Agathe Read online

  That was why the first thing he said to his sister after standing up straight again was: “Now I know what you are: You are my self-love!” No doubt it sounded strange, but it really described what moved him. “In a certain sense, I’ve always lacked true self-love, which other people have so strongly,” he explained. “And now evidently, by mistake or by fate, that self-love was embodied in you, instead of in myself!” he added without further ado.

  It was his first attempt that evening to form a judgment on the meaning of his sister’s arrival.

  17

  THE SIAMESE TWINS

  Later that evening he returned to this.

  “You should know,” he began to tell his sister, “that there is a kind of self-love I have never experienced, a certain tender relationship to oneself that seems to come naturally to most other people. I’m not sure how to describe it. I could say, for example, that I have always had lovers with whom I was mismatched. They were illustrations of some sudden whim, caricatures of my mood of the moment: in other words, basically just examples of my inability to enter into natural relationships with other people. Even that has to do with one’s relationship to oneself. Basically I always chose women I didn’t like—”

  “But you were perfectly justified in doing so!” Agathe interrupted him. “If I were a man, I would have no qualms treating women as irresponsibly as I pleased. And I would desire them out of distraction and wonder, nothing more!”

  “Really? You would? That’s nice of you!”

  “They’re ridiculous parasites. They share a man’s life together with his dog!” She said this without even a hint of moral indignation. She was pleasantly tired and was keeping her eyes closed, having gone to bed early, and Ulrich, who had come to say good night, saw her lying in his place in his bed.

  But it was also the bed in which Bonadea had lain only thirty-six hours earlier. That was probably why Ulrich returned to the subject of his mistresses. “All I was trying to describe,” he repeated, smiling, “was my own inability to arrive at a mildly reasonable relationship with myself. In order for me to experience anything with real interest, it has to be part of some context, it has to be controlled by an idea. The experience itself I’d really prefer to have behind me, as a memory; the emotional effort it calls for strikes me as unpleasant and absurdly misplaced. That’s how it is when I describe myself ruthlessly to you. And the simplest, most primal idea, at least in one’s younger years, is that you’re a hell of a guy, completely without precedent, and the world has been waiting for you. But once you’ve turned thirty, this is no longer sustainable!” He reflected a moment and then said: “No! It’s so hard to talk about oneself: What I really ought to say is that I’ve never been ruled by a lasting idea. There was nothing like that to be found. One should love an idea like a woman. It should be sheer joy to return to it. And one always has it inside oneself! And looks for it in everything outside oneself! I never found any ideas like that. I’ve always had a man-to-man relationship to the so-called great ideas, maybe even to the ones that are rightly so-called. I think I was not born to subordinate myself: ideas provoked me to overthrow them and put others in their place. Perhaps it was precisely this jealousy that drove me to science, whose laws are sought through collaboration and are not regarded as immutable either!” Again he paused and laughed, either at himself or at his self-portrayal. “But at any rate,” he continued earnestly, “because of this way I have of associating no idea or every idea with myself, I lost the ability to take life seriously. I find life much more exciting when I read about it in a novel, where it’s wrapped up in some conception; but when I’m expected to live it in all its particulars, I always find it outdated, crammed with detail in an old-fashioned way, and intellectually passé. I don’t think it’s just me, either. Most people are like this nowadays, even though many put on a charade of intense joie de vivre, rather like schoolchildren who are taught to skip merrily through the daisies. There’s always something deliberate about it, and they feel that. Actually they’re as capable of murdering each other in cold blood as they are of cheerfully getting along. Our time really doesn’t seem to take seriously the events and adventures it’s filled with. When they happen, there’s a stir. Before you know it, that sets off new happenings, one after the other, like a vendetta, a compulsive recital of the alphabet from B to Z because one has said A. But these events in our life have less life than a book, because they don’t have a coherent meaning.”

