Slowness by Milan Kundera

fellow’s jeering voice, and the silhouette of Pontevin, who, like some Trotsky, is running a huge uprising, a great riotous mutiny, from his Paris bunker.
    “We’re going to have a swim,” he announces to Julie, and he runs down the staircase to the pool, which at the moment is empty and has the look of a theater stage to the people up above. He unbuttons his shirt. Julie runs to join him. “We’re going to have a swim,” he repeats, and tosses his trousers aside. “Take off your clothes!”
    drama playing out before their eyes. Immaculata managed to let nothing show; when Berck turned away, she moved to the staircase, climbed it, and only when she was finally alone, in the deserted corridor leading to the rooms, did she realize she was staggering.
    Half an hour later, the unsuspecting cameraman came into the room they shared and found her on the bed, lying flat on her stomach.
    “What’s wrong?”
    She does not answer.
    He sits down beside her and lays his hand on her head. She shakes it off as if a snake had touched her.
    “But what’s wrong?”
    He repeats the same question several times more, until she says: “Please go gargle, I can’t stand bad breath.”
    He did not have bad breath, he was always well scrubbed and scrupulously clean, therefore he knew she was lying, yet he goes docilely into the bathroom to do as she ordered.
    The bad-breath idea did not occur to Immaculata out of nowhere, for what inspired that mischief was a recent memory immediately
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    The dreadful speech Berck directed at Immaculata was uttered in a low, hissing voice, so the people nearby could not grasp the real nature of the
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    repressed: the memory of Berck’s bad breath. While she was listening, crushed, to his insults, she was in no state to concern herself with his exhalation, and it was an observer hidden inside her who registered the nauseating odor and added this clear-mindedly concrete commentary besides: A man whose mouth stinks has no mistress; no woman would put up with it; any woman would find a way to let him know he stinks and would force him to rid himself of that fault. While she was being bombarded with insults, she was listening to this silent commentary, which she found happy and hopeful, because it told her that, despite the specter of gorgeous women Berck cannily allows to hover around him, he has long since lost interest in romantic adventures, and that the place beside him in bed is vacant.
    As he gargles, the cameraman, a man at once romantic and practical, says to himself that the only way to change his companion’s foul mood is to make love to her as soon as possible. So in the bathroom he puts on his pajamas, and, his step tentative, he returns to sit beside her on the edge of the bed.
    Not daring to touch her, he asks again: “What’s wrong?”
    With implacable presence of mind, she responds: “If you can’t say anything but that idiotic line, I guess there’s not much to gain from a conversation with you.”
    She rises and goes to the closet; she opens it to consider the few dresses she has hung there; the dresses appeal to her; they rouse a vague but strong wish to not let herself be driven from the scene; to pass again through the precincts of her humiliation; to not consent to her defeat; and if defeat there is, to transform it into great theater, in the course of which she will set her wounded beauty shining and deploy her rebellious pride.
    “What are you doing? Where are you going?” he says.
    “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is not to stay with you.”
    “But tell me what’s wrong!”
    Immaculata gazes at her dresses and remarks: “Sixth time,” and I would point out that she is not mistaken in her count.
    “You were perfect,” says the cameraman, determined to ignore her mood. “We were right to come.
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    Your Berck project looks like a sure thing to me. I ordered up a bottle of champagne to our room.”
    “You can drink what you want with whoever you