经那么狂热地爱好器乐，以至于最后，他无法再忍受音乐。她，玛尔特，会弹钢琴。但做工漂亮的钢琴实在太少，而他对器物的品位又异常苛刻。反正，他们从未买过一台钢琴。

“你还会弹钢琴吗？”他不无悲哀地问她。

“钢琴？”她反问。

她吃了一惊，她自己都已经想不起来了：她已经忘记了她的年轻时代。只有他，只有他一个人，还眷恋着记忆中玛尔特的颈背，她背对着他，坐在黑色的钢琴前，年轻的颈背笔直而端然，一头金色的长发。他转过头去。

“为什么和我说起钢琴？”她坚持问。

他没有回答，只是抓紧了她的手。他的心跳令他害怕，他又感觉到了那种熟悉的痛苦。啊！给我一点儿片刻的安全感吧，达夫妮的肩膀，或者酒的滋味。但达夫妮此刻正和居伊那个臭小子住在一起，而喝酒只会让他的病情恶化。他怕了，没错，他害怕了……

他的意识在消散，肌肉在萎缩。多么可怕。他极度害怕死亡，以至于无法对她挤出一个微笑。

“我害怕。”他对玛尔特说。

他重复着这三个字，加重语气。这三个字，生涩、粗粝、诚恳。而他这辈子，曾是那么习惯那些轻快顺口的词语，“亲爱的”“我的甜心”“你想什么时候”“马上”“明天”。玛尔特这个名字听起来不是那么柔和，他很少把它放在嘴边。

“别担心。”她说。

然后，她向他俯下身，将手放在他的眼睛上。

“一切都会好的。我会在这里，不会离开你。”

“哦，不可能，”他说，“要是你要出门，比如去购物……”

“那也马上就回来。”

她的眼眶浸满泪水。可怜的玛尔特，这令她很不好受。而他，却感到些许释怀。

“你不恨我？”他问。

“我还记得好多事呢。”她在他耳边喃喃地说。这声音令他想起起码十个相似的声音，带着喘息，在沙龙的某个角落，或是在海滩上。他的棺木后面应该会跟着一长串的呢喃，温柔又滑稽。在他的扶手椅上，达夫妮，他最后的情人，也许会抱着他的照片凭吊，而年轻的居伊则会勃然大怒。

“没事的，”他说，“我真希望能死在一片麦田或者玉米地中。”

“你说什么？”

“让麦秆在我的头顶随风舞动。你知道，有句话这么说：‘起风了，好好活着。’”

“放轻松。”

“人们总是对垂死的人说，放轻松。现在是时候了。”

“是的，”她说，“是时候了。”

她的声音很美，玛尔特的声音。他一直把她的手握在自己的手心里。他将握着一个女人的手死去，这多好。至于这个女人是不是属于他，已不重要。

“幸福，”他说，“两个人的幸福，不是那么容易……”然后他笑出声来，因为到头来，幸福，他已经不在乎了。幸福，或者玛尔特，或者达夫妮，都已无关紧要。他只剩下一颗心在跳动，一下，两下，三下。此刻，这是他唯一爱着的东西。

The Gigolo

He walked beside her along the rain-sodden paths full of dead leaves, giving her his hand now and again to guide her round a puddle. He smiled as he did so, a genuine, unforced smile. It occurred to her that this walk in the woods round Meudon would have been a penance for any young man, especially with a woman of her age. Not an old woman, but a bored, jaded one who walked through the woods without any real pleasure, merely because it was preferable to the cinema or a crowded bar.

Of course, for him, there had been the drive there,

in the luxurious fast car which it gave him a childish pleasure to drive; but was that sufficient compensation for this interminable, silent walk along these desolate autumnal paths? ‘He’s bored, he must be bored to death.’ Strangely relishing the idea, she turned down another path, one which led them further away from the car, with a sort of dread mixed with hope– the hope that he would suddenly revolt against this boredom, lose his temper, say something wounding, unforgivable, anything that would underline the gap of twenty years between them.

But he always smiled. She had never known him irritable or rude, never seen him smirk in the ironical,condescending way of very young men who know they are desirable. The smirk which said so plainly: ‘All right, as a favour to you... But remember,I’m as free as air: so don’t irritate me.’ The cruel smirk of youth which had made her cold, hard and wounding, and had so often caused her to end an affair.With Michel, for instance, the first time she had noticed it, then the others...

‘Careful,’ he said, taking her arm, saving her from tearing her stockings or her dress, her well-cut elegant dress, on a bramble. If he should ever smirk like that, would she still be able to throw him out like the rest of them? She didn’t feel she would have the heart. Not that she respected him more than the others: she kept him completely, dressed him, gave him expensive presents which he didn’t throw back in her face. He never went in for those stupid, boorish ploys the others indulged in, those sulky moods when they wanted something or felt they were the injured party in the bargain struck between their bodies and her money–that was it,really: they felt hard done by. They would get her to buy them all manner of luxuries and expensive trinkets which they didn’t even want, simply in order to restore their self-esteem.

The word esteem made her laugh inwardly.It was none the less the only word for it.

Perhaps Nicholas’s charm lay in the fact that he really hankered after these presents; not that he demanded them, but he took such evident pleasure in receiving them that she felt like a normal woman rewarding a child instead of an ageing mistress buying a fresh young body she secretly despised. She quickly dismissed such thoughts. Thank God, she didn’t go in for being maternal and protective with that bunch of grasping young men who were too handsome for their own good. Neither did she go in for disguising the facts; she was cynical and clear-headed,and they knew it and respected her for it,however grudgingly. ‘You give me your body, I pay you for it.’ Some, piqued at not having to rebuff her,had tried to introduce a vague touch of sentimentality,perhaps in order to get a little more out of her.These she had sent to other protectresses, explaining to them exactly where they stood: ‘I despise you, as I despise myself for putting up with you. I only keep you for the sake of those two hours at night.’ She relegated them to the rank of animals, deliberately,without a qualm.

With Nicholas, it wasn’t so simple: he brought no trace of affection, or caddishness or sentimentality to his role as gigolo. He was friendly, polite and a good lover, not very expert, perhaps, but passionate,almost tender . . . He stayed at home all day, lolling about on the carpet, reading anything he could lay his hands on. He didn’t ask to be taken out all the time, and when they did go out he seemed to be unaware of the meaningful looks they attracted: he was as attentive and smiling as if he were escorting the young woman of his choice. In fact, apart from the condescension, the brutality with which she treated him, there was nothing to distinguish their relationship from that of an ordinary couple.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ He glanced at her anxiously as though her health really mattered to him more than anything else in the world. She felt exasperated with him for playing his part so well, for being so nearly what she might still have hoped for ten years ago;she remembered that at the time she still had her rich husband, her rich and ugly husband, whose business affairs were his sole preoccupation.

How could she have been so stupid as to have failed to take advantage of her beauty, now faded,and been unfaithful to him? She had been asleep and it had taken her husband’s death and her first night with Michel to awaken her. Everything had begunthat night.

‘I asked you if you were cold.’

‘No, no. Anyway, it’s time we went back.’

‘Wouldn’t you like my jacket?’

His beautiful Creed jacket... she glanced at it without interest as at some dull new possession.A russet and grey check, its autumn colours suited Nicholas’s thick, silky auburn hair.

‘How autumnal we are,’ she murmured to herself.‘Your jacket, this wood...my autumn.’

He didn’t reply. She was surprised at herself because she never alluded to her age. He knew perfectly well how old she was and he didn’t care. She might just as well throw herself into that lake. She imagined herself for a moment, floating in the water in her Dior dress . . . Thoughts like that were all very well for the young. ‘At my age, one doesn’t think of death, one clings to life.’ One clings to the pleasures of money, of the night; one makes the most of things, and of people, such as this young man walking beside one down a deserted woodland path.

‘Nicholas,’ she said, in her hoarse, imperious voice. ‘Nicholas, kiss me.’

They were separated by a puddle. He looked at her for a moment before stepping over it, and the thought flashed through her mind: ‘He must hate me.’ He took her in his arms and gently raised her head.

‘My age,’ she thought, as he kissed her, ‘just for the moment you’ve forgotten my age; you’re too young to play with fire without getting burnt,Nicholas...’

‘Nicholas!’

He looked at her, a little breathless, his hair rumpled.

You were hurting me,’ she said with a faint smile.

They walked on in silence. She was surprised at the quickening of her pulse. That kiss– what had come over Nicholas?-that kiss was like a farewell kiss, hungry and sad, as if he loved her. He was as free as air; women and luxuries were his for the asking.What had possessed him? And that sudden pallor... He was dangerous, extremely dangerous.They had been together over six months; it couldn’t go on any longer without leading to trouble. Besides,she was tired, tired of Paris, of the noise and rush. Tomorrow she would leave for the Midi, alone.

They were back at the car. She turned to him and took his arm in an automatic gesture of pity. ‘After all,’ she thought, ‘the poor boy’s losing his livelihood.Even if it’s only temporary, it’s a nasty blow.’

‘I’m leaving for the Midi tomorrow, Nicholas. I’m tired.’

‘Will you be taking me?’

‘No, Nicholas, I shan’t be taking you.’

She almost wished that she was; it would have been fun showing Nicholas the sea. He must have been there before, of course, but he always gave the impression of discovering everything for the first time.

‘You’ve had enough of me?’

He spoke softly, his eyes downcast. There was a break in his voice which touched her. She had a glimpse of the life he would have, the sordid quarrels,the compromises and the boredom, all because he was too handsome, too weak and the ideal prey for a certain kind of woman belonging to a certain milieu and with a certain income, women like herself.

‘I haven’t had enough of you in the least, my dear Nicholas. You’re very sweet, very attractive, but it couldn’t go on for ever, could it? It’s over six months since we met.’

‘I know,’ he said, as though his mind were elsewhere.‘The first time was at that cocktail party of Mme Essini’s.’

She suddenly remembered that hectic party and the first glimpse she had had of Nicholas, looking miserable because old Mme Essini was talking to him at very close quarters and giggling girlishly. Nicholas was pressed up against the bar, with no hope of escape.The scene had amused her at first, then she had looked at Nicholas with increasing interest and cynical speculation. These cocktail parties were like horse fairs or cattle shows. One almost expected to see mature ladies lifting the young men’s upper lips to examine their teeth.

Finally, she had gone over to greet her hostess, and passing before a mirror, had suddenly been struck by her own beauty. Nicholas’s relief at the interruption had been so obvious that she couldn’t help smiling, and her smile had put old Mme Essini on her guard.

She had introduced Nicholas with reluctance.Then there had been the usual gossip about people and their private lives. Nicholas seemed rather at sea. After an hour, she found him decidedly attractive and resolved to tell him so at once, as was her wont. They were sitting on a sofa by a window, and he was lighting a cigarette when she addressed him by name in a voice that scarcely faltered:

‘I find you very attractive, Nicholas.’

He made no response, but took the cigarette out of his mouth and gazed at her.

‘I live at the Ritz,’ she went on coldly.

She was well aware of the importance of this last point. The Ritz was the answer to every gigolo’s dream. Nicholas made a slight gesture of protest,but said nothing to show that he had understood.She thought: ‘Well, that’s that,’ and rose to her feet.

Nicholas got up too. He was rather pale.

‘May I escort you home?’

In the car, he had put his arm round her shoulders and asked her innumerable eager questions about the overdrive and the finer points of the engine. In the bedroom, it was she who had kissed him first,and he had taken her in his arms with a slight tremor and a mixture of violence and gentleness. At dawn,while he slept like a child, dead to the world, she had gone to the window to watch the day break over the Place Vendôme.

Thereafter, it had been Nicholas playing patience on the floor, Nicholas by her side at the races, Nicholas’s eyes on the gold cigarette-case she gave him,

and Nicholas suddenly seizing her hand during a party and kissing it. And now there was Nicholas whom she was about to leave and who said nothing,who was keeping up this pose of exaggerated indifference...

She got into the car and threw her head back, suddenly exhausted. Nicholas got in beside her and drove off.

From time to time on the way back she glanced at his preoccupied, distant profile, and could not help thinking that she would have been madly in love with him at twenty and that maybe life was nothing but a hopeless mess. When they reached the Ported’Italie, Nicholas turned to her:

‘Where are we going?’

‘We have to drop in at Johnny’s Bar,’ she said. ‘I’ve made a date with Mme Essini there for seven o’clock.’

Mme Essini was punctual as usual. It was one of her few virtues. Nicholas shook the old lady’s hand,looking rather distraught.

Watching them both, a pleasing idea came to her:‘By the way, I’m leaving for the Midi tomorrow,so I shan’t be able to come to your party on the sixteenth.

I’m so sorry.’

Mme Essini regarded them both with a bogus air of affection:

‘You lucky things, off to the sun...’

‘I’m not going,’ said Nicholas shortly.

There was a silence. The eyes of both women converged on Nicholas, Mme Essini’s the more meaningfully.

‘Then you must come to my party. You can’t stay in Paris all alone, it’s too depressing.’

‘What a good idea,’ she interjected.

Mme Essini’s hand was already resting possessively on Nicholas’s sleeve. The latter’s reaction was unexpected. He jumped up and walked out. She found him waiting by the car.

‘What’s come over you, Nicholas? Poor old Essini might have been a bit premature, but she’s fancied you for a long time, there’s nothing to get upset about.’

Nicholas stood there without a word and seemed to be breathing with difficulty. She felt an upsurge of pity.

‘Get in. You can tell me all about it when we get home.’

But he didn’t wait until they got home. He told her in a strangled voice that he wasn’t an animal to be bought and sold, that he could perfectly well look after himself and that he refused to be put out to pasture with an old vulture like Essini. And in any case he couldn’t do anything for her, she was too old...

‘But my dear Nicholas, she’s my age.’

They had arrived. Nicholas turned towards her and suddenly took her face between his hands. He looked at her searchingly and she tried in vain to free herself, conscious that her make‑up had probably not survived the day.

‘You’re different,’ said Nicholas in a low voice.

‘You’re... you’re attractive. I like your face. How could you...’

There was a note of despair in his voice as he let her go. She was dumbfounded.

‘How could I what?’

‘How could you offer me to that woman? Haven’t I spent six months with you? Didn’t it occur to you that I might become attached to you, that I could... ?’

She turned away brusquely.

‘You’re cheating,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I can’t afford to cheat. I’ve had enough. Go away.’

Alone in her bedroom, she examined herself in the mirror. She was irretrievably old; she was over sixty and her eyes were full of tears. She packed hurriedly and went to bed alone in her double bed. She cried for some time before going to sleep, putting it down to nerves.

The Unknown Visitor

She took the corner at full speed and pulled up sharply in front of the house. She always sounded her horn on arrival. She didn’t know why, but every time she arrived home she would give David, her husband, this warning that she was back. That day,she found herself wondering how and why she had acquired the habit. After all, they had been married for ten years, they had been living for ten years in this charming cottage in Berkshire, and it hardly seemed necessary to announce herself in this way to the father of her two children, her husband and ultimate protector.

‘Where can he have got to?’ she said in the ensuing silence, and she got out of the car and walked with her golfer’s stride towards the house, followed by the faithful Linda.

Life had not been kind to Linda Forthman. At the age of thirty-two,after an unhappy divorce, she had remained alone– often courted, but still alone– and it required all Millicent’s good nature and enthusiasm to endure, for example, this entire Sunday in her company, playing golf. Though uncomplaining, Linda was infuriatingly apathetic. She looked at men (unmarried men, of course), they looked back at her,and things never seemed to go any further. To a woman like Millicent, who was full of charm and vitality,Linda Forthman’s character was an enigma.From time to time, with his usual cynicism, David would offer an explanation: ‘She’s waiting for a chap,’ he would say. ‘Like every other girl, she’s waiting for some chap she can get her hooks into.’ Not only was it untrue, it was grossly unfair. In Millicent’s view, Linda was simply waiting for someone who would love her, for all her apathy, and take her in hand.

Come to think of it, David was very contemptuous and acerbic on the subject of Linda, and indeed of the majority of their friends. She must talk to him about it. For instance, he refused to see the good side of that buffoon Jack Harris, who, even if he was as dumb as an ox, was generosity and kindness itself.

David was always saying of him: ‘Jack’s a ladies’ man... without the ladies’, at which point he would roar with laughter at his own joke as though it were one of the inimitable witticisms of Shaw or Wilde.

She pushed open the door into the drawing room and paused, flabbergasted, on the threshold. There were overflowing ashtrays and open bottles all over the place and two dressing gowns lying in a corner in a heap: hers and David’s. For one panic-stricken moment she wanted to turn round and leave, and pretend not to have seen. She cursed herself for not having telephoned beforehand, to say she was coming back earlier than expected: Sunday night instead of Monday morning. But Linda was there behind her, wide-eyed, a look of dismay on her pale face, and she would have to think up some plausible explanation for the irreparable occurrence that had evidently taken place in her house. Her house...? Their house . . . ? For the past ten years, she had said ‘our house’ and David ‘the house’. For the past ten years, she had talked about pot plants, gardenias, verandahs and lawns, and for the past ten years David had said nothing in reply.

‘What on earth,’ said Linda, and her high-pitched voice made Millicent shudder, ‘what on earth has been going on here? Has David been giving parties in your absence?’

Millicent laughed. She, at least, seemed to be taking it fairly lightly. And indeed it was perfectly possible that David, who had left for Liverpool two days before, had come back unexpectedly, spent the night there and gone out to dine at the near‑by Country Club. Only there were these two dressing gowns, those two gaudy shrouds, those two banners, as it were, of adultery. She was astonished by her own astonishment. After all, David was a very attractive man. He had blue eyes, black hair and considerable wit. And yet it had never occurred to her, she had never had the slightest presentiment, let alone proof, that he was interested in any other woman. Of that much, without knowing why, she was certain. In fact she was absolutely convinced that David had never even looked at another woman.

She pulled herself together, crossed the room, picked up the two incriminating dressing gowns and threw them into the kitchen-hurriedly, but not hurriedly enough to avoid seeing the two used cups on the table and a butter-smeared plate. She shut the door hastily as though she had witnessed a rape; and, emptying the ashtrays, tidying away the bottles, chatting amiably, she set about trying to distract Linda from her initial curiosity and get her to sit down.

‘Such a bore,’ she said. ‘Probably the maid didn’t come to clean up after last weekend. Do sit down,darling. Shall I make you a cup of tea?’

Linda sat down gloomily, her head between her knees and her bag swinging from her fingertips. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘I’d prefer something stronger than tea. That last round of golf exhausted me...’

Millicent went back to the kitchen, averting her eyes from the cups, grabbed some ice cubes and a bottle of whisky and set them down in front of Linda. They sat facing one another in the drawing room furnished in bamboo and shadowed cretonne which David had brought back from somewhere or other. The room now looked-if not huma-at least presentable once again, and through the french windows the elm trees could be seen swaying in the wind, that same wind which had driven them off the golf course an hour ago.

‘David’s in Liverpool,’ said Millicent, and she realized that her voice was peremptory, as though she felt poor Linda was liable to contradict her.

‘I know,’ said Linda amiably, ‘you told me.’

They both stared out of the window, then at their feet, then at one another.

Something was beginning to take hold in Millicent’s mind. Like a wolf, or a fox, at any rate some sort of wild animal, it was gnawing at her. And the pain was getting worse. She gulped down some whisky to calm herself and caught Linda’s eye again. ‘Well,’ she thought to herself, ‘if it’s what I think it is, if it’s what any reasonable person might be expected to think it is, at least it isn’t Linda. We’ve been together all weekend and she’s just as appalled as I am, in fact even more so, oddly enough.’ For, to her mind, the idea of David bringing a woman back to their house, whether or not the children were there,the idea of David bringing that woman here and lending her her dressing gown, still seemed absolutely unthinkable. David never looked at other women. In fact David never looked at anyone. And the word ‘anyone’ suddenly resounded in her head like a gong. It was true that he never looked at anyone. Not even her. David had been born handsome and blind.

Of course it was natural enough, only seemly, really, that after ten years their physical relations should have dwindled practically to nothing. Of course it was only to be expected that after all this time nothing much should remain of the eager, hot- blooded, highly- strung young man she had once known, but even so it was really rather odd that this handsome husband of hers, so blind but so attractive...

‘Millicent,’ said Linda, ‘what do you make of all this?’

She gestured vaguely around the room, indicating the general disorder.

‘What do you expect me to make of it?’ said Millicent.‘Either Mrs Briggs, the charlady, didn’t come in last Monday to clean up, or else David spent the weekend here with a call-girl.’

And she laughed. If anything she felt rather relieved. These were the two alternatives, there was no great mystery about it. There was nothing wrong

with having a good laugh with a girl friend about being deceived by one’s husband and discovering it by chance because it was too windy to play golf.

‘But,’ said Linda (and she too was laughing), ‘but what do you mean, a call-girl? David spends his entire time with you and the children and your friends.I can’t see how he would have the time for girls.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Millicent, laughing even louder-she really did feel relieved, without knowing why-‘perhaps it’s Pamela or Esther or Janie... Search me.’

‘I don’t think any of them would appeal to him,’

said Linda, almost regretfully, and she made a move as if to get up, to Millicent’s alarm.

‘Look, Linda,’ she said, ‘even if we had caught them in the act, you know very well we wouldn’t have made a scene. After all, we’ve been married for ten years, David and I. Both of us have had the odd fling...there’s nothing to make a fuss about...’

‘I know,’ said Linda, ‘these things don’t matter very much. All the same, I must go, I want to get back to London.’

‘You don’t like David much, do you?’

For a second there was a look of amazement in Linda’s eyes, which quickly changed to one of warmth and tenderness.

‘Yes I do, I like him very much. I’ve known him since I was five years old, he was my brother’s best friend at Eton...’

And, having made that pointless and uninteresting statement, she looked intently at Millicent, as though she had just said something of the utmost importance.

‘Good,’ said Millicent. ‘In that case, I don’t see why you can’t forgive David for something I myself am prepared to forgive. I know the house is in a mess, but I’d rather stay here than be stuck in that awful traffic all the way back to London!’

‘David is very good to you,’ she said.

‘Of course he is,’ said Millicent unhesitatingly.

And it was true that he had been a considerate husband, courteous, protective and on occasion highly imaginative. He could also, alas, be exceedingly neurotic: but she would keep that to herself. She wasn’t going to tell Linda about David lying on the sofa in London with his eyes closed for days on end, refusing to go out. She wasn’t going to tell her about David’s terrifying nightmares. She wasn’t going to tell her about David’s manic telephone conversations with some businessman whose name she couldn’t even remember. She wasn’t going to tell her about David’s rages when one of the children failed an exam. Nor would she tell Linda how insufferable David could be about furniture or pictures, nor how forgetful David, the considerate David, sometimes was about his appointments, including those with her. Nor about the state he was sometimes in, when he came home. Least of all could she tell Linda about the marks she had seen on his back one day when she caught sight of it in the mirror ... And the mere memory of this was enough to break down her conventional English reticence, and she asked-at least she heard herself ask-‘Do you really think it’s Esther or Pamela?’ Because it was true that he didn’t have the time to see other women, and even women who indulge in illicit affairs demand a certain amount of time from their lovers. David’s adventures, if they existed, could only be crude, frantic, hurried affairs, with prostitutes or specialists. And it was surely impossible to imagine David, proud, fastidious David, as a masochist...

Linda’s voice seemed to come from a long way away.

‘What makes you think of Pamela or Esther? They’re much too demanding...’

‘You’re right,’ said Millicent.

She stood up, went over to the mirror on the wall and examined herself in it. She was still beautiful-men had told her so often enough, and sometimes proved they meant it-and her husband was one of the most charming and gifted men in their circle. Why, then, did she seem to see in the mirror a sort of skeleton without flesh or nerves or blood or sinews?

‘It seems a pity,’ she said (she hardly knew what she was saying any longer), ‘it seems a pity that David hasn’t more men friends, as well as women friends. Have you noticed?’

‘I’ve never noticed anything,’ said Linda, or rather Linda’s voice, since dusk had descended and all Millicent could see of her was a silhouette, a sort of mouse- like creature perched on the sofa, who knew-but what did she know? The woman’s name. Why didn’t she tell her? Linda was nasty enough or nice enough-how could one tell in such cases?-to murmur a name. Why then, in this July twilight,wrapped in her solitude and her pale suit, did she look as though she was scared out of her wits? One must be rational and down to earth about these things. If it was true, she would have to face up to the fact that David was having an affair with some woman, either a friend or a professional. Vulgar recriminations must be avoided at all costs, and, perhaps, later on, she might even take a light- hearted revenge with Percy or someone. One must see things in their proper perspective, like a woman of the world. She got to her feet, straightened the cushions with a regal hand, and declared:

‘Listen, darling, whatever happens we’ll stay here the night. I’ll go and see what sort of state the rooms are in upstairs. If by any chance my husband has been having an orgy, I’ll telephone Mrs Briggs, who lives down the road, and ask her to give us a hand. Does that suit you?’

‘Fine,’ said Linda from the shadows. ‘Fine. Anything you say.’

And Millicent walked towards the staircase, giving the photograph of their sons an absent- minded smile on the way. They were to go to Eton, like David, and who else was it? Oh, yes, Linda’s brother. Climbing the stairs, she was surprised to find that she needed to lean on the banisters. Something had deprived her of the use of her legs; it wasn’t the golf, nor the thought of possible adultery. Anyone can envisage, indeed must envisage, the possibility of their partner’s infidelity-it wasn’t an excuse for creating a scene or putting on an act. Not to Millicent’s way of thinking, at any rate. She went into ‘their’ bedroom, the bedroom of ‘their’ house, and noticed without the slightest embarrassment that the bed was unmade, the sheets rumpled, churned up as they had never been, it seemed to her, since her marriage to David. Then she noticed the watch on the bedside table, her bedside table. It was a heavy, waterproof watch, a man’s watch, and she weighed it in her hand for a moment, fascinated and incredulous, until the realization that it must have been left behind by another man finally sank in. She understood everything now. Downstairs, there was Linda, worried stiff and getting more and more scared, sitting there, in the dark. Millicent went downstairs again, and with a curious, almost pitying expression in her eyes, looked at dear Linda who also knew.

‘Linda, my poor pet,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid you were right. There’s a pair of salmon- pink cami- knickers in the bedroom I wouldn’t be seen dead in.’

The Lake of Loneliness

Prudence-for such was her name, alas, and an inappropriate one at that-Prudence Delvaux had parked her car in a forest ride, near Trappes, and was strolling aimlessly in the damp, chill November wind. It was five o’clock and growing dark: a melancholy hour, in a melancholy month, in a melancholy landscape, but nonetheless she whistled as she walked, stooping now and then to pick up a chestnut or a russet leaf whose colour appealed to her. She wondered drily what she was doing there-why, on her way home from a charming weekend, with charming friends, with her charming lover, she had felt a sudden and almost irresistible urge to stop her Fiat and set off on foot on this heart- rending autumn evening, why she had suddenly succumbed to the desire to be alone and walk.

She was wearing a silk scarf and an extremely well- cut coat in lodencloth the colour of the leaves, she was thirty years old and her hand- sewn walking shoes made every stride a pleasure. A rook flew cawing overhead and was immediately joined by a bevy of its fellows until they filled the sky to the horizon. And oddly enough, this raucous cry, familiar though it was, made her heart beat faster as though in response to some nameless terror. Not that Prudence was afraid of prowlers, or the cold, or the wind, or even of life itself. On the contrary, her friends would burst out laughing whenever they uttered her name. Considering her attitude to life, they said, it was the purest paradox. However, she hated anything she couldn’t understand, and that was really the only thing she was frightened of: not understanding what was happening to her. And now, suddenly, she had to stop and catch her breath.

The landscape reminded her of a Breughel, and she liked Breughel; she liked the warm car that awaited her and the music she would switch on once she was back inside it; she liked the thought of meeting, around eight o’clock, a man who loved her and whom she loved in return, a man called Jean-François. She also liked the thought of getting up, yawning, after their night of love, and gulping down the cup of coffee which he, or she, would have made for ‘the other’; and also the thought of her office tomorrow morning, of discussing advertising ideas with Marc, the good friend with whom she had worked for the past five years. They would agree, laughing, that in the end the best way of promoting a new washing powder was to show that it washed greyer, and that people needed greyness more than whiteness, dullness more than sparkle, obsolescence more than durability.

She liked all that; in fact, she liked her life: plenty of friends, plenty of lovers, an amusing job, a child even, together with a taste for music, books, flowers and log fires. But now this rook had flown over, chased by that frantic rabble, and something was tearing at her heart, something that she couldn’t quite grasp, couldn’t explain, not even (and this was the worst part) to herself.

The path branched to the right. There was a notice board proclaiming ‘Etangs de Hollande ’. The idea of those lakes in the setting sun, with reeds, furze, perhaps some duck, immediately attracted her and she quickened her step. She came upon the first of the promised lakes almost at once. It was a mixture of blues and greys, and although not covered with wildfowl (there wasn’t even a single duck) it was nevertheless strewn with dead leaves which were slowly sinking, one after another, in a dying spiral; and each one seemed to be in need of aid and protection. Each of these dead leaves was an Ophelia. Spotting a dead tree trunk, no doubt abandoned by a careless forester, she sat down on it. Increasingly, she asked herself what she was doing there. She would end up by being late, Jean-François would be worried; he would be furious and he would be quite right. When one is happy, when one is doing what one likes to do-and also when other people like one-one has no right to sit about on tree trunks, alone, in the cold, beside a lake no one has ever heard of. It wasn’t as though she was at all ‘neurotic’, as ‘other people’ say when talking of unhappy people (or at any rate, people who couldn’t cope with life).

As though to reassure herself, she took a packet of cigarettes from her coat pocket, was relieved to discover a lighter in the other pocket, and lit up. The smoke was warm and acrid, and the cigarette tasted unfamiliar. And yet it was the same brand that she had been smoking for ten years.

‘Perhaps,’ she said to herself, ‘all I really needed was to be alone for a bit? Perhaps it’s too long since I’ve been alone? Perhaps this lake has an evil spirit? Perhaps it wasn’t chance but fate that led me here? Perhaps there’s a long history of charms and spells surrounding these lakes...’

She put her hand on the tree trunk at the point where her hip rested against it, and felt the contact of the rough wood, worn and mellowed by rain and by solitude (for what could be more solitary or more melancholy than a dead tree, cut down, abandoned, no good for anything; not as firewood, nor as timber, nor as a lovers’ seat?). The contact with the wood aroused a sort of tenderness and affection in her, and to her astonishment she felt the tears well up in her eyes. She contemplated the wood, the veins of the wood, difficult though they were to make out: grey, almost white, in wood that had itself turned grey and white (like old people’s veins, she thought: one can’t see the blood flowing, one knows it’s there but one can’t see it any more than one can hear it). And it was much the same with this tree: the sap had dried up; the sap, the incentive, the fever, the desire to do, to act, to act the fool, make love, create, make things happen...

All these ideas went through her head in a flash; resigned, passive, she hardly knew who she was any longer. She, who never saw herself, who never even wanted to see herself, whose life was full, now suddenly saw herself as a woman in a smart coat, smoking a cigarette, sitting on a dead tree trunk beside a stagnant lake. There was someone inside her who wanted desperately to get away from this place, to go back to the car, to the music in the car, to the road and the thousand and one ways of avoiding death, the thousand and one tricks a clever motorist must know to avoid accidents, someone who longed to be back in Jean- François’s arms, or in a Paris café with ‘the gin, the gipsies, the siphons and the garishness’ so dear to the heart of Guillaume Apollinaire. But there was someone else inside her whom she didn’t recognize-at least whom she had never met until now-who wanted to stay until nightfall, watching the darkness settle on the lake and feeling the wood grow cold beneath her hand. And per haps-why not-this someone would later want to walk into that water, aware of the cold at first, then, immersing herself in it, losing herself in it, go down to the deepest depths to rejoin, on the blue and golden sands, the dead leaves which had been sucked down there throughout the day. And there, stretched out on a bed of leaves, surrounded by tender, playful fishes, this someone would be perfectly at peace at last, restored to the cradle, restored to real life, or rather to death.

‘I’m going crazy,’ she thought, and a voice whispered to her: ‘I assure you it’s the truth, your truth,’ and it seemed to be the voice of childhood. And another voice, a voice acquired over thirty years of pleasure of one kind or another, said, ‘My dear girl, what you ought to do is to go home and take some Vitamin B or C. There’s something the matter with you.’

Needless to say, it was the second voice which prevailed. Prudence Delvaux stood up, abandoning the tree trunk, the lake, the leaves and life. She returned to Paris, to her divans, her bars, to what is known as existence. She returned to her love, who was known as Jean-François.

And she switched on the music in her car and she drove very carefully and she even smiled at her half- hour of aberration. But it took her two months to forget the Etangs de Hollande. At least. And not once did she mention them to Jean-François.

In Extremis

He turned over yet again between the enveloping sheets, dangerous as quicksands, sniffing with disgust the smell of his own body, that smell he had once so delighted to find on women’s bodies in the morning. Those mornings in Paris after a white night and a few hours of exhausted sleep beside a strange body, those mornings when he awoke light- headed with fatigue and in a hurry to leave. In a hurry... he had always been a man in a hurry, but now, on this spring afternoon, lying there prostrate, he was taking his time about dying. Dying was a strange word, no longer, it seemed to him, the absurd but inescapable reality which had so often spurred him on, but a sort of accident. Rather like breaking a leg skiing. ‘Why me, why today, why?’

‘Of course I may recover,’ he said out loud. And the shadowy figure silhouetted against the window gave a slight start. He had forgotten her, as indeed he had always forgotten her. He remembered his surprise on learning of her affair with Jean. There was someone for whom she still existed, was still beautiful, for whom she had a body. He gave a faint chuckle which quickened his precious, precarious heart-beat.

He was dying. He knew now that he was dying. Something was tearing at his body. Meanwhile she was leaning over him, supporting him by the shoulders, and he felt his shoulder- blade, ignominiously reduced to skin and bone, flinch beneath his wife’s gentle hand. Ignominy, that was what he was dying of, ignominy. Was there an illness which allowed you to die gracefully? There probably wasn’t, and mankind’s only grace, perhaps, lay in that aspiration towards what lay ahead. But he was calmer now, and as she leant over him to lay him back on his pillow, her face caught the light and he saw her. She had a beautiful face, all said and done, for which he had married her twenty years earlier. But its expression irritated him. It was preoccupied, abstracted. She must be thinking of Jean.

‘I was saying that I might perhaps recover.’

‘Of course you will,’ she said.

It was funny: she really didn’t love him any more. She knew perfectly well that he was lost, done for. But it was such a long time ago that ‘she’ had lost him. ‘One only loses people once.’ Where had he read that? Was it true? At all events, she would never again see him come through the door, read his newspaper, talk. No, she no longer loved him. If she had loved him, she would have taken his hands and said: ‘Yes, my darling, you’re going to die,’ with that smooth, drawn face that comes from the knowledge of the irrevocable, the knowledge that one acquires all of a sudden when faced with somebody one loves who is dying, somebody...

‘You mustn’t get agitated,’ she said.

‘I’m not agitated, I’m just a little restless. Agitation is over as far as I’m concerned.’

He had adopted a playful tone. ‘But after all, I’m going to die,’ he thought, ‘perhaps I ought to talk to her seriously? But what about? About us? But there’s nothing left to talk about, or hardly anything.’ Nevertheless, the mere thought that he could still exert some influence by his words brought back his old impatience.

‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

And he reached for her hand with a calm deliberate gesture. The last time had been two years ago, in the Bois de Boulogne: he was sitting on a bench with a young and rather silly girl and he had made the same calm gesture, in order not to alarm her. Pointlessly, as it turned out, for she was back at his flat with him an hour later. But he remembered the immense length of time it had taken before his hand reached those slightly reddened fingers... It was moments like those...

‘You have nice hands,’ he said.

She didn’t reply. He could hardly see her. He would have liked her to open the shutters, but it occurred to him that darkness was more appropriate to this final act of the play. Play? What gave him that idea? There was nothing theatrical about his situation. But he was doing his best to remedy that.

‘It’s Thursday today,’ he said plaintively, ‘ half-holiday.

When I was a small boy, I always hoped that a week with four Thursdays in a row would turn up one day. I do now: then I’d have three days longer to live.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ she said with an impatient shrug.

‘Oh no you don’t!’ he said, suddenly furious, trying to raise himself on his elbows. ‘You’re not going to do me out of my death! You know perfectly well that I’m going to die.’

She looked at him with a slight smile.

‘Why are you smiling?’ he asked in a gentle voice.

‘That reminded me of a remark you made-you probably won’t remember it-about fifteen years ago. We were at the Faltoneys. I didn’t know that you were being unfaithful to me at the time, or at any rate I only had a faint suspicion...’

He felt the stirrings of an old complacency that he quickly suppressed. What extraordinary situations he had got himself into, what unbelievable adventures he had had!

‘Well, go on.’

‘That evening I realized that you were Nicole Faltoney’s lover. Her husband wasn’t there, and when you brought me home, you said you had to drop in at your office to finish something or other...’

She spoke slowly, pausing after every other word. His thoughts had turned to Nicole. She was blonde, gentle, a little querulous.

‘So then I said that I’d like you to come home with me, that I’d prefer it if you did. I didn’t dare tell you that I knew: you were always talking about the stupidity of jealous women, and I was afraid...’

She spoke more and more softly, dreamily, almost like someone tenderly recalling an unhappy childhood. It got on his nerves.

‘You mean I told you I was going to die?’

‘No, but you used much the same formula: you said... Oh, no!’ she said, and she burst out laughing, ‘it’s too preposterous...’

He began to laugh too, but half- heartedly. It scarcely seemed the moment for laughter, especially not for her-only he could be allowed such heroic gaiety.

‘Well? Go on.’

‘You said: “You’re not going to deprive me of that woman, you know perfectly well that I want her.” ’

‘Oh,’ he said. (He was disappointed, having vaguely expected some witticism.) ‘There’s nothing very funny about that.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘But to say that to me, as though it was self- evident!...’

She laughed again, but with a touch of constraint, as though she sensed that he was annoyed.

But now he was busy listening to his heart. Its beat was muffled, pitifully faint. ‘How frail we are,’ he thought with a touch of bitterness. He was tired of seeing clichés he had despised at the age of twenty being borne out time and again. Death was going to resemble death just as much as love resembled love.

‘Ah, well,’ he said, closing his eyes, ‘it’s been a very accommodating heart.’

‘What?’ she said.

He looked at her. It was strange to be leaving behind one a person primed with such anecdotes, stories against one, against what would be one’s ghost. Someone who had been so gentle at twenty, so defenceless, and whom he now found so changed-whom he would never find again. Marthe... Whatever had become of her?

‘Do you love this man Jean?’ he asked.

She answered him, but he wasn’t listening. He was trying for the umpteenth time to count the sun-beams on the ceiling. The wavering, feathery reflections of the sun. Would the Mediterranean still be as blue, afterwards? Someone was singing in the courtyard. He had loved a handful of songs in his life so passionately that, in the end, he could no longer bear to listen to music. Marthe, on the other hand, used to play the piano. But pretty pianos were hard to find and he had been very particular when it came to furniture. So they hadn’t had a piano.

‘Don’t you play the piano any longer?’ he asked plaintively.

‘The piano?’ she said wonderingly.

She was surprised; she herself couldn’t remember any more: she had forgotten her youth. He alone retained the fond memory of Marthe’s blonde hair and straight young neck against the black background of the piano. He turned his head away.

‘Why do you ask me about the piano?’ she asked again.

He didn’t reply, but he squeezed her hand. His heart frightened him; he recognized the old pain. He longed for a moment’s reassurance, the comfort of Daphne’s shoulder, the taste of alcohol.

But Daphne was living with that young idiot Guy and alcohol would only hasten the end. He was afraid, that was all, simply afraid . . . It was that blankness in his head and that shrinking of his muscles. It was horrible. The thought of his death filled him with such horror that it made him smile.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said to Marthe. Then he repeated the words, stressing each syllable. They were harsh, rough words, manly words. All the words in his life had been so easy to say, tripping off the tongue: ‘my darling, my sweet, whenever you like, soon, tomorrow.’ Marthe wasn’t a very soft name and it hadn’t come often to his lips.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said.

Then she leaned over him and put her hand over his eyes.

‘Everything will be all right. I shall be here. I won’t leave you.’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘if you have to go out, if you’ve some shopping to do...’

‘Later.’

Her eyes were full of tears. Poor Marthe, crying didn’t suit her. Nevertheless, he felt a little comforted.

‘You don’t feel bitter towards me?’ he said.

‘I remember other things too,’ she said, dropping her voice to a whisper that reminded him of a dozen similar, slightly breathless voices in the corner of a drawing room or on a beach. His coffin would be followed by a long trail of whispers, tender and silly. Sitting at home in her armchair, Daphne, the last of his mistresses, would evoke his memory, much to Guy’s irritation.

‘All is well,’ he said. ‘I should have liked to die in a cornfield, though.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘With the wheat waving over my head. You know the line: “the wind is rising, life must go on”.’

‘Calm yourself.’

‘The dying are always told to keep calm. A fine time to say it.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s the right time.’

He thought what a beautiful voice she had. He was still holding her hand in his. He would die with a woman’s hand in his; all would be well. What did it matter if the woman was his own wife? ‘Happiness between two people,’ he said, ‘it’s not so easy.’

Then he burst out laughing, because, in the last resort, he didn’t give a damn about happiness. Happiness, or Marthe, or Daphne. He was nothing but a heart still beating away, and that, for the moment, was the only thing that mattered to him.

1. Martin Luther King, JR. · Letter from Birmingham Jail

2. Allen Ginsberg · Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber

3. Daphne du Maurier · The Breakthrough

4. Dorothy Parker · The Custard Heart

5. Three Japanese Short Stories

6. Anaïs Nin · The Veiled Woman

7. George Orwell · Notes on Nationalism

8. gertrude Stein · Food

9. Stanislaw Lem · The Three Electroknights

10. Patrick Kavanagh · The Great Hunger

11. Danilo Kiš · The Legend of the Sleepers

12. Ralph Ellison · The Black Ball

13. Jean Rhys · Till September Petronella

14. Franz Kafka · Investigations of a Dog

15. Clarice Lispector · Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady

16. Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski · An Advertisement for Toothpaste

17. Albert Camus · Create Dangerously

18. John Steinbeck · The Vigilante

19. Fernando Pessoa · I Have More Souls Than One

20. Shirley Jackson · The Missing Girl

21. Four Russian Short Stories

22. Italo Calvino · The Distance of the Moon

23. Audre Lorde · The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

24. Leonora Carrington · The Skeleton’s Holiday

25. William S. Burroughs · The Finger

26. Samuel Beckett · The End

27. Kathy Acker · New York City in 1979

28. Chinua Achebe · Africa’s Tarnished Name

29. Susan Sontag · Notes on ‘Camp’

30. John Berger · The Red Tenda of Bologna

31. Françoise Sagan · The Gigolo

32. Cyprian Ekwensi · Glittering City

33. Jack Kerouac · Piers of the Homeless Night

34. Hans Fallada · Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?

35. Truman Capote · The Duke in His Domain

36. Saul Bellow · Leaving the Yellow House

37. Katherine Anne Porter · The Cracked Looking-Glass

38. James Baldwin · Dark Days

39. Georges Simenon · Letter to My Mother

40. William Carlos Williams · Death the Barber

41. Betty Friedan · The Problem that Has No Name

42. Federico García Lorca · The Dialogue of Two Snails

43. Yuko Tsushima · Of Dogs and Walls

44. Javier Marías · Madame du Deffand and the Idiots

45. Carson McCullers · The Haunted Boy

46. Jorge Luis Borges · The Garden of Forking Paths

47. Andy Warhol · Fame

48. Primo Levi · The Survivor

49. Vladimir Nabokov · Lance

50. Wendell Berry · Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer

[1]Prudence，本意为谨慎、小心。（本书脚注均为译者注。）

[2]1972年以前，星期四是法国小学生的休息日。如果一周有四个星期四（再加上周日也是一个休息日），那就只有两天要去上学。后来，“一周四个星期四”转化为一句俗语，表示不可能发生的事。

让我们遇见在。。

企鹅图书 微博(penguinbooks)

企鹅图书微信订阅号

企鹅图书数字业务微信服务号

更多关于我们对信息请

访问企鹅兰登北亚官网 PRHNA.COM

关于“坎普”的札记

企鹅现代经典 第一辑

（美）苏珊·桑塔格/著

程巍/译

企鹅图书 | PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

New Zealand | India | South Africa | North Asia

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at:

global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

NOTES ON 'CAMP'

Copyright © Susan Sontag, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966

Notes on 'Camp 'and One Culture and the New Sensibility are both taken from Against Interpretation and

Other Essays, first published in 1966. This selection first published in 2018 in Penguin Modern. Simplified

Chinese translation copyright © 程巍, authorized by Shanghai Translation Publishing House（上海

译文出版社）. Simplified Chinese edition copyright © 2021 by Penguin Random House North Asia in

association with CITIC Press Group. All rights reserved.

© “企鹅”及其相关标识是企鹅兰登（北京）文化发展有限公司已经注册或尚未注册的商标。

未经允许，不得擅用。

企鹅兰登电子书 | Penguin Random House eBooks

目录

关于“坎普”的札记

一种文化与新感受力

Notes on ‘Camp’

One Culture and the New Sensibility

返回总目录

“它之所以是好的，是因为它是可怕的……”

关于“坎普”的札记

世界上有许多事物还没有被命名。还有一些事物，尽管已经被命名，但从来没有被描述过。其中之一便是以“坎普”（Camp）这个时尚之名流传的那种感受力——它显然是现代的，是复杂性的一个变体，但并不等同于此。

感受力（不同于思想）是最难以谈论的东西之一。但就坎普而言，还有一些特别的原因，使坎普尤其没有得到探讨。它不是一种自然形态的感受力，如果存在着这类自然形态的感受力的话。的确，坎普的实质在于其对非自然之物的热爱：对技巧和夸张的热爱。而且坎普是小圈子里的东西——某种拥有自己的秘密代码甚至身份标识的东西，见于城市小团体中间。除了克里斯托弗·伊舍伍德的小说《夜晚的世界》（1954）花了两页篇幅潦潦草草地对其加以勾勒外，它几乎还没有形之于出版物。因而，谈论坎普，就是出卖坎普。如果能为这种出卖提供辩解的理由的话，那么可以说，出卖它，是为了有利于它所提供的那种启迪，或有利于它所解决的那种冲突的体面。就我自己而言，我的理由是为了自我启迪，为了激发我本人感受力中的尖锐冲突。我既为坎普所强烈吸引，又几乎同样强烈地为它所伤害。这正是我要谈论它以及我能谈论它的原因。因为，一个把全副身心都交给了某种感受力的人，不能分析它；不论他的愿望如何，他也只能展示它。要命名一种感受力、勾画其特征、描述其历史，就必须具备一种为反感所缓和的深刻同情。

我谈论的只是感受力——这种感受力的特征之一是，将严肃之物转化成琐碎之物——但这并非清楚明白之事。大多数人把感受力或趣味想象成纯粹主观偏爱的领域，即那些还没有被纳入理性的绝对控制、大多充满感性色彩的神秘吸引力。他们恩准对趣味的考虑在他们对人和对艺术作品的反应中起某种作用。但这种态度是幼稚的，甚至更糟。显示趣味能力的优越，就是显示自己的优越。这是因为，趣味统辖着人们的每一个自由的——对立于老套的——反应。没有哪种趣味更具有决定性。既有对人的趣味、视觉趣味、情感方面的趣味，又有行为和道德方面的趣味。智慧其实也是一种趣味：思想方面的趣味。（一个需要慎重考虑的事实是，趣味倾向于不均衡地发展。同一个人既具有良好的视觉趣味，又具有良好的对人的趣味，还具有思想方面的趣味，这委实罕见。）

趣味没有体系，也无法验证。但它具有某种类似趣味逻辑的东西，就是那种支配、产生某种趣味的连贯的感受力。感受力几乎是难以言喻的，但并非完全不能言喻。任何一种可以被塞进某种体系框架中或可以被粗糙的验证工具加以操控的感受力，都根本不再是一种感受力。它已僵化成了一种思想……

要以言语来框定一种感受力，尤其是一种活跃的、旺盛的感受力，[1]人们必须审慎而灵活。要把握这种独特的难以捉摸的感受力，札记的形式似乎比论文的形式（它要求一种线性的、连贯的论述）更恰当一些。以一种正经和专题论文似的方式对待坎普，只会使人不知所措。果真要这样做的话，那就得冒风险，因为自己炮制出来的东西，可能是一件非常低劣的坎普作品。

以下是就奥斯卡·王尔德的言论所做的札记。

“一个人应该要么成为一件艺术品，要么就穿戴一件艺术品。”

——摘自《妙语警句便览》

1.先就一般而论：坎普是唯美主义的某种形式。它是把世界看作审美现象的一种方式。这种方式，即坎普的方式，不是就美感而言，而是就运用技巧、风格化的程度而言。

2.强调风格，就是忽略内容，或引入一种相对于内容而言中立的态度。不消说，坎普感受力是不受约束的，是不受政治左右的——或至少是非政治的。

3.不仅存在着坎普观，即一种看待事物的坎普方式，坎普也是一种可见于物体和人的行为中的品性。有“坎普式的”电影、服装、家具、流行歌曲、小说、人、建筑……这种区分至关重要。的确，坎普的眼光能使体验发生改观。但并非任何东西都能够被看作坎普。它并非全部取决于观看者的眼睛。

4.以下随意列举的一些范例，属于坎普经典之作：

《祖雷卡·多布逊》

蒂凡尼的灯具

斯戈皮顿公司制作的电影

洛杉矶的布朗·德比旅馆

《探询》，标题以及报道

奥勃雷·比尔兹利的绘画

《天鹅湖》

贝里尼的歌剧

维斯康蒂导演的《莎乐美》和《可惜，她是一个婊子》

世纪之交的某些美术明信片

肖德萨克的《金刚》

古巴通俗歌手拉·鲁普

林恩·沃德的木板印刻的小说《上帝之子》

弗莱希·戈登的老式连环画

二十世纪二十年代的女装（皮毛披肩，饰以流苏和珠子的上装）

罗纳德·菲尔班克和艾维·康普顿·伯内特的小说

只供男子观看的不激发欲望的色情电影

5.坎普趣味与某些艺术有契合之处，但与其他一些艺术则不然。例如，服装、家具、一切视觉装饰因素，构成坎普的很大部分。因为坎普艺术常常是装饰性的艺术，不惜以内容为代价来突出质地、感性表面和风格。协奏曲也没有内容，但它几乎不是坎普。譬如，它并不提供无聊或过度的内容与丰富的形式之间的一种对比……有时，整个艺术形式都充满了坎普趣味。古典芭蕾、歌剧、电影似乎很长一段时间以来就是如此。在过去两年中，流行音乐（如后摇滚乐，即被法国人称为“小阿飞”的音乐）也进入了这一行列。或许电影评论（例如“我所看过的十部最差影片”的排名）是当今坎普趣味的最有影响力的普及者，这是因为，大多数人仍然以一种愉快的、不做作的心情去看电影。

6.这样说不无道理：“它太好了，以至于成不了坎普。”或者说，它“太重要了”，不够边缘。（后一种说法后来更常用。）因此，让·科克托的个性及其许多作品是坎普，但安德烈·纪德的则不是；理查德·施特劳斯的歌剧是坎普，瓦格纳的则不是；纽约流行音乐集中区和英国利物浦的杂拌儿音乐是坎普，爵士乐则不是。从“严肃”角度看，坎普的许多范例要么是糟糕的艺术，要么是媚俗之作，尽管并非全部如此。但坎普不一定非得是糟糕的艺术，而且某些被视为坎普的艺术（如露易斯·菲伊拉德的主要影片）还值得予以最严肃的观赏和研究。

“我们越是研究艺术，我们对自然就越漠不关心。”

——摘自《谎言的衰朽》

7.一切坎普之物和人，都包含大量的技巧因素。自然中没有什么东西能够成为坎普……乡村坎普仍为人工制品，大多数坎普之物是城市的。（但它们通常具有一种与田园牧歌风格类似的宁静感——或质朴性。大量的坎普令人想到燕卜荪的那个短语——“城市田园牧歌”。）

8.坎普是一种以风格表达出来的世界观——不过，这是一种特别的风格。它是对夸张之物、对“非本来”（the“off”）的热爱，是对处于非本身状态的事物的热爱。最好的例子见于新艺术中，它是最典型、发展最彻底的坎普风格。“新艺术”作品通常将一种东西转化为另一种东西。例如照明设施被制作成了开花植物的形状，起居室被制作成了名副其实的岩洞。一个著名的例子是：在十九世纪九十年代，赫克特·基玛把巴黎地铁的入口设计成了铁铸兰花柄的形状。

9.作为一种对人的趣味，坎普尤其对那些十分纤弱以及极度夸张的人物感兴趣。女性化的男子或男性化的女子肯定是坎普感受力的最伟大意象之一。例如拉斐尔前派的绘画和诗歌中那种孱弱、纤细、柔软的人形；被雕刻在灯具和烟灰缸上面的新艺术出版物和招贴画中的那些单薄、平滑、缺乏性感的身体；葛丽泰·嘉宝绝色美貌背后的那种令人难以忘怀的男性化的闲散感觉。这里，坎普趣味显露出了一种大体上未被认可的趣味的真相：一个人的性吸引力（以及性快感）的最精致的形式在于与他的性别相反的东西；在那些颇有男子气概的男子身上，最美的东西是某种具有女性色彩的东西；在那些颇有女人味的女子身上，最美的东西是某种具有男性色彩的东西……与坎普对男性化的女子或女性化的男子的趣味相类似的，是某种看起来完全不同但其实不然的东西：一种对夸张性特征和个性风格的爱好。出于显而易见的理由，这里所能引用的最好的例子是电影明星。如简纳·曼斯菲尔德、吉娜·洛罗布里吉达、简·拉塞尔、弗吉尼亚·梅奥的多愁善感以及过于浮夸的女人气，史蒂夫·里夫斯、维克多·马修尔的夸张男子气。此外还有那些在气质和举止方面最伟大的风格家，如贝蒂·戴维斯、芭芭拉·斯坦威克、塔露拉·班克赫德和艾德维奇·弗伊里埃尔。

10.坎普在引号中看待一切事物。例如这不是一只灯，而是一只“灯”；这不是一个女人，而是一个“女人”。从物和人中感知坎普，就是去理解其角色扮演的状态。它是“生活是戏剧”这一隐喻在感受力中的最远延伸。

11.坎普是那种兼具两性特征的风格（“男人”与“女人”、“人”与“物”的可转换性）的胜利。但所有的风格，也就是说所有的技巧，终究是兼具两性特征的。生活没有风格。自然也没有。

12.问题不是“为什么是滑稽模仿、仿拟、戏剧性”，而是“滑稽模仿、仿拟、戏剧性何时获得了坎普的特别青睐”。为什么莎士比亚的喜剧（如《皆大欢喜》等）的基调不兼具两性特征，而《玫瑰骑士》却如此？

13.分界线似乎出现在十八世纪。在那里可以发现坎普趣味的起源（哥特风格的小说、中国工艺品、讽刺画、人工废墟等）。但那时与自然的关系全然不同。在十八世纪，有趣味的人士要么经常惠顾自然（如草莓山），要么就试图将其重新塑造成某种人工制品（如凡尔赛）。他们也不知疲倦地惠顾过去。当今的坎普趣味消除了自然，或与自然全然格格不入。坎普趣味与过去的关系也极为感性化。

14.当然，即便是坎普简史，也应该有一个更早的开端——可追溯到诸如庞托摩、罗梭、卡拉瓦乔这些具有独特风格的艺术家那里，或追溯到乔治·德·拉图尔的极富戏剧性的绘画或文学中夸饰的尤弗伊斯体（如李利等）。但最有说服力的起始点似乎还是十七世纪末和十八世纪初。因为这一时期对技巧、外表、对称有种非同一般的感觉，对栩栩如生、扣人心弦的描绘有鉴赏力，对再现倏忽即逝的情感及性格的全貌有典雅的传统手法——如警句和有节奏感的对句（在文字中），如炫示性的动作和装饰性的颤音（在手势和音乐中）。十七世纪末和十八世纪初是伟大的坎普时期：体现于蒲柏、康格里夫、沃尔浦尔等人，但不包括斯威夫特；体现于法国的女才子；体现于慕尼黑的洛可可风格的教堂；体现于佩戈莱西；体现于稍后的莫扎特的众多作品。但在十九世纪，这种曾经分布于一切高级文化领域的东西，变成了一种特别的趣味；它开始染上了敏感、晦涩、反常的色彩。仅就英国的情形而言，我们看到，坎普在十九世纪的唯美主义（体现于伯恩·琼斯、佩特、拉斯金、丁尼生等人）中苟延残喘，复又随着视觉艺术和装饰艺术的新艺术运动而变得如日中天，并且在诸如王尔德、菲班克这等“才子”那儿找到了自己的自觉的理论家。

15.当然，说所有这些东西都是坎普，并不是在声称它们只是坎普。譬如，若对新艺术运动进行全面分析，就会发现它并不等同于坎普。但这样的分析却不能忽视：新艺术中的某些因素能够使新艺术在体验中被认为是坎普。新艺术充满了“内容”，甚至是政治道德一类的内容；它是艺术中的一场革命，受着一种有机的政治和趣味的乌托邦幻象（介乎威廉·莫里斯与包豪斯团体之间）的激励。然而，新艺术作品也有一个特征，暗示出一种超脱的、非正儿八经的“唯美主义者的”幻象。它为我们了解新艺术——以及遮蔽内容的坎普透镜为何物——提供了某种重要的信息。

16.因此，坎普感受力，就某些事物的理解的双重意义而言，是一种生动的感受力。然而，这不是那种我们所熟知的对字面意义以及象征意义的层层叠叠、错落有致的构织，而是作为某物或任何物的意指物与作为纯粹人工制品的物之间的差异。

17.这一点明显地见于“坎普”这个词作为动词的一种通俗用法：做某种事，被称作“做坎普”（to camp）。做坎普是一种诱惑方式——它采用的是可作双重解释的浮夸举止，具有双重性的姿态，行家深知其中三昧，外行却对此无动于衷。同样，延伸开来说，当这个词变成一个名词，当某个人或某个东西成了“一个坎普”（a camp），其意义也具有双重性。在事物可被理解的“直接的”公共意义背后，人们发现了对该物的个人的、滑稽的体验。

“做到自然，此乃万难长久保持的一种姿态。”

——摘自《理想的丈夫》

18.人们必须区分朴实的坎普与蓄意的坎普。纯粹的坎普通常是朴实的。知道自己是坎普的坎普（即“做坎普”）总是不那么令人满意。

19.纯粹的坎普范例非蓄意而为，它们绝对严肃。新艺术的艺匠把盘绕的蛇雕刻在自己制作的灯具上，不是图好玩，也不是为取悦他人。他非常认真地说：瞧，东方情调！真正的坎普——例如，巴斯比·贝克利为二十世纪三十年代早期华纳兄弟影业公司的那些音乐剧设计的数字标题（“第四十二街”“一九三三年的淘金者”“一九三五年的……”“一九三七年的……”等）——并非有意逗乐。而做坎普——例如诺尔·柯沃德的剧作——却是有意而为。如果大多数歌剧的创作者当初不是带着严肃的态度来创作带有传奇剧荒诞色彩的歌剧情节的话，那么歌剧的许多传统保留剧目就似乎不可能成为这种令人满意的坎普。人们不必了解艺术家私下的意图。艺术作品说明了一切。（对比一下十九世纪的某部典型的歌剧与萨缪尔·芭芭拉的《瓦雷萨》这部特意制作的坎普之作，其间的差别显而易见。）

20.也许，有意去做坎普，通常是有害的。在那些制作得最出色的坎普电影中，《天堂风波》和《马耳他之鹰》的完美无缺归因于那种使风格得以保存下来的不经意的、圆熟的方式。而二十世纪五十年代的那些自诩为坎普的著名影片，如《前夜》和《难倒魔鬼》，却不是这样。这两部更晚出现的影片，都非常走红，但前一部影片过于圆滑，后一部影片过于歇斯底里；它们太想成为坎普，以至于一再失去其节奏……尽管如此，也许更多的并非意料之外的效果与自觉的意图之间的问题，如坎普中的戏仿与自我嘲弄之间的微妙关系。希区柯克的影片能显示这一问题。当自我嘲弄失之贫乏而显示出（即便是零星地）一种对主题和材料的轻蔑时（如《捉贼记》《后窗》《西北偏北》中的情形）效果就显得牵强、笨拙，很难说是坎普。成功的坎普——如卡雷的影片《滑稽戏》，梅·韦斯特和爱德华·艾维勒特·霍尔顿的电影表演，《傻瓜秀》的某些段落——即使在显示自我嘲弄时，也充满了自爱。

21.因此，坎普有赖于天真。这就是说，坎普显露天真，但如果可能的话，它也腐蚀天真。当坎普的眼力挑中某个物体时，作为物，它并不发生改变。然而，人却要对观众做出回应。人开始“做坎普”：如梅·韦斯特、比·利莉、拉·鲁普、塔鲁拉·班克赫德在《怒海孤舟》中的情形以及贝蒂·戴维斯在《彗星美人》中的情形。（人甚至可以在己所不知的情况下被诱导去做坎普，如费里尼在《甜蜜的生活》中让阿尼塔·艾克贝格滑稽地模仿她自己。）

22.不那么严格地说，坎普要么是质朴的，要么就是全然自觉的（当人为坎普而表演时）。后一种情形的一个例子是王尔德的警句本身。

“把人们分为好与坏，这委实荒唐。人们要么有趣，要么乏味。”

——摘自《温夫人的扇子》

23.在质朴或纯粹的坎普中，基本的因素是严肃，一种失败的严肃。当然，并非所有失败的严肃都可以作为坎普而获得救赎。只有那些适当地混合了夸张、奇异、狂热以及天真的因素的严肃，才能算作坎普。

24.当某物被看作是坏（而不是坎普）时，这通常是因为它在志向上太过平庸。该艺术家没有试图把事情做得真正出奇。（“这太过了”“这太奇异了”“这不可信”，这些平庸论调是坎普热衷使用的标准用语。）

25.坎普的标志是那种铺张的精神。坎普是一个身穿由三百万片羽毛织成的上装四处游荡的女人。坎普是卡洛·克里韦利的绘画，画中的砖石结构上缀有真正的珠宝，画着栩栩如生的昆虫和裂缝。坎普是斯登贝格与蒂特里希合作拍摄的那六部美国影片中令人惊叹的唯美主义，六部都是这样，尤其是《魔鬼是女人》这最后一部……在坎普中，通常有某种宏大的东西，这不仅见于作品本身的风格，也见于志向的品质。高迪在巴塞罗那的那些绚丽、漂亮的建筑物是坎普，不仅因为它们的风格，还因为它们显示了——最明显地见于萨格拉达·法米利亚天主教教堂——其创造者的志向，即一个人去完成通常要花去整整一代人、整整一种文化的工夫才能完成的事。

26.坎普是一种严肃规划自身的艺术，但它不能被全然严肃地对待，因为它“太过了”。《泰特斯·安德洛尼克斯》和《奇异的插曲》差不多是坎普，或可以被当作坎普来表演。戴高乐在公共场合里的举止和言谈常常是纯粹的坎普。

27.一件作品可以接近于坎普，但无意成为坎普，因为它已经达到了效果。爱森斯坦的影片很少是坎普，因为它们尽管铺张，却没有多余，达到了效果。如果它们多一点“离谱”的话，或可成为伟大的坎普——尤其是《伊凡雷帝》第一部和第二部。布莱克的素描和油画也是如此，它们怪诞而又别具一格。它们不是坎普，而受布莱克影响的新艺术却是。

以一种不连贯或不狂热的方式展现的铺张，不是坎普。而任何看起来不是来自一种不可遏制、根本无法控制的感受力的东西，也不能算是坎普。没有激情，人们就只能得到伪坎普——仅仅是装饰性的、四平八稳的东西，一句话，是花哨。在坎普沉闷的边缘上，存在着大量有吸引力的东西：达利的那些华丽的幻觉，阿尔比柯柯的《金色眼睛的姑娘》中高级女装的那种风雅。但这两样东西——坎普和风雅——不可混为一谈。

28.坎普是尝试去做非同寻常之事。不过，这种意义上的非同寻常，通常是指特别、有诱惑性（如弧线和过于夸张的手势），而不仅仅指用功意义上的非同寻常。里普利的《信不信由你》中的那些条目很难说是坎普。这些条目要么是自然界的怪异现象（长着两个脑袋的公鸡，长成十字架形状的茄子），要么是付出巨大劳动获得的成果（如某位男子靠双手从美国走到了中国，某位女子把《新约》的全部文字刻在了一枚图钉的顶部），它们缺乏那种使某些夸张作为坎普与其他夸张区别开来的视觉特征——诱惑性和戏剧性。

29.诸如《海滨》这样的电影以及《小城畸人》《丧钟为谁而鸣》这样的小说，就其好笑的程度而言是不好的，而就其令人愉悦的程度而言是不坏的，原因在于，它们太拘泥、太做作，它们缺乏幻想。在诸如《浪子》《参孙与达莉拉》，以及以超级英雄马希斯特为主角的意大利系列彩色片和无数的日本科幻影片（如《拉顿》《地球防卫军》《美女与液体人》）这一类的坏电影中，存在着坎普，因为，尽管它们相对朴实和粗糙，但它们在幻想上更极端、更肆无忌惮——因而也就引人入胜，趣味盎然。

30.当然，坎普的规则可以改变。时间对此起了很大的作用。时间可以提升那些现在看起来不过是刻板或缺乏想象的作品。它们看起来刻板或缺乏想象，是因为它们在时间上距我们太近，因为它们与我们自己的日常幻想太相像，我们从中感知不到奇异之处。当某种幻想不是我们自己的幻想时，我们反倒更能把它当作一个幻想来赏识。

31.这正是如此之多为坎普趣味所赞赏的物品不时髦、过时且陈旧的原因。但这并非对旧物的热爱。不过是因为，变旧或衰变的过程提供了那种必然的不偏不倚的视角——或唤起了某种必然的同情。当一部表现重大的当代主题的艺术作品受到冷落时，我们会感到愤愤不平。时间会改变这种情况。时间使艺术作品摆脱道德的纠葛，把它送到坎普感受力那儿……时间的另一个作用是，它缩小了平庸的范围。（严格说来，平庸总是给予同时代作品的一种定义。）曾经平庸的东西，随着时间的流逝，可能变得奇异。许多人愉快地欣赏着由英国流行乐队“七戒”演绎的鲁迪·瓦利风格的流行歌曲，但假若他们是在鲁迪·瓦利当红的时代听他本人演唱的话，那他们或许会被他逼得发疯。

因此，事物变成坎普，不是当它们变得老旧的时候——而是当我们与它们不那么有瓜葛的时候，此时，我们才能够欣赏它们当初的失败，而不是为其失败所困惑。但时间的作用是不可预料的。或许“方法派表演”（如詹姆斯·迪恩、罗德·斯泰格尔、沃伦·比蒂的表演）在将来的某一天看起来也会是坎普，正如鲁比·基勒现在的情形——或如莎拉·伯恩哈特在她职业生涯末期演的那些电影在现在的情形。但也可能不会出现这种结果。

32.坎普是对“性格”的赞美。说什么话无关紧要——当然，除非是什么有名的人（路易·富勒、高迪、塞西尔·B.戴米尔、克里维里、戴高乐等）在说。坎普眼光所欣赏的是人物自身的一致性和感染力。因而，在老态龙钟的玛莎·格拉翰出演的每一部影片中，她都以玛莎·格拉翰的形象出现……这一点，明显地见于坎普趣味的伟大、严肃偶像葛丽泰·嘉宝。作为一个女演员，嘉宝在表演方面的不到位（至少是缺乏深度）反倒增加了她的美。她总是她自己。

33.坎普趣味感兴趣的是“固定的性格”（当然，这是非常有十八世纪色彩的说法）。与此相反，它对性格发展的意识不感兴趣。性格被理解成一种持续发光的状态——人成了一个非常密实的物。对性格的这种态度，是体现于坎普感受力的那种体验戏剧化的一个关键因素。它有助于解释这一事实，即歌剧和芭蕾被看作是坎普的珍品，因为这两种形式都无法方便自如地表现人性的复杂。性格的发展出现在哪里，哪里的坎普就受到了削弱。例如，在歌剧中，《茶花女》（其中出现了性格的某种微小发展）就不如《游吟诗人》（毫无性格发展）那样具有坎普的色彩。

“生活是如此重要的一件事，以致不能严肃地谈论它。”

——摘自《维拉，或虚无主义者们》

34.坎普趣味反感惯常的审美评判的那种好坏。坎普并不反转事物。它不去争辩那些看起来好的事物其实是坏的，或者看起来坏的事物其实是好的。它要做的是为艺术（以及生活）提供一套不同的——补充性的——标准。

35.通常，我们高度评价一部艺术作品，是因为它所达到的成就具有严肃、庄重的性质。我们高度评价它，是因为它达到了原初的效果——达到了它本来之所是，而且，据推测，也完全实现了当初隐藏在它背后的那种意图。我们断定在意图与成品之间存在着一种固有的关系，也就是说，一种直接的关系。根据这种标准，我们赞赏《伊利亚特》、阿里斯托芬的剧作、《赋格的艺术》、《米德尔马契》、伦勃朗和夏特莱的画作、邓恩的诗歌、《神曲》、贝多芬的四重奏，以及——如果提到一些人物——苏格拉底、耶稣、圣弗朗西斯、拿破仑、萨伏那洛拉。简而言之，是高级文化的万神殿：真、美与庄严。

36.但除了高级文化以及品评人物的高级方式的那种严肃性（无论是悲剧性的，还是喜剧性的）外，还有另外一些有创造性的感受力。不管一个人暗地里做些什么其他事，或有什么其他感觉，如果他表示只尊重高级文化的风格，那么，作为一个人，他是在自欺。

例如有一种以痛苦、残酷和错乱为标志的严肃性。我们确实承认，意图与结果在这里发生了错位。我这里所谈论的，显然既是个体存在的一种风格，也是艺术中的一种风格；但最好的来自艺术。想一想博希、萨德、兰波、雅里、卡夫卡、阿尔托，想一想二十世纪大多数重要的艺术作品，这一类的艺术，其目标不在于创造和谐，而是使媒介紧张，引进越来越多的激烈而且无法解决的题材。这种感受力也强调这一原则，即要创作出一部过去意义上的作品（既指艺术中的作品，又指生活中的作品）是不可能的。只有“碎片”是可能的……显然，这里运用的是与传统的高级文化不同的标准。某物是好的，不是因为它达到了预期目的，而是因为它揭示了人类状况的另一种真相以及人之为人的另一种体验——简而言之，它揭示了另一种令人信服的感受力。

这些伟大的有创造性的感受力中的第三种，是坎普：它是一种对失败的严肃性以及体验的戏剧化的感受力。坎普既拒绝传统严肃性的那种和谐，又拒绝全然认同情感极端状态的那种危险做法。

37.第一种感受力，即高级文化的感受力，基本上是道德性的。第二种感受力，即体现于当代众多“先锋派”艺术中的那种情感极端状态的感受力，依靠道德激情与审美激情之间的一种张力来获得感染力。第三种感受力，即坎普，纯粹是审美的。

38.坎普是坚持在审美层面上体验世界。它体现了“风格”对“内容”、“美学”对“道德”的胜利，体现了反讽对悲剧的胜利。

39.坎普是悲剧的对立面。在坎普中有严肃（艺术家的参与程度意义上的严肃性），通常还有哀怜。痛苦也是坎普色调中的一种。亨利·詹姆斯著作中广泛的坎普因素，恰恰归功于他众多作品（如《欧洲人》《青春期》《鸽翼》）中的那种痛苦特征。然而，在坎普中，从来就没有悲剧，从来没有。

40.风格就是一切。例如，热内的思想非常坎普。热内的“行为的唯一准则是它是否优雅”[2]的说法，作为一种陈述，完全可以与王尔德的“在那些至关重要的事情中，关键的因素不是真诚，而是风格”进行互换。但重要的终究是表达思想的那种风格。例如，《温夫人的扇子》和《巴巴拉少校》中有关道德和政治的思想是坎普，但这不仅仅是因为这些思想本身的性质，还因为这些思想被以一种特别的、玩笑的方式表达出来。热内《花之圣母》中的坎普思想表现得过于严厉，而文笔本身又过于崇高、严肃，以致热内的著作成不了坎普。

41.坎普的关键之处在于废黜严肃。坎普是玩笑性的，是反严肃的。更确切地说，坎普与“严肃”建立起了一种新的、更为复杂的关系。人们可以以严肃的方式对待轻浮之事，也可以以轻浮的方式对待严肃之事。

42.当一个人意识到“真诚”不够时，他就会为坎普所吸引。真诚也有可能是浅薄平庸和思想狭隘。

43.那种传统的超越一本正经的严肃性手段——如反讽、讥讽——在当今显得软弱无力，不适合为文化所浸透并滋养着当代感受力的媒介。坎普引入了一种新的标准：作为理想的技巧，即戏剧性。

44.坎普提出了一种喜剧色彩的世界观。但这里所说的喜剧不是某种苦涩或论辩性的喜剧。如果说悲剧是深深卷入某种事态的体验，那么喜剧就是不那么投入事态的体验，是不动声色、超然事外的体验。

“我喜爱那些简单的乐趣，它们是复杂之物最后的庇护所。”

——摘自《一个无足轻重的女人》

45.超然，这是精英的特权。正如十九世纪的纨绔子弟在文化方面是贵族的替代者，坎普是现代的纨绔作风。坎普是对这一问题的回答：在这个大众文化的时代，怎样成为一个纨绔子弟。

46.纨绔子弟受了优裕的教养。他的姿态要么倨傲，要么厌倦。他寻求那些稀有的、未被大众趣味糟蹋的感觉（例如于斯曼《逆流》中的艾塞特、《伊壁鸠鲁主义者马里尤斯》中的马里尤斯，以及瓦雷里《台斯特先生》中的台斯特）。他献身于“优雅趣味”。

坎普鉴赏家发现了更巧妙的乐趣。他的乐趣不在拉丁诗歌、稀有的酒类和天鹅绒上衣上，而在那些最通俗、最常见的乐趣上，在大众艺术上。仅仅是利用，并不糟蹋让他产生乐趣的对象，因为他学会了以一种稀有的方式来拥有它们。坎普——大众文化时代的纨绔作风——不在独一无二之物与大量生产之物之间进行区分。坎普趣味超越了对复制品的厌恶。

47.王尔德本人是一个过渡性人物。终其一生，他都从来没能离那些旧派纨绔作风的乐趣太远。他第一次到伦敦时，行头非常惹眼，头戴一顶天鹅绒软帽，身着饰有绲边的衬衫和棉绒质地的短裤，脚上则是黑色丝质长筒袜。这种保守主义反映在《道连·格雷的画像》中。但他的许多态度还是显露了某种更为现代的东西。当王尔德表示他志在“配得上”他的青花瓷器或声称一个球形门把手能与一幅油画一样令人赞叹时，他道出了坎普感受力的一个重要因素——对一切物品等量齐观。当他宣称领结、别在纽扣里的花、椅子的重要性时，他已经是在提前实践坎普的民主精神。

48.老派的纨绔子弟厌恶粗俗。而新派的纨绔子弟，即坎普的热爱者，则欣赏粗俗。老派的纨绔子弟常常感到厌恶或者不胜厌倦的地方，坎普鉴赏家则常常感到愉悦、兴致盎然。老派的纨绔子弟用洒了香水的手绢捂着鼻子，而且很容易昏厥，坎普鉴赏家则吸着气去嗅那些恶臭，而且为自己坚强的神经而扬扬得意。

49.这当然是一项业绩。归根到底，是厌倦的威胁促成的一项业绩。但厌倦与坎普趣味之间的关系不能高估。坎普趣味从其本性上说，只可能存在于富裕社会，存在于那些能体验到富裕的精神机能障碍的社会或者圈子。

“生活中反常的东西，对艺术来说却是正常的。而生活中唯一的事，是与艺术保持正常的关系。”

——摘自《对饱学者的几则忠告》

50.贵族气派是对于文化（也是对于权力）的一种立场，而坎普趣味的历史是自命不凡者的趣味历史的一部分。然而，由于当今不再存在传统意义上的真正贵族来倡导特殊的趣味，那么谁将是这种趣味的持有者？答案：一个临时拼凑的自选的阶层，大多是同性恋者，他们自封为趣味贵族。

51.必须对坎普趣味与同性恋之间的那种独特关系进行一番解释。尽管不能说坎普趣味就是同性恋趣味，但无疑这两者之间存在着某种特别的契合和重叠之处。并非所有的自由主义者都是犹太人，但犹太人显示出与自由主义和改良主义事业的一种特别的契合。同理，并非所有的同性恋者都有坎普趣味。然而，总的来说，同性恋者构成了坎普的先锋——以及最清晰可辨的观众。（我并非随随便便选择犹太人与同性恋者进行类比。犹太人和同性恋者是当代城市文化中非常突出的有创造性的少数群体。说其具有创造性，是就这个词最真切的意义而言——他们是种种感受力的创造者。现代感受力的两支先驱力量，分别是犹太人的道德严肃性和同性恋者的唯美主义及反讽。）

52.同性恋者中贵族姿态盛行，其原因似乎也与犹太人的情形类似。这是因为，每一种感受力都自我服务于提倡这种感受力的群体。犹太人的自由主义是自我合法化的一个姿态。坎普趣味也是如此，它肯定具有某种为其宣传的成分。不消说，运作这种宣传的方式恰好相反。犹太人把自己与现代社会同化的希望寄托于道德感的提升。同性恋者却把自己与社会同化的希望寄托于审美感的提升。坎普是道德的一剂融解剂。它使道德义愤中立化，倡导游戏精神。

53.然而，尽管同性恋者一直是坎普趣味的先锋，坎普趣味却不只是同性恋趣味。坎普把生活当作戏剧的隐喻，作为对同性恋者处境的某个方面的一个辩护和反映，显然特别恰当。（坎普对“游戏”而非“严肃”的强调，也与那种永葆青春的同性恋欲望有关。）不过，人们感到，如果同性恋者不曾或多或少地发明了坎普的话，那别的人也会去发明。这是因为，与文化有关的那种贵族姿态不可能消亡，尽管它或许只以某些日益反复无常、遮遮掩掩的方式苟延残喘。在一个对风格的采纳已经发展到大可怀疑的时代，坎普是（重复一遍）风格的近似物。（在现代，除非是那种显然落伍过时的风格，每一种新风格都以某种反风格的面目出现。）

“读小耐儿之死的描写而不发笑，一个人非得有铁石心肠不可。”

——摘自《谈话》

54.坎普的体验基于这一重大发现，即高级文化的感受力并未完全做到细腻。坎普主张，良好的趣味并非只是良好的趣味；的确还存在着对劣等趣味的良好趣味（热内在《花之圣母》中谈到了这一点）。发现对劣等趣味的良好趣味，能使人摆脱重负。强调高级的、严肃的快乐的人，是在剥夺自己的快乐；他老是限制自己能够享受的快乐。容我打个比方：一个人持之以恒地培养着他的良好趣味，可到头来，却因要价太高而失去了市场。坎普以一种肆无忌惮的、妙趣横生的享乐主义出现，对良好趣味施加影响。它使具有良好趣味的人在意志消沉前就振奋起来。它对消化有利。

55.坎普趣味主要是欣赏、品味的方式——而不是评判的方式。坎普宽宏大量。它想愉悦人。它只是看起来牢骚满腹、愤世嫉俗而已。（或者，如果它是一种愤世嫉俗的话，也不是冷酷的，而是甜美的。）坎普并不认为严肃是低劣的趣味。它并不嘲弄那些成功地表达出严肃激情的人。它所要做的是在某些充满强烈情感色彩的失败中发现成功。

56.坎普趣味是一种爱，对人性的爱。它品味而不是评判“性格”里的小小的喜悦和笨拙的激情……坎普趣味认同它所品味的东西。分享这种感受力的人不会嘲笑那些被他们标识为“坎普”的东西，他们欣赏它们。坎普是一种温柔的情感。

（这里，人们或许会把坎普与众多波普艺术做比较。波普艺术——当其不只是坎普时——体现了一种与坎普虽然有关但仍然大有区别的态度。波普艺术更单调、更枯燥、更严肃、更冷淡，最终是虚无主义的。）

57.坎普趣味依靠那种已经融入某些物品和个人风格之中的爱来滋养自己。像《冷暖人间》（指那本书）和提希曼大厦这一类拙劣的玩意儿成不了坎普，原因正在于它们缺乏这种爱。

58.坎普的最终声明：它之所以是好的，是因为它是可怕的……当然，人们不能总这么说。只有在某些情形下，即在本札记中予以勾勒的那些情形下，才能这么说。

[1964]

一种文化与新感受力[3]

过去数年间，就大约两世纪前随着工业革命的来临而显露出来的“两种文化”，即文学艺术文化与科学文化之间的分离这一问题，人们进行了大量的讨论。根据这一诊断，任何一个有才智、头脑清晰的现代人，都只可能进入其中一种文化而排斥另一种文化。他所关切的是，不同于另一种文化的那些文献、技艺和问题；他说着不同于另一种文化的一种语言。最重要的是，掌握这两种文化所必须付出的努力，具有巨大的差别。这是因为，文学艺术文化被认为是一种总体文化。它针对任何一个人，只要他是人。它是奥特加·伊·加塞特所定义的那种文化意义上的文化，说得确切些，它提升着这种意义上的文化：当一个人忘却了他所读过的一切而依然为他所拥有的那种文化。与此形成对照的是，科学文化是属于专家们的一种文化；它以记忆为基础，而要把握它，就要求全神贯注于理解。文学艺术文化旨在内化和吸收，换言之，是教化。而科学文化则旨在积累和外化，即在用来解决问题的复杂工具和把握问题的特殊手段方面的积累和外化。

T.S.艾略特在一篇著名论文中谈到，十七世纪就已出现某种“感受力的分离”，从而把这两种文化之间的分离上溯到现代史上更久远的年代。不过，把这一问题与工业革命联系在一起，似乎很在理。对众多文学知识分子和艺术家而言，他们对赋予现代社会以特征的那些变迁——其中主要的是工业化，以及每个人都体验到的工业化的那些后果，诸如规模巨大、毫无人情味儿的城市的激增，千篇一律的城市生活方式的盛行，等等——有着一种历史的反感。工业化，即现代“科学”的产物，无论是依据十九世纪和二十世纪早期的模式，把它看作是毁坏自然并使生活标准化的机器轰鸣、烟雾弥漫的人工过程，还是依据那种更新的模式，把它看作是出现于二十世纪下半叶的那种清洁的、自动化的技术，都无关紧要。给出的评判都大体相同。痛感人性自身的状况正面临新科学和新技术的威胁的文人们，憎恶这种变化，悲叹这种变化。但文人们不可避免地处在守势，无论是十九世纪的爱默生、梭罗、拉斯金，还是二十世纪那些把现代社会说成是一个新得难以理解的、“异化的”社会的知识分子。他们深知，科学文化以及机器时代的来临不可遏止。

对“两种文化”这一问题（这一议题的出现，比C.P.斯诺在数年前的一次著名演讲中就这一问题发表的那种粗糙、平庸的见解要早好几十年）的通常反应是，草率而浅薄地对艺术的功用进行一番辩护，使用的是“人道主义”这一更为含糊的意识形态词句，或仓促地把艺术的功用拱手让与科学。就第二种反应来说，我指的不是那些把艺术当作不精确、不真实之物，顶多是玩具，因而不予考虑的科学家（以及属于他们一派的那些艺术家和哲学家）的平庸论调。我指的是出现在热心投身于艺术的人们中间的那种严重的疑惑。有个性的艺术家在创造独一无二的艺术品以愉悦他人并培养其良知和感受力方面的作用，一再受到质疑。某些文学知识分子和艺术家则走得更远，以至于预言人的艺术创造行为终将消亡。艺术，在一个自动化的科学社会，将会丧失功用，变得毫无用处。

不过，我认为，这种结论完全站不住脚。的确，在我看来，整个议题的表述似乎都失之粗糙。这是因为，“两种文化”这一问题假定科学和技术是变化的，是变动不居的，而艺术则是静止的，满足人类的某种永恒不变的普遍功用（慰藉？教化？消遣？）。只有基于这种错误的假定，人们才会推断出艺术将面临被淘汰的危险的结论。

艺术的进步，不是科学技术意义上的那种进步。然而艺术的确在发展，在变化。例如，在我们这个时代，艺术越来越变成专家们的领域。我们的时代最令人感兴趣，也最有创造性的艺术，并不面向那些受过一般教育的人；它要求特别的才具；它说着一种特别的语言。米尔顿·巴比特和莫顿·费尔德曼的音乐，马克·罗斯科和弗兰克·斯特拉的绘画，梅斯·卡宁翰和詹姆斯·瓦林的舞蹈，要求某种感受力的培养，其难度和学徒期的长度至少与掌握物理学或工程学所面临的难度和所需要的时间不相上下。（在各类艺术中，只有小说未能提供相似的例子，至少在美国是这样。）当代艺术与现代科学在玄妙深奥程度上的相似过于明显，以至于不能忽视。当代艺术与科学文化的另一个相似之处是其对历史的关切。当代艺术最令人感兴趣的那些作品，都大量涉及艺术媒介的历史。只要它们评论过去的艺术，就必须具备历史方面的知识，至少是不远的过去的知识。正如哈罗德·卢森贝格指出的，当代绘画自身就是批评的行为，也是创造的行为。这一看法，同样适用于当今的电影、音乐、舞蹈、诗歌和文学（欧洲文学）方面众多的作品。此外，在当代艺术与科学风格（这一次是就科学的积累方面而言）之间，还可以发现一个相似之处。

“两种文化”之间的冲突其实是一个幻觉，是发生令人困惑的深刻历史变化的时代产生的一个暂时现象。我们所目睹的，与其说是不同文化之间的冲突，不如说是某种新的（具有潜在一致性的）感受力的创造。这种新感受力必然根植于我们的体验，在人类历史上新出现的那些体验：对极端的社会流动性，以及身体流动性的体验；对人类所处环境的拥挤不堪（人口和物品都以令人目眩的速度激增）的体验；对所能获得的诸如速度（身体的速度，如乘飞机旅行的情形；画面的速度，如电影中的情形）一类的新感觉的体验；对那种因艺术品的大规模再生产而成为可能的艺术的泛文化观点的体验。

我们所看到的不是艺术的消亡，而是艺术功能的一种转换。艺术最初出现于人类社会时，是作为一种巫术宗教活动，后来变成了描绘和评论世俗现实的一种技艺。而到了我们这个时代，艺术僭取了一种新的功用——既不是宗教的，也不起世俗化宗教的功用，也不仅仅是世俗的或渎神的。（“世俗的”或“渎神的”这一观念，在其对立观念“宗教的”或“神圣的”过时之时，也就失效了。）艺术如今是一种新的工具，一种用来改造意识、形成新的感受力模式的工具。艺术的实践手段也获得了极大的拓展。的确，为应对艺术的这种新功用（这种新功用更多是被感觉到的，而不是被清晰、系统地表述出来的），艺术家不得不成为自觉的美学家：不断地对他们自己所使用的手段、材料和方法提出质疑。对取自“非艺术”领域——例如从工业技术，从商业的运作程序和意象，从纯粹私人的、主观的幻想和梦——的新材料与新方法的占用和利用，似乎成了众多艺术家的首要工作。画家们不再感到自己必须受制于画布和颜料，还可以采用头发、图片、胶水、沙子、自行车轮胎，以及他们自己的牙刷和袜子。音乐家们不再拘泥于传统乐器的声音，他们还去使用改装的乐器，以及合成声音（通常是录制的）和工业噪声。

一切为传统所认可的界限因而都受到了挑战：不仅是“科学”文化与“文学艺术”文化之间的界限，或“艺术”与“非艺术”之间的界限，也是文化领域本身众多已经确立的区分——如形式与内容之间的区分，浅薄与严肃之间的区分，以及“高级”文化与“低级”文化之间的区分（这一区分，最为文学知识分子所看重）。

“高级”文化与“低级”（或“大众”“流行”）文化之间的区分，部分基于对独一无二的艺术品与大量生产的艺术品之间的差异的一种评价。在一个大规模技术性再生产的时代，如果说严肃艺术家的作品具有某种特殊的价值，不过是因为这件作品独一无二，因为它带有他个性的印记。大众文化（甚至电影在很长一段时间里都被归于这一范畴）的作品被看得一文不值，是因为它们是被大量生产出来的物品，不带有个性的痕迹——是为那些没有多少个性特征的观众制作的大路货。但按照当代的艺术实践，这种区分看起来极为肤浅。近几十年来，众多严肃的艺术作品具有明显无个性的特征。艺术作品重申自己作为“物品”（甚至是作为大量制造或大量生产并吸收了大众艺术因素的物品）的存在，而不是作为“具有个性的个人表达”的存在。