  That was how Ulrich spoke. Loosely. Shifting in tone and mood. Agathe did not answer; her eyes were still shut, but she was smiling.

  Ulrich said: “I no longer know what I’m telling you. I don’t think I can get back to the beginning.”

  They were silent for a while. He was able to contemplate his sister’s face at leisure, since it was not defended by the gaze of her eyes. It lay there as a piece of naked body, like women when they are alone with each other in a bathhouse. The feminine, unguarded, natural cynicism of this sight, not intended for men’s eyes, still exerted an unaccustomed effect on Ulrich, even though it was no longer as intense as in their first days together, when Agathe had immediately claimed her sisterly right to talk to him without hiding her soul behind veils of decorum, since for her he was not a man like others. He remembered the mixture of surprise and fright he had felt as a boy when he had seen a pregnant woman on the street, or a mother breastfeeding her baby: secrets carefully withheld from the boy suddenly bulged, full-blown and unembarrassed in the sun. And perhaps he had been carrying vestiges of such impressions about with him for a long time, because suddenly it seemed to him that he felt entirely free of them. That Agathe was a woman with all sorts of experiences in her past was a pleasant and comfortable thought; there was no need to guard one’s speech as with a young girl, indeed it struck him as touchingly natural that with a mature woman everything was already morally less constrained. He also felt a need to protect her, to make up to her for something or other by being kind to her in some way. He resolved to do everything he possibly could for her. He even resolved to find her another husband. And this need for kindness recovered for him, though he barely noticed, the lost thread of the conversation.

  “Probably our self-love changes during the years of sexual maturation,” he said without transition. “Because there, a meadow of tenderness in which one had been playing suddenly gets mowed down to produce fodder for one particular instinct.”

  “To make the cow give milk!” Agathe supplemented after the slightest pause, mischievously and with dignity, but without opening her eyes.

  “Yes, I suppose it’s all connected,” Ulrich said, and continued: “So there is a moment when our life loses almost all its tenderness and contracts into that one particular operation, which then remains supercharged with it: Doesn’t it seem to you too as if there were a horrible drought that prevails everywhere on earth, except for one place where it never stops raining?!”

  Agathe said: “It seems to me that as a child I loved my dolls more fiercely than I’ve ever loved a man.”

  “What did you do with them?” Ulrich asked. “Did you give them away?”

  “Who could I have given them to? I laid them to rest in the kitchen stove.”

  Ulrich responded with animation: “When I recall my earliest years, I’m tempted to say that outside and inside were scarcely distinguishable. When I crawled toward something, it came toward me on wings; and when something happened that was important to us, it wasn’t just we who were excited by it, but the things themselves began to seethe. I wouldn’t claim that we were happier then than we were later. We weren’t in possession of ourselves yet; in fact, we didn’t really exist, our personal states were not yet distinctly separated from those of the world. It sounds strange, and yet it is true when I say that our feelings, our volitions, our very selves were not yet entirely inside ourselves. What is even stranger is that I could just as well say: were not yet entirely apart from ourselves. Because if today, when you feel you’re entirely in posses
sion of yourself, if you ask yourself the unusual question, “Who am I really?” you will make this discovery. You will always see yourself from the outside, like a thing. You will notice that at one moment you get angry, at another sad, just as your coat will at one time be wet and at another time hot. No matter how closely you observe yourself, you will at best find unknown sides of yourself, but your inner self will remain hidden. Whatever you do, you remain outside yourself, except for those rare moments when someone would say of you that you’re beside yourself. As adults, of course, we’ve compensated by being able to think, ‘I am,’ whenever we wish, if we care to do so. You see a car, and somehow in a shadowy way you also see: ‘I see a car.’ You’re in love or you’re sad and you see that you’re sad or in love. But in a full sense neither the car nor your sadness or your love, nor you yourself, are completely there. Nothing is as completely there as it once was in childhood. Instead, everything you touch, down to your innermost self, is more or less petrified from the moment you have succeeded in being a ‘personality,’ and what is left over, enveloped in a wholly external existence, is a spectral thread of misty self-certainty and murky self-love. What has gone wrong there? One has a feeling that somewhere, something could still be reversed! Surely no one can claim that a child’s experience is totally different from a man’s! I don’t have a definitive answer to this question, even though there may be this or that idea about it. But for a long time my answer has been that I’ve lost my love for this manner of selfhood and this kind of world.”

