by Peter Nadas
Then she looked at me.
I'm an old woman, she said.
Her statement, her look, the slight quiver of her voice had not the slightest trace of self-pity and self-indulgence, not even as much as might seem natural and understandable; she looked at me so openly with her beautiful brown eyes that the physical image of her face blotted out the meaning of her sentence.
The inner strength she mustered to utter that sentence, the strength she hurled into my eyes, now did something to her: she was no longer a woman, or old, or beautiful, or anything, but a single human being struggling with the heroic task of self-definition in a universe still enthralling in its infinite possibilities—and that was beautiful.
She certainly could not have done it inside a room; there all this would have turned into sentimental soul-searching or lovemaking; between four walls I would have found her statement comical, too true or too false, either way it was the same, and would have protested vehemently or made light of it; but here, with nothing to echo these meaningful sounds, they left her mouth, came up against my face, I took some into myself, and the rest dissipated, vanished into the landscape, found their proper, final place.
And in that moment I realized that the source of her beauty was always her raw anguish; I had met a human being who did not want to eliminate her own suffering or exploit it either, but simply wanted to retain her capacity for pain, and that was the quality that might explain my attraction to her: she wasn't interested in enlisting sympathy, which was why she objected so strenuously to living-the-part or getting-lost-in-the-part method acting; she had nothing to conceal, since what she showed of herself was something she extracted from me—something I always tried to keep hidden.
And in exchange I was giving her my own pain, so similar to hers and forever obscured by clouds of self-pity and self-deception.
It wasn't her age that made her old, she added quickly, as if wanting to destroy any illusion that her self-pity was meant to elicit my sympathy, or her own; no, counting only her years she could still consider herself young, it was her soul that was old, but that was silly, too, she didn't have a soul, she said, she didn't know what it was, then, something in her or about her.
It was strange that lately she had to play all these lovesick women, vamps and all sorts of seductive females, and she was always good at it, but when she had to fall into the arms of strange men and kiss strange mouths, she found she wasn't there anymore, it was as if someone else were doing it for her, someone else was playing at being in love.
Love and desire in her—and she begged my pardon if she was about to say something stupid—became something no longer directed at another living human being but at everyone, anyone, yes, silly as it may sound, aimed at anything and everything that was humanly impossible to reach, and she was no longer interested in reaching, but feeling this way made her very pitiful in her own eyes.
If she really didn't want to reach it, she wouldn't be able to act, I said quietly, and since she did want to act, she had to reach what she no longer wanted.
Her eyelashes quivered hesitantly; she either didn't understand what I said or didn't want to; she chose to ignore it.
She said she'd be lying if she claimed this was the first fiasco of her life, it wasn't, not by a long shot, she was never beautiful enough or ingratiating enough to rise above a constant state of failure, she got used to it.
But she wouldn't talk about this anymore, she said, interrupting herself abruptly; she found it ridiculous and in bad taste to be discussing this with me, of all people, but then who should she discuss it with?
I didn't want to distract her with questions or friendly, consoling words; anything coming from me would have stifled her; I knew she wanted to talk, but would have understood if she hadn't said another word.
In the fragrant puffs of her voice bouncing off my face I felt she wasn't talking to me, she was sending words to the surface of my body, whose mediating reverberation turned them into the purest form of address directed at her self.
She had to stand up, but she did it as though her body had been filled with a single thought of anger that wouldn't let her straighten out her knees, making her look stooped and ugly.
The skin on her chin grew taut.
No, she said, this wasn't true either.
She said this and then bit off the rest of her words, also squelching the meaning of the unsaid words.
And this may have hurt me more than it hurt her; at least she had the courage to say what she wanted to.
But she wasn't interested in any kind of truth, in anybody's truth.
Sometimes she could make herself believe there was no such thing as humiliation.
There was a time, soon after they got to know each other, when she thought she could throw everything to the winds for him, but fortunately, she was more sensible now.
And for him she could have killed her husband, Arno, who snored away all their nights.
And yes, she admitted, it was she who kept calling Melchior at night.
And she came up with this stupidity about being old because her body was going to pieces in this humiliation which had been going on for months, and her mind could concentrate on nothing else, no matter how much she told herself she was over it; she was becoming like an addle-brained teenager who can only think about how ugly she is.
These stupid feelings would never leave her, and then, on top of it all, she had to look at our disgustingly happy faces.
And then I would have liked to tell her that the happiness she saw was indeed real but that I had never felt a more persistent suffering than this happiness; but of course I couldn't tell her any of this.
She wasn't jealous of me, she said; it was disgust she felt, rather than jealousy, the kind of disgust that makes men scrawl on toilet walls things like Castrate the fags, she said more softly, placatingly; of course she knew it wasn't the same thing, she said, as a matter of fact she felt a certain approval regarding our relationship, and despite all her swearing and rage, she couldn't be jealous of me as she would be of another woman, she took it almost as if I were her substitute, but that was humiliating, because she didn't want to come between us, yet she just had to keep calling him on the phone, she couldn't help it.