当代艺术中对非个人（以及超个人）的探索，已经成为一种新古典主义；至少，与那种被认为是浪漫主义精神的东西背道而驰的做法，主导着当今大多数有趣的艺术。当今的艺术更接近于科学精神，而不是传统意义上的艺术精神，它强调冷静，拒绝它认为属于多愁善感的那种东西，提倡精确的精神，具有“探索”和“问题”意识。通常，艺术家的作品只是他的思想，他的观念。当然，这在建筑艺术中是一个常见的做法。人们也可能记得，文艺复兴时期的画家们常常在自己的画布上留出一部分，让自己的学生去完成；记得在协奏曲的兴盛时期，协奏曲第一乐章结尾部分的华彩段落被留给独奏者自己随意发挥。但同样的做法在当今，在艺术的这个后浪漫主义时代具有一种不同的、更有争议性的意义。当诸如约瑟夫·阿尔伯斯、艾尔斯沃斯·柯里和安迪·沃霍尔这样的画家，把自己作品的某些部分（如往上面添颜色）交给自己的一位朋友或当地的某个园丁来完成的时候，当诸如斯多克豪森、约翰·凯奇和卢伊吉·诺诺这样的音乐家给乐队成员改变总谱顺序以制造随机效果，以及即席演奏的合作机会的时候，他们就在改变我们大多数人借以辨识艺术作品的那些基本规则。他们在表达艺术不必是什么，至少不一定非得是什么。

新感受力的首要特征是，其典范之作不是文学作品，尤其不是小说。当今存在着一种新的非文学的文化，而大多数文学知识分子完全没有意识到这种文化的存在，更不用说了解其意义了。这个新的团体包括：某些画家、雕刻家、建筑师、社会规划家、电影制作人、电视技术人员、神经病学家、音乐家、电子工程师、舞蹈家、哲学家和社会学家（少数诗人和散文作家也可以包括进来）。这个新的文化联盟的一些基本读本见于尼采、维特根斯坦、安托南·阿尔托、C.S.谢林顿、巴克敏斯特·富勒、马歇尔·麦克卢汉、约翰·凯奇、安德烈·布勒东、罗兰·巴特、克洛德·列维-斯特劳斯、希格弗莱德·吉迪恩、诺尔曼·O.布朗以及基奥吉·科普斯的著作。

那些为“两种文化”之间的隔阂忧心忡忡的人，即英国和美国的几乎全部文学知识分子，把一个显然必须重新审视的文化观念当成了不言而喻、理所当然的观念。最出色地表达出这种观念的人，也许是马修·阿诺德（在他表达的这种观念中，文化的重要作为是文学创造，而文学自身又被看作是对文化的批评）。这些人忽视了其他艺术中发生的重大的、引人注目的（所谓“先锋派”的）进展，沉迷于那个更为传统的文化观念的永恒幻觉里而变得盲目，一贯坚持认为文学是创造性表达的典范。

使文学获得突出地位的是，它所肩负的“内容”的重荷：既包括满篇的事实描写，又包括道德评判。（正是这一点，使得英国和美国的大多数文学批评家能够把文学作品主要当作进行社会和文化诊断的文本，甚至是托词加以利用——而不是专注于某部给定的小说或者剧作的那些作为艺术作品的属性。）然而，我们这个时代的典范艺术实际上是那些内容要少得多、道德评判方式要冷静得多的艺术——如音乐、电影、舞蹈、建筑、绘画和雕刻。这些艺术的实践——它们全都大量地、自然地、不觉尴尬地吸纳科学和技术的因素——是新感受力的核心所在。

简言之，“两种文化”的问题，源于我们对当今文化处境的无知、落伍的理解。它源于文学知识分子（以及对艺术一知半解的那些科学家，如作为科学家小说家的C.P.斯诺本人）对一种新文化及其显露出来的感受力的无知。事实上，在科学技术与艺术之间不可能出现分离，正如在艺术与社会生活形式之间不可能出现分离一样。艺术作品、心理形式和社会形式互为映衬，彼此相随变化。但是，大多数人自然难以敏捷地适应这种变化——尤其是在当今，当变化以前所未有的速度出现之时。马歇尔·麦克卢汉把人类历史描绘成以技术来拓展人类能力的那些过程的接续，其中每一次拓展过程都给我们的环境，以及我们思考、感觉、评价的方式带来了重大变化。他说，变化的总趋势是把旧的环境提升至艺术形式（因而在新的工业环境中，自然变成了美学价值和精神价值的容器），“然而这种新的状况被人们视为堕落、退化”。显然，在任何一个既定的时代，只有某些艺术家才“具有那种与其时代的环境保持直接接触的才干和闯劲……这正是他们看起来‘领先于其所处时代’的原因……更胆怯的人则乐于接受先前环境的价值，把它们当作在自己时代延续下来的现实。我们天生有一种倾向，即只有把新出现的革新（例如自动化）当作一件能够为旧的伦理秩序所接纳的事物，它才能被接受下来”。只有依据麦克卢汉所说的那种旧的伦理秩序，“两种文化”的问题似乎才成了一个真正的问题。对我们时代大多数有创造性的艺术家（小说家极少能够被列入其中）来说，这不会成为一个问题，因为他们中的大多数人（不论自己是否能意识到）已经摆脱了马修·阿诺德的那种文化观念，他们发现这种观念在历史意义和人道意义上都已过时。

马修·阿诺德的文化观念把艺术定义为对生活的批评——这被理解为提出了道德、社会和政治方面的思想进行思考。新感受力却把艺术理解为对生活的拓展——这被理解为（新的）活力形式的再现。道德评价的作用在这里并未被否定，只是其范围被改变了。它变得不那么严厉，它在精确性和潜意识力量方面的所获弥补了它在话语明确性方面的损失。这是因为，比起储存在我们脑袋里的那些思想所塑造的我们，我们本能够更强烈、更深刻地去看（去听、去尝、去嗅、去感觉）。当然，“两种文化”危机说的支持者们仍旧能在晦涩难懂却在道德上保持中立立场的科学技术与在道德上保持某种立场的属于人性范围的艺术之间发现一种绝望的对比。但是事情没那么简单，也从来都不那么简单。一件伟大的艺术作品从来就不只是（或不主要是）某些思想或道德情感的表达。它首先是一个物品——更新我们的意识和感受力，改变（不论这种改变如何轻微）滋养一切特定的思想和情感的那种成分。义愤填膺的人道主义者们，请务必留意。没有必要大惊小怪。当道德良知被理解为不过是人类种种意识功能中的一种时，艺术作品并没有停止其在人类意识中的存在。

感觉，情感，感受力的抽象形式与风格，全都具有价值。当代意识所诉诸的正是这些东西。当代艺术的基本单元不是思想，而是对感觉的分析和拓展。（或者，即便是“思想”，也是关于感受力形式的思想。）里尔克把艺术家描绘成“为拓展个体感觉的领域”而工作的人。麦克卢汉把艺术家称为“感觉意识的专家”。当代艺术最引人入胜的作品（至少可追溯到法国象征主义诗歌）是对感觉的探索之作，是新的“感觉混合物”。大体上说，这样的艺术是实验性的——这并非出自精英人物对那些大多数人皆可获取之物的鄙视，而恰恰是因为意识到科学是实验性的。这种艺术也显然是非政治性的和不说教的，或更确切地说，是次说教的。

当奥特加·伊·加塞特在二十世纪二十年代写作《艺术的非人化》这部著名的论著时，他把现代艺术的种种特征（如非个人性，对痛苦的回避，对过去的敌意，拿一切不当真，随心所欲地标新立异，不承担伦理和政治方面的责任）归因于那种在他看来主导着我们这个时代的青春精神。[4]回过头去看，这种“非人化”似乎并不是指孩子气的天真无邪的回归，而是指一种颇有成人色彩以及洞察力的反应。在紧随最初的麻木以及后来的醒悟，并将理智抬举到情感之上而来的痛苦之外，是否可能还存在另外的反应，来应对我们时代的社会混乱和大量暴行，应对——这一点对我们的感受力来说同样重要，但不那么经常地为人们所注意——那种将我们的环境从可被理解并且可见的状态带入难被理解的、不可见的状态的前所未有的变化？我把艺术的特征描述为更新与培养感受力和意识的一种工具，如今，艺术在一个不能被感觉所把握的环境中运作。

巴克敏斯特·富勒写道：

在第一次世界大战中，工业突然从可见的基础变成不可见的基础，从有轨变成无轨，从有线变成无线，从合金的可见构成变成合金的不可见构成。第一次世界大战的大事是人们从此不再把感性频谱作为鉴别创新的首要标准……自第一次世界大战以来，所有重要的进展都处在电磁频谱的次感性或超感性频率上。人的所有重要技术如今都变得不可见了……那些曾经是感觉主义者的老大师开启了不能为感性所控制的现象的潘多拉之盒，而他们此前一直避免认可这些现象……突然间，他们失去了对它们的真正控制，因为从那时起他们自己也不理解正在发生的事。如果你不理解，你就无法控制……自第一次世界大战后，那些老大师已经消失得无影无踪了……

然而，艺术却保持着与感觉的联系。正如人们不能够让颜料飘浮在空中（不管怎样，画家都需要某一类平面，例如画布，无论这个平面如何模糊，如何缺乏质感），人们不可能创造一件不触及人类感性的艺术作品。然而，意识到以下这一点颇为重要，即人类的感性意识不仅具有一种生物学本质，还具有一种独特的历史，每一种文化都会看重某些感觉，而抑制其他的感觉。（对人类一些重要的情感来说，情况也是如此。）这种历史，正是艺术（还包括其他东西）进入的地方，也是我们的时代最引人入胜的艺术对其产生这样一种痛苦和危机感受的原因，无论这种艺术以怎样游戏、抽象、明显价值中立的面目出现。据说，至少是从工业革命开始，西方人就患上了一种群体的感觉麻痹症（马克斯·韦伯所说的“官僚体制的理性化”过程的伴随物），而现代艺术则起着某种既弄混我们的感觉又打开我们的感觉的电击疗法的作用。

新感受力（它抛弃了马修·阿诺德的文化观念）的一个重要后果已经被人们提及，那就是，“高级”文化与“低级”文化之间的区分似乎变得越来越没有意义。这是因为，这种区分对一个由那些致力于发掘种种感觉、对作为道德文章的那一类艺术不感兴趣的艺术家和科学家组成的创造性团体来说，没有任何意义。不管怎样，艺术总是要比道德文章多些什么。

对当今文化状况的特征进行描绘，就其最有创造性的方面而言，还有另外一种方式，那就是去谈论对于快感的一种新态度。在某种意义上，新艺术和新感受力对快感采取了一种甚为阴暗的看法。（法国当代伟大的作曲家皮埃尔·布雷在十二年前为他的一篇重要论文起了《反对音乐中的享乐主义》这样一个题目。）现代艺术的严肃性排除了通常意义上的那种快感——人们离开音乐厅后还哼得出的某段旋律带来的那种快感，人们能够识别、认同并按现实主义心理动机加以剖析的小说或戏剧中的某个人物带来的那种快感，描绘在画布上的一片美丽风景或一个戏剧性场景带来的那种快感。如果享乐主义指的是保持我们在艺术中发现快感的那些传统方式（传统的感觉形式和心理形式），那么，新艺术是反享乐主义的。它使人们的感觉受到挑战，或给感觉造成痛苦。新的严肃音乐刺痛人们的耳朵，新绘画也不愉悦人的眼目，新电影和少数令人感兴趣的新散文则难以看下去。对安东尼奥尼的电影，或贝克特、巴勒斯的叙事作品的通常抱怨是它们难以看懂或者难以卒读，它们“乏味”。然而指责其乏味，其实出自虚伪。从某种意义上说，没有乏味这种东西。乏味只是某一类气馁的别名而已。我们时代的那些引人入胜的艺术所说的那种新语言，令大多数受过教育的人的感受力气馁。

然而，艺术的目的终究是提供快感——尽管我们的感受力要花一些时间才赶得上艺术在某个既定的时间提供的那种快感的形式。同样，人们也可以说，现代感受力抵消了当代严肃艺术的表面的反享乐主义，比以前任何时候都更深地涉及通常意义上的那种快感。这是因为，新感受力要求艺术具有更少的“内容”，更加关注“形式”和风格的快感，它也不那么势利，不那么道学气——就其并不要求艺术中的快感必须与教育意义联系在一起而言。如果艺术被理解为情感的一种训导或者感觉的一种引导的话，那么劳森贝格的一幅画所带来的感觉（或感受）就与“至尊演唱组”的一支歌曲所产生的感觉没有什么差别了。巴德·波艾蒂歇尔《勒格斯·戴尔蒙德的兴衰》的活泼和优雅或者迪昂娜·瓦维克的歌唱风格可以被当作一个复杂的、令人愉快的事件来欣赏。要体验它们，不必屈尊俯就。

这最后一点，在我看来，似乎值得强调一番。这是因为，众多更年轻的艺术家和知识分子对流行艺术的那种喜爱之情并不是一种新的平庸作风（如人们常常指责的那样），或某一类型的反智主义，或对文化的某种放弃行为：理解这一点非常重要。例如，美国众多最严肃的画家同样也是流行音乐中的“新声音”的着迷者，这一事实并非寻求消遣或者放松所致。它与勋伯格也玩网球不一样。它反映了一种更开放地看待我们这个世界以及世界中的万物的新方式。它并不意味着否定、抛弃所有的标准：有大量愚蠢的流行音乐，也有低劣的装模作样的“先锋派”绘画、电影和音乐。关键之处在于，有着一些新标准，关于美、风格和趣味的新标准。新感受力是多元的。它既致力于一种令人苦恼的严肃性，又致力于乐趣、机智和怀旧。它也极有历史意识。其贪婪的兴趣（以及这些兴趣的变换）来得非常快，而且非常活跃。从这种新感受力的观点看，一部机器的美、解决一个数学难题的美、雅斯贝·约翰斯的某幅画作的美、让-吕克·戈达尔的某部影片的美，以及披头士的个性和音乐的美，全都可以被同等地接纳。

[1965]

Notes on ‘Camp’

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility – unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it – that goes by the cult name of ‘Camp.’

A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening (1954), it has hardly broken into print. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves. For myself, I plead the goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp conflict in my own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

Though I am speaking about sensibility only – and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous – these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free – as opposed to rote – human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion – and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It’s rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)

Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea . . .

To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful,[5] one must be tentative and These notes are for Oscar Wilde.

‘One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.’

– Phrases & Philosophies for the Use of the Young

1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical.

France – which do tell us something about the sensibility of the period.

3. Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things, Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are ‘campy’ movies, clothes, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings . . . This distinction is important. True, the Camp eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. It’s not all in the eye of the beholder.

4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp:

Zuleika Dobson

Tiffany lamps

Scopitone films

The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA

The Enquirer, headlines and stories

Aubrey Beardsley drawings

Swan Lake

Bellini’s operas

Visconti’s direction of Salome and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

Certain turn‑of‑the-century picture postcards

Schoedsack’s King Kong

The Cuban pop singer La Lupe

Lynn Ward’s novel in woodcuts, God’s Man

The old Flash Gordon comics

Women’s clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)

The novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett

Stag movies seen without lust

5. Camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others. Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp. For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface and style at the expense of content. Concert music, though, because it is contentless, is rarely Camp. It offers no opportunity, say, for a contrast between silly or extravagant content and rich form . . . Sometimes whole art forms become saturated with Camp. Classical ballet, opera, movies have seemed so for a long time. In the last two years, popular music (post rock’n’ roll, what the French call yé yé) has been annexed. And movie criticism (like lists of ‘The 10 Best Bad Movies I Have Seen’) is probably the greatest popularizer of Camp taste today, because most people still go to the movies in a high-spirited and unpretentious way.

6. There is a sense in which it is correct to say: ‘It’s too good to be Camp.’ Or ‘too important’, not marginal enough. (More on this later.) Thus, the personality and many of the works of Jean Cocteau are Camp, but not those of André Gide; the operas of Richard Strauss, but not those of Wagner; concoctions of Tin Pan Alley and Liverpool, but not jazz. Many examples of Camp are things which, from a ‘serious’ point of view, are either bad art or kitsch. Not all, though. Not only is Camp not necessarily bad art, but some art which can be approached as Camp (example: the major films of Louis Feuillade) merits the most serious admiration and study.

‘The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.’

– The Decay of Lying

7. All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy . . . Rural Camp is still man-made, and most campy objects are urban. (Yet, they often have a serenity – or a naïveté – which is the equivalent of pastoral. A great deal of Camp suggests Empson’s phrase, ‘urban pastoral’.)

8. Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off ’, of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in Art Nouveau, the most typical and fully developed Camp style. Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.

9. As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Examples: the swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; the thin, flowing, sexless bodies in Art Nouveau prints and posters, presented in relief on lamps and ashtrays; the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one’s sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine . . . Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn’t: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms. For obvious reasons, the best examples that can be cited are movie stars. The corny flamboyant femaleness of Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida, Jane Russell, Virginia Mayo; the exaggerated he‑man-ness of Steve Reeves, Victor Mature. The great stylists of temperament and mannerism, such as Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Edwige Feuillère.

10. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman’. To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being‑as‑Playing‑a‑Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

11. Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, ‘person’ and ‘thing’.) But all style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene. Life is not stylish. Neither is nature.

12. The question isn’t, ‘Why travesty, impersonation, theatricality?’ The question is, rather, ‘When does travesty, impersonation, theatricality acquire the special flavor of Camp?’ Why is the atmosphere of Shakespeare’s comedies (As You Like It, etc.) not epicene, while that of Der Rosenkavalier is?

13. The dividing line seems to fall in the 18th century; there the origins of Camp taste are to be found (Gothic novels, chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth.) But the relation to nature was quite different then. In the 18th century, people of taste either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill) or attempted to remake it into something artificial (Versailles). They also indefatigably patronized the past. Today’s Camp taste effaces nature, or else contradicts it outright. And the relation of Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental.

14. A pocket history of Camp might, of course, begin farther back – with the mannerist artists like Pontormo, Rosso and Caravaggio, or the extraordinarily theatrical painting of Georges de La Tour, or Euphuism (Lyly, etc.) in literature. Still, the soundest starting point seems to be the late 17th and early 18th century, because of that period’s extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry; its taste for the picturesque and the thrilling, its elegant conventions for representing instant feeling and the total presence of character – the epigram and the rhymed couplet (in words), the flourish (in gesture and in music). The late 17th and early 18th century is the great period of Camp: Pope, Congreve, Walpole, etc., but not Swift; les précieux in France; the rococo churches of Munich; Pergolesi. Somewhat later: much of Mozart. But in the 19th century, what had been distributed throughout all of high culture now becomes a special taste; it takes on overtones of the acute, the esoteric, the perverse. Confining the story to England alone, we see Camp continuing wanly through 19th-century aestheticism (Burne-Jones, Pater, Ruskin, Tennyson), emerging full-blown with the Art Nouveau movement in the visual and decorative arts, and finding its conscious ideologists in such ‘wits’ as Wilde and Firbank.

15. Of course, to say all these things are Camp is not to argue they are simply that. A full analysis of Art Nouveau, for instance, would scarcely equate it with Camp. But such an analysis cannot ignore what in Art Nouveau allows it to be experienced as Camp. Art Nouveau is full of ‘content’, even of a political-moral sort; it was a revolutionary movement in the arts, spurred on by a utopian vision (somewhere between William Morris and the Bauhaus group) of an organic politics and taste. Yet there is also a feature of the Art Nouveau objects which suggests a disengaged, unserious, ‘aesthete’s’ vision. This tells us something important about Art Nouveau – and about what the lens of Camp, which blocks out content, is.

16. Thus, the Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.

17. This comes out clearly in the vulgar use of the word Camp as a verb, ‘to camp’, something that people do. To camp is a mode of seduction – one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation: gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders. Equally and by extension, when the word becomes a noun, when a person or a thing is ‘a camp’, a duplicity is involved. Behind the ‘straight’ public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.

‘To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.’

– An Ideal Husband

18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (‘camping’) is usually less satisfying.

19. The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine Camp – for instance, the numbers devised for the Warner Brothers musicals of the early thirties (42nd Street; The Golddiggers of 1933; . . . of 1935; . . . of 1937 ; etc.) by Busby Berkeley – does not mean to be funny. Camping – say, the plays of Noël Coward – does. It seems unlikely that much of the traditional opera repertoire could be such satisfying Camp if the melodramatic absurdities of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers. One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all. (Compare a typical 19th century opera with Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, a piece of manufactured, calculated Camp, and the difference is clear.)

20. Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful. The perfection of Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon, among the greatest Camp movies ever made, comes from the effortless smooth way in which tone is maintained. This is not so with such famous would‑be Camp films of the fifties as All About Eve and Beat the Devil. These more recent movies have their fine moments, but the first is so slick and the second so hysterical; they want so badly to be campy that they’re continually losing the beat . . . Perhaps, though, it is not so much a question of the unintended effect versus the conscious intention, as of the delicate relation between parody and self-parody in Camp. The films of Hitchcock are a showcase for this problem. When self-parody lacks ebullience but instead reveals (even sporadically) a contempt for one’s themes and one’s materials – as in To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, North by Northwest – the results are forced and heavy-handed, rarely Camp. Successful Camp – a movie like Carné’s Drôle de Drame ; the film performances of Mae West and Edward Everett Horton; portions of the Goon Show – even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.

21. So, again, Camp rests on innocence. That means Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it. Objects, being objects, don’t change when they are singled out by the Camp vision. Persons, however, respond to their audiences. Persons begin ‘camping’: Mae West, Bea Lillie, La Lupe, Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat, Bette Davis in All About Eve. (Persons can even be induced to camp without their knowing it. Consider the way Fellini got Anita Ekberg to parody herself in La Dolce Vita.)

22. Considered a little less strictly, Camp is either completely naïve or else wholly conscious (when one plays at being campy). An example of the latter: Wilde’s epigrams themselves.

‘It’s absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.’

– Lady Windermere’s Fan

23. In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate and the naïve.

24. When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish. (‘It’s too much’, ‘It’s too fantastic’, ‘It’s not to be believed,’ are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm.)

25. The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers. Camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe‑l’oeil insects and cracks in the masonry. Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Sternberg’s six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is a Woman . . . In Camp there is often something démesuré in the quality of the ambition, not only in the style of the work itself. Gaudí’s lurid and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal – most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Família – the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.

26. Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’. Titus Andronicus and Strange Interlude are almost Camp, or could be played as Camp. The public manner and rhetoric of de Gaulle, often, are pure Camp.

27. A work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it succeeds. Eisenstein’s films are seldom Camp because, despite all exaggeration, they do succeed (dramatically) without surplus. If they were a little more ‘off ’, they could be great Camp – particularly Ivan the Terrible I & II. The same for Blake’s drawings and paintings, weird and mannered as they are. They aren’t Camp; though Art Nouveau, influenced by Blake, is.

What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp. Neither can anything be Camp that does not seem to spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility. Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp – what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic. On the barren edge of Camp lie a number of attractive things: the sleek fantasies of Dalí, the haute couture preciosity of Albicocco’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes. But the two things – Camp and preciosity – must not be confused.

28. Again, Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous. (The curved line, the extravagant gesture.) Not extraordinary merely in the sense of effort. Ripley’s Believe‑It‑Or‑Not items are rarely campy. These items, either natural oddities (the two-headed rooster, the eggplant in the shape of a cross) or else the products of immense labor (the man who walked from here to China on his hands, the woman who engraved the New Testament on the head of a pin), lack the visual reward – the glamour, the theatricality – that marks off certain extravagances as Camp.

29. The reason a movie like On the Beach, books like Winesburg, Ohio and For Whom the Bell Tolls are bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable, is that they are too dogged and pretentious. They lack fantasy. There is Camp in such bad movies as The Prodigal and Samson and Delilah, the series of Italian color spectacles featuring the super-hero Maciste, numerous Japanese science fiction films (Rodan, The Mysterians, The H‑Man) because, in their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy – and therefore touching and quite enjoyable.

30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don’t perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

31. This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-

fashioned, out‑of‑date, démodé. It’s not a love of the old as such. It’s simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment – or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic. Many people who listen with delight to the style of Rudy Vallée revived by the English pop group, The Temperance Seven, would have been driven up the wall by Rudy Vallée in his heyday.

Thus, things are campy, not when they become old – but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt. But the effect of time is unpredictable. Maybe Method acting ( James Dean, Rod Steiger, Warren Beatty) will seem as Camp some day as Ruby Keeler’s does now – or as Sarah Bernhardt’s does, in the films she made at the end of her career. And maybe not.

32. Camp is the glorification of ‘character.’ The statement is of no importance – except, of course, to the person (Loie Fuller, Gaudí, Cecil B. De Mille, Crivelli, de Gaulle, etc.) who makes it. What the Camp eye appreciates is the unity, the force of the person. In every move the aging Martha Graham makes she’s being Martha Graham, etc., etc. . . . This is clear in the case of the great serious idol of Camp taste, Greta Garbo. Garbo’s incompetence (at the least, lack of depth) as an actress enhances her beauty. She’s always herself.

33. What Camp taste responds to is ‘instant character’ (this is, of course, very 18th century); and, conversely, what it is not stirred by is the sense of the development of character. Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence – a person being one, very intense thing. This attitude toward character is a key element of the theatricalization of experience embodied in the Camp sensibility. And it helps account for the fact that opera and ballet are experienced as such rich treasures of Camp, for neither of these forms can easily do justice to the complexity of human nature. Wherever there is development of character, Camp is reduced. Among operas, for example, La Traviata (which has some small development of character) is less campy than Il Trovatore (which has none).

‘Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.’

– Vera, or The Nihilists

34. Camp taste turns its back on the good–bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different – a supplementary – set of standards.

35. Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves. We value it because it succeeds – in being what it is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that lies behind it. We assume a proper, that is to say, straightforward relation between intention and performance. By such standards, we appraise The Iliad, Aristophanes’ plays, The Art of the Fugue, Middlemarch, the paintings of Rembrandt, Chartres, the poetry of Donne, The Divine Comedy, Beethoven’s quartets, and – among people – Socrates, Jesus, St Francis, Napoleon, Savonarola. In short, the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty and seriousness.

36. But there are other creative sensibilities besides the seriousness (both tragic and comic) of high culture and of the high style of evaluating people. And one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.

For instance, there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement. Here we do accept a disparity between intention and result. I am speaking, obviously, of a style of personal existence as well as of a style in art; but the examples had best come from art. Think of Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kaf ka, Artaud, think of most of the important works of art of the 20th century, that is, art whose goal is not that of creating harmonies but of overstraining the medium and introducing more and more violent, and unresol vable, subject-matter. This sensibility also insists on the principle that an oeuvre in the old sense (again, in art, but also in life) is not possible. Only ‘fragments’ are possible . . . Clearly, different standards apply here than to traditional high culture. Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human – in short, another valid sensibility – is being revealed.

And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.

37. The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically moralistic. The second sensibility, that of extreme states of feeling, represented in much contemporary ‘ avant-garde’ art, gains power by a tension between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is wholly aesthetic.

38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content’, ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality’, of irony over tragedy.

39. Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp (seriousness in the degree of the artist’s involvement) and, often, pathos. The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of Camp; it is the quality of excruciation in much of Henry James (for instance, The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove ) that is responsible for the large element of Camp in his writings. But there is never, never tragedy.

40. Style is everything. Genet’s ideas, for instance, are very Camp. Genet’s statement that ‘the only criterion of an act is its elegance’▲▲▲Sartre’s gloss on this in Saint Genet is: ‘Elegance is the quality of conduct which transforms the greatest amount of being into appearing.’★★★ is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with Wilde’s ‘in matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style.’ But what counts, finally, is the style in which ideas are held. The ideas about morality and politics in, say, Lady Windermere’s Fan and in Major Barbara are Camp, but not just because of the nature of the ideas themselves. It is those ideas, held in a special playful way. The Camp ideas in Our Lady of the Flowers are maintained too grimly, and the writing itself is too successfully elevated and serious, for Genet’s books to be Camp.

41. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

42. One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that ‘sincerity’ is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness.

43. The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness – irony, satire – seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.

44. Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

‘I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex.’

– A Woman of No Importance

45. Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

46. The dandy was overbred. His posture was disdain, or else ennui. He sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation. (Models: Des Esseintes in Huysmans’ À Rebours, Marius the Epicurean, Valéry’s Monsieur Teste.) He was dedicated to ‘good taste’.

The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp – Dandyism in the age of mass culture – makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

47. Wilde himself is a transitional figure. The man who, when he first came to London, sported a velvet beret, lace shirts, velveteen knee-breeches and black silk stockings, could never depart too far in his life from the pleasures of the old-style dandy; this conservatism is reflected in The Picture of Dorian Gray. But many of his attitudes suggest something more modern. It was Wilde who formulated an important element of the Camp sensibility – the equivalence of all objects – when he announced his intention of ‘living up’ to his blue-and-white china, or declared that a door-knob could be as admirable as a painting. When he proclaimed the importance of the necktie, the boutonnière, the chair, Wilde was anticipating the democratic esprit of Camp.

48. The old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity. Where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.

49. It is a feat, of course. A feat goaded on, in the last analysis, by the threat of boredom. The relation between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence.

‘What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.’

– A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated

50. Aristocracy is a position vis‑à‑vis culture (as well as vis‑à‑vis power), and the history of Camp taste is part of the history of snob taste. But since no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist today to sponsor special tastes, who is the bearer of this taste? Answer: an improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste.

51. The peculiar relation beween Camp taste and homosexuality has to be explained. While it’s not true that Camp taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap. Not all liberals are Jews, but Jews have shown a peculiar affinity for liberal and reformist causes. So, not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard – and the most articulate audience – of Camp. (The analogy is not frivolously chosen. Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.)

52. The reason for the flourishing of the aristocratic posture among homosexuals also seems to parallel the Jewish case. For every sensibility is self-serving to the group that promotes it. Jewish liberalism is a gesture of self-legitimization. So is Camp taste, which definitely has something propagandistic about it. Needless to say, the propaganda operates in exactly the opposite direction. The Jews pinned their hopes for integrating into modern society on promoting the moral sense. Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.

53. Nevertheless, even though homosexuals have been its vanguard, Camp taste is much more than homosexual taste. Obviously, its metaphor of life as theater is peculiarly suited as a justification and projection of a certain aspect of the situation of homosexuals. (The Camp insistence on not being ‘serious’, on playing, also connects with the homosexual’s desire to remain youthful.) Yet one feels that if homosexuals hadn’t more or less invented Camp, someone else would. For the aristocratic posture with relation to culture cannot die, though it may persist only in increasingly arbitrary and ingenious ways. Camp is (to repeat) the relation to style in a time in which the adoption of style – as such – has become altogether questionable. (In the modern era, each new style, unless frankly anachronistic, has come on the scene as an anti-style.)

‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.’

– In conversation

54. The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste. (Genet talks about this in Our Lady of the Flowers.) The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

55. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation – not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn’t propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

56. Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of ‘character’. . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as ‘a camp’, they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

(Here, one may compare Camp with much of Pop Art, which – when it is not just Camp – embodies an attitude that is related, but still very different. Pop Art is more flat and more dry, more serious, more detached, ultimately nihilistic.)

57. Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles. The absence of this love is the reason why such kitsch items as Peyton Place (the book) and the Tishman Building aren’t Camp.

58. The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful . . . Of course, one can’t always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I’ve tried to sketch in these notes.

One Culture and the New Sensibility

In the last few years there has been a good deal of discussion of a purported chasm which opened up some two centuries ago, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, between ‘two cultures’, the literary-artistic and the scientific. According to this diagnosis, any intelligent and articulate modern person is likely to inhabit one culture to the exclusion of the other. He will be concerned with different documents, different techniques, different problems; he will speak a different language. Most important, the type of effort required for the mastery of these two cultures will differ vastly. For the literary-artistic culture is understood as a general culture. It is addressed to man insofar as he is man; it is culture or, rather, it promotes culture, in the sense of culture defined by Ortega y Gasset: that which a man has in his possession when he has forgotten everything that he has read. The scientific culture, in contrast, is a culture for specialists; it is founded on remembering and is set down in ways that require complete dedication of the effort to comprehend. While the literary-artistic culture aims at internalization, ingestion – in other words, cultivation – the scientific culture aims at accumulation and externalization in complex instruments for problem-solving and specific techniques for mastery.

Though T. S. Eliot derived the chasm between the two cultures from a period more remote in modern history, speaking in a famous essay of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which opened up in the 17th century, the connection of the problem with the Industrial Revolution seems well taken. There is a historic antipathy on the part of many literary intellectuals and artists to those changes which characterize modern society – above all, industrialization and those of its effects which everyone has experienced, such as the proliferation of huge impersonal cities and the predominance of the anonymous style of urban life. It has mattered little whether industrialization, the creature of modern ‘science’, is seen on the 19th and early-20th-century model, as noisy smoky artificial processes which defile nature and standardize culture or on the newer model, the clean automated technology that is coming into being in the second half of the 20th century. The judgment has been mostly the same. Literary men, feeling that the status of humanity itself was being challenged by the new science and the new technology, abhorred and deplored the change. But the literary men, whether one thinks of Emerson and Thoreau and Ruskin in the 19th century, or of 20th-century intellectuals who talk of modern society as being in some new way incomprehensible, ‘alienated’, are inevitably on the defensive. They know that the scientific culture, the coming of the machine, cannot be stopped.

The standard response to the problem of ‘the two cultures’ – and the issue long antedates by many decades the crude and philistine statement of the problem by C. P. Snow in a famous lecture some years ago – has been a facile defense of the function of the arts (in terms of an ever vaguer ideology of ‘humanism’) or a premature surrender of the function of the arts to science. By the second response, I am not referring to the philistinism of scientists (and those of their party among artists and philosophers) who dismiss the arts as imprecise, untrue, at best mere toys. I am speaking of serious doubts which have arisen among those who are passionately engaged in the arts. The role of the individual artist, in the business of making unique objects for the purpose of giving pleasure and educating conscience and sensibility, has repeatedly been called into question. Some literary intellectuals and artists have gone so far as to prophesy the ultimate demise of the art-making activity of man. Art, in an automated scientific society, would be unfunctional, useless.

But this conclusion, I should argue, is plainly unwarranted. Indeed, the whole issue seems to me crudely put. For the question of ‘the two cultures’ assumes that science and technology are changing, in motion, while the arts are static, fulfilling some perennial generic human function (consolation? edification? diversion?). Only on the basis of this false assumption would anyone reason that the arts might be in danger of becoming obsolete.

Art does not progress, in the sense that science and technology do. But the arts do develop and change. For instance, in our own time, art is becoming increasingly the terrain of specialists. The most interesting and creative art of our time is not open to the generally educated; it demands special effort; it speaks a specialized language. The music of Milton Babbitt and Morton Feldman, the painting of Mark Rothko and Frank Stella, the dance of Merce Cunningham and James Waring demand an education of sensibility whose difficulties and length of apprenticeship are at least comparable to the difficulties of mastering physics or engineering. (Only the novel, among the arts, at least in America, fails to provide similar examples.) The parallel between the abstruseness of contemporary art and that of modern science is too obvious to be missed. Another likeness to the scientific culture is the history-mindedness of contemporary art. The most interesting works of contemporary art are full of references to the history of the medium; so far as they comment on past art, they demand a knowledge of at least the recent past. As Harold Rosenberg has pointed out, contemporary paintings are themselves acts of criticism as much as of creation. The point could be made as well of much recent work in the films, music, the dance, poetry, and (in Europe) literature. Again, a similarity with the style of science – this time, with the accumulative aspect of science – can be discerned.

The conflict between ‘the two cultures’ is in fact an illusion, a temporary phenomenon born of a period of profound and bewildering historical change. What we are witnessing is not so much a conflict of cultures as the creation of a new (potentially unitary) kind of sensibility. This new sensibility is rooted, as it must be, in our experience, experiences which are new in the history of humanity – in extreme social and physical mobility; in the crowdedness of the human scene (both people and material commodities multiplying at a dizzying rate); in the availability of new sensations such as speed (physical speed, as in airplane travel; speed of images, as in the cinema); and in the pan-cultural perspective on the arts that is possible through the mass reproduction of art objects.

What we are getting is not the demise of art, but a transformation of the function of art. Art, which arose in human society as a magical-religious operation, and passed over into a technique for depicting and commenting on secular reality, has in our own time arrogated to itself a new function – neither religious, nor serving a secularized religious function, nor merely secular or profane (a notion which breaks down when its opposite, the ‘religious’ or ‘sacred’, becomes obsolescent). Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended. Indeed, in response to this new function (more felt than clearly articulated), artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods. Often, the conquest and exploitation of new materials and methods drawn from the world of ‘ non-art’ – for example, from industrial technology, from commercial processes and imagery, from purely private and subjective fantasies and dreams – seems to be the principal effort of many artists. Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.

All kinds of conventionally accepted boundaries have thereby been challenged: not just the one between the ‘scientific’ and the ‘ literary-artistic’ cultures, or the one between ‘art’ and ‘ non-art’; but also many established distinctions within the world of culture itself – that between form and content, the frivolous and the serious, and (a favorite of literary intellectuals) ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.

The distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ (or ‘mass’ or ‘popular’) culture is based partly on an evaluation of the difference between unique and mass-produced objects. In an era of mass technological reproduction, the work of the serious artist had a special value simply because it was unique, because it bore his personal, individual signature. The works of popular culture (and even films were for a long time included in this category) were seen as having little value because they were manufactured objects, bearing no individual stamp – group concoctions made for an undifferentiated audience. But in the light of contemporary practice in the arts, this distinction appears extremely shallow. Many of the serious works of art of recent decades have a decidedly impersonal character. The work of art is reas serting its existence as ‘object’ (even as manufactured or mass-produced object, drawing on the popular arts) rather than as ‘individual personal ex-pression’.

The exploration of the impersonal (and trans-personal) in contemporary art is the new classicism; at least, a reaction against what is understood as the romantic spirit dominates most of the interesting art of today. Today’s art, with its insistence on coolness, its refusal of what it considers to be sentimentality, its spirit of exactness, its sense of ‘research’ and ‘problems’, is closer to the spirit of science than of art in the old-fashioned sense. Often, the artist’s work is only his idea, his concept. This is a familiar practice in architecture, of course. And one remembers that painters in the Renaissance often left parts of their canvases to be worked out by students, and that in the flourishing period of the concerto the cadenza at the end of the first movement was left to the inventiveness and discretion of the performing soloist. But similar practices have a different, more polemical meaning today, in the present post-romantic era of the arts. When painters such as Joseph Albers, Ellsworth Kelly and Andy Warhol assign portions of the work, say, the painting in of the colors themselves, to a friend or the local gardener; when musicians such as Stockhausen, John Cage and Luigi Nono invite collaboration from performers by leaving opportunities for random effects, switching around the order of the score, and improvisations – they are changing the ground rules which most of us employ to recognize a work of art. They are saying what art need not be. At least, not necessarily.

The primary feature of the new sensibility is that its model product is not the literary work, above all, the novel. A new non-literary culture exists today, of whose very existence, not to mention significance, most literary intellectuals are entirely unaware. This new establishment includes certain painters, sculptors, architects, social planners, film-makers, TV technicians, neurologists, musicians, electronics engineers, dancers, philosophers and sociologists. (A few poets and prose writers can be included.) Some of the basic texts for this new cultural alignment are to be found in the writings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Antonin Artaud, C. S. Sherrington, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, John Cage, André Breton, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sigfried Giedon, Norman O. Brown, and György Kepes.

Those who worry about the gap between ‘the two cultures’, and this means virtually all literary intellectuals in England and America, take for granted a notion of culture which decidedly needs re-examining. It is the notion perhaps best expressed by Matthew Arnold (in which the central cultural act is the making of literature, which is itself understood as the criticism of culture). Simply ignorant of the vital and enthralling (so called ‘ avant-garde’) developments in the other arts, and blinded by their personal investment in the perpetuation of the older notion of culture, they continue to cling to literature as the model for creative statement.

What gives literature its pre-eminence is its heavy burden of ‘content’, both reportage and moral judgment. (This makes it possible for most English and American literary critics to use literary works mainly as texts, or even pretexts, for social and cultural diagnosis – rather than concentrating on the properties of, say, a given novel or a play, as an art work.) But the model arts of our time are actually those with much less content, and a much cooler mode of moral judgment – like music, films, dance, architecture, painting, sculpture. The practice of these arts – all of which draw profusely, naturally, and without embarrassment, upon science and technology – are the locus of the new sensibility.

The problem of ‘the two cultures’, in short, rests upon an uneducated, uncontemporary grasp of our present cultural situation. It arises from the ignorance of literary intellectuals (and of scientists with a shallow knowledge of the arts, like the scientist-novelist C. P. Snow himself ) of a new culture, and its emerging sensibility. In fact, there can be no divorce between science and technology, on the one hand, and art, on the other, any more than there can be a divorce between art and the forms of social life. Works of art, psychological forms, and social forms all reflect each other, and change with each other. But, of course, most people are slow to come to terms with such changes – especially today, when the changes are occurring with an unprecedented rapidity. Marshall McLuhan has described human history as a succession of acts of technological extension of human capacity, each of which works a radical change upon our environment and our ways of thinking, feeling and valuing. The tendency, he remarks, is to upgrade the old environment into art form (thus Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values in the new industrial environment) ‘while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading.’ Typically, it is only certain artists in any given era who ‘have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age . . . That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time” . . . More timid people prefer to accept the . . . previous environment’s values as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automation, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethical order.’ Only in the terms of what McLuhan calls the old ethical order does the problem of ‘the two cultures’ appear to be a genuine problem. It is not a problem for most of the creative artists of our time (among whom one could include very few novelists) because most of these artists have broken, whether they know it or not, with the Matthew Arnold notion of culture, finding it historically and humanly obsolescent.

The Matthew Arnold notion of culture defines art as the criticism of life – this being understood as the propounding of moral, social and political ideas. The new sensibility understands art as the extension of life – this being understood as the representation of (new) modes of vivacity. There is no necessary denial of the role of moral evaluation here. Only the scale has changed; it has become less gross, and what it sacrifices in discursive explicitness it gains in accuracy and subliminal power. For we are what we are able to see (hear, taste, smell, feel) even more powerfully and profoundly than we are what furniture of ideas we have stocked in our heads. Of course, the proponents of ‘the two cultures’ crisis continue to observe a desperate contrast between unintelligible, morally neutral science and technology, on the one hand, and morally committed, human-scale art on the other. But matters are not that simple, and never were. A great work of art is never simply (or even mainly) a vehicle of ideas or of moral sentiments. It is, first of all, an object modifying our consciousness and sensibility, changing the composition, however slightly, of the humus that nourishes all specific ideas and sentiments. Outraged humanists, please note.

There is no need for alarm. A work of art does not cease being a moment in the conscience of mankind, when moral conscience is understood as only one of the functions of consciousness.

Sensations, feelings, the abstract forms and styles of sensibility count. It is to these that contemporary art addresses itself. The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. (Or if it is an ‘idea’, it is about the form of sensibility.) Rilke described the artist as someone who works ‘toward an extension of the regions of the individual senses’; McLuhan calls artists ‘experts in sensory awareness’. And the most interesting works of contemporary art (one can begin at least as far back as French symbolist poetry) are adventures in sensation, new ‘sensory mixes’. Such art is, in principle, experimental – not out of an elitist disdain for what is accessible to the majority, but precisely in the sense that science is experimental. Such an art is also notably apolitical and undidactic, or, rather, infra-didactic.

When Ortega y Gasset wrote his famous essay The Dehumanization of Art in the early 1920s, he ascribed the qualities of modern art (such as impersonality, the ban on pathos, hostility to the past, playfulness, willful stylization, absence of ethical and political commitment) to the spirit of youth which he thought dominated our age.▲▲▲Ortega remarks, in this essay: ‘Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.’★★★ In retrospect, it seems this ‘dehumanization’ did not signify the recovery of childlike innocence, but was rather a very adult, knowing response. What other response than anguish, followed by anesthesia and then by wit and the elevating of intelligence over sentiment, is possible as a response to the social disorder and mass atrocities of our time, and – equally important for our sensibilities, but less often remarked on – to the unprecedented change in what rules our environment from the intelligible and visible to that which is only with difficulty intelligible, and is invisible? Art, which I have characterized as an instrument for modifying and educating sensibility and consciousness, now operates in an environment which cannot be grasped by the senses.

Buckminister Fuller has written:

In World War I industry suddenly went from the visible to the invisible base, from the track to the trackless, from the wire to the wireless, from visible structuring to invisible structuring in alloys. The big thing about World War I is that man went off the sensorial spectrum forever as the prime criterion of accrediting innovations . . . All major advances since World War I have been in the infra-and the ultrasensorial frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. All the important technical affairs of men today are invisible . . . The old masters, who were sensorialists, have unleased a Pandora’s box of non-sensorially controllable phenomena, which they had avoided accrediting up to that time . . . Suddenly they lost their true mastery, because from then on they didn’t personallyunderstand what was going on. If you don’t understand you cannot master . . . Since World War I, the old masters have been extinct . . .

But, of course, art remains permanently tied to the senses. Just as one cannot float colors in space (a painter needs some sort of surface, like a canvas, however neutral and textureless), one cannot have a work of art that does not impinge upon the human sensorium. But it is important to realize that human sensory awareness has not merely a biology but a specific history, each culture placing a premium on certain senses and inhibiting others. (The same is true for the range of primary human emotions.) Here is where art (among other things) enters, and why the interesting art of our time has such a feeling of anguish and crisis about it, however playful and abstract and ostensibly neutral morally it may appear. Western man may be said to have been undergoing a massive sensory anesthesia (a concomitant of the process that Max Weber calls ‘bureaucratic rationalization’) at least since the Industrial Revolution, with modern art functioning as a kind of shock therapy for both confounding and unclosing our senses.

One important consequence of the new sensibility (with its abandonment of the Matthew Arnold idea of culture) has already been alluded to – namely, that the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture seems less and less meaningful. For such a distinction – inseparable from the Matthew Arnold apparatus – simply does not make sense for a creative community of artists and scientists engaged in programming sensations, uninterested in art as a species of moral journalism. Art has always been more than that, anyway.

Another way of characterizing the present cultural situation, in its most creative aspects, would be to speak of a new attitude toward pleasure. In one sense, the new art and the new sensibility take a rather dim view of pleasure. (The great contemporary French composer, Pierre Boulez, entitled an important essay of his twelve years ago, ‘Against Hedonism in Music’.) The seriousness of modern art precludes pleasure in the familiar sense – the pleasure of a melody that one can hum after leaving the concert hall, of characters in a novel or play whom one can recognize, identify with, and dissect in terms of realistic psychological motives, of a beautiful landscape or a dramatic moment represented on a canvas. If hedonism means sustaining the old ways in which we have found pleasure in art (the old sensory and psychic modalities), then the new art is anti-hedonistic. Having one’s sensorium challenged or stretched hurts. The new serious music hurts one’s ears, the new painting does not graciously reward one’s sight, the new films and the few interesting new prose works do not go down easily. The commonest complaint about the films of Antonioni or the narratives of Beckett or Burroughs is that they are hard to look at or to read, that they are ‘boring.’ But the charge of boredom is really hypocritical. There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration. And the new languages which the interesting art of our time speaks are frustrating to the sensibilities of most educated people.

But the purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure – though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer. And, one can also say that, balancing the ostensible anti-hedonism of serious contemporary art, the modern sensibility is more involved with pleasure in the familiar sense than ever. Because the new sensibility demands less ‘content’ in art, and is more open to the pleasures of ‘form’ and style, it is also less snobbish, less moralistic – in that it does not demand that pleasure in art necessarily be associated with edification. If art is understood as a form of discipline of the feelings and a programming of sensations, then the feeling (or sensation) given off by a Rauschenberg painting might be like that of a song by the Supremes. The brio and elegance of Budd Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond or the singing style of Dionne Warwick can be appreciated as a complex and pleasurable event. They are experienced without condescension.

This last point seems to me worth underscoring. For it is important to understand that the affection which many younger artists and intellectuals feel for the popular arts is not a new philistinism (as has so often been charged) or a species of anti-intellectualism or some kind of abdication from culture. The fact that many of the most serious American painters, for example, are also fans of ‘the new sound’ in popular music is not the result of the search for mere diversion or relaxation; it is not, say, like Schoenberg also playing tennis. It reflects a new, more open way of looking at the world and at things in the world, our world. It does not mean the renunciation of all standards: there is plenty of stupid popular music, as well as inferior and pretentious ‘avant-garde’ paintings, films, and music. The point is that there are new standards, new standards of beauty and style and taste. The new sensibility is defiantly pluralistic; it is dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia. It is also extremely history-conscious; and the voracity of its enthusiasms (and of the supercession of these enthusiasms) is very high-speed and hectic. From the vantage point of this new sensibility, the beauty of a machine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a painting by Jasper Johns, of a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the personalities and music of the Beatles is equally accessible.

[1]一个时代的感受力，不仅包括这种感受力的最有决定性的方面，也包括其最易消亡的方面。人们可以完全不触及一个时代的感受力或趣味，而去把握这个时代的思想（思想史）和行为（社会史），尽管这种感受力或趣味渗透于这些思想或行为中。能够向我们描述一个时代的感受力的历史研究——如赫伊津赫对中世纪后期的研究以及费弗尔对十六世纪法国的研究——颇为罕见。——原注（以下若无特殊说明，均为原注。）

[2]萨特在《圣热内》中对这句话的注释是：“优雅是那种将最大量的存在转化为显现的行为的特征。”

[3]本文发表于1996年。——编者注

[4]奥特加在著作中写道：“假若艺术想去拯救人的话，那它只能靠把人从生活的严肃性中拯救出来并让他恢复到一种意想不到的孩子气的状态，方可做到这一点。”

[5]The sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive, but also its most perishable, aspect. One may capture the ideas (intellectual history) and the behavior (social history) of an epoch without ever touching upon the sensibility or taste which informed those ideas, that behavior. Rare are those historical studies – like Huizinga on the late Middle Ages, Febvre on 16th century nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility. It’s embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp. One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a very inferior piece of Camp.

让我们遇见在。。

企鹅图书 微博(penguinbooks)

企鹅图书微信订阅号

企鹅图书数字业务微信服务号

更多关于我们对信息请

访问企鹅兰登北亚官网 PRHNA.COM

缠忧的男孩

企鹅现代经典 第一辑

（美）卡森·麦卡勒斯/著

杜蕴慈 李文俊/译

企鹅图书 | PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

New Zealand | India | South Africa | North Asia

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at:

global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

THE HAUNTED BOY

The Sojourner was first published in Mademoiselle in 1950 and A Domestic Dilemma was first published

in the New York Post magazine section in 1951; both appeared in The Ballad of the Sad Café in 1951. The

Haunted Boy was first published in Mademoiselle in 1955 and was posthumously published, amongst

other stories, in The Mortgaged Heart in 1972.This selection first published in 2018 in Penguin Modern.

Simplified Chinese translation of The Haunted Boy copyright © 杜蕴慈. Simplified Chinese translation

of The Sojourner and A Domestic Dilemma copyright © 李文俊. Simplified Chinese edition copyright ©

2021 by Penguin Random House North Asia in association with CITIC Press Group. All rights reserved.

© “企鹅”及其相关标识是企鹅兰登（北京）文化发展有限公司已经注册或尚未注册的商标。

未经允许，不得擅用。

企鹅兰登电子书 | Penguin Random House eBooks

目录

缠忧的男孩

旅居者

家庭困境

The Haunted Boy

The Sojourner

A Domestic Dilemma

返回总目录

“他的手向身边的身体伸过去，在他深情而又复杂的爱里，既混杂着哀伤，也存在着欲念。”

缠忧的男孩

休走过街角，寻找他的母亲，可她不在院子里。有时候她会在外头侍弄花坛里的春季小花——白蜀葵、石竹、半边莲（这些花的名字是母亲教给休的）。可是今天，在淡薄的四月午后阳光下，花坛里开着五颜六色的鲜花，前院绿色的草坪上一片空荡。休沿着人行道跑过来，约翰跟在他后头。他们两步跳上门前台阶，然后在背后甩上大门。

“妈妈！”休喊道。

在无人回应的寂静中，他们站在地板打了蜡的空荡门厅里，就在这个时候，休感觉有什么事不对劲。客厅的壁炉里没有火，他习惯了寒冷的季节里闪烁的壁炉火光，于是在这转暖的第一天，起居室里荒凉阴郁，显得陌生。他打了个冷战，很庆幸有约翰在这里。花朵图案的地毯上，阳光照出一片片红。明亮的红、暗沉的红、死亡的红——“那个时候”的冰冷回忆突然令他一阵心慌。那片红变成了眩晕的黑。

“布朗，你怎么了？”约翰问他，“你看起来好苍白。”

休抖了抖身子，一手扶着额头。“没事。我们去厨房吧。”

“我只能待一会儿。”约翰说，“我有任务在身，必须把那些票卖出去。我吃完就得走。”

厨房里挂着崭新的格子抹布、干净的锅盆，此刻这里算是整栋房子里最舒适的地方。搪瓷桌面上摆着一个柠檬派，是她做的。日常的厨房与派饼让休安了心，他又走回门厅，抬起头，冲楼上喊。

“妈！哦，妈！”

还是一样无人回应。

他说：“这个派是我妈做的。”他很快找出一把刀，切下去——好驱散越来越浓的忧惧。

“布朗，你要把它切开吧？”

“那当然了，莱尼。”

这个春天里他俩都以姓氏称呼对方，除非不巧忘了这个话茬儿。休觉得这样很潇洒、很成熟，而且颇有气派。约翰是整个学校里休最欣赏的男同学。约翰比他大两岁，跟约翰比起来，其他男生都像是一群蠢蛋。他是二年级最好的学生，有脑子——又不至于是老师的乖宝宝，还是最好的运动员。休读一年级，在高中的第一年还没有很多朋友——他多少有点与周遭保持距离，因为他害怕。

“我妈都会准备点好东西给我放学后吃。”休把切下的一大块派饼放在碟子上，分给约翰——给莱尼。

“这个派肯定很棒。”

“这个饼皮是用压碎的消化饼干做的，不是一般面团。”休继续说，“因为做饼皮面团总是非常麻烦。我们觉得这种消化饼干做的饼皮也一样好。不过我妈做一般饼皮面团当然也是没问题的。”

休没法安静下来，他在厨房里来回走动，吃着捧在手里的一片派饼，紧张地扒梳却弄乱了棕发，和气的金棕色眼睛里满是苦涩的茫然。约翰一直坐在桌前，感觉到了他的不安，约翰跷起腿来，两条瘦长的腿互相别住。

“我确实有事在身，我得去卖合唱团表演的票了。”

“先别走。你有整整一下午呢。”休害怕这栋空荡荡的房子。他需要约翰，他需要有人。他最需要的是听见他母亲的声音，知道她在家，跟他在一起。“也许我妈正在洗澡，”他说，“我再喊一喊。”

回应这第三次呼喊的依然是一片寂静。

“我想你母亲一定是看电影去了，或者买东西什么的。”

“不会的。”休说，“如果真是这样，她会留张字条。每次我回家她不在，她都会留字条。”

“我们还没有找找看，”约翰说，“也许她把字条留在门口鞋垫下头，要不就是客厅里什么地方。”

休听不进去安慰的话。“不会的。她会把字条留在这个派下头。她知道我一回家就会跑进厨房。”

“说不定她接了电话，或者突然想起来要去做什么事。”

“也许，”休说，“前两天我听到她跟我爸说，她要去给自己买几件新衣服。”话才说完，希冀的闪光却一瞬即逝。休扒开额前的头发，往外冲去。“我觉得我最好上楼看看。我该趁你在的时候上去。”

他站在楼梯口，一手抱着栏杆。楼梯的涂漆味儿，楼上浴室白色的、关着的门，都让“那个时候”活了过来。他抓紧栏杆，双脚没法走上台阶。那一片红再次变成旋涡般的病态暗红。休坐下来。他想起童子军急救法，告诉自己：把头放低，放在两膝之间。

“休，”约翰叫他，“休！”

晕眩感逐渐消失，休又发现了一件新的烦恼：莱尼正在用他平平无奇的名字叫他。莱尼认为他对母亲的事表现得太婆婆妈妈了，所以不值得用之前那样气派潇洒的方式称呼他。他回到厨房里，眩晕已经完全过去了。

约翰对他说：“布朗。”于是新烦恼又烟消云散。“贵处是否有一种与奶牛有关的物体？一种白色液态物，法语叫作lait，在美国，我们就简简单单管它叫牛奶。”

休一开始愕然摸不着头脑，然后才明白。“哎呀，莱尼，我真笨！请多原谅，我居然忘个精光。”休赶紧从冰箱里拿出牛奶，又找出两只玻璃杯。“我没动脑子。我在想别的事。”

约翰说：“我明白。”过了一会儿，他看着休的眼睛，以一种平静的语气问道：“休，你为什么这么担心你母亲？她病了吗？”

现在休知道了，约翰以名字称呼他并非轻视，而是因为他现在说的话很严肃，不能装潇洒。约翰是他从以前到现在最喜欢的朋友。这样和约翰面对面坐在厨房桌边，他感觉比较自然，也似乎更安全了。当他看着约翰平静的灰眼睛，情谊的慰藉纾解了恐惧。

约翰又问了一次，这次还是一样沉稳：“休，你母亲生病了吗？”

如果是别的男同学问起，休是没法回答的。他对谁都没有提起过自己的母亲，除了跟他父亲，而且那种亲近的时刻也很少见，都是闪烁其词的。他和父亲只有在手边忙着别的事情的时候，才会提起这个话题，比如做木工活时，还有在树林里打猎那两回——不然就是在做晚饭或者洗碗的时候。

“她并不算是生病，”休说道，“不过我跟我爸一直在担心她，起码是担心了一段时间。”

约翰问：“是心脏的问题？”

休的声音带着勉强。“你知道我跟克莱姆·罗伯茨那个蠢货打架的事吗？我把他的蠢脸按在花岗石路面上磨擦，差点结结实实地宰了他。他脸上还留了疤，缠了几天绷带。我被罚一星期每天放学后留校。可是我差点儿就宰了他。如果帕克斯顿老师没把我拽走，我早就已经宰了他了。”

“我听说了这件事。”

“你知道我为什么要搞死他吗？”

约翰的眼睛闪躲了一瞬。

休全身紧绷，他那粗糙的、男生的手，紧抓住桌沿；他深吸了一口气，气息粗重。“那个蠢货跟所有人说，我母亲在米利奇维尔。他到处说，我母亲疯了。”

“那个下流……”

接着，休的话音清晰，泄了气。“我母亲是在米利奇维尔待过，可是这并不代表她疯了。”他很快加上这句，“那个很大的州立医院，是有给疯人的病房，也有给一般病人的病房。我妈病了一段时间。我爸跟我商量以后，认为米利奇维尔医院有最好的医生，她可以得到最好的照料。可是，她是全世界最不可能发疯的人。约翰，你知道我妈是什么样的。”然后他又说了一遍：“我该上楼去。”

约翰说：“我一直觉得你母亲是这个城里最和蔼的女士。”

“情况是这样的，我母亲遇上了一件事，在那之后她就心情忧郁。”

这些深深埋藏的话是一场坦白，揭开了闷在他心里快要溃烂的秘密。于是他加快语速，继续往下说。他语气迫切，似乎找到了意料之外的宣泄之所。

“去年，我母亲以为自己要有一个宝宝了。她跟我爸还有我谈了很多，”休很自豪，“我们想要一个女孩。我要帮她起名字。我们开心得不得了。我把旧玩具都翻出来——我的电动火车和轨道……我要给她起名叫水晶——女孩叫这个名字会让你有什么感觉？我会想到明亮又娇美的东西。”

“宝宝出生时是死胎吗？”

虽然是跟约翰谈起这件事，休的耳朵还是热了起来，他用冰凉的手摸了摸耳朵。“不是的，他们说那其实是肿瘤。这就是我母亲遇上的事。他们只好在那里的医院给她做了手术。”他感到尴尬，声音低低的，“然后她经历了所谓的‘人生转变’。”这个词在休听来十分可怕。“之后她就变得忧郁了。我爸说这件事对她的神经系统来说是一次冲击。这是女性身上会发生的事，她只是忧郁、没有精神罢了。”

这里没有红色，厨房里所有地方都没有红色，但是休越来越接近“那个时候”了。

“有一天，她大概是放弃了之类的——去年秋天的时候。”休睁大了眼睛，目不转睛，走上了楼梯，打开浴室的门——他抬手遮住双眼，挡住那段记忆。“她要——弄伤自己。我从学校回来的时候发现了她。”

约翰伸出手，小心抚摩他出了汗的手臂。

“你不必担心。很多人都会因为忧郁、没有精神而去医院。这种事谁都有可能。”

“我们只好让她住院——最好的医院。”那漫长的几个月的回忆，被单调的寂寞拉得更长，始终无法得到安慰是如此残酷，就像“那个时候”——到底持续了多久呢？妈妈在医院里可以到处走，而且她脚上一直有鞋穿。

约翰谨慎地说：“这个派真的很棒。”

“我妈厨艺很棒。她做肉馅饼和鲑鱼卷——还有牛排和热狗。”

“虽然我不喜欢这样吃了就走。”约翰说。

休怕极了被单独留下，他感觉自己轰隆的心跳里响起了警报。

“你别走，”他急着说，“再聊一会儿。”

“聊什么？”

休无法启齿，甚至对约翰·莱尼也说不出口。空荡荡的家，那段日子的恐怖，他没法告诉他人。“你哭过吗？”他问约翰，“我没有。”

“我偶尔会哭。”约翰承认。

“要是我母亲不在家的那段时间，我跟你熟一点就好了。我爸跟我几乎每个星期六都去打猎。我们就靠鹌鹑和野鸽活着。我保证你会喜欢打猎的，”他又压低了嗓子说，“我们星期天去医院。”

约翰说：“卖票这件事，有点难办。有很多人并不喜欢高中合唱团的轻歌剧。除非有他们认识的人在里头表演，不然他们宁愿待在家里看一集好看的电视节目。很多人买票只是出于公益。”

“我家很快就要买电视了。”

“没有电视，我就活不下去。”约翰说。

休的声音听起来充满歉意。“我爸想要先付清医院账单，大家都明白，生病是很花钱的。然后我们就会买电视。”

约翰举起牛奶杯致意。“Skoal，”他说，“这是瑞典人喝酒前说的，祝好运的意思。”

“你懂得好多外国单词和语言。”

“没那么多，”约翰老实说，“只有kaput[1]、adios[2]、skoal，还有我们在法语课学的那些。不算多。”

“很多了。”休用法语说了这个词，他自觉很风趣，很得意。

积压的紧张突然爆发为身体的活力。休抓起门廊上的篮球，冲进后院。他运了几次球，然后瞄准投篮，那个篮筐是他上次生日时他父亲装上的。球没进，他又传给跟在后头跑进来的约翰。在户外感觉很好，这样日常的玩闹给休带来了一首诗的开头：“我的心像一个篮球。”通常他有了诗的灵感的时候，就趴在客厅地板上，舌尖在嘴里抵住一边，专心捕捉韵脚。他母亲从他身上跨过去的时候，就叫他“雪莱·坡”，有时候还把脚轻轻放在他臀部上。他母亲一直很喜欢他的诗。今天他的第二句来得很快，就像魔法。他高声朝着约翰念了出来：“‘我的心像一个篮球，兴高采烈在走廊上蹦。’你觉得拿这句当作诗的开头怎么样？”

“我觉得听起来有点疯，”约翰说，然后他赶紧改口，“我是说听起来有点——不对劲。我的意思是，不对劲。”

休明白为什么约翰改了说法，打球与诗句带给他的振奋心情马上消失无踪。他接起球，抱着它，站住了脚。这个下午一片金黄，门廊上的紫藤开足了花。这些花仿佛淡紫色的瀑布，清新的微风里有带着阳光暖意的花香。晴朗的天是蓝色的，没有一丝云。今天是这个春天里第一个温暖的日子。

“我得溜了。”约翰说。

“别！”休的声音很迫切，“你不要再吃一块派吗？我从来没听说过谁一次只吃一块的。”

他把约翰推进屋里，接着又喊了一声，这次完全是出于习惯，因为他总是在进屋的时候喊一声。“妈！”离开了太阳照耀的明亮户外，此刻他感觉冷。他感觉冷，不光是因为天气，也因为他非常害怕。

“我妈回家已经一个月了，每天下午我放学回家，她都在这里。一直都是这样。”

他们俩站在厨房里，看着那个柠檬派。在休眼里，这个切开的派饼看起来有点不对劲。就像他俩一动不动地站在厨房里，这样的寂静也很诡异，而且不对劲。

“你不觉得这屋里静悄悄的？”

“那是因为你家没有电视。我家早上七点打开电视，白天夜里都开着，直到睡觉，不管有没有人在客厅。各种节目，短剧、滑稽节目，一个接一个。”

“不过我们有收音机，还有唱机。”

“可是都比不上一台好电视机。等你有了电视，你根本不会知道你母亲到底在不在家。”

休没搭腔。他俩的脚步声在门厅里听起来显得空洞。他站在楼梯第一阶上，一手抱着栏杆，觉得恶心无力。“要是你可以上来一会儿——”

约翰的声音突然变得不耐烦，而且提高了音量。“我已经告诉你多少次我有任务在身，必须卖掉那些票。关于合唱团这一类的事，你得有公益心才行。”

“就一下——楼上有个很重要的东西我得给你看。”

约翰没问到底是什么，休拼了命想说出个够重要的东西，好让约翰上楼。最后他终于说：“我最近在装一套立体声音响。这个得很懂电子学才行——我父亲在帮我。”

可是，他也知道约翰根本不会相信这番谎话。哪个人没有电视机却会买立体声音响？他讨厌约翰，就像你讨厌自己如此迫切需要的人。他必须再多说点什么，于是他挺起了肩膀。

“我只是想让你知道，我十分看重和你的友情。过去几个月，我在某种程度上切断了自己与其他人的联系。”

“布朗，没事的。你不用这么敏感，不用因为你母亲曾经待过——她待过的地方。”

约翰一手放在门把上，休全身发颤。“我刚才想，要是你能上来一下——”

约翰看着他，眼神不安而迷惑。然后他慢慢问：“楼上是不是有什么让你害怕的东西？”

休想要把一切都告诉他。可是他说不出口，在那个九月的下午，他的母亲到底做了什么。那件事太可怕了，而且——不对劲。那就像是一个病人会做的事，一点也不像他母亲。他瞪得溜圆的眼睛里满是恐惧，可是他还是说：“我不怕。”

“那好。回见。很抱歉我得走了——身负责任就得去干。”

约翰带上门，空荡荡的房子里就只有休一个人了。现在什么也救不了他。就算现在客厅里有一群男生看着电视，冲着滑稽节目大声说笑，也还是帮不了他。他从约翰说的最后一句话里寻找勇气，高声复述：“身负责任就得去干。”可是这句话丝毫不能给他带来约翰那种不假思索与勇气，甚至在这样的寂静里，听起来诡异而陌生。

他慢慢转身上楼。他的心并不像篮球，而是像急速敲打的爵士鼓，随着他走上楼梯，越敲越快。他脚步拖沓，紧抓扶手，仿佛是在及膝的深水中蹚行。这房子看起来不对劲，疯狂。他往楼下看，看到一楼的桌子，桌上有一瓶春季的鲜花，看起来也很异常。二楼有一面镜子，他被自己的脸吓了一跳，因为看起来真的很疯狂。在镜中，他身上高中卫衣的校名缩写是反的，他张着嘴，活像疯人院里的白痴。他把嘴紧紧闭上，看起来好点了。可是他眼里的东西——楼下的桌子，楼上的沙发——虽然都是每天熟悉的，此刻看来都有点扭曲，或者突兀，因为他心里忧惧。他盯着楼梯口右边那扇紧闭的门，于是那急速敲打着的鼓敲得更快了。

他打开浴室门，一时之间，今天下午缠绕着他的忧惧让他看见了“那个时候”的浴室——他的母亲躺在地上，到处是血。他的母亲躺在那儿一动不动，到处是血，血在她割开的手腕上，一大摊血滴进浴缸里。休扶着门框，稳住自己。然后浴室清晰了起来，他明白过来，现在并不是“那个时候”。四月的阳光照亮了干净的白瓷砖，这里只有属于浴室的明亮，还有映着阳光的窗户。他走进卧室，看见床上没人，铺着玫瑰色床罩。女士用品在梳妆台上。这个房间看起来和以往一样，什么也没发生过……什么也没发生过，他扑在玫瑰色的夹棉床罩上，哭了起来，因为松了一口气，也因为持续了这么久的、紧张而凄苦的倦意。啜泣使得他全身阵阵抽搐，也平息了他那急速而喧闹的心。

在那几个月里，休始终没哭。“那个时候”，他发现母亲一个人在屋子里，到处是血，他没哭。虽然他没哭，可是他违反了童子军急救的步骤：他先搬动她浸着血的沉重身子，然后才试着为她缠裹伤口。他打电话给他父亲的时候，他没哭。他们考虑该怎么办的那几天里，他没哭。甚至在医生建议把她送到米利奇维尔的时候，还有他与父亲开车带她去医院的时候，他也没哭——可是他父亲在回家路上哭了。他们俩做饭，他没哭——他们连续一个月每天晚上都吃牛排，直到觉得牛排都要从眼睛里耳朵里流出来；然后换成热狗，一直吃到热狗要从耳朵里眼睛里流出来。他们在吃饭这件事上一成不变，而且把厨房弄得一团糟，除了钟点工在星期六来打扫，始终干净不了。在他跟克莱姆·罗伯茨打架之后，他觉得其他人都在揣测他母亲出了怪事，在那些寂寞的午后，他没哭。午后他待在脏乱的厨房，吃买来的无花果酱饼干或者巧克力棒。不然就去邻居理查德兹小姐家看电视——那是一位老小姐，看的是老小姐节目。在他父亲因为喝了太多酒而没胃口吃饭，他得自己吃饭的时候，他没哭。甚至在每个漫长的、等待的星期天，他们去米利奇维尔的时候，有两次，他看见一位女士在前廊上，光着脚没穿鞋，一个人自言自语，他也没哭。那位女士是病人，她的恐惧令他震撼，那是他道不明的恐惧。一开始他母亲说：“不要把我留在这里惩罚我。让我回家。”他并没哭。在那些可怕的话缠着他的时候——就是“人生的转变”“疯了”“米利奇维尔”那些，他并没哭。在那些充满了单调、想望、忧惧的漫长日月里，他不能哭。

他趴在玫瑰色床罩上哭泣，在泪湿的脸颊下，床罩柔软而凉爽。他的哭声很大，所以他没听见前门开了，甚至没听见母亲喊他，也没听见上楼的脚步声。他还在抽泣，这时候他母亲碰了碰他，把他的脸按在床罩上。他甚至蹬直了腿，双脚踢腾。

“怎么了呀，小乖乖，”他母亲用很久以前的儿时爱称叫他，“发生什么事了？”

虽然他母亲要把他的脸扳过去，可是他的哭声更响了。他要让她担心。他一直不转过脸去，最后她终于起身走开，此时他才看着她。她穿着一件和之前不一样的连衣裙，在淡薄的春日光线下，看起来是蓝色丝绸的。

“小心肝，发生什么事了？”

今天下午的恐怖已经过去了，可是他没法把它告诉母亲。他没法告诉她，他曾经恐惧着什么，也没法解释那些如今并不存在的事物有多么可怕——可是这些事曾经是真的。

“你为什么那么做？”

“今天是转暖的第一天，我只是突然决定去给自己买点新衣服。”

可是他说的并不是衣服，他说的是“那个时候”，还有随之而来的怨怼，在他看见那些鲜血与恐怖场面的时候，他心里觉得，为什么她要对我做这件事。他想到自己对母亲的怨怼，而她是自己在这世上最爱的人。在这伤心的几个月里，愤怒与爱互相撞击，中间还掺杂着罪恶感。

“我买了两件连衣裙，两件半身衬裙。你觉得怎么样？”

“我讨厌它们！”休满怀愤怒，“你的内衬露出来了。”

她转了两圈，衬裙实在露得太显眼了。“小傻瓜，这本来就是该露出来的。这是流行。”

“可是我还是不喜欢。”

“我在茶室吃了一个三明治，喝了两杯可可，然后去逛了门德尔商店。他们有好多漂亮东西，我简直走不出来。我买了这两件连衣裙，还有这个，休，你看！这双鞋子！”

他母亲走到床边，扭开台灯，好让他看清楚。这是一双平底鞋，忧郁的蓝色，鞋尖上有亮晶晶的钻石。他不知道该如何评论。“看起来比较像晚宴鞋，不是走在街上穿的。”

“我从来没有带颜色的鞋子，这个我实在抗拒不了。”

他母亲朝着窗边仿佛跳着舞步走过去，于是新裙子底下的衬裙就飞旋起来。他已经不哭了，可是依然愤怒。

“我不喜欢这件衣服，它让你看起来好像想装得年轻点，可是我觉得你肯定已经有四十岁了。”

他母亲停下了舞步，静止在窗前。她的脸突然肃静而哀伤。“六月我就满四十三岁了。”

他伤害了她，愤怒瞬间消失，只留下了爱。“妈妈，我不该说这种话。”

“我今天买东西的时候想起来，我已经一年多没逛商店了。你想想！”

休无法忍受这样哀伤的肃静，以及他深爱的母亲。他无法忍受自己的爱，也无法忍受他母亲这样好看。他抹掉卫衣袖子上的眼泪，从床上起来。“我从来没见过你这么好看，还有这么好看的连衣裙和内衬。”他蹲在他母亲身前，摸了摸那双闪亮的鞋，“这双鞋真棒。”

“我一看到这双鞋，就觉得你们会喜欢。”她把休拉起来，亲了他的脸颊，“我把唇膏蹭到你脸上了。”

休擦掉唇膏印，说了一句从前听到的俏皮话：“这只是代表我广受欢迎罢了。”

“休，刚才我回来的时候，你为什么在哭？学校里有什么事让你不开心吗？”

“我只是到家的时候发现你不在而且没有字条什么的——”

“我完全忘了留字条。”

“然后一整个下午我都觉得——约翰·莱尼也来了，可是他得去卖合唱表演的票。一整个下午我都觉得——”

“怎么了？出了什么事？”

可是他没法把那样的恐怖与原因告诉自己深爱的母亲。最后他说：“一整个下午我都觉得——不对劲。”

之后，他父亲回来了，他把休叫到后院去。他父亲带着忧心的神色——就像看见他忘了收好哪件昂贵的工具。可是事实上并没有，后廊上的篮球也已经放回了原位。

“儿子，”他父亲说，“有件事我要告诉你。”

“您请说。”

“你母亲说，今天下午你在哭。”他父亲没等他开口解释，“我只是想要你我之间能够密切了解彼此。是不是学校有事——还是跟女孩子有关的——还是其他什么事，让你困扰了？你为什么哭？”

休回顾这个下午，发现它已经很远了，像是从望远镜的一头看到的怪异景象那么遥远。

“我也不知道，”他说，“我想大概是有点神经紧张。”

他父亲揽住他的肩膀。“没有人会在十六岁之前就神经紧张的。你要走的路还长。”

“我知道。”

“我从来没见过你母亲的气色这么好。现在她看起来开心、漂亮，比过去几年好多了。你发现没有？”

“那件内衬——衬裙是本来就该露出来的。新流行。”

“夏天快到了，”他父亲说，“咱们去野餐——咱们三口人。”一幅景象随着这句话浮现了出来：黄溪上的耀眼回光，长着夏日绿叶、充满危险的树林。他父亲又说：“我把你叫出来，还要告诉你一件事。”

“您说。”

“我要你知道，我很清楚，在最糟糕的那阵子，你表现得很好。非常好，好得要命。”

他父亲就像对成年人说话那样用了一句粗话。随口赞美人并不是他的作风，对于成绩单以及忘了收好的工具，他总是很严格。他从来没有赞美过休，没有说过成年人的字眼，什么都没有。休觉得自己的脸热了起来，于是用冰冷的手碰了碰。

“儿子，我只是想告诉你这件事。”父亲拍拍他的肩膀，“要不了一两年，你就要比你老爸还高了。”他父亲很快进屋去了，只留下他，沉浸在受到称赞的余韵里，甜蜜而陌生。

夕阳的色彩逐渐往西边淡去，紫藤花变成了深紫色，休还站在天色渐暗的后院里。厨房里灯亮了，他看见母亲在准备晚餐。他知道，有一件事已经结束了；恐怖、与爱互相冲撞的愤怒、忧惧、罪恶感，如今已经远远离他而去。虽然他觉得自己不会再哭——至少在十六岁之前都不会——可是安全而灯火通明的厨房，此刻映照在他明亮的泪水里，因为他不再是个受到缠扰的孩子，因为他感到欢欣，不再害怕了。

（杜蕴慈译）

旅居者

这天早晨，似睡非睡的疆域似乎是来到了罗马那样的地方：这里有叮咚作响的喷泉，狭窄的街道时不时会拱起脊背，这是个炫耀金彩的城市，鲜花烂漫，连石头都因年代久远变得轮廓柔和。有时候，在这样半清醒的状态下，他会重访巴黎，或是又见战后德国的瓦砾堆，要不就是在瑞士滑雪，住高山客舍。有时候，又是在佐治亚的休耕地上迎接狩猎日的晨曦。今天早晨，这个没有时间性的梦境则是在罗马。

约翰·费里斯在纽约的一家旅馆里醒来。他有一种预感：某件不愉快的事情正等待着他——是什么，他不知道。这种感觉暂时被早晨的生活需要掩盖了下去，但是即使在他穿好衣服下楼去的时候依然滞留不去。这是秋季无云的一天，一片片淡淡的阳光穿过粉彩色的摩天高楼斜落下来。费里斯走进旅馆隔壁的一家便利店，在靠着玻璃的最后的那个卡座里坐下，看着外面的人行道。他要了一份美式早餐，外加煎泥肠鸡蛋。

费里斯是从巴黎回国参加他父亲的葬礼的，葬礼一星期前在佐治亚州他老家的小城举行。死亡带来的震惊使他明白地察觉到自己已经青春不再。他的发际线不断往后退缩，如今已变得光秃的鬓角上脉管的跳动显露得很清晰，尽管人不胖，他肚子却开始鼓起来了。费里斯一直很爱他的父亲，两人之间的关系曾一度非常融洽——可是岁月多多少少冲淡了这样的亲情。父亲的去世估计会在很长的一段时间内，让他感受到未曾预料的沮丧。他已经尽量多滞留了一些日子，好在家里多陪陪母亲和几个弟弟。他即将搭乘的去巴黎的飞机明天早上起飞。

费里斯掏出他的地址簿，想查一个电话号码。他专心地翻动起一页又一页的纸。纽约的人名与地址，欧洲的一些首都，南方老家那个州为数不多的字迹变淡的资料。发黄的印刷体，写得趴手趴脚，像是喝醉酒似的。贝蒂·威尔斯：偶然邂逅的爱侣，如今嫁人了。查理·威廉斯：在旭特根森林受了伤，后来没有消息了。老好人威廉斯——不知道还活着不？唐·格林：电视界的一位名人，现在正走财运吧。亨利·格林：战后落魄了，听说住进了一家疗养院。科姬·霍尔：听说她已不在人世了。大大咧咧、嘻嘻哈哈的科姬——真不知道这傻丫头好好的怎么就没了呢。把地址簿合上时，费里斯有了一种不安全的、人世无常的感觉——几乎是恐惧。

就在此时，他的身体像给电击中了似的忽然猛抽了一下。他正盯着窗外看，就在此时，他的前妻伊丽莎白竟从他面前经过，就在离他很近的人行道上慢慢地走了过去。他说不清楚，为什么她走开后自己的心会起了一阵强烈的颤动，也不懂接下来心中怎么又会有那样一种轻率与优雅的感情。

费里斯急忙付了账冲出去，来到人行道上。伊丽莎白站在街角等着过第五大道。他朝她赶过去想要叫她，可是绿灯亮了，还没等他赶上，伊丽莎白已经穿过马路。费里斯接着又跟了上去。到了马路对面他原本可以很容易就赶上她的，可是他发现自己却一点一点地落在了后面，他自己也不明白这是怎么回事。她的淡棕色头发很随意地卷着，在看着她的时候，费里斯回想起他父亲有一回说伊丽莎白的走路姿势“很有风度”。她在下一个街角又拐弯了，费里斯仍然跟着，虽然此时他要追上她的意愿已经消失了。费里斯在思量为什么见到伊丽莎白会引起自己身体上如此异常的反应，手心为什么会发潮，心跳又为什么会加快。

费里斯已经有八年没见到他的前妻了。他知道很久以前她又结婚了，而且还生有不止一个孩子。近几年来他很少想到她。可是最初，刚离婚那阵儿，那份失落感几乎要把他摧垮。可是，时间使痛苦渐渐消失，他重新去爱，接着又再一次去爱。燕妮，现在，他爱着的是燕妮。当然，他对前妻的爱早已是过去的事了。那么，为什么还会出现身体上的把持不住和精神上的动摇呢？他只知道他的阴暗心理与这个晴朗澄澈的秋日很不协调。费里斯猛地扭转身子，迈开大步，几乎像奔跑一样地急忙回到旅馆。

费里斯给自己倒了一杯酒，虽然时间还不到十一点钟。他像个精疲力竭的人那样瘫倒在一把圈椅里，手里紧握着那只盛有兑好水的波旁酒的玻璃杯。他面前还有整整一天，因为去巴黎的飞机明天早上才起飞。他检查了一下还有什么事情必须要做：把行李交到法航办事处，跟老板共进午餐，买一双皮鞋和一件大衣。那么还有什么事——是不是还有别的什么事情呢？费里斯把酒喝完，接着便打开电话簿。

他要打电话给前妻的决定很草率。在电话簿里，前妻的电话号码备注的名字是巴莱——她的丈夫。他等不及做思想斗争便匆匆拨通电话。他和伊丽莎白圣诞节时交换过贺卡，他在收到她的结婚宣告时曾寄去一套雕刻艺术品。不打电话是因为没什么理由嘛。可是在他等待着、聆听着那一头的铃声时，他却为疑虑所烦扰着。

接电话的是伊丽莎白，她那熟悉的声音对他来说又是一次新的震撼。他把自己的名字报了两遍。不过在她想起他是谁之后，费里斯从她的声音里听出她还是很高兴的。他解释说自己在此地只待一天。她说她和丈夫早就买好票今晚要去观剧，不过她不知道他可愿意过来吃一顿早一些开始的晚餐。费里斯说承蒙邀请，他感到不胜荣幸。

他一边办着一件件要做的事，一边时不时考虑有没有忘掉哪件务必要办的事。费里斯后半晌时洗了个澡，换了衣服。他做这些事时经常会想起燕妮，明天晚上他就可以和她在一起了。“燕妮，”他会这么说，“我在纽约的时候凑巧碰见了我的前妻。还和她一起用了晚餐。自然，还有她的丈夫。这么多年之后又见到她，真有点不可思议呢。”

伊丽莎白住在东五十街，费里斯坐在出租汽车里往城市僻静些的方向驶去，在车子驶过十字路口时，他总要抬起头去看看迟迟不肯落下的斜阳，不过等他到达目的地时已经进入秋季的迟暮时分了。她住的是一幢楼前有雨棚和看门人的住宅，她的那套公寓是在七层。

“请进，费里斯先生。”

本来是准备见见伊丽莎白，甚至是她那位想象不出来样子的丈夫的，可是费里斯却见到了一个脸上长有雀斑的红头发孩子，因而不免吃了一惊。他知道她有了孩子，可是下意识中不知怎么的总是难以接受。惊讶使得他笨拙地往后退了退。

“这就是我们的公寓，”那孩子很有礼貌地说，“你不是费里斯先生吗？我是比利。进来呀。”

穿过走廊来到起居室，在这儿，那位丈夫又让费里斯吃了一惊。这是又一个费里斯感情上无法接受的人。巴莱是个动作迟缓的红头发男人，一举一动都有点装腔作势。他站起身，伸出手向费里斯表示欢迎。

“我是比尔·巴莱。很高兴能见到你。伊丽莎白这就出来。她马上就打扮好了。”

最后的那几个字在他脑海里敲击出一组顺畅的变奏，令他忆起那些年月里的事。俏丽的伊丽莎白，浴前那一丝不挂的绯色躯体。衣服没有完全穿好的伊丽莎白，侧坐在梳妆台镜前，用发刷梳理那头细细的栗色发丝。这里面，处处都有她甜蜜、随和的亲切感以及肉体的温香软玉感。这些事前未曾料到的回忆使费里斯一下子回不过神来，他好不容易才强迫自己去应对比尔·巴莱投来的目光。

“比利，你能不能去把厨房桌子上的饮料托盘端过来？”

孩子立即按照吩咐去做了。他走开后，费里斯没话找话地说：“你们的孩子真好啊。”

“我们也是这么想的。”

孩子不在时费里斯再没说出一个字。孩子终于回来了，端着一个托盘，上面有几只玻璃杯和一只马天尼鸡尾酒的调酒器。在酒的帮助下他们好不容易才聊了起来，他们提到了俄国，说到纽约的人工增雨，还扯到曼哈顿与巴黎公寓状况的孰优孰劣。

“费里斯先生明天要坐飞机横越整片大洋呢。”巴莱对那小男孩说，孩子正斜靠在他的椅子扶手上，静静的，很乖的样子。“我猜你准是很想钻进他的箱包偷搭飞机吧。”

比利把父亲挺差劲的逗笑顶了回去。“我可是要当一名新闻记者，像费里斯先生那样正正经经搭乘飞机的。”接着他又加强语气说道，“我长大以后就是那么打算的。”

巴莱说：“我还以为你想当医生呢。”

“是的，”比利说，“我两样都想当。我还想当一名造原子弹的科学家呢。”

伊丽莎白走了进来，手里抱着一个女娃娃。

“哦，约翰！”她说。她把娃娃放在那位父亲的膝上，“见到你真好。你能够来我太高兴了。”

那个女娃娃很庄重地坐在父亲的腿上。她穿了一条水粉色中国绉纱裙子，裙腰处围有玫瑰花状的饰品，淡金色的柔软鬈发用颜色般配的丝带拢在了后面。她的皮肤让夏日的阳光晒得黑黝黝的，棕色的眼睛里闪烁出金光与笑意。在她把手举上去要抓父亲的角质框眼镜时，他干脆把眼镜摘下，让她透过镜片看了一会儿。“咱们的老糖球怎么样啊？”他说。

伊丽莎白看上去非常漂亮，也许比他过去理解的更加漂亮。她笔直、洁净的头发闪闪发光。她的脸显得比以前更柔和了，泛出了圣洁的光。那是一种因家庭氛围才产生的圣母般可爱的光芒。

“你几乎一点都没有变化嘛，”伊丽莎白说，“不过时间都过了那么久了呀。”

“八年了。”在双方进一步交谈时，他不禁局促不安地用手去摸摸自己正在变得稀薄的头发。

费里斯突然觉得自己成了一个旁观者——巴莱一家人中的一个闯入者。他为什么要来呢？他在受苦。他的生活看上去如此孤单，活像一根脆弱的支柱，几乎没能撑起岁月残骸中的任何东西。他觉得自己在这家人的房间里连一分钟也待不下去了。

他对着手表瞥了一眼：“你们不是要去剧院吗？”

“真是不好意思，”伊丽莎白说，“但这事一个多月以前就已经定下来了。不过，约翰，你不久后肯定还会回国的吧？你没打算移民吧，是不是？”

“移民，”费里斯重复地说道，“这个词我可不爱听。”

“那还有什么好听点的词吗？”她问道。

他想了几分钟：“也许叫旅居者还差不多吧。”

费里斯又朝他的手表瞥了一眼，伊丽莎白又再一次道歉：“要是我们能够早些知道——”

“我在这地方只待一天。我回来自己也没有料到。你明白吧，爸爸上星期去世了。”

“费里斯老爸不在啦？”

“是的，在约翰斯·霍普金斯医院。他生病后在那里住了快一年。葬礼是在佐治亚州老家举行的。”

“哦，我听了真难过。我一直都很喜欢费里斯老爸。”

那个小男孩从椅子后面钻出来，以便能正眼看他母亲的脸。他问道：“谁死啦？”