  Ulrich was pleased that Agathe had listened without interrupting him, for he was not expecting an answer from her any more than from himself and was convinced that for the present no one could give the kind of answer he had in mind. Nevertheless, he did not fear for a moment that what he was talking about might be too difficult for her. He did not regard it as philosophizing or even as an unusual subject for conversation, any more than a very young person, whom he resembled in this situation, will allow difficulties of expression to dissuade him from finding everything simple when he is prompted to exchange views on the eternal question “Who are you? This is how it is with me.” He derived his conviction that his sister could follow him word for word not from thought but from her presence. His gaze rested on her face, and he felt unaccountably happy. This face with closed eyes gave not even a hint of recoil. It exerted a bottomless attraction on him; also in the sense of drawing him into a depth without end. Sinking into contemplation of this face, he found nowhere that ground sludge of dissolved resistances from which a man who has dived into love can push off to rise back up to the dry surface. But since he was accustomed to experience inclination toward a woman as a violently reversed dislike of the person, which—even though he disapproved of it—does offer a certain guarantee of not losing oneself, he was now alarmed by the pure inclination with which he was leaning curiously and ever more deeply toward her, almost as if yielding to the pull of vertigo, so that he soon drew back and from sheer happiness took refuge in a somewhat boyish prank to recall Agathe to everyday life: with the most gingerly touch he was capable of, he tried to open her eyes. Agathe opened them, laughing, and exclaimed: “Considering I’m supposed to be your self-love, you’re treating me rather roughly!”

  This response was just as boyish as his attack, and their looks pressed against each other with playful exaggeration, like two boys who are ready for a scuffle but are laughing too hard to go through with it. But suddenly Agathe dropped this and asked seriously: “Do you know the myth Plato tells, based on some ancient tradition, that the gods divided the original human being into two parts, man and woman?” She had raised herself on an elbow and unexpectedly blushed, feeling a little foolish for having asked Ulrich whether he knew this story, which was probably widely known. So she quickly decided to forge ahead: “Now the unfortunate halves do all sorts of foolish things in order to join together again: This is written in all the schoolbooks for the higher grades; unfortunately, they don’t tell you why it can’t be done!”

  “I can tell you that,” Ulrich joined in, happy to realize how exactly she had understood. “No one knows which of the many halves that are running around is the one he is lacking. He or she will grab one that seems to fit and make the most futile efforts to become one with it, until in the end it’s clear that this will not happen. If a child is born as a result, both halves will believe through several years of their youth that they’ve at least become one in their child; but that’s just a third half, which soon shows signs of trying to get away as far as possible from the other two and set out in search of a fourth. Thus the human race keeps on bisecting itself physiologically, and the intrinsic oneness stands like the moon outside the bedroom window.”

  “You’d think siblings should have already gone at least halfway!” Agathe interjected in a voice that had become husky.

  “Twins, perhaps.”

  “Aren’t we twins?”

  “Certainly!”

  Ulrich suddenly veered away. “Twins are rare. Twins of different sexes are extremely rare. If in addition they are not the same age and have hardly known each other for the longest time, it adds up to a phenomenon that’s truly worthy of us!” he declared, striving to get back to the shallows of amusement.

  “But it was as twins that we met!” Agathe insisted, undeterred.

  “Because we happened to be wearing similar clothes?”

