The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera

Author:Milan Kundera [Milan Kundera]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571367412
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Ramon Arrives at the Cocktail Party in a Foul Mood

Despite the compassion he had felt at the end of their encounter in the Luxembourg Gardens, Ramon could not change the fact that D’Ardelo belonged to the sort of people he did not like. Even though they had a trait in common—the passion for dazzling others; for startling them by an amusing remark; for conquering a woman before their very eyes. Except that Ramon was not a Narcissus. He enjoyed success but feared to rouse envy; he liked being admired but fled the admirers. His diffidence had turned into a love of solitude after he sustained a few wounds in his private life, but especially since the previous year, when he had been obliged to join the dismal army of the retired: His nonconformist remarks, which had used to keep him young, now despite his misleading appearance made him an uncontemporary character, a person not of our time, and thus old.

So he decided to boycott the cocktail party he’d been invited to by his former colleague (a man not yet retired), and he did not change his mind until the last minute, when Charles and Caliban swore that only his presence would make bearable their ever more boring task as waiters. Still, he arrived very late, long after a guest had delivered a speech in the host’s honor. The apartment was jammed. Knowing no one, Ramon headed for the long table behind which his two friends were serving drinks. To lighten his foul mood, he greeted them with a few words in rough imitation of their Pakistani babble. Caliban replied in his authentic version of the same babble.

Then, with a wineglass in hand, still in a foul mood, wandering among the strangers, Ramon was drawn to the excitement of a few people turned toward the vestibule door. A woman appeared there, slender and beautiful, in her fifties. Her head tilted back, she slid a hand several times beneath her hair, lifting it, then letting it fall back gracefully, and she turned to offer everyone the voluptuously tragic expression of her face; no one among the guests had ever met her, but all knew her from photos: the famous Madame Franck. She stopped at the long table, bent over, and with grave concentration indicated to Caliban various canapés she liked.

Her plate was soon full, and Ramon thought of what D’Ardelo had told him in the Luxembourg Gardens: She had just lost her partner whom she had loved so passionately that, through some magical decree from the heavens, her sadness at the moment of his death had been transubstantiated into euphoria, and that her lust for life had grown a hundredfold. He watched her: She put canapés into her mouth, and her face displayed the vigorous motions of mastication.

When D’Ardelo’s daughter (Ramon knew her by sight) noticed the tall, famous woman, the girl’s mouth stopped moving (she, too, was masticating something) and her legs started running: “Darling!” She tried to embrace La Franck, but the woman was holding a plate at stomach level that thwarted her.

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