by Peter Nadas
What he had in mind, he said, was what I must be feeling.
Hatred, I said. I could say it out loud, because it wasn't quite that anymore.
Why hatred? would I tell him? could I?
A shock of curly blond hair, a forest of hair, a luxuriant mane; the smooth skin taut over the high forehead with its two pronounced bulges; the soft hollow of the temples; dense, dark eyebrows adorned with some longer hairs; although thinner and narrower over the ridge of the nose, the brows met and mingled with lighter hairs as they curved up toward the forehead and then descended in an even lighter, downier arch into the shell-like indentation of the temples, at once shading and accentuating the finely cushioned eyelids, themselves divided by long, curled dark lashes, forming a living and moving frame around the black centers of the pupils dilating and contracting smoothly in the blue of his eyes; what a blue that was! how strong and cold! and how strange the blue eyes seemed, framed in black on the milk-white skin; and the black dissolving into blond with the greatest of ease; all these intrusive colors! the nose, its spine descending in a straight line to the flaring base, blended at a steep angle into the low region of the face, but with an elegant flourish, curling back into itself, it also encircled the dark little caves of the nostrils, only to continue, imperceptibly and under the skin, and protrude in the form of two delicate hillocks above the lips, connecting, symbolically almost, the inner lobes of the nostrils with the rim of the upper lip, bringing into harmony total opposites: the vertical line of the nose with the horizontal of the mouth, the oblong face, the perfectly round head, and the lips! those coupling slabs of flesh, their rawness barely concealed.
He shouldn't be angry with me, that's all I was asking.
And the only way I could prove that I meant what I'd said was to kiss him, but this was no longer the mouth but just another mouth, and mine, too, was just a mouth, so this wasn't going to work.
Why should he be angry; he wasn't angry.
Maybe it wasn't even his features but the movements of his lips, parting and closing as they formed words, the mechanical motion itself that, for all his calm, exhaled an infinite coolness, or could I myself have been so cold at the time? or both of us? but everything, everything changed! his face, his mouth, mostly his mouth, opening and closing, and my arm feeling the weight of my body, the strain of being in that position turning it numb, and his hand as he propped himself up, as though all this was but the mechanics of that unfamiliar force manifesting itself in the physical properties of our bodies, we might have possessed this compelling force, but our every move was defined by those properties, everything was determined by them; to put it another way, I may feel God residing in me, yet no motion can be other than what is prescribed by my physical form, every gesture must take place within the limits set by this form, which also sets the patterns for that compelling force; thus, the effect produced by a gesture can be only a signal, an allusion, nothing more than the perception of the purposeful functioning of these physical forms; I may take pleasure in perceiving a familiar pattern realized, and take it to be a real feeling, but it's nothing but self-enjoyment; I am not enjoying him, I merely see a form, a pattern, not him, but a signal, an allusion; the only thing we enjoy in each other is that our bodies function in similar ways, his movements elicit identical patterns in me, immediately making it clear what he is after; amusing ourselves with mirrors, that's all we were doing, the rest was self-deception; and this realization then was as if in the middle of enjoying a piece of music I'd suddenly started paying attention to the physical workings of the instruments, to the strings and hammers, and the musical sounds themselves grew distant.
I said I was sorry, but I didn't understand anything.
Why must I understand, he asked, what was there to understand?
I told him not to be angry with me, but there was nothing else I could say; maybe now I'd be able to tell him what I'd kept quiet about last time because I'd thought it was too sentimental, and although he had been most curious to hear it, I'd feared ruining something then; but now, I hoped, he wouldn't be offended, I could tell him that even his movements were not that important to me, it just didn't matter anymore that he could touch me or I him, because whatever we might do—and there was nothing we couldn't do—it had been arranged this way and that's all there was to it! and somehow we had been together, he and I, long before we became acquainted, only we didn't know it; would he believe it if I told him that we had been together for almost thirty years? that was my obsession, my idée fixe, and now I could say it: I believed he was my brother.
