The lecture you never gave.
The lecture I never gave.
Suddenly you saw your chance, Arsénie, you still had the lecture in your head, as clearly as if it were before you in print, just as it had been before your canceled appearance at the Kolarac Institute. The audience was there in front of you, receptive and ready, like the Serbian Sisters had they been given the chance.
It was all about the collapse of the property system, the replacement of that real, human system by a new, unreal, inhuman one, the transformation of objects into symbols, things into numbers. And you abandoned caution, all civic dignity, you forgot the passage of time, the auction which would begin at any moment. You forgot your beloved Niké, you became the worst kind of paid agitator, in the middle of the street, and with no hat and a torn coat at that.
“Honored Lady President! Esteemed ladies! Gentlemen!”
Someone burst out laughing, but he was silenced by other citizens who had greater respect for the seriousness of the moment.
“I am speaking to you according to the program—”
“Long live the Communist Party program!”
“—As I said, to set out before you the economic life of Belgrade, I shall take in the economic factors of the whole country and indeed of the whole continent, tear off the mask from that incompetent and alien policy which at last, here and now, has brought us to disaster!”
“Down with the antinational government! Down with the gravediggers of Yugoslavia!”
You raise your hand to silence the audience. You need to concentrate. Interruptions disturb you.
“Esteemed ladies, gentlemen! The very last moment has arrived for us to speak without ambiguity or prevarication…”
“Better war than the Pact, better the grave than be a slave!”
“… and especially the existence of the ordre de propriétaire, that toiling breed of people who, like Antaeus on his powerful shoulders, have been carrying the weight of social progress!”
“Long live the working masses!”
“And we ask ourselves what could more worthily express a nation’s capacity for existence than the vitality of its ownership class, and we answer boldly at once: rien, rien du tout, absolument rien!”
“Louder!”
Now you must be very serious in what you remember, Arsénie; all at once the events have begun to mingle, as if emulsifying, as if they were sinking back into the anonymity of a general impression from which only your sharpest words can be distinguished. Over there to one side, no more than a few yards from you, a group of young men are laughing out loud.
Yes, those youths. Clear faces. An exceptionally favorable sign. The general mood is good, people are relaxing, and the anger is disappearing; it seems that at last, as they say, I’ve got them.
“What’s all this about, folks?”
“Never mind, hear him out!”
“He’s crazy!”
“Just you keep going, Grandpa!”
“Shut up over there — let him alone!”
“If we cast just a superficial glance at the state of our national economy, what do we see? An amazing picture of calamity: quarries shut down; speculation in timber; the synthetic cartel dictating prices to us in association with I. G. Farben; unfair increase in the cost of skilled building services; incompetent upstarts in our architectural design bureaus who are allowed to have their own way…”
“Enough! Enough!”
“… the complete absence of regulatory plans and any kind of urbanist ideas. On the other hand…”
“Go fuck yourself!”
“… with the helpless feelings of well-meaning owners, we see impoverished citizens unable to put roofs over the heads of their children, while the finest flats stand empty. For houses, esteemed ladies, are like human souls: if we don’t inhabit them, they are lost. And most of all, ladies and gentlemen…”
“Shit on your gentlemen!”
“… that the direct system of ownership is being replaced by the indirect…”
“Get rid of that idiot.”
“This is freedom! Anyone can talk!”
“What freedom? It’s a circus!”
“Listen to him!”
The crowd was exhilarated and I had to keep going at all costs. “Whereas once possession was a means of setting up a mutually corrective relationship between material and its produced forms, in the sense that work on material was carried out by the mind” (laughter), “even so it used to be balanced by the reciprocal work which material carried out on the mind” (laughter), “so that we continually had the identification of roles between mind and matter” (loud laughter). “But today the dividing lines have disappeared” (wild laughter, applause), “so that all relationship between owner and what is owned has been lost, and there are people — tycoons who call themselves owners, but don’t in fact know what they own! Bremmer, Brevit, Brickhouse, British Aluminum, British Cotton, British Termo, Broom, Wade, Cable Covers, Allied Brick, Allied Insulators, Allied Textile — what can their owners know of their possessions from the interest rates and fractions which the stock exchange index shows them, or from the mathematical symbols in which the banks have drowned our assets?”
To your horror, the painted idol beneath the red sky is leaning forward as if he wants to crawl over the heads toward you. He’s shouting:
“Get rid of that madman!”
You are offended. You protest in the name of ordinary decency. You resist.
“Get rid of him — get him down!”
In such a situation the best thing is to act as if that shameless interruption in no way concerned you, to remain aloof.
“Gentlemen! If the French client could have seen with his own eyes…”
“Aaaahh, down with the speaker!”
“… I repeat, if he could have seen that Louisiana on the basis of whose fatal natural riches Mr. Low from Highland Scotland” (laughter, applause, whistles) “issued his assignats, would any one of them have been deceived or gone bankrupt?”
“He doesn’t even know how to speak Serbian!”
“Down with the imperialist agents!”
“I will pass over the unworthy invective from the gentlemen over there, and as a proof of good faith I will give as a personal example the property owner in personam. I don’t know my Christina or Stephanie through brokers’ valuations, I know them in my heart. And Niké…” (Indignation, acclamation, laughter, whistling.) “I withdraw, I demonstratively withdraw from the platform, I request to be put down!”
“Knock him down!”
“I’ve lost my Borsalino with the black ribbon — first give me back my hat!”
“Fuck your burzalino, fuck your whore of a mother, and fuck you, too!”
That is the last observation which I am reasonably certain was directed at me. Controlling myself, I ask with whom I have the honor, then everything becomes mixed up, troubled, disintegrating in a seething emulsion of colors, movement, and shouting.
“Long live the Communist Party! Down with the Bolsheviks! Slavs, unite! Moscow-Belgrade! God and Justice! Citizens! Comrades! Cattle! Long live the young King! Down with Hitler! Down with Stalin! What a crock of shit! Kill the traitors! Wretched of the world, arise! Moscow ass lickers! Get him! Police, police! Here comes the cavalry!”
Twenty-seven years later, here I am on that same corner, but not flat on the ground. I am standing, as if I had just got up, as if I had spent that unknown time — time deep as a well — in the shallow dusty gutter. I suddenly felt a jerking of my facial muscle, I was seized by Pareze facialis dextri (whenever I woke up that muscle began to quiver), so that at the threshold of Kosmajska Street I had to turn my back on the road and, facing the shining window of the clinic, take the muscle between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand and gently but firmly massage its pliable rubber mass until it calmed down. Only after that internal shuddering had subsided did I venture to look about.