Identity by Milan Kundera

Author:Milan Kundera
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

28

Jean-Marc looked at Chantal, whose face suddenly brightened with a secret amusement. He did not want to ask her the reason, content to savor the pleasure of watching her. As she lost herself in her comic imaginings, he reflected that she was his sole emotional link to the world. People talk to him about prisoners, about the persecuted, about the hungry? He knows the only way he feels personally, painfully touched by their misfortune: he imagines Chantal in their place. People tell him about women raped in some civil war? He sees Chantal there, raped. She and she alone releases him from his apathy. Only through her can he feel compassion.

He would have liked to tell her this, but he was ashamed of the pathetic. The more so because another idea, completely opposite, caught him by surprise: what if he should lose this one person who binds him to humankind? He was thinking not of her death but of something subtler, something elusive that has been haunting him lately: that one day he wouldn’t recognize her; that one day he would notice that Chantal was not the Chantal he lived with but that woman on the beach he mistook for her; that the certainty Chantal represented for him would turn out to be illusory, and that she would come to mean as little to him as everybody else.

She took his hand: “What’s wrong with you? You’re sad again. For the last couple of days I’ve noticed you’re sad. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing, nothing at all.”

“Sure there is. Tell me, what’s making you sad just now?”

“I imagined you were someone else.”

“What?”

“That you’re different from what I imagine you. That I’m wrong about your identity.”

“I don’t understand.”

He saw a pile of brassieres. A sad little hill of brassieres. A silly hill. But right through that vision he immediately caught sight of the real face of Chantal as she sat across from him. He felt the touch of her hand on his, and the sense of having a stranger, or a traitor, before him vanished rapidly. He smiled: “Forget that. I didn’t say a thing.”

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