He burst into hearty laughter, he guffawed, and as soon as I said the word I had to laugh, too; to take the edge off his guffaw, he touched my face with the tips of his fingers, gently, patiently; and the reason we had to laugh, I was laughing, too, was not only that what I had said, in a voice charged with emotion, was embarrassingly gauche—not to mention that it was not at all what I had meant to say—but also that the word itself, "brother," in his language, and in our particular situation, did not mean the same thing it did in mine; as soon as the word slipped out, I noticed my error, because one immediately had to think of the little adjective "warm," which had to be attached to the word "brother" if one wanted to say "queer," warmer Bruder, in his language; so what I had said to him, in a voice charged with emotion, was that he was my little faggot, which may have been a witty wordplay, if only I hadn't said it so emotionally, but this way it was like mentioning rope in a hanged man's house, a well-intentioned gesture gone laughably awry, and we did laugh, he in particular laughed so hard his eyes filled with tears, and it was no use explaining to him that in the Hungarian word for brother, testvér, blood and body are linked, and that's what I had in mind.
When he had calmed down a bit, and the little afterbursts of laughter were coming at longer intervals, I realized we had drifted even further apart.
He seemed to have assumed again that air of superiority with which he had looked me over on our first night together.
I told him quietly that what I had said before was not what I'd wanted to say.
He held my face, he forgave my silly slip, but his forgiveness, already past the laughter, made him appear even more superior.
What I wanted to tell him, I said, what I really wanted to tell him was something we hadn't talked about before, because I didn't want to hurt him, but now I felt this whole thing to be hopeless, and please don't be offended, I felt I was locked up in jail.
Why should he be offended; there was no reason to be offended.
Perhaps, I said, we should stop seeing each other for a while.
Well, yes, that's why he'd said before that this is what it's like, now I could see it for myself, but then I'd pretended not to understand.
I didn't.
The truth was, he continued, he hadn't thought about it either, for once, with me, he also forgot that this is what it's like, and just a few minutes earlier, when he sensed on my hand that it was over, he was surprised, and terrified; but he assumed that this was how long the thing was meant to last, and not longer; and while he was pretending to watch TV, he had to realize that if I felt that way, he would just have to accept it, and that made him feel better, because—I had to believe him—he knew from experience that two men, or as I was kind enough to put it before, two brothers—and he let out one more tiny burst of laughter, though it could have been a sob, too—two men simply cannot take it for long, and there were no exceptions; what I had tried to do was to force on our relationship the emotional standards I'd been used to with women, and he couldn't help it if I had such a muddled past, but I shouldn't forget that with a woman, which ruled out both of us, it was possible to make something of the relationship even if I knew there was no chance, for no disqualifying circumstance could upset the chances of natural continuity; between two men, however, what you had was always just what you had, no more, no less; and for this reason, in a situation like this, the best thing to do was to get up, stop playing games, find som
e excuse, and clear out quickly and gracefully, and never come back, never even look back; what I could take with me this way would be more precious to both of us than if I tried to deceive myself; with all due respect, him I couldn't deceive; he didn't mean to rub it in, but he was beyond all that, he knew these routines all too well, so really, the only sensible thing to do was not to give him another thought, ever.
I said he was trying to play the ruthless male, not to mention the fascist, just a little too transparently.
I was being sentimental, he said.
Maybe, I said, but I couldn't express myself properly in this rotten language.
He'd do the expressing for me.
Please, stop acting silly.
Is that what he was doing? he asked.
He could go on acting silly, if he liked.
Did I still know what we were talking about?
Did he?
