by Peter Nadas
Still, I couldn't get the painting out of my mind.
As if solving a puzzle, considering not only the possible evidence but all the disqualifying factors as well, I concluded again and again that the youth was as beautiful as Eros, his beauty kept me in thrall, yet he could not be Eros, because he was sad like Hermaphroditos, but he couldn't be Hermaphroditos either, since he was holding Pan's pipe and Hermes' staff, then again, I countered, refuting an elusive opposition while fondly observing the youth's phallus, rendered with the delicate strokes found in miniatures, he couldn't really be Pan, if only because the great phallic god is never depicted as being so calmly immodest, his thighs spread apart and seen from the front, we always view him from the side or in a pose that conceals his member, which is logical as well as natural, since from the tip of his horn to the heel of his hoof he is one great phallus, so it would be both impossible and absurd for anyone to use paltry human judgment to decide what this phallus should look like in a painting— small or large, brown or white, thick or slender, dangling sideways over his testicles or stiffening upward like a red bludgeon; in my picture it was more like a handsome little jewel, untouched, like a hairless infant's, like his whole body, whose taut skin glistened with oil; when there was nothing more to ponder, not a single detail which I hadn't thoroughly scrutinized, either with my naked eyes or with a magnifying glass, not a single allusion I hadn't tried to clarify with the aid of scholarly books, to bring light into the dimness of my own ignorance and lack of erudition, I finally realized that it made very little difference to me who was portrayed in that picture; it wasn't their story that interested me, for the stories of Apollo, Hermes, Pan, and Hermaphroditos flow into one another like all the things I had intended to reveal about myself, and that, after all, is as it should be, and it wasn't even their humanly fallible bodies that interested me; it was the subject of my planned narrative, which seemed to be identical with that in the painting and was most clearly present in the eyes of its figures, eyes which, though bound to their bodies, were no longer corporeal, their gaze being somehow beyond their bodies, transcendent; well anyway, to pursue this line of thought I should have set out for the place where the youth's gaze as well as mine were directed, the woods, to see who was standing among the trees, who was it whom this youth loved so much and so hopelessly while he was loved just as hopelessly by someone else? what was this all about? well, we were back at the original question again, but I realized I couldn't make my own life's no doubt foolish questions more momentous by concealing them in some antique mural, because they would keep crawling out from the wall—all right, then, enough! let's talk about things as they are, no pretense, let's talk about what is ours—our own body, our own eyes; I shuddered at this thought, and at the same time I discovered something I'd been blind to up to then, though with a magnifying glass I had gone over the youth's calves, toes, arms, mouth, eyes, and forehead repeatedly, with my ruler measured the angle and direction of his glance, and with intricate calculations identified the spot where the mysterious figure had to be standing; what I hadn't noticed, simply failed to notice, was that the two ringlets falling on his forehead were actually two tiny horns, that's right, which means that he must be Pan after all, yes, Pan, no doubt about it, except this certainty no longer interested me in the least.
And neither did the forest.
Standing at dusk by the window of my flat on Weissenburgerstrasse— feigning even to myself a certain absentmindedness, so that I could always retreat into the wings of the curtain without having to feel ashamed about spying—to be able to witness undisturbed the scene that took place twice a week, I felt the same gently fluttering excitement I had when studying the painting, because, just as in a classical story where there's always an objective, down-to-earth designation of the time and place of the occurrence, however abstracted and rarefied the human events being dealt with, I could be sure that the little interlude on my street would always take place not only at dusk but on Tuesdays and Fridays; my own excitement arrived according to this timetable, I could feel it in my throat, in my belly, and around my groin, and I could no longer tell which image was more important, the one of the antique mural or the one I'd call real and could see come to life by looking through my window; at any rate, this is where I would have begun my narrative, with this scene, though I would have liked to leave out the observer and his creative feelings, so similar to sexual arousal; I didn't want to treat the story as if someone were actually witnessing it, but instead indirectly, as it unfolded of itself, always the same way, repeating itself, beginning with the arrival of the horse-drawn wagon: on nearby Wörther Platz the gas lamps were already burning, but the lamplighter still had to traverse the square, with his forked pole uncover the peaked glass bells, and with the same long fork turn up the bluish-yellow flames before he got to our street; it wasn't dark yet, daylight still lingered when in the shadow of young plane trees lining the street, and just in front of the entrance to the basement butcher shop across the street, the closed white wagon came to a halt and the slim coachman, after throwing the reins over the shiny brake handle, jumped off his seat; in winter, or if a cold wind was blowing, he would quickly pull two horse blankets from under the seat and spread them over the horses' backs, so that while the scene was taking place the sweating animals wouldn't catch cold—this bit with the blankets was omitted in the mild weather of spring or fall or when the ruddy twilight of a warm summer evening still played with the breeze among the trees and on the blackened roofs of the mean tenements; then he would take the whip and, after first cracking it against his boot, stick it next to the reins; by this time the three women would be standing on the sidewalk near the wagon, but since I was watching from my fifth-floor window, from the shadow of the roof, the wagon blocked my view of their shapely figures; moments earlier the three heads had popped up, one after the other, as the women emerged from the depth of the steep staircase leading to the basement; the heaviest of the three, by no means fat, was the mother, who, from a distance at least, hardly looked older than her unmarried daughters, more like an older sister of the twin girls, who in build and movement were perfectly identical, and only from close up could one tell them apart by the color of their hair, one being an ash-blond, the other's blond hair darkened by a tinge of red, but they had the same, somewhat blank blue eyes set in the full, white expanse of their faces; I knew them, though I had never made it down to the cold bowels of their white-tiled shop; once in a while I had seen them on the street when during their lunch break they went for a stroll in the square, arm in arm, their skirts swaying evenly around their waists, or when I peeked through the barred cellar window and they, like two wild goddesses, were standing behind the counter, their blouse sleeves rolled up to their elbows, carving bloody chunks of meat; and thanks to my good old landlady Frau Hübner, who cooked for me and who bought cold cuts and other meats there, I knew everything about these women, everything that could be gleaned from kitchen gossip; not that I wanted to include in my story those intimate details known to everyone on our street; what interested me was the mere unfolding of the scene, its mute choreography, as it were, and the series of exciting relationships it intimated.