费里斯没有注意到孩子的忧虑，他在想他自己父亲的死亡。他眼前又出现了那具直直地躺在棺材里丝绸垫巾上的遗体。遗体被怪异地上了胭脂，而他如此熟悉的那双手被交叉摆放在一层殡丧用的玫瑰花的上面，显得特别巨大。记忆的画面消失了，费里斯被伊丽莎白安详的声音唤回到现实中来。

“是费里斯先生的父亲，比利。一个非常好的人。你不认识他的。”

“不过你干吗叫他费里斯老爸呀？”

巴莱和伊丽莎白交换了一个窘促的眼色。挺身出来回答孩子的问题的是巴莱。“很久以前，”他说，“你母亲和费里斯先生结过婚，那时还没有你呢——是很久很久以前的事了。”

“跟费里斯先生？”

小男孩瞪眼看着费里斯，一副大惑不解、无法相信的样子。而回看这样的眼神的费里斯先生，似乎也同样有点难以置信。难道他真的曾经直呼这个陌生女人为伊丽莎白吗？在晚上亲热的时候甚至还叫过她“小奶油鸭子”吗？他们真的共同生活过大约一千个日日夜夜吗？最终，又经历了婚姻爱情破灭所致的痛苦，以及那种突如其来的孤独感（嫉妒呀，酗酒呀，还有那些金钱纠葛）。

巴莱对两个孩子说：“该轮到谁吃晚饭啦？随我来吧。”

“可是，爹爹！妈妈跟费里斯先生——我——”

比利那双紧盯不放的眼睛——困惑不解中带有一丝敌意的闪光——使费里斯想起了另外一个孩子的眼光。那是燕妮年幼的儿子——一个七岁的男孩，他有一张阴森森的小脸，那双膝盖也像是随时要使坏，费里斯总想躲开他，但往往会忘记。

“结完婚很快就分开了！”巴莱将比利轻轻地朝门口推，“现在就说再见吧，儿子。”

“再见，费里斯先生。”比利老大不高兴地加了一句，“我原来以为可以留下来吃蛋糕呢。”

“你待会儿还可以再来的嘛，”伊丽莎白说，“快跟爸爸走，吃你的晚饭去。”

现在房间里只剩下费里斯和伊丽莎白了。一开始，好几分钟都没有人说话，气氛有些尴尬。费里斯请求允许他再给自己斟一杯酒，伊丽莎白便把鸡尾酒调酒器移到桌子靠他的这一边。他看了看那架三角钢琴，注意到书架上的那摞乐谱。

“你现在还弹得跟原先一样迷人吗？”

“我仍然很喜欢弹。”

“请奏几曲吧，伊丽莎白。”

伊丽莎白很痛快地站起身来。只要有人请，她就会应邀弹奏，这一直是她脾气中最随和的一面。她从来不推诿退缩，不会光说几句抱歉的话就把事情打发过去。此刻她向钢琴走去时还多了几分如释重负的感觉呢。

她先弹了一首巴赫的前奏曲与赋格。那首前奏曲欢快多彩，犹如晨室里的一面多棱镜。赋格的第一声部是一个纯正、孤独的宣告，它由第二声部变化着花样重复了一遍，然后又在一个很繁复的框架内被第三次重复，多声部多层次的圣洁音乐从容不迫地、很辉煌地流淌而出。主题由两个副主题交织着，又装饰以无数精妙的乐音——它们有时起着主导作用，接着又潜隐到背景里去，它具有一种孤独者不惧怕汇入整体的高尚精神。快到结尾时，音乐语言密集，一鼓作气地使占据统治地位的第一主题得以有辉煌的再现，几个和弦则宣告了赋格的终止。费里斯把头靠在椅背上，闭上了眼睛。在曲终后的寂静中，一个清晰高亢的声音从走廊尽头的房间里传来。

“爸爸，妈妈和费里斯先生怎么能——”房门关上了。

钢琴又响起来了——这又是什么曲子呢？说不清曲名是什么，调子却很熟悉，这清澈的曲调曾长期潜伏在他的心中。现在它在向他叙述着另外的一段时间，另外的一个地方——这可是伊丽莎白过去经常弹的曲子。这精巧的曲调唤醒了一片荒原似的记忆。费里斯迷失在对过去的渴念、冲突与矛盾的争斗之中。奇怪的是，这段成为混乱无序状态的催化剂的音乐，本身竟是如此圣洁与明净。但是如歌的乐句被女仆的出现打断了。

“巴莱太太，晚饭已经在餐桌上摆好了。”

即使此刻费里斯已在餐桌旁主人与主妇的中间坐下来了，那没有奏完的音乐仍然影响着他的情绪。他都有几分微醺了。

“世事无常[3]，”他说，“一首没有唱完的歌，再没有什么比这更能让人体会到世事无常了。或者是一本旧地址簿，也能起到这样的作用。”

“地址簿？”巴莱重复了一句。但是他打住了，他不想多打听，便很有礼貌地不追问了。

“你仍然是往昔的那个大男孩呢，约翰。”伊丽莎白说，语气里带着当初那种温柔的痕迹。

那天晚上他们吃的是一顿南方的晚餐，那些菜都是他一向爱吃的。餐桌上有炸鸡和玉米布丁，还有厚厚地裹了一层糖浆的甜薯。吃饭的时候，如果沉默的时间稍长一些，伊丽莎白就会设法让交谈活跃起来。现在该由费里斯来谈谈燕妮的情况了。

“我是去年秋天才认识燕妮的——也就是此刻的这个季节——是在意大利。她是一位歌唱家，签了合同在罗马演出。我估计不久之后我们就要结婚了。”

这些话听起来那么像真的，是那么地自然，连费里斯自己都不敢相信那是编出来的了。实际上他和燕妮一年来根本没有提到过婚嫁的事情。其实她仍然是有夫之妇——她的丈夫是巴黎的一个白俄罗斯钱商，他们分居已有五年。可是现在再要纠正为时已晚。伊丽莎白已经在向他表示祝贺了：“知道你这样好我真高兴。祝贺你了，约翰。”

他想尽量多讲些真话作为弥补。“罗马的秋天美极了。气温宜人，鲜花灿烂。”他接着说，“燕妮有一个小男孩，六岁[4]，会讲三种语言，真是个聪明的小家伙。我们有时候一起去杜伊勒里宫[5]游玩。”

他又扯了个谎。他倒是带那个男孩到花园里去过一次。那个脸色蜡黄的外国男孩穿了条露出两条细腿的短裤，在水泥水池子里玩他的小船，还骑了小马。孩子还想去看木偶剧，可是时间来不及了，因为费里斯有一个约会，要赶去斯克赖伯饭店。他答应孩子改天下午再去看布袋木偶。他只带瓦伦丁——那个男孩——去过一次杜伊勒里宫。

房间里起了一些骚动。女仆端来了带白霜的蛋糕，上面插着粉红色的蜡烛。孩子们穿着睡衣进来了。费里斯仍然不明白是怎么回事。

“生日快乐，约翰，”伊丽莎白说，“快吹蜡烛吧。”

费里斯认出了蛋糕上自己的生日日期。烛火很顽强，好不容易才吹灭，空气里飘着蜡燃烧的气味。费里斯都三十八岁了。他太阳穴上的血管颜色加深了，脉搏跳得更快了。

“到时候了，你们该动身去剧院了。”

费里斯为生日晚餐谢过了伊丽莎白，也说了告别时该说的那些话。全家人都聚在门口目送他离开。

一弯细细的月牙儿高悬在参差不齐的、黑乎乎的摩天大楼上空。街上刮着风，很冷。费里斯急匆匆地走到第三大街叫了一辆出租车。他盯着这座夜间的城市，怀着一种离别，甚至是永远告别的细腻的专注心情。他很孤独。他都迫不及待上飞机了。

第二天他从空中俯瞰这座城市，它在阳光中闪闪发亮，像玩具似的，精巧细致。接着，美国被抛在身后，下面只有大西洋和远方的欧洲海岸了。大海泛出了牛奶般的灰白色，在云层下面显得很宁静。费里斯一整天几乎都在打瞌睡。天快黑下来时他又想起伊丽莎白和头天晚上的做客了。他怀着渴望、淡淡的嫉妒和难以解释的遗憾想念着置身于一家人之中的伊丽莎白。他在苦苦回忆曾如此感动过他的那首曲子，那段未能终奏的曲调。他唯一能记起来的只有结尾处的和弦与些许不相干的乐音了，主要旋律本身已经从他的记忆中逃离。不过他倒还记得伊丽莎白弹奏的赋格的第一声部——只是讽刺性地颠倒了前后次序，而且用的还是小调。在大洋上空飞行时，他已经不再为无常与孤寂的焦虑所困扰，他平静地想到了父亲的死。到了用晚餐的时候，飞机已经来到法兰西的岸边了。

半夜时分，费里斯坐在一辆出租车里穿越巴黎。那是个多云的夜晚，协和广场灯光的上空缭绕着一层轻雾。半夜还营业的小酒吧射出的灯光在潮湿的人行道上闪烁。如同往常一样，在经过一次越洋飞行后，两片大陆的差别总让人感到突兀。早上在纽约，半夜却来到巴黎。费里斯眼前闪过了生活的无序与混乱：一个又一个城市的更迭，短暂爱情的嬗变，还有时间，岁月那邪恶的滑奏[6]，时间永远都在变化。

“快！快！”他惊恐地喊道，“你快些呀。”

瓦伦丁为他开了门。这小男孩穿了条睡裤和一件快穿不下的红睡袍。他的灰眼睛显得没精打采，在费里斯从过道进入套间时，那双眼睛才眨动了几下。

“我在等妈妈呢。”

燕妮如今在一家夜总会唱歌。她还得过一小时才能回到家中。瓦伦丁继续去画他的画，他蹲着，用蜡笔在铺在地上的一张纸上画画。费里斯低下头去看了看——画的是一个在弹班卓琴的乐师，旁边的一只气球形状的圆圈里写了些说明词，还画了几条波浪状的杠杠。

“咱们以后一定再去杜伊勒里宫啊。”

孩子抬起头来看看他，费里斯将他拉到自己膝前来。突然，他想起伊丽莎白未能弹完的曲子的旋律了。他并未苦思冥想，记忆的沉重负担却自己卸了下来——这一回带来的仅仅是认可与突然的惊喜。

“约翰先生，”那孩子说，“你见到他了吗？”

费里斯被弄糊涂了，他还以为说的是另外那个孩子呢——那个长了雀斑的、全家宠爱的男孩。“见到谁呀，瓦伦丁？”他问。

“在佐治亚你死了的爸爸。”孩子补充了一句，“他没事了吧？”

费里斯急切地快声说道：“咱们以后一定要经常去杜伊勒里宫。让你骑上小马，咱们直接去看布袋木偶。咱们好好地看木偶剧，再也不慌慌张张地离开了。”

“约翰先生，”瓦伦丁说，“布袋木偶戏现在已经不演了。”

又是恐惧，又是不得不承认虚度的年华和死亡。瓦伦丁，很懂事又很自信的样子，仍然靠在他的臂弯里。他的面颊挨蹭到那张柔嫩的小脸，感觉到了细细的眼睫毛的抚触。他怀着内心的绝望感将孩子搂得更紧一些——仿佛与他的爱同样变化多端的一种情绪能够主宰时间的脉搏似的。

（李文俊译）

家庭困境

星期四那天，马丁·麦道斯早早就离开了办公室，以便搭乘第一班特快公共汽车回家。他步出办公楼时，淡紫色的暮霭正在化雪的街道上逐渐变浓，等公共汽车驶离市中心的终点站时，城里已是一片灯火通明。星期四下午女佣休息，马丁希望能尽早回家，因为这一年来他妻子的情况，嗯——不大好。这个星期四他疲倦得很，生怕有哪个老乘客会选中他，跟他没完没了地聊天。因此，一直到公共汽车过了乔治·华盛顿桥，他都把头埋在打开的报纸里。每回车子一驶上西九公路，马丁总觉得一半的路程已经过去，便深深地往肺里吸气。即使这时是冬天，刮进烟气弥漫的车子里的冷风也只不过是绸带般一窄条一窄条的，他也相信他现在吸进去的是乡间的新鲜空气了。要是在往日，到这时候，他就会松弛神经，开始美滋滋地想到他的家了。可是这一年来，离家越近，他越是感到紧张，他几乎不期望旅途结束了。今天晚上，马丁让他的脸紧挨车窗，凝望着荒芜的田野和掠过去的村镇的孤零零的灯火。天边升起了月亮，被黑沉沉的大地和潮滋滋的晚雪一衬，显得惨白惨白的。在马丁眼里，今晚的乡野也似乎格外苍茫，格外凄凉。在拉响车铃通知司机有人要下车的前几分钟，他从帽架上取下帽子，把叠好的报纸塞进他的大衣口袋。

他住的那幢房子离公共汽车站还有一段路，离河很近，可又不紧挨河边。从他起居室的窗口可以越过街道和对面的小花园，瞥见哈得孙河。他的房子是现代风格的，在狭窄的小花园里，显得又白又新，有点刺眼。夏天的时候，花园里的草柔嫩、鲜亮，马丁精心栽种了一个小花圃，还在玫瑰花后面搭了一个木格架。可是在寒冷、休耕的季节里，花园里很荒凉，他的房子也显得光秃秃的。现在，这所小房子每个房间的灯都亮着，马丁在大门前的小道上急急地走着，快到台阶时，他停下步子，把一辆手推车推到小道外面去。

两个孩子在起居室里玩得很专心，一开始连他开门进来都没有察觉。马丁停住步子，望着他这两个太平无事的、可爱的孩子。他们打开了写字桌最底下的抽屉，把装饰圣诞树的小道具都拿了出来。安迪居然设法插上了圣诞树小电灯的插头，那些红红绿绿的小灯泡在起居室的地毯上蜿蜒，一亮一暗，发出了一种不合时令的节日气氛。这会儿，他正努力地把亮着的灯线往玛丽安娜的木马的背上拉去呢。玛丽安娜正坐在地上，把小天使的一只翅膀拽下来。孩子一看见他，发出一声尖叫，表示欢迎。马丁把胖嘟嘟的小女孩一下子抱起来，放在自己肩膀上，安迪扑了过来，抱住了他爸爸的腿。

“爸爸，爸爸，爸爸！”

马丁小心翼翼地把小姑娘放下来，又抱起安迪，把他像钟摆似的晃了几下。接着他把圣诞树的灯线收了起来。

“干吗把这些东西都拿出来呀？来帮我把它塞回到抽屉里去。你可不能去动那个电灯插座。我不是告诉过你吗？这可不是开玩笑的事，安迪。”

那个六岁的男孩点点头，关上了书桌的抽屉。马丁摸了摸他那头柔软的金发，他的手温柔地停留在孩子细细的后脖颈上。

“吃过晚饭了吗，小老乡？”

“不好吃。烤面包是辣的。”

小女孩在地毯上绊了一跤，她先是吓了一跳，愣住了，紧接着就号啕大哭起来。马丁把她抱在怀里，带她到后面的厨房去。

“你瞧，爸爸，”安迪说，“烤面包——”

艾米莉光是把孩子们的晚饭放在了瓷砖面的餐桌上，连桌布都不铺。桌子上有两只盘子，里面有麦乳精和鸡蛋的残渣，还有两只盛牛奶的银壶。另外还有一只盘子，放的是夹肉桂酱的烤面包，除去被小牙齿咬掉一口之外，别的一点也没动。马丁闻了闻咬过的那块，又试探性地咬了一小口。他马上把烤面包全倒进了垃圾桶：“咳——呸——这算是什么玩意儿！”

原来艾米莉是误把盛辣椒面的罐头当作肉桂粉罐头了。

“我像被火烧着了似的，”安迪说，“我喝了口水，跑到门外，张大嘴巴。玛丽安娜统统没吃。”

“一口没吃。”马丁纠正他说。他手足无措地站着，眼光从厨房这面墙扫到那面墙，不知该怎么办才好。“好吧，那只好算了吧。”他终于这样说，“妈妈这会儿在哪儿呢？”

“她在楼上你们的屋子里。”

马丁让孩子们待在厨房里，他独自上楼去找他的妻子。他来到房门口，站了一会儿，好把怒气往下压压。他没有敲门，进屋后马上把身后的门关上。

艾米莉坐在这个舒适的房间窗前的一把摇椅里。她正在从一只玻璃杯里喝着什么东西，一见他进来，赶紧把杯子藏在摇椅后面的地上。她的表情里有几分慌乱和内疚的神态，为了掩饰这种神态，她故意做出一副轻松活泼的样子。

“噢，马丁，你都已经回来啦？时间过得真快。我正要下楼去——”她蹒跚地歪倒在他身上，她的吻里冒出了一股刺鼻的雪利酒味。见到他站在那里毫无反应，她便退后了一步，神经质地哧哧笑了起来。

“你这是怎么啦？站在那儿，就跟理发店前面旋转的花柱子似的。你有什么毛病没有？”

“我有毛病？”马丁弯下腰去，从摇椅后面的地上捡起那只玻璃杯，“我真希望你能明白我多么不喜欢——这对我们全家又是多么不好。”

艾米莉用一种假惺惺、轻飘飘的腔调说话了，这种腔调他太熟悉了。遇到这种场合她常常会冒出一股淡淡的英国口音，没准是从哪个她所崇拜的女明星那里学来的。“我半点也不明白你指的是什么事儿。也许你是指我倒了几滴雪利酒的玻璃杯吧。我才喝了一指高——顶多两指。可这又有什么不对呢，我倒要请问？我挺好的嘛。一点事也没有嘛。”

“好不好谁都看得出来。”

艾米莉往浴室走时小心翼翼地保持着平衡。她拧开水龙头，用双手接住水往自己的脸上泼，接着又用浴巾的一角按按脸，把水擦干。她面容秀美娟丽，显得很年轻，没有一点瑕疵。

“我正要下楼去准备晚饭。”她步履不稳地走着，全靠扶住了门框才没有跌倒。

“我来弄晚饭吧。你待在这儿。我会把饭端上来的。”

“那可不行。有谁听说过这样的事吗？”

“求求你了。”马丁说。

“你别拦住我。我什么事也没有。我正要下楼——”

“你听我说呀。”

“你让你奶奶听你的好了。”她跌跌撞撞地朝门口走去，可是马丁抓住了她的胳膊，“我不愿让孩子看见你这副模样。你清醒些好不好？”

“这副模样！”艾米莉猛地把胳膊挣脱开。她因为发火声调变高了，“哼，就因为我下午喝了两口雪利酒，你就硬说我像酒鬼！哼，我连一滴威士忌都没碰。你也不是不知道，我从来不在酒吧里狂饮。这你总该没什么好说的吧？我在正正经经吃晚饭的时候连杯鸡尾酒也不喝。我只不过偶尔喝一杯雪利酒。我倒要问，这又有什么见不得人的？这副模样！”

马丁搜索枯肠，想找出几句话使他的妻子安静下来。“咱们俩单独在楼上安安静静地吃一顿。你乖乖地坐着，做个好姑娘。”他说。艾米莉在床沿上坐了下来，他打开门，急急忙忙地退了出去。“我一分钟就回来。”

他在楼下一边手忙脚乱地准备晚餐，一边又像往常那样，陷入沉思，琢磨他们家的麻烦是怎么开始的。他自己倒是一向喜欢喝上一两杯好酒。以前住在亚拉巴马州的时候，他们总是用很长时间啜饮一杯烈酒或鸡尾酒，他们把这看作一件很自然的事。多年来，他们总是在晚饭前喝上一两杯——顶多三杯，临睡前再慢慢地啜饮一杯。在节假日的前夕，他们有时也会放量饮酒，说不定还会有点醉醺醺。可是杯中之物对他来说从未构成一个问题，仅仅是意味着一笔令人不快的开支，在食指日繁的情况下有点负担不起罢了。是在他的公司把他调到纽约来之后，马丁才明确地认识到他的妻子饮酒过量了。他注意到，在大白天，她也不断地酗酒。

承认有这个问题存在之后，他便试着来分析根源。从亚拉巴马搬到纽约有点打乱了她的生活习惯。她原来是习惯于南方小镇那种懒洋洋的温暖气氛的，是习惯于在家庭、亲戚、儿时的朋友圈子里活动的，遇到北方比较严峻、比较冷酷的社会风气，她感到不能适应。在她看来，带孩子和料理家务是一项再繁重不过的工作。她怀念帕里斯，她在这大城市的市郊小镇上没交到什么朋友。她只是翻翻杂志，看看侦探小说，别的什么书也不读。没有酒精的调剂，她的内心像是缺了什么似的。

艾米莉暴露出自己的不节制，这就使他暗暗地改变了对妻子的最初印象。有时候，他们之间会生出一种无法解释的怨恨，会因为酒精这个导火线引来一场不适宜的勃然大怒。他发现艾米莉身上隐藏着一种粗俗的性格，这与她那自然单纯的天性是格格不入的。为了喝酒，她扯谎，用莫名其妙的花招来哄骗他。

接着，又出了一件事故。大约一年前，他晚上下班回家，听见孩子的卧室里发出一阵阵尖叫声。他发现艾米莉手里抱着刚洗完澡的光赤赤、湿漉漉的婴儿。是孩子从她怀里掉下来了，那极其娇嫩的头颅撞击在桌子边上，有一缕血迹沾在孩子柔软的发丝上面。艾米莉在抽抽搭搭地啜泣，她喝醉了。马丁把当时觉得无比珍贵的受伤的婴儿抱在怀里，他面前升起了一幅阴森可怖的前景。

第二天，玛丽安娜看上去倒没什么事。艾米莉发誓以后滴酒不沾了，那以后的几个星期里，她是清醒的、冷静的，却又是萎靡不振的。接着，慢慢地，她又开始了——她倒不喝威士忌与杜松子酒，而是大量地喝啤酒、雪利酒或是各种各样稀奇古怪的酒。有一次他打开一只帽盒，发现里面都是薄荷酒的空瓶。马丁找到一个可靠的女佣，她把家务事料理得挺好。这个弗尔吉也是从亚拉巴马州来的，马丁没敢告诉艾米莉纽约用人的工资一般是多少。艾米莉现在喝酒完全是偷偷摸摸的了，总是在他回家之前就停住不喝。喝酒的反应一般也是几乎察觉不出——只不过动作有点迟缓，眼皮有点沉滞。不像话的时候，像这次做出辣椒烤面包这样的事，倒也不多。弗尔吉若是在，马丁倒可以不用担心。不过，他的生活中总是潜伏着一种焦虑感，总有一种不定什么时候会出现灾祸的预感在威胁着他。

“玛丽安娜！”马丁喊道。回想起那个事故，他就感到害怕，他需要见到女儿好让自己安心。女孩后来再没受到什么伤害，但是当父亲的却越来越疼爱她了，现在，她和哥哥一起走进厨房。马丁继续准备晚饭。他打开了一个做汤菜的罐头，又往煎锅里放下去两块排骨。接着他在餐桌边坐下来，把他的小玛丽安娜抱到膝头上，让她“骑马马”。安迪一边看着他们，一边把手指伸进嘴里，摇晃那颗活动了一个星期的牙齿。

“见了糖就不要命的安迪！”马丁说，“那颗牙还没掉吗？走近点，让爸爸好好瞧瞧。”

“我有一根绳子，可以用来拔牙。”那孩子从兜里掏出一根乱成一团的线，“弗尔吉说，把它系在牙齿上，另一头拴在门把上，使劲一关门，牙就会掉了。”

马丁摸出一块干净的手帕，隔着手帕仔细地摸了摸那颗松动的牙齿。“这颗牙今天晚上就会从咱们安迪的嘴里掉下来的。不然，咱们家可要长出一棵牙齿树来了。”他说。

“什么树？”

“牙齿树呀，”马丁说，“你咬什么东西，一不小心，就会把那颗牙齿咽到肚子里去。牙齿在倒霉的安迪肚子里生根长大，变成一棵牙齿树，上面挂满了又尖又怪的小牙齿。”

“我不信，爸爸，”安迪说。可是他却用十分肮脏的大拇指和食指紧紧捏住那颗牙齿。“从来没有那种树的。我根本没见过。”

“你应该说根本没有那种树，我从来没见到过。”马丁身子突然发僵，艾米莉从楼上走下来了。他听着她那不稳的探索的脚步声，不由得惊惧地搂住他的儿子。等艾米莉走进房间，他从她的动作和阴郁的脸色看出她又多喝了一些雪利酒。她使劲地拉开一个个抽屉，拿餐具，铺餐桌。

“这副模样！”她大着舌头含混不清地说道，“你这样跟我说话。别以为我能忘得了。你说的每一句恶毒的谎言我都会记住的。别一厢情愿地以为我会忘记。”

“艾米莉！”他恳求道，“孩子们——”

“孩子们——一点不错！别以为我没看穿你的阴谋诡计。在楼下这儿收买我的孩子的心，让他们不喜欢我。别以为我看不透，不明白。”

“艾米莉！我求求你——请你回到楼上去。”

“好让你唆使我的孩子——我亲生的孩子——”两颗大大的泪珠迅速地顺着她的脸颊流了下来，“想唆使我的宝贝儿子，我的小安迪，来反对他的亲妈妈。”

艾米莉带着酒醉后的冲动，对着吓呆的男孩跪了下来。她双手支在孩子肩膀上以平衡自己的身体。“听我说，我的好安迪，你不会听你爸爸跟你说的那些胡说八道的话吧？你不会相信的，是吧？告诉我，安迪，我没下楼那会儿你爸爸跟你说什么来着？”那孩子不知该怎么办，就用眼光去探索他爸爸的脸。“告诉我，妈妈想知道呢。”

“说那棵牙齿树。”

“什么？”

男孩重复了那三个字。接着，艾米莉又用不可言状的恐怖语气，把那三个字念了一遍。“牙齿树！”她身子晃了晃，又重新抓紧了孩子的肩膀。“我真不知道你们说的是什么。不过，听着，安迪，妈妈没什么不对头，不是吗？”眼泪像泉水似的从她脸上淌下来，安迪往后退缩，想离她远一些，因为他感到害怕。艾米莉抓住桌子边，支撑着站了起来。

“瞧！你已经做到让孩子不喜欢我了。”

玛丽安娜哭了起来，马丁把她搂在自己怀里。

“行啊，你可以疼你的女儿。你打一开始就偏心眼。这我也不管，不过你至少不要来影响我的乖儿子。”

安迪一点点挨近他的父亲，碰碰他的腿。“爸爸！”他带着哭腔喊道。

马丁把两个孩子送到楼梯口：“安迪，你带玛丽安娜先上楼，爸爸一会儿就来。”

“那么妈妈呢？”男孩悄悄地问。

“妈妈一会儿就会好的。别担心。”

艾米莉趴在餐桌上啜泣，她的脸埋在臂弯里。马丁盛来一碗汤，放在她的面前。她那刺耳的抽泣声让他心烦，她感情上这样冲动，先不说原因是什么，倒勾起了他的一丝柔情。他不由自主地伸出手，按在她的黑头发上。“坐起来，把这碗汤喝了吧。”她仰起头来看他，那张脸变得纯洁了，像是在恳求什么。孩子的退缩或是马丁的抚摩使她情绪上有了改变。

“马——丁，”她抽噎地说，“我真不好意思。”

“把汤喝了吧。”

她听从了他的话，一边抽噎，一边一口一口地喝着。喝完第二碗之后，她顺从地让马丁领着她，回到自己的卧室去。她现在很柔顺，能够控制住自己的感情了。他替她把睡衣放在床上，正准备走开，这时一阵新的悲哀、新的醉意又向艾米莉袭来。

“他把头扭开了。我的安迪瞧瞧我，把头扭开了。”

不耐烦与疲倦使他的声音变僵硬了，可他还是小心翼翼地说：“你忘了安迪还不过是一个小小孩——他是弄不清楚这场闹剧是怎么一回事的。”

“我方才胡闹了吗？噢，马丁，我是在孩子们面前胡闹了吗？”

她那惊恐的面容使他感到既可怜又可笑，虽然这种感情是违反他的意愿的：“别往心里去了。穿上睡衣上床睡吧。”

“我的孩子不要我了。安迪瞅瞅他的妈妈，把脸扭开了。孩子们——”

她又被酒后间歇性忧郁症控制住了。马丁一边走出房间一边说道：“看在上帝的分儿上快睡吧。孩子们明天一早就会忘掉的。”

他说这句话的时候连自己都不大相信。这个不愉快的场面会那么容易从记忆中抹掉吗——还是会根深蒂固地隐藏在潜意识里，多年之后又浮上来起腐蚀作用呢？马丁也不清楚，但是这后一种可能使他的心沉了下去。他想到了艾米莉，预料到第二天早晨她醒来之后又会出现的羞辱感：支离破碎的印象，什么都记不清，一片黑暗混沌，然而又会泛出几个清晰的景象。她会给他纽约的办公室打去两个——甚至是三四个电话。马丁也预见到自己会羞愧难当，他唯恐办公室里别的人会察觉出什么迹象。他感到他的女秘书很久以前就发现他的苦恼了，而且在暗暗地怜悯自己。他一时之间憎恨和不满起自己的命运来。他恨他的妻子。

他一走进孩子们的卧室就马上把身后的门关上，这个晚上他还是第一次获得安全感。玛丽安娜朝地板上倒下去，又自己爬起来，喊道：“爸爸，瞧我呀！”说完又倒下去，再爬起来，一遍又一遍玩这种跌倒与叫人的游戏。安迪坐在小椅子里，还在摇晃那颗牙齿。马丁往澡盆里放水，在洗脸盆里洗了手，然后把男孩叫到浴室里来。

“咱们再来瞧瞧那颗牙齿。”马丁坐在马桶上，把安迪夹在双膝之间。孩子张大嘴，马丁捏住那颗牙齿。一晃，使劲一拧，那颗有珍珠光泽的乳牙就给拔下来了。安迪的脸上同时露出了恐惧、诧异以及喜悦的种种表情。他把一口唾沫吐在洗脸盆里：“瞧，爸爸！有血。玛丽安娜！”

马丁喜欢给他的孩子洗澡，他难以言喻地喜欢他们赤条条站在水里时那柔嫩、光滑的身体。艾米莉说他偏心眼，其实这种指责是不公正的。在马丁给他儿子那细瘦的小男孩的身子抹肥皂的时候，他觉得自己对儿子的爱已经到了极点，再进一步都是不可能的了。不过他也承认他对两个孩子的感情在性质上是有所不同的。他对女儿的爱更加严肃，带着怜悯的成分，有一种接近痛苦的温存感。他给小男孩起了各种各样亲昵的外号，这些都是平日里奇思妙想的结果。而对小女孩，他始终只叫她玛丽安娜，但是他吐出这几个字时，他的声音本身就是一种温存的抚触。马丁用浴巾把小娃娃胖嘟嘟的肚子上的水擦干。孩子洗过澡后，小脸蛋像花瓣一样鲜嫩，也一样招人疼爱。

“我要把牙齿放在我的枕头底下。明天早上我会拿到一枚两毛五的硬币。”

“怎么会呢？”

“你怎么不知道，爸爸。约翰尼上回那颗牙就拿到了两毛五。”

“是谁放在那儿的呢？”马丁问，“我一向以为是仙女在半夜放的。而且我小时候大家拿到的都只是一毛钱。”

“在幼儿园里大家都说是两毛五。”

“到底是谁放的呢？”

“是孩子们的爸爸妈妈。”安迪说，“就是你！”

马丁把玛丽安娜的被子用别针别好。女儿已经睡着了。她的呼吸很浅，几乎让人觉不出来。马丁弯下身去吻了吻她的前额，又吻了吻她睡梦中摊开在脑袋两侧的两只手。

“晚安，安迪老弟。”

回答他的仅仅是一声充满睡意的哼哼。过了一会儿，马丁摸出他的零钱，在孩子枕下塞进去一枚两毛五的硬币。他给房间里留了一盏过夜用的小灯。

马丁在厨房里东摸摸西弄弄，想给自己做一顿迟了的晚餐。这时，他忽然想到孩子们一回也没有提到他们的母亲，也没有提到他们肯定不能理解的那次争吵。他们都被当前发生的小事吸引住了——牙齿啦、洗澡啦、硬币啦……飞逝的儿童时代里充满了许多这种微不足道的小插曲，就像一条水流很急的浅滩里回旋着许多落叶，而成年人的那些莫测高深的谜却搁浅在河滩上，被遗忘了。马丁感谢上帝这样巧妙的安排。

可是他自己的愤怒，暂时被压下去隐藏起来的愤怒，却又涌上心头。他的青春被一个废物般的酗酒女人糟蹋掉了，连他的男子汉凌云气概也无形中受到了损害。还有那两个孩子，等他们混沌不懂事的阶段过去——一两年之后，情况又将如何呢？他双肘支撑在桌子上，胡乱地吃着，一点也没尝出食物的滋味。真相总是掩盖不住的——要不了多久，办公室里和镇上就会有各种流言蜚语了。人家会说他的妻子是个不检点的女人，不检点。于是，他和孩子们的前途肯定会越来越暗淡，越来越不好过。

马丁推开椅子，气鼓鼓地大步走进起居室。他拿起一本书，他的眼睛顺着一行行字往下滑，可是他脑子里却映现出一幅幅悲惨的图景：他看见自己的孩子淹死在河里，人们在大街上对着他妻子的脊背点点戳戳。到他去歇息时，这沉郁、巨大的愤怒像一大团铁块压在他的心头，他拖着沉重的脚步爬上楼去。

卧室里一片漆黑，只有浴室半开的门里漏出一道灯光。马丁轻轻地脱掉衣服。逐渐地，不知怎么的，他情绪上起了一些变化。他的妻子睡着了，她那安静的呼吸声在房间里轻轻地响着。她那双高跟鞋连同两只随手一扔的长袜在默默地向他发出哀诉。她的内衣乱七八糟地搭在椅子上。马丁拾起了她的腰带和柔滑的丝乳罩，拿在手里，呆呆地站了好一会儿。这个晚上第一回，他细细地端详着他的妻子。他的眼光停留在她那秀美的前额上，那两道细眉稍稍弯起的地方。这样的前额已经遗传给了玛丽安娜，还有那微微翘起的细巧的鼻子。至于他的儿子，高高的颧骨和尖下巴是从妈妈那儿来的。她胸脯高高的，腰肢很细，曲线很美。在马丁凝视着他平静的熟睡了的妻子时，他那股积了好久的怨气不知不觉地消失了。一切责怪她、埋怨她的想法都跑到远远的地方去了。马丁熄掉浴室的灯，打开窗户。他小心翼翼地上床，留神不去吵醒艾米莉。他借着月光又看了他妻子一眼。他的手向身边的身体伸过去，在他深情而又复杂的爱里，既混杂着哀伤，也存在着欲念。

（李文俊译）

The Haunted Boy

Hugh looked for his mother at the corner, but she was not in the yard. Sometimes she would be out fooling with the border of spring flowers – the candytuft, the sweet William, the lobelias (she had taught him the names) – but today the green front lawn with the borders of many-colored flowers was empty under the frail sunshine of the mid-April afternoon. Hugh raced up the sidewalk, and John followed him. They finished the front steps with two bounds, and the door slammed after them.

‘Mamma!’ Hugh called.

It was then, in the unanswering silence as they stood in the empty, wax-floored hall, that Hugh felt there was something wrong. There was no fire in the grate of the sitting room, and since he was used to the flicker of firelight during the cold months, the room on this first warm day seemed strangely naked and cheerless. Hugh shivered. He was glad John was there. The sun shone on a red piece in the flowered rug. Redbright, red-dark, red-dead – Hugh sickened with a sudden chill remembrance of ‘the other time’. The red darkened to a dizzy black.

‘What’s the matter, Brown?’ John asked. ‘You look so white.’

Hugh shook himself and put his hand to his forehead. ‘Nothing. Let’s go back to the kitchen.’

‘I can’t stay but just a minute,’ John said. ‘I’m obligated to sell those tickets. I have to eat and run.’

The kitchen, with the fresh checked towels and clean pans, was now the best room in the house. And on the enameled table there was a lemon pie that she had made. Assured by the everyday kitchen and the pie, Hugh stepped back into the hall and raised his face again to call upstairs.

‘Mother! Oh, Mamma!’

Again there was no answer.

‘My mother made this pie,’ he said. Quickly, he found a knife and cut into the pie – to dispel the gathering sense of dread.

‘Think you ought to cut it, Brown?’

‘Sure thing, Laney.’

They called each other by their last names this spring, unless they happened to forget. To Hugh it seemed sporty and grown and somehow grand. Hugh liked John better than any other boy at school. John was two year older than Hugh, and compared to him the other boys seemed like a silly crowd of punks. John was the best student in the sophomore class, brainy but not the least bit a teacher’s pet, and he was the best athlete too. Hugh was a freshman and didn’t have so many friends that first year of high school – he had somehow cut himself off, because he was so afraid.

‘Mamma always has me something nice for after school.’ Hugh put a big piece of pie on a saucer for John – for Laney.

‘This pie is certainly super.’

‘The crust is made of crunched‑up graham crackers instead of regular pie dough,’ Hugh said, ‘because pie dough is a lot of trouble. We think this graham-cracker pastry is just as good. Naturally, my mother can make regular pie dough if she wants to.’

Hugh could not keep still; he walked up and down the kitchen, eating the pie wedge he carried on the palm of his hand. His brown hair was mussed with nervous rakings, and his gentle gold-brown eyes were haunted with pained perplexity. John, who remained seated at the table, sensed Hugh’s uneasiness and wrapped one gangling leg around the other.

‘I’m really obligated to sell those Glee Club tickets.’

‘Don’t go. You have the whole afternoon.’ He was afraid of the empty house. He needed John, he needed someone; most of all he needed to hear his mother’s voice and know she was in the house with him. ‘Maybe Mamma is taking a bath,’ he said. ‘I’ll holler again.’

The answer to his third call too was silence.

‘I guess your mother must have gone to the movie or gone shopping or something.’

‘No,’ Hugh said. ‘She would have left a note. She always does when she’s gone when I come home from school.’

‘We haven’t looked for a note,’ John said. ‘Maybe she left it under the doormat or somewhere in the living room.’

Hugh was inconsolable. ‘No. She would have left it right under this pie. She knows I always run first to the kitchen.’

‘Maybe she had a phone call or thought of something she suddenly wanted to do.’

‘She might have,’ he said. ‘I remember she said to Daddy that one of these days she was going to buy herself some new clothes.’ This flash of hope did not survive its expression. He pushed his hair back and started from the room. ‘I guess I’d better go upstairs. I ought to go upstairs while you are here.’

He stood with his arm around the newel post; the smell of varnished stairs, the sight of the closed white bathroom door at the top revived again ‘the other time.’ He clung to the newel post, and his feet would not move to climb the stairs. The red turned again to whirling, sick dark. Hugh sat down. Stick your head between your legs, he ordered, remembering Scout first aid.

‘Hugh,’ John called. ‘Hugh!’

The dizziness clearing, Hugh accepted a fresh chagrin – Laney was calling him by his ordinary first name; he thought he was a sissy about his mother, unworthy of being called by his last name in the grand, sporty way they used before. The dizziness cleared when he returned to the kitchen.

‘Brown,’ said John, and the chagrin disappeared. ‘Does this establishment have anything pertaining to a cow? A white, fluid liquid. In French they call it lait. Here we call it plain old milk.’

The stupidity of shock lightened. ‘Oh, Laney, I am a dope! Please excuse me. I clean forgot.’ Hugh fetched the milk from the refrigerator and found two glasses. ‘I didn’t think. My mind was on something else.’

‘I know,’ John said. After a moment he asked in a calm voice, looking steadily at Hugh’s eyes: ‘Why are you so worried about your mother? Is she sick, Hugh?’

Hugh knew now that the first name was not a slight; it was because John was talking too serious to be sporty. He liked John better than any friend he had ever had. He felt more natural sitting across the kitchen table from John, somehow safer. As he looked into John’s gray, peaceful eyes, the balm of affection soothed the dread.

John asked again, still steadily: ‘Hugh, is your mother sick?’

Hugh could have answered no other boy. He had talked with no one about his mother, except his father, and even those intimacies had been rare, oblique. They could approach the subject only when they were occupied with something else, doing carpentry work or the two times they hunted in the woods together – or when they were cooking supper or washing dishes.

‘She’s not exactly sick,’ he said, ‘but Daddy and I have been worried about her. At least, we used to be worried for a while.’

John asked: ‘Is it a kind of heart trouble?’

Hugh’s voice was strained. ‘Did you hear about that fight I had with that slob Clem Roberts? I scraped his slob face on the gravel walk and nearly killed him sure enough. He’s still got scars or at least he did have a bandage on for two days. I had to stay in school every afternoon for a week. But I nearly killed him. I would have if Mr Paxton hadn’t come along and dragged me off.’

‘I heard about it.’

‘You know why I wanted to kill him?’

For a moment John’s eyes flickered away.

Hugh tensed himself; his raw boy hands clutched the table edge; he took a deep, hoarse breath. ‘That slob was telling everybody that my mother was in Milledgeville. He was spreading it around that my mother was crazy.’

‘The dirty . . .’

Hugh said in a clear, defeated voice, ‘My mother was in Milledgeville. But that doesn’t mean that she was crazy,’ he added quickly. ‘In that big State hospital, there are buildings for people who are crazy, and there are other buildings, for people who are just sick. Mamma was sick for a while. Daddy and me discussed it and decided that the hospital in Milledgeville was the place where there were the best doctors and she would get the best care. But she was the furtherest from crazy than anybody in the world. You know Mamma, John.’ He said again, ‘I ought to go upstairs.’

John said: ‘I have always thought that your mother is one of the nicest ladies in this town.’

‘You see, Mamma had a peculiar thing happen, and afterward she was blue.’

Confession, the first deep-rooted words, opened the festered secrecy of the boy’s heart, and he continued more rapidly, urgent and finding unforeseen relief.

‘Last year my mother thought she was going to have a little baby. She talked it over with Daddy and me,’ he said proudly. ‘We wanted a girl. I was going to choose the name. We were so tickled. I hunted up all my old toys – my electric train and the tracks . . . I was going to name her Crystal – how does the name strike you for a girl? It reminds me of something bright and dainty.’

‘Was the little baby born dead?’

Even with John, Hugh’s ears turned hot; his cold hands touched them. ‘No, it was what they call a tumor. That’s what happened to my mother. They had to operate at the hospital here.’ He was embarrassed and his voice was very low. ‘Then she had something called change of life.’ The words were terrible to Hugh. ‘And afterward she was blue. Daddy said it was a shock to her nervous system. It’s something that happens to ladies; she was just blue and rundown.’

Although there was no red, no red in the kitchen anywhere, Hugh was approaching ‘the other time.’

‘One day, she just sort of gave up – one day last fall.’ Hugh’s eyes were wide open and glaring: again he climbed the stairs and opened the bathroom door – he put his hand to his eyes to shut out the memory. ‘She tried to – hurt herself. I found her when I came in from school.’

John reached out and carefully stroked Hugh’s sweatered arm.

‘Don’t worry. A lot of people have to go to hospitals because they are rundown and blue. Could happen to anybody.’

‘We had to put her in the hospital – the best hospital.’ The recollection of those long, long months was stained with a dull loneliness, as cruel in its lasting unappeasement as ‘the other time’ – how long had it lasted? In the hospital Mamma could walk around and she always had on shoes.

John said carefully: ‘This pie is certainly super.’

‘My mother is a super cook. She cooks things like meat pie and salmon loaf – as well as steaks and hot dogs.’

‘I hate to eat and run,’ John said.

Hugh was so frightened of being left alone that he felt the alarm in his own loud heart.

‘Don’t go,’ he urged. ‘Let’s talk for a little while.’

‘Talk about what?’

Hugh could not tell him. Not even John Laney. He could tell no one of the empty house and the horror of the time before. ‘Do you ever cry?’ he asked John. ‘I don’t’

‘I do sometimes,’ John admitted.

‘I wish I had known you better when Mother was away. Daddy and me used to go hunting nearly every Saturday. We lived on quail and dove. I bet you would have liked that.’ He added in a lower tone, ‘On Sunday we went to the hospital.’

John said: ‘It’s a kind of a delicate proposition selling those tickets. A lot of people don’t enjoy the High School Glee Club operettas. Unless they know someone in it personally, they’d rather stay home with a good TV show. A lot of people buy tickets on the basis of being public-spirited.’

‘We’re going to get a television set real soon.’

‘I couldn’t exist without television,’ John said.

Hugh’s voice was apologetic. ‘Daddy wants to clean up the hospital bills first because as everybody knows sickness is a very expensive proposition. Then we’ll get TV.’

John lifted his milk glass. ‘Skoal,’ he said. ‘That’s a Swedish word you say before you drink. A good-luck word.’

‘You know so many foreign words and languages.’

‘Not so many,’ John said truthfully. ‘Just kaput and adios and skoal and stuff we learn in French class. That’s not much.’

‘That’s beaucoup,’ said Hugh, and he felt witty and pleased with himself.

Suddenly the stored tension burst into physical activity. Hugh grabbed the basketball out on the porch and rushed into the backyard. He dribbled the ball several times and aimed at the goal his father had put up on his last birthday. When he missed he bounced the ball to John, who had come after him. It was good to be outdoors and the relief of natural play brought Hugh the first line of a poem. ‘My heart is like a basketball.’ Usually when a poem came to him he would lie sprawled on the living-room floor, studying to hunt rhymes, his tongue working on the side of his mouth. His mother would call him Shelley-Poe when she stepped over him, and sometimes she would put her foot lightly on his behind. His mother always liked his poems; today the second line came quickly, like magic. He said it out loud to John: ‘ “My heart is like a basketball, bouncing with glee down the hall.” How do you like that for the start of a poem?’

‘Sounds kind of crazy to me,’ John said. Then he corrected himself hastily. ‘I mean it sounds – odd. Odd, I meant.’

Hugh realized why John had changed the word, and the elation of play and poems left him instantly. He caught the ball and stood with it cradled in his arms. The afternoon was golden and the wisteria vine on the porch was in full, unshattered bloom. The wisteria was like lavender waterfalls. The fresh breeze smelled of sun-warmed flowers. The sunlit sky was blue and cloudless. It was the first warm day of spring.

‘I have to shove off,’ John said.

‘No!’ Hugh’s voice was desperate. ‘Don’t you want another piece of pie? I never heard of anybody eating just one piece of pie.’

He steered John into the house and this time he called only out of habit because he always called on coming in. ‘Mother!’ He was cold after the bright, sunny outdoors. He was cold not only because of the weather but because he was so scared.

‘My mother has been home a month and every afternoon she’s always here when I come home from school. Always, always.’

They stood in the kitchen looking at the lemon pie. And to Hugh the cut pie looked somehow – odd. As they stood motionless in the kitchen the silence was creepy and odd too.

‘Doesn’t this house seem quiet to you?’

‘It’s because you don’t have television. We put on our TV at seven o’clock and it stays on all day and night until we go to bed. Whether anybody’s in the living room or not. There’re plays and skits and gags going on continually.’

‘We have a radio, of course, and a vic.’

‘But that’s not the company of a good TV. You won’t know when your mother is in the house or not when you get TV.’

Hugh didn’t answer. Their footsteps sounded hollow in the hall. He felt sick as he stood on the first step with his arm around the newel post. ‘If you could just come upstairs for a minute ––’

John’s voice was suddenly impatient and loud. ‘How many times have I told you I’m obligated to sell those tickets. You have to be public-spirited about things like Glee Clubs.’

‘Just for a second – I have something important to show you upstairs.’

John did not ask what it was and Hugh sought desperately to name something important enough to get John upstairs. He said finally: ‘I’m assembling a hi‑fi machine. You have to know a lot about electronics – my father is helping me.’

But even when he spoke he knew John did not for a second believe the lie. Who would buy a hi‑fi when they didn’t have television? He hated John, as you hate people you have to need so badly. He had to say something more and he straightened his shoulders.

‘I just want you to know how much I value your friendship. During these past months I had somehow cut myself off from people.’

‘That’s OK, Brown. You oughtn’t to be so sensitive because your mother was – where she was.’

John had his hand on the door and Hugh was trembling. ‘I thought if you could come up for just a minute ––’

John looked at him with anxious, puzzled eyes. Then he asked slowly: ‘Is there something you are scared of upstairs?’

Hugh wanted to tell him everything. But he could not tell what his mother had done that September afternoon. It was too terrible and – odd. It was like something a patient would do, and not like his mother at all. Although his eyes were wild with terror and his body trembled, he said: ‘I’m not scared.’

‘Well, so long. I’m sorry I have to go – but to be obligated is to be obligated.’

John closed the front door, and he was alone in the empty house. Nothing could save him now. Even if a whole crowd of boys were listening to TV in the living room, laughing at funny gags and jokes, it would still not help him. He had to go upstairs and find her. He sought courage from the last thing John had said, and repeated the words aloud: ‘To be obligated is to be obligated.’ But the words did not give him any of John’s thoughtlessness and courage; they were creepy and strange in the silence.

He turned slowly to go upstairs. His heart was not like a basketball but like a fast, jazz drum, beating faster and faster as he climbed the stairs. His feet dragged as though he waded through knee-deep water and he held on to the banisters. The house looked odd, crazy. As he looked down at the ground-floor table with the vase of fresh spring flowers that too looked somehow peculiar. There was a mirror on the second floor and his own face startled him, so crazy did it seem to him. The initial of his high-school sweater was backward and wrong in the reflection and his mouth was open like an asylum idiot. He shut his mouth and he looked better. Still the objects he saw – the table downstairs, the sofa upstairs – looked somehow cracked or jarred because of the dread in him, although they were the familiar things of everyday. He fastened his eyes on the closed door at the right of the stairs and the fast, jazz drum beat faster.

He opened the bathroom door and for a moment the dread that had haunted him all that afternoon made him see again the room as he had seen it ‘the other time’. His mother lay on the floor and there was blood everywhere. His mother lay there dead and there was blood everywhere, on her slashed wrist, and a pool of blood had trickled to the bathtub and lay dammed there. Hugh touched the doorframe and steadied himself. Then the room settled and he realized this was not ‘the other time’. The April sunlight brightened the clean white tiles. There was only bathroom brightness and the sunny window. He went to the bedroom and saw the empty bed with the rose-colored spread. The lady things were on the dresser. The room was as it always looked and nothing had happened . . . nothing had happened and he flung himself on the quilted rose bed and cried from relief and a strained, bleak tiredness that had lasted so long. The sobs jerked his whole body and quieted his jazz, fast heart.

Hugh had not cried all those months. He had not cried at ‘the other time’, when he found his mother alone in that empty house with blood everywhere. He had not cried but he made a Scout mistake. He had first lifted his mother’s heavy, bloody body before he tried to bandage her. He had not cried when he called his father. He had not cried those few days when they were deciding what to do. He hadn’t even cried when the doctor suggested Milledgeville, or when he and his father took her to the hospital in the car – although his father cried on the way home. He had not cried at the meals they made – steak every night for a whole month so that they felt steak was running out of their eyes, their ears; then they had switched to hot dogs, and ate them until hot dogs ran out of their ears, their eyes. They got in ruts of food and were messy about the kitchen, so that it was never nice except the Saturday the cleaning woman came. He did not cry those lonesome afternoons after he had the fight with Clem Roberts and felt the other boys were thinking queer things of his mother. He stayed at home in the messy kitchen, eating fig newtons or chocolate bars. Or he went to see a neighbor’s television – Miss Richards, an old maid who saw old-maid shows. He had not cried when his father drank too much so that it took his appetite and Hugh had to eat alone. He had not even cried on those long, waiting Sundays when they went to Milledgeville and he twice saw a lady on a porch without any shoes on and talking to herself. A lady who was a patient and who struck at him with a horror he could not name. He did not cry when at first his mother would say: Don’t punish me by making me stay here. Let me go home. He had not cried at the terrible words that haunted him – ‘change of life’ – ‘crazy’ – ‘Milledgeville’ – he could not cry all during those long months strained with dullness and want and dread.

He still sobbed on the rose bedspread which was soft and cool against his wet cheeks. He was sobbing so loud that he did not hear the front door open, did not even hear his mother call or the footsteps on the stairs. He still sobbed when his mother touched him and burrowed his face hard in the spread. He even stiffened his legs and kicked his feet.

‘Why, Loveyboy,’ his mother said, calling him a long-ago child name. ‘What’s happened?’

He sobbed even louder, although his mother tried to turn his face to her. He wanted her to worry. He did not turn around until she had finally left the bed, and then he looked at her. She had on a different dress – blue silk it looked like in the pale spring light.

‘Darling, what’s happened?’

The terror of the afternoon was over, but he could not tell it to his mother. He could not tell her what he had feared, or explain the horror of things that were never there at all – but had once been there.

‘Why did you do it?’

‘The first warm day I just suddenly decided to buy myself some new clothes.’

But he was not talking about clothes; he was thinking about ‘the other time’ and the grudge that had started when he saw the blood and horror and felt why did she do this to me. He thought of the grudge against the mother he loved the most in the world. All those last, sad months the anger had bounced against the love with guilt between.

‘I bought two dresses and two petticoats. How do you like them?’

‘I hate them!’ Hugh said angrily. ‘Your slip is showing.’

She turned around twice and the petticoat showed terribly. ‘It’s supposed to show, goofy. It’s the style.’

‘I still don’t like it.’

‘I ate a sandwich at the tearoom with two cups of cocoa and then went to Mendel’s. There were so many pretty things I couldn’t seem to get away. I bought these two dresses and look, Hugh! The shoes!’

His mother went to the bed and switched on the light so he could see. The shoes were flat-heeled and blue – with diamond sparkles on the toes. He did not know how to criticize. ‘They look more like evening shoes than things you wear on the street.’

‘I have never owned any colored shoes before. I couldn’t resist them.’

His mother sort of danced over toward the window, making the petticoat twirl under the new dress. Hugh had stopped crying now, but he was still angry.

‘I don’t like it because it makes you look like you’re trying to seem young, and I bet you are forty years old.’

His mother stopped dancing and stood still at the window. Her face was suddenly quiet and sad. ‘I’ll be forty-three years old in June.’

He had hurt her and suddenly the anger vanished and there was only love. ‘Mamma, I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘I realized when I was shopping that I hadn’t been in a store for more than a year. Imagine!’

Hugh could not stand the sad quietness and the mother he loved so much. He could not stand his love or his mother’s prettiness. He wiped the tears on the sleeve of his sweater and got up from the bed. ‘I have never seen you so pretty, or a dress and slip so pretty.’ He crouched down before his mother and touched the bright shoes. ‘The shoes are really super.’

‘I thought the minute I laid eyes on them that you would like them.’ She pulled Hugh up and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Now I’ve got lipstick on you.’

Hugh quoted a witty remark he had heard before as he scrubbed off the lipstick. ‘It only shows I’m popular.’

‘Hugh, why were you crying when I came in? Did something at school upset you?’

‘It was only that when I came in and found you gone and no note or anything ––’

‘I forgot all about a note.’

‘And all afternoon I felt – John Laney came in but he had to go sell Glee Club tickets. All afternoon I felt ––’

‘What? What was the matter?’

But he could not tell the mother he loved about the terror and the cause. He said at last: ‘All afternoon I felt – odd.’

Afterward when his father came home he called Hugh to come out into the backyard with him. His father had a worried look – as though he spied a valuable tool Hugh had left outside. But there was no tool and the basketball was put back in its place on the back porch.

‘Son,’ his father said, ‘there’s something I want to tell you.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Your mother said that you had been crying this afternoon.’ His father did not wait for him to explain. ‘I just want us to have a close understanding with each other. Is there anything about school – or girls – or something that puzzles you? Why were you crying?’

Hugh looked back at the afternoon and already it was far away, distant as a peculiar view seen at the wrong end of a telescope.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I guess maybe I was somehow nervous.’

His father put his arm around his shoulder. ‘Nobody can be nervous before they are sixteen years old. You have a long way to go.’

‘I know.’

‘I have never seen your mother look so well. She looks so gay and pretty, better than she’s looked in years. Don’t you realize that?’

‘The slip – the petticoat is supposed to show. It’s a new style.’

‘Soon it will be summer,’ his father said. ‘And we’ll go on picnics – the three of us.’ The words brought an instant vision of glare on the yellow creek and the summer-leaved, adventurous woods. His father added: ‘I came out here to tell you something else.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I just want you to know that I realize how fine you were all that bad time. How fine, how damn fine.’

His father was using a swear word as if he were talking to a grown man. His father was not a person to hand out compliments – always he was strict with report cards and tools left around. His father never praised him or used grown words or anything. Hugh felt his face grow hot and he touched it with his cold hands.

‘I just wanted to tell you that, son.’ He shook Hugh by the shoulder. ‘You’ll be taller than your old man in a year or so.’ Quickly his father went into the house, leaving Hugh to the sweet and unaccustomed aftermath of praise.

Hugh stood in the darkening yard after the sunset colors faded in the west and the wisteria was dark purple. The kitchen light was on and he saw his mother fixing dinner. He knew that something was finished; the terror was far from him now, also the anger that had bounced with love, the dread and guilt. Although he felt he would never cry again – or at least not until he was sixteen – in the brightness of his tears glistened the safe, lighted kitchen, now that he was no longer a haunted boy, now that he was glad somehow, and not afraid.

The Sojourner

The twilight border between sleep and waking was a Roman one this morning: splashing fountains and arched, narrow streets, the golden lavish city of blossoms and age-soft stone. Sometimes in this semi-consciousness he sojourned again in Paris, or war German rubble, or Swiss ski-ing and a snow hotel. Sometimes, also, in a fallow Georgia field at hunting dawn. Rome it was this morning in the yearless region of dreams.

John Ferris awoke in a room in a New York hotel. He had the feeling that something unpleasant was awaiting him – what it was, he did not know. The feeling, submerged by matinal necessities, lingered even after he had dressed and gone downstairs. It was a cloudless autumn day and the pale sunlight sliced between the pastel skyscrapers. Ferris went into the next-door drugstore and sat at the end booth next to the window glass that overlooked the sidewalk. He ordered an American breakfast with scrambled eggs and sausage.

Ferris had come from Paris to his father’s funeral which had taken place the week before in his home town in Georgia. The shock of death had made him aware of youth already passed. His hair was receding and prominent and his body was spare except for an incipient belly bulge. Ferris had loved his father and the bond between them had once been extraordinarily close – but the years had somehow unravelled this filial devotion; the death, expected for a long time, had left him with an unforeseen dismay. He had stayed as long as possible to be near his mother and brothers at home. His plane for Paris was to leave the next morning.

Ferris pulled out his address book to verify a number. He turned the pages with growing attentiveness. Names and addresses from New York, the capitals of Europe, a few faint ones from his home state in the South. Faded, printed names, sprawled drunken ones. Betty Wills: a random love, married now. Charlie Williams: wounded in the Hürtgen Forest, unheard of since. Grand old Williams – did he live or die? Don Walker: a BTO in tele-vision, getting rich. Henry Green: hit the skids after the war, in a sanatorium now, they say. Cozie Hall: he had heard that she was dead. Heedless, laughing Cozie – it was strange to think that she too, silly girl, could die. As Ferris closed the address book, he suffered a sense of hazard, transience, almost of fear.

It was then that his body jerked suddenly. He was staring out of the window when there, on the sidewalk, passing by, was his ex‑wife. Elizabeth passed quite close to him, walking slowly. He could not understand the wild quiver of his heart, nor the following sense of recklessness and grace that lingered after she was gone.

Quickly Ferris paid his cheque and rushed out to the sidewalk. Elizabeth stood on the corner waiting to cross Fifth Avenue. He hurried towards her meaning to speak, but the lights changed and she crossed the street before he reached her. Ferris followed. On the other side he could easily have overtaken her, but he found himself lagging unaccountably. Her fair brown hair was plainly rolled, and as he watched her Ferris recalled that once his father had remarked that Elizabeth had a ‘beautiful carriage’. She turned at the next corner and Ferris followed, although by now his intention to overtake her had disappeared. Ferris questioned the bodily disturbance that the sight of Elizabeth aroused in him, the dampness of his hands, the hard heart-strokes.

It was eight years since Ferris had last seen his ex‑wife. He knew that long ago she had married again. And there were children. During recent years he had seldom thought of her. But at first, after the divorce, the loss had almost destroyed him. Then, after the anodyne of time, he had loved again, and then again. Jeannine, she was now. Certainly his love for his ex‑wife was long since past. So why the unhinged body, the shaken mind? He knew only that his clouded heart was oddly dissonant with the sunny, candid autumn day. Ferris wheeled suddenly and, walking with long strides, almost running, hurried back to the hotel.

Ferris poured himself a drink, although it was not yet eleven o’clock. He sprawled out in an armchair like a man exhausted, nursing his glass of bourbon and water. He had a full day ahead of him as he was leaving by plane the next morning for Paris. He checked over his obligations: take luggage to Air France, lunch with his boss, buy shoes and an overcoat. And something – wasn’t there something else? Ferris finished his drink and opened the telephone directory.

His decision to call his ex‑wife was impulsive. The number was under Bailey, the husband’s name, and he called before he had much time for self-debate. He and Elizabeth had exchanged cards at Christmas-time, and Ferris had sent a carving set when he received the announcement of her wedding. There was no reason not to call. But as he waited, listening to the ring at the other end, misgiving fretted him.

Elizabeth answered; her familiar voice was a fresh shock to him. Twice he had to repeat his name, but, when he was identified, she sounded glad. He explained he was only in town for that day. They had a theatre engagement, she said – but she wondered if he would come by for an early dinner. Ferris said he would be delighted.

As he went from one engagement to another, he was still bothered at odd moments by the feeling that something necessary was forgotten. Ferris bathed and changed in the late afternoon, often thinking about Jeannine: he would be with her the following night. ‘Jeannine,’ he would say, ‘I happened to run into my ex‑wife when I was in New York. Had dinner with her. And her husband, of course. It was strange seeing her after all these years.’

Elizabeth lived in the East Fifties, and as Ferris taxied uptown he glimpsed at intersections the lingering sunset, but by the time he reached his destination it was already autumn dark. The place was a building with a marquee and a doorman, and the apartment was on the seventh floor.

‘Come in, Mr Ferris.’

Braced for Elizabeth or even the unimagined husband, Ferris was astonished by the freckled red-haired child; he had known of the children, but his mind had failed somehow to acknowledge them. Surprise made him step back awkwardly.

‘This is our apartment,’ the child said politely. ‘Aren’t you Mr Ferris? I’m Billy. Come in.’

In the living-room beyond the hall the husband provided another surprise; he too had not been acknowledged emotionally. Bailey was a lumbering red-haired man with a deliberate manner. He rose and extended a welcoming hand.

‘I’m Bill Bailey. Glad to see you. Elizabeth will be in in a minute. She’s finishing dressing.’

The last words struck a gliding series of vibrations, memories of the other years. Fair Elizabeth, rosy and naked before her bath. Half-dressed before the mirror of her dressing-table, brushing her fine, chestnut hair. Sweet, casual intimacy, the soft-fleshed loveliness indisputably possessed. Ferris shrank from the unbidden memories and compelled himself to meet Bill Bailey’s gaze.

‘Billy, will you please bring that tray of drinks from the kitchen table?’

The child obeyed promptly, and when he was gone Ferris remarked conversationally, ‘Fine boy you have there.’

‘We think so.’

Flat silence until the child returned with a tray of glasses and a cocktail shaker of Martinis. With the priming drinks they pumped up conversation: Russia, they spoke of, and the New York rain-making, and the apartment situation in Manhattan and Paris.

‘Mr Ferris is flying all the way across the ocean tomorrow,’ Bailey said to the little boy who was perched on the arm of his chair, quiet and well behaved. ‘I bet you would like to be a stowaway in his suitcase.’

Billy pushed back his limp bangs. ‘I want to fly in an aeroplane and be a newspaperman like Mr Ferris.’ He added with sudden assurance, ‘That’s what I would like to do when I am big.’

Bailey said, ‘I thought you wanted to be a doctor.’

‘I do!’ said Billy. ‘I would like to be both. I want to be an atom-bomb scientist too.’

Elizabeth came in carrying in her arms a baby girl.

‘Oh, John!’ she said. She settled the baby in the father’s lap. ‘It’s grand to see you. I’m awfully glad you could come.’

The little girl sat demurely on Bailey’s knees. She wore a pale pink crêpe‑de‑Chine frock, smocked around the yoke with rose, and a matching silk hair ribbon tying back her pale soft curls. Her skin was summer tanned and her brown eyes flecked with gold and laughing. When she reached up and fingered her father’s horn-rimmed glasses, he took them off and let her look through them a moment. ‘How’s my old Candy?’

Elizabeth was very beautiful, more beautiful perhaps than he had ever realized. Her straight clean hair was shining. Her face was softer, glowing and serene. It was a madonna loveliness, dependent on the family ambience.

‘You’ve hardly changed at all,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but it has been a long time.’

‘Eight years.’ His hand touched his thinning hair self-consciously while further amenities were exchanged.

Ferris felt himself suddenly a spectator – an interloper among these Baileys. Why had he come? He suffered. His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years. He felt he could not bear much longer to stay in the family room.

He glanced at his watch. ‘You’re going to the theatre?’

‘It’s a shame,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but we’ve had this engagement for more than a month. But surely, John, you’ll be staying home one of these days before long. You’re not going to be an expatriate, are you?’

‘Expatriate,’ Ferris repeated. ‘I don’t much like the word.’

‘What’s a better word?’ she asked.

He thought for a moment. ‘Sojourner might do.’

Ferris glanced again at his watch, and again Elizabeth apologized. ‘If only we had known ahead of time –’

‘I just had this day in town. I came home unexpectedly. You see, Papa died last week.’

‘Papa Ferris is dead?’

‘Yes, at Johns-Hopkins. He had been sick there nearly a year. The funeral was down home in Georgia.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry, John. Papa Ferris was always one of my favourite people.’

The little boy moved from behind the chair so that he could look into his mother’s face. He asked, ‘Who is dead?’

Ferris was oblivious to apprehension; he was thinking of his father’s death. He saw again the outstretched body on the quilted silk within the coffin. The corpse-flesh was bizarrely rouged and the familiar hands lay massive and joined above a spread of funeral roses. The memory closed and Ferris awakened to Elizabeth’s calm voice.

‘Mr Ferris’s father, Billy. A really grand person. Somebody you didn’t know.’

‘But why did you call him Papa Ferris?’

Bailey and Elizabeth exchanged a trapped look. It was Bailey who answered the questioning child. ‘A long time ago,’ he said, ‘your mother and Mr Ferris were once married. Before you were born – a long time ago.’

‘Mr Ferris?’

The little boy stared at Ferris, amazed and unbelieving. And Ferris’s eyes, as he returned the gaze, were somehow unbelieving too. Was it indeed true that at one time he had called this stranger Elizabeth, Little Butterduck during nights of love, that they had lived together, shared perhaps a thousand days and nights and – finally – endured in the misery of sudden solitude the fi bre by fi bre (jealousy, alcohol, and money quarrels) destruction of the fabric of married love.

Bailey said to the children, ‘It’s somebody’s supper-time. Come on now.’

‘But, Daddy! Mama and Mr Ferris–I–’

Billy’s everlasting eyes – perplexed and with a glimmer of hostility – reminded Ferris of the gaze of another child. It was the young son of Jeannine – a boy of seven with a shadowed little face and nobbly knees whom Ferris avoided and usually forgot.

‘Quick march!’ Bailey gently turned Billy towards the door. ‘Say good night now, son.’

‘Good night, Mr Ferris.’ He added resentfully, ‘I thought I was staying up for the cake.’

‘You can come in afterward for the cake,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Run along now with Daddy for your supper.’

Ferris and Elizabeth were alone. The weight of the situation descended on those first moments of silence. Ferris asked permission to pour himself another drink and Elizabeth set the cocktail shaker on the table at his side. He looked at the grand piano and noticed the music on the rack.

‘Do you still play as beautifully as you used to?’

‘I still enjoy it.’

‘Please play, Elizabeth.’

Elizabeth arose immediately. Her readiness to perform when asked had always been one of her amiabilities; she never hung back, apologized. Now as she approached the piano there was the added readiness of relief.

She began with a Bach prelude and fugue. The prelude was as gaily iridescent as a prism in a morning-room. The first voice of the fugue, an announcement pure and solitary, was repeated intermingling with a second voice, and again repeated within an elaborated frame, the multiple music, horizontal and serene, flowed with unhurried majesty. The principal melody was woven with two other voices, embellished with countless ingenuities – now dominant, again submerged, it had the sublimity of a single thing that does not fear surrender to the whole. Towards the end, the density of the material gathered for the last enriched insistence on the dominant first motif and with a chorded final statement the figure ended. Ferris rested his head on the chair back and closed his eyes. In the following silence a clear, high voice came from the room down the hall.

‘Daddy, how could Mama and Mr Ferris –’ A door was closed.

The piano began again – what was this music? Unplaced, familiar, the limpid melody had lain a long while dormant in his heart. Now it spoke to him of another time, another place – it was the music Elizabeth used to play. The delicate air summoned a wilderness of memory. Ferris was lost in the riot of past longings, conflicts, ambivalent desires. Strange that the music, catalyst for this tumultuous anarchy, was so serene and clear. The singing melody was broken off by the appearance of the maid.

‘Miz Bailey, dinner is out on the table now.’

Even after Ferris was seated at the table between his host and hostess, the unfinished music still overcast his mood. He was a little drunk.

‘L’improvisation de la vie humaine,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.’

‘Address book?’ repeated Bailey. Then he stopped, non-committal and polite.

‘You’re still the same old boy, Johnny,’ Elizabeth said with a trace of the old tenderness.

It was a Southern dinner that evening, and the dishes were his old favourites. They had fried chicken and corn pudding and rich, glazed candied sweet potatoes. During the meal Elizabeth kept alive a conversation when the silences were over-long. And it came about that Ferris was led to speak of Jeannine.

‘I first knew Jeannine last autumn – about this time of the year – in Italy. She’s a singer and she had an engagement in Rome. I expect we will be married soon.’

The words seemed so true, inevitable, that Ferris did not at first acknowledge to himself the lie. He and Jeannine had never in that year spoken of marriage. And indeed, she was still married – to a White Russian money-changer in Paris from whom she had been separated for five years. But it was too late to correct the lie. Already Elizabeth was saying: ‘This really makes me glad to know. Congratulations, Johnny.’

He tried to make amends with truth. ‘The Roman autumn is so beautiful. Balmy and blossoming.’ He added, ‘Jeannine has a little boy of six. A curious trilingual little fellow. We go to the Tuileries sometimes.’

A lie again. He had taken the boy once to the gardens. The sallow foreign child in shorts that bared his spindly legs had sailed his boat in the concrete pond and ridden the pony. The child had wanted to go in to the puppet show. But there was not time, for Ferris had an engagement at the Scribe Hotel. He had promised they would go to the guignol another afternoon. Only once had he taken Valentin to the Tuileries.

There was a stir. The maid brought in a white-frosted cake with pink candles. The children entered in their night clothes. Ferris still did not understand.

‘Happy birthday, John,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Blow out the candles.’

Ferris recognized his birthday date. The candles blew out lingeringly and there was the smell of burning wax. Ferris was thirty-eight years old. The veins in his temples darkened and pulsed visibly.

‘It’s time you started for the theatre.’

Ferris thanked Elizabeth for the birthday dinner and said the appropriate good-byes. The whole family saw him to the door.

A high, thin moon shone above the jagged, dark skyscrapers. The streets were windy, cold. Ferris hurried to Third Avenue and hailed a cab. He gazed at the nocturnal city with the deliberate attentiveness of departure and perhaps farewell. He was alone. He longed for flight-time and the coming journey.

The next day he looked down on the city from the air, burnished in sunlight, toylike, precise. Then America was left behind and there was only the Atlantic and the distant European shore. The ocean was milky pale and placid beneath the clouds. Ferris dozed most of the day. Towards dark he was thinking of Elizabeth and the visit of the previous evening. He thought of Elizabeth among her family with longing, gentle envy, and inexplicable regret. He sought the melody, the unfinished air, that had so moved him. The cadence, some unrelated tones, were all that remained; the melody itself evaded him. He had found instead the first voice of the fugue that Elizabeth had played – it came to him, inverted mockingly and in a minor key. Suspended above the ocean the anxieties of transience and solitude no longer troubled him and he thought of his father’s death with equanimity. During the dinner hour the plane reached the shore of France.

At midnight Ferris was in a taxi crossing Paris. It was a clouded night and mist wreathed the lights of the Place de la Concorde. The midnight bistros gleamed on the wet pavements. As always after a transocean flight the change of continents was too sudden. New York at morning, this midnight Paris. Ferris glimpsed the disorder of his life: the succession of cities, of transitory loves; and time, the sinister glissando of the years, time always.

‘Vite! Vite!’ he called in terror. ‘ Dépêchez-vous.’

Valentin opened the door to him. The little boy wore pyjamas and an outgrown red robe. His grey eyes were shadowed and, as Ferris passed into the flat, they flickered momentarily.

‘J’attends Maman.’

Jeannine was singing in a night club. She would not be home before another hour. Valentin returned to a drawing, squatting with his crayons over the paper on the floor. Ferris looked down at the drawing – it was a banjo player with notes and wavy lines inside a comicstrip balloon.

‘We will go again to the Tuileries.’

The child looked up and Ferris drew him closer to his knees. The melody, the unfinished music that Elizabeth had played, came to him suddenly. Unsought, the load of memory jettisoned – this time bringing only recognition and sudden joy.

‘Monsieur Jean,’ the child said, ‘did you see him?’

Confused, Ferris thought only of another child – the freckled, family-loved boy. ‘See who, Valentin?’

‘Your dead papa in Georgia.’ The child added, ‘Was he okay?’

Ferris spoke with rapid urgency: ‘We will go often to the Tuileries. Ride the pony and we will go into the guignol. We will see the puppet show and never be in a hurry any more.’

‘Monsieur Jean,’ Valentin said. ‘The guignol is now closed.’

Again, the terror, the acknowledgement of wasted years and death. Valentin, responsive and confident, still nestled in his arms. His cheek touched the soft cheek and felt the brush of the delicate eyelashes. With inner desperation he pressed the child close – as though an emotion as protean as his love could dominate the pulse of time.

A Domestic Dilemma

On Thursday Martin Meadows left the office early enough to make the first express bus home. It was the hour when the evening lilac glow was fading in the slushy streets, but by the time the bus had left the Midtown terminal the bright city night had come. On Thursdays the maid had a half-day off and Martin liked to get home as soon as possible, since for the past yearhis wife had not been – well. This Thursday he was very tired and, hoping that no regular commuter would single him out for conversation, he fastened his attention to the newspaper until the bus had crossed the George Washington Bridge. Once on 9‑W Highway Martin always felt that the trip was half-way done, he breathed deeply, even in cold weather when only ribbons of draught cut through the smoky air of the bus, confident that he was breathing country air. It used to be that at this point he would relax and begin to think with pleasure of his home. But in this last year nearness brought only a sense of tension and he did not anticipate the journey’s end.

This evening Martin kept his face close to the window and watched the barren fields and lonely lights of passing townships. There was a moon, pale on the dark earth, and areas of late, porous snow; to Martin the countryside seemed vast and somehow desolate that evening. He took his hat from the rack and put his folded newspaper in the pocket of his overcoat a few minutes before time to pull the cord.

The cottage was a block from the bus stop, near the river but not directly on the shore; from the living-room window you could look across the street and opposite yard and see the Hudson. The cottage was modern, almost too white and new on the narrow plot of yard. In summer the grass was soft and bright and Martin carefully tended a flower border and a rose trellis. But during the cold, fallow months the yard was bleak and the cottage seemed naked. Lights were on that evening in all the rooms in the little house and Martin hurried up the front walk. Before the steps he stopped to move a wagon out of the way.

The children were in the living-room, so intent on play that the opening of the front door was at first unnoticed. Martin stood looking at his safe, lovely children. They had opened the bottom drawer of the secretary and taken out the Christmas decorations. Andy had managed to plug in the Christmas tree lights and the green and red bulbs glowed with out‑of‑season festivity on the rug of the living-room. At the moment he was trying to trail the bright cord over Marianne’s rocking horse. Marianne sat on the floor pulling off an angel’s wings. The children wailed a startling welcome. Martin swung the fat little baby girl up to his shoulder and Andy threw himself against his father’s legs.

‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’

Martin set down the little girl carefully and swung Andy a few times like a pendulum. Then he picked up the Christmas-tree cord.

‘What’s all this stuff doing out? Help me put it back in the drawer. You’re not to fool with the light socket. Remember I told you that before. I mean it, Andy.’

The six-year-old child nodded and shut the secretary drawer. Martin stroked his fair soft hair and his hand lingered tenderly on the nape of the child’s frail neck.

‘Had supper yet, Bumpkin?’

‘It hurt. The toast was hot.’

The baby girl stumbled on the rug and, after the first surprise of the fall, began to cry; Martin picked her up and carried her in his arms back to the kitchen.

‘See, Daddy,’ said Andy. ‘The toast –’

Emily had laid the children’s supper on the uncovered porcelain table. There were two plates with the remains of cream‑of‑wheat and eggs and silver mugs that had held milk. There was also a platter of cinnamon toast, untouched except for one toothmarked bite. Martin sniffed the bitten piece and nibbled gingerly. Then he put the toast into the garbage pail.

‘ Hoo – phui – What on earth!’

Emily had mistaken the tin of cayenne for the cinnamon.

‘I like to have burnt up,’ Andy said. ‘Drank water and ran outdoors and opened my mouth. Marianne didn’t eat none.’

‘Any,’ corrected Martin. He stood helpless, looking around the walls of the kitchen. ‘Well, that’s that, I guess,’ he said finally. ‘Where is your mother now?’

‘She’s up in you alls’ room.’

Martin left the children in the kitchen and went up to his wife. Outside the door he waited for a moment to still his anger. He did not knock and once inside the room he closed the door behind him.

Emily sat in the rocking chair by the window of the pleasant room. She had been drinking something from a tumbler and as he entered she put the glass hurriedly on the floor behind the chair. In her attitude there was confusion and guilt which she tried to hide by a show of spurious vivacity.

‘Oh, Marty! You home already? The time slipped up on me. I was just going down –’ She lurched to him and her kiss was strong with sherry. When he stood unresponsive she stepped back a pace and giggled nervously.

‘What’s the matter with you? Standing there like a barber pole. Is anything wrong with you?’

‘Wrong with me ?’ Martin bent over the rocking chair and picked up the tumbler from the floor. ‘If you could only realize how sick I am – how bad it is for all of us.’

Emily spoke in a false, airy voice that had become too familiar to him. Often at such times she affected a slight English accent, copying perhaps some actress she admired. ‘I haven’t the vaguest idea what you mean. Unless you are referring to the glass I used for a spot of sherry. I had a finger of sherry – maybe two. But what is the crime in that, pray tell me? I’m quite all right. Quite all right.’

‘So anyone can see.’

As she went into the bathroom Emily walked with careful gravity. She turned on the cold water and dashed some on her face with her cupped hands, then patted herself dry with the corner of a bath towel. Her face was delicately featured and young, unblemished.

‘I was just going down to make dinner.’ She tottered and balanced herself by holding to the door frame.

‘I’ll take care of dinner. You stay up here. I’ll bring it up.’

‘I’ll do nothing of the sort. Why, whoever heard of such a thing?’

‘Please,’ Martin said.

‘Leave me alone. I’m quite all right. I was just on the way down –’

‘Mind what I say.’

‘Mind your grandmother.’

She lurched towards the door, but Martin caught her by the arm. ‘I don’t want the children to see you in this condition. Be reasonable.’

‘Condition!’ Emily jerked her arm. Her voice rose angrily. ‘Why, because I drink a couple of sherries in the afternoon you’re trying to make me out a drunkard. Condition! Why, I don’t even touch whisky. As well you know. I don’t swill liquor at bars. And that’s more than you can say. I don’t even have a cocktail at dinnertime. I only sometimes have a glass of sherry. What, I ask you, is the disgrace of that? Condition!’

Martin sought words to calm his wife. ‘We’ll have a quiet supper by ourselves up here. That’s a good girl.’ Emily sat on the side of the bed and he opened the door for a quick departure.

‘I’ll be back in a jiffy.’

As he busied himself with the dinner downstairs he was lost in the familiar question as to how this problem had come upon his home. He himself had always enjoyed a good drink. When they were still living in Alabama they had served long drinks or cocktails as a matter of course. For years they had drunk one or two – possibly three drinks before dinner, and at bedtime a long nightcap. Evenings before holidays they might get a buzz on, might even become a little tight. But alcohol had never seemed a problem to him, only a bothersome expense that with the increase in the family they could scarcely afford. It was only after his company had transferred him to New York that Martin was aware that certainly his wife was drinking too much. She was tippling, he noticed, during the day.

The problem acknowledged, he tried to analyse the source. The change from Alabama to New York had somehow disturbed her; accustomed to the idle warmth of a small Southern town, the matrix of the family and cousinship and childhood friends, she had failed to accommodate herself to the stricter, lonelier mores of the North. The duties of motherhood and housekeeping were onerous to her. Homesick for Paris City, she had made no friends in the suburban town. She read only magazines and murder books. Her interior life was insufficient without the artifice of alcohol.

The revelations of incontinence insidiously undermined his previous conceptions of his wife. There were times of unexplainable malevolence, times when the alcoholic fuse caused an explosion of unseemly anger. He encountered a latent coarseness in Emily, inconsistent with her natural simplicity. She lied about drinking and deceived him with unsuspected stratagems.

Then there was an accident. Coming home from work one evening about a year ago, he was greeted with screams from the children’s room. He found Emily holding the baby, wet and naked from her bath. The baby had been dropped, her frail, frail skull striking the table edge, so that a thread of blood was soaking into the gossamer hair. Emily was sobbing and intoxicated. As Martin cradled the hurt child, so infinitely precious at that moment, he had an affrighted vision of the future.

The next day Marianne was all right. Emily vowed that never again would she touch liquor, and for a few weeks she was sober, cold, and downcast. Then gradually she began – not whisky or gin – but quantities of beer, or sherry, or outlandish liqueurs; once he had come across a hatbox of empty crème‑de‑menthe bottles. Martin found a dependable maid who managed the household competently. Virgie was also from Alabama and Martin had never dared tell Emily the wage-scale customary in New York. Emily’s drinking was entirely secret now, done before he reached the house. Usually the effects were almost imperceptible – a looseness of movement or the heavy-lidded eyes. The times of irresponsibilities, such as the cayenne-pepper toast were rare, and Martin could dismiss his worries when Virgie was at the house. But, nevertheless, anxiety was always latent, a threat of indefined disaster that underlaid his days.

‘Marianne!’ Martin called, for even the recollection of that time brought the need for reassurance. The baby girl, no longer hurt, but no less precious to her father, came into the kitchen with her brother. Martin went on with the preparations for the meal. He opened a can of soup and put two chops in the frying-pan. Then he sat down by the table and took his Marianne on his knees for a pony ride. Andy watched them, his fingers wobbling the tooth that had been loose all that week.

‘ Andy-the-candyman!’ Martin said. ‘Is that old critter still in your mouth? Come closer, let Daddy have a look.’

‘I got a string to pull it with.’ The child brought from his pocket a tangled thread. ‘Virgie said to tie it to the tooth and tie the other end to the doorknob and shut the door real suddenly.’

Martin took out a clean handkerchief and felt the loose tooth carefully. ‘That tooth is coming out of my Andy’s mouth tonight. Otherwise I’m awfully afraid we’ll have a tooth tree in the family.’

‘A what?’

‘A tooth tree,’ Martin said. ‘You’ll bite into something and swallow that tooth. And the tooth will take root in poor Andy’s stomach and grow into a tooth tree with sharp little teeth instead of leaves.’

‘Shoo, Daddy,’ Andy said. But he held the tooth firmly between his grimy little thumb and forefinger. ‘There ain’t any tree like that. I never seen one.’

‘There isn’t any tree like that and I never saw one.’

Martin tensed suddenly. Emily was coming down the stairs. He listened to her fumbling footsteps, his arm embracing the little boy with dread. When Emily came into the room he saw from her movements and her sullen face that she had again been at the sherry bottle. She began to yank open drawers and set the table.

‘Condition!’ she said in a furry voice. ‘You talk to me like that. Don’t think I’ll forget. I remember every dirty lie you say to me. Don’t you think for a minute that I forget.’

‘Emily!’ he begged. ‘The children –’

‘The children – yes! Don’t think I don’t see through your dirty plots and schemes. Down here trying to turn my own children against me. Don’t think I don’t see and understand.’

‘Emily! I beg you – please go upstairs.’

‘So you can turn my children – my very own children –’ Two large tears coursed rapidly down her cheeks. ‘Trying to turn my little boy, my Andy, against his own mother.’

With drunken impulsiveness Emily knelt on the floor before the startled child. Her hands on his shoulders balanced her. ‘Listen, my Andy – you wouldn’t listen to any lies your father tells you? You wouldn’t believe what he says? Listen, Andy, what was your father telling you before I came downstairs?’ Uncertain, the child sought his father’s face. ‘Tell me. Mama wants to know.’

‘About the tooth tree.’

‘What?’

The child repeated the words and she echoed them with unbelieving terror. ‘The tooth tree!’ She swayed and renewed her grasp on the child’s shoulder. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. But listen, Andy, Mama is all right, isn’t she?’ The tears were spilling down her face and Andy drew back from her, for he was afraid. Grasping the table edge, Emily stood up.

‘See! You have turned my child against me.’

Marianne began to cry, and Martin took her in his arms.

‘That’s all right, you can take your child. You have always shown partiality from the very first. I don’t mind, but at least you can leave me my little boy.’

Andy edged close to his father and touched his leg. ‘Daddy,’ he wailed.

Martin took the children to the foot of the stairs. ‘Andy, you take up Marianne and Daddy will follow you in a minute.’

‘But Mama?’ the child asked, whispering.

‘Mama will be all right. Don’t worry.’

Emily was sobbing at the kitchen table, her face buried in the crook of her arm. Martin poured a cup of soup and set it before her. Her rasping sobs unnerved him; the vehemence of her emotion, irrespective of the source, touched in him a strain of tenderness. Unwillingly he laid his hand on her dark hair. ‘Sit up and drink the soup.’ Her face as she looked up at him was chastened and imploring. The boy’s withdrawal or the touch of Martin’s hand had turned the tenor of her mood.

‘ Ma‑Martin,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m so ashamed.’

‘Drink the soup.’

Obeying him, she drank between gasping breaths. After a second cup she allowed him to lead her up to their room. She was docile now and more restrained. He laid her nightgown on the bed and was about to leave the room when a fresh round of grief, the alcoholic tumult, came again.

‘He turned away. My Andy looked at me and turned away.’

Impatience and fatigue hardened his voice, but he spoke warily. ‘You forget that Andy is still a little child – he can’t comprehend the meaning of such scenes.’

‘Did I make a scene? Oh, Martin, did I make a scene before the children?’

Her horrified face touched and amused him against his will. ‘Forget it. Put on your nightgown and go to sleep.’

‘My child turned away from me. Andy looked at his mother and turned away. The children –’

She was caught in the rhythmic sorrow of alcohol. Martin withdrew from the room saying: ‘For God’s sake go to sleep. The children will forget by tomorrow.’

As he said this he wondered if it was true. Would the scene glide so easily from memory – or would it root in the unconscious to fester in the after-years? Martin did not know, and the last alternative sickened him. He thought of Emily, foresaw the morning-after humiliation: the shards of memory, the lucidities that glared from the obliterating darkness of shame. She would call the New York office twice – possibly three or four times. Martin anticipated his own embarrassment, wondering if the others at the office could possibly suspect. He felt that his secretary had divined the trouble long ago and that she pitied him. He suffered a moment of rebellion against his fate; he hated his wife.

Once in the children’s room he closed the door and felt secure for the first time that evening. Marianne fell down on the floor, picked herself up and calling: ‘Daddy, watch me,’ fell again, got up, and continued the falling-calling routine. Andy sat in the child’s low chair, wobbling the tooth. Martin ran the water in the tub, washed his own hands in the lavatory, and called the boy into the bathroom.

‘Let’s have another look at that tooth.’ Martin sat on the toilet, holding Andy between his knees. The child’s mouth gaped and Martin grasped the tooth. A wobble, a quick twist and the nacreous milk tooth was free. Andy’s face was for the moment split between terror, astonishment, and delight. He mouthed a swallow of water and spat into the lavatory.

‘Look, Daddy! It’s blood. Marianne!’

Martin loved to bath his children, loved inexpressibly the tender, naked bodies as they stood in the water so exposed. It was not fair of Emily to say that he showed partiality. As Martin soaped the delicate boy-body of his son he felt that further love would be impossible. Yet he admitted the difference in the quality of his emotions for the two children. His love for his daughter was graver, touched with a strain of melancholy, a gentleness that was akin to pain. His pet names for the little boy were the absurdities of daily inspiration – he called the little girl always Marianne, and his voice as he spoke it was a caress. Martin patted dry the fat baby stomach and the sweet little genital fold. The washed child faces were radiant as flower petals, equally loved.