PART II
On an Antique Mural
The picture I had been keeping tucked away in my notes, the one I would have described in my planned narrative as the multisecret world of my presentiments and presumptions—had I the necessary talent and strength to do it, of course—depicted a delicate, lovely Arcadian landscape with a gently rising clearing among hills that stretched into the horizon, sparse thickets and silky grass, flowers, storm-ruffled olive trees and weather-beaten oaks, a skillful copy of an antique mural I had had the opportunity to admire several years ago during my travels through Italy which, in the full splendor of its bold colors and formidable dimensions, captured the landscape in the very moment when morning slowly rises out of Oceanus to bring light to mankind, and with its infinitely fine light illuminated the dewdrops perched on blades of grass and settled in the hollow palms of leaves, the time of dew, a time when the wind does not rustle the leaves but seems to have abated, a time we think of as eternity, when night has already laid its silver egg but Eros, according to some tales the son of the wind god, cannot yet emerge from this egg and is still in a state of Before, before something, before anything we might call an event, in the moment just before that event but already after the noble act of impregnation and conception, when the two powerful primordial elements, the wild wind and the dark of night, have already coupled; this is a time when as yet there are no shadows, we are still before everything that might be described later as Afterward—this is the nature of a primal morning! and that is why this extraordinary moment should not be confused with, although it may be compared to, that other moment when Helios is about to vanish with his horses and chariot behind the rim of the earth, because then, terrified of mortality and hoping to overtake the departing sun—anything is better than to stay here! not here!—every living thing stretches to the limit of its own shadow and the pain of parting turns everything ruddily fatal, shining like gold; but in this early moment everything is almost lifeless, almost stiff, pale, almost gray, silvery, looming in the dimness, cold, and if just now I mentioned vivid colors, it was only because this silver is of course no longer the silver glow of the night which so eagerly draws into itself all the colors of the world, dissolving them into homogeneous metallic flashes; no, at this hour things have already received their own colors, which is to say these colors have been conceived but are not yet fully alive: the naked body of Pan, at the geometrical center of the picture, bursting with pleasure, shows a rich brown; the coat of the handsome little he-goat at his feet is appropriately gray, dirty white; the grass is an angry green, the oak tree an even deeper green, the stone is whiter than white, and the light capes of the three nymphs are turquoise, olive-green, and red silk; but just as at this dewy border of night and day the nymphs are motionless, having completed their last nocturnal movements but not yet begun the first gestures of their new day, so the colors of their bodies and garb remain within the shadowless outline of their pure forms, and so do the colors of the shadowless trees, grass, and stones, because just as at the border of the End and the Beginning these creatures have nothing to do with one another, each looking in a different direction—making the picture, even on our small copy, seem to grow in size—colors have no relationship to one another either: the red is red for and by itself, the blue is blue only for itself and not because it is to be distinguished from green, which is only green; it is as if the painter of the picture, in his own barbarically simplifying ignorance, had captured the very moment of the world being born, or, more simply, as if with deadly precision he had insisted on depicting the mood of a summer dawn when one is suddenly startled out of sleep without knowing why; one gets out of the blind warmth of bed, staggers out of the house to relieve oneself—that at least if one's already awake—and is greeted by a terrible silence undisturbed even by the dew congealing into dripping drops, and although one knows that in the very next moment the warming yellow of daylight will jolt the universe out of its frozen, mortal state, making it come alive in a new birth, one also knows that all one's experience and knowledge is as nothing compared to the silence of nonexistence, and if up to now one has sought death in the shadows of the day or while groping in the dark of night, one now discovers it, in this colorfully colorless instant, and unexpectedly and with such dreadful ease that the hot urine won't gush out: death lay in the moment that, until now, one has been fortunate to sleep through, one's body kept warm in the embrace of the gods.