Now that she said it, maybe she wouldn't be calling anymore.
And if in the midst of this constant state of turmoil she could retain a modicum of sanity, then she could feel that maybe she had chosen this impossible predicament because she didn't really want him anymore, she wanted something else, equally impossible; and that really put her at a loss, for that couldn't possibly be happening to her, she really was too old for that kind of perfect impossibility.
She didn't want anything anymore.
Not even to die.
Why did her life fall apart and why couldn't she put it back together, or rather, why did all the pieces she still had left add up to nothing.
Even as she was talking she felt her talking was nothing, her words were nothing, it was only habit that made her say these nothings out loud.
And now she was going to stop altogether, we should really get going.
And I should get up, too.
She wasn't talking loudly, and I can't even say there was passion or excitement caused by suppressed tension in her voice, yet she wiped away invisible drops of perspiration above her lips.
And in that gesture there was something an old person would do, which younger people wouldn't be caught doing, for they wouldn't find it aesthetic.
I stood up, our faces were again very close, she smiled.
Well, I had never seen her in an open-air performance before, she said, and tilted her head to the side.
This last, awkward attempt at ending things and distancing herself sobered me up, perhaps because it was so awkward and self-conscious, because she seemed to have bitten into herself and, though painful, that prevented her from revealing a far greater pain; once again I was aware of the coolness of the air, the pungent autumn fragranc
e of the pine trees, the reassuring smallness of our bodies that only moments earlier seemed magnified in the vastness of the flat landscape.
And I felt an increasingly impatient urge to leave the place, get back to her car, lock ourselves in its safe, confining space; at the same time, from so close, her gestures and words suggested unmistakably that I was treading on very dangerous ground if I gave her the impression I was trying to hold her back, since, in reality, with my sheer presence I was hoping to thrust her toward something; the wish to murder her that had flashed through my mind moments earlier was more than an innocent play of my imagination; consciously repressed sexual desires produce such violent impulses; but even if I did reach my goal and manage to get the two of them together, what would I have done with such an impulse— save using it to kill myself.
Or maybe it was the other way around, I thought, inverting cause and effect with a casual shrug of my shoulders: the reason I wanted them to get together, wanted to get away from them and get closer to a woman, any woman, felt a man's body to be insufficient, too little or too much, was that I wanted to kill my love for Melchior; and the reason I couldn't make anything last was that deep in my soul I feared the punishment which others, in their great anxiety about their own sexuality, scrawled as warnings on bathroom walls.
But I couldn't run away, or escape, not yet; there were still words hanging on her lips that she would dare formulate only after turning from the intimate proximity she had created between us to the petty world of practicality full of cold calculations, only after this alluring and circumspect introduction.
I waited, and she could see in my eyes how this waiting was wearing me down; she had the upper hand, she could ask anything, say anything; she was vulnerable only while talking, but what she told me made me the more vulnerable of the two of us.
This mutual vulnerability began to affect us: the emotions emerging from a consciously controlled desire, my defenselessness, and my secret wish to reach her through the very man she loved drove me to the edge of helplessness and ridiculousness, to the verge of tears—yes, my futile exertion sent tears to my eyes, and she, pressing her advantage, stroked my face, kindly and with restrained excitement, as if making herself believe that it was her story that had moved me so, and didn't or wouldn't see that the tears had just as much to do with helpless, frustrated desire; still, her fingers trembled on my skin, I felt it and so did she, and we both knew that we were entering the time of catastrophe we had dreaded only moments earlier; this meant a renewed fear, or rather a cause for recoiling.
But she managed to grab my arm, as if holding on to her own advantage.
If the ethics of love were not stronger than love's desire, I wouldn't have left time for this move, I would have reciprocated the trembling of her fingers with a kiss on her lips; and if that had happened, she would not have demurred, I'm sure, but would have dissolved her own helplessness on my mouth, but since this didn't happen, her lips quivered for the lack of contact, for the shame of this lack.
Again we had to retreat, because the ethics of love do not tolerate the presence of the slightest foreign element, everything must be directed exclusively at one's partner, and only through one's partner can a third person have any relevance; this retreat again turned me into a means: she held on to me only insofar as she needed to get closer to Melchior, and we once again found ourselves in a rather dark territory where I also had to stick to my objective of reaching her through Melchior.
So, this meant, I stammered, that she didn't love me; in her language this could be expressed by using a more mundane, less emotionally charged word, as if I were to say in Hungarian that she didn't care for me all that much.
But she did love me, she did.
The last syllable was uttered on my neck, blown onto my skin from a kiss of parting and quickly closing lips.
Of course all the feelings we had had until then ceased in the wake of that kiss.
However, we were holding each other, filling up with many little details of ever-intensifying sensations, standing there, our arms entwined, a little lost, stunned by the newness of the other's body, not sure our minds could or even cared to name or analyze this new situation so deprived of logic; and it all turned out as if two coats were embracing, a little too theatrical, a little too rigid; what should have dissolved did not, for no matter how tightly we clung to each other, there was not enough passion in our bodies meant just for the other, or not enough details in the passion each of us had hoped would be exclusively ours, as if no power could dispel or neutralize the sensation that we were just two coats.