‘I’m putting the tooth under my pillow. I’m supposed to get a quarter.’

‘What for?’

‘You know, Daddy. Johnny got a quarter for his tooth.’

‘Who put the quarter there?’ asked Martin. ‘I used to think the fairies left it in the night. It was a dime in my day, though.’

‘That’s what they say in kindergarten.’

‘Who does put it there?’

‘Your parents,’ Andy said. ‘You!’

Martin was pinning the cover on Marianne’s bed. His daughter was already asleep. Scarcely breathing, Martin bent over and kissed her forehead, kissed again the tiny hand that lay palm-upward, flung in slumber beside her head.

‘Good night, Andy-man.’

The answer was only a drowsy murmur. After a minute Martin took out his change and slid a quarter underneath the pillow. He left a night-light in the room.

As Martin prowled about the kitchen making a late meal, it occurred to him that the children had not once mentioned their mother or the scene that must have seemed to them incomprehensible. Absorbed in the instant – the tooth, the bath, the quarter – the fluid passage of child-time had borne these weightless episodes like leaves in the swift current of a shallow stream while the adult enigma was beached and forgotten on the shore. Martin thanked the Lord for that.

But his own anger, repressed and lurking, arose again. His youth was being frittered by a drunkard’s waste, his very manhood subtly undermined. And the children, once the immunity of incomprehension passed – what would it be like in a year or so? With his elbows on the table he ate his food brutishly, untasting. There was no hiding the truth – soon there would be gossip in the office and in the town; his wife was a dissolute woman. Dissolute. And he and his children were bound to a future of degradation and slow ruin.

Martin pushed away from the table and stalked into the living-room.

He followed the lines of a book with his eyes, but his mind conjured miserable images: he saw his children drowned in the river, his wife a disgrace on the public street. By bedtime the dull, hard anger was like a weight upon his chest and his feet dragged as he climbed the stairs.

The room was dark except for the shafting light from the half-opened bathroom door. Martin undressed quietly. Little by little, mysteriously, there came in him a change. His wife was asleep, her peaceful respirations sounding gently in the room. Her high-heeled shoes with the carelessly dropped stockings made to him a mute appeal. Her underclothes were flung in disorder on the chair. Martin picked up the girdle and the soft, silk brassière and stood for a moment with them in his hands. For the first time that evening he looked at his wife. His eyes rested on the sweet forehead, the arch of the fine brow. The brow had descended to Marianne, and the tilt at the end of the delicate nose. In his son he could trace the high cheekbones and pointed chin. Her body was full-bosomed, slender, and undulant. As Martin watched the tranquil slumber of his wife the ghost of the old anger vanished. All thoughts of blame or blemish were distant from him now. Martin put out the bathroom light and raised the window. Careful not to awaken Emily he slid into the bed. By moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.

[1]德语：运转不正常，坏掉了。——编者注（以下若无特别说明，均为译者注。）

[2]西班牙语：再见。——编者注

[3]此处为法语，L’improvisation de la vie humaine。

[4]这里与上文提到的七岁互相矛盾，想来是费里斯对情人儿子的年龄并不上心。——编者注

[5]法国王宫，在巴黎卢浮宫附近。

[6]音乐演奏术语。如弹钢琴，便是用指甲在琴键上迅速刮滑。

让我们遇见在。。

企鹅图书 微博(penguinbooks)

企鹅图书微信订阅号

企鹅图书数字业务微信服务号

更多关于我们对信息请

访问企鹅兰登北亚官网 PRHNA.COM

名声

企鹅现代经典 第一辑

（美）安迪·沃霍尔/著

寇淮禹/译

企鹅图书 | PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

New Zealand | India | South Africa | North Asia

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at:

global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

FAME

Copyright © 1975, Andy Warhol

This selection first published 2018. The moral rights of the author have been asserted. This selection first

published in 2018 in Penguin Modern. Simplified Chinese translation copyright © 寇淮禹, authorized by

上海梯书文化传播有限公司. Simplified Chinese edition copyright © 2021 by Penguin Random House

North Asia in association with CITIC Press Group. All rights reserved.

© “企鹅”及其相关标识是企鹅兰登（北京）文化发展有限公司已经注册或尚未注册的商标。

未经允许，不得擅用。

企鹅兰登电子书 | Penguin Random House eBooks

目录

爱（老年）

美

名声

Love (Senility)

Beauty

Fame

返回总目录

“好的‘体臭’意味着好的票房。你在一英里之外就能闻到味儿。”

爱（老年）

B：你昨天晚上怎么没来？你最近情绪可不太对啊。

A：你知道——我实在是见不了新人。我太累了。

B：可昨天晚上都是老相识，你也没来啊。你不该看那么多电视的。

A：是啊，我知道。

B：那个角色是男扮女装吗？

A：扮的谁？

A：最刺激的事儿是不做。如果你爱上了某人而不做，比做可刺激多了呢。

恋爱让人太过投入了，其实不值当的。但如果因为某种原因，你觉得值，那么你应该只投入和对方一样多的时间和精力。换句话说，恋爱应该“两不相欠”。

关于爱，人们有太多的问题和困扰了。人们总是在寻找一个人，可以做他们的威尼托大街[1]，做他们不会塌陷的舒芙蕾。一年级就该开设关于爱的课程。应该有关于美、关于爱和关于性的课程，而关于爱的课程要作为重中之重。此外我总是觉得，人们应该向孩子们展示如何做爱，一劳永逸地讲给他们听、演示给他们看：性爱其实没什么大不了的。但是人们不会这么做的，因为爱和性都是生意。

但我转念又想，也许就那么蒙在鼓里也挺好，因为如果一切你都知晓了，那接下来的人生就没什么念想了，而没了可以去幻想的东西，你也许会发疯。因为不管怎么说我们现在的寿命是越来越长了，青春期之后有太长的时间可以做爱。

我不太记得青春期的事儿了。我大概因为卧病在床——身边是我的查利·麦卡锡玩偶——而错失了大部分的青春期，就像我错失了《白雪公主》[2]一样。我直到四十五岁才看《白雪公主》，是和罗曼·波兰斯基[3]一起去林肯中心看的。长久的等待大概是件好事，因为我想象不出怎么才能比当时更兴奋了。这让我想到，&nbsp；与其早早地告诉孩子们性爱的过程和虚无，也许倒不如等他们到了四十岁，再忽然间兴奋难耐地告诉他们有关性爱的一切。你和一位刚过了四十岁生日的友人一起在街上走，不经意间讲起性爱那些事儿，接着等他因为知晓了“什么进到什么里”而起的震撼平息下去之后，再将余下的部分耐心解释给他。这样在四十岁之时，他们的人生忽然有了新的意义。考虑到我们现在活得更久，我们真的应该让我们的孩童期变得更长。

更长的寿命让所有旧时的价值和它们的应用都失灵了。过去人们在十五岁的时候了解性，三十五岁的时候就死了，显然，他们的问题会比我们少。我们如今八岁左右——我想差不多吧——就了解了性，而要一直活到八十岁。这意味着我们要在漫长的岁月里从同一个观念那儿取乐——同一个无聊的观念。

真正爱自己的孩子，希望孩子在人生中的无聊和不满尽可能少的家长，应该采取老派的做法——尽可能晚地准许他们谈恋爱，这样他们将会在一段更长的时期里有所期盼。

性爱在银幕上和书本里要比在枕席之间更激动人心。让孩子们去阅读吧，让他们期盼吧，然后在他们就要有亲身体验之前，告诉他们最美妙的部分他们已经品尝过了，再就不剩什么了。

幻想中的爱恋比实际的爱恋好得多。永远不做是最刺激的。最为刺激的吸引来自永不相遇的两极。

我喜欢每一个“解放”运动，因为“解放”之后，那些一直谜一般地存在的事物变得可以理解了，变得无聊起来。这样，若有人未能置身于正在发生的事情之中，他也不会感到自己被排除在外了。比如说吧，尚在寻找适合自己的丈夫或妻子的单身人士，过去会觉得自己被排除在了婚姻之外，因为在过去，婚姻所拥有的形象是那么美好。像是简·怀亚特和罗伯特·扬[4]、尼克·查尔斯和诺拉·查尔斯[5]、埃塞尔·默茨和弗雷德·默茨[6]，以及戴伍德和金发女郎[7]。

已婚看起来是如此美好之事，以至于如果你不够幸运，没能嫁人或娶妻的话，日子简直要没法过了似的。对于单身的人来说，婚姻看起来是美好的，有关它的林林总总似乎都是迷人的；而性爱就更不用说了，总被暗示为理所当然地美妙——没人能以语言形容，因为“你必须亲自试过”才能知道那有多么地好。整件事都像是结了婚的人的阴谋，他们绝口不提结婚和性爱并不一定全然是美妙的。如果他们能够坦诚一些，是很可以让单身的人不感到那么大的压力的。

但有关婚姻的秘密总是被保守得相当好，没什么人会告诉你一旦结了婚，床上的地方就不够睡了，而且还可能不得不在每天早上面对另一半呼出的臭气。

关于爱的歌曲非常多。但有一天，我特别激动：有人给我寄来一首歌词，歌词中写到他如何满不在乎，还有他对我是如何不在乎。这真是非常好。他成功地传达了他真的什么都不在乎。

只身一人我看没什么不好。对我来说，只身一人棒极了。人们把一个人的爱看得太重了，其实并不非得看得那么重。众人环绕的生活也是，人们也看得太重了。但与他人有着过分牵连的生活和来自他人的爱是东方式的智者不予一顾的事情。

我不知道爱情是否有可能一直持续。如果你已经结婚三十年，当你“为你爱的那个人做早餐”时，他走了进来，他真的会为之心里一动吗？我是说，这就只是个普普通通的早晨。我想他会为那早餐心里一动，不过这样也不错。有人给做早餐是件不错的事。

你为爱付出的最大代价就是你身边将会总是有个人，你没法再只是一个人了，而一个人总是要好得多。最不好的地方，不用说，就是床变得特别挤。即使是养一只宠物也会侵占你卧室的空间的。

我相信订婚是美好的，而且订得越久越好。

可以有爱有性，也可以有性无爱，还可以有爱无性，但是过于投入的爱和过于投入的性是不好的。

你可以像忠于一个人那样忠于某个地方或者某样东西。有的地方真的能让你的心为之一动，特别是若你必须要搭飞机才能去那里的话。

*

我妈总是说别为爱发愁，但千万得结婚。但我一直都清楚我是不会结婚的，因为我不想要孩子，我不想他们有我所有的那些问题。我不认为有谁活该经受那些问题。

我常会想到那些说来应该是什么问题都没有的人，他们结婚，过日子，然后死去，一切都很美好。我认识的人里没有这样的。我认识的人总会有点儿问题，哪怕是厕所堵了这样的问题。

我理想中的妻子应该有很多的培根，她把它们全部带回家[8]。培根之外，她还要有一家电视台。

我看老的战争片，看到女孩儿透过电话和在大洋彼岸服役的男友结婚的情节时总是会看得入迷。她们会在电话里说：“亲爱的，我听到你了！”我常常想，要是她们就以这样的方式过下去该多好啊，她们会非常幸福。不过我猜她们还是会想要每个月的生活费的。

我有一位电话伴侣。我们有一段透过电话构建的关系，迄今已经六年了。我住在上城，她住在下城。我们的安排实在是好：我们不必面对彼此早上的口臭，然而我们可以像所有幸福的夫妻一样，每天早晨愉快地共进早餐。我在上城的厨房里冲泡薄荷茶，给烘烤到半焦的英式松饼涂橘子果酱；而她则在下城等着咖啡店来送外卖：一杯浅焙咖啡，烘烤过的圆面包抹黄油和蜂蜜——咖啡豆浅焙，东西不少吃，蜂蜜、黄油和果仁。我们闲聊，消磨几个小时的晨间时光，阳光很好，电话听筒舒服地夹在头和臂膀间。我们可以放下听筒暂时离开，也可以在想的时候随时挂电话。我们不用操心孩子，只需想着多接几台分机。我们有共识，彼此也能理解。十二年前她嫁给了一位钉枪皇后，自那以后就差不多一直在等法院的离婚判决，不过对于问起的人她一律答复说，他已经在一场泥石流中死掉了。[9]

你体内的一些化学物质变质时，你就会呈现出爱的症状。所以“爱”里一定是有点儿什么的，因为化学物质确实会告诉你一些事情。

我年轻时努力了又努力，试着去了解爱。然而既然学校里并不教授“爱”，我就转向了电影去寻找线索，想弄明白爱是什么以及该拿它怎么办。那会儿确实能够从电影中就某一种爱学到点儿什么，但你没法运用学到的那些东西来在现实中获得哪怕一点点成功。比如说吧，有天晚上我在电视上看一九六一年版的《后街》，由约翰·加文和苏珊·海沃德主演。这片子看得我目瞪口呆，因为片子从头到尾展示的都是他们在有幸共度的时光中感叹他们共度的时光是多么地美妙，所以他们共度的每一刻时光都是对他们共度的每一刻时光的美妙的证明。

但我总是在想，电影可以展示给人们的要比这多得多。电影可以展示人与人之间究竟是怎样的，并由此帮助那些无法理解的人，让他们知道可以怎样做，知道他们有哪些实际的选项。

我在我的早期电影中试图做的，正是展示人们可以怎样和他人相识，人们可以相互做些什么、说些什么。这就是那会儿的全部想法：展示两个人是怎样熟识起来的。这样当你看这些电影的时候，你会看到这件事有多么简单，你会学到这件事究竟是怎么一回事。那些电影展示给你人们是如何行动的，又是如何与他人互动的。它们像是现实版本的社会学式的“举个例子”。它们就像是纪录片，如果你觉得它们适用于你，那它们就是示例，而如果你觉得它们不适用于你，至少它们还是纪录片，它们可以适用于你认识的某个人，可以澄清一些你关于他们的疑问。

比如说，在《澡盆女孩》中，姑娘们必须跟别人一起在澡盆中洗澡，而她们也在我们拍摄这部电影期间学会了怎样与别人一起在澡盆中洗澡。他们彼此在澡盆中相识。姑娘必须带着她的澡盆去见下一个她必须与之一起洗澡的人，所以她得在胳膊下面夹着澡盆去……我们在那部片子里用的是一个透明的塑料澡盆。

我从未想要专门制作纯粹的性爱电影。如果我想要拍一部真正的性爱电影的话，我会拍一朵花生下另一朵花，而最棒的爱情故事是一只笼子里的两只爱情鸟。

最好的爱是那种“不去想它”的爱。有些人可以在性爱之中让头脑放空，一心就只想着性；另一些人永远不能让头脑放空而只想着性，所以他们在性爱之中会想个不停：“真的是我在做吗？我真的在干这档子事儿吗？这实在是很奇怪。五分钟前，我还没有在干这事儿。再过一小会儿，我将不会再干这事儿。我妈会怎么说？过去的人们又是怎么想这档子事儿的？”第一类人——可以让头脑放空，只想着性而不想东想西的人——更好。另外那类人必须要找些其他的事情来放松，在那些事情里沉醉。对我来说，这其他的事就是幽默。

唯有一类人是我真正感兴趣的，那就是风趣之人；因为一个人要是无趣，就会让我感到无聊。但如果某人的逗趣对你来说是最大的魅力，你就会遇到一个麻烦，因为风趣毕竟不同于风情。到头来，在大家要赤裸相见的时候，你很可能无法真正地兴奋起来，你没法真的“做”。

但比起做，我宁愿在床上笑。钻进被子里，啪啪啪地抛出一个又一个笑话，我想是最棒的了。“怎么样，我厉不厉害？”“嗯，刚才那个很好笑。”“哇哦，你今晚真是特别特别好笑！”

如果我去找小姐，大概会付款让她给我讲笑话。

有时，性魅力历久不衰。我见过不止一对夫妻，彼此间在性事上的吸引力并不随着时光的流逝而衰减。

当一对夫妻长久地生活在一起，确实会变得彼此相像。因为你喜欢一个人，就会在不经意间学到他的小动作，贴近他的生活习惯。同住也意味着吃同样的饭菜。

关于爱，每个人都有不同的理解。有个我认识的女孩儿跟我说：“他没有射在我嘴里，那一刻我就知道了，他是爱我的。”

这些年来，我应对爱比起应对嫉妒要做得好。我时不时会感到妒意袭来。我觉得我可能是世界上最善妒的那类人了。要是我的左手画了一张漂亮的画，我的右手就会感到嫉妒。如果我的左腿跳了一步不错的舞，我的右腿就会嫉妒。我左半边嘴会嫉妒，如果我右半边嘴在嚼好吃的。外出用餐，要是谁的菜点得比我的好，我会嫉妒。要是谁用傻瓜相机拍出了模糊的照片，哪怕我用宝丽来拍同一个场景拍得清清楚楚，我也会嫉妒。基本上，不管什么事，只要不是由我来最先挑选，我就会发狂。很多时候我都在做着我根本就不想做的事，其原因不过是妒意暗涌，唯恐要是我不做就该有别人抢先做了。实际上，我总是力图买下许多东西和许多人的原因，也不过是嫉妒别人可能会买下他们，而他们有可能很不错。这就是我种种人生故事之一种。我平生上过的不多的几次电视，也因为我太嫉恨节目主持人而没能开口。节目组的摄像机才一开动，我脑子里的全部念头就只剩下一样：“我要有一档我自己的电视节目……我要有一档我自己的电视节目。”

想到有人爱上了我，我就紧张得不行。每当我有一段新的“罗曼史”，我都特别紧张，我会把整个办公室的人都带上，通常这意味着五六个人吧。他们一起来接上我，然后我们再去接她。要爱我，就要爱我整个办公室。

每个人到最后都会发现自己在跟错误的人吻别、道晚安。我感谢办公室的人陪我约会的方式之一，是答应陪他们一起赴约。他们中的一两个人喜欢利用这一服务，因为他们中的这一两位有点儿像我，他们不希望有任何事情发生。当我在场的时候，他们跟我说，就不会有事发生。不管去哪儿，我都会让事情无法发生。我看得出来，我进门的时候他们中的一位如释重负，因为有事情正要发生，而他们等不及要由我来让事情无法发生。特别是当他们滞留在意大利的时候，因为你知道意大利人是多么喜欢弄出点儿事来，而我显然是解毒剂。

人们应该闭着眼睛坠入爱河。闭上你的双眼吧。别看。

我认识的一些人会花很多时间在脑海中构想新的勾引计划。我过去认为只有不用工作的人才有时间想这些，但我后来意识到大部分人都是用别人的时间来构想他们的新方案的。大部分人坐在办公室里，拿着薪水，脑子里想的却是怎么把某人弄上床。

我确信昏暗的灯光和魔术镜是有其价值的。一个人有权选择他需要怎样的照明。而且，如果你四十岁的时候才了解性——像我之前建议的那样——那么你最好相信昏暗的灯光和魔术镜是有其价值的。

爱可以被买和卖。超级明星中较年长的一位，每次被她所爱的人踢出房门时都哭得厉害。我常跟她说：“别为这种事烦心。有一天你会变得非常有名，那时你就可以把他买下来了。”事情也正是这样发展的，而现在她很幸福。

碧姬·芭铎是最早的那批特别现代的女人中的一个，她对待男人就像对待爱恋之物，买下又丢弃。这我喜欢。

如今最时髦的姑娘是风尘女子。她们穿着最时髦的衣装。过去她们总是落后于时代，衣着过时，但现在她们是街上最早穿上新装的人。她们消息灵通了。现如今，更有头脑的姑娘也要数风尘女子。她们更为自由，更为解放。但她们仍然在背难看的小挎包。

思考一下“性和怀旧”是有意思的。有一天，我在西区四十几街走着，那儿不是有些廉价舞厅吗，我就看了看他们展示出来的姑娘的照片，十寸大小的那种。其中一家的橱窗里展示的照片带有非常浓郁的二十世纪五十年代风情，但相纸却并不发黄，看不出时光流逝的痕迹。所以我就不清楚了，照片上的姑娘此刻就在店里吗？还是说店里等着你的不是玛米·范多伦[10]那种类型的女孩儿，而是疲惫不堪的退役嬉皮？我不知道。那家店也许是专做特定人群的生意的，那些人出于怀旧，寻找着他们在五十年代曾经试图搞到手的姑娘。

现在，一切都变化得如此之快，当你终于准备好去实现你长久以来的幻想之时，你发现世界变了，而你已经没有机会了。那些曾无数次地幻想过穿着漂亮的蕾丝胸衣和绸缎睡裙的姑娘的小男孩儿，该如何是好呢？他们没有机会找到他们一直以来所期盼的了，除非那位姑娘才刚去了一趟本地的二手店，而没有什么比这更糟的了。

幻想和衣装常有密切的关联，但时光流转，风俗变迁，现在也基本没有这回事儿了。过去，当服装的生产者还在用好料子做好衣服的时候，一个去买西装或衬衫的普通人，他什么也不用多想，只看是否合身，而这样也就很可能买到一套细节讲究、料子也好、穿上很精神的西装了。

但是后来劳动力的价格贵了起来，同样价钱的东西，生产商开始在工艺上俭省起来，工艺一年比一年次，然而却没有人真的不满。所以他们就进一步，再进一步——直到今天他们仍在得寸进尺——他们想看看工艺差到什么地步，人们才会说：“这还算是衬衫吗？”今天，价位适中的服装生产商真的是在卖破烂儿。除了衣服的工艺极为不堪——粗针大线，没有衬里，没有收腰，没有锁边——衣服还都是用合成材料做的，从穿第一次难看到最后一次。（尼龙是唯一还不错的合成材料，我想。）

唉，如今人们买东西的时候必须非常小心，不然他买到的一定是破烂儿。不光得小心，还得花很多钱才行。所以这就意味着，在今天，如果你看到一个衣着讲究的人，你可以肯定他在衣装和外表上花了不少的心思。而这可不太妙，因为一个人不该太过在意他的外表。对女孩儿来说也是如此，不过没那么严重——女孩子可以稍稍多花些心思，她不会因为显得自恋而有失魅力，因为女孩儿天生更漂亮。但是一个操心他的外表的男人通常是在极力地表现他的魅力，对男人来说这可是非常地没有魅力。

如今你要是在街上看到一个人，看着特别像你青春期时幻想过的模样，他恐怕并非你曾经幻想过的那类人，而是一个和你有过同样幻想的人。他决定，与其得到或是成为曾经的幻想，还不如让自己看起来像那曾经的幻想。所以他就找了一家店，买了你和他都喜欢的衣装，装扮成你和他都喜欢的样子。所以，忘了他吧。

只要想想所有那些做詹姆斯·迪恩[11]打扮的人以及那究竟有何意味，你就能够明白了。

杜鲁门·卡波特有一次跟我说，有些性爱完全是怀旧的表现；我觉得他说得对。另一些性爱则含有不同程度的怀旧，从有一点儿到有很多。我想，说大多数性爱都包含了对于某一事物的某种形式的怀旧，恐怕是不错的。

有时，性爱是对你特别想要做爱的那段时光的怀旧。

性爱是对性爱的怀旧。

有些人觉得暴力是性感的，但我从来就没能看出来暴力有何性感可言。

“爱情”在我妈用的解梦手册里总是对应着一个好的号码。我小时候，我妈会去彩票站投注。我记得她那时有一本解梦手册，她会在里面查她做的梦，手册会告诉她那个梦的吉凶，还会附带一个号码，她会用那个号码下注。有关“爱情”的梦总是能让她选到好的号码。

当你想要像什么，这意味着你对它是真的喜爱。如果你想要像一块石头，说明你真的喜爱那块石头。我喜爱塑料偶像。[12]

笑容美好的人令我着迷。你忍不住要想是什么让他们笑得这样美。

人在不化妆时看起来最适合接吻。梦露的双唇不适合接吻，但非常适合拍照片。

我有一部电影叫《反叛的女人》，它起初的名字是《性》，我记不得当时我们为什么改名字了。电影的三位女主角是三个男扮女装的人：宝贝儿甜心、杰基·柯蒂斯和霍利·伍德劳恩。他们扮演了处在不同的“解放”阶段、有着不同的“解放”程度的女人。

别的不谈，易装皇后[13]可谓明证，向我们展示着女人过去希望自己成为的样子，展示着有些人现在也仍然希望女人成为的样子，还展示着有些女人仍然希望自己成为的样子。易装皇后是行走的档案，保存着理想的电影明星般的女人的样子。他们发挥着记录的功能，奉献他们的生命，让那些熠熠发光的别样的女性形象留存在人世间，有待你（不要太过接近）的审视[14]。

过去要是想在医院有一个单间，你需要非常有钱，但现在你只需要是一位易装皇后。如果你是易装皇后，他们会想要把你和其他患者隔开，但也可能是现在的医院有更多的病房了。

我着迷于那些一生都在努力成为一个完完全全的女孩儿的男孩儿，因为他们必须非常努力、毫不懈怠，才能摆脱所有可能让他们露馅儿的男性特质，再将所有那些女性特质吸纳进来。我的意思不是说这么做是对的，我也不是说有这种想法是好的，我不是说这不是自我欺骗或自我毁灭，我也不是说这不是一个男人对他的一生所能做的可能最为荒谬的事。我是在说，这是一项非常艰辛的工作。想到他们，我们不应该忽视这一点。看起来和上天所塑造的你完全相反是一项艰辛的工作，更不要说他们所力图成为的女人本就是只存在于幻想中的女人。把电影明星放进厨房，他们就不再是明星，而变成和你我一样的人。易装皇后对我们是个提醒：有些明星的确是和你我不同的人。

有一阵，我们的电影常用易装皇后，因为我们认识的真正的女孩儿似乎对任何事情都打不起精神，而易装皇后对任何事情都可以很来劲儿。但是近来姑娘们似乎开始恢复了活力，所以我们又开始在电影里用真正的女孩儿了。

*

在《反叛的女人》中，杰基·柯蒂斯男扮女装，演一位来自新泽西州贝永市的女教师，他即兴发挥的一个地方成就了全片的最佳台词之一。还是处女的她被强迫给阿梅里卡先生来点儿口头的愉悦——给他口交，而她的那句台词道出了对性爱的幻灭。在又咳又呕，好不容易结束之后，可怜的杰基弄不明白她这算是有过性爱了还是没有：“成千上万的女孩儿在男友抛弃她们时自杀，总不会是因为这个吧……”杰基演出了当人们意识到性爱不过像其他事情一样，都只是艰辛的劳作时所感到的困惑。

人们的幻想给他们带来麻烦。如果你没有幻想，你就不会有麻烦，因为不管有什么，你都会就那么接受下来。但这样一来，你也不会体验到浪漫的感觉，因为浪漫意味着在一个没有你所寻找的特质的人身上，找寻你所幻想的特质。我的一个朋友总是说：“女人爱的我，是我所不是的那个男人。”

和恋爱中的人聊天时很容易失礼，因为他们对什么都更加敏感。我记得有一次，我在社交晚宴上和一对夫妇讲话，他们彼此相伴，看上去很幸福。我说：“你们是我见过的看上去最幸福的夫妻了。”这话还好，不过之后我又稍稍推进了一步，赢得了整晚的最佳失礼奖。“你们一定像故事书中的梦幻爱情故事那般美好。我一看就知道你们是青梅竹马的一对儿。”话音刚落，他们的脸就拉下来了，他们转身离去，而且整个晚上都回避我。之后我了解到，他们为了能在一起，抛弃了各自的配偶和家庭。

所以跟人谈起他们的爱情真是得非常小心。恋爱中的人，他们的问题会以古怪的比例混合在一起，想预先知晓你会在何时说错话是很困难的。

想一下你认识的人的爱情问题，你会觉得很古怪。因为他们的爱情问题和他们的人生问题是如此不同。

我认识的一个易装皇后在等待一个真正的男人爱上他（她）。

我总是碰上女强人在寻找弱男子来掌控她。

我不认识没有幻想的人。每个人都一定有幻想。

我的一位电影制作人朋友一语中的，他说：“性冷淡的人其实很能‘干’。”他说得没错，他们真的能，而且真去干。

美

B：她是穿了别人的衣服吗，还是确实穿的是她自己的？

A：啊，一言难尽。她穿的是她丈夫的衣服——她去他的裁缝那儿做衣服。他们为了这事儿打得不可开交。

我还没见过一个我不能称之为“美人”的人。

每个人都可能在人生的某一阶段是美的，当然通常美的程度是不同的。有时他们在婴儿期是美的，待到长大成人，就不再美了，但等老了的时候，有可能又是美的了。或者一个人可能胖，但却有一张美丽的脸庞，又或者有罗圈儿腿，但身形健美。有时，一等一的美女没有胸；有时，一等一的美男子那里非常小（你知道我说的是哪里）。

有人觉得美人的人生会比较顺遂，但实际上情况人人不同。一个人长得美，却可能没脑子。一个人长得不美，可能却并非没脑子。所以人生的境况取决于有没有脑子和美不美，以及有多美和有多没脑子。

我总是在说“她是个美人！”或者“他是个美人！”或者“好一位美人！”，但我从来不清楚自己在讲什么。我真的不明白“美”是什么，更不要说“美”人了。这就让我的处境变得有些奇怪了，因为我以整日里赞叹“这可是位美人啊”或“那可是位美人啊”而知名。之前有一年，所有的杂志都在讲我的下一部电影将是《美人》。片子的关注度极高，但之后我却决定不了该由谁来出演。如果说有谁不是美人，那么就没有谁是美人。我不想暗示说出演《美人》这部片子的孩子是美人，而出演我其他片子的孩子不是，所以这部片子我就因为片名的缘故而没有拍。片名很成问题。

我其实不是很在意美人。我真正喜欢的是谈天的人。对我来说，擅长谈天的人是美的，因为好的谈话是我所中意的。“谈天的人”和“美人”，两者在构词法上就能显示出何以我更爱“谈天的人”，何以我录音多过拍电影。“谈天的人”可不是“有声电影”。[15]谈天的人是在做事，而美人只是在那里。也不是说“在那里”就一定不好，只是我不清楚如果就只是在那里的话，又算是什么呢。和做事的人在一起更有意思。

我在我的自画像里把粉刺全都省略了，因为是人就该这样做嘛。粉刺是临时状况，和你本人的真正样貌无关。斑斑点点、坑坑洼洼也一概略去，它们不是你想要的好的画面的一部分。

如果一个人是他那个时代的美人，我是说他的样子刚好是流行的样子，而之后时代变了，品味变了，就这样十年过去了，如果他能完好地保持他的样子，没做任何改变，保养得也精心的话，他仍将是美人。

施拉夫特连锁餐厅代表了它们那个时代的美好，然而之后它们力图跟上新时代，改了又改，直到魅力尽失，被一个大公司买去了。但如果它们当时保持住自己的样貌和风格，再挺过它们为潮流所弃的艰难岁月，今天的它们将是最棒的餐厅。你必须在自己的风格不再流行的时候坚持住，因为如果它是好的，它将会再次流行，人们也将再次认识到你的美。

有些美会令你显得渺小，让你觉得在它旁边你就如同一只蚂蚁。有一次，我在墨索里尼体育场，那儿的雕塑都比真人大得多，我感到自己就像是一只蚂蚁。今天下午我在画一个美人，一只小虫忽地飞到颜料上，粘住了。我试图把小虫从颜料上弄起来，我试了又试，直到把小虫弄死在了美人的嘴唇上。所以本可以是很美的一只小虫，就这样留在了某人的嘴唇上。我在墨索里尼体育场就是这样的感受。像一只小虫。

照片里的美人和现实中的美人不同。做模特儿肯定特别不容易，因为你会想和照片上的你一个样，然而你看起来却绝非那个样。所以你开始模仿你的照片。照片通常可以提供半个全新的维度。（电影则提供一整个全新的维度。银幕魅力是个颇为神秘的东西，如果你能看穿它的奥秘，又懂得如何制造它，你就有了一项可供销售的特别棒的产品。但除非你真的在银幕上看到某人，否则你无法知晓他是否有银幕魅力。所以试镜是必需的。）

只有非常少的美人是懂得谈天的人，但确实有一些。

美容觉。睡美人。

容貌问题。问题美人。[16]

即使是美人也可以并不动人。如果你刚好在错误的光线下碰到一位美人，还是趁早忘了吧。

我相信昏暗的灯光和魔术镜是好的。

我相信整容手术是好的。

有一阵儿，我鼻子的样子很是困扰我——它总是红红的——我决定去做个磨皮。甚至我的家人都管我叫“红鼻子”安迪·沃霍拉[17]。我去看医生，我觉得他大概是想要迎合我，所以就给我做了磨皮。从圣路加医院出来的时候，我还是我，但多了条绷带。

手术不打麻药，但他们会拿一个喷射罐给你满脸都喷上一种冰冰的东西。之后他们用砂纸在你整张脸上仔细地磨。事后疼得很。接下来两周你都没法出门，只能待在家里等着脸上结的痂脱落。我做了所有这一切，结果我的毛孔反而更大了。我真的特别失望。

我还有另一项皮肤问题：八岁的时候，我失掉了我的肤色。另一个人们曾用来称呼我的名字是“斑块儿”。我是这样失掉我的肤色的：我在街上碰到个女孩儿，她的皮肤有深浅不同的两个色调，我很着迷，就一路跟着她看。过了没两个月，我自己的肤色也变得深浅不一了。我甚至都不认识那个女孩儿，她不过是我在路上碰巧看到的。我问过一个医学生，有没有可能我光是因为看她就感染了什么。他没说话。

大概二十年前，我去过一次乔吉特·克林格尔的皮肤护理中心，乔吉特拒绝了我。那会儿她还没有开设男宾部，她就这样不公平地对待了我。

如果有人想把一辈子都花在涂面霜、修眉、搽粉上，花在这里动一下、那里动一下上，那也没什么不可以，因为这让他们有事可做。

有时，那些为精神崩溃的问题所困扰的人，可以看起来非常美，因为他们举手投足间有着某种脆弱的感觉。他们散发出一种氛围，让他们变得更美。

有人跟我说美人会失去他们的美，如果他们在床上放不开的话。我不相信这种说法。[18]

如果你对某人有兴趣，而你觉得他可能对你也有兴趣的话，你应该立刻指明你所有的容貌问题和缺陷，而不是想着他也许不会注意到。举个例子来说吧，也许你有某个无法改变的永久性的容貌问题，比如腿短，你应该说出来。“我的腿——也许你已经注意到了——相较于我的上半身，实在是不合比例地短。”为什么要给其他人发现的机会和由此带来的满足呢？一旦公开，至少你知道在你们的关系里，它永远不会是一个问题了，如果它后来确实成了问题，至少你还可以说：“我一开始就告诉你了啊。”

另一方面，如果你的容貌问题完全是暂时性的，&nbsp；比如一颗新长的青春痘，没有光泽的头发，一宿没睡的憔悴双眼，或者腰上的五磅赘肉，不管是什么问题，原则是一样的：你应该明确地讲出来。如果你自己不讲明，不说“我每月的这个时候头发都特别地干枯毛糙，大概是我大姨妈要来了”，又或者“我圣诞假期吃罗素·斯托弗巧克力胖了五磅，但我很快就能减掉”，别人就可能以为你那些暂时的容貌问题是永久性的。如果你们才刚认识，人家为什么一定会往好了想呢？要记住，他们此前从未见过你，所以让他们摆正观点和充分发挥想象力就全得靠你自己了。要让他们想象你的头发柔顺闪亮时的样子，想象你没有赘肉时的身材，想象你的连衣裙要是没有溅上油点儿的话得有多好看。甚至可以跟他们讲，你衣柜里挂着的衣服比你现在穿着的还要好——而且好得多。如果他们真的喜欢你，他们会乐于想象你没有那些暂时的容貌问题时，看起来会是什么样子。

如果你的脸色天生苍白，你应该多用腮红来弥补。但如果你有个大鼻子，那就只管突显它好了。而若是你有一颗青春痘，涂药的时候要这样涂：要让涂完了药的痘痘分外显眼——“看！我给痘痘涂了药！”不同问题要不同对待。

我一直认为人们在街上转身看向某人，大概是因为从他身上闻到了某种气味，是那气味让他们转身，让他们性兴奋的。

黛安娜·弗里兰在《时尚》杂志做过十年编辑，她是世上最美的女人之一，因为她不惧怕他人，想做什么就做什么。杜鲁门·卡波特提到关于她的另外一点——她干净整洁，这让她更美。甚至这也许是她的美的根基。

干净整洁非常重要。梳洗一新、干干净净的人是真正的美人。不管人们穿着什么，和谁在一起，首饰和衣服有多贵，又或者妆容有多完美，只要他们没有做到干净整洁，那么所有的一切也就不作数了：他们不美。这世上最普通又或是最不时尚的人仍然可以是美的，只要他们非常干净、非常整洁。

二十世纪六十年代，我认识的许多人似乎都认为胳肢窝味儿对人来说是有吸引力的。他们似乎从来不穿能丢进洗衣机洗的衣服。所有的东西都必须干洗——绸缎、带着小镜片的衣服、丝绒——但问题是从来没人拿去干洗。之后，当人们开始穿翻毛皮和皮制衣装的时候，情况变得更糟了，这些衣服真的从来都不清洗。我得承认，有一阵儿我自己也穿翻毛皮和皮制的长裤来着，你真的没法觉得自己干净整洁，而且不管怎么说，除非是为了保暖，否则穿动物的皮毛就是一种堕落——我一直不明白怎么还没有发明出和皮草一样暖和的东西来。所以过了这一堕落时期，我就又回去穿牛仔裤了。牛仔裤是你能穿的最干净的东西了，因为它们本就需要经常洗。而它们在本质上又是如此地美国。

美和一个人展示它的方式密切相关。“美”的出现，和地点相关，和人们的衣着相关，和他们站在什么旁边相关，和他们从什么样的衣帽间走下楼梯相关。

珠宝首饰并不会让一个人更美，但它会让人觉得自己更美。如果你给某位美人戴上珠宝首饰，穿上美丽的衣装，放到有着美丽的家具和美丽的油画的美丽的房子里，她们不会变得更美，她们还是原来的样子，但她们会认为自己更美了。然而，如果你给一位美人穿上破衣烂衫，她们会变丑。你总是可以让一个人变得不那么美。

处于危险中的美会变得更美，但污垢中的美则会变丑。

让一幅画成其为美的是上颜料的方式，但我不明白女人是怎么上妆的。连嘴唇都要上妆，而且化妆品又是那么厚重。口红、底妆、粉饼和眼影膏，还有珠宝，一切都是那么厚重。

孩子总是美的。小孩儿，我觉得，一直长到八岁通常都是很好看的，即使戴眼镜也好看。他们的鼻子总是很完美。我还没见过不讨人喜欢的婴儿呢。五官小小的，皮肤也很好。动物也一样，我还没见过难看的动物呢。婴儿以其美而受到保护，因为他们的美，人们不太会想要伤害他们。这一点也适用于动物。

美和性一点儿关系也没有。美和美有关，性和性有关。

如果一个人在大多数人看来都算不上美，他仍然可能取得成功，只要他在口袋里备上一些笑话，而且还要有许多的口袋。

相较于普通人，美人有时更可能让你长久地等待，因为在美和普通之间有着巨大的时差。而且美人知道大多数人是会等他们的，所以即使晚了他们也不着急，于是到得就更晚了。不过等他们到了，他们通常会感到愧疚。为了弥补迟到的过失，他们会对你特别好，变得特别甜，这甜美让他们变得更美。对美人来说，这是个常见的综合征。

我总是在想，一个女人如果很搞笑，她还可不可能仍然是美丽的。有些女性喜剧演员很有魅力，但如果非要在美和逗之间挑一个词来形容她们的话，你会说她们很逗。有时我在想，极致的美必须排除任何幽默的成分。但我紧接着就想到玛丽莲·梦露，她在一些电影里讲过最好笑的对白。如果当年她找到了适合自己的喜剧天地，可能会成为一位相当搞笑的艺人。我们今天会看着她在“玛丽莲·梦露秀”里的演出而捧腹大笑。

有人曾让我就我所见过的最美之人这个问题给出终极答案。这个嘛，我只能从电影里拣选出确切无疑的美人。因为你要是见了他们，会发现他们也算不上是真正的美人，所以你能给出的标准甚至并不真的存在。在现实生活里，电影明星甚至无法达到他们自己在电影中定下的标准。

旧时极为美丽的电影明星，有些美丽地老去了，有些则不那么美丽地老去了。有时你看到很久以前曾出演过同一部电影的两位美丽女星一同现身：一位的模样和举止已经像个老女人了，另一位还像个女孩子。但我想，这其实并不太关紧要，因为历史只会记住她们在电影里的美丽时刻，其他的则并不记录在案。

一个好的、平凡的相貌是我的最爱。哪天我要是不想看起来如此“坏”了，我会想要看起来“平凡”。那将是我的下一个选项。

我总是在想戴眼镜意味着什么。当你习惯了戴眼镜，你就不知道你实际上可以看多远了。我想了想眼镜发明之前，人们是什么样的。那会儿一定很古怪，因为每个人都依照自己视力的好坏而有其看待世界的不同方式。如今，眼镜使得所有人的视力都标准化了，都是5.0。这是人们正在变得彼此相似的一个事例。要不是因为眼镜，每个人都可以用不同的视力水平来看世界。

在一些圈子里，深沉的人有着他们自认为深沉的思想，而诸如“迷人”“伶俐”“漂亮”这类词语全都被用作贬损之语；生活中那些更轻巧的东西，也就是那些最为重要的东西，全都受到贬抑。

体重并不像杂志上讲的那样重要。我认识一个女孩儿，她照镜子时只看自己的脸而从不看肩膀以下。她的体重得有四五百磅，但她看也不看，她只看自己那张漂亮的脸，因此她也就自认为是个美人了，而因此我也认为她是个美人，因为我通常按照人们的自我形象来认识他们。而相较于一个人的客观形象，他的自我形象和他看问题的方式有着更大的关联。也许她体重六百磅，谁知道呢。如果她不在意，我也就不在意。

但是如果你想要控制体重，不妨试试“安迪·沃霍尔纽约节食法”：我在餐厅里点餐的时候，会把所有我不想吃的都点上，这样当其他人在吃的时候，我有很多菜可以玩儿。之后，不管那家餐厅有多时髦多优雅，我都会坚持让服务员像打包外卖那样把所有的菜都包起来。等我们离开餐厅，我会在街头找一个角落，把饭菜留在那里。因为在纽约，有非常多的人露宿街头，他们的全部家当都装在塑料袋里。

这样我减了重，保持了身材，而街角的某个流浪汉则会在窗台上发现一顿格勒努耶餐厅[19]的晚餐。不过他们也许和我一样，也不喜欢我点的菜——这种事真的说不好。他们可能会对那晚餐嗤之以鼻，转而在垃圾箱里寻找半块裸麦面包。对于他人，你永远猜不透。你永远无法知晓他们会喜欢什么，以及你该为他们做什么。

不管怎么说，这就是“安迪·沃霍尔纽约节食法”。

我知道有些好的厨师会花上几天来寻找新鲜的大蒜、新鲜的罗勒、新鲜的龙蒿等，然后拿罐头番茄来做酱汁，还说这没关系。但我知道这有关系。

一个民族也好，一个文明也罢，当它们变得堕落、拜金的时候，它们总是会指着自己的外在美和物质财富说，如果它们的所作所为不好，它们的境况是不会这样好、这样富有和美丽的。比如《圣经》中崇拜金牛犊的人就是这样说的，而崇拜人体的希腊人也是同一套说辞。但美与财富和你是否是个良善之人没有一丁点儿关系，只要想一下所有那些得了癌症的美人你就明白了，另外很多杀人犯长得也很好看。事情就是这么简单。

有些人，甚至一些有头脑的人，说暴力可以是美的。对此，我无法理解，因为美是一些时刻，而对我来说，那些时刻从来都不是暴力的。

一个新想法。

一副新打扮。

一桩新性事。

一条新内裤。

城里要有源源不断的新女孩儿才好，实际上也确实总是有。

龙虾的颜色之美只有当它被放入滚水之中时才会显现……天地改易万物，碳可以化为钻石，泥土可以成金……说起来，在鼻子上穿个环也是很漂亮的。

当我在海边望着沙滩，它的美总是让我缓不过神。海浪冲刷着它，把它抚平。海边的树和草看起来也总是很好。我觉得拥有一片土地而不去破坏它，是人们所能拥有的最美的艺术。

东京最美的事物是麦当劳。

斯德哥尔摩最美的事物是麦当劳。

佛罗伦萨最美的事物是麦当劳。

……

美国是真的美。但是如果每个人都能有足够的钱过活的话，它会变得更美。

美丽的监牢给美丽的人。

美感对每个人来说都是不同的。当我看到有人穿着丑得都没法儿看的衣服时，我试着想象他们买下那件衣服的时刻，他们肯定在想：“这太棒了，我喜欢，我买了。”你无法想象他们的脑子是哪里坏掉了，让他们买下紫红色涤纶格纹长裤，或是写有亮闪闪的Miami（迈阿密）字样的腈纶吊带衫。你不禁想知道在他们看来什么是不美的——腈纶吊带衫上面写着Chicago（芝加哥）？

你永远无法预料一个人的样子、谈吐或是举动中的哪个小地方会触发别人古怪的情感反应。比如说吧，有天晚上我和一位女士在一起，忽然间她激动起来，开始数落一个我们都认识的人的容貌之不堪——他瘦弱的胳膊、他那长着青春痘的脸、他不良的体态、他粗重的眉毛、他的大鼻子和他不佳的着装。这让我不知道该说些什么，因为我不懂如果她不希望别人看到她和那个人在一起的话，为什么她不介意被看到和我在一起呢？不管怎么说，我也有着瘦弱的胳膊，也长青春痘，但她似乎没有注意到我的这些问题。我认为某个小地方确实会激起别人的反应，而你无法知晓他人过往经历中的什么会让他们强烈地喜欢抑或不喜欢一个人，以至于连带他的一切也都一并喜欢或讨厌起来。

有时，某物看起来是美的，不过是因为它和周遭的事物相较，有着某种不同。窗台花箱里的一朵红色牵牛花看起来会非常美，如果其他的花都是白色的话。反过来也一样。

在瑞典，你见到一位美丽的人，接着又是一位美丽的人，接着又是一位美丽的人，最终你甚至都不会再转过身去看，因为你知道你见到的下一个人将会和你懒得转身去看的人一样美。在瑞典这样的地方，你真的会感到无聊，以至于当你看到一个不美的人，他在你眼里会非常美，因为他打破了美丽的单调。

对我来说，有三样事物总是看起来非常地美：我那双穿旧了的、不会挤脚的鞋，我自己的卧室，以及回国时的美国海关。

名声

B：那些唱片公司的人想要什么？

A：他们想要我出唱片。他们说会把我的声音弄得好像在唱一样。

A：我喜欢你在《每日新闻》上的广告。我看了十五次。

最近有家公司表示想要买下我的“光环”。他们不想要我的产品。他们反复跟我说：“我们想要你的‘光环’。”我到最后也没能明白他们想要的到底是什么。但是他们出价很高，所以我就想说既然有人愿意花这么大价钱买我的光环，那么我应该试着弄清楚它到底是什么。

我认为“光环”是只有他人才能看到的东西，而且他们看到的“光环”的多少取决于他们想要看到多少。光环全要仰仗他人的目光。你只能在不太熟识或者完全不认识的人身上看到光环。有天晚上，我和我办公室的所有人一起外出吃饭。办公室的那帮孩子视我如草芥，因为他们认识我而且每天都能看到我。但有个不知道是谁带过来的朋友从来没见过我，这孩子简直不敢相信自己在和我共进晚餐！其他所有人看到的都是我，只有他看到的是我的“光环”。

当你在街上看到某人时，他真的可以头顶光环。可是等他一开口，光环就消失了。“光环”可以持续到你开口。

最有声望的人是那些以自己的名字命名店铺的人。那些有着以自己的名字命名的大型百货公司的人是我会特别嫉妒的，比如马歇尔·菲尔德[20]。

但其实有名没那么重要。如果我没有名，也就不会有人因为我是安迪·沃霍尔而朝我开枪。不过也许我会因为在军中服役而中枪，又或者我可能会成为一名肥胖的中小学老师。又有谁能说得准呢？

不过有名有个好处，那就是当你读那些大牌杂志的时候，里面讲到的人你都认识。一页又一页，每页上的故事，谈的都是你见过的人。我极为喜欢这样的阅读体验，而说到为什么要出名，这可谓是最佳理由。

关于新闻的归属问题，我感到颇为困惑。我一直都觉得如果你的名字出现在新闻里，那么媒体就应该给你钱。因为那是你的新闻，而它们却把它拿走了，拿它当作它们自己的产品卖钱。媒体总是说它们这是在帮你宣传，这倒也是实情。但话说回来，如果所有人都不给媒体他们的新闻，如果每个人都把他们的新闻攥在自己手里，那媒体不就没有新闻可报了吗？所以我想两方都应该给对方付钱。不过这事儿我还没有完全想清楚。

我读过的关于我自己的最糟糕、最残忍的报道是《时代》杂志关于我遭受枪击一事所做的评论。

我发现几乎所有的采访在开始之前就已经定好了。他们在跟你对谈之前就已经知道他们要怎么写你、已经知道他们该怎么看你了，访谈不过是给了他们个机会，可以从这里那里找些只言片语和细节作为证据，填充到他们已然决定要写的话里去。如果你盲目地接受采访，那么你是绝对无法预料那个跟你讲话的人会写出什么样的文章来的。最为友善、笑声不断的人可以写出最为刻薄的文章，而那些你觉得讨厌你的人可以写出最为风趣、最为友善的文章。辨识记者比辨识政客还要难。

每当有人写了一篇特别刻薄的报道，我总是就那么听之任之，因为你又有什么资格说文章讲的不是事实呢？

过去人们会说我试图“戏弄”媒体，他们指的是我会把一个版本的人生故事讲给一家报纸听，然后把另一个版本的人生故事讲给另一家报纸。我那会儿确实喜欢将不同的话讲给不同的杂志，这就像是给信息加上了追踪器，可以知晓人们是从哪儿得到的消息。以这种方式，我通过人们说出的“我的言论”，总是可以判断出他们读的是哪份报纸或杂志。有时，你的一个搞笑讲法会在许多许多年之后再次出现在你面前。比如当一个采访者这样提问：“你曾说乐福雷克城[21]是世界上最美的地方……”你就知道他看过《建筑论坛》跟你做的访谈了。

有时，一篇在恰当的地方出现的恰当的报道可以让你备受瞩目好几个月，甚至好几年。有那么十二年的时间，我每天都会去住处近旁的格瑞斯超市。我会在货架间转来转去，找我需要的东西——这好比我的每日仪式，对此我十分享受。在十二年的时间里，我几乎每天都会去店里转一转。之后有一天，《纽约邮报》在首页上登了一幅莫妮克·凡·沃伦[22]、鲁道夫·努列耶夫[23]和我的彩色照片。等我再去店里的时候，所有的伙计都开始喊起来：“他来了！”要不就是：“我就跟你说是他吧！”我再也不想去那家店了。而等我的照片上了《时代》杂志，我有一周都没法儿带我的狗去公园了，因为人们对着我指指点点。

直到一年前，我在意大利都还是个无名小卒。而在德国和英格兰，我大概算得上是个人物，而这也就是我不再去这些国家的原因。但在意大利，他们甚至都还拼不对我的名字。结果《男性时尚》[24]从我们的一位超级明星那儿弄清了我名字的拼法。当时我们的这位超级明星和那本杂志的一位摄影师刚开始交往，他把我名字的正确拼法——我猜是在枕边谈话时，不过这不重要——泄露给了《男性时尚》，之后他还把我几部电影的片名和我画作的照片也都交代给了他们。一时间，我在意大利成了人们街谈巷议的热门话题。那天我在博伊萨诺——那是个非常小的市镇——河岸边的一家当地报摊前的露台上喝餐前酒，一个年轻小伙，还在上高中，走过来对我说：“嗨，安迪，霍利·伍德劳恩[25]最近还好吗？”我很是震惊。他大概知道五个英文单词，而其中的四个是肉体、垃圾、热和达里桑德罗[26]，最后一个可能不算，因为达里桑德罗是个意大利姓。

我一直都对谈话节目的主持人很感兴趣。一个我认识的人跟我说，他可以从电视访谈中看出一个主持人来自哪里、上的什么样的学校、有什么宗教信仰，他仅仅从观察他们请哪些人来上节目以及他们问来宾什么样的问题就能看出这一切。我希望我也有能力从电视上看出一个人的方方面面，能够看出他们的问题是什么。想象一下，通过观看一档谈话节目你能立即知晓诸如此类的事情：

“这个人的问题是他想成为一位美人。”

“这个人的问题是他憎恶有钱人。”

“这个人的问题是他硬不起来。”

“这个人的问题是他想要痛苦度日。”

“这个人的问题是他想要有头脑。”

也许你还能弄明白：

“为什么迪娜·肖尔[27]什么问题都没有。”

要是我能只看电视就知晓一个人眼睛的颜色，我也会很激动的，因为彩色电视在这个问题上仍然给不了你多少帮助。

有些人有电视魔法：当他们不在镜头前的时候，他们崩溃得四分五裂，但是镜头一旦对准他们，他们就变得完好无缺。他们上镜前不停地发抖、冷汗直流，他们在插播广告的时候不停地发抖、冷汗直流，他们在节目结束后不停地发抖、冷汗直流，但是当摄像机拍他们的时候，他们泰然自若，看起来成竹在胸。摄像机控制着他们的开与关。

我从不会崩溃得四分五裂，因为我从不曾完好无缺。我就那么坐在那儿，心里不停地念叨：“我要晕倒了，我要晕倒了，我知道我就要晕倒了。我是不是已经晕倒了？我就要晕倒了。”我每次上电视，都没办法考虑他们问我的任何问题，我也没办法考虑我将给出怎样的答语。我脑子里的念头就只是：“这是直播吗？是直播？哦，那可好了，我要晕倒了。我跟这儿简直就是在等着自己晕倒。”以上就是我在直播的电视节目上露面时的意识流。要是录播的节目，那就不同了。

我以前总是以为，谈话节目的主持人和其他电视名人永远都不会了解像我这般紧张究竟是一种什么感觉，但后来我意识到，也许他们中的一些人实际上也有同样的问题，只不过版本不同而已。也许他们每时每刻都在想的是：“我要搞砸了，我要搞砸了……东汉普顿的夏日别墅要没有了……公园大道上的合作公寓要没有了……桑拿要洗不成了……”不同之处在于，当他们在脑海里念叨着他们那一版本的“我要晕倒了”之时，他们仍然可以——凭借他们的电视魔法——将预先存储在某处的对白和材料滔滔不绝地讲出来。

有些人只要一“开动”就能开始表演。[28]“开动”对不同的人来说意味着不同的东西。有一次，我在电视上看到一位年轻演员上台领艾美奖。他走到台上去，立刻就开动了，他直接开始了他的表演，他说：“我想要在这里道谢，感谢我的太太——”说到这儿，他略做停顿，演了个“意味深长的时刻”。看得出，他很尽兴。我继而想到，对于一个要在人前才能“开动”的人来说，得到像艾美奖这样的奖项得是怎样的一个重大的时刻啊。对这样的人来说，当他得到上台领奖的机会，他站在台上时一定自我感觉良好，他的心里会有一个声音冒出来：“我什么都能办得到，任何事都能，任何事都能！”

所以我想每个人都有他们能够让自己开动起来的时间和地点。

我要在什么地方才能开动起来呢？

我要在关闭时才能开动——我在上床睡觉的时候方才开动起来。上床睡觉是我总在等待的重大时刻。

我认为，好演员是涵括一切的记录者，因为他们可以模拟情绪、言语、样子和氛围，与录音、录像或者小说相比，他们能够涵括的范围更广。好演员可以用某种方式记录下完整的经验、人物和情景，之后当他们需要时，再把这些记录调取出来。他们可以将一句对白以其该有的方式讲出来，并且当他们讲的时候，又能做出该有的样子，因为他们此前在别处看到过这样的场景，他们将它记录、收纳了起来。所以他们知道对白该是怎样的，以及他们该以怎样的方式把对白讲出来，又或者隐忍不讲时该是什么样子。

我只能理解特别业余的演员或者特别差的演员，因为不管他们演什么都不能真的成功，所以他们的演出骗不了你。但我永远无法理解真正好的、专业的演员。

每一位我见过的专业演员在他们演出的每部戏里，都能在完全相同的时刻做完全相同的事情。他们知道观众何时会笑，何时会看得入迷。但我喜欢的是每次不同的事物。这就是为什么我喜欢业余演员和不怎么样的演员，你总也说不准他们接下来会做什么。

过去，杰基·柯蒂斯会创作戏剧，然后在第二大道上演出。每晚他的戏都会有所改变——台词会变，甚至连剧情都会变，唯有戏的名字保持不变。如果两个人不是在同一天晚上看的他的戏，他们在谈起它时会发现，那两场演出没有什么是相同的。这些戏剧的演出是“处于演化之中的”，因为戏会一直变来变去。

我知道“专业”意味着进展迅速，而这是好的。人们会准点儿来——当然首先是他们真的会来，他们会把事情做好，他们会在调门儿上，他们会做他们该做的，不会出问题。你去看他们的演出，他们看起来是如此自然，以至于你简直无法相信他们不是在自由发挥——他们的那句搞笑对白看上去完全是在他们说出口的那一刻才想到的嘛。但你要是第二天晚上再去看他们的演出，那同一句搞笑对白会再次仿佛被他们临时想到一般说出口。

如果哪天我要选角的话，我会挑一个不合适的人来演出。我永远无法想出一个合适的人是什么样子的。由一个合适的人来演一个合适的角色太过了。更何况，现实中根本不会有谁是全然适合某一角色的，因为戏里的角色永远都不是真实的，而如果你不能找到完全合适的人，找一位完全不合适的人就是更能令人满意的安排了。因为这样你能明确地知道你真的找到了点儿什么。

不合适的人在我看起来总是很合适。而且当你有很多人可以挑选而他们都很“好”的时候，要在他们之间做出区分是很难的，最简单的反而是选那个特别差的人。而我总是做最简单的事，因为如果它是最简单的，对我来说它通常也就是最好的。

有一次，我给某个音响拍广告。照理说我本可以装装样子，说出他们给我准备的、我自己决不会以那种方式说的台词，但我就是办不到。

我在和伊丽莎白·泰勒[29]拍电影时扮演一位机场的工作人员，他们给我的台词是类似“我们走吧，我有个重要的约会”这种，但我总是说成“快点儿，姑娘们”。不过在意大利，他们给所有人做后期配音，所以不管你有什么没说，最后你都会说。

有一次，我和桑尼·利斯顿[30]给一家航空公司拍广告。“既然拥有，何不炫耀！”我很享受说这句话，但他们后来给我重新配了音，不过没有给他配。

有人说，只有在两种情况下，一位知名人士能给你留下深刻印象：要不你从小就知道他，要不你在碰到他之前的很长一段时间都知道他。这些人说，如果你从未听说过某人，而在你与之碰面后，有人过来告诉你你刚才遇到的是——比如说——德国最富有、最知名的人，你将不会太在乎与他碰过面，因为你本人没花过一丁点儿时间在想他是多么有名这件事上。我的感受却与此相反：对于那些稀奇古怪的名人，我并不怎么在意，因为我一直以来都觉得他们是最容易碰到的人。最让我印象深刻的是，当我碰到我认为自己永远不会碰到的人的时候，那些我从未想过自己会在某天能和他们说上话的人。比如凯特·史密斯[31]、莱西[32]、帕洛玛·毕加索的母亲[33]、尼克松、玛米·艾森豪威尔[34]、塔布·亨特[35]和查理·卓别林这些人。

我小时候总是一边在床上给涂色书上色，一边听广播上的《唱歌的姐姐》节目[36]。然后，一九七二年我在纽约参加一个派对，我被介绍给一位女士，他们说：“她就是以前那档电台节目中的‘唱歌的姐姐’。”我感到非常意外。我几乎无法相信我真的见到了她，我做梦都没想到自己有一天会见到她，我一直都觉得压根儿不会有机会。当你见到你做梦都没想过会遇见的人，这完全出乎你的意料，你从未有过任何幻想，所以也就不会有任何失望。

有些人用他们的一生来惦念某个特定的名人。他们选定一个有名的人，从此念念不忘。他们将几乎全部的心思都用来想着这个他们甚至见都没见过——或者也许只见过一次——的人。随便问一个名人，问问他们会收到怎样的来信，你会发现几乎每个人都至少有一个迷恋着他们的人，持续不断地给他们写信。想到有人会将他们的全部时间都用来想你，难免会产生古怪的感觉。

总有疯疯癫癫的人写信给我。这让我总是觉得自己一定是被写在了某本疯子通讯录上。

我总是担心疯疯癫癫的人的行事方式，怕他们会在几年之后将做过的事重新再做一遍而根本不记得他们之前已经做过了——他们会觉得自己是在做一件全新的事。我在一九六八年被人开枪打了，所以那是一九六八年版。但之后我不得不考虑的一个问题是：“会不会有人想要来一个朝我开枪的一九七〇年代重制版？”这是另一种类型的狂热粉丝。

在电影的早期岁月，粉丝会对一个明星的全部全都极为崇拜——他们认定了一个明星，就会爱上那位明星的一切。今天的粉丝粉的程度各个不同。如今，粉丝只对明星的部分加以崇拜。人们会崇拜一个明星在某一领域的表现，而在另一领域则完全忽视他。一个摇滚巨星可能唱片几百万张几百万张地卖，但是如果他拍了一部不怎么样的电影，消息一旦传开，票房就别指望了。

“明星”开始有了一些新类型。运动员正在将自己打造为耀眼的新星。（当我看奥运会这类比赛的时候，我总是在想：什么时候才能迎来纪录不再被打破的时候呢？如果有人能跑2秒2，是不是说之后人们能跑2秒1、2秒、1秒9，直到0秒0呢？要到哪一点上，他们就不再破纪录了呢？到那时，他们是不是就得改时间或者改纪录了呢？）

现如今，即使你是个浑蛋，你仍然可以被奉为上宾。你可以出书、上电视、接受访问——你是大名人，甚至没人会因为你是个浑蛋而看不起你。你仍然可以举足轻重。这是因为比起任何东西来，人们都更想要明星。

好的“体臭”意味着好的票房。[37]你在一英里之外就能闻到味儿。你越是就票房讲个不停，味儿就越大；味儿越大，你就越能得到高票房。

为了一大笔钱而工作可能会让你将自我形象抛到一边。我过去为杂志画鞋子插画时，是按件计酬，每画一只鞋都能得到一定量的钱，所以我会数我画了多少只鞋来计算我将得到多少钱。我靠着鞋子插画的数量维持生计，我数一下数，就知道自己有多少钱。

模特有时会非常无礼。因为他们按小时计酬，每天八小时；等他们回了家，他们仍然觉得应该有人给他们钱。电影明星毫无来由地就能挣到几百万，所以要是有人请他们做事而一分钱报酬都没有的话，他们就会发狂——他们认为即使是和杂货店里的人说上几句话，也应该给他们每小时五十美元才对。

所以你永远应该有一样产品，而且那产品不能仅仅是“你”。女演员应该计算一下她戏剧和电影的数量，模特应该计算一下她的照片，作家应该计算他写出的字数，艺术家应该计算他的画作，这样你总是能确切地知道自己的价值，而不用陷在僵局里，想着你的产品是你自己、你的名声，以及你的光环。

Love (Senility)

B: Why didn’t you show up last night? You’ve been in a funny mood lately.

A: It’s just – I can’t meet new people. I’m too tired.

B: Well, these were old people and you didn’t show up. You shouldn’t watch so much TV.

A: Oh I know.

B: Is that a female impersonator ?

A: Of what ?

A: The most exciting thing is not- doing‑it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it’s much more exciting.

Love affairs get too involved, and they’re not really worth it. But if, for some reason, you feel that they are, you should put in exactly as much time and energy as the other person. In other words, ‘I’ll pay you if you pay me.’

People have so many problems with love, always looking for someone to be their Via Veneto, their soufflé that can’t fall. There should be a course in the first grade on love. There should be courses on beauty and love and sex. With love as the biggest course. And they should show the kids, I always think, how to make love and tell and show them once and for all how nothing it is. But they won’t do that, because love and sex are business.

But then I think, maybe it works out just as well that nobody takes you out of the dark about it, because if you really knew the whole story, you wouldn’t have anything to think about or fantasize about for the rest of your life, and you might go crazy, having nothing to think about, since life is getting longer, anyway, leaving so much time after puberty to have sex in.

I don’t remember much about puberty. I probably missed most of it being sick in bed with my Charlie McCarthy doll, just like I missed Snow White. I didn’t see Snow White until I was forty-five, when I went with Roman Polanski to see it at Lincoln Center. It was probably a good thing that I waited, because I can’t imagine how it could ever be more exciting than it was then. Which gave me the idea that instead of telling kids very early about the mechanics and nothingness of sex, maybe it would be better to suddenly and very excitingly reveal the details to them when they’re forty. You could be walking down the street with a friend who’s just turned forty, spill the birds-and-the-bees beans, wait for the initial shock of learning what-goes-where to die down, and then patiently explain the rest. Then suddenly at forty their life would have new meaning. We should really stay babies for much longer than we do, now that we’re living so much longer.

It’s the long life-spans that are throwing all the old values and their applications out of whack. When people used to learn about sex at fifteen and die at thirty-

five, they obviously were going to have fewer problems than people today who learn about sex at eight or so, I guess, and live to be eighty. That’s a long time to play around with the same concept. The same boring concept.

Parents who really love their kids and want them to be bored and discontented for as small a percentage of their lifetimes as possible maybe should go back to not letting them date until as late as possible so they have something to look forward to for a longer time.

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets anyway. Let the kids read about it and look forward to it, and then right before they’re going to get the reality, break the news to them that they’ve already had the most exciting part, that it’s behind them already.

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

I love every ‘lib’ movement there is, because after the ‘lib’ the things that were always a mystique become understandable and boring, and then nobody has to feel left out if they’re not part of what is happening. For instance, single people looking for husbands and wives used to feel left out because the image marriage had in the old days was so wonderful. Jane Wyatt and Robert Young. Nick and Nora Charles. Ethel and Fred Mertz. Dagwood and Blondie.

Being married looked so wonderful that life didn’t seem livable if you weren’t lucky enough to have a husband or wife. To the singles, marriage seemed beautiful, the trappings seemed wonderful, and the sex was always implied to be automatically great – no one could ever seem to find words to describe it because ‘you had to be there’ to know how good it was. It was almost like a conspiracy on the part of the married people not to let it out how it wasn’t necessarily completely wonderful to be married and having sex; they could have taken a load off the single people’s minds if they’d just been candid.

But it was always a fairly well-kept secret that if you were married to somebody you didn’t have enough room in bed and might have to face bad breath in the morning.

There are so many songs about love. But I was thrilled the other day when somebody mailed me the lyrics to a song that was about how he didn’t care about anything, and how he didn’t care about me. It was very good. He managed to really convey the idea that he really didn’t care.

I don’t see anything wrong with being alone. It feels great to me. People make a big thing about personal love. It doesn’t have to be such a big thing. The same for living – people make a big thing about that too. But personal living and personal loving are the two things the Eastern-type wise men don’t think about.

I wonder if it’s possible to have a love affair that lasts forever. If you’re married for thirty years and you’re ‘cooking breakfast for the one you love’ and he walks in, does his heart really skip a beat? I mean if it’s just a regular morning. I guess it skips a beat over that breakfast and that’s nice, too. It’s nice to have a little breakfast made for you.

The biggest price you pay for love is that you have to have somebody around, you can’t be on your own, which is always so much better. The biggest disadvantage, of course, is no room in bed. Even a pet cuts into your bed room.

I believe in long engagements. The longer, the better.

Love and sex can go together and sex and unlove can go together and love and unsex can go together. But personal love and personal sex is bad.

You can be just as faithful to a place or a thing as you can to a person. A place can really make your heart skip a beat, especially if you have to take a plane to get there.

*

Mom always said not to worry about love, but just to be sure to get married. But I always knew that I would never get married, because I don’t want any children, I don’t want them to have the same problems that I have. I don’t think anybody deserves it.

I think a lot about the people who are supposed to not have any problems, who get married and live and die and it’s all been wonderful. I don’t know anybody like that. They always have some problem, even if it’s only that the toilet doesn’t flush.

My ideal wife would have a lot of bacon, bring it all home, and have a TV station besides.

I was always fascinated when I watched old war movies where the girls get married by proxy over the phone to husbands across the sea and they’d say, ‘I hear you, my darling!’ and I always thought how great it would be if they just stayed that way, they’d be so happy. I guess they wanted the monthly check, though.

I have a telephone mate. We’ve had an on‑going relationship over the phone for six years. I live uptown and she lives downtown. It’s a wonderful arrangement: we don’t have to get each other’s bad morning breath, yet we have wonderful breakfasts together every morning like every other happy couple. I’m uptown in the kitchen making myself peppermint tea and a dry, medium‑to‑dark English muffin with marmalade, and she’s downtown waiting for the coffee shop to deliver a light coffee and a toasted roll with honey and butter – heavy on the light, honey, butter, and seeds. We while and talk away the sunny morning hours with the telephone nestled between head and shoulders and we can walk away or even hang up whenever we want to. We don’t have to worry about kids, just about extension phones. We have an understanding. She married a staple-gun queen twelve years ago and has been more or less waiting for the annulment to come through ever since, although she tells people who ask that he died in a mudslide.

The symptom of love is when some of the chemicals inside you go bad. So there must be something in love because your chemicals do tell you something.

I tried and tried when I was younger to learn something about love, and since it wasn’t taught in school I turned to the movies for some clues about what love is and what to do about it. In those days you did learn something about some kind of love from the movies, but it was nothing you could apply with any reasonable results. I mean, the other night I was watching on TV the 1961 version of Back Street with John Gavin and Susan Hayward and I was stunned the whole time because all they kept saying was how wonderful every precious moment they had together was, and so every precious moment was a testimonial to every precious moment.

But I always thought that movies could show you so much more about how it really is between people and therefore help all the people who don’t understand to know what to do, what some of their options are.

What I was actually trying to do in my early movies was show how people can meet other people and what they can do and what they can say to each other. That was the whole idea: two people getting acquainted. And then when you saw it and you saw the sheer simplicity of it, you learned what it was all about. Those movies showed you how some people act and react with other people. They were like actual sociological ‘For instance’s. They were like documentaries, and if you thought it could apply to you, it was an example, and if it didn’t apply to you, at least it was a documentary, it could apply to somebody you knew and it could clear up some questions you had about them.

In Tub Girls, for example, the girls had to take baths with people in tubs, and they learned how to take baths with other people. While we were doing Tub Girls. They met in a tub. And the girl would have to carry her tub to the next person she’d have to take a bath with, so she’d put her tub under her arm and carry her tub . . . We used a clear plastic tub.

I never particularly wanted to make simply sex movies. If I had wanted to make a real sex movie I would have filmed a flower giving birth to another flower. And the best love story is just two love-birds in a cage.

The best love is not‑to‑think-about‑it love. Some people can have sex and really let their minds go blank and fill up with the sex; other people can never let their minds go blank and fill up with the sex, so while they’re having the sex they’re thinking, ‘Can this really be me? Am I really doing this? This is very strange. Five minutes ago I wasn’t doing this. In a little while I won’t be doing it. What would Mom say? How did people ever think of doing this?’ So the first type of person – the type that can let their minds go blank and fill up with sex and not-think-about‑it – is better off. The other type has to find something else to relax with and get lost in. For me that something else is humor.

Funny people are the only people I ever get really interested in, because as soon as somebody isn’t funny, they bore me. But if the big attraction for you is having somebody be funny, you run into a problem, because being funny is not being sexy, so in the end, near the moment of truth, you’re not really attracted, you can’t really ‘do it’.

But I’d rather laugh in bed than do it. Get under the covers and crack jokes, I guess, is the best way. ‘How am I doing?’ ‘Fine, that was very funny.’ ‘Wow, you were really funny tonight.’

If I went to a lady of the night, I’d probably pay her to tell me jokes.

Sometimes sex doesn’t wear off. I’ve seen cases of couples where the sex for each other didn’t wear off over the years.

Couples do become like each other when they’re together for a long time, because you like the person and you pick up their mannerisms and their little good habits. And you eat the same food.

Everybody has a different idea of love. One girl I know said, ‘I knew he loved me when he didn’t come in my mouth.’

Over the years I’ve been more successful at dealing with love than with jealousy. I get jealousy attacks all the time. I think I may be one of the most jealous people in the world. My right hand is jealous if my left hand is painting a pretty picture. If my left leg is dancing a good step, my right leg gets jealous. The left side of my mouth is jealous when my right side is eating something good. I’m jealous at dinner that somebody else will think of something better to order than I did. I’m jealous of somebody’s blurred Instamatics even when I have my own sharp Polaroids of the same scene. Basically, I go crazy when I can’t have first choice on absolutely everything. A lot of times I do things I don’t want to do at all, just because I’m on stand‑by jealousy that somebody else will get to do it instead. As a matter of fact, I’m always trying to buy things and people just because I’m so jealous somebody else might buy them and they might turn out to be good after all. That’s one of the stories of my life. And the few times in my life when I’ve gone on television, I’ve been so jealous of the host on the show that I haven’t been able to talk. As soon as the TV cameras turn on, all I can think is, ‘I want my own show . . . I want my own show.’

I get very nervous when I think someone is falling in love with me. Every time I have a ‘romance’ I’m so nervous I bring the whole office with me. That’s usually about five or six people. They all come to pick me up and then we go to pick her up. Love me, love my office. Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person good-night.

One of my ways of thanking the office for coming with me to chaperone is to make myself available to chaperone their dates. One or two of them like to take advantage of that service, because one or two of them are a little like me, they don’t want anything to happen. When I’m there, they tell me, nothing happens. I make nothing happen. Wherever I go. I can tell when one of them is glad to see me walk in the door, because something’s happening and they can’t wait for me to make nothing happen. Especially when they’re stranded in Italy, because you know how the Italians like to make something happen. I’m the obvious antidote.

People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don’t look.

Some people I know spend a lot of time trying to dream up new seductions. I used to think that only the people who didn’t work had time to think about those kinds of things but then I realized that most people are using somebody else’s time to dream up their new seductions. Most of the people in offices are actually getting paid while they day-dream up their new seductions.

I believe in low lights and trick mirrors. A person is entitled to the lighting they need. Plus, if you learn about sex when you’re forty, as suggested earlier, you’d better believe in low lights and trick mirrors.

Love can be bought and sold. One of the older superstars used to cry every time somebody she loved kicked her out of his loft, and I used to tell her, ‘Don’t worry. You’re going to be very famous someday and you’ll be able to buy him.’ It worked out just that way and she’s very happy now.

Brigitte Bardot was one of the first women to be really modern and treat men like love objects, buying them and discarding them. I like that.

The most fashionable girls around town now are the girls of the night. They wear the most fashionable clothes. They were always behind the times, looking old-fashioned, but now they’re the first ones on the street with the new clothes. They wised up. More intelligent girls are girls of the night now, too. More liberated. But they all still use those ugly shoulder pocketbooks.

Sex-and-nostalgia is funny to think about. I was walking on the West Side in the Forties, around the honky tonks and I was looking at the 8 × 10 glossies of girls that they put out front. One window-case display had a very 50s look but the pictures weren’t yellow with age or anything, so I couldn’t tell if those exact girls were inside right then or if that was an old picture left over and the girls inside, instead of being Mamie Van Doren types, were tired ex‑hippies. I didn’t know. The establishment might have been catering to a crowd who were nostalgic for all the girls they’d tried to pick up in the 50s.

With everything changing so fast, you don’t have a chance of finding your fantasy image intact by the time you’re ready for it. What about all the little boys who used to have fantasies about girls in beautiful lace bras and silk slips? They don’t have a chance of finding what they’d always looked forward to, unless the girl had just made a trip to the local thrift shop, and that’s worse than nothing.

Fantasy and clothes go together a lot, but the times and mores have thrown that off, too. When clothes-makers were making good clothes out of good materials, an ordinary guy who bought a suit or a shirt without giving too much thought to anything except ‘Does it fit?’ would be likely to come away with a nice-looking suit with good detailing out of a nice piece of material.

But then labor got expensive and the manufacturers began giving a little less good workmanship for the money every year, and nobody really complained, so they pushed – and they’re still pushing to the limit – how little they can give before people will say, ‘Is this a shirt?’ The moderate-priced clothes-makers really are giving people junk these days. On top of the awful way the clothes are made – long stitches, no linings, no darts, no finished seams – they’re made out of synthetics that look awful from the first to the last wearing. (The only good synthetic is nylon, I think.)

No, a person has to be very careful about what he’s buying these days or else he’ll wind up buying junk. And paying a lot for it too. So this means that if you see a well-dressed person today, you know that they’ve thought a lot about their clothes and how they look. And then that ruins it because you shouldn’t really be thinking about how you look so much. The same applies to girls but not as much – they can care a little more about themselves without being unattractively self-interested, because they’re naturally prettier. But a man caring about how he looks is usually trying very hard to be attractive, and that’s very unattractive in a man.

So today, if you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street, it’s probably not your fantasy, but someone who had the same fantasy as you and decided instead of getting it or being it, to look like it, and so he went to the store and bought the look that you both like. So forget it.

Just think about all the James Deans and what it means.

Truman Capote told me once that certain kinds of sex are total, complete manifestations of nostalgia, and I think that’s true. Other kinds of sex have nostalgia in varying degrees, from a little to a lot, but I think it’s safe to say that most sex involves some form of nostalgia for something.

Sex is a nostalgia for when you used to want it, sometimes.

Sex is nostalgia for sex.

Some people think violence is sexy, but I could never see that.

‘Love’ used to have a good number always in Mom’s dream book. When I was little Mom used to play the numbers and I remember she used to have a dream book and she’d look up her dream and the book would tell her whether it was a good dream or not, and there were numbers after it which she played. And ‘Love’ dreams always had a good number.

*

When you want to be like something, it means you really love it. When you want to be like a rock, you really love that rock. I love plastic idols.

People with pretty smiles fascinate me. You have to wonder what makes them smile so pretty.

People look the most kissable when they’re not wearing makeup. Marilyn’s lips weren’t kissable, but they were very photographable.

One of my movies, Women in Revolt, was originally entitled Sex, I can’t now remember why we changed its name. The three female leads were three female impersonators – Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn. They played women in varying degrees and various stages of ‘liberation’.

Among other things, drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women still actually want to be. Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood. They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not- too-close) inspection.

To get a private room in a hospital you used to have to be very rich but now you can get one if you’re a drag queen. If you’re a drag queen they want to isolate you from the other patients, but maybe they have enough for a ward now.

I’m fascinated by boys who spend their lives trying to be complete girls, because they have to work so hard – double- time – getting rid of all the tell-tale male signs and drawing in all the female signs. I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do, I’m not saying it’s a good idea, I’m not saying it’s not self-defeating and self-destructive, and I’m not saying it’s not possibly the single most absurd thing a man can do with his life. What I’m saying is, it is very hard work. You can’t take that away from them. It’s hard work to look like the complete opposite of what nature made you and then to be an imitation woman of what was only a fantasy woman in the first place. When they took the movie stars and stuck them in the kitchen, they weren’t stars any more – they were just like you and me. Drag queens are reminders that some stars still aren’t just like you and me.

For a while we were casting a lot of drag queens in our movies because the real girls we knew couldn’t seem to get excited about anything, and the drag queens could get excited about anything. But lately the girls seem to be getting their energy back, so we’ve been using real ones a lot again.

*

In Women in Revolt, Jackie Curtis ad‑libbed one of the best lines of disillusionment with sex when he‑as‑she, portraying a virgin schoolteacher from Bayonne, New Jersey, was forced to give oral gratification – a blow-job –to Mr America. After gagging and somehow finishing up, poor Jackie can’t figure out if she’s had sex or not – ‘This can’t be what millions of girls commit suicide over when their boy-friends leave them . . .’ Jackie was acting out the puzzled thoughts so many people have when they realize that sex is hard work just like everything else.

People’s fantasies are what give them problems. If you didn’t have fantasies you wouldn’t have problems because you’d just take whatever was there. But then you wouldn’t have romance, because romance is finding your fantasy in people who don’t have it. A friend of mine always says, ‘Women love me for the man I’m not.’

It’s very easy to make faux pas when you’re talking to a person who’s in love, because they’re more sensitive about everything. I remember once I was at a dinner party and I was talking to a couple who looked so happy together and I said, ‘You are the happiest-looking couple I’ve ever seen.’ That was okay and then I went that little bit further to score my nightly faux pas. ‘It must have been like a storybook dream love story. I just know you were childhood sweethearts.’ And at that point their faces fell and they turned away and avoided me for the rest of the evening. I found out later that they had deserted their husbands and wives and families to go after each other.

So you really have to watch what you say to people about their love lives. When people are in love all their problems are in strange proportions and it’s hard to know when you’re saying the wrong thing.

To think about the love problems of people you know is really strange, because their love problems are so different from their life problems.

A drag queen I know is waiting for a real man to fall in love with him/her.

I always run into strong women who are looking for weak men to dominate them.

I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have a fantasy. Everybody must have a fantasy.

A movie producer friend of mine hit on something when he said, ‘Frigid people can really make out.’ He’s right: they really can and they really do.

Beauty

B: Does she wear someone’s clothes or does she just get them herself ?

A: Oh no no no no. She wears her husband’s clothes – she goes to the same tailor. That’s what they fight about.

I’ve never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty.

Every person has beauty at some point in their lifetime. Usually in different degrees. Sometimes they have the looks when they’re a baby and they don’t have it when they’re grown up, but then they could get it back again when they’re older. Or they might be fat but have a beautiful face. Or have bow-legs but a beautiful body. Or be the number one female beauty and have no tits. Or be the number one male beauty and have a small you-know-what.

Some people think it’s easier for beauties, but actually it can work out a lot of different ways. If you’re beautiful you might have a pea-brain. If you’re not beautiful you might not have a pea-brain, so it depends on the pea-brain and the beauty. The size of the beauty. And the pea-brain.

I always hear myself saying, ‘She’s a beauty!’ or ‘He’s a beauty!’ or ‘What a beauty!’ but I never know what I’m talking about. I honestly don’t know what beauty is, not to speak of what ‘a’ beauty is. So that leaves me in a strange position, because I’m noted for how much I talk about ‘this one’s a beauty’ and ‘that one’s a beauty’. For a year once it was in all the magazines that my next movie was going to be The Beauties. The publicity for it was great, but then I could never decide who should be in it. If everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is, so I didn’t want to imply that the kids in The Beauties were beauties but the kids in my other movies weren’t so I had to back out on the basis of the title. It was all wrong.

I really don’t care that much about ‘Beauties’. What I really like are Talkers. To me, good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love. The word itself shows why I like Talkers better than Beauties, why I tape more than I film. It’s not ‘talkies’. Talkers are doing something. Beauties are being something. Which isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just that I don’t know what it is they’re being.

It’s more fun to be with people who are doing things.

When I did my self-portrait, I left all the pimples out because you always should. Pimples are a temporary condition and they don’t have anything to do with what you really look like. Always omit the blemishes – they’re not part of the good picture you want.

*

When a person is the beauty of their day, and their looks are really in style, and then the times change and tastes change, and ten years go by, if they keep exactly their same look and don’t change anything and if they take care of themselves, they’ll still be a beauty.

Schrafft’s restaurants were the beauties of their day, and then they tried to keep up with the times and they modified and modified until they lost all their charm and were bought by a big company. But if they could just have kept their same look and style, and held on through the lean years when they weren’t in style, today they’d be the best thing around. You have to hang on in periods when your style isn’t popular, because if it’s good, it’ll come back, and you’ll be a recognized beauty once again.

Some kind of beauty dwarfs you and makes you feel like an ant next to it. I was once in Mussolini Stadium with all the statues and they were so much bigger than life and I felt just like an ant. I was painting a beauty this afternoon and my paint caught a little bug. I tried to get the paint off the bug and I kept trying until I killed the bug on the beauty’s lip. So there was this bug, that could have been a beauty, left on somebody’s lip. That’s the way I felt in Mussolini Stadium. Like a bug.

*

Beauties in photographs are different from beauties in person. It must be hard to be a model, because you’d want to be like the photograph of you, and you can’t ever look that way. And so you start to copy the photograph. Photographs usually bring in another half-dimension. (Movies bring in another whole dimension. That screen magnetism is something secret – if you could only figure out what it is and how to make it, you’d have a really good product to sell. But you can’t even tell if someone has it until you actually see them up there on the screen. You have to give screen tests to find out.)

Very few Beauties are Talkers, but there are a few.

Beauty sleep. Sleeping beauty.

Beauty problems. Problem beauties.

Even beauties can be unattractive. If you catch a beauty in the wrong light at the right time, forget it.

I believe in low lights and trick mirrors.

I believe in plastic surgery.

At one time the way my nose looked really bothered me – it’s always red – and I decided that I wanted to have it sanded. Even the people in my family called me ‘Andy the Red-

Nosed Warhola’. I went to see the doctor and I think he thought he’d humor me, so he sanded it, and when I walked out of St Luke’s Hospital I was the same underneath, but I had a bandage on.

They don’t put you to sleep but they spray frozen stuff all over your face from a spray can. Then they take a sandpaperer and spin it around all over your face. It’s very painful afterwards. You stay in for two weeks waiting for the scab to fall off. I did all that and it actually made my pores bigger. I was really disappointed.

I had another skin problem, too – I lost all my pigment when I was eight years old. Another name people used to call me was ‘Spot’. This is how I think I lost my pigment: I saw a girl walking down the street and she was two-toned and I was so fascinated I kept following her. Within two months I was two-toned myself. And I hadn’t even known the girl – she was just somebody I saw on the street. I asked a medical student if he thought I caught it just by looking at her. He didn’t say anything.

About twenty years ago I went to Georgette Klinger’s Skin Clinic and Georgette turned me down. It was before she had a men’s department and she discriminated against me.

If people want to spend their whole lives creaming and tweezing and brushing and tilting and gluing, that’s really okay too, because it gives them something to do.

*

Sometimes people having nervous breakdown problems can look very beautiful because they have that fragile something to the way they move or walk. They put out a mood that makes them more beautiful.

People tell me that some beauties lose their looks in bed when they don’t do the bed things they’re supposed to. I don’t believe those things.

When you’re interested in somebody, and you think they might be interested in you, you should point out all your beauty problems and defects right away, rather than take a chance they won’t notice them. Maybe, say, you have a permanent beauty problem you can’t change, such as too-short legs. Just say it. ‘My legs, as you’ve probably noticed, are much too short in proportion to the rest of my body.’ Why give the other person the satisfaction of discovering it for themselves? Once it’s out in the open, at least you know it will never become an issue later on in the relationship, and if it does, you can always say, ‘Well I told you that in the beginning.’

On the other hand, say you have a purely temporary beauty problem – a new pimple, lackluster hair, no‑sleep eyes, five extra pounds around the middle. Still, whatever it is, you should point it out. If you don’t point it out and say, ‘My hair is really dull this time of the month, I’m probably getting my friend’, or ‘I put on five pounds eating Russell Stover chocolates over Christmas, but I’m taking it off right away’ – if you don’t point out these things they might think that your temporary beauty problem is a permanent beauty problem. Why should they think otherwise if you’ve just met them? Remember, they’ve never seen you before in their life. So it’s up to you to set them straight and get them to use their imagination about what your hair must look like when it’s shiny, and what your body must look like when it’s not overweight, and what your dress would look like without the grease spot on it. Even explain that you have much better clothes hanging in your closet than the ones you’re wearing. If they really do like you for yourself, they’ll be willing to use their imagination to think of what you must look like without your temporary beauty problem.

If you’re naturally pale, you should put on a lot of blush‑on to compensate. But if you’ve got a big nose, just play it up, and if you have a pimple, put on the pimple cream in a way that will make it really stand out – ‘There! I use pimple cream!’ There’s a difference.

I always think that when people turn around to look at somebody on the street it’s probably that they smell an odor from them, and that’s what makes them turn around and on.

Diana Vreeland, the editor of Vogue for ten years, is one of the most beautiful women in the world because she’s not af raid of other people, she does what she wants. Truman Capote brought up something else about her –she’s very very clean, and that makes her more beautiful. Maybe it’s even the basis of her beauty.

Being clean is so important. Well-groomed people are the real beauties. It doesn’t matter what they’re wearing or who they’re with or how much their jewelry costs or how much their clothes cost or how perfect their makeup is: if they’re not clean, they’re not beautiful. The most plain or unfashionable person in the world can still be beautiful if they’re very well-groomed.