The wagon came from the main slaughterhouse on Eldenaerstrasse.
The coachman could not have been more than twenty, just slightly older than the two girls, and hadn't yet lost the adolescent resilience that long years of hard physical labor would surely rob him of; his tanned skin had a healthy sheen, his hair was so black it seemed to glitter, and a profusion of wild, dark chest hair curled out of his always unbuttoned shirt; the three women looked even more alike on such occasions, because they all wore bloodstained smocks over their dresses.
As the young man strode to the back of the wagon, he gave each of the women, the mother included, a gentle slap on the face; they had been waiting for this, anticipating the pleasurable warmth of the rough hand on their cheeks, and now fell in behind him, giggling, touching, pinching one another as they went
, as if to share among themselves what each of them had just received from the young man; he opened the wagon door and, throwing a large blood-spattered sheet over his shoulder, began to unload the shipment of meat.
The women carried the smaller pieces, shank, ribs cut in long strips, heads split in half, and haslets—livers, hearts, kidneys, and the like—in blue enamel dishes, while the coachman, with an exaggerated ease meant to impress the women, lifted and carried down into the cellar pigs cut in half and whole sides of beef; well, this is where the real plot of my story would begin, for they were apparently all working attentively, efficiently, at a nice even pace, yet they kept finding opportunities to touch one another, push, jostle, and bump into one another; moreover, under the pretext of assisting him, the women managed to touch the bare skin of the coachman's chest, neck, arm, and hand, and when they did, they relayed their pleasure in the touch, as if they were parts of a chain— sometimes they'd cling adroitly to his body for a while—but it was clear that, no matter how slyly or eagerly they did all this touching, this was not the object of the game, which, once accomplished, would satisfy them, but rather as if it was just an introduction to a more complete, purer form of contact, a more elaborate game they had to prepare gradually; but I was not given a chance to see this next phase, because they'd often disappear inside the basement shop for long periods, sometimes as much as half an hour, leaving the wagon full of merchandise open and unattended; occasionally dogs with bristling hair and cats dazed with hunger would appear on the scene, sniffing at the spilled blood and shreds of meat, but oddly enough they never risked climbing up or jumping into the wagon; there I stood, behind the drawn curtains, in the twilight dimness of my room, waiting patiently, and if the four of them did not appear for a long time, then in my imagination somehow the basement opened up, its walls fell away, and they, shedding their bloody clothes, stripping down to bare skin, reached that Arcadian meadow—I don't know how, or I should say
I do, of course I do! I pictured a subterranean passage that led them under the city and out into the open, where the two images simply merged, observation slipped into imagination; they were pure, innocent, and natural, and this is the point where my story of that coarsely beautiful man and the three women really becomes involved.
One reason I didn't like Frau Hübner barging into my room without knocking was that while observing the Tuesday and Friday twilight tableaux, or while concentrating on my fantasies about its absence, I experienced such a powerful arousal that to calm myself, and also intensify my solitary pleasure, I had to reach inside my trousers and touch myself; I would not move away from the drawn-back curtain; letting the fear of being discovered increase the tension, I stayed put and gently wrapped five fingers around my hard member pressing against my robe, doing it, of course, like a discriminating connoisseur, simultaneously cupping the soft testes and the blood-stiffened shaft in my warm palm, as if seizing at its source, at its root, what would soon erupt, and at the same time, with a certain amount of cunning self-control, I continued to pay strict attention to the events of the street, then to the silence, the absence of any action, and now and then to the unsuspecting passersby; I wasn't interested in quick gratification; delaying it kept me on the edge between the real spectacle and creative fantasy; the sudden rush of shuddering ecstasy, the convulsing spurt of semen would have deprived me of the very thing that, with the help of endless and timeless fantasies of pleasure, had nourished the body's delight in itself; delaying bliss is the way to prolong it; by touching my own body I could feel the pleasure of other bodies; I'd say that in this way my hour of shame had become the hour of communion with humanity, the hour of creation; consequently, it would have been most unpleasant if at such a moment Frau Hübner had entered my room; and it wasn't just the street I saw, I was there with them in the cellar, I was the man and I was also the three women, in my own body I felt their intimate contacts, and my imagination shifted the scene of their ever more serious game to that particular clearing, for that was where they belonged, the coachman became Pan, mother and daughters turned into nymphs; and there was nothing high-handedly false about this, because I had no doubt that this lovely meadow was very familiar to me; my imagination wasn't leading me to an unknown place; it merely took me back in time to a place that lived in my memory as one of the scenes in our summers at Heiligendamm.