And maybe it's not even Pan sitting on that stone: in spite of my careful and thorough studies, I have been unable to determine for sure—maybe it's Hermes my picture represents, which means not the son but the father, no small difference, that! for in that case it is not the son's lovemates whom we see, his frolicking maid-lovers depicted as the three nymphs, but the woman-mother herself: in an ambiguous way, every little motif in the picture refutes its own assertions, so much so that I could afford quietly to suppose—in fact, this supposition is what has excited me—that the painter deliberately did this brave mixing up, showing the father but meaning the son or, conversely, painting the son but meaning to show the father in his youth, and depicting for us the mother as the adoring lover of them both, for this figure in her olive-green cloak at the right side of the picture, with her head lowered, her sparkling eyes following her fingers gliding over the strings of the lyre pressed against her bosom, seems somewhat older, perhaps considerably older than the naked youth, and we must risk drawing this conclusion even if we shudder at the thought that our eyes, prompted by wishful imagination, may deceive us and even if we know well that gods are ageless; of course, when it comes to nymphs, this is not entirely accurate, for their immortality, as evidenced by traditional narratives that have come down to us, is directly proportional to their proximity to the divinities, and consequently there are mortals among them: nymphs of the sea are said to be immortal, like the sea itself, but the same cannot be said about the more common naiads of the springs, and even less so of the nymphs of the meadows, groves, and trees, especially those who live in oak trees and die when the trees die; and if, following the painter's rather confusing hints, we try to guess the age of a particular nymph by examining her face, as her fingers reach for the most distant string of the lyre, her glance measuring the exact intervals between the strings, for she wants to produce an elegant light glissando, we must remind ourselves of the ancient method of reckoning life spans according to which the chattering crow lives the equivalent of nine human generations, a stag has as many as four crows' lives, and three stags' lives add up to a raven's age; a palm tree lives as long as nine ravens, and nymphs, Zeus' lovely-haired daughters, can expect to live as many years as make up the lives of ten palm trees; in this calculation, then, our nymph must have been into her sixth raven's lifetime, so by declaring her older than the naked youth I don't mean to measure her age in human years, and I did not see the tiniest wrinkle on her face—she appeared to be blessed with the wisdom of motherhood, at least when compared to the two other nymphs, who, although closer to the youth, in fact identical to him in age, were untouched by that bliss beyond pain; and I could
not exactly tell you why, but her neck also indicated this maternal wisdom, arching out of the rich folds of the cloak draped over her shoulders; oh, that exquisite feminine neckline! which remained bare and white under auburn hair gathered into a loose bun by a silver clasp and seeming so attractively and shamelessly naked precisely because of a few unruly curls, short, frizzy strands falling back onto the flesh—of course this is most attractive, for it is the mix of being dressed and being naked that we like so much; and if I succeeded in describing the nymph's neck in some such fashion, I'd most likely put into words the experience I've preserved in the image of my betrothed's neck, no, not just preserved, but cherished, adoringly, an experience of the two of us sitting next to each other while leafing through a photo album, let's say: she would lean forward a little, to look at some negligible detail in a picture, and I'd gaze at her from the side, quite close, wanting to bend over her, touch her neck with my lips, with tiny kisses barely graze the skin made taut by her movement, dissolve her warmth and smell in my mouth, work my way up to her hair—but I don't, I am held back by a sense of propriety, tact.
When the dawning day melts night's residual silver into gold—oh, if only I could speak of ancient mornings in such phrases!—and fingers pluck the strings, the flurry of sounds will be the beginning; with the dulcet tones of her lyre, the nymph wishes to be first to greet the new day in whose warm light the oak tree casts its pleasing shadow.
For, needless to say, it was an oak tree behind her, gnarled and to our eyes quite old-looking, probably hit by lightning once, because it seemed oddly tilted, though the wind had already ripped out and scattered the withered branches, and in their places new clumps of foliage had sprouted; this not only confirmed my sense that she had to be rather advanced in years but directly indicated that we are dealing with the nymph of the oak who, strumming her lyre in the morning, was none other than Dryope, of whom we know that with her slender body and noble mien she so aroused the passion of the Arcadian shepherd Hermes that the inflamed god spent a long time pursuing her—though let it be said in passing only long in human terms, about three lifetimes, but no more than one-third of a crow's life span—until their love was properly consummated: this was by no means an extraordinary occurrence; we might even say that the nymph, whose name suggests a female creature who turns a man into a nymphios, that is, a bridegroom confirming his manhood, did only what she had to do, as did the god himself; nevertheless, the love-child brought into the world of immortals by the beautiful Dryope could not be judged by the standards to which this poor dutiful mortal, almost human girl-mother, had been accustomed.