  “Maybe. And anyway! You can say it was chance, but what is chance? I believe chance is precisely fate or destiny or whatever you want to call it. Didn’t it ever seem like chance to you that you were born precisely as you and nobody else? Our being brother and sister is the same thing, doubled!” That was how Agathe explained it, and Ulrich submitted to this wisdom. “So we declare ourselves twins!” he agreed. “Symmetrical creatures of nature’s whim, we will from now on be the same age, the same height, have the same hair, wear identically striped clothes with the same ribbon tied under our chins as we follow our path through the throngs of humanity; but let me point out that people watching us as we pass will find us both touching and somewhat absurd, as always when something reminds them of the mysteries of their becoming.”

  “We could dress in an opposite way,” Agathe retorted, amused. “One in yellow when the other one’s in blue, or red next to green, and we could dye our hair violet or purple, and I’ll make myself a hump and you give yourself a belly: and still we’ll be twins!”

  But the joke was depleted, its pretext worn out, and they fell silent for a while.

  “Do you realize,” Ulrich said suddenly then, “that this is a very serious matter we’re talking about?” No sooner had he said this than his sister again lowered the fan of her lashes over her eyes and, hiding her interest, let him go on talking by himself. Maybe it only looked as if she had closed her eyes. The room was dark, and what lamplight there was did not clarify so much as submerge all contours beneath planes of pale light. Ulrich had said: “There’s not only the myth of the human being who was divided in two; we could also think of Pygmalion, Hermaphroditus, or Isis and Osiris: beneath the differences, it always remains the same. This desire for a double of the opposite sex is very ancient. It seeks the love of a being who is completely the same as oneself and yet an other, distinct from oneself, a magical creature who is oneself and yet remains a magical creature and who, above all, has the advantage over anything we merely imagine of possessing the breath of autonomy and independence. This dream of a quintessential love, free of the limitations of the bodily world, meeting itself in two beings that are the same unsame self, has risen countless times in solitary alchemy from the alembic of the human skull—”

  Then he had halted in mid-speech; evidently something disturbing had occurred to him, and he had concluded with the almost unfriendly words: “Even under the most ordinary everyday conditions of love, traces of this can be found: in the charm of every change of clothing, every disguise, in the significance of mutual correspondences or repetitions of oneself in another. The
little magic is always the same, whether one sees a lady naked for the first time, or a naked girl for the first time in a high-necked dress, and the great, ruthless passions are all due to someone imagining that his most secret self is peering out from behind the curtains of a stranger’s eyes.”

  It sounded as though he were asking her not to overestimate what they were saying. But Agathe thought once again of the lightning flash of surprise she had felt when they first met, disguised, as it were, in their lounging suits. And she replied: “So this has been around for thousands of years; does it make it any easier to understand if one explains it as a meeting of two illusions?”

  Ulrich was silent.

  And after a while Agathe said delightedly: “But it’s like that in sleep! There you see yourself sometimes transformed into something else. Or you meet yourself as a man. And then you’re nicer to him than you ever are to yourself. You’ll probably say those are sexual dreams; but to me it seems they’re much older.”

  “Do you often have dreams like that?” Ulrich asked.

  “Sometimes; rarely.”

  “I almost never do,” he confessed. “It’s ages since I’ve had that kind of dream.”

  “And yet you once declared to me,” Agathe now said, “—I think it must have been right at the beginning, still in the old house—that thousands of years ago people really had different kinds of experiences!”

  “Oh, you mean the ‘giving’ and the ‘receiving’ kind of seeing?” Ulrich replied and smiled, even though Agathe could not see him. “The spirit’s modes of ‘being embraced’ and ‘embracing’? Yes, of course I must have talked about this mysterious bisexuality of the soul, too. And who knows what else! There are hints of this in everything. Even in every analogy there’s a remnant of the magic of being the same and not the same. But haven’t you noticed: In all the patterns of behavior we’ve mentioned—in dream, myth, poem, childhood, even in love—the increase in feeling is purchased at the expense of understanding, and that means: at the expense of reality.”