During the 60s a lot of people I knew seemed to think that underarm smell was attractive. They never seemed to be wearing anything washable. Everything always had to be dry-

cleaned – the satins, the sewn‑on mirrors, the velvets – the problem was that it never was dry-cleaned. And then it got worse when everybody was wearing suedes and leathers, and those really never got cleaned. I admit to having worn suede and leather pants myself for a while, but you just never feel clean, and it’s degenerate, anyway, to wear animal skins unless it’s to keep yourself warm. I’ll never understand why they haven’t invented something yet that’s as warm as fur. So I went back to bluejeans after that degenerate period. Very happily. Bluejeans wind up being the cleanest thing you can wear, because it’s just their nature to be washed a lot. And they’re so American in essence.

Beauty really has to do with the way a person carries it off. When you see ‘beauty’, it has to do with the place, with what they’re wearing, what they’re standing next to, what closet they’re coming down the stairs from.

Jewelry doesn’t make a person more beautiful, but it makes a person feel more beautiful. If you draped a beautiful person in jewels and beautiful clothes and put them in a beautiful house with beautiful furniture and beautiful paintings, they wouldn’t be more beautiful, they’d be the same, but they would think they were more beautiful. However, if you took a beautiful person and put them in rags, they’d be ugly. You can always make a person less beautiful.

Beauty in danger becomes more beautiful, but beauty in dirt becomes ugly.

*

What makes a painting beautiful is the way the paint’s put on, but I don’t understand how women put on makeup. It gets on your lips, and it’s so heavy. Lipstick and makeup and powder and shadow creams. And jewelry. It’s all so heavy.

Children are always beautiful. Every kid, up to, say, eight years old always looks good. Even if the kid wears glasses it still looks good. They always have the perfect nose. I’ve never seen an unattractive baby. Small features and nice skin. This also applies to animals – I’ve never seen a bad-looking animal. Babies by being beautiful are protected because people want less to hurt them. This applies also to all animals.

Beauty doesn’t have anything to do with sex. Beauty has to do with beauty and sex has to do with sex.

If a person isn’t generally considered beautiful, they can still be a success if they have a few jokes in their pockets. And a lot of pockets.

Beautiful people are sometimes more prone to keep you waiting than plain people are, because there’s a big time differential between beautiful and plain. Also, beauties know that most people will wait for them, so they’re not panicked when they’re late, so they get even later. But by the time they arrive, they’ve usually gotten to feel guilty, so then to make up for being late they get really sweet, and being really sweet makes them more beautiful. That’s a classic syndrome.

I’m always trying to figure out whether if a woman is funny, she can still be beautiful. There are some very attractive comediennes, but if you had to choose between calling them beautiful and calling them funny, you’d call them funny. Sometimes I think that extreme beauty must be absolutely humorless. But then I think of Marilyn Monroe and she had the best funny lines. She might have been a lot of fun if she’d found the right comedy niche. We might be laughing at skits on ‘The Marilyn Monroe Show’ today.

Someone once asked me to state once and for all the most beautiful person I’d ever met. Well, the only people I can ever pick out as unequivocal beauties are from the movies, and then when you meet them, they’re not really beauties either, so your standards don’t even really exist. In life, the movie stars can’t even come up to the standards they set on film.

Some of the very beautiful film stars of the past decades have aged beautifully and some have aged not‑so beautifully, and sometimes you see two stars together today who were once beautiful together in the same movie a long time ago, and now one of them looks and acts like an old woman and the other still looks and acts like a girl. But all of that doesn’t matter very much, I think, because history will remember each person only for their beautiful moments on film – the rest is off-the-record.

A good plain look is my favorite look. If I didn’t want to look so ‘bad’, I would want to look ‘plain’. That would be my next choice.

I always think about what it means to wear eyeglasses. When you get used to glasses you don’t know how far you could really see. I think about all the people before eyeglasses were invented. It must have been weird because everyone was seeing in different ways according to how bad their eyes were. Now, eyeglasses standardize everyone’s vision to 20‑20. That’s an example of everyone becoming more alike. Everyone could be seeing at different levels if it weren’t for glasses.

In some circles where very heavy people think they have very heavy brains, words like ‘charming’ and ‘clever’ and ‘pretty’ are all put-downs; all the lighter things in life, which are the most important things, are put down.

Weight isn’t important the way the magazines make you think it is. I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she’s four or five hundred pounds but she doesn’t see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she’s a beauty. And therefore I think she’s a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do. Maybe she’s six hundred pounds, who knows. If she doesn’t care, I don’t.

But if you do watch your weight, try the Andy Warhol New York City Diet: when I order in a restaurant, I order everything that I don’t want, so I have a lot to play around with while everyone else eats. Then, no matter how chic the restaurant is, I insist that the waiter wrap the entire plate up like a to‑go order, and after we leave the restaurant I find a little corner outside in the street to leave the plate in, because there are so many people in New York who live in the streets, with everything they own in shopping bags.

So I lose weight and stay trim, and I think that maybe one of those people will find a Grenouille dinner on the window ledge. But then, you never know, maybe they wouldn’t like what I ordered as much as I didn’t like it, and maybe they’d turn up their noses and look through the garbage for some half-eaten rye bread. You just never know with people. You just never know what they’ll like, what you should do for them.

So that’s the Andy Warhol New York City Diet.

I know good cooks who’ll spend days finding fresh garlic and fresh basil and f resh tarragon, etc., and then use canned tomatoes for the sauce, saying it doesn’t matter.

But I know it does matter.

Whenever people and civilizations get degenerate and materialistic, they always point at their outward beauty and riches and say that if what they were doing was bad, they wouldn’t be doing so well, being so rich and beautiful. People in the Bible did that when they worshiped the Golden Calf, for example, and then the Greeks when they worshiped the human body. But beauty and riches couldn’t have anything to do with how good you are, because think of all the beauties who get cancer. And a lot of murderers are good-looking, so that settles it.

Some people, even intelligent people, say that violence can be beautiful. I can’t understand that, because beautiful is some moments, and for me those moments are never violent.

A new idea.

A new look.

A new sex.

A new pair of underwear.

There should be a lot of new girls in town, and there always are.

The red lobster’s beauty only comes out when it’s dropped into the boiling water . . . and nature changes things and carbon is turned into diamonds and dirt is gold . . . and wearing a ring in your nose is gorgeous.

I can never get over when you’re on the beach how beautiful the sand looks and the water washes it away and straightens it up and the trees and the grass all look great. I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s.

The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s.

*

The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s.

Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet.

America is really The Beautiful. But it would be more beautiful if everybody had enough money to live.

Beautiful jails for Beautiful People.

Everybody’s sense of beauty is different from everybody else’s. When I see people dressed in hideous clothes that look all wrong on them, I try to imagine the moment when they were buying them and thought, ‘This is great. I like it. I’ll take it.’ You can’t imagine what went off in their heads to make them buy those maroon polyester waffle-iron pants or that acrylic halter top that has ‘Miami’ written in glitter. You wonder what they rejected as not beautiful – an acrylic halter top that had ‘Chicago’?

You can never predict what little things in the way somebody looks or talks or acts will set off peculiar emotional reactions in other people. For instance, the other night I was with a lady who suddenly got very intense about a person we both knew and she started to tear apart his looks – his weak arms, his pimply face, his bad posture, his thick eyebrows, his big nose, his bad clothes, and I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t see why she would be seen with me if she wouldn’t be seen with him. After all, I have weak arms, I have pimples, but she didn’t seem to notice my problems. I think that some little thing can set off reactions in people, and you don’t know what it is in their past that’s making them like or not like somebody so much and therefore like or not like everything about them.

Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.

When you’re in Sweden and you see beautiful person after beautiful person after beautiful person and you finally don’t even turn around to look because you know the next person you see will be just as beautiful as the one you didn’t bother to turn around to look at – in a place like that you can get so bored that when you see a person who’s not beautiful, they look very beautiful to you because they break the beautiful monotony.

There are three things that always look very beautiful to me: my same good pair of old shoes that don’t hurt, my own bedroom, and U.S. Customs on the way back home.

Fame

B: What did those record people want ?

A: They want me to cut a record. They’ll make my voice sound like it’s singing.

A: I love your Daily News commercial on television. I’ve seen it fifteen times.

Some company recently was interested in buying my ‘aura’. They didn’t want my product. They kept saying, ‘We want your aura.’ I never figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it. So then I thought that if somebody was willing to pay that much for my it, I should try to figure out what it is.

I think ‘aura’ is something that only somebody else can see, and they only see as much of it as they want to. It’s all in the other person’s eyes. You can only see an aura on people you don’t know very well or don’t know at all. I was having dinner the other night with everybody from my office. The kids at the office treat me like dirt, because they know me and they see me every day. But then there was this nice friend that somebody had brought along who had never met me, and this kid could hardly believe that he was having dinner with me! Everybody else was seeing me, but he was seeing my ‘aura’.

When you just see somebody on the street, they can really have an aura. But then when they open their mouth, there goes the aura. ‘Aura’ must be until you open your mouth.

The people who have the best fame are those who have their name on stores. The people with very big stores named after them are the ones I’m really jealous of. Like Marshall Field.

But being famous isn’t all that important. If I weren’t famous, I wouldn’t have been shot for being Andy Warhol.Maybe I would have been shot for being in the Army. Or maybe I would be a fat schoolteacher. How do you ever know?

A good reason to be famous, though, is so you can read all the big magazines and know everybody in all the stories. Page after page it’s just all people you’ve met. I love that kind of reading experience and that’s the best reason to be famous.

I’m confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if your name’s in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it’s your news and they’re taking it and selling it as their product. But then they always say that they’re helping you, and that’s true too, but still, if people didn’t give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn’t have any news. So I guess you should pay each other. But I haven’t figured it out fully yet.

The worst, most cruel review of me that I ever read was the Time magazine review of me getting shot.

I’ve found that almost all interviews are preordained. They know what they want to write about you and they know what they think about you before they ever talk to you, so they’re just looking for words and details from here and there to back up what they’ve already decided they’re going to say. If you go into an interview blind, there is absolutely no way of guessing what kind of article the person you’re talking to is going to write. The nicest, laughingest people can write the meanest articles, and the people you think are hating you can write the funniest, nicest articles. It’s harder to tell with journalists than with politicians.

When somebody writes a really mean article, I always just let it go by because who are you to say it isn’t the truth?

People used to say that I tried to ‘put on’ the media when I would give one autobiography to one newspaper and another autobiography to another newspaper. I used to like to give different information to different magazines because it was like putting a tracer on where people get their information. That way I could always tell when I met people what newspapers and magazines they were reading by the things they would tell me I had said. Sometimes funny pieces of information come back to you years and years later when an interviewer says, ‘You once said that Lefrak City was the most beautiful place in the world’, and then you know that they’ve read what you once told Architectural Forum.

The right story in the right place can really put you up‑there for months or even years. I lived next to a Gristedes grocery for twelve years, and every day I would go in and drift around the aisles, picking out what I wanted – that’s a ritual I really enjoy. For twelve years I did this just about every day. Then one afternoon the New York Post ran a color picture of Monique Van Vooren and Rudolf Nureyev and me on the front page, and when I next went into the store all the stockboys started yelling ‘Here he is!’ and ‘I told you it was him!’ I didn’t want to go back there ever again. Then after my picture was in Time, I couldn’t take my dog to the park for a week because people were pointing at me.

Up until a year ago I was a real nobody in Italy. I was somebody – maybe – in Germany and England – which is why I no longer go to those countries – but in Italy they couldn’t even spell my name. Then L’Uomo Vogue found out how to spell my name from a superstar of ours who started going with one of their photographers – pillow talk I guess – but anyway, he leaked the correct spelling of my name to L’Uomo and then he leaked the titles of my movies and photos of my paintings and now I’m a fad in Italy. In fact, I was just in a very small town called Boissano, on the wrong side of the Riviera, and I was having an aperitif on the terrace of the local newsstand and a young fellow, a high school student, came up to me and said, ‘Hi, Andy, how’s Holly Woodlawn doing?’ I was shocked. He knew about five words of English and four of them were FLESH, TRASH, HEAT, and DALLESANDRO, which maybe doesn’t count because it’s Italian.

I’m always interested in talk-

show hosts. A person I

know told me he can look at people who do interviews on television and know where they’re from, what kind of schools they went to, what religion they are, just by seeing what kind of guests they have on their show and by hearing what kind of questions they ask their guests. I’d love to be able to know everything about a person from watching them on television – to be able to tell what their problem is. Can you imagine watching a talk show and knowing immediately things like –

‘This one’s problem is HE WANTS TO BE A BEAUTY.’

‘This one’s problem is HE HATES RICH PEOPLE.’

‘This one’s problem is HE CAN’T GET IT UP.’

‘That one’s problem is HE WANTS TO BE MISERABLE.’

‘This one’s problem is HE WANTS TO BE INTELLIGENT.’

And maybe you’d also be able to figure out –

‘Why Dinah Shore DOESN’T HAVE A PROBLEM.’

I would also be thrilled to be able to know what color eyes a person has just from looking at them, because color TV still can’t help you too much there.

Certain people have TV magic: they fall completely apart off-camera but they are completely together on‑camera. They shake and sweat before they go on, they shake and sweat during commercials, they shake and sweat when it’s all over; but while the camera is filming them, they’re poised and confident-looking. The camera turns them on and off.

I never fall apart because I never fall together. I just sit there saying ‘I’m going to faint. I’m going to faint. I know I’m going to faint. Have I fainted yet? I’m going to faint.’ When I’m on television I can’t think about anything they’re going to ask me, I can’t think about anything that’s going to come out of my mouth – all I can think is, ‘Is this a live show? It is? Well then forget it, I’m going to faint. I’m waiting for a faint.’ That’s my live television appearance stream‑of‑consciousness. Taped is different.

And I always thought that talk-show hosts and other television personalities could never know what it’s like to feel that nervous, but then I realized that some of them might actually have a variation of the same problem – maybe every minute they’re thinking ‘I’m going to blow it, I’m going to blow it . . . there goes the summer house in East Hampton . . . there goes the Park Avenue co‑op . . . there goes the sauna . . .’ The difference is that while they’re thinking their version of ‘I’m going to faint’, they can somehow – through their TV magic – keep pulling out the lines and stuff they have stored somewhere.

There are some people who just begin performing when they’re ‘on’. ‘On’ is different things to different people. I was watching a young actor accepting his Emmy on television and he went up there on the stage, and he turned right on, he went right into his acting to say, ‘I want to say thanks, thanks to my wife—’ and he was doing a ‘meaningful moment’ scene. He was having a ball. I started thinking what a big fantastic moment getting an award like that must be for a person who can only turn ‘on’ when he’s in front of people. If that’s what turns him on, when he gets that chance, he has to be up there feeling fine, thinking, ‘I can do anything, anything, ANYTHING!’

So I guess everybody has their own time and place when they turn themselves on.

Where do I turn on?

I turn on when I turn off and go to bed. That’s my big moment that I’m always waiting for.

‘Good performers’, I think, are all-inclusive recorders, because they can mimic emotions as well as speech and looks and atmosphere – they’re more inclusive than tape recordings or videotapes or novels. Good performers can somehow record complete experiences and people and situations and then pull out these recordings when they need them. They can repeat a line exactly the way it should sound and look exactly the way they should look when they repeat it because they’ve seen the scene before somewhere and they’ve shelved it away. So they know what the lines should be and the way the lines should come out of them. Or stay in them.

I can only understand really amateur performers or really bad performers, because whatever they do never really comes off, so therefore it can’t be phoney. But I can never understand really good, professional performers.

Every professional performer I’ve ever seen always does exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment in every show they do. They know when the audience is going to laugh and when it’s going to get really interested. What I like are things that are different every time. That’s why I like amateur performers and bad performers – you can never tell what they’ll do next.

Jackie Curtis used to write plays and stage them on Second Avenue, and the play would change every night – the lines and even the plot. Only the name of the play would stay the same. If two people saw the show on different nights and started talking about it to each other, they found out that nothing was the same in the two shows. The runs of these plays were ‘evolutionary’, as the play kept changing all the time.

I know that ‘professional’ is fast, and it’s good, and people are on time, and they show up, and they do it right, and they’re on key, and they do their numbers, and there are no problems. You watch them perform and they look so natural you just can’t believe they’re not ad‑libbing – it looks like the funny line just occurred to them at the moment they said it. But then you go to see them the next night and the same funny line is just occurring to them all over again.

If I ever have to cast an acting role, I want the wrong person for the part. I can never visualize the right person in a part. The right person for the right part would be too much. Besides, no person is ever completely right for any part, because a part is a role is never real, so if you can’t get someone who’s perfectly right, it’s more satisfying to get someone who’s perfectly wrong. Then you know you’ve really got something.

The wrong people always look so right to me. And when you’ve got a lot of people and they’re all ‘good’, it’s hard to make distinctions, the easiest thing is to pick the really bad person. And I always go after the easiest thing, because if it’s the easiest, for me it’s usually the best.

I was doing a commercial the other day for some sound equipment, and I could have pretended to say all the words they gave me that I would never say that way, but I just couldn’t do it.

When I played an airport person in a movie with Elizabeth Taylor the lines they gave me were something like ‘Let’s go. I have an important date’, but it kept coming out of my mouth, ‘Come on, girls.’ But in Italy they dub everything in afterwards, so no matter what you don’t say, you say it anyway.

I did an airline commercial once with Sonny Liston – ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it!’ I liked saying that, but then later they dubbed my voice, although they didn’t dub his.

Some people say that you’re only impressed with somebody famous if you’ve known about them since you were little or for a long time before you met them. They say that if you’ve never heard of an individual and you meet them, and then afterwards somebody comes over and tells you that you’ve just met the richest, most famous person in, say, Germany, you would not be so impressed at having met them, because you yourself had never put any of your own time into thinking about how famous they are. However, I feel just the opposite: I’m not impressed with all these funny people that everybody thinks are famous, because I always feel they’re the easiest to meet. What I’m most impressed with is when I meet somebody I thought I could never meet – that I’d never dream I’d be talking to some day. People like Kate Smith, Lassie, Paloma Picasso’s mother, Nixon, Mamie Eisenhower, Tab Hunter, Charlie Chaplin.

When I was little I used to listen to The Singing Lady on the radio all the time while I was in bed coloring. Then in 1972 I was at a party in New York and I was introduced to a woman and they said, ‘She used to be The Singing Lady on the radio.’ I was just incredulous. I could hardly believe that I was really meeting her, because I never dreamed that I would ever meet her. I’d just assumed that there was no chance at all. When you meet someone you never dreamed you’d meet, you’re taken by surprise, so you haven’t made up any fantasies and you’re not let down.

Some people spend their whole lives thinking about one particular famous person. They pick one person who’s famous, and they dwell on him or her. They devote almost their entire consciousness to thinking about this person they’ve never even met, or maybe met once. If you ask any famous person about the kind of mail they get, you’ll find that almost every one of them has at least one person who’s obsessed with them and writes constantly. It feels so strange to think that someone is spending their whole time thinking about you.

Nutty people are always writing me. I always think I must be on some nutty mailing list.

I always worry that when nutty people do something, they’ll do the same thing again a few years later without ever remembering that they’ve done it before – and they’ll think it’s a whole new thing they’re doing. I was shot in 1968, so that was the 1968 version. But then I have to think, ‘Will someone want to do a 1970s remake of shooting me?’ So that’s another kind of fan.

In the early days of film, fans used to idolize a whole star – they would take one star and love everything about that star. Today there are different fan levels. Now fans only idolize parts of the stars. Today people can idolize a star in one area and forget about him in another. A big rock star might sell millions and millions of records, but then if he makes a bad movie, and when the word gets around that it’s bad, forget it.

New categories of people are now being put up there as stars. The sports people are making themselves into great new stars. (Something I think about when I’m watching things like Olympic meets is ‘When will a person not break a record?’ If somebody runs at 2.2, does that mean that people will next be able to do it at 2.1 and 2.0 and 1.9 and so on until they can do it in 0.0? So at what point will they not break a record? Will they have to change the time or change the record?)

Nowadays if you’re a crook you’re still considered up‑there. You can write books, go on TV, give interviews – you’re a big celebrity and nobody even looks down on you because you’re crook. You’re still really up‑there. This is because more than anything people just want stars.

Good b.o. means good ‘box office’. You can smell it from a mile away. The more you spell it out, the bigger the smell, and the bigger the smell, the more b.o. you get.

Working for a lot of money can throw your self-

image off. When I used to do shoe drawings for the magazines I would get a certain amount for each shoe, so then I would count up my shoes to figure out how much I was going to get. I lived by the number of shoe drawings – when I counted them I knew how much money I had.

Models can sometimes be very rude. Because they get paid by the hour and put in their eight-hour day, when they go home they think they should still be getting paid. Movie stars get millions of dollars for nothing, so when someone asks them to do something for nothing, they go crazy – they think that if they’re going to talk to somebody at the grocery store they should get fifty dollars an hour.

So you should always have a product that’s not just ‘you’. An actress should count up her plays and movies and a model should count up her photographs and a writer should count up his words and an artist should count up his pictures so you always know exactly what you’re worth, and you don’t get stuck thinking your product is you and your fame, and your aura.

1.Martin Luther King, JR.·Letter from Birmingham Jail

2.Allen Ginsberg·Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber

3.Daphne du Maurier·The Breakthrough

4.Dorothy Parker·The Custard Heart

5.Three Japanese Short Stories

6.Anaïs Nin·The Veiled Woman

7.George Orwell·Notes on Nationalism

8.gertrude Stein·Food

9.Stanislaw Lem·The Three Electroknights

10.Patrick Kavanagh·The Great Hunger

11.Danilo Kiš·The Legend of the Sleepers

12.Ralph Ellison·The Black Ball

13.Jean Rhys·Till September Petronella

14.Franz Kafka·Investigations of a Dog

15.Clarice Lispector·Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady

16.Ryszard ·An Advertisement for Toothpaste

17.Albert Camus·Create Dangerously

18.John Steinbeck·The Vigilante

19.Fernando Pessoa·I Have More Souls Than One

20.Shirley Jackson·The Missing Girl

21.Four Russian Short Stories

22.Italo Calvino·The Distance of the Moon

23.Audre Lorde·The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

24.Leonora Carrington·The Skeleton’s Holiday

25.William S.Burroughs·The Finger

26.Samuel Beckett·The End

27.Kathy Acker·New York City in 1979

28.Chinua Achebe·Africa’s Tarnished Name

29.Susan Sontag·Notes on‘Camp’

30.John Berger·The Red Tenda of Bologna

31.Françoise Sagan·The Gigolo

32.Cyprian Ekwensi·Glittering City

33.Jack Kerouac·Piers of the Homeless Night

34.Hans Fallada·Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?

35.Truman Capote·The Duke in His Domain

36.Saul Bellow·Leaving the Yellow House

37.Katherine Anne Porter·The Cracked Looking-Glass

38.James Baldwin·Dark Days

39.Georges Simenon·Letter to My Mother

40.William Carlos Williams·Death the Barber

41.Betty Friedan·The Problem that Has No Name

42.Federico García Lorca·The Dialogue of Two Snails

43.Yuko Tsushima·Of Dogs and Walls

44.Javier Marías·Madame du Defand and the Idiots

45.Carson McCullers·The Haunted Boy

46.Jorge Luis Borges·The Garden of Forking Paths

47.Andy Warhol·Fame

48.Primo Levi·The Survivor

49.Vladimir Nabokov·Lance

50.Wendell Berry·Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer

[1]威尼托大街（Via Veneto）是罗马的一条著名购物街，也是该市地价最为昂贵的街区之一。意大利导演费德里科·费里尼（Federico Fellini）1960年的电影《甜蜜生活》（La Dolce Vita）主要表现的就是威尼托大街一带，影片使这条街在二十世纪六七十年代出名，变成了高档咖啡馆和商店的聚集之地。（本书脚注均为译者注。）

[2]指迪士尼1937年电影版的《白雪公主和七个小矮人》（Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs）。

[3]罗曼·波兰斯基（Roman Polanski，1933—），法国导演、制片人、演员。波兰斯基生于法国的一个波兰籍犹太家庭，1962年以《水中刀》（Nóz w wodzie）崭露头角，在各个时期有多部代表作。

[4]这里指罗伯特·扬（Robert Young，1907—1998）和简·怀亚特（Jane Wyatt，1910—2006）在二十世纪五十年代广受欢迎的美国情景喜剧《老爸最清楚》（Father Knows Best）中饰演的安德森夫妇。

[5]两人是美国侦探小说家达希尔·哈米特（Dashiell Hammett，1894—1961）的小说《瘦子》（The Thin Man）中的夫妻档。《瘦子》在1934年至1947年间，曾被改编为大受欢迎的系列电影，也曾被改编为广播剧、电视剧、百老汇音乐剧和舞台剧。

[6]这里指威廉·福劳利（William Frawley，1887—1966）和维维安·万斯（Vivian Vance，1909—1979）在二十世纪五十年代广受欢迎的美国情景喜剧《我爱露西》（I Love Lucy）中饰演的默茨夫妇。

[7]两人是奇克·扬（Chic Young）于1930年开始创作的漫画《金发女郎》（Blondie）中的一对夫妻。

[8]英语中说“带培根回家”（bring home the bacon），意为养家糊口。

[9]这里的电话伴侣应为安迪·沃霍尔在《波普主义》（POPism）中提及的布里吉德·伯林（Brigid Berlin）。伯林曾在1960年嫁给一位橱窗设计师。钉枪（staple-gun）是橱窗设计师日常会用到的工具。皇后（queen）这个词，可以指称男同性恋中女性化的一方。沃霍尔在《波普主义》中曾谈及布里吉德·伯林带着她的未婚夫回家时她母亲的反应：她母亲让门房通知这位未婚夫去街对面的中央公园里等着，然后她给了伯林一百美元让她去买点儿内衣，同时祝她和她的“那位小仙女（fairy）”好运。

[10]玛米·范多伦（Mamie Van Doren，1931—），美国演员，性感偶像，代表作有1957年的电影《不羁青春》（Untamed Youth）等。

[11]詹姆斯·迪恩（James Deans，1931—1955），美国演员，以其迷惘叛逆的青少年形象名垂影史，代表作有《伊甸园之东》（East of Eden，1955）、《无因的反叛》（Rebel Without a Cause，1955）等。

[12]这里塑料偶像的“塑料”，其含义近似于当代汉语中塑料姐妹花、塑料普通话里的“塑料”。

[13] drag queen，指男扮女装者。

[14]受制于当时的化妆品品质和化装技术，以及易装皇后往往并不太好的社会经济状况，他们装扮的女人通常禁不起过于切近的打量。

[15]“美人”的英文beauties和“有声电影”的英文talkies都是以ies结尾，与“谈天的人”的talkers以ers结尾不同。英文中动词加er表示“做……的人”，与此处沃霍尔想要表达的“谈天的人”是在做事情一致。

[16]这里是作者的文字游戏，这四个讲法两两一组，在英文里可由前后词序调换而来。英文原文是“Beauty sleep.Sleeping beauty.Beauty problems.Problem beauties.”。

[17]安迪·沃霍尔本名安德鲁·沃霍拉（Andrew Warhola）。在英文中，安迪是安德鲁的昵称。

[18]“美人”（beauties）一词虽然在英文中通常用来指女人，但在本章中，依照沃霍尔的用法，“美人”既可以指男人，也可以指女人，所以这里用了“他们”作为代词。

[19]格勒努耶（Grenouille）是一家位于第五大道和麦迪逊大道间的高档法式餐厅，1962年开业。在纽约，格勒努耶是绝无仅有的一家二十世纪六十年代开业而至今仍在营业的高档法式餐厅。格勒努耶在法语里是“青蛙”的意思。

[20]马歇尔·菲尔德（Marshall Field，1834—1906）于1852年在芝加哥创办了同名百货公司，后发展为大型连锁企业。他还捐赠了一块土地用于创建芝加哥大学。

[21]乐福雷克城（Lefrak City）：一个位于纽约市皇后区、由20栋公寓楼及附属设施构成的住宅项目。

[22]莫妮克·凡·沃伦（Monique Van Vooren，1927—2020），比利时裔美国演员、舞者。

[23]鲁道夫·努列耶夫（Rudolph Nureyev，1938—1993），芭蕾舞者、编舞家。

[24]《男性时尚》（L’Uomo Vogue）是《时尚》在意大利发行的面向男性读者的杂志版本。

[25]霍利·伍德劳恩（Holly Woodlawn，1946—2015）是一位跨性别者，沃霍尔的超级明星，除了前文提到的《反叛的女人》（Women in Revolt，1971），他还出演过电影《垃圾》（Trash，1970）。他同时是路·里德（Lou Reed）的大热单曲《走向狂野》（Walk on the Wild Side）中霍利的原型。

[26]指乔·达里桑德罗（Joe Dallesandro，1948—），沃霍尔的超级明星、演员。他出演了沃霍尔的《肉体》（Flesh，1968）、沃霍尔的友人保罗·莫里西（Paul Morrissey）编导的《垃圾》以及沃霍尔的《热》（Heat，1972）等影片。达里桑德罗被普遍视为美国地下电影界的性感偶像。

[27]迪娜·肖尔（Dinah Shore，1916—1994），美国歌手、演员和电视明星。

[28]这里延续上文“摄像机控制着他们的开与关”，就开关问题做进一步的探讨。

[29]伊丽莎白·泰勒（Elizabeth Taylor，1932—2011），美国演员，有多部代表作，以《巴特菲尔德八号》（Butterfeld 8，1960）和《灵欲春宵》（Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?，1966）两获奥斯卡最佳女主角奖。

[30]桑尼·利斯顿（Sonny Liston，1930—1970），美国职业拳击手，1962年重量级世界冠军。

[31]凯特·史密斯（Kate Smith，1907—1986），美国歌手、女低音，有“广播第一夫人”之名。她演唱的《天佑美国》（God Bless America）是这首歌最为知名的版本。

[32]莱西（Lassie）是英国小说家埃里克·奈特（Eric Knight）在《莱西回家》（Lassie Come-Home）中创造的苏格兰牧羊犬形象。1943年，米高梅将小说搬上大银幕，片中扮演莱西的是一只名叫帕尔（Pal）的狗。此后，帕尔还多次扮演莱西，比如从1954年开始的电视剧集《莱西》（Lassie）。在之后的19年里，帕尔的后代相继在这部电视剧中出演莱西。直到今天，帕尔的后代仍在出演莱西。沃霍尔这里提到的，应为帕尔的某一后代。

[33]指弗朗索瓦丝·吉洛（Françoise Gilot，1921—），她和画家巴勃罗·毕加索（Pablo Picasso，1881—1973）育有两个孩子，其一为帕洛玛·毕加索（Paloma Picasso，1949—）。

[34]玛米·艾森豪威尔（Mamie Eisenhower，1896—1979），美国第34任总统艾森豪威尔的夫人。

[35]塔布·亨特（Tab Hunter，1931—2018），美国电影演员，是二十世纪五六十年代的万人迷。

[36]《唱歌的姐姐》（The Singing Lady）是艾琳·威克（Ireene Wicker，1905—1987）在二十世纪三四十年代的一档电台节目，节目由家乐氏（Kellogg Company）赞助，宣传语称这档节目为全美第一档儿童电台节目。尽管节目名字是“唱歌的姐姐”，但节目的主要内容是由艾琳·威克给小孩儿讲故事。

[37]原文为“Good b.o. means good‘box office’.”。b.o.最常见的解释为body odor（不良的体味、体臭）的缩写，box office（票房）也可以缩写为b.o.。体臭当然不可能是好的，但沃霍尔通过b.o.这个缩写勾连起“体臭”和“票房”，又在营销和出汗之间进行类比，从而给出了“好的‘体臭’意味着好的票房”这一观察。

让我们遇见在。。

企鹅图书 微博(penguinbooks)

企鹅图书微信订阅号

企鹅图书数字业务微信服务号

更多关于我们对信息请

访问企鹅兰登北亚官网 PRHNA.COM

正义卫士

企鹅现代经典 第一辑

（美）约翰·斯坦贝克/著

李天奇/译

企鹅图书 | PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

New Zealand | India | South Africa | North Asia

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at:

global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

THE VIGILANTE

The stories in this volume are taken from The Long Valley. First published in 1938. This selection first

published in 2018 in Penguin Modern. Simplified Chinese translation copyright © 李天奇. Simplified

Chinese edition copyright © 2021 by Penguin Random House North Asia in association with CITIC Press

Group. All rights reserved.

© “企鹅”及其相关标识是企鹅兰登（北京）文化发展有限公司已经注册或尚未注册的商标。

未经允许，不得擅用。

企鹅兰登电子书 | Penguin Random House eBooks

目录

正义卫士

蛇

菊花

The Vigilante

The Snake

The Chrysanthemums

返回总目录

“一切都失去了活力，一切都变得那么不真实，黑暗中的身影仿佛是一个个僵硬的人体模型。”

正义卫士

澎湃的激情和喧嚣的叫嚷逐渐退去，城镇公园里落下一片沉寂。仍有一群人聚集在几棵榆树下，两条街外的路灯远远投来的蓝色灯光，映出他们模糊的身影。人群中蔓延着一股疲惫的沉默，有些人趁着夜色偷偷溜走了。公园的草坪被众人的脚步踩得零落不堪。

麦克明白，一切都结束了。他已经感觉到了高潮后的低落。他很疲倦，仿佛一连几天几夜没合过眼，但那是一种梦境般的疲倦，让人舒适的灰色疲倦。他拉低帽檐遮住眼睛，转身离开，但就在走出公园之前，他回头望了最后一眼。

在人群中央，有人将报纸拧成卷，点上火，举了起来。麦克看见火焰凑近了吊在榆树上的灰色人影，在那具裸体的脚边摇曳。他觉得有点新奇：原来黑鬼的皮肤在死后会变成蓝灰色。报纸燃烧的火光照亮了在下方抬头仰望的几张脸，男人们都沉默不语，目不转睛地看着吊在树上的人。

不知道是谁想出来要焚烧尸体，麦克有点恼火。他转向旁边同样隐没在黑暗中的男人。“真是多此一举。”他说。

男人没有回答，走开了。

报纸做的火把熄灭了，衬托得整个公园漆黑一片。但没过多久，又有一卷报纸点起火，举到了尸体脚边。麦克走向另一个旁观者。“真是多此一举。”他说，“人都死了，再烧也伤不着他。”

第二个男人哼了一声，看都没看麦克一眼。“干得好。”他说，“这能给国家省不少钱，律师也没机会耍花样。”

“我也这么觉着。”麦克表示同意，“没律师耍花样的份儿。但烧了他也没什么用啊。”

男人继续盯着火焰。“嗨，也没什么坏处嘛。”

麦克重新望向那个场景，觉得自己的感官都迟钝了。他在看，然而看得远远不够。他想记住一切细节，这样回头就能讲给别人听了，然而那股钝重的疲倦感降低了景象的清晰度。他的大脑在说这很可怕、很重要，但他的眼睛和情感都无法苟同。这不过是日常罢了。就在半小时前，他与其他人一起高声叫喊，还奋身向前，急切地找机会帮忙拽绳子。那时的情感如此充沛，令他不仅胸口满满当当，甚至还哭了出来。但现在，一切都失去了活力，一切都变得那么不真实，黑暗中的身影仿佛是一个个僵硬的人体模型。火光下，人们的脸如木雕般毫无表情。麦克自己也感觉到了同样的僵硬和虚幻。他终于转过身，走出了公园。

一离开人群，麦克就被一阵冰冷的孤独感攫获了。他快步走在街道上，暗自希望能有谁与自己同行。宽敞的街道冷冷清清，空无一人，和刚才的公园一样没有真实感。路灯的光芒照亮了两条延伸至远方的金属电车轨道，也映在两侧漆黑的商店橱窗上。

一阵轻微的疼痛在麦克胸腔里升起。他的手指也一样，肌肉阵阵酸痛。他这才想起，当人群冲撞紧闭的监狱大门时，他自己就在第一线。如果说人群是一只公羊，他就是羊头，身后至少四十人之厚的冲锋阵将他紧压在监狱大门上。那时他并没什么感觉，就算是现在，疼痛感也和孤独感一样朦胧。

在两条街开外的人行道上，霓虹灯牌闪烁着“啤酒”二字。麦克向它快步走去，希望能够见到别人，能够说上两句话，驱散这片沉默。最好是没有参与这场私刑的人。

酒吧面积不大，里面只站着酒保一人。他是个小个头的中年男人，留着气质忧郁的八字胡，表情像只上了年纪的老鼠，睿智机警，不修边幅。

麦克一进门，酒保就向他点头致意。“你这样子好像在梦游。”他说。

麦克意外地打量着他。“你说得一点儿没错，我也觉得像在梦游。”

“我可以给你倒杯烈酒喝。”

麦克犹豫片刻。“不——我有点渴了。来杯啤酒吧……你参加了吗？”

老鼠模样的脑袋点了点。“我到最后了才去，他已经被吊起来了，一切都结束了。我想肯定有人想喝点什么，所以就回来开了门，结果只有你一个。可能是我想错了。”

“说不定很快就来了。”麦克说，“好多人还在公园里呢。不过大家都冷静下来了。还有人想拿报纸烧他呢，那可真是多此一举。”

“确实多此一举。”酒保说，捻了下细细的八字胡。

麦克往啤酒里倒了几粒芹籽盐[1]，一下子灌了好几口。“不错，”他说，“我可是累坏了。”

酒保俯身越过吧台向他凑近，双眼闪闪发光。“你从一开始就在吗？监狱什么的都去了？”

麦克又喝了口酒，然后透过啤酒，盯着杯底盐粒上冒出的串串气泡。“都去了。”他说，“我是最先冲进监狱的那一拨，还帮着拽绳子来着。有时候，咱们公民就得靠自己执法。律师只会耍花样，保住恶棍，让他们啥事没有。”

老鼠似的头颅上下摇晃。“说得太对啦。”酒保说，“不管干了什么坏事，律师都能想办法让他们平安无事。我看那黑鬼绝对有罪。”

“哦，那肯定的！有人说他都认罪了。”

老鼠头又越过吧台凑了过来。“这是怎么开始的啊，先生？我去的时候一切都结束了，我只待了一分钟就回来了，想着万一有人想来喝一杯呢。”

麦克喝光杯中的啤酒，推给酒保续杯。“嗯，谁都知道，那是迟早的事。我本来在监狱对面的酒吧里喝酒呢，都喝了一下午了。有个人进了门，跟大家说：‘我们还等什么呢？’于是我们过了街，那边已经有不少人了，后来又来了好多人。我们就站在那儿开始喊，警长出来要讲话，被我们喊下去了。有个人拿二十二式步枪出来，把整条街的街灯都打碎了。嗯，然后我们就开始撞门，把监狱大门给撞开了。警长什么也做不了。他总不能为了救一个十恶不赦的黑鬼，就把这么多好人都开枪打死吧。”

“再说离选举也不远了。”酒保插话道。

“嗯，警长也开始喊，‘别弄错人，伙计们，看在老天爷的分儿上，可别弄错人了。他在第四间牢房里’。”

“那可真是有点儿可怜。”麦克语速缓慢地说，“其他囚犯都吓坏了。我们能透过铁栅看见他们，我从来没见过那种表情。”

酒保激动地给自己倒了杯威士忌，一饮而尽。“也难怪。想象一下，你已经被关了三十天，突然有一群人冲进来要动私刑。你当然会怕他们弄错人。”

“就是啊，所以我说有点儿可怜。反正，我们进了那黑鬼的牢房。他一动不动地站着，眼睛也闭着，就像喝醉了似的。有个人一拳把他打倒在地，他又爬起来了，然后另一个人又打了一拳，他摔倒时脑袋撞在水泥地上了。”麦克俯身靠到吧台上，用食指敲敲打磨光滑的木头，“我觉着那时候他就死了。当然啦，这只是我自己的看法。我帮着把他衣服都扒下来了，可他一点儿都没挣扎，我们把他吊起来的时候他也根本没反应。一动都没动。要我看，他早就死了，就在第二个人打完那一拳的时候。”

“嗨，什么时候死的都一样。”

“不，不一样。要干就要好好干才行。他完全是自作自受，不该那么早就解脱了才对。”麦克把手伸进裤兜，掏出一片扯烂的蓝色牛仔布，“这是从他裤子上撕下来的。”

酒保凑过来细看布条，然后猛然抬起头。“我出一元，你卖不卖？”

“哈，想得美！”

“好吧，我出两元，分我一半就好。”

麦克怀疑地看着他。“你要它干吗？”

“来！把杯子给我！我请你一杯。我就把它钉在墙上，底下再贴张小卡片，来喝酒的人都会想看的。”

麦克用折叠刀将布料切成两半，从酒保手中接过两枚银币。

“我认识一个写广告小卡片的人，”酒保说，“他每天都来。我可以找他给我好好写一张，把小卡片贴在底下。”接着，他露出警惕的表情：“你觉着警长会抓人吗？”

“当然不会。他找那麻烦干吗？今晚那么多人，能拉到不少选票呢。等人都走光了，警长就会过去，把那黑鬼放下来，把那地方清理干净。”

酒保看了看门口。“我还以为大家都会想喝上一杯，看来是我猜错了。时间也不早了。”

“我也该回家了。我累坏了。”

“你要是往南边走，可以等我关个门，跟你走一段。我住在南区八号街。”

“嘿，离我就两条街。我住在南区六号街。你回家的时候会经过我家门口，我怎么从来没见过你呢。”

酒保洗净麦克喝过的杯子，脱下身上的长围裙。他戴好帽子，穿上大衣，走到门边，关上红色霓虹灯招牌和酒吧里的灯。两人站在人行道上，回头望着公园的方向。整座城市寂静无声，公园那里也没有任何声音。一名警察在一条街开外走过，拿手电透过商店橱窗往里照。

“瞧见没有？”麦克说，“就跟什么都没发生过一样。”

“嗯，要是真有人想喝酒，他们肯定到别处去了。”

“我之前就这么告诉你了。”麦克说。

他们沿着空荡荡的街道往前走，向南转走出了商业街。“我叫韦尔奇。”酒保说，“我两年前刚搬过来。”

麦克的心头重新被孤独感所围绕。“这还真巧——”他说，然后止住了话头，又重新开口，“我是这里土生土长的人，现在住的房子就是我出生的房子。我结婚了，还没有孩子，我老婆也是在这儿出生的。大家都认识我们。”

他们并肩走了几条街。商铺被他们抛在身后，街边都是整洁精巧的小房子，有着繁茂的花园和修剪整齐的草坪。街边用来绿化的大树在路灯下投下片片阴影。两只狗缓慢地走在深夜的街头，互相嗅来嗅去。

韦尔奇轻声说：“不知道他是个什么样的人——我是说，那个黑鬼。”

麦克在孤独感的驱使下答了话。“报纸上都说他是个恶棍。我把每份报纸都读过了，每份都这么说。”

“嗯，我也读了。但这让人更好奇了。我认识好几个挺不错的黑鬼。”

麦克转头看着他，语气有些愤懑：“哈，我也认识些挺不错的黑鬼。我跟黑鬼并肩工作过，他们和白人里的好人一样，是挺不错的。——可是恶棍不一样。”

他激烈的语调让小个子韦尔奇沉默了一会儿。然后韦尔奇又说：“你能看得出他是个什么样的人吗？”

“不能——他就一动不动地站着，闭着嘴，紧闭着眼睛，胳膊垂在身侧。然后就有人揍了他一拳。要我说，我们把他抬出去的时候，他已经死了。”

韦尔奇走得离他近了些。“这一带的花园都挺好看的。这得花不少钱吧。”他靠得更近了，肩膀碰到了麦克的胳膊，“我从来没参加过私刑。结束以后，你什么感觉？”

麦克躲开了他。“什么感觉都没有。”他低头加快了步子，酒保几乎小跑起来才勉强跟上。这里的街灯更少了，四周更暗，更安全。麦克不禁脱口而出：“你会觉得像是跟世界断了联系，累得不行，但也有种满足感。就像圆满完成了一项任务，但是很累，又很困。”他放慢了脚步。“你瞧，那边的厨房亮着灯。那就是我家。我那婆娘还等着我呢。”他在家门口站住了脚。

韦尔奇也在他身边站住了，显得有些紧张。“想喝酒就到我店里来吧，啤酒也行，烈酒也行。我们午夜才关门。我不会亏待朋友的。”他匆匆走开了，样子像只年迈的老鼠。

麦克喊道：“晚安。”

他绕着房子走了一圈，从后门进了家。他那脾气暴躁、瘦骨嶙峋的老婆正坐在敞开的煤气炉边烤火。她转过头来看着门边的麦克，眼中满是责备。

然后她瞪大眼睛，盯着麦克的脸。“你找女人去了。”她声音嘶哑地说，“是谁？”

麦克大笑起来。“你觉得自己很聪明，是不是啊？你可真聪明，啊？你凭什么觉得我是找女人去了？”

他老婆语气激烈地说：“你以为我看不出？你那表情就是刚找过女人。”

“好吧，”麦克说，“既然你这么聪明，什么都知道，我就什么都不告诉你了。你等着看明天的早报吧。”

老婆质疑的神色里增添了几分犹豫。“是那个黑鬼？”她问道，“他们弄死那黑鬼了吗？大家都说要动手。”

“既然你这么聪明，你自己判断吧。我可什么也不会告诉你。”

麦克穿过厨房，进了浴室。浴室墙上有面小镜子。他摘下帽子，端详自己的脸。“老天爷，她说得没错。”他心想，“那感觉确实一模一样。”

蛇

天色几乎完全暗了，年轻的菲利普斯博士才将麻袋甩上肩头，离开了潮池[2]。他爬过岩石堆，湿答答的橡胶靴踏在街面上，发出吧嗒吧嗒的水声。等他回到自己位于蒙特雷市罐头厂街上的小型商业实验室时，街灯已经亮了起来。实验室是座狭小的平房，一半建在海湾码头的圆柱上，一半建在陆地上。平房两侧都是用瓦楞铁建起的沙丁鱼罐头厂，将实验室紧紧挤在中间。

菲利普斯博士爬上木头台阶，打开门。笼子里的小白鼠在铁丝网间上蹿下跳，猫在猫笼里喵喵叫着要奶喝。菲利普斯博士打开解剖台上方的灯，在耀眼的光线下将湿乎乎的麻袋扔到地上。他走到窗边那个养着响尾蛇的玻璃缸边，俯身往里张望。

几条响尾蛇盘在玻璃缸的角落里休息，每条蛇的头都看得很清楚。它们雾蒙蒙的眼睛似乎什么也没看，但当年轻人俯身靠近玻璃缸，它们分叉的舌头都探了出来，缓缓上下摆动。舌头的尖端是黑色的，后面则是粉红色的。然后几条蛇都认出了年轻人，舌头缩了回去。

菲利普斯博士脱下皮衣，在锡炉里点了火。他将盛好水的锅摆到炉子上，把一个豆子罐头放到锅里。然后他站在原地，盯着地板上的麻袋。他身材瘦削，眼神蒙眬而心不在焉，一看就是平时盯着显微镜看了太久。他留着一小把金色的胡须。

烟囱里传来呼呼的风声，炉中传出温暖的火光。轻柔的波浪在实验室下方轻轻拍打着石柱。实验室里四处都是架子，上面层层叠叠地摆着陈列用的瓶瓶罐罐，里面都是实验室售卖的海洋生物标本。

菲利普斯博士打开一扇侧门，走进了自己的卧室。卧室很小，四处散落着书籍，里面有一张行军床、一盏书灯和一把坐起来很不舒服的木椅。他脱下橡胶靴，换了双羊皮拖鞋，然后回到了原来的房间。壶里的水正好发出烧开的咕嘟声。

博士提起麻袋，放到白色灯光下的桌子上，倒出二十多只海星，将它们一只一只摆好。他心不在焉的目光转向了铁笼里的老鼠。他从纸袋里拿出一把谷粒，撒在食槽里。小白鼠迅速蹿下铁丝网，埋头吃了起来。玻璃架子上摆着一瓶牛奶，夹在章鱼标本和水母标本之间。菲利普斯博士拿起牛奶，走到猫笼前，在倒奶前先把手伸进笼子，轻轻抓起一只瘦弱的大虎斑猫。他摸了摸猫，将它放进一个涂成黑色的盒子里，关上盒盖，上了锁，然后旋转活塞，将煤气送入了毒气盒。盒内传来隐约的挣扎声，没多久就停止了。在这段时间里，他把牛奶倒入了喂猫的小碟子里。一只猫弓起身体拱他的手，他微微一笑，轻抚猫的后颈。

盒子里没了声音。他关上了活塞。密闭的盒子里现在应该满是煤气。

炉子上，豆子罐头周围满是沸腾的气泡。菲利普斯博士用一副大镊子夹出罐头，打开后将豆子倒在玻璃盘上。他一边吃豆子，一边看着桌上的海星。海星的触角之间渗出了一小滴一小滴乳白色的液体。菲利普斯博士大口吞下豆子，吃完后将盘子放进水池，随即走到仪器柜前，拿出了显微镜和一叠小型玻璃皿。他打开水龙头，给每只玻璃皿都倒上海水，将它们依次摆到海星旁边。然后他拿出手表，放到白色灯光笼罩的桌面上。地板下方，海浪轻拍石柱的声音像是一声声叹息。菲利普斯博士从抽屉里拿出滴管，专心处理起海星。

就在这时，木头台阶上传来敏捷而轻盈的脚步声，随即传来有力的敲门声。年轻的博士做了个不耐烦的苦脸，走过去开门。门外站着一个又高又瘦的女人，一身气氛肃穆的黑色西装。她的前额扁平，又长又直的黑色刘海有些凌乱，似乎是被风吹的。在强烈的灯光下，她的黑眸闪闪发亮。

她嗓音低沉地轻声说：“能让我进去吗？我有事找你。”

“我现在很忙。”菲利普斯博士兴致不高地说，“有些事必须在固定的时间做。”但他还是让开了，女人进了门。

“我会在旁边等着，你有空了再理我。”

博士关上门，从卧室里拿出那把不太舒服的椅子。“是这样的，”他有些抱歉地说，“这事一旦开始，就得按时做完。”有太多人会随意地找上门来，向他提问。他已经形成了一套惯用的说辞，来向这些普通人解释自己在干什么，说的时候甚至不用动脑子。“请坐。稍等几分钟就好。”

高个子女人俯视着解剖桌。年轻人用滴管吸起海星触角间的液体，挤到装了海水的玻璃皿里，然后又吸起一些乳白色的液体，挤入同一个玻璃皿，然后用滴管轻轻搅动里面的海水。他自言自语地解释起来。

“海星性成熟后，会在落潮时释放精子和卵子。我选出成熟的个体，并让它们离开海水，以此模拟落潮的条件。我已经把精子和卵子混合在一起。现在我要把混合液分到这十个表面皿上。十分钟后，我会在第一个表面皿中加入薄荷醇，杀死里面的精子和卵子。二十分钟后，我会以同样的方法杀死第二组，然后每隔二十分钟杀死一组。这样，我就能让精卵结合的过程停在好几个不同的地方，之后可以把它们装在显微镜载玻片上进行观察。”他顿了一下，“你想用显微镜看看第一组吗？”

“不用了，谢谢。”

他猛然转头看向女人。还从来没有人不想看显微镜。她没看桌面，而是看着博士本人。那双黑色的眼睛看着他，但不像真的看见了他。博士知道为什么了。她的虹膜与瞳孔一样黑，两者之间没有清晰的颜色分界线。她的回答让菲利普斯博士十分不悦。回答问题很无聊，然而对他的工作毫无兴趣会让他生气。他越来越想引起她的好奇了。

“在第一个十分钟里，我还有别的事要做。有些人看了会觉得很讨厌，你可以到那间屋子里等着。”

“不用。”女人用柔和又缺乏起伏的嗓音说，“你尽管做吧。我就在这儿等你闲下来。”她的双手整齐地摆在膝上，整个人都很放松。她的眼睛明亮，但除此之外，她整个人都像处于假死状态。博士心想：“看起来，她的新陈代谢速度非常慢，和青蛙一样慢。”他心里再次涌起一股冲动，想要让她从这种无动于衷的平静状态中惊醒。

他将一只小木篮摆到桌上，放好手术刀和剪刀，将一根又粗又大的针插入压力管。然后他从毒气盒里拿出死猫，摆到木篮里，把它的四肢绑到木篮侧面的挂钩上。他瞥了女人一眼。她一动没动，泰然自若。

猫在灯下咧着嘴，针尖般的牙齿间探出粉红色的舌头。菲利普斯博士动作敏捷地剪开猫喉咙处的皮肤，用手术刀划了条口子，找到一根动脉。他熟练而流畅地将粗针插入血管，用手术线将它固定好。“防腐剂。”他解释道，“待会我会往静脉系统里注入黄色液体，往动脉系统里注入红色液体——为了区分血液系统。生物课上的知识。”

他又抬头看了女人一眼，那双黑眸仿佛蒙着一层尘土。她面无表情地看着死猫剖开的喉咙。那里连一滴血都没有流出来，切口非常干净。菲利普斯博士看了一眼表。“第一组的时间到了。”他往第一个表面皿里倒了几颗晶体薄荷醇。

这个女人让他紧张。笼里的小白鼠又开始在铁丝网上爬来爬去，发出吱吱的叫声。脚下的石柱在波浪的拍打下传来阵阵颤动。

年轻人打了个寒噤。他往炉里加了几块炭，坐了下来。“好了，”他说，“接下来的二十分钟，我没事要做了。”他注意到，女人的下唇与下颌离得很近。她仿佛逐渐醒了过来，意识从某种深深的池底缓缓浮现。她抬起头，雾蒙蒙的黑眼睛环视房间，最后回到博士身上。

“我一直等着呢。”她说，双手仍然并排平放在腿上，“你这儿有蛇吗？”

“哦，有啊。”博士声音洪亮地回答，“我有二十几条响尾蛇。我会取走它们的毒液，送到抗毒血清实验室去。”

女人看着他，但眼神并没有集中在他身上，反而像是越过他，看着他周围的一切。“有公蛇吗，公的响尾蛇？”

“嗯，正好，确实有。有一天早上，我进来就看见一条大蛇正和另一条小一点的在——在交尾。这在人工饲养环境下很罕见。所以我可以肯定，我有一条公蛇。”

“它在哪儿呢？”

“喏，就在窗边的玻璃缸里。”

女人缓缓转过头，安静的双手仍然没动。她又回头看向博士。“能让我看看吗？”

博士站起身，走到窗边的玻璃缸边。响尾蛇在沙地上盘成一团，但蛇头都能看得很清楚。它们的舌头探出来闪了两下，随即上下挥动，感受着空气中的震动。菲利普斯博士紧张地回过头，女人就站在他身边。他完全没听见她站起来，听到的只有海水在石柱上的拍打声和小白鼠在铁丝网上四处奔跑的脚步声。

女人轻声说：“哪条是你说的公蛇？”

博士指向一条粗大的灰色响尾蛇，它正独自盘在玻璃缸的一角。“那条。它几乎有五英尺长，来自得克萨斯州。我们这边太平洋海岸上的蛇一般没那么大。它能把所有小白鼠都吃掉，我喂其他蛇的时候都得把它单独拿出来。”

女人低头看着干燥平滑的蛇头。分叉的舌头探了出来，在空中颤动着停留了许久。“你确定它是公的？”

“响尾蛇是种很有趣的动物。”博士语气轻松地说，“要想把规律应用在个体上，结果几乎都是错的。对于响尾蛇，我不想把话说得太死。但我可以保证，这是条公蛇。”

女人的目光一直停留在平坦的蛇头上。“能卖给我吗？”

“这条蛇？”博士提高了声音，“卖给你？”

“你平时也卖标本吧？”

“哦——是。当然。我当然卖了。”

“多少钱？五元？十元？”

“哦！用不了五元。可是——你了解响尾蛇吗？它可能会咬你。”

女人看了他片刻。“我没想把它带走。我想让它留在这里，但是——我想拥有它。我想随时过来看看它，给它喂食，知道它是属于我的。”她打开钱包，拿出一张五元美钞。“给！这下它是我的了。”

菲利普斯博士觉得有点儿害怕。“你不必买，也可以过来看它。”

“我想让它属于我。”

“哦，老天爷！”博士喊道，“我忘了时间了。”他奔到桌边：“过了三分钟。影响不大。”他往第二个表面皿里撒了几颗晶体薄荷醇，然后又回到玻璃缸旁边。女人仍然在盯着那条蛇看。

她问：“它吃什么？”

“我喂它们小白鼠，笼子里的那些。”

“你能把它单拿出来吗？我想喂它。”

“可它现在还不需要进食。它这个星期已经吃过小白鼠了。有时候它们会一连三四个月都不吃饭。我曾经养过一条，一年多都没吃过东西。”

女人用不带感情的低沉嗓音问道：“能卖给我一只小白鼠吗？”

博士耸了耸肩。“我明白了。你想看响尾蛇吃东西。好吧，我弄给你看。一只小白鼠要两角五分。从某个角度看，这就像是斗牛，但比斗牛要好一些。要是换个角度看，这不过是一条蛇在吃饭。”他的语气变得尖刻起来。他恨死了那些把自然过程当成体育活动的人。他不擅长体育，他是个生物学家。他宁可为了求知杀死上千只动物，也不愿为了娱乐杀死哪怕一只昆虫。他早就把这事想清楚了。

女人缓缓转头看他，薄唇上露出一丝笑意。“我想给我的蛇喂食。”她说，“我把它拿出来吧。”博士还没反应过来，她就打开玻璃缸的盖子，把手伸了进去。博士冲过去一把拉开她，缸盖“咣当”一声盖上了。

“你疯了吗？”博士语气激烈地问，“就算它咬不死你，你也会病得很厉害，我想救也救不了你。”

“那你把它拿出来吧。”女人淡淡地说。

菲利普斯博士不知所措。他发现自己在躲避那双什么也没看的黑眼睛。他觉得要把小白鼠放进玻璃缸是非常错误的，罪孽深重，可他不知道为什么。以前有人想看的时候，他也把小白鼠丢进去过，但今晚，这个念头让他直反胃。他试图用解释来说服自己。

“旁观整个过程是件好事，”他说，“这样你就能明白，蛇是怎么吃东西的。这会让你对响尾蛇心生敬意。有很多人会做噩梦，梦见被蛇攻击的可怕瞬间。我想那是因为，他们主观上把自我代入了老鼠，他们就是老鼠。如果你能亲眼看到整个进食过程，就会体验到客观的视角，小白鼠只是小白鼠，没有什么可怕的。”

他从墙上摘下一根长长的木棍，棍子尽头拴着皮革做的圆环。他打开玻璃缸的门，将皮环套在大蛇头上，然后拉紧皮带。屋里充斥着刺耳单调的嘶嘶声。博士把蛇拽出来，大蛇粗壮的身体在棍子周围扭来扭去。博士将它扔进了喂食箱。蛇高扬着头，有好一会儿都作势欲扑，然后嘶嘶声慢慢弱了下来。蛇爬到角落里，身体盘成数字“8”的形状，随即不动了。

“你看，”年轻人解释道，“这些蛇都挺听话的，我已经养了很久了。如果我愿意，我应该也可以直接用手抓，但用手抓响尾蛇的人迟早都会被咬。我不想冒这个险。”他瞥了女人一眼，实在不想把小白鼠放进去。女人走到了喂食箱前面，黑眼睛又盯住了大蛇石头般静止的头顶。

她说：“放老鼠进去吧。”

博士不情愿地走到鼠笼前。不知道为什么，他对小白鼠充满同情，这还是有史以来头一回。他用目光追随着铁丝网上一路向他爬来的白色皮毛。“要抓哪只呢？”他心想，“哪只才好？”他突然生气地转向女人。“放只猫进去不好吗？这样就能看到真正的战斗。猫也许还会赢呢，不过要是猫赢了，它会把蛇咬死。如果你愿意，我可以卖一只猫给你。”

女人头也不抬。“放只小白鼠进去吧。”她说，“我想让蛇吃东西。”

博士打开鼠笼，把手伸进去，感觉手指碰到了一条尾巴，随即揪出一只胖乎乎的红眼小白鼠。小白鼠挣扎着向上挺身，想咬他的手指，结果没能成功，四肢摊开地吊在空中。博士快步走过房间，打开喂食箱，将老鼠扔到沙地上。“好了，你看着吧。”他嚷道。

女人没有回答，只是盯着一动不动的蛇。蛇的舌头迅速伸出又缩回，感受着喂食箱中的空气。

老鼠四脚落地，转身闻了闻自己光秃秃的粉尾巴，然后无忧无虑地跳过沙地，边跑边嗅着地面。整个房间十分安静。菲利普斯博士不知道海水是否仍在石柱间叹息，也不知道女人是否发出了叹息。在他的余光中，女人弓起腰，绷紧了身体。

蛇动了起来，动作流畅而缓慢，舌头快速地进进出出。它的动作慢极了，同时又十分流畅，以至于看起来根本不像在动。老鼠在喂食箱另一侧坐下了，抬起前脚，舔着胸口上的白色细毛。蛇继续游动，脖颈始终保持着S形曲线。

沉默不停敲击着年轻人，他能感觉到全身的血液都在上涌。他大声地说：“你看！它已经准备好了袭击的姿势。响尾蛇非常谨慎，甚至可以说是胆小。它的袭击非常精确，捕食过程和外科手术一样，讲究毫厘不差。它绝不会拿自己的手术刀去冒险。”

蛇已经游到了喂食箱中央。老鼠抬头看了蛇一眼，毫不在意地继续舔着胸口的毛。

“这是世上最美的景象。”年轻人说，他的静脉传来阵阵鼓动，“也是世上最可怕的景象。”

蛇离猎物很近了。它的头缓缓上抬，抬到了离沙地有几英寸的位置上，然后慢慢地前后摆动，瞄准，测量距离，再瞄准。菲利普斯博士又看了女人一眼，感到一阵反胃。她也在前后晃着脑袋，虽然动作并不明显。

老鼠抬起头，看见了蛇。它放下前脚，重新四脚站立，开始向后退，然后——致命的一击。蛇的动作快得根本看不清，他们只能感到眼前一花，老鼠猛然一抖，仿佛被看不见的拳头打中了。蛇迅速退回原先休憩的角落，重新盘了起来，舌头一刻不停地探进探出。

“完美！”菲利普斯博士喊道，“咬在肩胛骨正中间。毒牙应该能一直咬到心脏里。”

老鼠一动不动地站着，呼呼喘气，像只白色小风箱。它突然跳起来，侧身倒在地上，四肢抽搐了片刻，然后死掉了。

女人放松下来，又是一副困倦的模样。

“怎么样，”年轻人问她，“是场情感上的洗礼吧？”

她蒙眬的目光转过来落在他身上。“蛇会吃掉它吗？”她问道。

“当然会吃，它又不是因为好玩才咬死小白鼠，而是因为它饿了。”

女人的嘴角又微微翘了起来。她低下头看着蛇。“我想看它吃饭。”

蛇又从角落里滑了出来。这次它没再把脖颈挑成攻击的曲线，但靠近小白鼠的动作很谨慎，准备好了在对方反击时及时撤退。它用没有棱角的鼻子轻拱老鼠，确信它已经死了，又用下巴触摸老鼠全身，从头到尾都没放过。它似乎在测量小白鼠的体积，并且给它来个全身吻。最后蛇张大了嘴，让下颌从嘴角处开始脱臼。

菲利普斯博士费了好大劲才没转头去看女人。他心想：“如果她也张开了嘴，我会吐的。我会很害怕。”他成功地没有从蛇身上移开目光。

蛇用上下颌裹住小白鼠的头，然后开始以肠蠕动般的缓慢节奏吞咽。它先是咬紧上下颌，整个喉部裹着小白鼠的身体向后蠕动，然后再次咬紧上下颌。

菲利普斯博士转过身，走到解剖台边。“你害我错过了一步。”他恨恨地说，“这下标本不完整了。”他拿起一块表面皿，放到低倍显微镜下看了看，然后生气地把所有培养皿里的液体都倒进了水池。潮水已经回落，地板下传来的声音变成了海水的低喃。年轻人打开地板上的活门，将海星都扔进了黑色的海水里。他在死猫身边站住了。猫仰面躺在木篮里，咧着嘴，冲灯光露出滑稽的笑脸。它的身体里已经注满了防腐剂。博士关掉压力阀，拔出针头，给猫的静脉打了结。

“要喝点咖啡吗？”他问女人。

“不用，谢谢。我很快就走了。”

她还站在喂蛇箱边。博士也走了过去。蛇已经基本将小白鼠吞咽完毕，只有一小截粉尾巴露在嘴边，像条嘲讽的舌头。蛇的喉咙又蠕动起来，连尾巴也消失了。蛇将上下颌回归原位，拖着沉重的身体爬回角落里，重新盘成数字“8”的形状，将头枕到沙地上。

“它睡了。”女人说，“我要走了。过一阵子，我会再来喂蛇的。我会付你小白鼠的钱。我想让它多吃点儿。——有时候，我也会把蛇带走。”她的目光一瞬间从梦境般的蒙眬中醒了过来：“别忘了，它是属于我的。别从它身上提取毒液了，我想让它自己留着。晚安。”她快步走出了门。博士听着她走下木头台阶，却听不见她走在人行道上的脚步声。

菲利普斯博士转过一把椅子，在喂食箱前坐下来。他看着纹丝不动的蛇，试图厘清思绪。“我读过许多关于性的象征符号的心理学文章，”他心想，“但那好像也解释不了。也许我与世隔绝太久了。也许我应该杀死这条蛇。如果我知道——不，我不能向任何东西祈祷。”

接下来好几个星期，他都在等着那个女人出现。“等她来了，我就出门，叫她自己待在这里。”他如此决定，“那种见鬼的景象，我可不要再看一遍。”

但女人始终没有来。一连好几个月，博士进城时都会四处张望，在街上寻找她的身影。有好几次，他追着高个子女人跑，以为那是她。但他从此再也没有见过她。

菊花

灰色法兰绒般的冬季浓雾将萨利纳斯山谷与天空隔绝开，也与整个世界隔绝开。浓雾如盖子般罩在四周的群山上，将整个山谷变成了一口密不透风的锅。在平坦开阔的大地上，多铧犁犁出深深的沟痕，犁头翻过的黑土如金属般闪闪发亮。在萨利纳斯河沿岸的山麓农场里，留茬地一片金黄，仿佛沐浴在清冷浅淡的阳光中，但十二月的山谷根本不见太阳。河岸边厚重的柳树丛挂满了尖锐明亮的黄叶。

这是属于静谧与等待的季节。空气寒冷，但并不刺骨。西南方吹来一阵轻风，昭示着不久就会来一场充沛的雨，让农民心怀期待，但浓雾和雨水绝不会同时出现。

河对面，亨利·艾伦家的山麓农场已经没剩多少活计要做了：干草已经割好并妥善储存；果园的地也犁过了，以便让雨水浇到土壤深处。山坡上的牛群毛正变得蓬松，毛的质地也变得坚硬。

艾丽莎·艾伦在花园里干着活，抬头看见丈夫亨利站在院子另一头，和两个穿西装的男人说着话。三个人站在拖拉机棚旁边，每人都抬起一条腿，把脚踏在福特逊拖拉机的机身上。他们一边说话，一边抽着烟打量小拖拉机。

艾丽莎望着他们看了一会儿，又低头继续干活。她三十五岁了，脸庞瘦长，神情坚毅，眼睛清澈如水。园艺围裙让她显得身材臃肿。她戴了顶男式黑帽，帽檐拉得很低，脚蹬一双笨重的工作靴，印花连衣裙几乎完全掩盖在硕大的灯芯绒围裙下。这条围裙有四个大口袋，装着园艺用剪刀、移植铲、松土耙、花种和小刀。为了保护双手，她还戴着一副厚实的皮手套。

她正用一把又短又锋利的剪刀剪下菊花开完后的残茎。她一边干活，一边不时望一眼拖拉机棚边的男人们。她的长相充满热情，成熟又标致。就连她挥舞剪刀的动作都显得过于热情，过于充满力量。与她的能量相比，菊花的根茎实在太小、太好剪了。

她用手背撩开眼前的发丝，手套蹭过脸颊，留下一块泥痕。她身后是整洁的白色农舍，墙根处种满了红色天竺葵，长得几乎有窗棂那么高。小房子收拾得一尘不染，窗户也擦得锃亮，门口的台阶上铺着干净的门垫。

艾丽莎又看了一眼拖拉机棚。两个陌生人钻进了他们的福特轿车。艾丽莎摘下一只手套，将强有力的手指插入了围绕菊花旧根长出的绿色新芽中。她抚平叶片，低头仔细检视紧簇的花根。没有蚜虫，也没有潮虫、蜗牛或飞蛾的幼虫。她敏捷的手指会在害虫孵化前就将它们全部杀死。

丈夫的声音让艾丽莎惊跳起来。他不知道什么时候走了过来，靠在防止牲畜、狗和鸡靠近花园的铁丝网上。

“又在干活啦。”丈夫说，“新一拨会长得很结实。”

艾丽莎直起身，重新戴上手套。“是啊。今年会长得很好。”她的语气和神情都带着一丝得意。

“你在这方面有天赋。”亨利评论道，“你今年那些黄菊花直径都有十英寸了。真希望你能来果园，把苹果也种得那么大。”

艾丽莎的目光亮了起来。“说不定可以呢。我在这些事上确实有天赋。我母亲就是这样。不管什么东西，她往地里一插就能活。她说那是因为她长了一双种植之手，她的手知道该怎么办。”

“嗯，至少在种花上确实如此。”丈夫说。

“亨利，那会儿跟你说话的那两个人是谁啊？”

“哦，对啊，我来就是要跟你说这个的。他们是西部肉类公司的人，我把那三十头三岁的肉用公牛都卖掉啦，跟我预期的价差不多。”

“那好啊，”艾丽莎说，“恭喜你。”

“我是这么想的，”亨利继续说，“现在不是周六下午吗，咱俩不如去萨利纳斯找家餐厅吃饭，然后再去看场电影，就当是庆祝。”

“那好啊。”艾丽莎重复道，“哦，那可真不错。”

亨利用了开玩笑的口气。“今晚还有拳击赛呢。你想看吗？”

“哦，不。”艾丽莎慌忙说，“不，我不喜欢看拳击。”

“开玩笑的，艾丽莎。咱们看电影去。我看看啊。现在两点了。我叫上斯科蒂，把那群公牛从山上赶回来。大概要两个小时吧。咱们五点左右进城，去科米诺斯酒店吃晚饭。行吗？”

“当然可以了。能出去吃饭多好啊。”

“那就这么定了。我去牵两匹马。”

艾丽莎说：“这样，时间也足够我把这些菊花种好了。”

她听着丈夫在谷仓旁边喊斯科蒂出来。过了一会儿，她看见两个男人骑马走上淡黄色的山丘，去寻找牛群了。

她的花园里有一块不大的方形沙地，是专门留着让菊花生根的。艾丽莎用园艺铲来回翻了好几遍土，将沙土抹平后又拍实。然后她挖了十条平行的长沟，准备种下新根。她回到菊花圃边，拔出新鲜的嫩芽，用剪刀修剪每个嫩芽的叶子，然后垒成整整齐齐的一小堆。

路上传来车轮的吱呀声和牲畜的蹄声。艾丽莎抬头望去。乡间小道沿河蜿蜒，与河水之间隔着一排茂密的柳树和棉白杨树。现在这小道上驶来一辆四轮马车，车身和拉车的动物都很奇特。马车很旧，顶上罩着大篷车似的圆形车篷，车前是一匹棕马和一头灰白色的小毛驴。一个留着络腮胡的高大男人坐在车篷入口处，拽着两只慢悠悠走路的牲口。在马车的后轮间，一只骨瘦如柴、四肢瘦长的杂种狗沉稳地走着路。车篷上用歪斜的字母印着“修理：锅碗瓢盆，菜刀剪刀，割草机”的字样，先是硕大的“修理”二字，其余内容分成两行，黑色的油漆在每个字母底下凝结成一个个小黑点。

艾丽莎蹲在地上，看着这辆破破烂烂的古怪马车经过。但它并没有走远，而是转弯驶入了她家门口的土路，凹凸不平的旧轮子吱呀作响。四肢瘦长的杂种狗从后轮间冲出来跑到了前面，两只农场牧羊犬立刻扑上去迎接。三只狗都停住脚步，尾巴高高竖起，不断抖动，四肢紧绷，带着外交使节般的尊严围着彼此绕圈，认真地互相嗅来嗅去。马车驶到艾丽莎的铁丝网前，停下了。新来的狗自觉寡不敌众，放低尾巴退回到马车下，全身毛发直竖，牙齿也露了出来。

马车上的男人喊道：“这狗要是提起了劲，打起架来可不含糊。”

艾丽莎笑出了声。“看得出来。它要多久才能提起劲来？”

男人也随她发出热情的笑声。“有时候要好几个星期。”他说着，动作僵硬地越过车轮爬下了车。马和驴无精打采地站着，仿佛没浇水的花。

艾丽莎注意到，男人身材十分高大。他的头发和胡须都已经花白，但人看起来一点儿也不老。他穿着一身皱皱巴巴的黑色旧西装，油渍溅得到处都是。他的笑声一停，笑意也随即从脸上和眼睛里消失了。他的眼睛很黑，里面是赶牲畜的人和水手眼中常见的忧郁神色。他把双手搭到篱笆上，那双手布满老茧，上面满是黑乎乎的纹路。他抬手摘下了头上皱皱巴巴的帽子。

“我走错路啦，太太。”他说，“这条土路能穿过河，带我回到洛杉矶公路上吗？”

艾丽莎站起身，把粗重的剪刀塞回围裙口袋里。“哦，可以，但这条路会沿着河绕来绕去，还有一些要蹚水过浅滩的地方。我想你的车恐怕过不了沙地。”

男人有些不客气地回答：“你恐怕猜不到这两只牲口能把车拉过什么样的地方。”

“如果它们提起劲的话？”

男人一瞬间露出了微笑。“对，如果它们提起劲的话。”

“我看，”艾丽莎说，“你还是沿着萨利纳斯路往回走再拐上公路，这样比较快。”

男人用粗大的手指拨弄了下铁丝网，发出“哐”的一声响。“我不赶时间，太太。我每年都从西雅图一路走到圣迭戈，再走回去。一路慢慢走，一趟要走六个月。哪儿的天气好，我就去哪儿。”

艾丽莎摘下手套，塞到刚才塞剪刀的口袋里。她摸摸自己男式帽的帽檐，捋了捋飘逸的发丝。“你的生活听起来挺潇洒。”她说。

男人越过铁丝网俯身过来，仿佛要告诉她一个秘密。“不知道你有没有注意到我车上写的字，我会修锅碗瓢盆，磨磨菜刀和剪刀什么的。你这儿有什么活儿要做吗？”

“哦，没有。”艾丽莎迅速回答，“没这方面的需要。”她的目光变得抗拒而严厉。

“剪刀可难搞着呢。”男人解释道，“好多人想磨剪子，结果把剪子给磨坏了。我知道该怎么磨，我有特殊工具。是个跟硬币似的东西，还有专利。好使着呢。”

“不用，我的剪刀都很锋利。”

“好吧。那锅呢？”男人继续热切地说，“比如锅底弯了呀，或者烧穿了什么的，我可以修得跟新的一样，这样您就不用再买了。能省不少钱呢。”

“不用。”艾丽莎简单地回答，“我说了，我这儿没有能给你做的活儿。”

男人的脸上露出夸张的悲伤神情，声音里也带上了哀求。“我今天一个活儿都没做上，晚上可能吃不上饭了。您瞧，我对这条路不熟。要是西雅图和圣迭戈之间那条公路，我到哪儿都有认识的人，他们也会把东西留着等我来磨，因为他们知道我手艺好，能给他们省不少钱。”

“抱歉。”艾丽莎不耐烦地说，“我这儿没活儿给你干。”

男人的目光离开她的脸，在地面上四处逡巡，最后停留在艾丽莎正在处理的菊花圃上。“那些是什么花啊，太太？”

艾丽莎脸上的不耐烦和反感烟消云散。“哦，这些是菊花，白色和黄色的大型品种。我每年都种，开出来的花比其他人的都大。”

“这种花的花茎很长吧？长得像五颜六色的烟雾喷出来那样？”男人问。

“没错。你形容得真好。”

“要是没闻惯，那气味真够难闻的。”他说。

“闻起来是有些苦，”艾丽莎反驳道，“但一点儿也不难闻。”

男人迅速变了语气：“我也挺喜欢那气味的。”

“我今年种的花有十英寸粗。”艾丽莎说。

男人把身体探得更往前了。“跟您说，我认识一位太太，她家离这儿有那么几十公里吧，她的花园简直漂亮极了。什么花都有，就是没有菊花。上次我给她修她家的铜底洗衣盆——那活儿可不好做，但我还是给她修好了。她跟我说，‘要是你看见有不错的菊花，帮我弄点儿种子来’。她是这么跟我说的。”

艾丽莎的目光又机警，又热切。“她肯定不了解菊花。从种子开始种也不是不行，但拿这边这样的花芽来种，让它们生根，要简单得多。”

“哦。”男人说，“看来是没法给她带了。”

“当然可以啊。”艾丽莎大声说，“我可以用湿沙土装一些，你带走就好。只要保持土壤湿润，它们在盆里就能生根。然后她再移栽到花园里就行。”

“她肯定想要，太太。您这花好看吗？”

“美极了。”艾丽莎说，“哦，美极了。”她的双眼闪闪发亮。她一把摘下皱皱巴巴的帽子，晃晃头，松开顺滑的黑发。“我用花盆给你装点儿，你带走就行。你到院子里来吧。”

男人从木桩门走了进来。艾丽莎兴奋地跑过天竺葵围绕的花园小径，从后门回屋，拿了只红色的大花盆。她在花圃边跪下来，完全忘了要戴手套，就那么赤手挖起沙土，放入崭新鲜艳的花盆里。然后她拿起一束拾掇好的菊花芽，用有力的手指压入土中，再用指关节将花芽周围的土压实。男人站在旁边低头看着她。“我告诉你该怎么做，”艾丽莎说，“你好好记着，回头转告那位太太。”

“好，我会记住的。”

“嗯，是这样的。这些芽大概一个月后会生根，然后她得把它们分开，每两棵之间留出大概一英尺的距离，种在养分充足的好土里，瞧见没有？”她捧起一把黑土给男人看，“这样，它们就能长得又快又高。你记住啊，到了七月份，你得提醒她把花都剪掉，大概是长到离地面八英寸的时候。”

“在开花之前？”男人问。

“对，在开花之前。”艾丽莎的脸上满是急切，“它们会重新再长，到了九月底就会结花苞了。”

她停住话头，有些不知所措。“结花苞的时候是最需要注意的，”她犹豫地说，“我不知道怎么才能讲清楚。”她注视着男人的眼睛，认真地探求着什么。她微微张开嘴，仿佛在倾听。“我努力讲吧，”她说，“你听说过种植之手吗？”

“应该没有，太太。”

“好吧，我只能告诉你那是一种什么感觉。在你掐掉那些不要的花苞的时候，一切都汇集在你的指尖。你只要看着自己的手指动起来就好，它们自己知道该怎么做。你能感觉到，它们会选择哪些花苞该留着，哪些花苞该摘掉。它们不会犯错，它们和花是一体的。明白吗？你的手指和花。你能感觉到，那感觉从手指一直蔓延到胳膊上。你的手知道，它们不会犯错。你能感觉到的。只要进入那种状态，你怎么做都错不了。明白吗？你能听懂吗？”

艾丽莎跪在地上，抬头看着男人，胸口激动地上下起伏。

男人眯起眼睛，有些不自在地移开了目光。“或许我知道，”他说，“有时候，在夜里，在马车上——”

艾丽莎打断了他，嗓音变得低哑。“我没过过你那种生活，但我明白你的意思。夜深的时候——哎，星星清晰又明亮，周围安静极了。不知道怎么回事，你会一直往上升！每颗发光的星星都会照进你的身体。就像那样。又热又亮——感觉好极了。”

她跪在地上，双手伸向他布满油渍的黑色裤腿，迟疑的指尖几乎碰到了布料。然后她的手垂了下去，整个人趴在地上，像只示好的青蛙。

男人说：“确实，就像您说的，那感觉确实不错。但要是晚上没饭吃，那感觉也没那么好。”

艾丽莎爬了起来，身体站得笔直，表情有些羞愧。她将花盆递过去，轻轻放到男人怀里。“喏。你放到车里去吧，最好摆在车座上，这样可以随时看着点儿。也许我能找点儿活儿给你干。”

她在靠近后门的杂物堆里翻了一会儿，找出两只坑洼不平的铝制平底锅，走回来递给男人。“给，你可以把它们修了。”

男人的态度变了，变得十分专业。“我能修得像新锅一样。”他在马车后部架起铁砧，从满是油渍的工具箱里拿出一把小锤子。艾丽莎走出大门，看着他将锅上的凹坑锤打平整。他胸有成竹地抿着嘴，遇到难处时咬起下嘴唇。

“你就睡在车里？”艾丽莎问道。

“就睡车里。管它天晴还是下雨，我在车里，跟牛似的不受影响。”

“多好啊。”艾丽莎说，“这种生活肯定很惬意。真希望女人也可以这样。”

“这可不是女人该过的生活。”

艾丽莎微微掀起上唇，露出一部分牙齿。“你怎么知道？哪来的根据？”她说。

“我是不知道，太太。”男人回道，“我当然没根据了。您的锅修好了，用不着买新的。”

“多少钱？”

“哦，五角钱就行。我的手艺物美价廉。所以公路上都是我的回头客。”

艾丽莎进屋拿了一枚五角硬币，丢进他手里。“说不定哪天你就多了个竞争者呢。我也会磨剪子，敲平小锅上的凹坑也没问题。让你瞧瞧女人有多能干。”

男人将锤子放回满是油渍的工具箱里，把小铁砧推到看不见的地方。“这种日子对女人来说太孤单了，太太，而且也很吓人，晚上老有动物偷偷爬到车底下。”他爬过马车前的横木，一手扶着毛驴白色的臀部稳住身体，坐好后拉起缰绳。“非常感谢您，太太。”他说，“我还是听您的话，掉头沿着萨利纳斯路往回走吧。”

“别忘了，”艾丽莎喊道，“如果走得太久，要保持沙土湿润。”

“沙土，太太？……沙土？哦，当然了。您是说菊花的土。我会的。”男人打了个响舌，马和驴动作悠闲地向前倾，套好了项圈。杂种狗站在后轮间就了位。马车掉头缓缓驶出土路，沿着河边的小道往回走了。

艾丽莎站在铁丝网前，看着马车缓慢前行。她站得笔直，微微仰着头，双眼半开半闭，以至于眼前的景象有些模糊。她无声地动着嘴唇，唇形在说“再见——再见”，然后她说出了声：“那是个明亮的方向。那里有光。”她被自己低语的声音吓了一跳，使劲摇了摇头，环顾四周，看有没有人听到了她说的话。在场的只有两条狗。它们卧在土地上，抬头看了看她，随即伸长脖子，又趴回去睡了。艾丽莎转身快步跑进了屋子。

她进了厨房，把手伸到火炉后面，摸了摸水缸。做午饭时烧的水还热着。她进了浴室，脱下脏衣服，扔到角落里。然后她拿一小块泡沫岩把全身擦了一遍，从双腿、腹部、胸口到胳膊，直到皮肤上都是摩擦的红痕。她擦干身体，站在卧室的镜子前看着自己。她绷紧小腹，挺高胸脯，又转过身回头望着自己的背部。

过了一会儿，她开始慢慢地穿衣服。她穿上最新的内衣、质量最好的一双长袜和能够代表她美貌的那条长裙。她认真地梳了头发，画了眉毛，涂红嘴唇。

她还没完全打扮好，就听见了远处的马蹄声和亨利他们将红色公牛赶入畜栏的呼喊。她听见农场的大门“咣当”一声撞上，等待着亨利进屋。

亨利的脚步声在门廊上响起。他一边进屋一边喊：“艾丽莎，你在哪儿呢？”

“在屋里，穿衣服呢。我还没准备好。有热水，你洗澡吧。动作快点儿，时间不早了。”

艾丽莎听见亨利进了浴缸，她将他的黑西装摆到床上，衬衫、袜子和领带摆到旁边，又把擦好的皮鞋放到床边的地板上。然后她走到门廊上，拘谨而僵硬地坐下了。她望着河边的小道，那里的柳树丛还挂着结了霜的黄叶，在高空中灰雾的衬托下，看起来仿佛是一层薄薄的阳光。在这个灰色的下午，只有那片树丛是彩色的。艾丽莎一动不动地坐了很久，几乎没有眨眼。

亨利“咣”的一声撞开了门，一边往外走，一边将领带往背心里塞。艾丽莎浑身一僵，整张脸都绷紧了。亨利猛然停下脚步，看着她。“怎么——怎么回事，艾丽莎。你这样子可真不错！”

“不错？你觉得我看起来不错？‘不错’是什么意思？”

亨利笨拙地说：“我不知道。我的意思是，你看起来不太一样了，又强壮，又开心。”

“我很强壮？嗯，强壮。‘强壮’是什么意思？”

亨利一脸困惑。“你在逗我玩吧，”他无助地说，“像是在演戏。你看起来很强壮，好像能一手把小牛按在腿上掐死，又开心得能当场像吃西瓜一样把它吃掉。”

艾丽莎一下子变得没那么僵硬了。“亨利！别这么说话。你不知道自己在说什么。”她又恢复成了原先的自己。“我是很强壮。”她自豪地说，“以前我都没意识到我有多强壮。”

亨利望向拖拉机棚，又望向她，目光恢复了正常。“我去把车开过来。你把大衣穿好，等着我吧。”

艾丽莎进了屋。她听见亨利将车开到大门边，空转着引擎等她。她用了很长时间穿大衣，一会儿拽平这里，一会儿又压压那里。等亨利关掉了引擎，她才穿好大衣，出了门。

小汽车在河边的土路上颠簸着开过，惊飞了鸟群，将兔子吓得躲进了树丛。两只鹤大声拍打着翅膀，飞过柳树丛，降落在河床上。

艾丽莎远远望见前方的路上有一片黑色。她什么都明白了。

汽车驶过那片黑色的时候，她尽量不去看它，但眼睛却不听使唤。她在心中悲哀地自言自语：“他完全可以把它们扔到路边。那也费不了多少事，没什么麻烦的啊。不过他把花盆留着了。”她给自己解释：“他总得把花盆留下，所以才没法把它们扔到路边去。”

汽车拐了个弯，她望见了前面的马车。她整个人都转过去面对着丈夫，这样当汽车开过去的时候，她就不用看见那辆带圆形车篷的马车，还有那对并不协调的马和驴了。

一瞬间，他们就超过去了。结束了。她没有回头。

她越过汽车的引擎声大声说：“今天的晚餐应该不错，我们吃顿好的。”

“你心情又变了。”亨利抱怨道。他从方向盘上撤下一只手，拍了拍她的腿。“我应该多带你出来吃饭，这对我们两个人都好。老在农场待着，我们都闷闷不乐的。”

“亨利，”艾丽莎问道，“晚饭的时候能喝葡萄酒吗？”

“当然可以。好主意！没问题。”

艾丽莎沉默了一会儿，又说：“亨利，在拳击比赛中，那些选手伤得重吗？”

“有时候，但只是偶尔。怎么问起这个？”

“嗯，我读过一些文章，说他们会打断鼻梁，血一直流到胸口上。还有的文章说，拳击手套里会灌满血，变得沉甸甸、湿乎乎的。”

亨利转头看着她。“怎么回事，艾丽莎？我不知道你还会读这种东西。”他停下向前跑的汽车，然后向右转，开上了萨利纳斯河大桥。

“有女人去看拳击比赛吗？”艾丽莎问。

“哦，当然，有些女人会。怎么了，艾丽莎？你想去吗？我以为你不喜欢呢，要是你真的想去，我就带你去。”

艾丽莎瘫坐在车座上，整个人松弛下来。“哦，不。不用。我不想去。真的不想。”她转头冲着亨利看不到的方向，“能喝葡萄酒就行。那样就够了。”她竖起大衣的衣领，好让亨利看不到自己正无助地哭泣，像个老太太。

The Vigilante

The great surge of emotion, the milling and shouting of the people fell gradually to silence in the town park. A crowd of people still stood under the elm trees, vaguely lighted by a blue street light two blocks away. A tired quiet settled on the people; some members of the mob began to sneak away into the darkness. The park lawn was cut to pieces by the feet of the crowd.

Mike knew it was all over. He could feel the letdown in himself. He was as heavily weary as though he had gone without sleep for several nights, but it was a dream- like weariness, a grey comfortable weariness. He pulled his cap down over his eyes and moved away, but before leaving the park he turned for one last look.