In such or similar situations our love experience can rush to our aid; with tiny, slow, cautious, and barely touching kisses I could have opened her lips resting bashfully on my neck; four little kisses like that could have opened her lips, and if at the same time I eased her body away from mine, broke the closeness, then she would again kiss my neck so that the rapid little kisses buried in our necks would rouse our desire for closeness, which could be quenched only by the closeness of lips, and so on, until we reached the state of no-closeness-is-close-enough.
It wouldn't have taken much to find the way to our bodies' biological urges, and without resorting to anything false or vulgar, for we did love each other, after all, and neither the coats nor our own clumsiness hindered us; but if that had happened, we would have transgressed against the ethics of love.
She had to stand on tiptoe to reach me, which I found especially endearing; her lips rested on my neck for a little while longer, waiting, as if wondering whether I would do what experience dictated now; and my mouth was on her neck, waiting for the possibility of a mutual response that would make a third partner vanish; at the same time I felt the wind's gentle little thrusts on my body.
Yet she couldn't have wished my mouth to make any of the experienced moves; she was the first to yield to Melchior's intrusive presence, and this was natural, since she wasn't as close to him as I was, and only if you're sure of possessing someone can you afford to stray; she pushed me away a little, but we did not break our embrace; she looked into my face with all of hers, she was so close that my eyes, trying to focus, ached a little, but the dull pain felt good, because at this close range the other's face can be superimposed on your own and the blurry sight is absorbed into your own uncertain vision.
Her senses had never deceived her, she said in a choked, agitated voice, her saliva's scent, mixed with nicotine but still sweet, pleasantly surprising my nose so unaccustomed to a woman's scent, what she said referred to both of us, as well as to the one who stood between us.
But the attraction of her scent was not strong enough to overcome a sudden revulsion, an urge to get away from this voice, from this face! for the face was not only distorted, like mine, it wasn't merely responding to my bewilderment with her own; hers seemed maniacal and possessed, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that she might be insane.
Everything she said and did, every ounce of her strength, every wish, every aspect of her curiosity sprang from a tiny, sensitive, painful, and balm-seeking point of her being, and everything penetrating her from the outside world in the form of strength, desire, and curiosity was channeled back to the same point; if by some miracle I could have freed us of our clothes, and my body could have begged hers for mercy, and kissing and clinging to her I could have sunk into her wetness, I still wouldn't have reached her.
At the moment I saw her as someone willing to oblige but not to reciprocate.
In a way it was ludicrous to discover this about her in that situation, but she frightened me; I was alarmed that she might indeed be crazy, and then I must be crazy, too.
And against my better judgment I had to admit that Frau Kühnert, though she may have been driven by jealousy, was probably right: for Thea, people and feelings were only tools, means to some end; but since at that moment I myself was this tool, exposed and at the mercy of her sensitive touch, the fragrance rising from her neck and lips, I found this state of
affairs tragic rather than amusing.
How did I ever get myself into this?
Whoever she picked out, she whispered hoarsely into my mouth, had to be one who had also picked her, she could be wrong about anything else, and also crazy and ugly and old.
No, no, she must be deranged or crazy, I thought, for thinking it made it less scary.
She might be vulgar and a fool, but she was never wrong about these things, and I must tell her—she was speaking right into my mouth and only a very abrupt, rough movement could have freed me from this position—because sometimes she felt, actually she felt for the first time, that she might have been deceiving herself in this case, so I must tell her whether Melchior had ever loved a woman.
Only madness could make somebody expend such an inordinate amount of physical and mental energy on so witless a question.
I pushed her away gently, but not so gently as to make it not seem cruel, for I had no intention of sparing her this cruelty.
Our arms fell helplessly to our sides, our bodies tilted back to their respective, balanced postures; as she looked at me, her face was so naked, as mine must have been looking at her, that it was as if we were seeing not each other's skin but the flesh, the bones, the rushing blood, the dividing cells, everything in the body that is selfish and self-serving and has nothing to do with another person; and at this point I should have said, It's over, let's quit, we're playing an impossible game, she's playing with me, at the expense of a third one, though we pretended to be playing for his sake.
I wanted to say all this but didn't.
It even seemed that the rudeness of my movement was useful in hiding a more calculating, more far-reaching act of kindness with which I could budge the moment of impasse into the next moment, delay and put off things and still leave her with a ray of hope.
Her hopelessness hurt me more than it hurt her, for she at least, by expressing it, could relieve herself of its pressure, and indeed, a faint glow of forced satisfaction did appear on her face, an almost audacious, sad smile that harked back not only to the question of Melchior's relation to women but also to the more provocative one about what Melchior and I could possibly do with each other that was so different from what she could be doing with me or with him, or could these things be completely identical? but this very common, pedestrian question only reinforced in me the feeling of hopelessness from which I wanted to save Melchior.