My antique mural could only vaguely remind me of this realer-than-real place.
If you let yourself down the side of the embankment, constantly slipping on the loose rocks, and then followed a well-trodden trail, shielding yourself with your arm to keep the sharp-edged sedge from poking you in the eye, and then waded through the marsh, you came to a tiny bay where, as I've already mentioned, I had once surprised my childhood playmate, the young Count Stollberg, lying on the soggy grass, playing with his tool; he was lying on his back, with his pants pulled down to his knees, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, and his mouth open; the rhythmic movement must have made his beribboned sailor's cap slide off his head and it was caught in a clump of grass, its blue ribbons dangling in the water; he raised his hips in a gentle arch and spread his thighs as far as his pants, stuck over his knees, allowed; with rapid jerks of his fingers he kept yanking the foreskin of his little penis—everything about him was small and well-shaped; pulling back and releasing his skin, he seemed to have a tiny red-headed animal appearing and disappearing in his hand; his tense face was riveted to the sky, and I had the impression that with his arched torso, open mouth, and tightly shut lids, he was having some sort of discourse with the heavens, while with bated breath he was most deeply engrossed in himself; when indignantly, shocked by my own agitated reaction, I asked him about it, he very willingly and in his charmingly affable way proceeded to initiate me into the pleasant ways of squeezing pleasure out of one's own body; nothing bad had happened, he said, no reason for me to be angry, and in fact I should join him, and further, we should look at each other while doing it, that would make it even more enjoyable; at any rate, as I was saying, after a ten-minute walk on this trail you could reach the clearing, still breathless from the stifling silent air of the marsh, where suddenly the landscape would open up, and in the distance you could see the forest that bore the quaint name of the Great Wilderness and where, had I ever succeeded in writing my story, I would have taken my four characters, using clear concise sentences as their guide.
After this encounter, because of our shared secret, I was not only more deeply drawn to the boy but also afraid of him, almost hating him; still, we often took that trail to the clearing, a trip that to me also meant a kind of flirting with death, because I could never stop thinking of what Hilde had once whispered to me, as if she knew exactly what she was saying and why, how precisely she touched a most delicate nerve with her warning: "Whoever strays from the trail into the marsh is a dead man."
But we kept going back just the same, though of course we needed an acceptable excuse to disappear periodically into the sedge; since Dr. Köhler had his snail farm in this clearing, we had a chance to look around, watch the snails, and chat with the servants or with the scholarly doctor himself about the life cycle of snails, thus finding the perfect cover for our favorite pastime; the snails became our accomplices, and no doubt it was from the mire of these early lies that my ghosts arose, the ones I was frightened enough to describe to my father.
I realized that to write my narrative I first had to straighten out my own life, to break open and reveal every layer of my self-deceit.
But time, minutes and hours, resolved nothing; my body became my worst enemy: so many conflicting desires lived their separate lives in it that my head was unable to follow them, or to keep them under control by tempering them with reason; I could not establish within myself a suitable balance of sense and sensuality that would find its proper expression in clear, lucid words, the only possible system of communication for me; but this was not to be; consequently, the thought of doing away with my body stayed with me like a faithf
ul friend all my waking hours; and yet the reason this never became more than a tempting thought was that my longings, imaginings, desires, literary ambitions, and the tension of little secret gratifications gave me such an abundance of pleasure, the pleasure of my own body, that to deprive myself of them would have seemed plain foolish; claiming that suffering was also pleasure, I allowed myself to take risks, to go too far, and that was the reason I had to keep imagining my own death, which would relieve the strain—indeed, I got so used to enjoying my suffering that I could no longer tell when I was genuinely happy; for example, on the morning of my departure, when my fiancée and I were lying in each other's arms on the rug and my glance strayed to the black leather case in which I'd carefully packed all the material I had collected for this story, even there and then, at the very moment the fluids of our bliss were flowing together inside her beautiful body, the first thought that occurred to me was that right now, this instant, I should drop dead, croak now, no better time than now to cease, to evaporate, and then I'd leave nothing behind except a few self-consciously mannered pieces of prose, a few glib sketches and stories that were published in various literary journals and would very quickly sink into oblivion, and the open, patent-leather case, which, in the form of raw and to others indecipherable notes, contained the real secrets of my life, that is all—except perhaps for my seed in her body uniting with her egg at that very moment.