In the center of the mob someone had lighted a twisted newspaper and was holding it up. Mike could see how the flame curled about the feet of the grey naked body hanging from the elm tree. It seemed curious to him that negroes turn a bluish grey when they are dead. The burning newspaper lighted the heads of the up‑looking men, silent men and fixed; they didn’t move their eyes from the hanged man.

Mike felt a little irritation at whoever it was who was trying to burn the body. He turned to a man who stood beside him in the near- darkness. ‘That don’t do no good,’ he said.

The man moved away without replying.

The newspaper torch went out, leaving the park almost black by contrast. But immediately another twisted paper was lighted and held up against the feet. Mike moved to another watching man. ‘That don’t do no good,’ he repeated. ‘He’s dead now. They can’t hurt him none.’

The second man grunted but did not look away from the flaming paper. ‘It’s a good job,’ he said. ‘This’ll save the country a lot of money and no sneaky lawyers getting in.’

‘That’s what I say,’ Mike agreed. ‘No sneaky lawyers.But it don’t do no good to try to burn him.’

The man continued staring toward the flame.‘Well, it can’t do much harm, either.’

Mike filled his eyes with the scene. He felt that he was dull. He wasn’t seeing enough of it. Here was a thing he would want to remember later so he could tell about it, but the dull tiredness seemed to cut the sharpness off the picture. His brain told him this was a terrible and important affair, but his eyes and his feelings didn’t agree. It was just ordinary. Half an hour before, when he had been howling with the mob and fighting for a chance to help pull on the rope, then his chest had been so full that he had found he was crying. But now everything was dead, everything unreal; the dark mob was made up of stiff lay- figures. In the flamelight the faces were as expressionless as wood. Mike felt the stiffness, the unreality in himself, too. He turned away at last and walked out of the park.

The moment he left the outskirts of the mob a cold loneliness fell upon him. He walked quickly along the street wishing that some other man might be walking beside him. The wide street was deserted, empty, as unreal as the park had been. The two steel lines of the car tracks stretched glimmering away down the street under the electroliers, and the dark store windows reflected the midnight globes.

A gentle pain began to make itself felt in Mike’s chest. He felt with his fingers; the muscles were sore. Then he remembered. He was in the front line of the mob when it rushed the closed jail door. A driving line forty men deep had crushed Mike against the door like the head of a ram. He had hardly felt it then, and even now the pain seemed to have the dull quality of loneliness.

Two blocks ahead the burning neon word beer hung over the sidewalk. Mike hurried toward it. He hoped there would be people there, and talk, to remove this silence; and he hoped the men wouldn’t have been to the lynching.

The bartender was alone in his little bar, a small, middle-aged man with a melancholy moustache and an expression like an aged mouse, wise and unkempt and fearful.

He nodded quickly as Mike came in. ‘You look like you been walking in your sleep,’ he said.

Mike regarded him with wonder. ‘That’s just how I feel, too, like I been walking in my sleep.’

‘Well, I can give you a shot if you want.’

Mike hesitated. ‘ No-I’m kind of thirsty. I’ll takea beer...Was you there?’

The little man nodded his mouse- like head again. ‘Right at the last, after he was all up and it was all over. I figured a lot of the fellas would be thirsty, so I came back and opened up. Nobody but you so far. Maybe I was wrong.’

‘They might be along later,’ said Mike. ‘There’s a lot of them still in the park. They cooled off, though. Some of them trying to burn him with newspapers. That don’t do no good.’

‘Not a bit of good,’ said the little bartender. He twitched his thin moustache.

Mike knocked a few grains of celery salt into his beer and took a long drink. ‘That’s good,’ he said.‘I’m kind of dragged out.’

The bartender leaned close to him over the bar,his eyes were bright. ‘Was you there all the time-to the jail and everything?’

Mike drank again and then looked through his beer and watched the beads of bubbles rising from the grains of salt in the bottom of the glass. ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘I was one of the first in the jail, and I helped pull on the rope. There’s times when citizens got to take the law in their own hands. Sneaky lawyer comes along and gets some fiend out of it.’

The mousy head jerked up and down. ‘You Goddam’ right,’ he said. ‘Lawyers can get them out of anything. I guess the nigger was guilty all right.’

‘Oh, sure! Somebody said he even confessed.’

The head came close over the bar again. ‘How did it start, mister? I was only there after it was all over, and then I only stayed a minute and then came back to open up in case any of the fellas might want a glass of beer.’

Mike drained his glass and pushed it out to be filled. ‘Well, of course everybody knew it was going to happen. I was in a bar across from the jail. Been there all afternoon. A guy came in and says, “What are we waiting for?” So we went across the street, and a lot more guys was there and a lot more come. We all stood there and yelled. Then the sheriff come out and made a speech, but we yelled him down. A guy with a twenty- two rifle went along the street and shot out the street lights. Well, then we rushed the jail doors and bust them. The sheriff wasn’t going to do nothing. It wouldn’t do him no good to shoot a lot of honest men to save a nigger fiend.’

‘And election coming on, too,’ the bartender put in.

‘Well, the sheriff started yelling, “Get the right man, boys, for Christ’s sake get the right man. He’s in the fourth cell down.”

‘It was kind of pitiful,’ Mike said slowly. ‘The other prisoners were so scared. We could see them through the bars. I never seen such faces.’

The bartender excitedly poured himself a small glass of whiskey and poured it down. ‘Can’t blame ’em much. Suppose you was in for thirty days and a lynch mob came through. You’d be scared they’d get the wrong man.’

‘That’s what I say. It was kind of pitiful. Well, we got to the nigger’s cell. He just stood stiff with his eyes closed like he was dead drunk. One of the guys slugged him down and he got up, and then somebody else socked him and he went over and hit his head on the cement floor.’ Mike leaned over the bar and tapped the polished wood with his forefinger. ‘ ’Course this is only my idea, but I think that killed him. Because I helped get his clothes off, and he never made a wiggle, and when we strung him up he didn’t jerk around none. No, sir. I think he was dead all the time, after that second guy smacked him.’

‘Well, it’s all the same in the end.’

‘No, it ain’t. You like to do the thing right. He had it coming to him, and he should have got it.’ Mike reached into his trousers pocket and brought out a piece of torn blue denim. ‘That’s a piece of the pants he had on.’

The bartender bent close and inspected the cloth. He jerked his head up at Mike. ‘I’ll give you a buck for it.’

‘Oh no, you won’t!’

‘All right. I’ll give you two bucks for half of it.’

Mike looked suspiciously at him. ‘What you want it for?’

‘Here! Give me your glass! Have a beer on me. I’ll pin it up on the wall with a little card under it. The fellas that come in will like to look at it.’

Mike haggled the piece of cloth in two with his pocket knife and accepted two silver dollars from the bartender.

‘I know a show card writer,’ the little man said. ‘Comes in every day. He’ll print me up a nice little card to go under it.’ He looked wary. ‘Think the sheriff will arrest anybody?’

‘ ’Course not. What’s he want to start any trouble for? There was a lot of votes in that crowd tonight.Soon as they all go away, the sheriff will come and cut the nigger down and clean up some.’

The bartender looked toward the door. ‘I guess I was wrong about the fellas wanting a drink. It’s getting late.’

‘I guess I’ll get along home. I feel tired.’

‘If you go south, I’ll close up and walk a ways with you. I live on south Eighth.’

‘Why, that’s only two blocks from my house. I live on south Sixth. You must go right past my house. Funny I never saw you around.’

The bartender washed Mike’s glass and took off the long apron. He put on his hat and coat, walked to the door and switched off the red neon sign and the house lights. For a moment the two men stood on the sidewalk looking back toward the park. The city was silent. There was no sound from the park. A policeman walked along a block away, turning his flash into the store windows.

‘You see?’ said Mike. ‘Just like nothing happened.’

‘Well, if the fellas wanted a glass of beer they must have gone someplace else.’

‘That’s what I told you,’ said Mike.

They swung along the empty street and turned south, out of the business district. ‘My name’s Welch,’ the bartender said. ‘I only been in this town about two years.’

The loneliness had fallen on Mike again. ‘It’s funny-’he said, and then, ‘I was born right in this town, right in the house I live in now. I got a wife but no kids. Both of us born right in this town. Everybody knows us.’

They walked on for a few blocks. The stores dropped behind and the nice houses with bushy gardens and cut lawns lined the street. The tall shade trees were shadowed on the sidewalk by the street lights. Two night dogs went slowly by, smelling at each other.

Welch said softly-‘I wonder what kind of a fella he was-the nigger, I mean.’

Mike answered out of his loneliness. ‘The papers all said he was a fiend. I read all the papers. That’s what they all said.’

‘Yes, I read them, too. But it makes you wonder about him. I’ve known some pretty nice niggers.’

Mike turned his head and spoke protestingly. ‘Well, I’ve knew some dam’ fine niggers myself. I’ve worked right ’longside some niggers and they was as nice as any white man you could want to meet. -But not no fiends.’

His vehemence silenced little Welch for a moment. Then he said, ‘You couldn’t tell, I guess, what kind of a fella he was?’

‘ No-he just stood there stiff, with his mouth shut and his eyes tight closed and his hands right down at his sides. And then one of the guys smacked him. It’s my idea he was dead when we took him out.’

Welch sidled close on the walk. ‘Nice gardens along here. Must take a lot of money to keep them up.’ He walked even closer, so that his shoulder touched Mike’s arm. ‘I never been to a lynching. How’s it make you feel-afterwards?’

Mike shied away from the contact. ‘It don’t make you feel nothing.’ He put down his head and increased his pace. The little bartender had nearly to trot to keep up. The street lights were fewer. It was darker and safer. Mike burst out, ‘Makes you feel kind of cut off and tired, but kind of satisfied, too. Like you done a good job-but tired and kind of sleepy.’ He slowed his steps. ‘Look, there’s a light in the kitchen. That’s where I live. My old lady’s waiting up for me.’ He stopped in front of his little house.

Welch stood nervously beside him. ‘Come into my place when you want a glass of beer-or a shot. Open till midnight. I treat my friends right.’ He scampered away like an aged mouse.

Mike called, ‘Goodnight.’

He walked around the side of his house and went in the back door. His thin, petulant wife was sitting by the open gas oven warming herself. She turned complaining eyes on Mike where he stood in the doorway.

Then her eyes widened and hung on his face. ‘You been with a woman,’ she said hoarsely. ‘What woman you been with?’

Mike laughed. ‘You think you’re pretty slick, don’t you? You’re a slick one, ain’t you? What makes you think I been with a woman?’

She said fiercely, ‘You think I can’t tell by the look on your face that you been with a woman?’

‘All right,’ said Mike. ‘If you’re so slick and know‑it‑all, I won’t tell you nothing. You can just wait for the morning paper.’

He saw doubt come into the dissatisfied eyes. ‘Was it the nigger?’ she asked. ‘Did they get the nigger? Everybody said they was going to.’

‘Find out for yourself if you’re so slick. I ain’t going to tell you nothing.’

He walked through the kitchen and went into the bathroom. A little mirror hung on the wall. Mike took off his cap and looked at his face. ‘By God, she was right,’ he thought. ‘That’s just exactly how I do feel.’

The Snake

It was almost dark when young Dr Phillips swung his sack to his shoulder and left the tide pool. He climbed up over the rocks and squashed along the street in his rubber boots. The street lights were on by the time he arrived at his little commercial laboratory on the cannery street of Monterey. It was a tight little building, standing partly on piers over the bay water and partly on the land. On both sides the big corrugated- iron sardine canneries crowded in on it.

Dr Phillips climbed the wooden steps and opened the door. The white rats in their cages scampered up and down the wire, and the captive cats in their pens mewed for milk. Dr Phillips turned on the glaring light over the dissection table and dumped his clammy sack on the floor. He walked to the glass cages by the window where the rattlesnakes lived, leaned over and looked in.

The snakes were bunched and resting in the corners of the cage, but every head was clear; the dusty eyes seemed to look at nothing, but as the young man leaned over the cage the forked tongues, black on the ends and pink behind, twittered out and waved slowly up and down. Then the snakes recognized the man and pulled in their tongues.

Dr Phillips threw off his leather coat and built a fire in the tin stove; he set a kettle of water on the stove and dropped a can of beans into the water. Then he stood staring down at the sack on the floor. He was a slight young man with the mild, preoccupied eyes of one who looks through a microscope a great deal. He wore a short blond beard.

The draft ran breathily up the chimney and a glow of warmth came from the stove. The little waves washed quietly about the piles under the building. Arranged on shelves about the room were tier above tier of museum jars containing the mounted marine specimens the laboratory dealt in.

Dr Phillips opened a side door and went into his bedroom, a book- lined cell containing an army cot, a reading light and an uncomfortable wooden chair. He pulled off his rubber boots and put on a pair of sheepskin slippers. When he went back to the other room the water in the kettle was already beginning to hum.

He lifted his sack to the table under the white light and emptied out two dozen common starfish. These he laid out side by side on the table. His preoccupied eyes turned to the busy rats in the wire cages. Taking grain from a paper sack, he poured it into the feeding troughs. Instantly the rats scrambled down from the wire and fell upon the food. A bottle of milk stood on a glass shelf between a small mounted octopus and a jellyfish. Dr Phillips lifted down the milk and walked to the cat cage, but before he filled the containers he reached in the cage and gently picked out a big rangy alley tabby. He stroked her for a moment and then dropped her in a small black painted box, closed the lid and bolted it and then turned on a petcock which admitted gas into the killing chamber. While the short soft struggle went on in the black box he filled the saucers with milk. One of the cats arched against his hand and he smiled and petted her neck.

The box was quiet now. He turned off the petcock, for the airtight box would be full of gas.

On the stove the pan of water was bubbling furiously about the can of beans. Dr Phillips lifted out the can with a big pair of forceps, opened it, and emptied the beans into a glass dish. While he ate he watched the starfish on the table. From between the rays little drops of milky fluid were exuding. He bolted his beans and when they were gone he put the dish in the sink and stepped to the equipment cupboard. From this he took a microscope and a pile of little glass dishes. He filled the dishes one by one with sea water from a tap and arranged them in a line beside the starfish. He took out his watch and laid it on the table under the pouring white light. The waves washed with little sighs against the piles under the floor. He took an eyedropper from a drawer and bent over the starfish.

At that moment there were quick soft steps on the wooden stairs and a strong knocking at the door. A slight grimace of annoyance crossed the young man’s face as he went to open. A tall, lean woman stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a severe dark suit-her straight black hair, growing low on a flat forehead, was mussed as though the wind had been blowing it. Her black eyes glittered in the strong light.

She spoke in a soft throaty voice, ‘May I come in? I want to talk to you.’

‘I’m very busy just now,’ he said half- heartedly. ‘I have to do things at times.’ But he stood away from the door. The tall woman slipped in.

‘I’ll be quiet until you can talk to me.’

He closed the door and brought the uncomfortable chair from the bedroom. ‘You see,’ he apologized, ‘the process is started and I must get to it.’ So many people wandered in and asked questions. He had little routines of explanations for the commoner processes. He could say them without thinking. ‘Sit here. In a few minutes I’ll be able to listen to you.’

The tall woman leaned over the table. With the eyedropper the young man gathered fluid from between the rays of the starfish and squirted it into a bowl of water, and then he drew some milky fluid and squirted it in the same bowl and stirred the water gently with the eyedropper. He began his little patter of explanation.

‘When starfish are sexually mature they release sperm and ova when they are exposed at low tide. By choosing mature specimens and taking them out of the water, I give them a condition of low tide. Now I’ve mixed the sperm and eggs. Now I put some of the mixture in each one of these ten watch glasses. In ten minutes I will kill those in the first glass with menthol, twenty minutes later I will kill the second group and then a new group every twenty minutes. Then I will have arrested the process in stages, and I will mount the series on microscope slides for biologic study.’ He paused. ‘Would you like to look at this first group under the microscope?’

‘No, thank you.’

He turned quickly to her. People always wanted to look through the glass. She was not looking at the table at all, but at him. Her black eyes were on him, but they did not seem to see him. He realized why-the irises were as dark as the pupils, there was no color line between the two. Dr Phillips was piqued at her answer. Although answering questions bored him, a lack of interest in what he was doing irritated him. A desire to arouse her grew in him.

‘While I’m waiting the first ten minutes I have something to do. Some people don’t like to see it. Maybe you’d better step into that room until I finish.’

‘No,’ she said in her soft flat tone. ‘Do what you wish. I will wait until you can talk to me.’ Her hands rested side by side on her lap. She was completely at rest. Her eyes were bright but the rest of her was almost in a state of suspended animation. He thought, ‘Low metabolic rate, almost as low as a frog’s, from the looks.’ The desire to shock her out of her inanition possessed him again.

He brought a little wooden cradle to the table, laid out scalpels and scissors and rigged a big hollow needle to a pressure tube. Then from the killing chamber he brought the limp dead cat and laid it in the cradle and tied its legs to hooks in the sides. He glanced sidewise at the woman. She had not moved. She was still at rest.

The cat grinned up into the light, its pink tongue stuck out between its needle teeth. Dr Phillips deftly snipped open the skin at the throat; with a scalpel he slit through and found an artery. With flawless technique he put the needle in the vessel and tied it in with gut. ‘Embalming fluid,’ he explained. ‘Later I’ll inject yellow mass into the veinous system and red mass into the arterial system-for bloodstream dissection-biology classes.’

He looked around at her again. Her dark eyes seemed veiled with dust. She looked without expression at the cat’s open throat. Not a drop of blood had escaped. The incision was clean. Dr Phillips looked at his watch. ‘Time for the first group.’ He shook a few crystals of menthol into the first watch glass.

The woman was making him nervous. The rats climbed about on the wire of their cage again and squeaked softly. The waves under the building beat with little shocks on the piles.

The young man shivered. He put a few lumps of coal in the stove and sat down. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I haven’t anything to do for twenty minutes.’ He noticed how short her chin was between lower lip and point. She seemed to awaken slowly, to come up out of some deep pool of consciousness. Her head raised and her dark dusty eyes moved about the room and then came back to him.

‘I was waiting,’ she said. Her hands remained side by side on her lap. ‘You have snakes?’

‘Why, yes,’ he said rather loudly. ‘I have about two dozen rattlesnakes. I milk out the venom and send it to the anti- venom laboratories.’

She continued to look at him but her eyes did not center on him, rather they covered him and seemed to see in a big circle all around him. ‘Have you a male snake, a male rattlesnake?’

‘Well, it just happens I know I have. I came in one morning and found a big snake in-in coition with a smaller one. That’s very rare in captivity. You see, I do know I have a male snake.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Why, right in the glass cage by the window there.’

Her head swung slowly around but her two quiet hands did not move. She turned back toward him.‘May I see?’

He got up and walked to the case by the window. On the sand bottom the knot of rattlesnakes lay entwined, but their heads were clear. The tongues came out and flickered a moment and then waved up and down feeling the air for vibrations. Dr Phillips nervously turned his head. The woman was standing beside him. He had not heard her get up from the chair. He had heard only the splash of water among the piles and the scampering of the rats on the wire screen.

She said softly, ‘Which is the male you spoke of?’

He pointed to a thick, dusty grey snake lying by itself in one corner of the cage. ‘That one. He’s nearly five feet long. He comes from Texas. Our Pacific coast snakes are usually smaller. He’s been taking all the rats, too. When I want the others to eat I have to take him out.’

The woman stared down at the blunt dry head. The forked tongue slipped out and hung quivering for a long moment. ‘And you’re sure he’s a male.’

‘Rattlesnakes are funny,’ he said glibly. ‘Nearly every generalization proves wrong. I don’t like to say anything definite about rattlesnakes, but-yes-I can assure you he’s a male.’

Her eyes did not move from the flat head. ‘Will you sell him to me?’

‘Sell him?’ he cried. ‘Sell him to you?’

‘You do sell specimens, don’t you?’

‘Oh-yes. Of course I do. Of course I do.’

‘How much? Five dollars? Ten?’

‘Oh! Not more than five. But-do you know anything about rattlesnakes? You might be bitten.’

She looked at him for a moment. ‘I don’t intend to take him. I want to leave him here, but-I want him to be mine. I want to come here and look at him and feed him and to know he’s mine.’ She opened a little purse and took out a five- dollar bill. ‘Here! Now he is mine.’

Dr Phillips began to be afraid. ‘You could come to look at him without owning him.’

‘I want him to be mine.’

‘Oh, Lord!’ he cried. ‘I’ve forgotten the time.’ He ran to the table. ‘Three minutes over. It won’t matter much.’ He shook menthol crystals into the second watch glass. And then he was drawn back to the cage where the woman still stared at the snake.

She asked, ‘What does he eat?’

‘I feed them white rats, rats from the cage over there.’

‘Will you put him in the other cage? I want to feed him.’

‘But he doesn’t need food. He’s had a rat already this week. Sometimes they don’t eat for three or four months. I had one that didn’t eat for over a year.’

In her low monotone she asked, ‘Will you sell me a rat?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I see. You want to watch how rattlesnakes eat. All right. I’ll show you. The rat will cost twenty- five cents. It’s better than a bullfight if you look at it one way, and it’s simply a snake eating his dinner if you look at it another.’ His tone had become acid. He hated people who made sport of natural processes. He was not a sportsman but a biologist. He could kill a thousand animals for knowledge, but not an insect for pleasure. He’d been over this in his mind before.

She turned her head slowly toward him and the beginning of a smile formed on her thin lips. ‘I want to feed my snake,’ she said. ‘I’ll put him in the other cage.’ She had opened the top of the cage and dipped her hand in before he knew what she was doing. He leaped forward and pulled her back. The lid banged shut.

‘Haven’t you any sense,’ he asked fiercely. ‘Maybe he wouldn’t kill you, but he’d make you damned sick in spite of what I could do for you.’

‘You put him in the other cage then,’ she said quietly.

Dr Phillips was shaken. He found that he was avoiding the dark eyes that didn’t seem to look at anything. He felt that it was profoundly wrong to put a rat into the cage, deeply sinful; and he didn’t know why. Often he had put rats in the cage when someone or other had wanted to see it, but this desire tonight sickened him. He tried to explain himself out of it.

‘It’s a good thing to see,’ he said. ‘It shows you how a snake can work. It makes you have a respect for a rattlesnake. Then, too, lots of people have dreams about the terror of snakes making the kill. I think because it is a subjective rat. The person is the rat. Once you see it the whole matter is objective. The rat is only a rat and the terror is removed.’

He took a long stick equipped with a leather noose from the wall. Opening the trap he dropped the noose over the big snake’s head and tightened the thong. A piercing dry rattle filled the room. The thick body writhed and slashed about the handle of the stick as he lifted the snake out and dropped it in the feeding cage. It stood ready to strike for a time, but the buzzing gradually ceased. The snake crawled into a corner, made a big figure eight with its body and lay still.

‘You see,’ the young man explained, ‘these snakes are quite tame. I’ve had them a long time. I suppose I could handle them if I wanted to, but everyone who does handle rattlesnakes gets bitten sooner or later. I just don’t want to take the chance.’ He glanced at the woman. He hated to put in the rat. She had moved over in front of the new cage; her black eyes were on the stony head of the snake again.

She said, ‘Put in a rat.’

Reluctantly he went to the rat cage. For some reason he was sorry for the rat, and such a feeling had never come to him before. His eyes went over the mass of swarming white bodies climbing up the screen toward him. ‘Which one?’ he thought. ‘Which one shall it be?’ Suddenly he turned angrily to the woman.’Wouldn’t you rather I put in a cat? Then you’d see a real fight. The cat might even win, but if it did it might kill the snake. I’ll sell you a cat if you like.’

She didn’t look at him. ‘Put in a rat,’ she said. ‘I want him to eat.’

He opened the rat cage and thrust his hand in. His fingers found a tail and he lifted a plump, red- eyed rat out of the cage. It struggled up to try to bite his fingers and, failing, hung spread out and motionless from its tail. He walked quickly across the room, opened the feeding cage and dropped the rat in on the sand floor. ‘Now, watch it,’ he cried.

The woman did not answer him. Her eyes were on the snake where it lay still. Its tongue, flicking in and out rapidly, tasted the air of the cage.

The rat landed on its feet, turned around and sniffed at its pink naked tail and then unconcernedly trotted across the sand, smelling as it went. The room was silent. Dr Phillips did not know whether the water sighed among the piles or whether the woman sighed. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw her body crouch and stiffen.

The snake moved out smoothly, slowly. The tongue flicked in and out. The motion was so gradual, so smooth that it didn’t seem to be motion at all. In the other end of the cage the rat perked up in a sitting position and began to lick down the fine white hair on its chest. The snake moved on, keeping always a deep S curve in its neck.

The silence beat on the young man. He felt the blood drifting up in his body. He said loudly, ‘See! He keeps the striking curve ready. Rattlesnakes are cautious, almost cowardly animals. The mechanism is so delicate. The snake’s dinner is to be got by an operation as deft as a surgeon’s job. He takes no chances with his instruments.’

The snake had flowed to the middle of the cage by now. The rat looked up, saw the snake and then unconcernedly went back to licking its chest.

‘It’s the most beautiful thing in the world,’ the young man said. His veins were throbbing. ‘It’s the most terrible thing in the world.’

The snake was close now. Its head lifted a few inches from the sand. The head weaved slowly back and forth, aiming, getting distance, aiming. Dr Phillips glanced again at the woman. He turned sick. She was weaving too, not much, just a suggestion.

The rat looked up and saw the snake. It dropped to four feet and back up, and then-the stroke. It was impossible to see, simply a flash. The rat jarred as though under an invisible blow. The snake backed hurriedly into the corner from which it had come, and settled down, its tongue working constantly.

‘Perfect!’ Dr Phillips cried. ‘Right between the shoulder blades. The fangs must almost have reached the heart.’

The rat stood still, breathing like a little white bellows. Suddenly it leaped in the air and landed on its side. Its legs kicked spasmodically for a second and it was dead.

The woman relaxed, relaxed sleepily.

‘Well,’ the young man demanded, ‘it was an emotional bath, wasn’t it?’

She turned her misty eyes to him. ‘Will he eat it now?’ she asked.

‘Of course he’ll eat it. He didn’t kill it for a thrill. He killed it because he was hungry.’

The corners of the woman’s mouth turned up a trifle again. She looked back at the snake. ‘I want to see him eat it.’

Now the snake came out of its corner again. There was no striking curve in its neck, but it approached the rat gingerly, ready to jump back in case it attacked. It nudged the body gently with its blunt nose, and drew away. Satisfied that it was dead, the snake touched the body all over with its chin, from head to tail. It seemed to measure the body and to kiss it. Finally it opened its mouth and unhinged its jaws at the corners.

Dr Phillips put his will against his head to keep it from turning toward the woman. He thought, ‘If she’s opening her mouth, I’ll be sick. I’ll be afraid.’ He succeeded in keeping his eyes away.

The snake fitted its jaws over the rat’s head and then with a slow peristaltic pulsing, began to engulf the rat. The jaws gripped and the whole throat crawled up, and the jaws gripped again.

Dr Phillips turned away and went to his work table. ‘You’ve made me miss one of the series,’ he said bitterly. ‘The set won’t be complete.’ He put one of the watch glasses under a low- power microscope and looked at it, and then angrily he poured the contents of all the dishes into the sink. The waves had fallen so that only a wet whisper came up through the floor. The young man lifted a trapdoor at his feet and dropped the starfish down into the black water. He paused at the cat, crucified in the cradle and grinning comically into the light. Its body was puffed with embalming fluid. He shut off the pressure, withdrew the needle and tied the vein.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ he asked.

‘No, thank you. I shall be going pretty soon.’

He walked to her where she stood in front of the snake cage. The rat was swallowed, all except an inch of pink tail that stuck out of the snake’s mouth like a sardonic tongue. The throat heaved again and the tail disappeared. The jaws snapped back into their sockets, and the big snake crawled heavily to the corner, made a big eight and dropped its head on the sand.

‘He’s asleep now,’ the woman said. ‘I’m going now. But I’ll come back and feed my snake every little while. I’ll pay for the rats. I want him to have plenty. And sometime-I’ll take him away with me.’ Her eyes came out of their dusty dream for a moment. ‘Remember, he’s mine. Don’t take his poison. I want him to have it. Good night.’ She walked swiftly to the door and went out. He heard her footsteps on the stairs, but he could not hear her walk away on the pavement.

Dr Phillips turned a chair around and sat down in front of the snake cage. He tried to comb out his thought as he looked at the torpid snake. ‘I’ve read so much about psychological sex symbols,’ he thought. ‘It doesn’t seem to explain. Maybe I’m too much alone. Maybe I should kill the snake. If I knew-no, I can’t pray to anything.’

For weeks he expected her to return. ‘I will go out and leave her alone here when she comes,’ he decided. ‘I won’t see the damned thing again.’

She never came again. For months he looked for her when he walked about in the town. Several times he ran after some tall woman thinking it might be she. But he never saw her again-ever.

The Chrysanthemums

The high grey- flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot. On the broad, level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left the black earth shining like metal where the shares had cut. On the foothill ranches across the Salinas River, the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine, but there was no sunshine in the valley now in December. The thick willow scrub along the river flamed with sharp and positive yellow leaves.

It was a time of quiet and of waiting. The air was cold and tender. A light wind blew up from the southwest so that the farmers were mildly hopeful of a good rain before long; but fog and rain do not go together.

Across the river, on Henry Allen’s foothill ranch there was little work to be done, for the hay was cut and stored and the orchards were plowed up to receive the rain deeply when it should come. The cattle on the higher slopes were becoming shaggy and rough- coated.

Elisa Allen, working in her flower garden, looked down across the yard and saw Henry, her husband, talking to two men in business suits. The three of them stood by the tractor shed, each man with one foot on the side of the little Fordson. They smoked cigarettes and studied the machine as they talked.

Elisa watched them for a moment and then went back to her work. She was thirty- five. Her face was lean and strong and her eyes were as clear as water. Her figure looked blocked and heavy in her gardening costume, a man’s black hat pulled low down over her eyes, clodhopper shoes, a figured print dress almost completely covered by a big corduroy apron with four big pockets to hold the snips, the trowel and scratcher, the seeds and the knife she worked with. She wore heavy leather gloves to protect her hands while she worked.

She was cutting down the old year’s chrysanthemum stalks with a pair of short and powerful scissors. She looked down toward the men by the tractor shed now and then. Her face was eager and mature and handsome; even her work with the scissors was over- eager, over- powerful. The chrysanthemum stems seemed too small and easy for her energy.

She brushed a cloud of hair out of her eyes with the back of her glove, and left a smudge of earth on her cheek in doing it. Behind her stood the neat white farmhouse with red geraniums close- banked around it as high as the windows. It was a hard- swept looking little house with hard- polished windows, and a clean mud- mat on the front steps.

Elisa cast another glance toward the tractor shed. The strangers were getting into their Ford coupé. She took off a glove and put her strong fingers down into the forest of new green chrysanthemum sprouts that were growing around the old roots. She spread the leaves and looked down among the close- growing stems. No aphids were there, no sowbugs or snails or cutworms. Her terrier fingers destroyed such pests before they could get started.

Elisa started at the sound of her husband’s voice. He had come near quietly, and he leaned over the wire fence that protected her flower garden from cattle and dogs and chickens.

‘At it again,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a strong new crop coming.’

Elisa straightened her back and pulled on the gardening glove again. ‘Yes. They’ll be strong this coming year.’ In her tone and on her face there was a little smugness.

‘You’ve got a gift with things,’ Henry observed. ‘Some of those yellow chrysanthemums you had this year were ten inches across. I wish you’d work out in the orchard and raise some apples that big.’

Her eyes sharpened. ‘Maybe I could do it, too. I’ve a gift with things, all right. My mother had it. She could stick anything in the ground and make it grow. She said it was having planters’ hands that knew how to do it.’

‘Well, it sure works with flowers,’ he said.

‘Henry, who were those men you were talking to?’

‘Why, sure, that’s what I came to tell you. They were from the Western Meat Company. I sold those thirty head of three-year-old steers. Got nearly my own price, too.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Good for you.’

‘And I thought,’ he continued, ‘I thought how it’s Saturday afternoon, and we might go into Salinas for dinner at a restaurant, and then to a picture show-to celebrate, you see.’

‘Good,’ she repeated. ‘Oh, yes. That will be good.’

Henry put on his joking tone. ‘There’s fights tonight. How’d you like to go to the fights?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said breathlessly. ‘No, I wouldn’t like fights.’

‘Just fooling, Elisa. We’ll go to a movie. Let’s see. It’s two now. I’m going to take Scotty and bring down those steers from the hill. It’ll take us maybe two hours. We’ll go in town about five and have dinner at the Cominos Hotel. Like that?’

‘Of course I’ll like it. It’s good to eat away from home.’

‘All right, then. I’ll go get up a couple of horses.’

She said, ‘I’ll have plenty of time to transplant some of these sets, I guess.’

She heard her husband calling Scotty down by the barn. And a little later she saw the two men ride up the pale yellow hillside in search of the steers.

There was a little square sandy bed kept for rooting the chrysanthemums. With her trowel she turned the soil over and over, and smoothed it and patted it firm. Then she dug ten parallel trenches to receive the sets. Back at the chrysanthemum bed she pulled out the little crisp shoots, trimmed off the leaves of each one with her scissors and laid it on a small orderly pile.

A squeak of wheels and plod of hoofs came from the road. Elisa looked up. The country road ran along the dense bank of willows and cottonwoods that bordered the river, and up this road came a curious vehicle, curiously drawn. It was an old spring- wagon, with a round canvas top on it like the cover of a prairie schooner. It was drawn by an old bay horse and a little grey- and- white burro. A big stubble- bearded man sat between the cover flaps and drove the crawling team. Underneath the wagon, between the hind wheels, a lean and rangy mongrel dog walked sedately. Words were painted on the canvas, in clumsy, crooked letters. ‘Pots, pans, knives,sisors, lawn mores, Fixed.’ Two rows of articles, and the triumphantly definitive ‘Fixed’ below. The black paint had run down in little sharp points beneath each letter.

Elisa, squatting on the ground, watched to see the crazy, loose- jointed wagon pass by. But it didn’t pass. It turned into the farm road in front of her house, crooked old wheels skirling and squeaking. The rangy dog darted from between the wheels and ran ahead. Instantly the two ranch shepherds flew out at him. Then all three stopped, and with stiff and quivering tails, with taut straight legs, with ambassadorial dignity, they slowly circled, sniffing daintily. The caravan pulled up to Elisa’s wire fence and stopped. Now the newcomer dog, feeling out numbered, lowered his tail and retired under the wagon with raised hackles and bared teeth.

The man on the wagon seat called out, ‘That’s a bad dog in a fight when he gets started.’

Elisa laughed. ‘I see he is. How soon does he generally get started?’

The man caught up her laughter and echoed it heartily. ‘Sometimes not for weeks and weeks,’ he said. He climbed stiffly down, over the wheel. The horse and the donkey drooped like unwatered flowers.

Elisa saw that he was a very big man. Although his hair and beard were greying, he did not look old. His worn black suit was wrinkled and spotted with grease. The laughter had disappeared from his face and eyes the moment his laughing voice ceased. His eyes were dark, and they were full of the brooding that gets in the eyes of teamsters and of sailors. The calloused hands he rested on the wire fence were cracked, and every crack was a black line. He took off his battered hat.

‘I’m off my general road, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Does this dirt road cut over across the river to the Los Angeles highway?’

Elisa stood up and shoved the thick scissors in her apron pocket. ‘Well, yes, it does, but it winds around and then fords the river. I don’t think your team could pull through the sand.’

He replied with some asperity, ‘It might surprise you what them beasts can pull through.’

‘When they get started?’ she asked.

He smiled for a second. ‘Yes. When they get started.’

‘Well,’ said Elisa, ‘I think you’ll save time if you go back to the Salinas road and pick up the highway there.’

He drew a big finger down the chicken wire and made it sing. ‘I ain’t in any hurry, ma’am. I go from Seattle to San Diego and back every year. Takes all my time. About six months each way. I aim to follow nice weather.’

Elisa took off her gloves and stuffed them in the apron pocket with the scissors. She touched the under edge of her man’s hat, searching for fugitive hairs. ‘That sounds like a nice kind of a way to live,’ she said.

He leaned confidentially over the fence. ‘Maybe you noticed the writing on my wagon. I mend pots and sharpen knives and scissors. You got any of them things to do?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said quickly. ‘Nothing like that.’ Her eyes hardened with resistance.

‘Scissors is the worst thing,’ he explained. ‘Most people just ruin scissors trying to sharpen ’em, but I know how. I got a special tool. It’s a little bobbit kind of thing, and patented. But it sure does the trick.’

‘No. My scissors are all sharp.’

‘All right, then. Take a pot,’ he continued earnestly,‘a bent pot, or a pot with a hole. I can make it like new so you don’t have to buy no new ones. That’s a saving for you.’

‘No,’ she said shortly. ‘I tell you I have nothing like that for you to do.’

His face fell to an exaggerated sadness. His voice took on a whining undertone. ‘I ain’t had a thing to do today. Maybe I won’t have no supper tonight. You see I’m off my regular road. I know folks on the highway clear from Seattle to San Diego. They save their things for me to sharpen up because they know I do it so good and save them money.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Elisa said irritably. ‘I haven’t anything for you to do.’

His eyes left her face and fell to searching the ground. They roamed about until they came to the chrysanthemum bed where she had been working. ‘What’s them plants, ma’am?’

The irritation and resistance melted from Elisa’s face. ‘Oh, those are chrysanthemums, giant whites and yellows. I raise them every year, bigger than anybody around here.’

‘Kind of a long- stemmed flower? Looks like a quick puff of colored smoke?’ he asked.

‘That’s it. What a nice way to describe them.’

‘They smell kind of nasty till you get used to them,’ he said.

‘It’s a good bitter smell,’ she retorted, ‘not nasty at all.’

He changed his tone quickly. ‘I like the smell myself.’

‘I had ten- inch blooms this year,’ she said.

The man leaned farther over the fence. ‘Look. I know a lady down the road a piece, has got the nicest garden you ever seen. Got nearly every kind of flower but no chrysantheums. Last time I was mending a copper- bottom washtub for her (that’s a hard job but I do it good), she said to me, “If you ever run acrost some nice chrysantheums I wish you’d try to get me a few seeds.” That’s what she told me.’

Elisa’s eyes grew alert and eager. ‘She couldn’t have known much about chrysanthemums. You can raise them from seed, but it’s much easier to root the little sprouts you see there.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I s’pose I can’t take none to her, then.’

‘Why yes you can,’ Elisa cried. ‘I can put some in damp sand, and you can carry them right along with you. They’ll take root in the pot if you keep them damp. And then she can transplant them.’

‘She’d sure like to have some, ma’am. You say they’re nice ones?’

‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘Oh, beautiful.’ Her eyes shone. She tore off the battered hat and shook out her dark pretty hair. ‘I’ll put them in a flowerpot, and you can take them right with you. Come into the yard.’

While the man came through the picket gate Elisa ran excitedly along the geranium- bordered path to the back of the house. And she returned carrying a big red flowerpot. The gloves were forgotten now. She kneeled on the ground by the starting bed and dug up the sandy soil with her fingers and scooped it into the bright new flowerpot. Then she picked up the little pile of shoots she had prepared. With her strong fingers she pressed them into the sand and tamped around them with her knuckles. The man stood over her. ‘I’ll tell you what to do,’ she said. ‘You remember so you can tell the lady.’

‘Yes, I’ll try to remember.’

‘Well, look. These will take root in about a month. Then she must set them out, about a foot apart in good rich earth like this, see?’ She lifted a handful of dark soil for him to look at. ‘They’ll grow fast and tall. Now remember this: In July tell her to cut them down, about eight inches from the ground.’

‘Before they bloom?’ he asked.

‘Yes, before they bloom.’ Her face was tight with eagerness. ‘They’ll grow right up again. About the last of September the buds will start.’

She stopped and seemed perplexed. ‘It’s the budding that takes the most care,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I don’t know how to tell you.’ She looked deep into his eyes, searchingly. Her mouth opened a little, and she seemed to be listening. ‘I’ll try to tell you,’ she said. ‘Did you ever hear of planting hands?’

‘Can’t say I have, ma’am.’

‘Well, I can only tell you what it feels like. It’s when you’re picking off the buds you don’t want. Everything goes right down into your fingertips. You watch your fingers work. They do it themselves. You can feel how it is. They pick and pick the buds. They never make a mistake. They’re with the plant. Do you see? Your fingers and the plant. You can feel that, right up your arm. They know. They never make a mistake. You can feel it. When you’re like that you can’t do anything wrong. Do you see that? Can you understand that?’

She was kneeling on the ground looking up at him. Her breast swelled passionately.

The man’s eyes narrowed. He looked away self- consciously. ‘Maybe I know,’ he said. ‘Sometimes in the night in the wagon there -’

Elisa’s voice grew husky. She broke in on him, ‘I’ve never lived as you do, but I know what you mean. When the night is dark-why, the stars are sharp- pointed, and there’s quiet. Why, you rise up and up! Every pointed star gets driven into your body. It’s like that. Hot and sharp and-lovely.’

Kneeling there, her hand went out toward his legs in the greasy black trousers. Her hesitant fingers almost touched the cloth. Then her hand dropped to the ground. She crouched low like a fawning dog.

He said, ‘It’s nice, just like you say. Only when you don’t have no dinner, it ain’t.’

She stood up then, very straight, and her face was ashamed. She held the flowerpot out to him and placed it gently in his arms. ‘Here. Put it in your wagon, on the seat, where you can watch it. Maybe I can find something for you to do.’

At the back of the house she dug in the can pile and found two old and battered aluminum saucepans. She carried them back and gave them to him. ‘Here, maybe you can fix these.’

His manner changed. He became professional. ‘Good as new I can fix them.’ At the back of his wagon he set a little anvil, and out of an oily toolbox dug a small machine hammer. Elisa came through the gate to watch him while he pounded out the dents in the kettles. His mouth grew sure and knowing. At a difficult part of the work he sucked his underlip.

‘You sleep right in the wagon?’ Elisa asked.

‘Right in the wagon, ma’am. Rain or shine I’m dry as a cow in there.’

‘It must be nice,’ she said. ‘It must be very nice. I wish women could do such things.’

‘It ain’t the right kind of a life for a woman.’

Her upper lip raised a little, showing her teeth. ‘How do you know? How can you tell?’ she said.

‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ he protested. ‘Of course I don’t know. Now here’s your kettles, done. You don’t have to buy no new ones.’

‘How much?’

‘Oh, fifty cents’ll do. I keep my prices down and my work good. That’s why I have all them satisfied customers up and down the highway.’

Elisa brought him a fifty- cent piece from the house and dropped it in his hand. ‘You might be surprised to have a rival some time. I can sharpen scissors, too. And I can beat the dents out of little pots. I could show you what a woman might do.’

He put his hammer back in the oily box and shoved the little anvil out of sight. ‘It would be a lonely life for a woman, ma’am, and a scary life, too, with animals creeping under the wagon all night.’ He climbed over the singletree, steadying himself with a hand on the burro’s white rump. He settled himself in the seat, picked up the lines. ‘Thank you kindly, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I’ll do like you told me; I’ll go back and catch the Salinas road.’

‘Mind,’ she called, ‘if you’re long in getting there, keep the sand damp.’

‘Sand, ma’am? . . . Sand? Oh, sure. You mean around the chrysantheums. Sure I will.’ He clucked his tongue. The beasts leaned luxuriously into their collars. The mongrel dog took his place between the back wheels. The wagon turned and crawled out the entrance road and back the way it had come, along the river.

Elisa stood in front of her wire fence watching the slow progress of the caravan. Her shoulders were straight, her head thrown back, her eyes half- closed, so that the scene came vaguely into them. Her lips moved silently, forming the words ‘ Goodbye-good- bye.’ Then she whispered, ‘That’s a bright direction. There’s a glowing there.’ The sound of her whisper startled her. She shook herself free and looked about to see whether anyone had been listening. Only the dogs had heard. They lifted their heads toward her from their sleeping in the dust, and then stretched out their chins and settled asleep again. Elisa turned and ran hurriedly into the house.

In the kitchen she reached behind the stove and felt the water tank. It was full of hot water from the noonday cooking. In the bathroom she tore off her soiled clothes and flung them into the corner. And then she scrubbed herself with a little block of pumice, legs and thighs, loins and chest and arms, until her skin was scratched and red. When she had dried herself she stood in front of a mirror in her bedroom and looked at her body. She tightened her stomach and threw out her chest. She turned and looked over her shoulder at her back.

After a while she began to dress, slowly. She put on her newest underclothing and her nicest stockings and the dress which was the symbol of her prettiness. She worked carefully on her hair, penciled her eyebrows and roughed her lips.

Before she was finished she heard the little thunder of hoofs and the shouts of Henry and his helper as they drove the red steers into the corral. She heard the gate bang shut and set herself for Henry’s arrival.

His step sounded on the porch. He entered the house calling, ‘Elisa, where are you?’

‘In my room, dressing. I’m not ready. There’s hot water for your bath. Hurry up. It’s getting late.’

When she heard him splashing in the tub, Elisa laid his dark suit on the bed, and shirt and socks and tie beside it. She stood his polished shoes on the floor beside the bed. Then she went to the porch and sat primly and stiffly down. She looked toward the river road where the willow- line was still yellow with frosted leaves so that under the high grey fog they seemed a thin band of sunshine. This was the only color in the grey afternoon. She sat unmoving for a long time. Her eyes blinked rarely.

Henry came banging out of the door, shoving his tie inside his vest as he came. Elisa stiffened and her face grew tight. Henry stopped short and looked at her. ‘ Why-why, Elisa. You look so nice!’

‘Nice? You think I look nice? What do you mean by “nice”?’

Henry blundered on. ‘I don’t know. I mean you look different, strong and happy.’

‘I am strong? Yes, strong. What do you mean “strong”?’

He looked bewildered. ‘You’re playing some kind of a game,’ he said helplessly. ‘It’s a kind of a play. You look strong enough to break a calf over your knee, happy enough to eat it like a watermelon.’

For a second she lost her rigidity. ‘Henry! Don’t talk like that. You didn’t know what you said.’ She grew complete again. ‘I’m strong,’ she boasted. ‘I never knew before how strong.’

Henry looked down toward the tractor shed, and when he brought his eyes back to her, they were his own again. ‘I’ll get out the car. You can put on your coat while I’m starting.’

Elisa went into the house. She heard him drive to the gate and idle down his motor, and then she took a long time to put on her hat. She pulled it here and pressed it there. When Henry turned the motor off she slipped into her coat and went out.

The little roadster bounced along on the dirt road by the river, raising the birds and driving the rabbits into the brush. Two cranes flapped heavily over the willow- line and dropped into the river bed.

Far ahead on the road Elisa saw a dark speck. She knew.

She tried not to look as they passed it, but her eyes would not obey. She whispered to herself sadly, ‘He might have thrown them off the road. That wouldn’t have been much trouble, not very much. But he kept the pot,’ she explained. ‘He had to keep the pot. That’s why he couldn’t get them off the road.’

The roadster turned a bend and she saw the caravan ahead. She swung full around toward her husband so she could not see the little covered wagon and the mismatched team as the car passed them.

In a moment it was over. The thing was done. She did not look back.

She said loudly, to be heard above the motor, ‘It will be good, tonight, a good dinner.’

‘Now you’ve changed again,’ Henry complained. He took one hand from the wheel and patted her knee. ‘I ought to take you in to dinner oftener. It would be good for both of us. We get so heavy out on the ranch.’

‘Henry,’ she asked, ‘could we have wine at dinner?’

‘Sure we could. Say! That will be fine.’

She was silent for a while; then she said, ‘Henry, at those prize fights, do the men hurt each other very much?’

‘Sometimes a little, not often. Why?’

‘Well, I’ve read how they break noses, and blood runs down their chests. I’ve read how the fighting gloves get heavy and soggy with blood.’

He looked around at her. ‘What’s the matter, Elisa? I didn’t know you read things like that.’ He brought the car to a stop, then turned to the right over the Salinas River bridge.

‘Do any women ever go to the fights?’ she asked.

‘Oh, sure, some. What’s the matter, Elisa? Do you want to go? I don’t think you’d like it, but I’ll take you if you really want to go.’

She relaxed limply in the seat. ‘Oh, no. No. I don’t want to go. I’m sure I don’t.’ Her face was turned away from him. ‘It will be enough if we can have wine. It will be plenty.’ She turned up her coat collar so he could not see that she was crying weakly-like an old woman.

[1]美国大萧条时期的啤酒味淡，人们会加一些香料或水果来加强味道。——译者注（以下若无特别说明，均为译者注。）

[2]又称“岩池”，指一种在海岸上，地形较低陷而且充满岩石和海水的地方。——编者注

让我们遇见在。。

企鹅图书 微博(penguinbooks)

企鹅图书微信订阅号

企鹅图书数字业务微信服务号

更多关于我们对信息请

访问企鹅兰登北亚官网 PRHNA.COM

创作危险

企鹅现代经典 第一辑

（法）阿尔贝·加缪/著

刘漪/译

企鹅图书 | PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

New Zealand | India | South Africa | North Asia

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at:

global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

CREATE DANGEROUSLY

Camus delivered the speech ‘Defence of Intelligence’ at a meeting organized by L’Amitié Française

in March 1945, and addressed ‘Bread and Freedom’ to the Labour Exchange of Saint-Étienne in

May 1953. ‘Create Dangerously’ was a speech delivered at the University of Uppsala in Sweden in

December 1957, a few days after Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This selection

first published in 2018 in Penguin Modern. Simplified Chinese translation copyright © 刘漪. Simplified

Chinese edition copyright © 2021 by Penguin Random House North Asia in association with CITIC

Press Group. All rights reserved.

© “企鹅”及其相关标识是企鹅兰登（北京）文化发展有限公司已经注册或尚未注册的商标。

未经允许，不得擅用。

企鹅兰登电子书 | Penguin Random House eBooks

目录

创作危险

保卫智识

面包与自由

Create Dangerously

Defence of Intelligence

Bread and Freedom

返回总目录

“今时今日，创作是项危险的事业。”

创作危险

一位东方的智者曾经祈求神灵饶过自己，让自己免遭“生活在一个有趣的时代”的厄运。但鉴于我们并不是智者，神灵也就没有饶过我们，于是我们便生在了这个有趣的时代。不管怎样，这是一个强迫我们对它感兴趣的时代。当代的写作者对此心知肚明。如果他们发声，就会遭到批评和攻击。如果他们变得谦逊并缄口不言，人们就会吵嚷着责备他们的沉默。

在这种喧哗与嘈杂中间，作家无法期待自己能够独善其身，去追求他所珍视的那些思绪和形象。在此前的历史中，独善其身一直是可能的。当一个人不赞同某个意见，他总是可以保持沉默，或是顾左右而言他。而今天一切都变了，甚至连沉默也带上了危险的意味。一旦“拒绝做出选择”也被当成一种选择看待，并相应地因之得到惩戒或嘉许，艺术家的身上就被强加了一种劳役，无论他本人的意愿如何。在这种语境里，“被强加”是个比“担负”更准确的词，因为他并非自愿报名，而是被迫服役的。每个当代作家都被绑上了这艘当代的奴隶船。他不得不接受这种状态，尽管他可能认为这艘船散发着属于过去的臭气，船上的奴隶主数量未免太多了一些，而且，掌舵的人似乎也不大称职。我们已经进入了公海。艺术家也像其他所有人一样，必须俯首依从船的航向，尽可能确保自己不死——换言之，尽可能继续活下来，并创作。

说实话，这么做并不容易，因此我能理解为什么艺术家们会怀念曾经的舒适。这种变化着实有些残酷。实际上，历史的露天剧场里始终在上演着殉道者和狮子的戏码；前者有永恒的慰藉作为依靠，而后者则以历史的生肉为食。但迄今为止，艺术家一直都是这类戏剧的场边观众。他曾经带着目的歌唱，为了他自己，在最好的情况下也可能是为了给殉道者打气，或试图让狮子放弃进食。然而到了今天，艺术家本人也在那剧场里了。必然地，他的声音会和以前有些不同，再难恢复往日的笃定。

这种持续的义务让艺术承受的损失是显而易见的。首先，它会失去游刃有余的轻松感，以及那种莫扎特作品中洋溢着的神圣自由。因此，为什么我们当代的艺术作品都显得呆板而无精打采，为什么它们这么一击即溃，就不难理解了。为什么我们会有更多的记者而非创意作家，有更多绘画界的童子军而非塞尚，为什么多愁善感的故事或是侦探小说会取代《战争与和平》或《帕尔马修道院》，原因也是再明显不过的了。当然，面对此种事态，你总是可以发些人文主义的悲叹，让自己成为《群魔》中的斯捷潘·特罗菲莫维奇所坚持成为的那类物什：一场活生生的谴责。你也可以像他那样，时不时爆发出阵阵爱国的忧郁。但这样的忧郁对现实毫无助益。在我看来，更好的做法是给这个时代以它应得的尊重——鉴于它如此激烈地索求这种尊重，并平静地承认，那个属于万众景仰的大师的时代，属于在扣眼里嵌一朵山茶花的艺术家的时代，属于安乐椅天才的时代已经一去不返了。今时今日，创作是项危险的事业。任何公开发表都是一种表演行为，它会将你暴露在整个时代的激情之前，而这是个什么都不原谅的时代。因此，问题不在于搞清楚这究竟是否会对艺术不利。对于所有那些没了艺术以及艺术所代表的东西就没法活着的人，问题仅仅在于搞清楚，在这么多种意识形态警察的威压之下（这么多的教会！何等的孤独！），那种属于创作的奇特自由还是否可能存续。

在这方面，只说艺术受到了国家政治权力的威胁是不够的。倘若是那样，事情就很简单了：艺术家要么战斗，要么投降。但实际上，一旦我们清楚地意识到，真正的战场其实位于艺术家本人的内心之中，问题就要复杂得多，也严重得多。在我们这个社会中，对艺术的仇恨是如此典型且屡见不鲜，其之所以有这么大的能量，只能是因为它得到了来自艺术家自身的滋养，从他们那里汲取了活力。以前的艺术家感到怀疑时，他们怀疑的是自己的才能。而当今的艺术家感到怀疑时，他们怀疑的是自己艺术的必要性，即他们的存在本身。如果拉辛[1]生活在一九五七年，他就需要找理由为自己辩解，为什么他在本可以为保卫《南特敕令》[2]摇旗呐喊的时候，竟去写了《蓓蕾妮斯》。

艺术家本人之所以会质疑艺术，背后的原因有很多，而只有其中最高尚的那一条才需要被我们纳入考量。最好的解释之一就是，如果没有将注意力投向历史的苦难的话，当代艺术家就会感觉自己像是在说谎，或是沉溺于无用的言辞。事实上，我们这个时代的标志性特征就是普罗大众以及他们的悲惨境况如何暴烈地冲击当代的感性。我们现在知晓了这些悲惨境况的存在，而过去的艺术家曾倾向于忘记它们。如果我们的意识更清醒，那也并不是因为我们时代的贵族（无论是艺术上的还是其他意义上的）变成了更好的人——不是的，别怕——而是因为普罗大众变得更强大了，能够确保别人无法忘记他们。

艺术家的投降还有其他的一些原因，其中有的可能也没这么高尚。但无论这些原因是什么，它们都促成了同一个结果：通过破坏其基础原则，也就是创作者对自身的信仰，自由创作得到了抑止。“一个人对他自己天才的服从，”爱默生曾气势恢宏地论断道，“是形式最纯粹的信仰。”另一位十九世纪的美国作家也说过：“只要一个人忠于自己，一切事物就都会有利于他，无论是政府、社会，还是太阳、月亮、群星。”这种惊人的乐观主义在今天似乎已经消亡了。大多数时候，艺术家在为他自己和他所享有的特权而感到羞愧，如果他有什么特权的话。他必须首先去回答那个他用来质问他自己的问题：艺术是一种虚假的奢侈品吗？

1

我们能做出的第一个直截了当的回答是：有些时候，艺术可能的确是一种虚假的奢侈品。我们知道，无论何时何地，人们总是可以坐在奴隶船的尾楼甲板上歌唱天上的星辰，哪怕身边还有许多苦役犯正在拼命划桨，或在货舱里精疲力竭地劳作。人总是可以记录露天剧场观众席上的社交闲谈，即使剧场内狮子正在噬咬受害者的身体。而且，我们也很难对过去曾获得过成功的这类艺术提出什么反对意见。但事情已经起了一些变化，世界各处，苦役犯和殉道者的数量都惊人地增加了，在如此巨量的苦难面前，如果艺术仍坚持要作为奢侈品，它同时也将成为一个谎言。

那么，艺术究竟可以谈论什么呢？如果它改变自己以迎合社会中大多数人的愿望，那么它将成为一种无意义的消遣。如果它一味盲目地拒斥社会，如果艺术家决意退回到自己的梦境中寻求庇护，那它将成为一个空洞的否定。这样，我们将只会得到娱乐大众者所制作的产品，或是文法形式专家的著作。这两种情况都会导致艺术与当下鲜活的现实脱节。在过去大约一个世纪里，我们所生活于其中的社会甚至不能被称作金钱社会（金子尚能挑动肉体的激情），而只能被称作金钱的抽象象征符号的社会。这个商人的社会可以被定义为一个事物在其中会消失，并被符号所取代的社会。当一个统治阶层的成员要衡量自己财富的时候，他不会去清点自己拥有多少亩土地或多少块金子，而是会去计算一个数字，而这个数字在理念中对应着一定数量的交易。这时，统治阶层就会迫使自己将某种冒牌货置于其经验和世界的中心。一个建立在符号之上的社会，本质上是一个虚假的社会，人们肉体的真理在这个社会里被当作某种虚假的东西对待。于是，这个社会选择将一种由形式原则构成的道德规范奉为圭臬，将“自由”和“平等”的字样既刻在它的监狱上，也刻在它的金融神殿上，也就完全不足为奇了。然而，人不能糟蹋词语而不受惩罚。当下最常被误解的价值当然要数“自由”。那些高智商的人（我一直觉得存在两种智力——聪明的智力和愚笨的智力）教导我们说，这只不过是通向真正进步的道路上的一个小障碍，仅此而已。但这种愚笨的言论之所以会被郑重其事地说出来，是因为商人们在一百年里独占了“自由”这个词，并片面地使用它，将它当作一种权利而非责任，而且绝不惮于尽可能频繁地援引理想中的自由，去为实实在在的压迫辩护。因此，这样一个社会要求艺术成为某种无足轻重的活动或是纯粹的娱乐，而非成为解放的手段，又有什么让人意外的呢？因此，在一个时髦的社会中，所有的麻烦都是金钱上的麻烦，所有的烦恼都是感伤的烦恼，这个社会能在过去几十年里始终满足于那些描绘社交生活的小说家和世界上最无用的艺术。对此，奥斯卡·王尔德曾评论说“浅薄是最大的罪恶”，说这话的时候，他想着的是当初那个未尝牢狱滋味的自己。

如此这般，一九〇〇年前后，欧洲那些中产阶级艺术品生产商（我没有说“艺术家”）接受了不去负责任，因为责任预先要求他们痛苦地与其所在的社会决裂（有人的确与之决裂了，他们是兰波、尼采和斯特林堡，而我们知道他们为此付出了怎样的代价）。那个时代给我们留下了“为艺术而艺术”的口号，这只是“不负责任”的另一种表达方式而已。为艺术而艺术——孤独艺术家的自娱自乐，实际上就是属于一个造作而自我沉溺的社会的虚假艺术。这个理论的必然产物就是小圈子艺术和纯粹形式化的艺术，它们从伪饰和抽象化中汲取养料，最终结局是摧毁一切现实。以这种方式，有少数作品愉悦了少数人，同时许多粗劣的创造败坏了许多其他人。最终，艺术渐渐在社会之外的地方成形，并斩断了与其生命之根源的联系。渐渐地，那些受追捧的艺术家也成了孤立的，或至少只能通过大众媒体或广播电台等媒介为他国家的国民所知，而这些媒介提供的只是他的一个便于理解的简单化版本。实际上，艺术越是专精，其普及化就越有必要。于是，无数的普通人感到自己对当代的这个或是那个伟大艺术家了如指掌，因为他们从报纸上读到他饲养金丝雀，或是他的每一段婚姻都没超过六个月之类的事情。在今天，享有最大的声望意味着被许多人仰慕，也被许多人厌恶，而这些人都没读过你写的东西。任何一位在我们这个社会里追求声名的艺术家都心知肚明：那成名的不会是他自己，而只是另一个顶着他名字的人，而这个人终将从他身上脱离，将来的某一天还可能回来杀死艺术家本人。

因此，十九世纪和二十世纪的欧洲，这个商人社会里创造出来的几乎一切有价值的东西——比方说，在文学上——都是反抗当时的社会的。可以说，大约到法国大革命时代之前的文学，总体上都是一种赞同的文学。那场革命的一个结果是形成了稳定的中产阶级，而一旦中产阶级的地位稳固之后，反抗的文学就应运而生。例如，在法国，官方价值观被来自两方面的力量否定：从浪漫派到兰波这一系列的革命价值观的旗手，以及贵族价值观的维护者，其中两个典型的例子是阿尔弗雷·德·维尼和巴尔扎克。大众和贵族——这两者是一切文明的源头——都起来反对他们时代的那个虚假社会。

然而这种否定被维持了太久，现在也已经变得僵化了，它带来了另一种贫乏。杰出的诗人生在了商人社会中（维尼笔下的查特顿是这个类型的最佳范例），渐渐接受了这种冷酷无情的假定，即一个人要想成为伟大的艺术家就必须对抗他所在时代的社会，无论这社会是什么。起初，当它坚持真正的艺术家不能向金钱世界妥协的时候，这个原则是真实合理的。然而到后来它又衍生出了附加信念，即艺术家只有通过在总体上对抗一切事物才能坚持自我，这时它就变得虚假了。因此，我们中的很多艺术家渴望变得与众不同，如果没能做到就会有负罪感，并希望自己同时收获喝彩和嘘声。很自然的是，对于这个疲倦或者说漠不关心的社会，喝彩和嘘声都只是随机发放的。所以今天的知识分子总是要把身体直直地绷着，为了让身材显得高些。但拒斥一切，甚至包括拒斥他自身艺术的传统，让当代的艺术家产生了一种幻觉，认为他正在创设自己独一无二的规则，最终将自己当成了上帝。同时他也觉得他可以创造自己的现实。然而，与社会隔绝使得他只能创造出形式化的或抽象的作品，尽管这些作品能给人带来刺激的体验，但它们缺乏那种与真正的艺术相联系的丰富多产，而只有真正的艺术才能将人们联合起来。简而言之，当代那些或细腻纤巧、或抽象写意的作品与托尔斯泰或莫里哀的作品之间的区别，就像一幅画有隐形小麦的概念图稿和犁沟中肥沃的土壤本身之间的区别一样大。

2

如此这般，艺术完全可以成为一种虚假的奢侈品。于是，人们或者说艺术家们想要让这种趋势停止下来并回归真实，也就不足为奇了。他们一旦这样做了，就否认了艺术家有保持孤独的权利，要求他将一切人类共同经历着和忍受着的那个现实，而非他自己的梦境，作为创作的题材。这些人深信，“为艺术而艺术”在题材和风格上都无法被大众所理解，或是完全不能表达大众的真实。这些人想让艺术家转而去有意识地为大多数人说话，说关于大多数人的话。他需要做的只是将所有人的苦难和幸福转译成所有人使用的那种语言，然后他就可以被所有人读懂了。作为对他绝对忠诚于现实的奖赏，他将在大众中间获得完全的、无损的传播。

这种普世交流的理想，实际上也是所有伟大艺术家的理想。与当代人通常的假定相反，如果有哪个人无权保持孤独的话，那就是艺术家了。艺术不可能是一个人的独角戏。当那个最孤独也最不出名的艺术家吸引了后世的受众时，他只是在重申自己的根本天职。考虑到艺术家不可能和一个装聋作哑或漠不关心的同时代人展开对话，他便只能诉诸更渺远的、与未来的世代的对话。

但是，要想与所有人谈论关于所有人的事情，你谈论的就必须是所有人都知道的东西，以及为我们所有人所共享的现实。大海、雨水、必然性、欲望、与死亡的搏斗——是这些将我们联结到一起。我们因共同看到的事物和共同经受的苦难而彼此相似。每个个体各自拥有不同的梦境，但世界的现实却为我们所有人共享。因此，朝向现实主义的努力是合理的，因为它在根本上与艺术的前景相关。

所以，让我们变得现实吧。或者说，让我们试图变得现实，如果这可能的话。因为我不确定这个词语是否有任何意义，“现实主义”即使是令人向往的，我也不确定它是不是可能的。让我们首先停下来，去问问纯粹的现实主义是否可能存在于艺术中。如果我们相信十九世纪那些自然主义者的宣言的话，现实主义就是对现实的精确再现。于是，现实主义之于艺术，就如同摄影之于绘画——前者再现事物，而后者在呈现时有所选择。然而，它所再现的究竟是什么，而现实又是什么？即使是最好的照片，也无法足够充分地再现其拍摄对象，因此也就不够现实主义。比方说，在我们的世界上，有什么东西能比人的一生更真实呢？而如果我们想要再现某个人的一生，有什么方式比得上拍一部现实主义的电影呢？但是，如果我们要问拍摄这样一部电影需要什么样的条件的话，答案只能是，条件只存在于纯粹的幻想之中。实际上，我们将不得不假设，有一台理想中的摄像机，它日夜不停地跟踪拍摄这个人，记录下他的每一个动作。这部电影的放映时间将会有人的一生那么长，因此只有那些乐意将自己的一生全都浪费在观看其他人的一生，包括其中的每个细节上的人，才可能会看它。即使在这样的条件下，这样一部不可想象的电影仍然不会是现实主义的，有一个简单的原因：一个人生命的全部现实不可能被局限在他恰好身处的那个位置上。它也存在于那些影响和塑造了他的生命的其他许多生命之中。比方说，那些他所爱之人的一生也应该被拍摄下来。还有那些无名者的生命，他们也都在默默无闻地施加着影响：其他的公民、警察、教授、矿井下和锻造厂里的同志、外交官和独裁者、宗教改革家、缔造了那些对我们的行为有决定性影响的神话的艺术家，简而言之，就是主宰着最平平无奇的生活的那个至高无上的“偶然性”的众多卑微的代表。因此，只有一种可能的现实主义电影，那就是由看不见的摄像机录制，在世界的屏幕上向我们播放的那一部。于是，只有上帝才是唯一的现实主义艺术家，如果他存在的话。由此可得，其他的所有艺术家都无法忠于现实。

因此，那些拒斥布尔乔亚社会及其形式艺术，坚持谈论现实并且只谈论现实的艺术家陷入了痛苦的两难——他们必须是现实主义的，但又无法做到。他们想让自己的艺术服从于现实，而任何对现实的描述都会实质上构成一个选择，这意味着它服从了艺术的原创性。俄国革命初期那些优美而悲惨的作品清楚地表明了这种痛苦。俄国通过勃洛克和伟大的帕斯捷尔纳克，马雅可夫斯基和叶赛宁，以及爱森斯坦和最早一批书写水泥和钢铁的小说家所赠予我们的，是一个绝佳的形式和主题的实验室，一片丰饶的躁动不安，一种狂野的研究热情。然而，我们有必要从中得出结论，道出人类如何能够遵循现实主义去创作，尽管彻底的现实主义是不可能的。无论是在这个还是在其他例子里，独裁统治都直奔主题，在它看来，只要你在创作中刻意坚持社会主义路线，现实主义便首先是必要的，其次也是可能的。这个命令意味着什么呢？

实际上，这条命令坦诚地承认了，如果没有一个选择的过程，再现现实就无从谈起。它也拒斥了由十九世纪的人们所阐述的那种现实主义理论。于是，需要做的就只剩下去找到一条选择的原则了，这条原则将给世界赋予形状。而这条原则不在我们所知的现实中，而是在将会成真的那个现实，简而言之就是在未来中被找到。要想正确地再现实存的事物，一个人就必须去描绘将来的事物。换言之，社会主义现实主义真正要摹画的对象，可能恰恰是那还未成为现实的东西。

这是个颇为美妙的矛盾。但是，归根结底，社会主义现实主义这个表达本身就有矛盾。既然现实根本就不完全是社会主义的，又怎么可能存在社会主义的现实主义呢？比方说，无论在过去还是在当下，现实都完全不是社会主义的。他们的回答很简单：那我们就从昨日或今日的现实中选取那些宣告了和服务于未来那个完美城邦的东西。因此我们一方面必须致力于否定和谴责现实中不符合社会主义的方面，另一方面又要全心全意地颂扬其中符合，或是将会符合社会主义的那些。我们将不可避免地得到一种政治宣传艺术，它有自己的一套正面人物和反面人物——换言之，一种教谕性的文学，它与鲜活现实之间的距离和形式主义艺术一样远。

于是，本来意在刻画现实的美学却成了一种新的唯心主义，而且对于真正的艺术家来说，它和布尔乔亚式的唯心主义一样贫瘠而缺乏养分。表面上，现实被赋予了至高无上的地位，但这只是为了让在实际中抛弃它这件事变得更容易。艺术化为乌有。艺术需要服务其他东西，这就将它变成了奴隶。只有那些从不描述现实的人才能被称颂为“现实主义者”，而其他人则遭到审查，在前者的授意之下。在布尔乔亚社会里，名声意味着不被阅读或是被误解；而在一个极权主义社会里，名声意味着阻止其他人的作品被阅读。再一次地，真正的艺术被扭曲和噤声，那些最热烈地欲求实现普世交流的人，让普世交流变得绝无可能了。

面对此种失败，最容易的做法就是承认那所谓的“社会主义现实主义”和伟大的艺术毫无关系。革命者们需要找到另一种不同的美学，这正是为了革命事业本身考虑。但众所周知，上述理论的捍卫者们大声叫喊着声称，在此之外，没有艺术。他们叫喊得颇为卖力，但我内心深处始终坚持认为，他们并不相信这件事，并且他们暗自下了决心，一定要让革命行动的价值凌驾于艺术价值之上。如果他们把这一点明白讲出来，讨论就会变得容易很多。有时，艺术家会与某些特权联系在一起，他们拒绝看到那些因贫穷而失声的人与那些其职责就是不停地表达自己的人之间，因彼此隔绝而产生的难以忍受的距离。因此，如果有些人因为目睹了大众的不幸与这一小部分人的特权之间刺眼的对照，并因此备感痛苦，从而做出了弃绝艺术的重大决定，这完全是值得尊敬的。于是，我们就可以理解这些人，试图与他们展开对话。比方说，尝试告诉他们压制创作自由或许不是推翻奴役的最好途径，而且只是因为他们尚未做到为所有人发声，就要放弃至少为一小部分人发声的这种想法是愚蠢的。没错，社会主义现实主义应该坦然承认自己和政治现实主义是一对孪生兄弟。它牺牲了艺术，为的是一个与艺术无关，但在诸价值的阶序上似乎高于艺术的目的。简而言之，它暂时压制艺术，是为了首先树立起正义。等到我们在某个不确定的未来时刻实现了正义之后，艺术就将被复活。就这样，当代情报机构所遵循的那条黄金法则被应用到了艺术领域——这条法则坚持，要想做出蛋卷，你就非得先打破鸡蛋不可。但我们决不能让这种飞扬跋扈的常识误导了。光是打破鸡蛋，哪怕打破几千个，也不足以做出一个美味的蛋卷来，而厨师的价值也绝对不由他打破鸡蛋的个数决定。如果今天的“艺术厨师们”打破了比他们原本打算打破的多得多的鸡蛋，那么文明的蛋卷可能就再也没法做得好了，艺术可能就再也没法复活了。野蛮状态从来都不会是暂时的。我们从来都没充分地防备过落入野蛮状态，而且它一旦发生，艺术领域的野蛮很自然地就会扩展到道德。接下来，人们的苦痛和流血中将会诞生无足轻重的文学、堕落放纵的媒体、肖像照片和独角戏。在其中，仇恨将变成新的宗教。于是艺术终结于强行矫饰的乐观主义——所有奢侈中的最糟糕者，所有谎言中的最荒谬者。

我们又怎么会感到惊讶呢？人类的苦难这个主题是如此广大，以至于似乎没人能够触及它，除非有一颗纤敏如济慈的心灵——据说他敏感到可以用双手触摸到痛苦本身。当一种受管控的文学试图用官样的安慰去缓和这种苦难的时候，人们就能看清这点了。“为艺术而艺术”的谎言假装自己对邪恶一无所知，因此便不用为它承担责任。但现实主义的谎言是同样严重的背叛，尽管它的确承认了人类当下的不幸，但利用这种不幸为某种未来的幸福状态添彩增辉。关于那个幸福的未来，没有任何人对它了如指掌，于是一切诡诈都可以假它之名而行。

这两种长期针锋相对的美学，一方赞成彻底拒斥现实生活，另一方则主张拒斥一切不是现实生活的东西，然而，它们最终却在一个远离现实的谎言和对艺术的压制上殊途同归了。右派的学院主义甚至不承认左派学院主义挂在嘴边的那种痛苦存在，而左派强调这痛苦，却是出于别有用心的动机。但在两种情况下，伴随着对艺术的否定，这痛苦都只是被加强了。

3

我们必须得出结论，认为艺术的本质就是这个谎言吗？我会说，恰恰相反，我上面描述的这两种态度之所以是谎言，正是因为它们与艺术并无关系。那么，艺术又是什么呢？可以确定的是，它绝对不是能被简单概括的东西。而且，在这么多执意要将事物简单化的人的喧哗之下，探究它变得更难了。一方面，人们期待天才是超凡绝俗而孤独的，而另一方面，他们又指望天才能够与所有人相似。可惜，现实要复杂得多。巴尔扎克用一句话说出了这个矛盾：“天才可以与每一个人相像，但没有人可以与他相像。”艺术也是如此，没有现实，艺术就什么都不是；而没有艺术，现实就会失去意义。那么，艺术究竟该如何在没有真实之物的情况下持存，而艺术又如何能够从属于真实？艺术家选择他的对象，同时也被对象选择。在某种意义上，艺术是对这世界中所有昙花一现和未竟之事的反抗。因此，它仅有的目的就是为一种现实赋以别样的形态，而这种现实是它无论如何都要保存的，因为它的情感都来源于此。这样看来，我们所有人都既是，又不是现实主义的。对于实存之物，艺术既不全盘拒绝，也不完全接受。它既拒绝又接受，而这就是为什么它必然是一场永不止息的持续撕裂。艺术家始终生活在这样一种矛盾含混的状态中，无法否定现实，但又永远注定要叩问现实里那些永远未及完成的部分。要想绘制一幅静物画，画家与苹果之间必须有一个对峙和彼此适应的过程。而如果没有这世界的光照射其上，理式就什么都不是的话，那么相应地，理式也为这光照增添了一些什么。真实的宇宙凭借其光辉召唤出了物体和雕像，同时它也从它们那里接收了另一种光，它限定了从天而降的光的模样。因此，伟大的风格位于艺术家和他的对象的正中间。

没有必要判定艺术究竟是必须逃离现实，还是必须服从现实。我们应该去探讨的，是作品具体需要压载多大分量的现实做负重，才能既不至于飘到九霄云外，又不至于被沉重的靴子压得走不动路，只能在地面上拖着脚勉强挪动。每个艺术家都得根据自己的天分和能力，对这个问题给出自己的答案。一个艺术家反抗这世界的现实越激烈，他所需的负重就越大，以平衡这种反抗的作用力。但这负重永远不能扼杀艺术家所处的那种孤独的紧迫状态。那些最高蹈的作品，如古希腊悲剧作家、梅尔维尔、托尔斯泰或莫里哀所创作的那些，永远会在现实和人对现实的拒绝之间保持某种平衡，让两者在永恒的角力中逼迫着彼此向上，形成一股源源不断的涌流，恰与生活本身最欢乐和最荡气回肠的情状相似。于是，每隔一段时间，就会出现一个新的世界，与我们日常的世界既不同又相同，既是特别的又是普世的，充满了天真无邪的不确定感——它在这短短几个小时里出现，是受天才的力量和执念所召唤的。事情就是这样，事情又不是这样；世界一无是处，世界就是全部——这就是每个真正的艺术家都会发出的，自相矛盾而不知疲倦的呼喊。正是这呼喊让他坐立不安，双眼永远大睁着，每过一段时间就替这个世界上所有沉睡者唤醒那个转瞬即逝却不屈不挠的现实的形象，那个现实我们从未真正认识过，但一见到就能认出来。

与此相似的是，艺术家既不能背离他的时代，也不能将自己彻底沉浸在时代之中。如果他背离了时代，他就是在对着虚空言说。但是反过来，只要他将自己的时代作为创作对象，他就树立了自己作为主体的身份，无法完全投入其中了。换言之，当艺术家选择与所有人共命运的那一刻，他便明确地肯定了自己的个体性。艺术家无法逃离这种模糊性。艺术家从历史中撷取那些自己可以理解或经历的部分，无论直接还是间接。换句话说就是，撷取切近的事件和当下生活着的人们，而不会去探讨某个切近的事件与对当下的艺术家来说不可见的未来之间会有的什么关系。以一个尚不存在的人的名义去论断当代的人，那是预言做的事情。而艺术家要想评判别人讲给他听的那些神话，就只能通过它们在活着的人中间产生的回响来判断。宗教或政治的预言家可以铁口直断，而且我们都知道，他们从不惮于这么做。但艺术家不能这样。如果他做绝对的论断，他就要将现实任意划分成善良与邪恶两派，这样就陷进了情节剧式的陈腐俗套。而与之相反，艺术的目的并不是去立法或去谋求至高统治的权柄，而是首先去理解。有时它的确会因为理解而实现了至高的统治，但没有哪部天才之作是建立在仇恨和蔑视之上的。这就是为什么，艺术家在他慢慢上升到那个高位之后，会选择赦免而非定罪。他不是审判官而是辩护者。他永远站在当下活着的生命一边，为他们代言，因为他们活着。他真挚地呼吁爱你的邻人，而非爱那些遥远的陌生人，因为当代的人文主义正是被强调对遥远陌生人的爱败坏了，到最后它成了法庭上人们有口无心的标准对答。相反，伟大的作品最终会让所有的审判官感到困惑和挫败。通过它，艺术家既向最高贵的人物致以敬意，也在最卑劣的罪犯面前谦卑地低头。王尔德在狱中曾这样写道：“同我一起在这个悲惨监狱里的所有悲惨的人中，没有一个是未与生活的奥秘缔结了一种象征性关系的。”是的，而且这生活的奥秘，恰与艺术的奥秘一致。

曾经有那么一百五十年，生于商人社会的作家，除了寥寥几个例外，都以为自己可以幸运而不负责任地生活。实际上，他们的确这样生活了，然后独自死去，就像他们独自活着一样。但我们这些二十世纪的作家再也不可能是独自一人了。我们必须知道，我们永远不可能逃脱人类共同的苦难，而且我们仅有的为自己辩护的方式，如果还可能辩护的话，就是尽最大努力为那些自己无法发声的人们发声。我们必须为所有此刻正在受苦的人们发声，无论那压迫着他们的国家或政党过去有怎样的丰功伟绩，将来又会有何等的荣耀光华：对艺术家来说，没有哪个施暴者可以免责。这就是为什么美无法为任何政党服务，即使是在今天，尤其是在今天；它不能为除人类苦难或人类自由之外的任何东西服务，无论短期还是长期。唯一称得上真正坚定的艺术家，是那些就算没有拒绝参与战斗，也至少会拒绝加入常规军队，始终保持自由佣兵身份的人。于是，如果他好好地思考过的话，他从美中得到的教益就应该不是自私自利，而是要坚定地与他人站在一起。这样看上去，美从未奴役过任何人。相反，在几千年里的每一天、每一秒钟，美都在减轻数以百万计的人所遭受的奴役，偶尔还会彻底解放其中的一部分人。毕竟，或许艺术的伟大就在于美和痛苦之间、对人类的爱和创造的疯狂之间、无法忍受的孤独和令人疲倦的人群之间、拒绝和允诺之间的永恒张力。艺术在“轻浮无聊”和“政治口号”这两条巨大的裂隙之间前进。伟大的艺术家在狭窄的山脊上前行，每一步都在踏入未知，在冒极大的风险。但只有在那风险中才有艺术的自由。那是一种困难的自由，更接近于苦行者的戒律吗？哪个艺术家会否认这点呢？又有哪个艺术家胆敢夸口自己能完成这样一项无止境的任务呢？这种自由预先假定了身体和心灵的健康，一种反映了强韧灵魂的风格，以及一种耐心的反抗。像所有的自由那样，它也是一种永恒的风险、一场让人精疲力竭的冒险活动，这就是为什么今天的人们往往回避这种风险，回避自由及其苛刻的要求，愿意接受任何枷锁，从而至少求得精神的安逸。但如果艺术不是一场冒险，它又是什么，又将如何得到辩护呢？不，自由的艺术家是那个会付出极大的努力来自己创造秩序的人。他所要赋予秩序的事物越是桀骜不驯，他的统治就越是铁腕，他就越能伸张自己的自由。我一直很欣赏纪德说过的一句话，尽管它可能容易遭到误解。他说：“艺术生于限制而死于自由。”的确如此。但千万不能把它理解成“艺术可以被控制”。只有由艺术施加于自身的那种限制才能让它生存，其他的限制都会扼杀它。相反，如果它不对自己施加限制，就会放纵自己沉溺于疯狂的呓语，沦为影子的奴隶。因此，最自由的艺术和最逆反的意志恰恰是最古典主义的，它奖赏最辛勤的工作。只要一个社会和其中的艺术家不认同这种漫长而自由的工作，只要他们还在怡情解闷的安逸或循规蹈矩的舒适中放松自己，享受“为艺术而艺术”的游戏或听任“现实主义艺术”的说教，这个社会的艺术家就必然会深陷虚无和贫乏。这就相当于在说，今天我们能否复兴，取决于我们的勇气和我们想要变得清醒的意愿。

是的，复兴取决于我们所有人。是我们决定了西方能否诞生一位或几位反亚历山大的人，来重新系好那曾被一剑斩断的、文明的戈耳狄俄斯之结[3]。为此我们必须担负起自由的所有风险和苦役。我们无须知道，通过追求正义，我们最终能否保存自由；只需要知道，如果没有自由我们将失去一切，无论是未来的正义，还是古代的美。只有自由能使人们脱离彼此孤立的状态，而奴隶制主宰的正是一大群孤立的人。艺术，凭借着我在前文中试图定义的那种自由本质使人团结，而暴政将人分散。因此现代无论是左派还是右派的暴政，首先迫害的总是艺术家和知识分子也就不足为奇了。暴君知道艺术作品中有解放的力量，只有对于那些不尊敬它的人，这力量才是神秘的。每一部伟大作品都让人类的面孔变得更可爱、更丰富了，而这就是它的全部秘密。成千上万的集中营和牢狱都不足以锁住这种人类尊严的惊人见证。这就是为什么文化无法被中止，哪怕是暂时地中止，来为一种新的文化让路。人对自己的苦难和高贵所做的完整见证不能被中止，呼吸的行为不能被中止。没有一种文化不背负前代的遗产，而我们不能，也断然不该拒绝我们西方遗产中的任何东西。无论将来会有什么作品出现，它们都将怀抱这同一个秘密——它由勇气和自由组成，被所有时代、所有国家的成千上万的艺术家的胆魄所滋养。是的，现代暴政向我们表明，即使当艺术家只是在完成他的天职的时候，他也是公众之敌，而且这么想是对的。但以这种方式，暴政实际上是在通过艺术家，向一个从来未曾被击垮过的“人”的形象致以敬意。

我的结论将会很简单。那就是，在所有这些源自我们历史的喧哗和骚动中间，说出一句“让我们欢庆吧”。让我们庆贺自己有幸见证了那个说谎的、贪恋安逸的欧洲的消亡，得以直面残酷的真相。让我们作为人而庆贺，因为一个旷日持久的骗局已经崩塌，我们清楚地看到了那威胁着我们的东西。让我们作为艺术家而庆贺，因为我们已经从沉睡不起和充耳不闻的状态中被唤醒，被迫将目光投向悲苦、牢狱和流血。如果在这样的景象面前，我们可以保持对岁月和面庞的记忆，以及反过来，在世界的美好面前，我们可以不致忘记那些被折辱的人，那么西方的艺术就将重获它的力量和最高主权。的确，历史上有许多这样的例子，在其中艺术家要面临同样严重的抉择。但是在一个哪怕是最简单的言语也要让人付出自由和鲜血的代价的时刻，艺术家必须学会克制，小心行事。危险让人遁入古典主义。而一切的伟大，最终都根植于冒险。

不负责任的艺术家的时代已经过去了。我们会为失去了那些片刻的欢喜而感到遗憾。但我们也能够承认，这场严峻的考验同时也增加了我们接近真实的可能，而且我们将接受这个挑战。如果艺术自由仅仅是为了确保艺术家感觉舒适，那它就一文不值。要想让一种价值或美德在社会中生根发芽，我们就必须对它诚实，换言之，我们必须在每个可能的时刻为它付出应付的代价。如果自由变成了危险品，人们就可能会停止对它的滥用。而我无法附和，比方说，那些在今天哀叹智慧衰落的人。表面上看，他们是对的。但说实话，智慧只有在它不牵涉任何风险，并且只被少数埋首书斋的人文主义者垄断的时候，才衰落得最厉害。而在今天，当它终于被迫直面真正的风险之时，它才有机会重新堂堂正正地站起来，再度赢得人们的尊敬。

据说，尼采在与卢·莎乐美[4]绝交后的那段时间里，曾一度陷入彻底的孤独。他因即将独自写作一部皇皇巨著而感到既濒临崩溃又格外振奋，于是经常深夜在热那亚湾附近的山间行走，用树枝和落叶燃起熊熊篝火，然后静静地站在一旁看着火堆燃烧。我经常梦见这些火焰，有时我还会想象把某些人和某些作品带到这些火堆前面，以检验其成色。嗯，我们这个时代就是这样的一簇火焰，它散发出的难以忍受的热力无疑会将许多著作烧成灰烬。但那些能经受住考验而存留下来的纯金则会毫发无伤。看着这样的作品，我们尽可以放心地、毫无保留地沉浸在无上的智识欢乐之中，我们称这种欢乐为“激赏”。

人完全可以渴望一种更温和的火焰，让人得以暂缓最终的宣判，停下来思索片刻，事实上我也是如此希望的。但或许对艺术家来说，唯有在最激烈的战斗中才能获得真正的平静。“每一堵墙都是一扇门。”爱默生如是说，而他说得完全正确。让我们不要去别处寻找那扇门和那条逃离这里的出路了，只在那堵挡在我们的生活面前的墙上寻找吧。让我们去战斗的风暴中心寻找喘息的空间，因为只有在那里才能找到。在我看来，如果让我选择在哪里结束这篇演讲，那在这里停下正好。人们说，伟大的思想都是像鸽子一般轻盈地来到这个世界上的。那么，或许如果我们听得足够专注，就能在各个帝国和民族的喧嚣嘈杂之中，听见翅膀振动的声音，那是生命和希望在振翅。有些人会说这希望存在于一个民族之中，另外一些人则会说它系于某个人的身上。而我更愿意相信它是被数百万个孤独的个体所唤醒和复活的，每一天，这些人的行动和工作都在取消边界，以及历史所强加于我们的粗暴的意义。因此，那始终受到威胁的真理从迷雾中赫然闪现——每一个人，都正从由他自己的苦难和欢乐构成的地基上，建造起一切人共有的大厦。

保卫智识

如果我们所关注的那种法国式的友谊，只不过是那些彼此相处融洽的人之间流溢出的亲善情感，那么，我不会对它抱什么希望。那将是最容易，也最无用的一种友谊。而我认为那些建立了这个名为“法国友谊协会”的人，心里想着的必定不是这个——他们想要的是另一种更困难的友谊，它要求人付出努力。为了避免屈从于便利或是落入自鸣得意的陷阱，我将利用接下来的这十分钟发言时间仅仅向你们指出一点：这项事业是多么困难。而指出这一点最有效的方式莫过于谈论一直在妨害友谊的东西——换句话说，谎言和仇恨。

事实上，如果我们不能摒除谎言和仇恨的话，就无法对法国式的友谊产生任何助益。在某种意义上，我们显然没能摒除它们。我们现在才汲取这个教训已经太迟了。而且，或许希特勒主义最后也最长久的胜利，就藏在它给那些最激烈地与之战斗的人心灵上留下的耻辱的伤痕中。怎么可能不是这样呢？这个世界困于一场空前的仇恨爆发，已有数年之久。这四个年头里[5]，我们在法国国内见证了那种仇恨的合乎情理的表达。许多和你我一样的人，他们的双手早上刚刚抚摸过孩童头顶，几个小时后，同一双手就将一丝不苟地将他人处以极刑。这些人成了施行仇恨和酷刑的官僚。这四个年头里，他们让一座座村庄里的孩童尽成孤儿；一连数枪打在男人们的脸上，直到最后没人能认出这些人本来的模样；将孩童的尸体硬生生地塞进过小的棺材里；在姐妹眼前折磨兄弟；批量制造懦夫和胆小鬼，并摧毁那些最骄傲的灵魂。他们就是通过这样的手段实行统治的。这些故事看上去在海外并不被采信。然而，在这四个年头里，我们这些深陷战争创痛的人无可避免地相信了这些故事。这四年里的每个早上，每个法国人翻开当天的报纸，就会领到自己那份仇恨和羞辱。而这些仇恨和羞辱必然无法从我们身上根除。我们心中留有仇恨。我们心中留有那种嗜血的冲动，正是这冲动那天在第戎让一个十四岁的孩子扑到一个被私刑处死的通敌者的尸身上，划花了他的脸。我们心中留有暴怒，一想到某些画面、某些面容，这暴怒就会整个吞噬我们的灵魂。处刑者的仇恨又唤起了受害者的仇恨。处刑结束之后，法国人心里仍然残存着一部分无处发泄的恨意。他们看向彼此的目光中仍然带着仇恨的痕迹。

而这就是我们必须首先战胜的东西。我们充满怨毒的心必须得到治疗。我们与未来的敌人之间最艰难的一战，注定是在我们内心的战场上展开的，我们需要付出卓绝的努力，才能将对仇恨的欲望转变为对正义的渴望。不向仇恨投降，不对暴力做出让步，遏制住自己的激愤使之不致盲目——这些是我们为了弘扬友谊、抵制希特勒主义所仍然能做的事。即使在今天，某些报刊还在肆意宣扬暴力和侮辱，但这么做其实只是在向敌人投降罢了。相反，我们有必要确保批评永远不要降格为侮辱；我们必须承认我们的敌人也有可能是对的，而且无论如何，他们自己的行事理由尽管可能是坏的，但也并非必然出自他们的一己私欲。简言之，我们有必要重铸我们的政治心态。

让我们停下来思考一下，这究竟意味着什么？这意味着我们必须保卫智识。当初纳粹党刚刚攫取权力的时候，戈林曾对他们的哲学做过一个精准的概括，他宣称：“只要有人在我面前提到‘智识’，我就要掏出左轮手枪。”而且这种哲学并不是德国人特有的，当时整个欧洲的文化界都在争相指责智识过度的危害和知识分子的缺陷。知识分子们自己也欣然参与到这场攻击之中。直觉的哲学在各处大行其道，与其相伴而生的还有重情感而轻理智的浪漫主义谬论，就好像这两者能被分开一样。然后战争就爆发了，我们随即战败。维希政权告诉我们，智识要为战败负主要责任。我们的农民读了太多的普鲁斯特。而且，所有人都知道，《巴黎晚报》、费南代尔和贸易联盟的宴会，这些都是智识的标志。似乎那些让法国败亡的领袖之所以这样平庸，全是因为他们书读多了。

即使到了现在，智识仍然遭到冷遇，而这只证明敌人尚未被击败。只要你试图不带成见地去理解事物，哪怕仅仅是提到“客观性”这个词，你就马上会被指控为诡辩和装腔作势。不，我们不能这样！这种状况必须被改变。我深知智识过度可能会带来哪些危害，我也深知知识分子是个多么狡狯的物种，随时可能倒戈。但这些都不是正确的智识。我们在讨论的那种智识是以勇气为后盾的，那种智识在这四年里付出了一切所要付出的代价，以守住自己的尊严。如果那种智识被彻底消灭，独裁的暗夜就要降临。这就是为什么我们必须要保卫它，保卫它所有的责任和权利。当且仅当我们做到了这一点，“法国式的友谊”才能有意义。因为友谊是一种唯自由人才能获取的学问，而智识和彼此间的相互理解则是自由的必要前提。

最后，我想直接对今天来到这场集会的学生朋友们说几句话。我无意向你们宣扬美德。有太多的法国人将美德和冷酷无情混为一谈了。如果我有任何权利这样做的话，我宁可向你们宣扬激情。但我实际上希望的是，那些将在未来代表法国智识界的人，至少能下决心永远不会在下面一两件事上投降。我希望，当别人告诉他们说，智识永远不讨好，或是人可以为了成功而说谎的时候，他们不要屈从于这些说辞。我希望，他们不要屈从于轻信、暴力或是惰性。到了那时，或许“法国式的友谊”便可以不再仅仅是一纸空文。到了那时，或许在一个自由而充满激情地拥抱真理的国度里，人们便可以再次开始对彼此心怀那种珍贵的情感，而只有那种情感，才能让世界免于沦为一片巨大的死寂。

面包与自由

如果把我们刚刚指出的那些背信弃义和敲诈勒索的案例放到一起来看的话，我们可以预料，总有一天欧洲会被集中营充满，所有人都会被关起来，除了那些狱卒，于是他们将不得不互相关押。到最后只剩下一个人的时候，他就会被称作“至高狱卒”。在这样一个理想社会里，“反对派”这个让所有二十世纪政府感到困扰的难题，将一劳永逸地得到解决。

当然，这只是一个预言而已。尽管世界各国的政府和警察机关都怀着极大的善意，力图实现这个幸福的局面，但我们距离实现它还很遥远。比方说，目前在我们这些西欧国家里，自由还是会受到官方的赞许。但这种自由总让我想到某些中产阶级家庭的穷苦女亲戚。她成了寡妇，失去了她天然的保护者。于是，这个家庭好心地收留她，让她住进顶楼的房间，家里的厨房也向她敞开大门。有时，她会在礼拜日被拉出去公开展览一圈，以证明这家主人的善良慷慨，没干什么不可告人的勾当。但在其他一切事情上，特别是在重要的场合，她都被要求缄口不言。另外，即使某个警察一时兴起，在黑暗的角落里对她动手动脚，也没人会太放在心上，因为她之前也不是没遇到过类似的事情，特别是在一家之主那里。而且，毕竟，为了这点小事去找执法机关的麻烦太不值当了。我们必须承认，在东方，人们要更坦率。他们会直接把女亲戚关进小储藏室里，然后插上两条结实的门闩，从而一劳永逸地解决所有关于她的麻烦。看上去，约莫五十年后她就会被放出来，到那时理想社会将被彻底建成。然后，人们还会以她的名义举办庆典。但在我看来，那时她可能已经变成一个风烛残年的老古董了，我非常怀疑她是否还能有一星半点的剩余价值。如果我们停下来思考这两种关于自由的观念，即储藏室那种和厨房那种，并决定强行把两者合并到一起，并在所有这些喧哗之中被迫进一步压缩这位女亲戚的活动空间，就马上可以看出，充斥在我们历史中的是奴役而非自由，而我们所生活其间的这个世界也正是如此。每天早上，这个丑陋的世界都从我们阅读的晨间报纸里一跃而出，直扑到我们面前，让我们日日夜夜都始终被愤恨和厌恶填满。

最简单，因此也最具诱惑力的做法就是去责怪政府，或是某些隐秘势力的放肆行径。何况他们也的确有罪，他们的罪责如此根深蒂固，以至于我们已经忘记是如何开始的了。但他们并非唯一应为此负责的人。毕竟，倘若自由始终必须依赖政府的鼓励才能茁壮成长，那么它很可能至今仍在摇篮里，或者早已被埋葬了，墓碑上刻着“另一个小天使去了天堂”的字样。据我所知，从来没有人声称由金钱和剥削所主导的社会确保了自由与公正的胜利；也从来没有人怀疑过，警察国家会将法律学堂开设在他们用来刑讯逼供的地窖里。于是，当他们压迫和剥削的时候，就仅仅是在履行自己的职责而已。如果有人盲目到将保护自由的工作托付到这些人手上的话，他就没有权利对自由随即遭到玷污表示惊讶。如果说，今时今日，自由被束缚和侮辱了，这绝不是因为它的敌人施行了什么狡计，只是因为它失去了天然的保护者。是的，自由成了寡妇。但我们还必须补充一句，这千真万确——让自由成为寡妇的正是我们。

关心自由的人是被压迫者，而它天然的保护者也一向要到被压迫者中去寻找。在封建制度下的欧洲，公社城镇成了自由的温床；一七八九年革命中自由那昙花一现的胜利也是城镇居民的功劳；十九世纪以来，工人运动始终捍卫着自由和正义的双重荣光，当时人们做梦都未想到去说它们二者之间的矛盾是不可调和的。无论是体力还是智力的劳动者，都共同参与到塑造并在这个世界上弘扬自由的事业之中，直到它成了我们一切思想的基石，像空气一样不可或缺却鲜少被我们特别注意，直到它突然被夺走，我们才发现自己命不久矣。如果今天自由在世界上的很大一部分地区都在逐渐退潮的话，这很可能是因为奴役的手段从未像今天这样被如此冷漠而精心选取过，或从未如此行之有效过，但同时也是因为自由的天然捍卫者们出于疲劳，出于绝望，或是出于有关“策略”和“效率”的错误观念而背弃了它。没错，二十世纪的大事件之一便是革命运动抛弃了自由的价值。从那一刻起，某种希望就从世界上消失了，于是每个自由人都陷入了孤独之中。

自二十世纪初，一种流言开始广为传播，并逐渐变得越来越有力量，即自由只是个布尔乔亚式的骗局。这个定义搞错了一个词语的位置，而我们今天仍然在为这个错位付出代价。正确的说法应该是：布尔乔亚式的自由是个骗局——而非所有自由。事实上我们只需要说布尔乔亚式的自由不是自由，或者在最好的情况下，只是自由的雏形。但有一些自由千真万确地需要我们去争取，并且一旦抓住就永远不能放手。诚然，对于那个白天被拴在机床旁边无法脱身，夜里则要与全家人挤在一个小房间里的男人来说，没有什么自由可言。但这个事实所谴责的应该是一个阶级、一个社会以及这个社会所施行的奴役，而非自由本身。如果没有自由，我们中最穷困的那些人就活不下去，因为即使社会在一夜之间改头换面，变得能让所有人体面舒适，它将仍然是野蛮的，除非自由得胜。仅仅是因为布尔乔亚社会谈论自由却不实践它，工人们的世界就该同样放弃实践自由，而只是因为自己并不空谈它而自豪吗？无论如何，混乱的确产生了，自由在革命运动中逐渐成了一个坏词，因为布尔乔亚社会把它用作骗局。人们开始只是合情合理地、健康地拒绝相信布尔乔亚社会对自由的挟持，而到后来他们开始不相信自由本身。在最好的情况下，自由被推迟到了遥不可及的未来，在那之前人们被禁止谈论它。他们给出的理由是我们需要首先实现正义，然后才轮到自由，就好像一群奴隶还能指望获得正义似的。还有些强硬的知识分子会向工人宣称，只有面包而非自由才是他们的利益所在，就好像工人们不知道他们的面包多多少少是因为自由而得到的。我们要承认，面对布尔乔亚社会中长期存在的不正义，走向另一个极端的诱惑是巨大的。毕竟，我们中可能没有哪个人，是从来不曾在行动上或思想上向这种诱惑屈服过的。但是，历史在前进，而鉴于我们目前所看到的东西，我们必须要停下来三思了。由工人们掀起的革命在一九一七年获得胜利，它标志了真正自由的降临，是这个世界上曾有过的最伟大的希冀。但这场革命在四周强敌环伺，面临内忧外患的情况下，建立起了一支警察力量以自保。于是这世界上最伟大的希冀便逐渐沦为世界上最高效的高压统治。与此同时，布尔乔亚社会那种虚假的自由却未被撼动分毫。

总的来说，我们所生活的这个世界是以那种犬儒主义的辩证法为特征的，它将不正义与奴役对立起来，并用其中的一方去加强另一方。当我们将戈培尔和希姆莱的朋友，第二次世界大战的真正赢家佛朗哥请进文化殿堂的时候，有人抗议说，佛朗哥的监狱里每一天发生的事情都在无情地嘲弄铭刻在联合国教科文组织宪章上的人权条款。对此，我们微笑着答道，波兰也是联合国教科文组织的成员国，而在公共自由这方面，两者其实是半斤八两。这当然是个愚蠢的论证！要是你不幸非得把你的大女儿嫁给一个前苦役犯队伍的头头，这也完全不构成你接下来应该将她的妹妹嫁给社会小组里最优雅的探员的理由，一个家庭里有一个败类就够多了。但这个愚蠢的论证却能生效，正如我们每天都能见到的那样。在令人作呕的“比烂”尝试之下，只有一件事情是始终不变的——受害者永远都是同一群人。自由的价值不断地遭到侵犯和冒用，于是我们注意到，在世界各处，正义也和自由一起遭到了亵渎。

要怎样打破这个极恶的循环呢？显然，只能通过立刻在我们自己和他人身上重新唤醒自由的价值，并永远不再允许它被牺牲或被与我们对正义的要求割裂开来，哪怕只是暂时。当下我们所有人的口号都只能是以下这句：在自由的层面上寸步不让，同时在正义的层面上寸土必争。具体来说，我们仍能保有的少数几项民主主义自由绝不是无足轻重的幻觉，我们必须强硬地捍卫它们。它们所代表的，恰恰是过去的两个世纪里所有伟大的革命胜利所留下的遗产。因此，它们绝不像诸多聪明的煽动家告诉我们的那样，是对真正自由的否定。并不存在一种理想的、会在未来的某天同时被给予全人类的自由，像一份在你生命行将结束时发放的养老金那样。只有需要一点一点地艰难战斗才能赢得的自由，而我们仍然拥有的这些只是前进路上的阶梯，它们当然远远不充足，但通向彻底解放的路径的确是由它们构成的。如果我们放任这些自由被压制，我们无法取得进步。相反，我们是在步步后撤和倒退了。而在将来的某一天，我们注定要重新沿着之前的足迹再度奋力前进，届时人们将再一次付出汗水与鲜血的代价。

不，在今天选择自由，并不意味着停止从苏联政权中获利，并向布尔乔亚政权那方投诚。因为那样反而相当于选择了被奴役两次，而且最恶劣的是，两次都是替其他人选择的。选择自由并不等于背弃正义，虽然有些人这样告诉我们。相反，今天选择自由，是关于那些在世界各处受苦和战斗的人的，而这便是自由的意义所在。在选择自由的同时我们也选择了正义，并且说实话，从今往后，我们无法只选择其中之一而放弃另一个。如果有人拿走了你的面包，那么他同时也压制了你的自由。然而，如果有人剥夺了你的自由，不用怀疑，你的面包一定也遭到了威胁，因为从此你的面包就不取决于你自己和你的奋斗了，而是取决于你主人的心情。纵观全世界，凡是自由消减的地方，贫穷就会增加，反之亦然。如果说这个残酷的世纪曾教会我们什么的话，那就是一切经济革命都必须是自由的，正如一切政治上的解放也必须要涵盖经济上的解放。被压迫者不但希望自己可以从饥饿中解脱，也希望可以从主人的宰制之下解脱。他们都很清楚，只有在他们可以成功抵抗和击退所有那些主人之后，他们才能在实质上免于饥饿。

在结语部分我还想补充一点，那就是，自由与正义的割裂就等同于劳工和文化的割裂，而后者是一切社会罪恶的缩影。欧洲工人运动面临的困惑，一部分就源于它失去了它那真正的、可以在经历一切失败之后为其提供抚慰的家园，即对自由的信仰。然而，与之相似的是，欧洲知识分子面临的困惑来自布尔乔亚和伪革命者共同制造的双重骗局，这骗局将他们与他们本真性的唯一来源，即一切人的工作和苦难割裂开来；将他们与他们唯一的同盟，即工人群体割裂开来。在我看来，称得上贵族的只有两种人：劳动的贵族和智识的贵族，而我现在知道了，试图让他们中的一方去统治另一方是多么疯狂和罪恶。我知道这两者共同组成了同一个高贵的整体，而他们的真理，以及最重要的，他们的有效性取决于联合。我知道如果两者被分开，他们就会放任自己逐渐被暴政和野蛮所压倒，但如果联合在一起，他们就可以统治世界。这就是为什么，一切致力于拆散他们的联盟、将他们分开的举动，都是在向人类和人类最高的希望开战。因此，所有独裁政权最关心的莫过于压制劳工和文化两者。事实上，两者都必须被噤声，因为暴君们非常清楚，不然的话其中一方总会为另一方振臂高呼。于是，在我看来，当下知识分子可能的背叛方式有两种，而这两种背叛都是因为他接受了同一个东西——劳工和文化的割裂。第一种背叛常见于布尔乔亚知识分子，他们希望压迫和奴役工人，以维持自己的种种特权。他们常声称自己在捍卫自由，但他们所捍卫的首先是自由赋予他们且只赋予他们的一系列特权[6]。第二种背叛则常见于那些自认为是左翼的知识分子，他们出于对自由的不信任，情愿在“服务未来的正义”这个虚假的借口下，将文化以及文化所预先假定的自由置于管控之下。在这两种情况下，无论是从不正义中得利的人还是叛变自由的人，都认定和支持了智力劳动和体力劳动的割裂，而这注定会让劳工和文化两者都变得苍白无力。他们同时贬低了自由和正义。

诚然，当自由主要由特权构成的时候，它侮辱了劳工并将他们与文化隔绝。但自由并不主要由特权构成，责任才是它最重要的构成部分。当我们中的每一个人都试图将自由的责任置于自由的特权之前时，自由就将劳工和文化联结到了一起，并释放出唯一一种能够促进正义的力量。我们行动的法则、我们抵抗的秘密可以被简单地陈述如下：一切羞辱了劳工的东西同时也羞辱了文化，反之亦然。而那革命的斗争，那长达数世纪的朝向解放的努力，首先可以作为一场持续的、对双重羞辱的抗拒而得到辩护。

说实话，我们还尚未完全摆脱这种羞辱。但时代之轮滚滚向前，历史在变化，而我敢肯定总有一天我们将不再是孤军奋战。对我来说，我们今天能聚到这里，这本身就是一个好的信号。各个工会的成员出于对我们的自由的关切而相聚，并准备着捍卫自由。这着实让我们有充分的理由从四面八方来到这里，来赞颂团结和希望。我们面前的路还很长，但如果扰乱一切的丑恶战争不致爆发的话，我们最终总会有时间来描绘我们所需要的那种正义和自由。但要做到这一点，我们今后必须平静而坚决地拒斥一切此前被灌输的谎言。不，自由不是建立在集中营或是殖民地那些被压迫民族的苦难，或是工人的贫困之上的！不，和平鸽绝不会栖息在绞刑架上！不，自由的力量绝不会强迫受害者的子孙们与马德里或其他地方的刽子手为伍！至少我们从今往后应该确信这一点，同时也要确信，自由不该是某个国家或领袖赠送给我们的礼物，而是一件我们必须每天都打起精神，齐心协力去赢取的珍宝。

Create Dangerously

An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it. The writers of today know this. If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked. If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence.

In the midst of such din the writer cannot hope to remain aloof in order to pursue the reflections and images that are dear to him. Until the present moment, remaining aloof has always been possible in history. When someone did not approve, he could always keep silent or talk of something else. Today everything is changed and even silence has dangerous implications. The moment that abstaining from choice is itself looked upon as a choice and punished or praised as such, the artist is willy-nilly impressed into service. ‘Impressed’ seems to me a more accurate term in this connection than ‘committed.’ Instead of signing up, indeed, for voluntary service, the artist does his compulsory service. Every artist today is embarked on the contemporary slave galley. He has to resign himself to this even if he considers that the galley reeks of its past, that the slave-drivers are really too numerous, and, in addition, that the steering is badly handled. We are on the high seas. The artist, like everyone else, must bend to his oar, without dying if possible-in other words, go on living and creating.

To tell the truth, it is not easy, and I can understand why artists regret their former comfort. The change is somewhat cruel. Indeed, history’s amphitheatre has always contained the martyr and the lion. The former relied on eternal consolations and the latter on raw historical meat. But until now the artist was on the sidelines. He used to sing purposely, for his own sake, or at best to encourage the martyr and make the lion forget his appetite. But now the artist is in the amphitheatre. Of necessity, his voice is not quite the same; it is not nearly so firm.

It is easy to see all that art can lose from such a constant obligation. Ease, to begin with, and that divine liberty so apparent in the work of Mozart. It is easier to understand why our works of art have a drawn, set look and why they collapse so suddenly. It is obvious why we have more journalists than creative writers, more boy-scouts of painting than Cézannes, and why sentimental tales or detective novels have taken the place of War and Peace or The Charterhouse of Parma. Of course, one can always meet that state of things with a humanistic lamentation and become what Stepan Trofimovich in The Possessed insists upon being: a living reproach. One can also have, like him, attacks of patriotic melancholy. But such melancholy in no way changes reality. It is better, in my opinion, to give the era its due, since it demands this so vigorously, and calmly admit that the period of the revered master, of the artist with a camellia in his buttonhole, of the armchair genius is over. To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art. The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies,is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible.

It is not enough to say in this regard that art is threatened by the powers of the State. If that were true, the problem would be simple: the artist fights or capitulates. The problem is more complex, more serious too, as soon as it becomes apparent that the battle is waged within the artist himself. The hatred for art, of which our society provides such fine examples, is so effective today only because it is kept alive by artists themselves. The doubt felt by the artists who preceded us concerned their own talent. The doubt felt by artists of today concerns the necessity of their art, hence their very existence. Racine in 1957 would make excuses for writing Bérénice when he might have been fighting to defend the Edict of Nantes.

That questioning of art by the artist has many reasons, and only the loftiest need be considered. Among the best explanations is the feeling the contemporary artist has of lying or of indulging in useless words if he pays no attention to history’s woes. What characterizes our time, indeed, is the way the masses and their wretched condition have burst upon contemporary sensibilities. We now know that they exist, whereas we once had a tendency to forget them. And if we are more aware, it is not because our aristocracy, artistic or otherwise, has become better-no, have no fear-it is because the masses have become stronger and keep people from forgetting them.

There are still other reasons, and some of them less noble, for this surrender of the artist. But, whatever those reasons may be, they all work toward the same end: to discourage free creation by undermining its basic principle, the creator’s faith in himself. ‘A man’s obedience to his own genius,’ Emerson said magnificently,‘is faith in its purest form.’ And another American writer of the nineteenth century added:‘So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.’ Such amazing optimism seems dead today. In most cases the artist is ashamed of himself and his privileges, if he has any. He must first of all answer the question he has put to himself: is art a deceptive luxury?

I

The first straightforward reply that can be made is this: on occasion art may be a deceptive luxury. On the poop deck of slave galleys it is possible, at any time and place, as we know, to sing of the constellations while the convicts bend over the oars and exhaust themselves in the hold; it is always possible to record the social conversation that takes place on the benches of the amphitheatre while the lion is crunching the victim. And it is very hard to make any objections to the art that has known such success in the past. But things have changed somewhat, and the number of convicts and martyrs has increased amazingly over the surface of the globe. In the face of so much suffering, if art insists on being a luxury, it will also be a lie.

Of what could art speak, indeed? If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation. If it blindly rejects that society, if the artist makes up his mind to take refuge in his dream, art will express nothing but a negation. In this way we shall have the production of entertainers or of formal grammarians, and in both cases this leads to an art cut off from living reality. For about a century we have been living in a society that is not even the society of money (gold can arouse carnal passions) but that of the abstract symbols of money. The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favour of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man’s carnal truth is handled as something artificial. There is no reason for being surprised that such a society chose as its religion a moral code of formal principles and that it inscribes the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ on its prisons as well as on its temples of finance. However, words cannot be prostituted with impunity. The most misrepresented value today is certainly the value of liberty. Good minds (I have always thought there were two kinds of intelligence-intelligent intelligence and stupid intelligence) teach that it is but an obstacle on the path of true progress. But such solemn stupidities were uttered because for a hundred years a society of merchants made an exclusive and unilateral use of liberty, looking upon it as a right rather than as a duty, and did not fear to use an ideal liberty, as often as it could, to justify a very real oppression. As a result, is there anything surprising in the fact that such a society asked art to be, not an instrument of liberation, but an inconsequential exercise and a mere entertainment? Consequently, a fashionable society in which all troubles were money troubles and all worries were sentimental worries was satisfied for decades with its society novelists and with the most futile art in the world, the one about which Oscar Wilde, thinking of himself before he knew prison, said that the greatest of all vices was superficiality.

In this way the manufacturers of art (I did not say the artists) of middle-class Europe, before and after 1900, accepted irresponsibility because responsibility pre-supposed a painful break with their society (those who really broke with it are named Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Strindberg, and we know the price they paid). From that period we get the theory of art for art’s sake, which is merely a voicing of that irresponsibility. Art for art’s sake, the entertainment of a solitary artist, is indeed the artificial art of a factitious and self-absorbed society. The logical result of such a theory is the art of little cliques or the purely formal art fed on affectations and abstractions and ending in the destruction of all reality. In this way a few works charm a few individuals while many coarse inventions corrupt many others. Finally art takes shape outside of society and cuts itself off from its living roots. Gradually the artist, even if he is celebrated, is alone or at least is known to his nation only through the intermediary of the popular press or the radio, which will provide a convenient and simplified idea of him. The more art specializes, in fact, the more necessary popularization becomes. In this way millions of people will have the feeling of knowing this or that great artist of our time because they have learned from the newspapers that he raises canaries or that he never stays married more than six months. The greatest renown today consists in being admired or hated without having been read. Any artist who goes in for being famous in our society must know that it is not he who will become famous, but someone else under his name, someone who will eventually escape him and perhaps someday will kill the true artist in him.

Consequently, there is nothing surprising in the fact that almost everything worthwhile created in the mercantile Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-in literature, for instance-was raised up against the society of its time. It may be said that until almost the time of the French Revolution current literature was, in the main, a literature of consent. From the moment when middle-class society, a result of the revolution, became stabilized, a literature of revolt developed instead. Official values were negated, in France, for example, either by the bearers of revolutionary values, from the Romantics to Rimbaud, or by the maintainers of aristocratic values, of whom Vigny and Balzac are good examples. In both cases the masses and the aristocracy-the two sources of all civilization-took their stand against the artificial society of their time.

But this negation, maintained so long that it is now rigid, has become artificial too and leads to another sort of sterility. The theme of the exceptional poet born into a mercantile society (Vigny’s Chatterton is the finest example) has hardened into a presumption that one can be a great artist only against the society of one’s time, whatever it may be. Legitimate in the beginning when asserting that a true artist could not compromise with the world of money, the principle became false with the subsidiary belief that an artist could assert himself only by being against everything in general. Consequently, many of our artists long to be exceptional, feel guilty if they are not, and wish for simultaneous applause and hisses. Naturally, society, tired or indifferent at present, applauds and hisses only at random. Consequently, the intellectual of today is always bracing himself stiffly to add to his height. But as a result of rejecting everything, even the tradition of his art, the contemporary artist gets the illusion that he is creating his own rule and eventually takes himself for God. At the same time he thinks he can create his reality himself. But, cut off from his society, he will create nothing but formal or abstract works, thrilling as experiences but devoid of the fecundity we associate with true art, which is called upon to unite. In short, there will be as much difference between the contemporary subtleties or abstractions and the work of a Tolstoy or a Molière as between an anticipatory draft on invisible wheat and the rich soil of the furrow itself.

II

In this way art may be a deceptive luxury. It is not surprising, then, that men or artists wanted to call a halt and go back to truth. As soon as they did, they denied that the artist had a right to solitude and offered him as a subject, not his dreams, but reality as it is lived and endured by all. Convinced that art for art’s sake, through its subjects and through its style, is not understandable to the masses or else in no way expresses their truth, these men wanted the artist instead to speak intentionally about and for the majority. He has only to translate the sufferings and happiness of all into the language of all and he will be universally understood. As a reward for being absolutely faithful to reality, he will achieve complete communication among men.

This ideal of universal communication is indeed the ideal of any great artist. Contrary to the current presumption, if there is any man who has no right to solitude, it is the artist. Art cannot be a monologue.When the most solitary and least famous artist appeals to posterity, he is merely reaffirming his fundamental vocation. Considering a dialogue with deaf or inattentive contemporaries to be impossible, he appeals to a more far-reaching dialogue with the generations to come.

But in order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death-these are the things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual to individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all. Striving toward realism is therefore legitimate, for it is basically related to the artistic adventure.

So let’s be realistic. Or, rather, let’s try to be so, if this is possible. For it is not certain that the word has a meaning; it is not certain that realism, even if it is desirable, is possible. Let us stop and inquire first of all if pure realism is possible in art. If we believe the declarations of the nineteenth-century naturalists, it is the exact reproduction of reality. Therefore it is to art what photography is to painting: the former reproduces and the latter selects. But what does it reproduce and what is reality? Even the best of photographs, after all, is not a sufficiently faithful reproduction, is not yet sufficiently realistic. What is there more real, for instance, in our universe than a man’s life, and how can we hope to preserve it better than in a realistic film? But under what conditions is such a film possible? Under purely imaginary conditions. We should have to presuppose, in fact, an ideal camera focused on the man day and night and constantly registering his every move. The very projection of such a film would last a lifetime and could be seen only by an audience of people willing to waste their lives in watching someone else’s life in great detail. Even under such conditions, such an unimaginable film would not be realistic for the simple reason that the reality of a man’s life is not limited to the spot in which he happens to be. It lies also in other lives that give shape to his-lives of people he loves, to begin with, which would have to be filmed too, and also lives of unknown people, influential and insignificant, fellow citizens, policemen, professors, invisible comrades from the mines and foundries, diplomats and dictators, religious reformers, artists who create myths that are decisive for our conduct-humble representatives, in short, of the sovereign chance that dominates the most routine existences. Consequently, there is but one possible realistic film: the one that is constantly shown us by an invisible camera on the world’s screen. The only realistic artist, then, is God, if he exists. All other artists are, ipso facto, unfaithful to reality.

As a result, the artists who reject bourgeois society and its formal art, who insist on speaking of reality, and reality alone, are caught in a painful dilemma. They must be realistic and yet cannot be. They want to make their art subservient to reality, and reality cannot be described without effecting a choice that makes it subservient to the originality of an art. The beautiful and tragic production of the early years of the Russian Revolution clearly illustrates this torment. What Russia gave us then with Blok and the great Pasternak, Maiakovski and Essenine, Eisenstein and the first novelists of cement and steel, was a splendid laboratory of forms and themes, a fecund unrest, a wild enthusiasm for research. Yet it was necessary to conclude and to tell how it was possible to be realistic even though complete realism was impossible. Dictatorship, in this case as in others, went straight to the point: in its opinion realism was first necessary and then possible so long as it was deliberately socialistic. What is the meaning of this decree?

As a matter of fact, such a decree frankly admits that reality cannot be reproduced without exercising a selection, and it rejects the theory of realism as it was formulated in the nineteenth century. The only thing needed, then, is to find a principle of choice that will give shape to the world. And such a principle is found, not in the reality we know, but in the reality that will be-in short, the future. In order to reproduce properly what is, one must depict also what will be. In other words, the true object of socialistic realism is precisely what has no reality yet.

The contradiction is rather beautiful. But, after all, the very expression of socialistic realism was contradictory. How, indeed, is a socialistic realism possible when reality is not altogether socialistic? It is not socialistic, for example, either in the past or altogether in the present. The answer is easy: we shall choose in the reality of today or of yesterday what announces and serves the perfect city of the future. So we shall devote ourselves, on the one hand, to negating and condemning whatever aspects of reality are not socialistic and, on the other hand, to glorifying what is or will become so. We shall inevitably get a propaganda art with its heroes and its villains-an edifying literature, in other words, just as remote as formalistic art is from complex and living reality. Finally, that art will be socialistic insofar as it is not realistic.

This aesthetic that intended to be realistic therefore becomes a new idealism, just as sterile for the true artist as bourgeois idealism. Reality is ostensibly granted a sovereign position only to be more readily thrown out. Art is reduced to nothing. It serves and, by serving, becomes a slave. Only those who keep from describing reality will be praised as realists. The others will be censured, with the approval of the former. Renown, which in bourgeois society consisted in not being read or in being misunderstood, will in a totalitarian society consist in keeping others from being read. Once more, true art will be distorted or gagged and universal communication will be made impossible by the very people who most passionately wanted it.

The easiest thing, when faced with such a defeat, would be to admit that so‑called socialistic realism has little connection with great art and that the revolutionaries, in the very interest of the revolution, ought to look for another aesthetic. But it is well known that the defenders of the theory described shout that no art is possible outside it. They spend their time shouting this. But my deep-rooted conviction is that they do not believe it and that they have decided, in their hearts, that artistic values must be subordinated to the values of revolutionary action. If this were clearly stated, the discussion would be easier. One can respect such great renunciation on the part of men who suffer too much from the contrast between the unhappiness of all and the privileges sometimes associated with an artist’s lot, who reject the unbearable distance separating those whom poverty gags and those whose vocation is rather to express themselves constantly. One might then understand such men, try to carry on a dialogue with them, attempt to tell them, for instance, that suppressing creative liberty is perhaps not the right way to overcome slavery and that until they can speak for all it is stupid to give up the ability to speak for a few at least. Yes, socialistic realism ought to own up to the fact that it is the twin brother of political realism. It sacrifices art for an end that is alien to art but that, in the scale of values, may seem to rank higher. In short, it suppresses art temporarily in order to establish justice first. When justice exists, in a still indeterminate future, art will resuscitate. In this way the golden rule of contemporary intelligence is applied to matters of art-the rule that insists on the impossibility of making an omelette without breaking eggs. But such overwhelming common sense must not mislead us. To make a good omelette it is not enough to break thousands of eggs, and the value of a cook is not judged, I believe, by the number of broken eggshells. If the artistic cooks of our time upset more baskets of eggs than they intended, the omelette of civilization may never again come out right, and art may never resuscitate. Barbarism is never temporary. Sufficient allowance is never made for it, and, quite naturally, from art barbarism extends to morals. Then the suffering and blood of men give birth to insignificant literatures, an ever indulgent press, photographed portraits, and sodality plays in which hatred takes the place of religion. Art culminates thus in forced optimism, the worst of luxuries, it so happens, and the most ridiculous of lies.

How could we be surprised? The suffering of mankind is such a vast subject that it seems no one could touch it unless he was like Keats so sensitive, it is said, that he could have touched pain itself with his hands. This is clearly seen when a controlled literature tries to alleviate that suffering with official consolations. The lie of art for art’s sake pretended to know nothing of evil and consequently assumed responsibility for it. But the realistic lie, even though managing to admit mankind’s present unhappiness, betrays that unhappiness just as seriously by making use of it to glorify a future state of happiness, about which no one knows anything, so that the future authorizes every kind of humbug.

The two aesthetics that have long stood opposed to each other, the one that recommends a complete rejection of real life and the one that claims to reject anything that is not real life, end up, however, by coming to agreement, far from reality, in a single lie and in the suppression of art. The academicism of the Right does not even acknowledge a misery that the academicism of the Left utilizes for ulterior reasons. But in both cases the misery is only strengthened at the same time that art is negated.

III

Must we conclude that this lie is the very essence of art? I shall say instead that the attitudes I have been describing are lies only insofar as they have but little relation to art. What, then, is art? Nothing simple, that is certain. And it is even harder to find out amid the shouts of so many people bent on simplifying everything. On the one hand, genius is expected to be splendid and solitary; on the other hand, it is called upon to resemble all. Alas, reality is more complex. And Balzac suggested this in a sentence: ‘The genius resembles everyone and no one resembles him.’ So it is with art, which is nothing without reality and without which reality is insignificant. How, indeed, could art get along without the real and how could art be subservient to it? The artist chooses his object as much as he is chosen by it. Art, in a sense, is a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world. Consequently, its only aim is to give another form to a reality that it is nevertheless forced to preserve as the source of its emotion. In this regard, we are all realistic and no one is. Art is neither complete rejection nor complete acceptance of what is. It is simultaneously rejection and acceptance, and this is why it must be a perpetually renewed wrenching apart. The artist constantly lives in such a state of ambiguity, incapable of negating the real and yet eternally bound to question it in its eternally unfinished aspects. In order to paint a still life, there must be confrontation and mutual adjustment between a painter and an apple. And if forms are nothing without the world’s lighting, they in turn add to that lighting. The real universe which, by its radiance, calls forth bodies and statues receives from them at the same time a second light that determines the light from the sky. Consequently, great style lies midway between the artist and his object.

There is no need of determining whether art must flee reality or defer to it, but rather what precise dose of reality the work must take on as ballast to keep from f loating up among the clouds or from dragging along the ground with weighted boots. Each artist solves this problem according to his lights and abilities. The greater an artist’s revolt against the world’s reality, the greater can be the weight of reality to balance that revolt. But the weight can never stifle the artist’s solitary exigency. The loftiest work will always be, as in the Greek tragedians, Melville, Tolstoy, or Molière, the work that maintains an equilibrium between reality and man’s rejection of that reality, each forcing the other upward in a ceaseless overflowing, characteristic of life itself at its most joyous and heart-rending extremes. Then, every once in a while, a new world appears, different from the everyday world and yet the same, particular but universal, full of innocent insecurity-called forth for a few hours by the power and longing of genius. That’s just it and yet that’s not it; the world is nothing and the world is everything-this is the contradictory and tireless cry of every true artist, the cry that keeps him on his feet with eyes ever open and that, every once in a while, awakens for all in this world asleep the fleeting and insistent image of a reality we recognize without ever having known it.

Likewise, the artist can neither turn away from his time nor lose himself in it. If he turns away from it, he speaks in a void. But, conversely, insofar as he takes his time as his object, he asserts his own existence as subject and cannot give in to it altogether. In other words, at the very moment when the artist chooses to share the fate of all, he asserts the individual he is. And he cannot escape from this ambiguity. The artist takes from history what he can see of it himself or undergo himself, directly or indirectly-the immediate event, in other words, and men who are alive today, not the relationship of that immediate event to a future that is invisible to the living artist. Judging contemporary man in the name of a man who does not yet exist is the function of prophecy. But the artist can value the myths that are offered him only in relation to their repercussion on living people. The prophet, whether religious or political, can judge absolutely and, as is known, is not chary of doing so. But the artist cannot. If he judged absolutely, he would arbitrarily divide reality into good and evil and thus indulge in melodrama. The aim of art, on the contrary, is not to legislate or to reign supreme, but rather to understand first of all. Sometimes it does reign supreme, as a result of understanding. But no work of genius has ever been based on hatred and contempt. This is why the artist, at the end of his slow advance, absolves instead of condemning. Instead of being a judge, he is a justifier. He is the perpetual advocate of the living creature, because it is alive. He truly argues for love of one’s neighbour and not for that love of the remote stranger which debases contemporary humanism until it becomes the catechism of the law court. Instead, the great work eventually confounds all judges. With it the artist simultaneously pays homage to the loftiest figure of mankind and bows down before the worst of criminals. ‘There is not,’ Wilde wrote in prison, ‘a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life.’ Yes, and that secret of life coincides with the secret of art.

For a hundred and fifty years the writers belonging to a mercantile society, with but few exceptions, thought they could live in happy irresponsibility. They lived, indeed, and then died alone, as they had lived. But we writers of the twentieth century shall never again be alone. Rather, we must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so. But we must do so for all those who are suffering at this moment, whatever may be the glories, past or future, of the States and parties oppressing them: for the artist there are no privileged torturers. This is why beauty, even today, especially today, cannot serve any party; it cannot serve, in the long or short run, anything but men’s suffering or their liberty. The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a free-lance. The lesson he then finds in beauty, if he draws it fairly, is a lesson not of selfishness but rather of hard brotherhood. Looked upon thus, beauty has never enslaved anyone. And for thousands of years, every day, at every second, it has instead assuaged the servitude of millions of men and, occasionally, liberated some of them once and for all. After all, perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent. Art advances between two chasms, which are frivolity and propaganda. On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lies the freedom of art. A difficult freedom that is more like an ascetic discipline? What artist would deny this? What artist would dare to claim that he was equal to such a ceaseless task? Such f reedom presupposes health of body and mind, a style that reflects strength of soul, and a patient defiance. Like all f reedom, it is a perpetual risk, an exhausting adventure, and this is why people avoid the risk today, as they avoid liberty with its exacting demands, in order to accept any kind of bondage and achieve at least comfort of soul. But if art is not an adventure, what is it and where is its justification? No, the free artist is no more a man of comfort than is the free man. The free artist is the one who, with great effort, creates his own order. The more undisciplined what he must put in order, the stricter will be his rule and the more he will assert his freedom. There is a remark of Gide that I have always approved although it may be easily misunderstood: ‘Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.’ That is true. But it must not be interpreted as meaning that art can be controlled. Art lives only on the constraints it imposes on itself; it dies of all others. Conversely, if it does not constrain itself, it indulges in ravings and becomes a slave to mere shadows. The freest art and the most rebellious will therefore be the most classical; it will reward the greatest effort. So long as a society and its artists do not accept this long and free effort, so long as they relax in the comfort of amusements or the comfort of conformism, in the games of art for art’s sake or the preachings of realistic art, its artists are lost in nihilism and sterility. Saying this amounts to saying that today the rebirth depends on our courage and our will to be lucid.

Yes, the rebirth is in the hands of all of us. It is up to us if the West is to bring forth any anti-Alexanders to tie together the Gordian Knot of civilization cut by the sword. For this purpose, we must assume all the risks and labours of freedom. There is no need of knowing whether, by pursuing justice, we shall manage to preserve liberty. It is essential to know that, without liberty, we shall achieve nothing and that we shall lose both future justice and ancient beauty. Liberty alone draws men from their isolation; but slavery dominates a crowd of solitudes. And art, by virtue of that f ree essence I have tried to define, unites whereas tyranny separates. It is not surprising, therefore, that art should be the enemy marked out by every form of oppression. It is not surprising that artists and intellectuals should have been the first victims of modern tyrannies, whether of the Right or of the Left. Tyrants know there is in the work of art an emancipatory force, which is mysterious only to those who do not revere it. Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret. And thousands of concentration camps and barred cells are not enough to hide this staggering testimony of dignity. This is why it is not true that culture can be, even temporarily, suspended in order to make way for a new culture. Man’s unbroken testimony as to his suffering and his nobility cannot be suspended; the act of breathing cannot be suspended. There is no culture without legacy, and we cannot and must not reject anything of ours, the legacy of the West. Whatever the works of the future may be, they will bear the same secret, made up of courage and freedom, nourished by the daring of thousands of artists of all times and all nations. Yes, when modern tyranny shows us that, even when confined to his calling, the artist is a public enemy, it is right. But in this way tyranny pays its respects, through the artist, to an image of man that nothing has ever been able to crush.

My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: ‘Let us rejoice.’ Let us rejoice, indeed, at having witnessed the death of a lying and comfort-loving Europe and at being faced with cruel truths. Let us rejoice as men because a prolonged hoax has collapsed and we see clearly what threatens us. And let us rejoice as artists, torn from our sleep and our deafness, forced to keep our eyes on destitution, prisons, and bloodshed. If, faced with such a vision, we can preserve the memory of days and of faces, and if, conversely, faced with the world’s beauty, we manage not to forget the humiliated, then Western art will gradually recover its strength and its sovereignty. To be sure, there are few examples in history of artists confronted with such hard problems. But when even the simplest words and phrases cost their weight in freedom and blood, the artist must learn to handle them with restraint. Danger makes men classical, and all greatness, after all, is rooted in risk.

The time of irresponsible artists is over. We shall regret it for our little moments of bliss. But we shall be able to admit that this ordeal contributes meanwhile to our chances of authenticity, and we shall accept the challenge. The f reedom of art is not worth much when its only purpose is to assure the artist’s comfort. For a value or a virtue to take root in a society, there must be no lying about it; in other words, we must pay for it every time we can. If liberty has become dangerous, then it may cease to be prostituted. And I cannot agree, for example, with those who complain today of the decline of wisdom. Apparently they are right. Yet, to tell the truth, wisdom has never declined so much as when it involved no risks and belonged exclusively to a few humanists buried in libraries. But today, when at last it has to face real dangers, there is a chance that it may again stand up and be respected.

It is said that Nietzsche after the break with Lou Salomé, in a period of complete solitude, crushed and uplifted at the same time by the perspective of the huge work he had to carry on without any help,used to walk at night on the mountains overlooking the gulf of Genoa and light great bonfires of leaves and branches which he would watch as they burned. I have often dreamed of those fires and have occasionally imagined certain men and certain works in f ront of those fires, as a way of testing men and works. Well, our era is one of those fires whose unbearable heat will doubtless reduce many a work to ashes! But as for those which remain, their metal will be intact, and, looking at them, we shall be able to indulge without restraint in the supreme joy of the intelligence which we call ‘admiration.’

One may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for the artist than what he finds in the heat of combat. ‘Every wall is a door,’ Emerson correctly said. Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living. Instead, let us seek the respite where it is-in the very thick of the battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all.

Defence of Intelligence

If the kind of French friendship with which we are concerned were to be but an effusion of feeling among people who get along together, I should not count on it. That would be the easiest, but also the least useful, form of friendship. And I suppose that the people who founded this society called L’Amitié Française wanted something else-a more difficult form of friendship that calls for effort. In order to avoid yielding to facility and indulging in self-congratulation, I should like, in the ten minutes allotted me, merely to point out the difficulties of such an undertaking. I could not possibly do this more effectively than by speaking of what always stands in the way of f riendship-in other words, falsehood and hatred.

We shall indeed not accomplish anything for French friendship if we cannot get rid of falsehood and hatred. In a way, we have certainly not got rid of them. We have been learning their lessons for too long now. And perhaps the last and most long-lived victory of Hitlerism is to be found in the shameful scars made on the hearts of those who fought Hitlerism most vigorously. How could it be otherwise? For years now, this world has been subjected to an unparalleled outbreak of hatred. For four years we witnessed here at home the reasoned expression of that hatred. Men like you and me who in the morning patted children on the head would a few hours later become meticulous executioners. Such men became the bureaucrats of hatred and torture. For four years their administration functioned by creating villages of orphans, by shooting men’s faces full of holes so that they would not be recognized, by jamming and stamping children’s bodies into coffins too small for them, by torturing brothers in their sisters’ presence, by shaping cowards as in a mould, and by destroying the proudest of souls. It seems that such stories are not believed abroad. But for four years, in our anguish, we could not avoid believing them. Every morning for four years each Frenchman received his ration of hatred and his slap in the face-when he opened his newspaper. Necessarily, some of that has remained with us. We were left with hatred. We were left with the impulse that the other day in Dijon made a fourteen-year-old child fall upon a collaborator who had been lynched and disfigure his face. We were left with the rage that consumes our souls at the memory of certain images and certain faces. The executioners’ hatred engendered the victims’ hatred. And once the executioners had gone, the French were left with their hatred only partially spent. They still look at one another with a residue of anger.

Well, this is what we must overcome first of all. Our poisoned hearts must be cured. And the most difficult battle to be won against the enemy in the future must be fought within ourselves, with an exceptional effort that will transform our appetite for hatred into a desire for justice. Not giving in to hatred, not making any concessions to violence, not allowing our passions to become blind-these are the things we can still do for friendship and against Hitlerism. Even today certain newspapers still indulge in violence and insult. But that is simply still giving in to the enemy. Instead, it is essential that we never let criticism descend to insult; we must grant that our opponent may be right and that in any case his reasons, even though bad, may be disinterested. It is essential, in short, that we remake our political mentality.

What does this mean, if we stop to think about it? It means that we must save intelligence. A few years ago, when the Nazis had just seized power, Goering gave a fair idea of their philosophy by declaring: ‘When anyone talks to me of intelligence, I take out my revolver.’ And that philosophy was not limited to Germany. At the same time throughout civilized Europe the excesses of intelligence and the faults of the intellectual were being pointed out. Intellectuals themselves, by an interesting reaction, were not the last to join the attack. Everywhere philosophies of instinct were dominant and, along with them, the spurious romanticism that prefers feeling to understanding as if the two could be separated. Since then intelligence has regularly been blamed. The war came and then the defeat. Vichy taught us that the chief responsibility lay with the intelligence. Our peasants had read too much Proust. And everyone knows that Paris-Soir, Fernandel, and trade-association banquets are signs of intelligence. It seems that the mediocrity of her leaders which was killing France had its source in books.

Even now intelligence is ill-treated. This proves simply that the enemy is not yet conquered. If you merely make an effort to understand without preconceptions, if you merely talk of objectivity, you will be accused of sophistry and criticized for having pretensions. No, we can’t have that! That is what must be reformed. For I know as well as anyone the excesses of intelligence, and I know as well as anyone that the intellectual is a dangerous animal ever ready to betray. But that is not the right kind of intelligence. We are speaking of the kind that is backed by courage, the kind that for four years paid whatever was necessary to have the right to respect. When that intelligence is snuffed out, the black night of dictatorship begins. This is why we must maintain it with all its duties and all its rights. At that price, and only at that price, will French f riendship have a meaning. For friendship is a knowledge acquired by free men. And there is no freedom without intelligence or without mutual understanding.

In conclusion, I shall speak directly to you students who are gathered here. I am not one to preach virtue to you. Too many Frenchmen confuse virtue with bloodlessness. If I had any right to do so, I should rather preach the passions to you. But I should like those who will represent French intelligence in the future to be resolved at least never to yield on one or two points. I should like them not to give in when they are told that intelligence is always unwelcome or that it is permissible to lie in order to succeed. I should like them not to give in to guile, to violence, or to inertia. Then perhaps a French friendship will be possible that will be more than idle talk. Then perhaps, in a nation that is f ree and passionately attached to truth, man will begin again to have that feeling for man, without which the world can never be but a vast solitude.

Bread and Freedom

If we add up the examples of breach of faith and extortion that have just been pointed out to us, we can foresee a time when, in a Europe of concentration camps, the only people at liberty will be prison guards who will then have to lock up one another. When only one remains, he will be called the ‘supreme guard,’ and that will be the ideal society in which problems of opposition, the headache of all twentieth-century governments, will be settled once and for all.

Of course, this is but a prophecy and, although governments and police forces throughout the world are striving, with great good will, to achieve such a happy situation, we have not yet gone that far. Among us, for instance, in Western Europe, freedom is officially approved. But such f reedom makes me think of the poor female cousin in certain middle-class families. She has become a widow; she has lost her natural protector. So she has been taken in, given a room on the top floor, and is welcome in the kitchen. She is occasionally paraded publicly on Sunday, to prove that one is virtuous and not a dirty dog. But for everything else, and especially on state occasions, she is requested to keep her mouth shut. And even if some policeman idly takes liberties with her in dark corners, one doesn’t make a fuss about it, for she has seen such things before, especially with the master of the house, and, after all, it’s not worth getting in bad with the legal authorities. In the East, it must be admitted, they are more forthright. They have settled the business of the female cousin once and for all by locking her up in a closet with two solid bolts on the door. It seems that she will be taken out fifty years from now, more or less, when the ideal society is definitively established. Then there will be celebrations in her honour. But, in my opinion, she may then be somewhat moth-eaten, and I am very much afraid that it may be impossible to make use of her. When we stop to think that these two conceptions of freedom, the one in the closet and the other in the kitchen, have decided to force themselves on each other and are obliged in all that hullabaloo to reduce still further the female cousin’s activity, it will be readily seen that our history is rather one of slavery than of freedom and that the world we live in is the one that has just been described, which leaps out at us from the newspaper every morning to make of our days and our weeks a single day of revolt and disgust.

The simplest, and hence most tempting, thing is to blame governments or some obscure powers for such naughty behavior. Besides, it is indeed true that they are guilty and that their guilt is so solidly established that we have lost sight of its beginnings. But they are not the only ones responsible. After all, if freedom had always had to rely on governments to encourage her growth, she would probably be still in her infancy or else definitively buried with the inscription ‘another angel in heaven.’ The society of money and exploitation has never been charged, so far as I know, with assuring the triumph of freedom and justice. Police states have never been suspected of opening schools of law in the cellars where they interrogate their subjects. So, when they oppress and exploit, they are merely doing their job, and who ever blindly entrusts them with the care of freedom has no right to be surprised when she is immediately dishonoured. If freedom is humiliated or in chains today, it is not because her enemies had recourse to treachery. It is simply because she has lost her natural protector. Yes, freedom is widowed, but it must be added because it is true: she is widowed of all of us.

Freedom is the concern of the oppressed, and her natural protectors have always come from among the oppressed. In feudal Europe the communes maintained the ferments of f reedom; those who assured her fleeting triumph in 1789 were the inhabitants of towns and cities; and since the nineteenth century the workers’ movements have assumed responsibility for the double honour of freedom and justice, without ever dreaming of saying that they were irreconcilable. Labourers, both manual and intellectual, are the ones who gave a body to freedom and helped her progress in the world until she has become the very basis of our thought, the air we cannot do without, that we breathe without even noticing it until the time comes when, deprived of it, we feel that we are dying. And if freedom is regressing today throughout such a large part of the world, this is probably because the devices for enslavement have never been so cynically chosen or so effective, but also because her real defenders, through fatigue, through despair, or through a false idea of strategy and efficiency, have turned away from her. Yes, the great event of the twentieth century was the forsaking of the values of freedom by the revolutionary movement. Since that moment a certain hope has disappeared from the world and a solitude has begun for each and every free man.

When, after Marx, the rumor began to spread and gain strength that freedom was a bourgeois hoax, a single word was misplaced in that definition, and we are still paying for that mistake through the convulsions of our time. For it should have been said merely that bourgeois freedom was a hoax-and not all f reedom. It should have been said simply that bourgeois freedom was not freedom or, in the best of cases, was not yet freedom. But that there were liberties to be won and never to be relinquished again. It is quite true that there is no possible freedom for the man tied to his lathe all day long who, when evening comes, crowds into a single room with his family. But this fact condemns a class, a society and the slavery it assumes, not freedom itself, without which the poorest among us cannot get along. For even if society were suddenly transformed and became decent and comfortable for all, it would still be a barbarous state unless freedom triumphed. And because bourgeois society talks about freedom without practicing it, must the world of workers also give up practicing it and boast merely of not talking about it? Yet the confusion took place and in the revolutionary movement freedom was gradually condemned because bourgeois society used it as a hoax. From a justifiable and healthy distrust of the way that bourgeois society prostituted f reedom, people came to distrust freedom itself. At best, it was postponed to the end of time, with the request that meanwhile it be not talked about. The contention was that we needed justice first and that we would come to freedom later on, as if slaves could ever hope to achieve justice. And forceful intellectuals announced to the worker that bread alone interested him rather than f reedom, as if the worker didn’t know that his bread depends in part on his freedom. And, to be sure, in the face of the prolonged injustice of bourgeois society, the temptation to go to such extremes was great. After all, there is probably not one of us here who, either in deed or in thought, did not succumb. But history has progressed, and what we have seen must now make us think things over. The revolution brought about by workers succeeded in 1917 and marked the dawn of real freedom and the greatest hope the world has known. But that revolution, surrounded from the outside, threatened within and without, provided itself with a police force. Inheriting a definition and a doctrine that pictured f reedom as suspect, the revolution little by little became stronger, and the world’s greatest hope hardened into the world’s most efficient dictatorship. The false freedom of bourgeois society has not suffered meanwhile.

In conclusion, the characteristic of the world we live in is just that cynical dialectic which sets up injustice against enslavement while strengthening one by the other. When we admit to the palace of culture Franco, the friend of Goebbels and of Himmler-Franco, the real victor of the Second World War-to those who protest that the rights of man inscribed in the charter of UNESCO are turned to ridicule every day in Franco’s prisons we reply without smiling that Poland figures in UNESCO too and that, as far as public freedom is concerned, one is no better than the other. An idiotic argument, of course! If you were so unfortunate as to marry off your elder daughter to a sergeant in a battalion of ex‑convicts, this is no reason why you should marry off her younger sister to the most elegant detective on the society squad; one black sheep in the family is enough. And yet the idiotic argument works, as is proved to us every day. In such a disgusting attempt at outbidding, one thing only does not change-the victim, who is always the same. A single value is constantly outraged or prostituted-freedom-and then we notice that everywhere, together with freedom, justice is also profaned.

How then can this infernal circle be broken? Obviously, it can be done only by reviving at once, in ourselves and in others, the value of freedom-and by never again agreeing to its being sacrificed, even temporarily, or separated from our demand for justice. The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom. In particular, the few democratic liberties we still enjoy are not unimportant illusions that we can allow to be taken from us without a protest. They represent exactly what remains to us of the great revolutionary conquests of the last two centuries. Hence they are not, as so many clever demagogues tell us, the negation of true freedom. There is no ideal freedom that will someday be given us all at once, as a pension comes at the end of one’s life. There are liberties to be won painfully, one by one, and those we still have are stages-most certainly inadequate, but stages nevertheless-on the way to total liberation. If we agree to suppress them, we do not progress nonetheless. On the contrary, we retreat, we go backward, and someday we shall have to retrace our steps along that road, but that new effort will once more be made in the sweat and blood of men.

No, choosing freedom today does not mean ceasing to be a profiteer of the Soviet regime and becoming a profiteer of the bourgeois regime. For that would amount, instead, to choosing slavery twice and, as a final condemnation, choosing it twice for others. Choosing freedom is not, as we are told, choosing against justice. On the other hand,freedom is chosen today in relation to those who are everywhere suffering and fighting, and this is the only freedom that counts. It is chosen at the same time as justice, and, to tell the truth, henceforth we cannot choose one without the other. If someone takes away your bread, he suppresses your freedom at the same time. But if someone takes away your freedom, you may be sure that your bread is threatened, for it depends no longer on you and your struggle but on the whim of a master. Poverty increases insofar as freedom retreats throughout the world, and vice versa. And if this cruel century has taught us anything at all, it has taught that the economic revolution must be free just as liberation must include the economic. The oppressed want to be liberated not only from their hunger but also from their masters. They are well aware that they will be effectively freed of hunger only when they hold their masters, all their masters, at bay.

I shall add in conclusion that separating freedom from justice is tantamount to separating culture and labour, which is the epitome of the social sin. The confusion of the workers’ movement in Europe springs in part from the fact that it has lost its real home, where it took comfort after all defeats, which was its faith in f reedom. But, likewise, the confusion of European intellectuals springs from the fact that the double hoax, bourgeois and pseudo-revolutionary, separated them from their sole source of authenticity, the work and suffering of all, cutting them off from their sole natural allies, the workers. Insofar as I am concerned, I have recognized only two aristocracies, that of labour and that of the intelligence, and I know now that it is mad and criminal to try to make one dominate the other. I know that the two of them constitute but a single nobility, that their truth and, above all, their effectiveness lie in union; I know that if they are separated, they will allow themselves to be overcome gradually by the forces of tyranny and barbarousness, but that united, on the other hand, they will govern the world. This is why any undertaking that aims to loosen their ties and separate them is directed against man and his loftiest hopes. The first concern of any dictatorship is, consequently, to subjugate both labour and culture. In fact, both must be gagged or else, as tyrants are well aware, sooner or later one will speak up for the other. Thus, in my opinion, there are two ways for an intellectual to betray at present, and in both cases he betrays because he accepts a single thing-that separation between labour and culture. The first way is characteristic of bourgeois intellectuals who are willing that their privileges should be paid for by the enslavement of the workers. They often say that they are defending freedom, but they are defending first of all the privileges freedom gives to them, and to them alone.1 The second way is characteristic of intellectuals who think they are leftist and who, through distrust of freedom, are willing that culture, and the freedom it presupposes, should be directed, under the vain pretext of serving a future justice. In both cases the profiteers of injustice and the renegades of freedom ratify and sanction the separation of intellectual and manual labour which condemns both labour and culture to impotence. They depreciate at one and the same time both f reedom and justice.

It is true that f reedom, when it is made up

1. And, besides, most of the time they do not even defend freedom the moment there is any risk in doing so.

principally of privileges, insults labour and separates it from culture. But freedom is not made up principally of privileges; it is made up especially of duties. And the moment each of us tries to give freedom’s duties precedence over its privileges, freedom joins together labour and culture and sets in motion the only force that can effectively serve justice. The rule of our action, the secret of our resistance can be easily stated: everything that humiliates labour also humiliates the intelligence, and vice versa. And the revolutionary struggle, the centuries-old straining toward liberation can be defined first of all as a double and constant rejection of humiliation.

To tell the truth, we have not yet cast off that humiliation. But the wheel turns, history changes, and a time is coming, I am sure, when we shall cease to be alone. For me, our gathering here today is in itself a sign. The fact that members of unions gather together and crowd around our freedoms to defend them is indeed reason enough for all to come here from all directions to illustrate their union and their hope. The way ahead of us is long. Yet if war does not come and mingle everything in its hideous confusion, we shall have time at last to give a form to the justice and freedom we need. But to achieve that we must henceforth categorically refuse, without anger but irrevocably, the lies with which we have been stuffed. No, freedom is not founded on concentration camps, or on the subjugated peoples of the colonies, or on the workers’ poverty! No, the doves of peace do not perch on gallows! No, the forces of freedom cannot mingle the sons of the victims with the executioners of Madrid and elsewhere! Of that, at least, we shall henceforth be sure, as we shall be sure that freedom is not a gift received from a State or a leader but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.

[1]让·拉辛（Jean Racine，1639—1699），法国剧作家，与高乃依和莫里哀合称十七世纪最伟大的三位法国剧作家。《蓓蕾妮斯》（Bérénice）是拉辛的作品之一，是一部悲剧作品，灵感来自罗马史学家苏维托尼乌斯（Suetonius）记述的古罗马皇帝提图与蓓蕾妮斯的爱情悲剧。——编者注

[2]《南特敕令》（Édit de Nantes）是1598年法国国王亨利四世签署的一条敕令。这条敕令承认了法国国内结盟宗（又称胡格诺派）的信仰自由，并保证其信徒在法律上享有和公民同等的权利，是世界近代史上第一份有关宗教宽容的敕令。不过，1685年，法国国王路易十四颁布《枫丹白露敕令》，宣布基督新教是非法的，《南特敕令》亦因此而被废除。——编者注

[3]戈耳狄俄斯之结（Gordian/Gordius Knot）是亚历山大大帝在弗里吉亚首都戈尔迪乌姆时的传说故事。故事中提到了一个神谕：解开戈耳狄俄斯之结的人就可成为亚细亚之王。故事中，是亚历山大大帝斩断了绳结。——编者注

[4]卢·莎乐美（Lou Salomé，1861—1937），出生于俄罗斯，精神分析学家，游历甚广的作家和散文家。她对各种知识的兴趣使她结识了众多杰出的思想家，包括弗里德里希·尼采、西格蒙德·弗洛伊德和里尔克。——译者注

[5]加缪于1945年3月发表本次演说。——译者注

[6]并且，大部分时间，只要捍卫自由存在风险，他们就会袖手旁观。——原注

让我们遇见在。。

企鹅图书 微博(penguinbooks)

企鹅图书微信订阅号

企鹅图书数字业务微信服务号

更多关于我们对信息请

访问企鹅兰登北亚官网 PRHNA.COM

博洛尼亚的红窗帘

企鹅现代经典 第一辑

（英）约翰·伯格/著

郑远涛/译

企鹅图书 | PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

New Zealand | India | South Africa | North Asia

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at:

global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

THE RED TENDA OF BOLOGNA

Copyright © JOHN BERGER, 2007 and JOHN BERGER ESTATE.

First published in 2007. This selection first published in 2018 in Penguin Modern. Simplified Chinese

translation copyright © 郑远涛. Simplified Chinese edition copyright © 2021 by Penguin Random

House North Asia in association with CITIC Press Group. All rights reserved.

© “企鹅”及其相关标识是企鹅兰登（北京）文化发展有限公司已经注册或尚未注册的商标。

未经允许，不得擅用。

企鹅兰登电子书 | Penguin Random House eBooks

目录

博洛尼亚的红窗帘

The Red Tenda of Bologna

返回总目录

“这是个不太可能的城市，博洛尼亚——就像一个你在死后也许会行过的地方。”

博洛尼亚的红窗帘

我应该起笔于我如何爱他，以什么方式，到什么程度，怀着什么样的不懂。

埃德加是我父亲的大哥，在他出生的十九世纪八十年代，维多利亚女王刚加冕成为印度女皇。他刚搬来跟我们同住的时候，我十岁左右，他五十好几。然而在我心中他没有年龄。不是没有变化，也绝非永生，这没有年龄，是因为不曾锚定于任何时期，往昔或将来。因此，童年的我，可以平等地爱他。我是那么做的。

以我成长年代的标准，他是个失败的人。手头拮据，没有结婚，不修边幅，显然也胸无大志。他在南克罗伊登[1]开了一家规模很小的职业介绍所。他的热情主要在于写信（还有收信）。他写信给笔友、远房亲属、陌生人、旅途中的萍水相识。在他的梳妆台上永远搁着一册邮票。他对世界的了解或推断使我着迷。青春期的我喜欢他与众不同的憧憬，他落魄而极致的执着。

他和我很少拥抱或触碰彼此的身体，我们最亲密的联系在于互赠礼物。三十年间，我们的礼物依从着一条默契的不成文规矩：任何礼物都要小，不同寻常，并能够回应心中知道的对方的某一种兴趣。

随意罗列一部分我们互赠的礼物。

一柄开启信封的小刀

一袋布列塔尼酥饼

一张冰岛地图

一副摩托车护目镜

一册平装本的斯宾诺莎的《伦理学》

一打半惠特斯特布尔生蚝

一部狄更斯传

满满一火柴盒的埃及沙粒

一瓶龙舌兰酒——来自墨西哥的沙漠白兰地

还有（这时他在医院里快要死了）一条闪亮抢眼的丝绸宽领带，我把它系到他的法兰绒条纹睡衣外套的领口上，一边呵呵笑着，未曾号哭。他也知道我为什么笑。

我爱他，也由于他的从容淡定。他相信从总体和原则而言，美好盛世在于未来。这信仰在二十世纪很难延续，除非人闭上眼睛。他到哪儿都随身带着三副眼镜——镜片个个不同。他验看一切。他一九七二年去世。

他是我遇见过的最安分守己的人，还是最执着而独立的人？也许两样都是。他永远不在你预料他会在的地方。

他练习佩尔曼记忆术[2]和世界语，是和平主义者。代步工具是一辆样子古板的直立式单车，后部有行李架，上面绑着他从东克罗伊登公共图书馆换来或借来的书籍。他有三张这座图书馆的借阅证，随时可以调出十来本书。

骑上单车前，他先扣上两个绑腿夹，在刚过脚踝的地方扎住裤管。这使他看上去有点儿像印度人，尽管他的肤色很白——令人联想到法国人所谓牛奶面包的那种肤色，于男子而言也分外柔软。他没有驾驶证，虽然他三十岁时在第一次世界大战的西线战场上开过两年救护车。

每次和他并肩的时候——不论是比喻义还是实际意义上的——我都感到心安。他常常说，时间会证明的。他语气中有点儿什么使我设想，时间终究会证明那些我俩高兴听说的事情。

写信之外，他还热爱旅行。那时候旅行的人不少，但是观光业尚未出现。旅行者，不论富有还是俭朴，都自己计划行程。他是个俭朴的、持久不断的旅行者。他相信旅行能开阔心胸。在他阅读的大量传记之中，我记得有一本是成立了第一家旅行社的托马斯·库克的传记。另一本是柏辽兹传，在我伯父看来，他的音乐是最杰出的[3]旅行音乐。当然[4]。用上法语和意大利语（这比较少）词组的时候，他会露出一种自豪的微笑。

在我们家的餐室早早吃毕晚餐，他总是回到楼上自己的小卧室里读书，常常读到凌晨。那个房间不足欧陆火车卧铺单间的两倍大小，里面有一台收音机、一部打字机，他用两只手指在上面敲出信件和想法。大多数晚上，孩提和少年时的我会进去跟他道晚安，而我常常有个印象，觉得我们至少有三个人身处那个仅有一把直背椅（讨论时我总是坐在床上）的房间。那第三人，要么是他当时所读书本的作者，要么是书里他最喜爱的一个人物。就在那个拥挤的房间，我领会到印刷文字在阅读之际可以召唤出一个真人，如在身边。

伯父读的书大多关乎他计划的下次旅行，不然就是他刚结束的旅行。一年年过去，他已踏足爱尔兰、挪威、俄罗斯、丹麦、印度。（也许我夸张了，也许其中的一两次旅程，仅仅是我们在他的南克罗伊登办公室里低声交谈时计划过而已。）他也确实到过埃及、格陵兰岛和意大利。

他去南方研究历史，去北方（他更喜欢北方）跟大自然融为一体。

在意大利，他发现我们家的两个表亲，两人都在罗马教音乐。游历佛罗伦萨之前，他读了布克哈特的《意大利文艺复兴时期的文化》，花了好几个星期来详细计划每日的参观行程以及次序。定下计划，执行计划。后来，他对博洛尼亚这座城市着了迷。

这时我已经在上美术学校，便向他提起博洛尼亚是莫兰迪的城市。话刚出口，我就灵机一动：他和莫兰迪两人即使对调鞋子穿，也会浑然不觉有差别！他们都没有结婚，都在不同时期和一个未嫁的姐妹同住。他们的鼻子和嘴有同样的表情，在寻求一种无关肉体的亲密。他们都喜欢独自漫步，行走时始终对目光所遇保持好奇。两人的不同在于，莫兰迪是个孜孜矻矻的大艺术家，而我伯父不是，他是个热情洋溢的写信人。

这些话任何一点讲出来都很无礼，所以我只反复说了一句话：他去博洛尼亚时应该看看莫兰迪的画。

莫兰迪，他是个非常安静的人，伯父回来后告诉我。

什么意思？他已经死了，去年死的。

我知道。我只看了他画的瓶瓶罐罐、贝壳、花卉。非常细致，非常安静。他本来也可以当个建筑师，你不觉得吗？

是的，建筑师。

裁缝也行！

嗯，裁缝。你喜欢那城市吗？

它是红的，我从没见过博洛尼亚那样的红。啊！假使我们能明白那种红的秘密……它是一个让人想重返的城市，下回吧。[5]

沿着主广场的一些台阶拾级而上，便来到圣白托略大教堂的东面，它像博洛尼亚的很多历史建筑一样为砖石结构。数百年来，人们坐在这些台阶上观望广场上的动静，注意到昨日和今日的细微差别。我正坐在这些台阶上。

没有机动车，只有单车来来往往。我注意到，有些穿越广场的人到了大致是中心的地方，会停下来，背靠着一座伸向天宇的隐形空气塔的一堵隐形墙壁，原地仰视，检查云朵或空阔的天。谈到明日天气，这里的人总是意见各异。

五个少年置身于想象中的绿茵场，展现着他们耍弄足球的天赋。有位老妇人显然大吃一惊，她碰见了一个相识的、似乎是独自在此的五岁女孩。

大约她俩住在同一城区，比如圣多纳托那样的工人公寓区，得坐趟公车来市中心。老妇从街头小贩手里给女孩买了个氦气球。球身是一只老虎，有黑黄相间的条纹。它在女孩头上高高飘荡着，一路跳跳纵纵。

一个提着两只塑料袋的五十多岁男人——他买了点杂货——放下袋子，俯身凑过来问我有没有一根香烟。我掏出一包烟，递给他几根。他的眼睛，属于那种惯于阅读文字而非观看楼房的男人。只要一根！他决然说。他的帆布鞋露了线，灰扑扑的。他用自己的打火机点了烟。

从我面对的地方向右步行十分钟，便是博洛尼亚大学，如今有六千名在读生。中世纪，欧洲第一所世俗大学建立于此。

女孩带着她的老虎，走向帕瓦利俄涅拱廊的商店橱窗。她跟自己头顶上的动物一样行着猫步。连真实大小的老虎行走时也有轻盈之态。老虎后面相当远的地方，两幢塔楼矗立，更高的那座建于十二世纪，近一百米高。文艺复兴时期，城里有许多这样的塔楼——每一座均为互相竞争的经商家族为了展示各自的财富和权势而建造的。塔楼一幢又一幢坍塌了，不足百年之后，余存者五指即可数完。十六世纪，罗马兼并此城，其后居民饱受贫困和瘟疫之苦。没有薪水，没有工作，没有出路。十九世纪的最后一二十年，受惠于马可尼、无线电和光学精密工程，这里开始再度繁荣，随后成为熟练工人之都。

有老虎飘浮相随的女孩那样如痴如醉，她微笑抬头时，我不禁遐想她是不是听见了一些音乐片段。这是个不太可能的城市，博洛尼亚——就像一个你在死后也许会行过的地方。

我离开广场，朝着大学的方向信步东行。街道两边都有连续的拱廊。这里的人不但争论明日的天气，也争论穿过城市的拱廊有多少公里。

拱廊的传统始于中世纪早期，当时称为门廊。每座大宅门前都有一小块临街的地方，许多人家有了主意，给自家地块加上屋顶。这样就可以供不期而至的旅行者留宿，让增员的仆役过夜休息，或租给大学的穷学生栖身。与此同时，民众行走于各个门廊之间，受其荫庇，把大街让给套车、马匹和牲口。长年下来，当局说服豪宅的主人自豪地维护这种对大街的贡献，同时颁行一套规范。门廊终于演变为拱廊。

对本地居民来说，拱廊是一种用石料、砖头和鹅卵石做成的行事历。你可以走访你的债主们、你的秘密情人、你誓不两立的仇敌、你最偏爱的咖啡馆、你的母亲、你的牙医、你的失业管理局、你年龄最大的朋友，或去一张你常常孑然独坐的长椅，调整你生疣疼痛的食指上的绷带——你可以前往所有这些约会，无须身处露天之地。这会给你的人生万事带来任何差别吗？不会。然而在那些拱廊下，万事会产生不一样的回音。到了晚上，晚间散步的逸乐与荒凉会沿着拱廊挽手同行。

我路过的窗户都有帘子，一律是同样的颜色。红。大多已褪色，少数是新的，但全都属于同一种颜色或年轻或陈旧的样子。每一幅帘子都在靠内的一侧跟窗户贴合，它还能根据室内所需的光线来调整角度。这种帘子叫tenda [6]。这种红色不是黏土红，不是赤陶色，是一种染料红。它的另一边有各种身体和它们的秘密，那一边，这些并不是秘密。

我想买一段这种红色的亚麻窗帘布。不确定有何用途。可能我只是需要用它来制作一幅肖像。无论怎样，我将能够摸到它的质感，揉皱它、抹平它，把它对着阳光举高、悬挂、折叠，遐想另一边的情景。

我问路人哪一家商店可以买到。

去帕斯昆尼斯那边试试，有个女人对我说，海神喷泉附近。

前去的路上，我在一个很久以前曾经是陶器集市的转角路过一道高墙，隔着玻璃，墙上展示出数千张黑白照片。有男子的肖像，也有女子的，各人的姓名及出生和死亡日期印刷在他们的胸膛底部，那是一个你可以戴上听诊器，聆听他们心音的位置。他们以字母排序，形成队伍。这是二十世纪中叶。多少人预见到自己的肖像跟别的几千名烈士的肖像并列，肩膀挨肩膀，一行高过一行，在市中心的一道公共墙壁上展示？数目大于我们的想象。在字母排序的队伍里他们知道赌注几何：意大利这一地区，抵抗法西斯的男女游击队员每四人中就有一人牺牲。

我看了一些人名，听见名字被诵读出来。他们的脸，大多神情自信，而在心里蕴含痛苦。审视照片，我隐约想起帕索里尼的一点儿文字。现在，在写作的时候，我找到了我希望想起的诗句：

……未来的光

从无一刻停止地伤害我们，

在我们一切日常行为里烙上

焦灼，哪怕是给我们带来

活力的信心……

经过一九四五年的自由选举，博洛尼亚成了一座共产党执政的城市。五十年间，一次又一次选举后，市议会依然由共产党掌握。在这里，管理层必须接受工人委员会对工厂经营的监督。另一个结果（政治实践常好比织布机的运转，在意料之中与意料之外两相穿梭），则是博洛尼亚成了意大利保存最完好的城市，以其小小的奢侈、精致品位和平静著称——这里也是欧洲最受青睐的交易会主办城市。（体育设施、时尚针织品、农用机械、儿童书等。）

帕斯昆尼斯的店面在转角，从街道望过去只见标语：亚麻、棉、羊毛面料、窗帘。店堂里看上去已经五十年没有变过了。但是谁知道，也许待售的料子有些是百分之七十五腈纶的。

有三个高高的柜台，柜台之间和柜台后面全是一卷卷的染色布匹，从地板上直立堆成一堵墙。你会想到圆木的围桩。圈养颜色的地方。

每个柜台后都站着个单穿衬衫的男子，扣着宽宽的皮腰带，上面插着一把大剪刀、一支量杆、一把尺。柜台高，当这些男子展开一卷布，征得顾客同意举起剪刀剪裁的时候，他可以站着操作，不用弯腰。

我前面有两个女子。一个抚摸着天鹅绒，犹豫不决，好像那是她女儿才洗好的头发；另一个大声数着自己在地板上迈开的步子，计算一种印花白棉布她需要几米。

店堂尽头，入口门附近，有一个高高的平台，上面摆着一张凳、一张桌、一个钱柜。店主正坐在凳上，对生意的每个环节一览无余。此时他在读报。

光，如那静一样，是弥漫、喑哑的，仿佛一卷卷布匹，长年累月，散发出一种极细的、无法识别的白棉尘埃——莫兰迪所绘物品的表面上，落的也是这种尘，他一定知道这家店。

轮到我了，我向年轻的伙计讲明意图。他像他的两个同事一样，有牧场工人而非布商的气质。为了取出尺幅两米的红亚麻布，他极其灵巧地移动了别的几卷，然后把那布匹放到柜台上，以炫技姿态展开一米长短。我掂了掂那个料子。

这是一种厚重的亚麻，他说。

多少钱一米？我问。

十九欧元。

好的。请给我来……三米。

他从腰际抽出剪刀和量杆，又看了我一眼征求确认（错误无法纠正），我点头，他便剪了。把我买的布匹折了四折放进袋子以后，他拿起同样以系绳连在腰带上的铅笔，写好账单，对平台那边点了点头。

我提了货物，从钱包掏出三张二十欧元的钞票，走去付账，钞票高举过头。店主前倾身子并俯过来拿我手上的钞票，我们四目相遇。我认识他。他假装不认识我。他了然的表情我何其熟悉。最后一次他露出这种表情，是我赠他领带，在医院跟他道别的时候。他在双焦镜片背后的一只眼睛（左眼）无比迅捷地闪烁了一下，示意：时候到了，我就在转角跟你碰面。

我默默离开店堂，回到主广场的台阶上，在那里端详我买的东西，又拿它跟我看见的广场四周顶层窗户里的帘子比较。

时间会证明的。

我思来想去。接着，我把布料再对折了一折，搁在身旁的台阶上，顺着那级台阶平躺下来，头枕着布料，合上了眼睛。

我十四岁之前，我们一起旅行过三次。一次去了诺曼底，一次布列塔尼，第三次去了比利时和卢森堡。每当抵达一座小城——不管根特、鲁昂还是卡纳克，找到他事先预订的旅馆后，我们有一个特殊程序，也许可称仪式，只不过它毫不张扬。

我们会稍事饮啖——可能是一小杯白葡萄酒，接着踏上一条他计划好的路线，一条又一条街地走过去。路途上惊奇连连，于我是全然惊异，于他，则是预料中的惊奇。街道一般交错的运河。一个绞刑架。一个橱窗展示的白色镂空纱，犹如最遥远的星系中的星群般令人赞叹。

有时候，这路线需要叫出租车载我们穿越乡野。为了在环法单车赛上，趁着骑手们结束一日车程冲刺时为之喝彩。为了观看一条渔船在夜晚驶离码头，桅杆挂一盏油灯，火光摇摇，始终不灭。为了寻觅一块可以躺上去的巨石——如同我现在躺于其上的主广场台阶那样。

所有这些由我们一同获得的发现，就像包好的礼物那样隐秘。甚至更加隐秘，因为，它们一旦拆开了也仍旧是秘密。他会把那只长疣的手指抬到嘴唇上，示意我别说，自己记着就好。

年少如我，也感到这不只是个孩子气的游戏。他早已明白许多人有种执着不已的需求，要将目光避开，要中和他们周围的一切。为此他们频频采取的手段之一是，坚称一切注定平平无奇。未言明的事物具有优势：它不能被贬低为平平无奇。神明是那未用语言表达的，某夜在圣马洛他对我低声道，一边喝着一杯睡前本尼狄克丁酒。

在卡普拉里耶街，我们将会找到纸袋里的一公斤帕萨帖利面，看样子是预备给松露铺底的。复活节后，暑热时光，博洛尼亚人会停止食用太油腻的千层面和宽扁面，改为帕萨帖利这种高汤面食。你想要食材单子吗？四百克白面包碎，二百四十克帕尔马干酪，一茶匙面粉，六只鸡蛋，一小颗肉豆蔻，五十克黄油？

他对茶匙着迷，旅途中时有搜集。半打都柏林茶匙是他的藏品，保存在一个类似军功章盒的扁盒子里，托在一块深蓝天鹅绒上。

在马尔萨拉街，我们会吃到世上最好的意式肉肠。它是十七世纪初叶的本地发明，叫摩泰台拉香肚，得名于里面调味的“摩泰尔”（桃金娘）浆果。味道好的时候，肉肠不是切片而是大块享用的，还要喝一种产自上阿迪杰的白葡萄酒。他举起酒杯跟我碰杯。

现在来点儿咖啡？新门街的一家店。这里，你看到了，每款咖啡豆都标有收获年份，像葡萄酒一样。年头有好也有坏。时间会证明的。来自世界各地的豆子：巴西南米纳斯，爪哇水洗豆，印度羊皮纸豆。我们直接要最好的吧：牙买加蓝山咖啡。当这种咖啡豆新货运到，他们夜夜将它放进保险箱，跟钞票一起！喝完，滋味会在嘴里停留五十分钟，整个头脑都有它相伴。

躺在台阶上，我继续闭着眼睛。

当你嘴里已感觉不到那滋味，到圣马利亚生命教堂去。

我睁开眼睛，凝视广场上空寥廓的天。

那教堂我知道，那里有哀悼基督的群像。

一组真人大小的赤陶塑像。十五世纪。死去的基督倒卧在地，站在他周围的有：亚利马太人约瑟，那个买了墓地收葬耶稣的财主；门徒约翰和雅各的母亲马利亚；耶稣的母亲马利亚；讲故事和传福音的约翰；耶稣的婶婶马利亚；抹大拉的马利亚。雕塑家是制圣棺的尼科洛，大半生在博洛尼亚城工作。

在这群人里两个男子举止平静，四个马利亚则被哀恸的风暴所裹挟。风暴的旋涡在抹大拉的马利亚身上。风对她衣裳的作用、风随着她的前奔而撕扯衣服的方式，与哀恸对她的嘴和喉咙的作用一样。

但“哀恸”这个词对吗？她的哀恸已成了她的决心。什么也挡不住她。

后天晚上，她会独处于同一个地方。墓穴洞开。基督的尸身不知去向，只留下裹尸布和裹头布。她会询问园丁，他把钉过十字架的尸身放到何处了，她要找到尸体，给以料理。那园丁会看着她，她会立即认出他来。他会说：不要碰我。她会第一次相信他正是此意。告诉我的门徒，我到我父亲那里去了……

艺术史上有些人物最终落入了错误的场景。在委拉斯凯兹的一幅画作里有个马德里石匠，是专注和耐心的典范，而最终被看作战神玛尔斯！在这组哀悼基督的雕像里，抹大拉的马利亚最终代表了每一位烈士——露西亚、特蕾莎、塞西莉亚、凯瑟琳、厄休拉。[7]

她无所畏惧。面对她，一切事物都毫不减缓。

到达教堂时，那里没有旁人。我独处着，把那如在柜台时一般对折四次的帘布挂上环绕着哀悼基督像的熟铁栏杆，和膝盖高度相齐。

我原地等待。心生一念——一幅窗帘除了把阳光阻挡在外，还可以把哀恸保存在内，并让决心生长。

过了些时候，我离开圣马利亚生命教堂。它所蕴含的风暴从来没有刮到外面。外头夜晚宁静。人们谈论着明日的天气。我走进帕瓦利俄涅购物中心，因为我有个预感。这里有一个两条拱廊在圆顶下交叉的地方。它角落上有高高的壁柱。鸽子经常从那儿飞过。麻雀不来，因为那里没有人们就餐的桌子。它是个通行之所。也许当年帕瓦利俄涅用作室内农贸市场时，这里是最清静的地方。无论如何，这里有一种声学现象，可称为“悄悄话的叫喊”。

如果你背靠某一根壁柱站立，视线越过八边形空间望着对角的壁柱，刚巧有人站在那里，你就能与之交谈，他们也能与你交谈，你们的声音会清晰响亮，不管多少人从你们中间经过，并且谁也旁听不到你们的话语。秘密这观念被倒转了过来。在这儿分享秘密，你们要远远相隔，话语会回荡在公共场所，却只有你们俩能够听见。

我的预感是，如果我在其中一根壁柱前等待，也许他会来。

我好像等了很长时间。并不是年龄增强了我的耐性。我依然像十一岁时那样没耐性。原因只是我不再那么相信时间了。一条狗摇着尾巴向我走近。狗在博洛尼亚很少见。狗的女主人责备它，对我皱眉，继续前行。她想起了自己的青春，同时又不可救药地将其遗忘。

忽然他在那儿了。他身上冒汗。他没穿外套。他的双手轻轻扣在身后。他知道那个隐形的声学话筒。他声音里平静的自信，显示他是个表面上自言自语，其实知道自己会被听见的人。

不要忘记，烈士是平凡的人，他们从来无权无势。过后，一点点势力会因为他们立下的榜样而累加。一个榜样，延续着千千万万的小希望。小希望，就像小快乐的追求一样。

他抹抹额头。

唯有在帕瓦利俄涅的这个圆顶下，我们能够谈起这样的悖论。谁会天马行空地想到把烈士和蓝山咖啡并列？然而，两者比卫道士假装的更为接近，十分接近。

他的目光穿透眼镜盯着我。

烈士值得羡慕。他们由于亲身遭受的痛苦，在某些时刻极其严酷的痛苦，而惹人怜悯。但是他们也值得羡慕。

我点点头。

他们学会了如何被触碰——那是烈士特有的天分，战士学不到。

他的白衬衫有一粒扣子松开了，他不瞥一眼地用右手重新扣起，同时继续悄声细语。

他们死前知道自己为了某件事而活过，这让很多人羡慕。

哪怕他们信仰的事业失败了？我问。

我相信如此，嗯。无论如何，我不确定历史有赢家和输家，就像正义无分胜负。烈士死了，四海为家。所以穷人敬奉他们。当在庙堂上供奉他们时，烈士便反抗、消失——只遗下他们的骸骨。

他摘下眼镜，从衬衫胸前的口袋取出手帕擦拭。

那些小快乐，我回答，肯定不属于死亡，只属于生命。

烈士殉难也是。他说这话的方式，仿佛是要我听清楚词语里的每一个字母。它是对立面的巧合。在烈士中间，在精致的小快乐的追求上，都有一点儿同样的蔑视、同样的谦逊。层次不同，当然。但巧合依然存在。两者都蔑视生活的残酷。

你让我想起卡拉瓦乔的一幅画。

画的什么？

圣厄休拉的殉道。

他的笑声响彻穹顶，除了我，谁也听不见。商店关门在即，路人都加快了脚步。

厄休拉由始至终都属于谣言。他摊开双手做了个谦卑顺从的手势。街头传闻。那女子生活在三世纪，而她的故事直到九世纪才开始流传。来辨明一下真相。四世纪末叶，在修缮科隆附近一座巴西利卡[8]的时候，石匠们发现了一个集体墓葬，清一色女性，据说是童贞女。石匠们刻了一段碑铭，没有引用名字或日期。四个世纪过去，出现了一个说书人。这说书人从别处一座坟墓上看到厄休拉的名字。孩子的墓，八岁夭折。此人读错了罗马数字，想入非非，让厄休拉一夜之间成了英格兰国王的女儿，由一万一千童贞女陪伴，踏上朝圣之旅！显然，没有足够的船可供她们渡过英吉利海峡。于是得动工打造。等待之际，女子们自己学会航海，成了无所畏惧的水手。她们一同渡过了海峡，在莱茵河溯流而上，航行到巴塞尔，再从那里徒步越过阿尔卑斯山到了罗马。

他摇摇头，等待，我们一同望着路人在拱廊下经过。

灾祸是在回程降临到她们身上的。距科隆不远，她们落入阿提拉及其暴徒的手中，坚拒不从的女子概遭杀害。

他用拇指徐徐划过下唇。

谣言从来都有，无法避免。谣言会帮助我们渐渐接纳那些被严厉否认，但可能是真实的传说。

他拿手帕揩了揩嘴。手帕移开时，他的嘴含着微笑。

由它去。博洛尼亚！博洛尼亚！靠近圣维塔勒门有一个叫“金嘴”的酒吧，那里做的柠檬酒——如果你坚持要老板的母亲亲自动手的话——味道会是你尝过的最好的。它承诺一切。

只有壁柱还在。他不见了。我耳朵里只充满城市的喧哗。

The Red Tenda of Bologna

I should begin with how I loved him, in what manner, to what degree, with what kind of incomprehension.

Edgar was my father’s eldest brother, born in the 80s of the nineteenth century at the time when Queen Victoria became Empress of India. When first he came to live with us, I was about ten years old and he was in his mid-fifties. Yet I thought of him as ageless. Not unchanging, certainly not immortal, but ageless because unanchored in any period, past or future. And so, as a kid, I could love him as an equal. Which I did.

According to the standards by which I was being brought up, he was a failure. He was hard-up for money, unmarried, unprepossessing, apparently without ambition. He ran a very modest employment agency in South Croydon. His principal passion was writing (and receiving) letters. He wrote to penpals, distant members of the family, strangers, and people he had once encountered on his travels. On his dressing table there was always a book of stamps. What he knew or surmised about the world fascinated me. And as an adolescent I loved his alternative vision, his shabby and royal intransigence.

He and I seldom embraced or touched one another, our most intimate contact was made through gifts. During three decades our gifts conformed to the same tacit, unwritten law: any gift had to be small, unusual and addressed to a particular appetite known to exist in the other.

Here is a random list of some of the gifts we exchanged.

A knife for opening envelopes

A packet of Breton galette

A map of Iceland

A pair of motorbike goggles

A paperback edition of Spinoza’s Ethics

One and a half dozen Whitstable oysters

A biography of Dickens

A matchbox full of Egyptian sand

A bottle of Tequila, the eau de vie of the desert from Mexico

And (when he was in hospital dying) a flamboyant wide silk necktie, which I tied around the collar of his striped flannel pyjama jacket, laughing so as not to howl. He too knew why I was laughing.

I also loved him for his imperturbability. He believed in general and in principle that the best was to come. A belief hard to sustain during the twentieth century, if one didn’t close one’s eyes. And he carried with him everywhere three pairs of spectacles-each pair with different lenses. He examined everything. He died in 1972.

Was he the most compliant man I’ve ever met, or the most persistent and independent? Perhaps he was both. He was never where you expected him to be.

He practised Pelmanism and Esperanto and was a pacifist. He got around on a staid, upright bicycle with a luggage rack behind, on to which he strapped books which he was exchanging or bringing home from the Public Library in East Croydon. He had three tickets f rom this library so that at any given moment, he could take out at least a dozen books.

Before mounting his bike he attached a pair of bicycle clips to his legs and they gathered in his trousers just above his ankles. Like this he had a slightly Indian look, although the skin of his body was pale, and for a man, particularly soft-reminiscent of what the French call le pain au lait. He didn’t possess a driving license, although for two years when he was thirty he had driven ambulances on the Western Front during the First World War.

Whenever I stood beside him-in the figurative or physical sense-I felt reassured. Time will tell, he used to say, and he said this in such a way that I assumed time would tell what we’d both be finally glad to hear.

Beside letter-writing his other passion was travelling. At that time many people travelled, but tourism as such did not yet exist. Travellers, rich or modest, planned their own journeys. He was a modest and persistent traveller. He believed travel broadened the mind. One of the many biographies I remember him reading was one of Thomas Cook who founded the first travel agency. Another was of Berlioz whose music, according to my uncle, was, par excellence, the music of travel. Bien sûr. He smiled with a kind of pride when he used French phrases and-less frequently-Italian ones.

After an early supper in our dining room he used to go upstairs and read in his very small bedroom, often until the small hours of the morning. The room was less than double the size of a wagon-lit cabin. In it was a radio and a typewriter, on which he typed out with two fingers his letters and thoughts. Most evenings as a boy and young adolescent I went to say goodnight to him, and I often had the impression there were at least three of us in the room with the single upright chair (I always sat on the bed when we were discussing together.) The third person was either the writer of the book he was reading or one of his favourite characters in the book. It was in this cramped room that I learnt how printed words when read can summon up a physical presence.

Much of what my Uncle read was related to the next journey he was planning or the one he had just made. The years passed and he travelled to Iceland, Norway, Russia, Denmark, India. (Maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe one or two of these journeys were only planned in low-voiced conversations between us when we met in his South Croydon office.) He certainly did go to Egypt, Greenland and Italy.

He went south to study history and north (which he preferred)to be at home with nature.

In Italy he discovered two cousins of ours who were music teachers in Rome. Before visiting Florence he read Burckhardt’s Renaissance and spent weeks planning exactly what he wanted to see each day and in what order. Plan your work and work your plan. Later he became fascinated by the city of Bologna.

By this time I was at art school and so I mentioned to him that Bologna was the city of Morandi. And no sooner had I said this, than I saw in a flash that he and Morandi could well put on and wear each other’s shoes without either of them noticing the difference! Neither of them were married: both of them had lived at various times with a spinster sister. Their noses and mouths had the same expression of seeking an intimacy that is not carnal. The two of them liked solitary walks and both were continually curious about what they saw as they walked. The difference between them was that Morandi was an obsessional, great artist and my Uncle, who was no artist, was a passionate letter writer.

To have said any of this would have been an impertinence, and so I simply repeated several times that he should look at Morandi’s paintings when he went to Bologna.

He’s a very quiet man Morandi, my Uncle told me on his return.

What do you mean? He’s dead. He died last year.

I know. I only saw his pictures of pots and shells and flowers. Very careful and very quiet. He could have been an architect too, wouldn’t you say?

Yes, an architect.

Or a tailor!

Yes, a tailor. Did you like the city?

It’s red, I’ve never seen a red like Bologna’s. Ah! If we knew the secret of that red ... It’s a city to return to, la proxima volta.

In the Piazza Maggiore some steps lead up to the east face of the Basilica of St Petronius, which, like many of Bologna’s historic buildings is constructed in brick. For centuries people have sat on these steps to watch what’s happening in the square and to notice the minute differences between yesterday and today. I’m sitting on these steps.

No traffic except bicycles. I notice that some people crossing the square, when they are more or less at its centre, pause and lean their backs against an invisible wall of an invisible tower of air, which reaches towards the sky, and there they glance upwards to check the clouds or the sky’s emptiness. In conversations about tomorrow’s weather opinions here continually differ.

Five teenagers are demonstrating their talents with a football, imagining a stadium. An elderly woman, to her evident surprise, meets a five-year-old girl whom she recognizes and who appears to be here alone.

Probably they live in the same district, a bus ride from the centre, a district of worker’s flats like San Donato. The woman buys the girl a helium balloon from a street vendor. The balloon has the body of a tiger, with black and yellow stripes. It slinks along wafting on high above the girl’s head.

A man in his fifties carrying two plastic bags-he has been shopping for his groceries-puts them down, stoops towards me and asks me whether I have a cigarette. I take out a packet and offer him several. He has the eyes of a man more used to reading print, than looking at buildings. Only one! he insists. His canvas shoes are frayed and dusty. He uses his own lighter to light the cigarette.

At the University, ten minutes walk away to the right of where I’m facing-sixty thousand students study today. In medieval times the first secular university in Europe was established here.

The girl, with her tiger, walks towards the shop windows of the Pavaglione. Her steps are as feline as the animal above her. Even life-size tigers look weightless when walking. Way behind the tiger stand two towers, the taller of the two, built in the twelfth century, is almost one hundred metres high. During the Renaissance there were many such towers in the city-each one built by a rivalling mercantile family to demonstrate its wealth and power. One by one they collapsed and within a century you could count on one hand those that remained. After the city was annexed by Rome in the sixteenth century the population suffered from poverty and pestilence. No wages, no work, no outlets. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, thanks to Marconi, the radio, and to light precision engineering, it began to prosper again, and then became a capital of skilled labour.

The girl with her floating tiger is so enchanted that, as she looks up smiling, I imagine her listening to some bars of music. It’s an improbable city, Bologna-like one you might walk through after you have died.

I leave the piazza and wander east towards the university. There are continuous arcades on both sides of the street. People here argue not only about tomorrow’s weather, but about how many kilometres of arcades there are crossing the city.

The tradition of the ‘porticoes’, as the arcades were called, began in the early Middle Ages. Each mansion had before its door a small plot of land which gave on to the street. A number of householders had the idea of roofing over their plots. Like this they could accommodate unforeseen travellers, allow extra servants to sleep overnight, or rent accommodation to poor students from the university. At the same time the public walked from portico to portico, benefiting from the shelter, and leaving the street proper open for wagons, horses and animals. With the passing of time the city persuaded its rich house owners to take a pride in what they were offering the street, whilst imposing a certain standardization. Thus finally the porticoes became arcades.

For those living here, the arcades are a kind of personal agenda, made of stone, brick and cobbles. You can visit your creditors, your secret love, your sworn enemy, your favourite coffee shop, your mother, your dentist, your local office of unemployment, your oldest f riend, or a bench where you regularly sit down utterly alone, adjusting the elastoplast you’ve put over a sore wart on your index finger-you can keep all these rendezvous without ever being exposed to the sky. And what difference does this make to the facts of your life? None. Yet under the arcades the echoes of those facts sound different. And in the evening Pleasure and Desolation take their evening stroll along the arcades and walk hand in hand.

All the windows I pass have awnings and all of them are of the same colour. Red. Many are faded, a few are new, but they are old and young versions of the same colour. Each fits its window exactly on the inside, and its angle is adjustable according to the amount of light desired indoors. They are called tende. The red is not a clay red, it’s not terracotta, it’s a dye red. On the other side of it are bodies and their secrets, which on the other side are not secrets.

I want to buy a length of this red tende linen. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it. Maybe I only need it to make this portrait. Anyway I’ll be able to feel it, scrumble it up, smooth it out, hold it against the sunlight, hang it, fold it, dream of what’s on the other side.

I enquire about a possible shop.

Try Pasquinis, a woman tells me, near the Neptune fountain.

On my way there, in a corner of what was once long ago a pottery market, I pass a long high wall with several thousand black and white photographs, behind glass, displayed on it. Portraits of men and some women, with their names and their dates of birth and death printed across the bottom of their chests, where one might listen to their hearts if one had a stethoscope. They are arranged in alphabetical order. Midtwentieth century. How many foresaw their portraits being placed along with thousands of other martyrs, side by side, row above row, on a public wall in the city centre? More than we might guess. In alphabetical order they knew what was at stake: in this area of Italy one out of every four anti-fascist Partisans was to lose her or his life.

I read some of their names, hearing them spoken out loud. Their faces look confident, most of them, and with the confidence there is pain. Looking at them I vaguely remember something written by Pasolini. And now, whilst writing, I have found the lines I wanted to remember:

……The light

of the future doesn’t cease for even an instant

to wound us: it is here to

brand us in all our daily deeds

with anxiety even in the confidence

that gives us life……

After 1945 and free elections, Bologna became a communist city. And the City Council remained Communist, election following election, during fifty years. It was here that Management was obliged to accept Workers Control committees in the running of their factories. Another consequence (so easy to forget how political practice often operates like a loom, weaving in two directions, the expected and the unexpected) was that Bologna became the best conserved city in Italy, famous for its small luxuries, refinements and calm-and Europe’s favourite host-city for Trade Fairs. (Sports Installations, Fashion Knitwear, Agricultural machinery, Children’s Books, etc.)

The Pasquinis shop is on a corner. From the street you see nothing except the announcement: Tessuti lino, cotone e lana, tendaggi. Inside it looks as though nothing has changed for fifty years. Maybe some of the textiles on sale are 75% acrylic, but you wouldn’t guess it.

There are three high counters, and between and behind them are hundreds of bolts of coloured fabrics, stacked up horizontally from the floor so that they make a wall. You think of a log stockade. A corral for colours.

Behind each counter a man stands in his shirt sleeves, wearing a wide leather belt with a pair of large scissors, a metre rod and a ruler stuck into it. The counters are high so that when one of these men unrolls a bolt of cloth, and, if the customer approves, cuts it with his scissors, he can work standing up, without bending.

There are two women before me. One is touching the velvet, over which she’s hesitating, as if it were her daughter’s just washed hair. The other is counting out loud her steps as she strides across the floorboards, calculating how many metres of a floral calico she will need.

At the end of the shop, near the entrance door, there’s a high podium with a stool, table and cash-till placed on it. Seated on the stool the shop owner oversees every operation taking place. At the moment he’s reading his newspaper.

The light, like the quiet, is diffused, muted, as if all the rolls of cloth had given off, over the years, a very fine, unidentifiable white cotton dust-the same dust that settled on the objects painted by Morandi, who surely knew this shop.

When my turn comes, I explain to the young assistant what I want. Like his two companions he has the air of a rancher rather than a draper. To extract the 2 metre bolt of red linen he shifts with great dexterity several others. Then he places the bolt on the counter and with a flourish unrolls about a metre. I finger the cloth.

It’s a heavy linen, he says.

How much a metre? I ask.

19 euros.

OK. Give me, please，3 metres.

He takes scissors and rod from his belt, looks at me again to check (mistakes can’t be corrected), I nod, and he cuts. Folding the length I’ve bought four times, he slips it into a bag, writes out the bill with a pencil, also attached by a string to his belt, and nods in the direction of the podium.

I pick up the purchase, take out three 20 euro notes from my wallet and go to pay, holding the notes up high, above my head. The owner leans forward and down to take them from me, and our eyes meet. I recognize him. He pretends not to recognize me. His conspiratorial expression is familiar. The last time he put it on was when I had given him his tie and was saying goodbye to him in the hospital. Behind his bifocal glasses the swiftest flicker of one eye (his left) says: I’ll see you round the corner-when the time comes.

I leave the shop without a word, return to the steps in the Piazza Maggiore, and there I look at what I’ve acquired and compare it to the awnings I can see in the top floor windows, surrounding the square.

Time will tell.

I turn things over in my mind. Then I fold the cloth another time, place it on the step beside me, and stretch myself out to lie along the step with my head on it, as if it were a pillow, eyes shut.

We made three voyages together, before I was fourteen years old. One to Normandy, another to Brittany and the third to Belgium and Luxembourg. When we arrived in a town-be it Ghent or Rouen or Carnac-after we found the hotel, booked by him in advance, we had a special procedure. I might say ritual-except that it was so discreet.

We had something light to eat-perhaps a small glass of white wine, and then we followed, street-name by streetname, a trail he had already prepared. Along it were surprises, for me total surprises, for him anticipated ones. Canals like streets. A gallows. A shop window with a display of white lace as fine as the stars in the furthest galaxy.

Sometimes the trail called for a taxi to take us cross-country. To cheer the Tour de France as the riders came in at the finish of the day’s stint. To watch a fisherman’s boat leaving at night a quayside, an oil lamp on its mast, flame flickering and never going out. To search for a megalith one could lie on-like I’m now lying on this step in the Piazza Maggiore.

All these finds which we came upon together, were as secret as wrapped presents. In fact more secret, for, once unwrapped they still remained secrets. He would put his finger with the wart on it to his lips, as a sign to remind me not to tell, to keep it to myself.

Even at that early age I sensed this was something more than a childish game. He had learnt how persistently many people need to look away from, to neutralize, what surrounds them. And one of the frequent devices they use to achieve this is to insist that everything is bound to be ordinary. The advantage of the untold is that it cannot be dismissed as ordinary. God is the unsaid, he murmured to me one evening in St Malo, drinking, before bed, a glass of Benedictine.

In the Via Caprarie we are going to find a kilo of passatelli in a paper bag, that looks as if it was made to hold truffles. After Easter, during the summer heat, the Bolognese stop eating lasagne and tagliatelle which are too heavy, and move on to passatelli, a pasta in brodo. You want the list of ingredients? 400gr. white bread crumbs, 240 gr. Parmesan cheese, 1 teaspoon of flour, 6 eggs, 1 small nutmeg, 50 gr. butter?

Teaspoons fascinated him, and on his travels he collected them. He had half a dozen teaspoons from Dublin which he kept in a flat box, like a box for war medals. Inside it the spoons lay on a dark blue velvet.

In the Via Marsala we’ll eat the best mortadella in the world. Mortadella was invented here at the beginning of the 17th century. Its name comes from the fact that it is seasoned with myrtle berries. When it’s good, it’s eaten in chunks, not thin slices. With it, drink a white wine from Alto Adige. He raises his glass to touch mine.

Now some coffee? A merchant in the Via Porta Nuova. Here, as you see, the coffees are listed with the year of their harvesting, like wines. There are good years and poor ones. Time will tell. Coffees from all over the world, Brasil sul de Minas. Java Wib. India Parchment. Let’s go straight to the best. Blue Mountain from Jamaica. When they receive a new delivery of this coffee, they put it, each night, in the safe along with the bank notes! After drinking it, the taste stays in the mouth for fifty minutes. It keeps the whole brain company.

Lying on the step I keep my eyes shut.

When you can taste it no more in your mouth, go to the church of Santa Maria della Vita.

I open my eyes to look up into the empty sky above the Piazza.I already know the church; there’s a Compianto there.

A group of life-size figures made in terracotta. Fifteenth century. Christ lies dead on the ground and standing around him are Joseph of Arimathea, the rich man who bought the tomb so Jesus could be buried, Mary the mother of the apostles John and James, Mary the mother of Jesus, John the storyteller and evangelist, the Mary who was Jesus’ aunt and Mary Magdalene. The sculptor is Nicolo dell’Arca who worked most of his life for the city of Bologna.

The two men in the group are calm, the four Marys are caught in a hurricane of grief. The vortex of the hurricane is Mary Magdalene. What the wind does to her clothes, the way it tears at them as she rushes forward, is the same as what her grief has done to her mouth and throat.

Yet is grief the right word? Her grief has become her own determination. Nothing will stop her.

The night after next she will be alone in the same place. The tomb will be open. Christ’s body will have disappeared. Only the shroud and head cloth will remain. And she will ask the gardener where he has placed the crucified body so she may find it and tend it. And the gardener will look at her and she will instantly recognize him, and he will say: Do not touch me. And for the first time she’ll believe he means it. Tell my disciples I have gone to my Father...

There are a few figures in art who have ended up in the wrong setting. In a painting by Velasquez there’s a Madrid stonemason, exemplary for his care and patience, who has ended up as Mars the god of war! In this compianto over the dead Christ, Mary Magdalene ends up representing every martyr-Lucy, Teresa, Cecilia, Catherine, Ursula.

She is intrepid, and in face of her nothing is mitigated.

When I arrive at the church, there is nobody else. I’m alone and I hang the tenda, folded as it was four times over itself on the counter, on the wrought iron railing which surrounds the Compianto group at the level of my knees.

There I wait. It crosses my mind that a tenda, as well as being a blind for keeping sunlight out, may also be one for keeping grief in, and for cultivating determination.

After some time, I leave the church of Santa Maria della Vita. The hurricane it contains never blows itself out. Outside the evening is peaceful. People are discussing tomorrow’s weather. I enter the Pavaglione shopping centre, for I have a premonition. There is a certain place where two arcades cross under a dome. In the corners of this space are tall pilasters. Pigeons often fly through there. The sparrows don’t come because there are no tables with people eating. It’s a place of passage. Perhaps when the Pavaglione was used, as an indoor food market, it was the quietest place. Anyway there’s an acoustic phenomenon. Which might be called ‘the whispering shout.’

If you stand against a particular pilaster and look diagonally across the octagon to the corresponding one on the other side, and if somebody happens to be standing there, you can talk to them, and they can talk to you, and your voices will be very distinct and loud, however many people are passing between you, and nobody else will hear your words. The idea of a secret is stood on its head. To share a secret here you move far apart, the words resound in public, and only the two of you hear them.

My premonition is that if I wait by one of the pilasters in question, he may come.

I wait for what seems a long while. It’s not that with age I have become more patient. I’m as impatient as I was when I was eleven; it’s simply that I believe in time less. A dog comes up to me wagging its tail. Dogs in Bologna are rare. The dog’s mistress scolds it, frowns at me and walks on, remembering, and at the same time fatally forgetting, her youth.

Suddenly he’s there. He’s perspiring. He has no jacket. His hands are gently clasped behind his back. He knows about the invisible acoustic telephone. He speaks with the quiet confidence of somebody who, apparently talking to himself, knows he will be heard.

Don’t forget, martyrs are ordinary people, they are never the powerful. Afterwards, a little power may accrue because of the example they’ve set. An example sustaining thousands of little hopes. Little hopes like the pursuit of little pleasures.

He mops his brow.

It’s only under this dome in the Pavaglione that we can talk of such paradoxes. Who would ever dream of putting martyrs and Blue Mountain coffee side by side? Yet they are closer than the moralists pretend, very close.

He peers through his glasses at me.

Martyrs are enviable. They’re to be pitied for the pain they suffer, for at one moment it is pain, very harsh pain. Yet they are also enviable.

I nod.

They have learnt how to be touched-that is the special gift of martyrs, warriors never learn it.

One of the buttons of his white shirt is undone and he does it up with his right hand without glancing at it, whilst continuing his whispering.

They know before they die that their life has served for something. Many would envy that.

Even if the cause they believe in was lost? I ask.

I believe so, yes. Anyway I’m not sure history has winners and losers any more than justice does. Martyrs die to have a home everywhere. That’s why they are honoured by the poor. When they are honoured in palaces, the martyrs, they revolt and disappear-leaving behind only their relics.

He takes off his spectacles and wipes them on a handkerchief he takes from the breast pocket of his shirt.

Surely the little pleasures, I reply, belong not to death but to life.

So does martyrdom. He says this as if he wants me to hear every letter of the words. It’s the coincidence of opposites. Amongst martyrs, and in the pursuit of little refined pleasures, there is something of the same defiance, and of the same modesty. At a different level naturally. But the coincidence remains. Both defy the cruelties of life.

You make me think of a painting by Caravaggio.

What of?

The martyrdom of St Ursula.

His laughter fills the dome, and nobody apart from me hears it. People are walking faster before the shops shut.

Ursula is rumour from beginning to end. He opens both palms in a gesture of humility and resignation. Street gossip. The woman lived in the 3rd century and her story was only told in the 9th. Some respect for the facts. At the end of the 4th century, a basilisk near Cologne was being repaired and the masons discovered a mass grave, all of them women, said to be virgins. They carved an inscription without citing a name or date. Four centuries pass, and along comes a storyteller. This storyteller finds the name of Ursula on a grave somewhere else. The grave of a child, who had died aged eight. Misreading the Roman numerals, he further proposes that Ursula, who has become overnight the daughter of the King of England, was accompanied on a pilgrimage by eleven thousand other virgins! There were understandably not enough ships for them to cross the Channel. So the ships had to be built. Whilst waiting, the women themselves learnt to sail and to become intrepid sailors. They crossed the Channel together, they sailed up the Rhine as far as Basel, and from there they walked over the Alps to Rome.

He shakes his head and waits, and we both watch the people passing through the arcade.

It was on their return journey that disaster befell them. Not far from Cologne they fell into the hands of Attila and his thugs and all of them who resisted were massacred.

He passes his thumb slowly along his lower lip.

There have always been rumours. They’re inevitable. They help us to come to terms with what is forcefully denied and may be true.

He dabs at his mouth with his handkerchief. When he takes it away, his mouth is smiling.

So be it. Bologna! Bologna! Near the Porta S. Vitale there’s a bar called the Bocca d’Oro, where they serve, if you insist on the one made by the capo’s mother, the best limoncello you’ve ever tasted. It promises everything.

Only the pilaster now. He’s gone. In my ears only the sounds of the city.

1.Martin Luther King, JR.·Letter from Birmingham Jail

2.Allen Ginsberg·Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber

3.Daphne du Maurier·The Breakthrough

4.Dorothy Parker·The Custard Heart

5.Three Japanese Short Stories

6.Anaïs Nin·The Veiled Woman

7.George Orwell·Notes on Nationalism

8.gertrude Stein·Food

9.Stanislaw Lem·The Three Electroknights

10.Patrick Kavanagh·The Great Hunger

11.Danilo Kiš·The Legend of the Sleepers

12.Ralph Ellison·The Black Ball

13.Jean Rhys·Till September Petronella

14.Franz Kafka·Investigations of a Dog

15.Clarice Lispector·Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady

16.Ryszard ·An Advertisement for Toothpaste

17.Albert Camus·Create Dangerously

18.John Steinbeck·The Vigilante

19.Fernando Pessoa·I Have More Souls Than One

20.Shirley Jackson·The Missing Girl

21.Four Russian Short Stories

22.Italo Calvino·The Distance of the Moon

23.Audre Lorde·The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

24.Leonora Carrington·The Skeleton’s Holiday

25.William S.Burroughs·The Finger

26.Samuel Beckett·The End

27.Kathy Acker·New York City in 1979

28.Chinua Achebe·Africa’s Tarnished Name

29.Susan Sontag·Notes on‘Camp’

30.John Berger·The Red Tenda of Bologna

31.Françoise Sagan·The Gigolo

32.Cyprian Ekwensi·Glittering City

33.Jack Kerouac·Piers of the Homeless Night

34.Hans Fallada·Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?

35.Truman Capote·The Duke in His Domain

36.Saul Bellow·Leaving the Yellow House

37.Katherine Anne Porter·The Cracked Looking-Glass

38.James Baldwin·Dark Days

39.Georges Simenon·Letter to My Mother

40.William Carlos Williams·Death the Barber

41.Betty Friedan·The Problem that Has No Name

42.Federico García Lorca·The Dialogue of Two Snails

43.Yuko Tsushima·Of Dogs and Walls

44.Javier Marías·Madame du Defand and the Idiots

45.Carson McCullers·The Haunted Boy

46.Jorge Luis Borges·The Garden of Forking Paths

47.Andy Warhol·Fame

48.Primo Levi·The Survivor

49.Vladimir Nabokov·Lance

50.Wendell Berry·Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer

[1]South Croydon，伦敦南部市镇。（以下若无特别说明，均为译者注。）

[2]Pelmanism，二十世纪上半叶在英国流行的一种记忆训练体系。——编者注

[3]原文为法语：par excellence。

[4]原文为法语：Bien sûr。

[5]原文为意大利语：la proxima volta，规范拼写为la prossima volta。

[6]意大利语，意为“窗帘”。——编者注

[7]她们都是被基督教封圣的殉道者。

[8]Basilica，古罗马的一种建筑形式，其平面呈长方形，外侧有一圈柱廊，主入口在长边，短边有耳室，后来的教堂建筑即源于巴西利卡。——编者注

让我们遇见在。。

企鹅图书 微博(penguinbooks)

企鹅图书微信订阅号

企鹅图书数字业务微信服务号

更多关于我们对信息请

访问企鹅兰登北亚官网 PRHNA.COM

幸存者

企鹅现代经典 第一辑

（意）普里莫·莱维/著

武忠明/译

企鹅图书 | PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

New Zealand | India | South Africa | North Asia

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at:

global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

THE SURVIVOR

Copyright © GARZANTI EDITORE S.P.A. 1984, 1990, 1998;

© 2004, GARZANTI LIBRI S. P.A., MILANO

Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol

All poems are taken from Collected Poems, first published in 1988. This selection first published in 2018

in Penguin Modern. Simplified Chinese translation copyright © 武忠明, authorized by Shanghai Sanhui

Culture and Press Ltd.（上海三辉咨询有限公司）. Simplified Chinese edition copyright © 2021 by

Penguin Random House North Asia in association with CITIC Press Group. All rights reserved.

© “企鹅”及其相关标识是企鹅兰登（北京）文化发展有限公司已经注册或尚未注册的商标。

未经允许，不得擅用。

企鹅兰登电子书 | Penguin Random House eBooks

目录

布纳

歌唱

1944年2月25日

乌鸦的歌（一）

施玛篇

起床号

周一

仿里尔克

弗索利的日落

1946年2月11日

冰川

女巫

等待

乌鸦的歌（二）

他们一百人

上岸

起初

暗星

告别

庞贝城的女孩

塞蒂莫的海鸥

去山谷

木头之心

1980年7月12日

自传

声音

未竟之事

逾越节

闲置

一座桥

守夜人

幸存者

星际信使

给我们

机场

Buna

Singing

February 25, 1944

Song of the Crow I

Shemà

Get Up

Monday

After R. M. Rilke

Sunset at Fòssoli

February 11, 1946

The Glacier

The Witch

Wait

Song of the Crow II

They Were a Hundred

Arrival

In the Beginning

The Dark Stars

Farewell

The Girl of Pompeii

The Gulls of Settimo

To the Valley

Heart of Wood

July 12, 1980

Autobiography

Voices

Unfinished Business

Passover

In Mothballs

A Bridge

Nachtwache

The Survivor

Sidereus Nuncius

Give Us

Airport

返回总目录

“退后，离开这儿，被淹没的人……”

布纳[1]

残损的脚和遭咒诅的土地，

一列长队在灰色早晨。

布纳从一千个烟囱中冒烟，

一天等着我们就像每一天。

破晓时可怖的汽笛声：

“你们面目死灰的众人，

在单调恐怖的泥泞上

诞生了苦难的又一天。”

衰竭的同伴，我在心里看见你，

我读懂了你的眼睛，悲痛的同伴。

你胸中满是寒冷饥饿与空虚。

你内心仅存的勇气也已破碎。

苍白的人，你曾是个强壮的男人，

一个女人曾走在你身边。

空洞的同伴，你已不再有名字，

遭弃的人，你已不再有眼泪，

如此贫乏你不再痛苦，

如此疲惫你不再恐惧，

被耗尽的一度强壮的人：

假使我们重逢

在上面美好的世间，在日光下

我们将以何面目面对彼此？[2]

1945年12月28日

歌唱[3]

……可当我们开始唱起

那些美好、愚蠢的歌，

仿佛恒常事今又再行，

万事万物重回从前。

一天只是一天：

七天组成一周。

杀戮，于我们恍若恶事；

死亡，已然遥远。[4]

岁月匆匆流逝，

可仍有如此多在我们面前！

我们重又变回年轻人：

不是烈士，不是恶徒，不是圣人。[5]

只要我们开口唱，

凡此种种就会走进脑海；

但它们像云一样，

难以描述。

1946年1月3日

1944年2月25日[6]

我想要相信，

是死亡之外的某些东西毁了你。[7]

我想描述那种力量，

那时我们曾依靠它来渴望

我们已淹没，

渴望能再次一起

自由行走在日光下。

1946年1月9日

乌鸦的歌（一）

“我从远方来

带来坏消息。[8]

我飞过高山，

穿过低云，

我的肚腹映照在水塘。

我不停地飞，

不停地飞了一百里，

为了找到你的窗户，

为了找到你，

给你带来悲哀的消息，

这消息将夺走你睡梦中的欢乐，[9]

染污你的面包和酒，

每夜停坐在你心上。”

它如此唱着，卑琐地舞动，

在窗玻璃外，在雪上。

歌声止歇后，它邪恶地张望，

用鸟喙在地上刻出一个十字架标记，

然后大大张开它的黑色翅膀。

1946年1月9日

施玛篇[10]

你，安全地生活

在你温暖的屋里，

晚上回到家看到

热饭与亲切的脸：

想想这是不是一个男人：

在泥泞中劳役，

不知安宁为何物，

为半块面包而争斗，

死于一个“是”或“否”。

想想这是不是一个女人：

没有头发，没有名字，

没有多余力气去回忆，

眼睛空洞，子宫冰冷，

像冬日里的蛙。

想想这些已然发生过：

我将这些话托付于你。

将它们刻在你心上

当你坐在屋里或走在路上，

当你躺下或站起：

要向你的孩子反复念起。

不然，愿你的房屋崩塌，

疾病致你无力，

你的后代把脸转离你。

1946年1月10日

起床号[11]

在那些残酷的夜里我们常常做梦，

稠密而狂暴的梦，

用灵魂和身体去梦见：

回家；吃饭；讲述。

直到破晓时响起

短促而低沉的号令：

Wstawać；

而心在胸中撕裂。

如今我们又找到了家，

我们把肚子塞满了，

我们已讲完这一切。

是时候了。很快我们又会听到

那陌生的号令：

Wstawać。

1946年1月11日

周一

有什么比一列火车更悲哀？

它必须按时离开，

只有一种声音，

只走一条路线。

没什么比一列火车更悲哀了。

或许一匹拉车的马除外。

套在两车杆间，

甚至不得旁顾。

它的一生就是行走。

而一个人呢？一个人不悲哀吗？

倘若他长久活在孤独中，

倘若他相信时间已终结，

一个人也是个悲哀的东西。

1946年1月17日

仿里尔克[12]

主啊，是时候了：酒已发酵。

是该有个家了，

或将长久无家。

是该不再孤独了，

或将长久孤独：

我们将耗费时辰在书上，

或写信给远方，

出自孤独深处的长信；

我们将徘徊着穿过街道，

心绪不安，当树叶落下。

1946年1月29日

弗索利的日落[13]

我知道一去不返意味着什么。

透过铁丝网

我看见太阳落下并消殒；

我感到自己的肉身

被老诗人的诗句撕裂。

“太阳落下了还能再升起：

而我们，一旦短暂的光亮逝去，

只能在无尽的暗夜里永久沉睡。”[14]

1946年2月7日

1946年2月11日[15]

我一直在群星间找寻你，

像个孩子一样询问它们。

为了你我问遍群山，

可它们只给予我寥寥几次

孤独与短暂的寂静。

因为你不在那儿，那些长夜里

我心生狂妄的渎神意念：

这世界乃神的差错，

我自己是这世间的谬误。

而当我面对死亡，

我用每根神经大喊“不”，

我还未完成；

还有许多事要做。

因为你在那儿，在我前面，

你有我在你身旁，就像今天，

一个男人和一个女人在日光底下。

我回来了，因为你在那儿。

1946年2月11日

冰川

我们停下脚步，放胆望向

底下那愁惨的绿色峡口，

我们胸中的勇气顿时消散，

如同失去了希望一般。

某种悲苦的力量在它里面酣睡。

当寂静的月夜降临，

它时而会尖叫长啸。

那是因为，它体形硕大行动迟缓，

躺在石床上做梦，

试图翻身却不得。

阿维利亚纳，1946年3月15日

女巫[16]

长时间在毯子底下，

她把蜡紧紧焐在胸前，

直到它变得柔软且温暖。

而后她起身，温柔而仔细地

用一只多情而耐心的手，

为她心中的男人

雕刻出鲜活的肖像。

完成后，她将肖像

与橡树叶葡萄树叶橄榄树叶一起

投入火中，让火吞噬。

她感到自己将痛苦而死，

因为咒语起效了。

唯有此刻她才能哭。

阿维利亚纳，1946年3月23日

等待[17]

这是有闪电而无雷鸣的时辰，

有声音，却无人听见，

睡眠不安，醒觉也徒然。

朋友们，让我们莫忘那些岁月里

从容而长久的静默，

夜晚温馨的街道，

沉静的冥想，

当树叶还未掉落，

当天空还未再次关闭，

当我们门前走过的

熟悉的沉重铁靴声

还未再次惊醒我们。

1949年1月2日

乌鸦的歌（二）[18]

“你还有多少时日？我已算过：

少而短，且每天都背负忧愁。

焦虑于无法逃避的夜晚，

无处可给予你庇护；

忧惧于随后而来的黎明，

你等待我，我也等待你，

而我（无望，无望逃避！）将追赶你到地极，

骑乘你的马，

用我的微小黑影

遮暗你的轮船甲板，

坐在你坐的桌旁，

必在每个港口拜访你，

定在每次休息陪伴你。

“直到预言皆成真，

直到你的气力衰竭，

直到你也如此终结：

不是砰的一声，而是无声无息，

如同十一月的树被剥光了叶子，

如同有人发现一座停摆的钟。”

1953年8月22日

他们一百人

他们是武装的一百人。

当太阳升起，

他们齐步向前。

时间流逝，无声无息：

他们目光坚定不移。

当钟声敲响，

他们齐步向前。

就这样白天过去，夜晚来临，

但是当第一颗星绽放在夜空，

他们一道，迈步向前。

“后退，别靠近，不洁的鬼魂：

回到你们古老的暗夜去。”

但无人回应，他们反而

将我围拢，齐步走来。

1959年3月1日

上岸[19]

幸福的是抵达港口的人，

将大海与风暴抛在身后，

他的梦已死或从未诞生；

坐在不来梅一家小酒馆，

在炉旁饮酒，心绪平静。

幸福的是仿佛已熄火焰的人，

幸福的是如同河口沙砾的人，

他放下重担，擦擦额头，

在路边歇息。

他无所惧无所望无所盼，

只是定睛凝望落日。

1964年9月10日

起初[20]

人类弟兄，一年于你们显得太长，

一个世纪，如一座庄严的里程碑，

你们为生计而奔波劳碌，

疲倦，易怒，受骗，患病，迷惘；

听听吧，这些话里满有慰藉与嘲弄：

二百亿年前，

有一团璀璨的火球，

孤独而永恒，飘浮于时间与空间，

兼任我们的先父与行刑者，

它爆炸了，一切变化自此始。

甚至如今，这一灾难性逆转的黯淡回声

仍回响在宇宙各极。

万物皆诞生于那一次痉挛：

拥抱我们又嘲弄我们的深渊，

生养我们又击倒我们的时间，

我们所爱的女人们的眼睛，

不计其数的恒星，还有

这只写作的手。

1970年10月13日

暗星[21]

让人别再咏唱爱或战争。

宇宙因之得名的秩序业已消解。

天穹的星团俨然混乱的群魔，

全宇宙围困我们，盲目、残酷且陌生。

天空撒满恐怖的死太阳，

稠密堆积着破碎的原子，

从中只发散出绝望之重，

无能量，无信息，无粒子，无光；

光已沉落，被自身重负所伤，

而我们所有人类，虚妄地生与死，

天穹永恒地空自旋转。

1974年11月30日

告别

时候不早了，我的朋友们。

所以我不要你们的面包和酒了，

我只要几许寂静的时刻，

渔夫彼得的故事，

这片湖水的麝香味，

古老的烧树枝气味，

海鸥饶舌的呼啸，

屋瓦上免费的金色地衣，

一张床，可让我独卧。

作为交换，我给你们留下这些无用[22]的诗行，

写下来只为给五六个人读：

我们要走了，各负心事离开，

因为，我刚才说了，时候不早了。

安圭拉萨巴齐亚[23]，1974年12月28日

庞贝城[24]的女孩

因为痛苦为我们人人所共有，

我们仍能体会你的痛苦，瘦弱的小女孩，

那个下午天空变黑，

你痉挛般抓住你母亲，

仿佛想重回母亲体内。

可全然无用，因为空气变成毒气，

穿透你那四壁厚实的宁静房屋

（里面曾充满你的欢歌和赧笑），

渗透关闭的窗户找到了你。

多少世纪过去了，灰烬化为石头，

永远禁锢了你柔嫩的肢体。

因此，你扭曲的石膏模型，与我们同在，

无尽的痛苦，恐怖地见证了

诸神对我们骄傲的人类绝少眷顾。

而你远方的姊妹[25]什么也没留下，

这个来自荷兰的小女孩被禁锢在四堵墙内，

书写她没有明天的童年：

她无声的骨灰被风吹散，

短暂的生命封存于残破的笔记本。

广岛的这个女学生什么也没留下，

被一千个太阳[26]的光印在墙上的影子，

沦为受害者，恐惧之祭坛上的牺牲品。

世间的强者，掌管新毒的大师，

悲哀而神秘的最后雷霆的守护人，

上天施予我们的苦厄已足够多。

在你按下按钮前，请停下来想一想。

1978年11月20日

塞蒂莫的海鸥[27]

跨过道道河湾，年复一年，

这群天空之主溯河而上。

忘记了海浪与盐水，在汹涌的河口

狡猾又耐心地猎捕贪婪的螃蟹。

雏鸟比老鸟更果决，贪食

我们高贵人类的弃物，日渐肥硕。

它们在迷雾中搜索，

在懒散的树枝间探寻，

沾染了大路微温的气息，

悲哀地尖叫，痛苦地致意。

它们停在河口，在桥下筑巢，

附近是柏油堆和聚乙烯的残留。

它们曾飞离大海，不知向何处去，

被我们的富足所吸引。

此时它们在塞蒂莫上空盘旋不息：

遗忘了过去，它们翻捡我们的垃圾。

1979年4月9日

去山谷

四轮马车往山谷缓缓行进，

烟雾挂在树丛，苦涩而发蓝，

最后一只蜜蜂，徒然嗅着秋天的番红花；

崩塌的山石，淹在水中，无声地颤抖。

薄雾瞬时升起于落叶松林，仿佛受到召唤：

我追寻这薄雾，却徒劳无功，脚步沉重而蹒跚，

不久又将落雨：这个季节已走到尽头，

我们的半个世界蜿蜒走进冬天。

属于我们的所有季节行将结束：

我这尚未衰颓的身躯还会听从我多久？

生活与爱，为时已晚，

来不及凝望天空，理解这世界。

是时候俯身

走下山谷，沉默无言，

栖身于我们的烦忧之影。

1979年9月5日

木头之心

我的隔壁邻居很顽强：

一棵长在翁贝托国王大街[28]的七叶树，

和我一般年纪，看起来却不像。

它怀抱麻雀和画眉，却不知羞，

四月，它抽芽长叶，

五月开出柔嫩的花，

九月呼呼生刺，刺多却不伤人，

枝叶间藏着闪亮的鞣质果栗。

它想冒充，可太天真：它渴望让人相信

它与它的山中兄弟不相上下，

掌管甘美的果实和珍稀的蘑菇。

它生活艰辛。每隔五分钟，它的根

就被八路和十九路电车碾轧而过；

被噪声聒聋了，它扭曲地生长，

仿佛想离开此地。

年复一年，它从满是甲烷的底土

吸收慢性毒素；

受到狗尿浇灌，

树皮裂纹塞满了

街道上的腐败尘土；

树枝下悬吊着枯萎的

永不会化为蝴蝶的菊花。

然而，它依旧以迟钝的木头之心，

感受并享受着季节变换。

1980年5月10日

1980年7月12日[29]

请耐心些，我疲惫的夫人，

耐心对待世事，

耐心对待你的旅伴，包括我，

从我落入你命运的那刻起。

这么多年过去了，请接受我这几行潦草的诗句

给你重要的生日。

请耐心些，我焦躁不安的夫人，

你备受碾轧、消磨和剥蚀，

每天剥去自己身上一点点，

赤裸的肉身于是伤害你更多。

再不该独自生活了。

请接受这十四行诗句，

我以此粗陋的方式表达我多么爱你，

要是没有你，我就不会活在这世上。

1980年7月12日

自传

我曾是一个孩子，一位姑娘，一簇灌木，

一只小鸟，一条跃出海面的无声的鱼。

——《恩培多克勒残篇》[30]

对你们讲话的我，像这世界一般古老。

在起初的黑暗里，

我爬出昏蒙的海沟，

躺在海底的腐物中间，

眼睛看不见，却已开始渴求光。

我用一千个极小的喉咙吞咽盐分。

我曾是一条鱼，光滑而敏捷。我避开罗网，

指给我的后代看螃蟹弯曲地爬行。

我曾高过塔尖，对天咆哮，

我的脚步声如雷霆，群山无不战栗。

我庞大的身躯曾阻断山谷：

你们时代的山岩上仍存有

我遗留的不可思议的痕迹。

我曾是蟾蜍，对月吟唱如水的歌，

源源不断的饥饿感穿透树木。

我曾是轻率而胆小的鹿，

飞奔于今日已成尘土的树林，

为自己的力量而欢喜。

我曾是陶醉的蝉，机警而可怕的大蜘蛛，

蝾螈，蝎子，独角兽与毒蛇。

我遭受过鞭打，

经历了寒冬酷暑，轭下的绝望，

推磨的驴子沉默的晕眩。

我曾是个少女，在舞会逡巡；

我是勘测员，考察这一圈的奥秘，

探究云和风变幻无常的道路：

我见过泪与笑，知道很多爱。

莫嘲笑我，阿格里真托的人，

倘若我衰老的身体上印刻有奇怪的标记。

1980年11月12日

声音

声音永远沉默了，或自昨日起，或暂时静息；

你若努力听，仍能捕捉到那回声。

再也说不出话的嘶哑声音，

说了却再也说不出什么的声音，

以为说出了什么的声音，

说了却无人理解的声音：[31]

用合唱与鸣钹

走私意义给虚空。

以纯粹的喧哗

假装那静寂并非静寂。

我对你们说话，狂欢的朋友们：[32]

你们像我一样沉醉于词，

作为刀剑的词，毒药的词，

钥匙的词，撬锁的词，

盐、面具、忘忧草的词。

我们要去的地方，哑默。

未竟之事

先生，请接受我

下个月的辞呈，

如果合适，就找人替代我。

我留下太多事没完成，

或因懒散或因现实困难。

我要告诉一些人一些事，

可我不再知道说什么和向谁说：我已忘了。

我还要献出一些东西，

一个睿智的词，一件礼物，一个吻；

我拖延了一天又一天。我很抱歉。

我要在所剩不多的时间里做这些。

我害怕自己忽略了重要客户。

我要探访

远方的城市、岛屿和荒原，

然而不得不将其从计划中剔除，

或托付给我的后继者。

我本要种树然而没有；

给自己造所房屋，

或许不漂亮，但合乎设计。

最主要的是，亲爱的先生，

我心里有一本奇妙的书，

它会揭示许多秘密，

缓解痛苦和恐惧，

消除疑惑，赠给人们许多

泪与笑的礼物。

你会在我的抽屉里找到书的草稿，

在底下，与未完成的事务堆放在一起；

我没有时间将它写出，真是罪过，

此后我将主要投身于这项工作。

1981年4月19日

逾越节[33]

告诉我，这个夜晚如何

不同于其他夜晚？

告诉我，这个逾越节如何

不同于其他逾越节？

点上蜡烛，打开门，

让朝圣者进来，

无论是外邦人还是犹太人：

也许先知正隐藏在褴褛衣衫下。

让他进来与我们同坐，

让他聆听、畅饮、歌唱并庆祝。

让他品尝无酵苦面包、

羔羊肉、甜沙拉与苦草。

这是个特别的夜晚，

你把肘支在桌上，

因为诫命已定下，

恶转化为善。

我们彻夜重温

充满奇迹的古远历史，

因所有这些葡萄酒，

群山欢跃如山羊。

今夜，智者、异教徒、愚人和孩子

互相提问题，

时间反转方向，

今天流回昨天，

如河流徘徊于河口。

我们人人变成埃及的奴隶，

汗水打湿稻草和泥土，

凭干裂的脚跨过海：

你也如此，陌生人。

今年苦于恐惧和耻辱，

明年得着道德与公义。

1982年4月9日

闲置

向晚的码头黏糊糊、泛油彩的水上，

在许多新船之间，

一只旧船孤独地摇荡。

它的木头不洁，铁锈呈黄褐色，

船体阴郁地撞击码头，臃肿

如无所孕育的肚腹。

在水面下你可以看到

柔软的海藻，

蛀船虫与笨拙的藤壶

缓慢钻出的孔洞。

在晒热的甲板上，几点晒干的

白色海鸥粪，

被阳光氧化的焦油和无用的油漆，

褐色斑点，恐怕是人的粪便。

还有蜘蛛网，我不知道

蜘蛛也会在闲置的船上筑巢。

我说不出它们在猎捕何物，但它们一定知道自己在干什么。

舵柄吱呀作响，慵懒地顺服着

阵阵细流的秘密幻想。

在阅遍世界的船尾，

一个名字与格言再也辨认不出。

但缆绳是崭新的，

黄色与红色的尼龙绳，紧绷、光亮，

以防这个疯狂的老太婆

突发奇想要去大海航行。

1982年6月27日

一座桥

不像其他的桥，

熬过了诸世纪的降雪

仍能让羊群跨过，前往河流牧场，

让狂欢者从此处到达彼处。

这是一座特别的桥，

你可以停在桥中间，若你乐意，

俯察深处并自问

明天是否还值得活。

它呆滞又鲜活，

且从不平静。

或许因为有一种毒，

一种我不愿描述的古老恶意，

从空洞的桥墩徐徐滴下；

或由于，如守夜人所说，

这桥是一桩肮脏交易的产物。

所以你在此处看不到河水

平静地映照桥的跨距，

只看到波峰与涡流。

所以它一直遭沙砾磨蚀，

石头被冲刷着尖叫不息，

它奋力把两岸往外推啊推，

试图打开地表。

1982年11月25日

守夜人[34]

“守望的啊，夜里如何？”[35]

“我听到猫头鹰重复着

空洞的预言音符，

蝙蝠捕猎时的尖叫，

池塘湿叶底下

水蛇咝咝作响。

在礼拜堂旁的酒馆打盹时，

我听到满含酒气的人声，

结结巴巴，怒气腾腾。

我听到情侣的絮语和笑声，

欲望释放时的气喘吁吁；

少年在梦中的低语，

其他人因欲望而辗转难眠。

我看见热气迸放无声的闪电，

我看见一个发疯的姑娘

分不清棺材与床榻，

夜夜饱受恐惧煎熬。

我听到一位孤独老人

与死亡搏斗时嘶哑地喘息，

听到一位被撕裂的妇人分娩，

一个新生儿的啼哭。

躺下入睡吧，市民，

一切秩序井然，今夜已过半。”

1983年8月10日

幸存者

致B.V.[36]

自那时起，在不定的时刻，

那痛苦回返：

直到它能找到人来倾听，

我里面的这颗心燃起火。[37]

又一次，他看见同伴的脸

阴沉地显现于最初的光，

灰暗地笼罩在水泥灰中，

在迷雾中如此模糊，

在不安的睡眠中染着死亡之色：

夜里，在梦的重负下

他们的下巴翕动，

咂巴着一块不存在的萝卜。

“退后，离开这儿，被淹没的人，

走开。我不曾侵夺过任何人，

不曾抢过任何人的面包。

没有人替我死去。没有人[38]

返回你们的雾中。这不是我的错，

要是我活着并呼吸，

又吃又喝又睡又穿衣。”[39]

1984年2月4日

星际信使[40]

我看见有两只角的金星

轻柔地在天空航行。

我看见月亮上的山谷，

有三个形体的土星；

我，伽利略，人类之中第一次，

看见四颗卫星环绕着木星，

银河分解成

无数星团的新世界。

我看见，虽然我不信，不祥的斑点

污染了太阳表面。

小望远镜是我造的，

我学识渊博，手也巧；

我打磨望远镜，对准苍穹，

如同发射石炮。

是我打开了苍穹，

在太阳灼伤我的眼睛前。[41]

在太阳灼伤我的眼睛前，

我不得不屈服说

我并未见我所见。[42]

将我禁锢在大地上的那位

并未释放地震和闪电，

他的声音低沉而平稳，

他有着每个人的脸。

每夜啃噬我的秃鹰

有着每个人的脸。

1984年4月11日

给我们

给一些东西让我们摧毁，

一朵花，一个安静的角落，

一个教友，一个法官，

一座电话亭，

一个记者，一个叛徒，

一个敌对阵营的支持者，

一根灯柱，一个井盖，一个长凳。

给一些东西让我们损毁，

一面石膏墙，蒙娜丽莎，

一片挡泥板，一座墓碑。

给一些东西让我们强暴，

一个腼腆的姑娘，

一个花坛，我们自己。

别小看我们，我们是先驱，是先知。

给我们一些东西来焚烧、攻击、粉碎、割裂、诽谤，

好让我们有存在感。

给我们一根警棍或一杆纳甘步枪。

给我们一支注射器或一辆铃木车。

怜悯我们。

1984年4月30日

机场

这是传送中的人类样本，

仿佛受到随机挑选，

供一位外来的买主检验。

富人穷人，胖子瘦子，

印度人，黑人，白人，病人，孩子。

传送中的人在做什么？

无足轻重，

在座位上聊天，睡觉，吸烟：

买主会怎么说？他会开价多少

给那个身穿紧身裤的七十岁妇人？

给那胡言乱语的一家八口，

祖父母、母亲、孙子和曾孙？

给那一家胖子，

他们卡在扶手椅中间？

给烦透了外国话的我们两人？

我们出发了。坑洞似的大鸟

将每个人毫无差别地吸了进去：

通过伸缩客运廊

我们穿越阿刻戎河[43]。

它滑行，加速，聚力，

起飞，突然冲向天空。

身体与灵魂：我们的身体与灵魂。

我们配蒙召升天[44]吗？

此时它飞入紫色黄昏，

底下是无名的海洋之冰，

或黑云的篷幔，

仿佛我们这个星球

羞耻地藏起了脸。

此刻它飞着，带着低沉的轰鸣，

几乎就像有人在打桩，

打入斯提克斯河[45]的沼泽；

眼下它沿着柔和、

流畅的空气跑道飞行。

夜晚无眠，但很短暂，

从未有过如此短暂的夜晚：

轻松愉快如最初的一个夜晚。

在马尔本萨机场，丽萨等着我们，

一副警觉而清朗的表情。

我认为这并非一趟无用之旅。

1985年5月29日

Buna[46]

Wounded feet and cursed earth,

The line long in the gray mornings.

Buna’s thousand chimneys smoke,

A day like every other day awaits us.

The sirens are terrific in the dawn:

‘You, multitude with wasted faces,

Another day of suffering begins

On the monotonous horror of the mud.’

I see you in my heart, exhausted comrade;

Suffering comrade, I can read your eyes.

In your breast you have cold hunger nothing

The last courage has been broken in you.

Gray companion, you were a strong man,

A woman traveled next to you.

Empty comrade who has no more name,

A desert who has no more tears,

So poor that you have no more pain,

So exhausted you have no more fear,

Spent man who was a strong man once:

If we were to meet again

Up in the sweet world under the sun,

With what face would we confront each other?

December 28, 1945

Singing[47]

... But then when we began to sing

Those good old silly songs of ours,

It was as if everything

Was still the way it used to be.

A day was nothing but a day:

And seven of them make a week.

Killing was something wrong to us;

Dying, something far away.

And the months pass rather fast,

But there are still so many left!

We were merely young again:

Not martyrs, infamous, or saints.

This and much else came to mind

While we kept on singing;

But they were things like clouds,

And not easy to explain.

January 3, 1946

February 25, 1944[48]

I’d like to believe something beyond,

Beyond death destroyed you.

I’d like to be able to say the fierceness

With which we wanted then,

We who were already drowned,

To be able someday to walk again together

Free under the sun.

January 9, 1946

Song of the Crow I

I’ve come from very far away

To bring bad news.

I crossed the mountain,

I flew through the low cloud,

I saw my belly mirrored in the pond.

I flew without rest,

A hundred miles without rest,

To find your window,

To find your ear,

To bring you the sad news

To take the joy from your sleep,

To spoil your bread and wine,

To sit in your heart each evening.’

So he sang obscenely dancing

Outside the window, on the snow.

When he stopped, he stared malevolent,

Etched a cross on the ground with his beak,

And spread his black wings.

January 9, 1946

Shemà[49]

You who live safe

In your heated houses

You who come home at night to find

Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider if this is a man,

Who toils in the mud

Who knows no peace

Who fights for half a loaf

Who dies by a yes or a no.

Consider if this is a woman,

With no hair and no name

With no more strength to remember

With empty eyes and a womb as cold

As a frog in winter.

Ponder that this happened:

I consign these words to you.

Carve them into your hearts

At home or on the street,

Going to bed or rising:

Tell them to your children.

Or may your house fall down,

May illness make you helpless,

And your children turn their eyes from you.

January 10, 1946

Get Up[50]

In the savage nights we dreamed

Dense and violent dreams

Dreamed with soul and body:

Of returning; eating; telling.

Until the dawn command

Resounded curt and low:

‘Wstawac´’;

And our hearts broke in our breasts.

Now we’re home again.

Our bellies are full,

We’ve finished telling.

It’s time. Soon we’ll hear again

The strange command:

‘Wstawac´.’

January 11, 1946

Monday

What is sadder than a train?

That leaves on time,

That only makes one sound,

That only goes one way.

Nothing’s sadder than a train.

Unless it is a cart horse.

It’s locked between two poles.

It can’t even look askance.

Its whole life is plodding.

And a man? Isn’t a man sad?

If he lives alone for long

If he thinks time is over,

A man’s a sad thing, too.

January 17, 1946

After R. M. Rilke[51]

Lord, it is time: the wine’s fermenting now.

The time has come to have a house,

Or to go without one a long time.

The time has come to not be alone,

Or we’ll live alone for a long time:

We’ll spend the hours at our books,

Or writing letters to far away,

Long letters from our solitude;

And we’ll pace up and down the avenues,

Restless, while the leaves fall.

January 29, 1946

Sunset at Fòssoli[52]

I know what it means not to come back.

Through barbed wire I’ve seen

The sun go down and die.

I’ve felt the old poet’s words

Tear at my flesh:

‘Suns can set and rise again:

For us, once our brief light is spent,

There’s one endless night to sleep.’

February 7, 1946

February 11, 1946

I looked for you in the stars

When as a child I questioned them.

I asked the mountains for you

But all they gave me were a few moments

of solitude and short-lived peace.

Since you weren’t there, those long evenings

I contemplated the mad blasphemy

That the world was one of God’s mistakes,

And I was one of the world’s.

But when, in the face of death,

I shouted no with every fi ber,

That I wasn’t through,

That I still had too much to do,

It was because you were there in front of me,

You with me beside you, as today,

A man a woman under the sun.

I came back because you were there.

February 11, 1946

The Glacier

We stopped, and dared to look

Into the grieving green jaws below,

And the courage in our hearts went slack

As happens when one loses hope.

A sad power sleeps in him;

And when, in the silence of the moon,

At night he sometimes screams and roars,

It’s because, torpid giant dreamer that he is,

He’s trying to turn over but cannot

In his bed of stone.

Avigliana, March 15, 1946

The Witch

A long time under the covers

She hugged the wax to her breast

Until it was soft and warm.

Then she got up, and gently, carefully,

With a loving patient hand

Molded the living effigy

Of the man who was in her heart.

When she was done, she threw oak

And grape and olive leaves on the fire

With his image, so it would melt.

She felt she was dying from the pain

Because the charm had worked,

And only then could she cry.

Avigliana, March 23, 1946

Wait

This is the time of lightning without thunder,

This is the time of unheard voices,

Restless sleep and pointless sleeplessness.

Comrade, let’s not forget the days

Of long easy silences,

Of friendly streets at night,

And calm contemplation,

Before the leaves fall,

Before the sky shuts down again,

Before the familiar clang of iron feet

Rouses us again

Outside our doors.

January 2, 1949

Song of the Crow II[53]

‘What is the number of your days? I’ve counted

them:

Few and brief, and each one heavy with cares;

With anguish about the inevitable night,

When nothing saves you from yourself;

With fear of the dawn that follows,

With waiting for me, who wait for you,

With me who (hopeless, hopeless to escape!)

Will chase you to the ends of the earth,

Riding your horse,

Darkening the bridge of your ship

With my little black shadow,

Sitting at the table where you sit,

Certain guest at every haven,

Sure companion of your every rest.

‘Till what was prophesied has been

accomplished,

Until your strength disintegrates,

Until you too end

Not with a bang but in silence,

The way the trees go bare in November,

The way one finds a clock stopped.’

August 22, 1953

They Were a Hundred

They were a hundred men at arms.

When the sun rose in the sky,

They all took a step forward.

Hours passed, without a sound:

They didn’t bat an eye.

When the bells rang,

All of them took a step ahead.

So the day went, it was evening,

But when the first star blossomed in the sky,

All at once, they took a step ahead.

‘Get back, get away, foul ghosts:

Back to your old night.’

But no one answered; so, instead,

They took a step ahead, all in a ring.

March 1, 1959

Arrival[54]

Happy the man who’s come to port,

Who leaves behind him seas and storms,

Whose dreams are dead or never born;

Who sits and drinks by the fire

At the beer hall in Bremen, and is at peace.

Happy the man like a flame gone out,

Happy the man like estuary sand,

Who has laid down his burden and wiped his

brow

And rests by the side of the road.

He doesn’t fear or hope or wait,

But stares intently at the setting sun.

September 10, 1964

In the Beginning[55]

Fellow men for whom a year is long,

A century a venerable goal,

Exhausted earning your bread,

Worn out, enraged, deluded, sick, and lost;

Hear, and be consoled and mocked:

Twenty billion years ago,

Splendid, moving through both space and time,

There was a globe of flame, alone, eternal,

Our common father and our executioner,

And it exploded, and all change began.

Even now, the faint echo from this one catastrophe

reversal

Sounds from the far ends of the universe.

Everything was born from that one spasm:

The same abyss that embraces us and taunts us,

The same time that gives us life and ruins us,

Everything each of us has thought,

The eyes of every woman we have loved,

Suns by the thousand, too,

And this hand that writes.

August 13, 1970

The Dark Stars[56]

No one should sing again of love or war.

The order the cosmos took its name from has

been dissolved;

The heavenly legions are a snarl of monsters,

The universe besieges us, blind, violent, and

strange.

The sky is scattered with horrible dead suns,

Dense sediment of shattered atoms.

Only despairing heaviness emanates from them,

Not energy, not messages, not particles, not

light;

Light itself falls back, broken by its own weight,

And all of us human seed we live and die for

nothing,

And the heavens perpetually roil in vain.

November 30, 1974

Farewell

It’s grown late, dear ones;

So I won’t take bread or wine from you

But only a few hours of silence,

The tales of the fisherman Peter,

The musky scent of this lake,

The ancient odor of burned shoots,

The screeching gossip of the gulls,

The free gold of the lichens on the roof tiles,

And a bed, to sleep alone in.

In return, I’ll leave you nebbish[57] lines like these,

Made to be read by five or seven readers:

Then we’ll go, each driven by his worries,

Since, as I was saying, it’s grown late.

Anguillara, December 28, 1974

The Girl of Pompeii

Since the anguish of each belongs to us all

We’re still living yours, scrawny little girl

Clinging convulsively to your mother

As if you wanted to get back inside her

When the sky went black that afternoon.

To no avail, because the sky, turned poison,

Infiltrated the shut windows of your quiet

House with its thick walls to find you

Happy before in your song and timid laughter.

The centuries have passed, the ash has turned to

stone,

Locking in these gentle limbs forever.

So you stay with us, contorted plaster cast,

Endless agony, horrific witness

To how our proud seed matters to the gods.

But there’s nothing left for us of your far-away

sister,

The girl from Holland walled up in four walls

Who wrote about her childhood without a

tomorrow:

Her quiet ashes have been spread by the wind,

Her brief life held inside a crumpled notebook.

Nothing’s left of the Hiroshima schoolgirl,

Shadow transfixed on the wall by the light of a

thousand suns,

Victim sacrificed on the altar of fear.

Masters of the earth lords of new poisons,

Sad secret guardians of definitive thunder,

The afflictions heaven offers us are sufficient.

Stop and consider before you push the button.

November 20, 1978

The Gulls of Settimo

Bend on bend, year after year,

The lords of the sky have come upriver,

Along the banks, up from its turbulent mouths.

They’ve forgotten backwash and salt water,

Shrewd, patient hunting, greedy crabs.

Above Crespino, Polesella, Ostiglia,

The newborns, more determined than the old,

Beyond Luzzara, beyond wasted Viadana,

Bloated with our ignoble

Waste, fatter at every turn,

They’ve explored Caorso’s mists,

The lazy tributaries between Cremona and

Piacenza,

Borne on the tepid breath of the autostrada,

Shrieking their mournful, brief salute.

They’ve halted at the mouth of the Ticino,

Built nests under the bridge at Valenza,

Near mounds of tar and leftover polyethylene.

They’ve sailed to nowhere, beyond Casale and

Chivasso,

Fleeing the sea, drawn on by our abundance.

Now they drift restless over Settimo Torinese:

Past forgotten, they pick over our waste.

April 9, 1979

To the Valley

The carriages trundle toward the valley,

Smoke from the brush hangs blue and bitter,

A bee, the last one, pointlessly noses the autumn

crocuses;

Slow, waterlogged, the landslides shudder.

Mist rises quickly among the larches, as if called:

I’ve followed it in vain with my heavy, fleshy step,

Soon it will fall again as rain: the season’s over,

Our half of the world wends toward winter.

And soon all our seasons will be over:

How long will these good limbs of mine

obey me?

It’s grown late to live and love,

To see into the sky and understand the world.

It’s time to go down

To the valley, with shut, silent faces,

To shelter in the shadows of our troubles.

September 5, 1979

Heart of Wood

My next-

door

neighbor’s sturdy:

A horse chestnut on Corso Re Umberto;

My age but he doesn’t seem it,

He shelters sparrows and crows, and has no

shame

Putting out buds and leaves in April,

Fragile flowers in May, and in September

Burrs with harmless spines

That hold shiny, tannic chestnuts.

An impostor, but naïve: he wants to seem

Like his fine mountain brother’s rival,

Lord of sweet fruit and rare mushrooms.

It’s not a happy life. The number 8

And 19 trams run across his roots

Every five minutes, leaving him deaf,

And he grows twisted, as if he wants to escape.

Year after year, he sucks up gentle poisons

From the methane-saturated subsoil;

He’s drenched by dog piss,

The striations on his bark get clogged

With the avenues’ polluted dust;

Under his bark hang desiccated

Chrysalises that will never be butterflies.

Still, in his slow-witted wooden heart

He senses and enjoys the changing seasons.

May 10, 1980

July 12, 1980

Be patient, my weary lady,

Patient with the things of this world,

With your fellow travelers, me included,

From the moment I was allotted to you.

After so many years, accept a few gnarled lines

For this important birthday.

Be patient, my impatient lady,

Pulverized and macerated, flayed,

Who flay yourself a little every day

So the raw flesh hurts you even more.

It’s no longer time to live alone.

Please, accept these fourteen lines;

They’re my rough way of telling you you’re

loved,

And that I wouldn’t be in the world without you.

July 12, 1980

Autobiography

‘Once I was both boy and girl, bush,

bird and silent fish jumping out of the sea.’

from a fragment by empedocles

I’m old like the world, I who speak to you.

In the dark of origins

I swarmed in the blind furrows of the sea,

Blind myself: but already I wanted the light

When I was still lying in the sea floor’s filth.

I swilled salt with a thousand infinitesimal

throats;

I was a fish, sleek and fast. I avoided traps,

I showed my young the sidewise tracks of the crab.

Taller than a tower, I offended the sky,

The mountains trembled at my storming step

And my brute hulk obstructed the valleys:

The rocks of your time still sport

The incredible mark of my scales.

I sang to the moon the liquid song of the toad,

And my patient hunger perforated wood.

Impetuous skittish stag

I ran through woods that are ashes today, and

gloried in my strength.

I was drunk cicada, astute horrendous tarantula,

And salamander and scorpion and unicorn and asp.

I suffered the whip

And heat and cold and the desperation of the yoke,

The donkey’s silent vertigo at the millstone.

I was a girl, hesitant in the dance;

Geometer, I sought the secret of the circle

And the dubious ways of clouds and winds:

I knew tears and laughter and many loves.

Don’t deride me, then, men of Agrigento,

If this old body is engraved with strange signs.

November 12, 1980

Voices[58]

Voices still forever, or since yesterday, or just now

quieted;

If you cock your ear you can still catch their echo.

Hoarse voices of those who can speak no longer,

Voices that speak and no longer say a thing,

Voices that believe they’re saying something,

Voices that speak and are not understood:

Choruses and cymbals to smuggle

A meaning into the message with no meaning,

Pure babble that pretends

That silence isn’t silence.

À vous parle, compaings de galle:

I speak for you, raucous companions

Drunk like me on words:

Words‑as‑swords

and words‑as‑poison

Key and picklock words,

Words of salt, mask and nepenthe.

The place we’re going to is quiet

Unfinished Business

Sir, please accept my resignation

As of next month,

And, if it seems right, plan on replacing me.

I’m leaving much unfinished work,

Whether out of laziness or actual problems.

I was supposed to tell someone something,

But I no longer know what and to whom: I’ve

forgotten.

I was also supposed to donate something-

A wise word, a gift, a kiss;

I put it off from one day to the next. I’m sorry.

I’ll do it in the short time that remains.

I’m afraid I’ve neglected important clients.

I was meant to visit

Distant cities, islands, desert lands;

You’ll have to cut them from the program

Or entrust them to my successor.

I was supposed to plant trees and I didn’t;

To build myself a house,

Maybe not beautiful, but based on plans.

Mainly, I had in mind

A marvelous book, kind sir,

Which would have revealed many secrets,

Alleviated pains and fears,

Eased doubts, given many

The gift of tears and laughter.

You’ll find its outline in my drawer,

Down below, with the unfinished business;

I didn’t have the time to write it out, which is a

shame,

It would have been a fundamental work.

April 19, 1981

Passover[59]

Tell me: how is this night

Different from all other nights?

Tell me, how is this Passover

Different from other Passovers?

Light the light, unbar the door

So that the traveler may enter,

Be he Gentile or Jew:

Perhaps the prophet is hidden under his rags.

Enter and sit with us,

Listen, drink, and sing and celebrate Passover.

Eat the bread of affliction,

Lamb, sweet mortar, and bitter herbs.

This is the night of differences,

When we put our elbows on the table,

Because the forbidden is prescribed

So that evil may turn into good.

We’ll spend the evening telling tales

Of age-old wonderful events,

And because of all the wine

The hills will prance like rams.

Tonight the wise, the heathen, the fool, and the

child

Ask each other questions,

And time changes direction,

Today flows back into yesterday,

Like a river silted up at its mouth.

Each of us has been a slave in Egypt,

Has soaked straw and clay with sweat

And crossed the sea with dry feet:

You, too, stranger.

This year in fear and shame,

Next year in strength and justice.

April 9, 1982

In Mothballs

Late and alone an old keel rocks,

Among the many new ones, in the slicked,

Oil-

iridescent

water of the harbor.

Its wood is leprous, its iron rusty orange.

Its hull knocks blind against the dock, obese

Like a belly pregnant with nothing.

Under the water’s surface

You see soft seaweed, and the slow, slow drills

Of teredos and stubborn barnacles.

On the torrid deck, white splotches

Of calcined gull guano,

Tar oxidized by sun, and useless paint,

And brown stains, I’m afraid, of human

excrement,

With spider lines of salt; I didn’t know

Spiders too nested in mothballed ships.

I can’t say what prey they’re after, but they must

know their work.

The tiller creaks and lazily obeys

The secret whims of all the little currents.

On the stern that saw the world,

A name and motto no longer legible.

But the mooring line is new,

Yellow and red nylon, taut and glossy,

Just in case the mad old dame

Had the wild idea of going to sea.

June 27, 1982

A Bridge

It’s not like other bridges,

Which survive the snowfall of the centuries

So flocks can cross to water and pasture

Or revelers can go from place to place.

This is a different kind of bridge,

Happy if you stop halfway

And stare into the depths and ask yourself

If it’s worthwhile to be alive tomorrow.

It’s dull but alive

And never at rest.

Maybe because a poison slowly

Drips from its hollow pier,

An old maliciousness I won’t describe;

Or maybe, as they said it late at night,

Because it’s the product of a dirty deal.

Which is here why you never see the current

Tranquilly reflect the bridge’s span,

But only cresting waves and eddies.

Which is why it’s always scoured by sand,

Screaming, stone on stone,

And pushes pushes pushes against the banks

To break the earth’s crust open.

November 25, 1982

Nachtwache[60]

‘Watchman, what of the night?’

‘I’ve heard the owl repeat

Its hollow warning note,

The bat shriek as it hunted,

the slither of the water snake

Under the pond’s sodden leaves.

I’ve heard wine-soaked voices,

Garbled, angry, while I dozed,

From the bar next to the chapel.

I’ve heard lovers whispering,

The laughter and breathlessness of satisfied

longing;

Adolescents murmuring in their sleep,

Others tossing sleepless with desire.

I’ve seen silent heat lightning,

I’ve seen the nightly terror

Of the girl who’s lost her mind

And can’t tell bed from bier.

I’ve heard the raucous heaving

Of a lonely old man wrestling with death,

Of a woman torn in childbirth,

The wail of a newborn.

Lie down and sleep, citizen,

All is well: this night’s half over.’

August 10, 1983

The Survivor[61]

To B.V.

Since then, at an uncertain hour,

That agony returns:

And till his ghastly tale is told,

His heart within him burns.

He sees his comrades’ faces

livid at first light,

gray with cement dust,

Vague in the mist,

Dyed by death in their restless sleep:

At night they grind their jaws

Under the heavy burden of their dreams

Chewing a nonexistent turnip.

‘Back, away from here, drowned people,

Go. I haven’t stolen anyone’s place,

I haven’t usurped the bread of anyone,

No one died for me. No one.

Go back to your haze.

It’s not my fault if I live and breathe

And eat and drink and sleep and put on clothes.’

February 4, 1984

Sidereus Nuncius

I’ve seen two-horned Venus

Navigating suavely in the sky.

I’ve seen valleys and mountains on the Moon

And three-bodied Saturn,

I, Galileo, first among humans;

Four stars orbiting Jupiter,

And the Milky Way disintegrating

Into infinite legions of new worlds.

I’ve seen, though I did not believe, ominous spots

Infecting the face of the Sun.

I built this telescope myself,

A learned man but with wise hands:

I polished its mirrors, I aimed it at the Sky

The way you’d aim a bombard.

I was the one who broke Heaven open

Before the Sun burned my eyes.

Before the Sun burned my eyes

I had to bend and say

I didn’t see what I saw.

He who chained me to the earth

Didn’t loose earthquakes or lightning,

He had a low, flat voice,

He had a face like everyman.

The vulture that gnaws at me every evening

Has the face of everyman.

April 11, 1984

Give Us

Give us something to destroy,

A crown, a quiet place,

A trusted friend, a magistrate,

A phone booth,

A journalist, a renegade,

A fan of the opposing team,

A lamppost, a manhole cover, a bench.

Give us something to deface,

A plaster wall, the Mona Lisa,

A mudguard, a gravestone,

Give us something to defile,

A timid girl,

A flower bed, ourselves.

Don’t despise us, we are heralds and prophets.

Give us something that burns, offends, cuts,

breaks, befouls,

That makes us feel we exist.

Give us a club or a Nagant,

Give us a syringe or a Suzuki.

Pity us.

April 30, 1984

Airport

It was a sampling of man in transit,

As if selected at random

For inspection by an alien buyer:

Rich and poor and fat and slim,

Indians, blacks, the sick, and children.

What does man in transit do?

Nothing of significance.

Chats and sleeps and smokes in his seat:

What will the buyer say? What will he offer

For that seventy-year-old woman in tights?

For that group of eight talking nonsense,

Grandparents, mothers, grand-and great-grandchildren?

For that family of fatties

Stuck in their chair?

For the two of us, fed up with foreign words?

We’re leaving. The great cavelike bird

Sucks up everyone indiscriminately:

We cross Acheron

Via a telescopic concourse.

It taxis, accelerates, gathers power,

Lifts off, and suddenly is raised into the sky

Body and soul: our bodies and souls.

Are we worthy of Assumption?

Now it flies into the purple twilight

Over the ice of nameless seas,

Or above a mantle of dark clouds,

As if this planet of ours

Had hidden its face in shame.

Now it’s flying with dull thuds

Almost as if someone were driving piles

Into the Stygian swamp;

Now along soft,

Smoothed tracks of air.

The night is without sleep, but brief,

Brief the way no night has ever been:

Light and carefree like a first night.

At Malpensa, Lisa with her bright,

alert expression was expecting us.

I don’t think it was a useless trip.

May 29, 1985

[1]这是我作为囚徒，曾工作的工厂。——原注布纳（Buna），即莫诺维茨-布纳，或称奥斯威辛三号集中营，位于莫诺维茨（Monowitz），由纳粹德国最大的化学公司I.G.法本公司建立，负责生产被称为“布纳”的人造橡胶与汽油，占地三十一平方公里，前后共有大约三万五千名囚犯（多为犹太人）在此干活，负责挖煤，以及水泥和橡胶生产等。实际上，由于工人怠工和盟军轰炸，这种橡胶从未被生产出来。奥斯威辛二号集中营（比克瑙）的医生会按时到访这里，将不能工作的人送往毒气室。——译者注（以下若无特别说明，均为译者注。）

[2]参见但丁《神曲·地狱篇》第七章，那些易怒的鬼魂陷在污泥中，悲叹道：“我们在世的时候，那里空气温和，阳光普照，但是我们与人落落寡合，心中藏着一股火气；现在我们惨淡地没在黑水污泥之中。”（王维克译）

[3]参见西格夫里·萨松（Siegfried Sassoon，1886—1967）写于第一次世界大战结束时的反战诗歌《众人齐唱》（Everyone Sang）。——原注另参见莱维著作《这是不是个人》（##Se questo è un uomo##）中《那三个人去实验室》一章：“这三个姑娘唱着，仿佛全世界所有实验室里的姑娘都在唱。”（沈萼梅译）

[4]参见《这是不是个人》：“杀戮和死亡对我来说，仿佛是写在书上的陌生之物。”

[5]参见莱维著作《元素周期表》（##Il Sistema Periodico##）的《铬》一章：“写作时，我找到了一种短暂的平静，感到自己又变成了一个人，像每个人一样，既非烈士，也非恶徒，也非圣人，就像一个刚刚成家的人，面向未来而非过去。”

[6]莱维研究专家汤姆森（Thomson）称，这是诗人悄悄写给芳达·玛斯托（Vanda Maestro）的一首情诗。芳达·玛斯托曾在都灵大学学习化学，与莱维一同被捕。在被运往奥斯威辛集中营的路上，莱维与她坠入爱河。1944年10月30日，她死于奥斯威辛集中营毒气室。

[7]参见但丁《神曲·地狱篇》第三章：“若非亲眼看到，我绝不相信死神已经毁掉了这么多的人。”（田德望译）另参见T.S.艾略特的长诗《荒原》中《死者葬仪》一章：“我没想到死亡毁坏了这许多人。”（赵萝蕤译）——原注

[8]参见《这是不是个人》中《医务室》一章最后一段：“我们再也回不去了。任何人不应该从这里出去，因为他会带着刻在肉体上的印记，把这里邪恶的坏消息传递给世界，告诉人们，在奥斯威辛，人得有多大的勇气才足以把人糟践成这样啊。”（沈萼梅译）

[9]参见《这是不是个人》中《劳动》一章：“一个痛苦的核心凝结，刺痛着我们，疼痛急剧增长，直到跨越意识的门槛，剥夺了我们睡眠的乐趣。”（沈萼梅译）

[10]施玛，希伯来文为Shemà（意为“听”），犹太教祷文的第一个词，用来申述对上帝的笃信。本诗的部分内容为对“施玛”的释义。——原注这首诗原题为《赞美诗》，作于纽伦堡审判期间，后用作《这是不是个人》的开篇题诗。

[11] Wstawać是波兰语，意为“起床”。——原注这首诗后用作《休战》（1963）的开篇题诗。《这是不是个人》的《我们的长夜》一章对于该诗主题有更详细的描写：“经过整宿的困倦、不眠、交替的噩梦，随时期待又惧怕起床时刻的到来：尽管没有钟表，我们运用很多人所熟知的神秘能力，能十分近似地预测敲起床钟的时刻。起床的时辰随着季节的不同而有所变化，但总是在黎明之前。这时，操场的钟声久久地回响着，于是每个棚屋夜间值岗的卫兵下岗了：他打开灯，站起来，伸伸懒腰，发出每天的指令‘Aufstehen’（起床），或者经常用波兰语说‘Wstawać’（起床）。很少有人在等起床令时还睡着：那是十分难受的时刻，因为睡得很沉的人在接近起床的时刻是难以消除睡意的。夜里值班的卫兵知道这个道理，因此他宣布起床时不用命令的语气，而是用平和而又低沉的声音，仿佛他知道所有的人都竖起耳朵听着，他们会听到命令，而且会服从。这句外国话就像石头一样落在大家心灵深处。‘起床’：暖和的被窝，虚幻的屏障，睡眠脆弱的盔甲，抑或折磨人的夜间外出方便，都支离破碎地纷纷落在我们周围，而我们发现自己又无奈地醒来了，令人难以忍受地赤裸着身体，脆弱地任人凌辱。日复一日，这一天又开始了……”（沈萼梅译）

[12]参见里尔克的《秋日》（Herbsttag）一诗。——原注

[13]弗索利（Fòssoli），位于意大利中部城市卡尔皮（Carpi）附近，纳粹德国建立的囚犯转运营，莱维曾从这里被转运至奥斯威辛集中营。

[14]参见古罗马诗人卡图卢斯（Valerius Catullus，约公元前84年至公元前54年）《歌集》第五首中的诗句（李永毅译）：莱斯比娅，让我们尽情生活爱恋，严厉的老家伙们尽可闲言碎语，在我们眼里，却值不了一文钱！太阳落下了还有回来的时候：可是我们，一旦短暂的光亮逝去，就只能在暗夜里沉睡，直到永久。

[15]这是莱维写给妻子露西娅的诗。

[16]这首诗取材于莱维的女助手菲丽丝·芳提诺（Felice Fantino）所讲的智慧女人的故事，这样的故事流传于皮埃蒙特乡村。

[17]这首诗是莱维为普珥节（Purim）而作。普珥节是犹太教节日，为纪念和庆祝古代流落波斯的犹太人战胜哈曼的种族灭绝阴谋。庆祝方式包括：饮酒、欢宴、集体歌唱、跳舞、集会放烟花、盛装假面、向穷人施舍和互赠食品。

[18]参见T.S.艾略特的诗作《空心人》（##The Hollow Men##）：“世界就是这样告终的/不是砰的一声，而是一声抽泣。”（赵萝蕤译）——原注

[19]参见诗人海涅（Heinrich Heine，1797—1856）的诗歌《北海集》（##Die Nordsee##）中的章节：幸福的是安全抵港的人，将大海及悲伤抛在身后，此刻坐在不来梅一家小酒馆如此暖和且平静。——原注

[20]“起初”（Bereshit）是《圣经》的第一个词，被看作关于“大爆炸”的一个典故，见科普杂志《科学美国人》（##Scientifc American##），1970年6月刊。——原注这首诗写于宇宙“大爆炸”理论发表和讨论期间。

[21]参见《科学美国人》1974年12月刊。——原注1974年12月，该杂志提出宇宙“黑洞”理论。“暗星”（darkstar）是理论设想的天体，逃逸速度等于甚至大于光速，发出的光无法摆脱天体引力的束缚，因此不可见。

[22]这里的用词为Nebbish，意第绪语，意为“无用、愚蠢、笨拙”。——原注

[23]安圭拉萨巴齐亚（Anguillara Sabazia），意大利拉齐奥大区的一个镇，位于布拉恰诺湖畔。

[24]庞贝城（Pompei）为意大利古城，公元79年维苏威火山喷发，庞贝古城被火山灰埋葬。据估计，当时庞贝及附近有一万到两万五千人当场遇难。

[25]指死于集中营的德国女孩安妮·弗兰克（Anne Frank），留有《安妮日记》（##Anne Frank：The Diary of a Young Girl##）一书。

[26]指广岛核爆。

[27] 1948年起，莱维在一家名为SIVA（Società Industriale Vernici e Affini）的油漆厂中工作，这家工厂于1953年搬到塞蒂莫托里内塞（Settimo Torinese）的郊区。塞蒂莫托里内塞位于意大利都灵省东北部。

[28]翁贝托国王大街（Corso Re Umberto），位于都灵市区，是莱维的出生地。

[29]莱维为妻子露西娅的六十岁生日而作。

[30]恩培多克勒（Empedocles，公元前490年至公元前430年），古希腊哲学家，出生于西西里岛的阿格里真托（Agrigento）。他认为万物皆由水、土、火、气四者构成。“爱”使所有元素聚合，“冲突”使所有元素分裂，宇宙本身在绝对的爱和冲突之间来回摆动。他的遗稿多散佚，留有大约四百五十行哲学残篇。诗中引文为残篇中第一百一十七篇。

[31]参见《这是不是个人》：“假如我们说，他们不会听；如果他们听，也不理解。”（沈萼梅译）

[32]原文为法文“A vous parle, compaignes de galle”，参见法国诗人维庸（François Villon）的《大遗嘱集》（##Le Testament##）的第1720行诗句。——原注

[33]逾越节（Passover）是犹太人庆祝摆脱埃及人奴役、跨越红海的节日，庆祝方式包含一系列传统的犹太教仪式，如祝祷、吃无酵饼、重述逾越故事等。——原注

[34]原文为“Nachtwache”，纳粹集中营专用语，特指集中营里的德国守卫。——原注

[35]此句出自《圣经·以赛亚书》21章11节。

[36] B.V.指布鲁诺·瓦萨里（Bruno Vasari），他是“被驱逐者协会都灵分会”主席。瓦萨里曾在1945年出版了关于毛特豪森集中营的回忆录《死亡野营》，他认为集中营幸存者之所以能幸存，并非靠狡猾和残忍，而是靠道德的力量。而莱维在其著作《被淹没与被拯救的》（##I Sommersi e i Salvati##）中表达了不同的观点：最好的人都死去了，不好的人却活了下来。

[37]这四句诗引自英国诗人柯勒律治（Coleridge，1772—1834）的长诗《古舟子咏》第七节：“自那时起，在不定的时刻，那痛苦回返：直到我的恐怖故事被述说，我里面的这颗心燃起火。”但莱维将第三句“直到我的恐怖故事被述说”改写为“直到它能找到人来倾听”。在此，找人“倾听”的希望胜过了“述说”故事的希望。在《这是不是个人》中，莱维曾写到自己的噩梦：“在我的家里，在我的亲朋好友中间，我有那么多东西要讲，这是一种强烈的难以表述的身心上的感受。但是我不能不发现，我的听众没有在听我说话，而且他们完全不感兴趣：他们胡乱地说别的，仿佛我不存在似的。”（沈萼梅译）

[38]参见《被淹没与被拯救的》第二章《灰色地带》：“你不曾替代某个人……你没有偷过任何人的面包；但你仍无法驱除怀疑的阴影。”（杨晨光译）

[39]参见但丁《神曲·地狱篇》第三十三章：“我相信你在欺骗我，因为勃兰加·杜利亚没有死；他还在吃、喝、睡觉和穿衣。”（朱维基译）

[40]《星际信使》是伽利略于1610年撰写的关于自己早期天文发现的科学论文，记录的主要是伽利略在1609年通过自制望远镜对月球、木星的卫星及银河等的观测结果。

[41]据说伽利略因为用自制的望远镜观察太阳而失明。

[42]伽利略迫于宗教法庭的压力昧心否认自己的科学发现。

[43]阿刻戎河（Acheron），古希腊神话中冥府的一条河，也叫痛苦之河。亡魂必须由赫尔墨斯带领着，交给船夫卡戎过河费方能渡河，否则只能在岸边流浪。

[44]依据天主教教义，蒙召升天（Assunzione）特指圣母马利亚在完成了今世生命之后，肉身和灵魂一同被提到天上。

[45]斯提克斯河（Styx），古希腊神话中的冥河，也叫苦难之河、守誓之河、愤怒之河，是进入冥界的必经之路。

[46]The name of the factory where I worked while I was a prisoner.

[47]Cf. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Everyone sang.’

[48]Cf. Inferno III:57, Purgatory V:134, and T. S. Eliot,The Waste Land : ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’

[49]Shemà means ‘Hear’ in Hebrew. It is the first word of the basic prayer of Judaism, which affirms the unity of God. Some lines of this poem paraphrase it.

[50]Wstawac´ means ‘get up’ in Polish.

[51]Cf. ‘Herbsttag,’ from Das Buch der Bilder.

[52]Cf. Catullus, V, 4. Fòssoli, near Carpi, was the site of the transit camp for prisoners bound for deportation.

[53]Cf. T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men : ‘This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.’

[54]Cf. H. Heine, Buch der Lieder, ‘Die Nordsee,’ II, 9: ‘Glücklich der Mann, der den Hafen erreicht hat . . .’

[55]‘Bereshit,’ ‘in the beginning,’ is the first word of Holy Scripture. On the big bang, to which allusion is made, see for example Scientific American, June 1970.

[56]Cf. Scientific American, December 1974.

[57]‘Nebbish’ is a Yiddish word. It means ‘stupid,useless, inept.’

[58]Cf. F. Villon, Le Testament, 1. 1720.

[59]Contains various references to the traditional Jewish ritual of Passover.

[60]‘Night watchman’ in German (it was a technical term in the Lager). The first line is from Isaiah 22:11.

[61]Cf. S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,l. 582, and Inferno XXXIII:141.

让我们遇见在。。

企鹅图书 微博(penguinbooks)

企鹅图书微信订阅号

企鹅图书数字业务微信服务号

更多关于我们对信息请

访问企鹅兰登北亚官网 PRHNA.COM