She showed me to the door, telling me in a whisper: “Now, don’t you make faces. I love you just as much as ever.” As I kept standing in the doorway, she dismissed me with a gentle kiss on the nose. This gesture of hers, which I had always doted on, now felt like a slap.
I went downstairs and, as soon as I could get away from my mother, I went to my room and cried. I pitied and hated myself for losing her, I swore and ground my teeth. Since then, I’ve often been left alone to amuse myself this way, for loving women’s company too much.
Eight
On Being Vain and Hopelessly in Love
This love is of the worst kind — it takes
away your appetite.
— Honoré de Balzac
Maya dismissed me in the spring. Through the summer I kept myself busy studying in order to skip the last two years of high school so that I could go to university in the fall. When I had passed my matriculation and university entrance exams I began to look for a woman, and after months of luckless passes, I fell in love desperately, hopelessly and without the slightest provocation. I was like the secretary who writes to the advice columnist about the fellow who sometimes talks to her at the office and once took her out to lunch. “He is nice and friendly, but he sees me as a colleague, not as a woman. He hasn’t asked me out again, even though we sit at opposite desks from nine to five. Dear Ann, I am very much in love, what should I do to make him interested?” Desperate passions such as these are most easily recognized by the unspoken yet obvious assumption that there is a way, that our idol ignores us only because we have been unable to communicate our true worth. If we could but show our real selves, the depth of our feelings — why, who could then resist us? This spirit of optimism is boundless.
I saw Ilona waving at me from the pool in the Lukács Bath, one early winter afternoon. I used to go to swim there between lectures. It’s a quite extraordinary place, a renovated relic of the Ottoman Empire: a Turkish bathing palace turned into a public swimming pool. About a hundred private steam-baths surround the pool, which is in a huge mosque-like chamber with a glass dome over it. The Lukács was jammed on weekends and holidays, but during working hours it was the domain of the off-beat: soccer stars, artists, actresses, members of the Olympic swimming team, some professors and university students, and high-class prostitutes. This varied collection of people had one characteristic in common, a defiantly exuberant attitude toward life. In the worst year of Stalinist terror and fanatical puritanism, the women there wore the latest Italian-style bikinis. This would have required some daring even in most parts of the West at the time; in the Budapest of 1950, it was an act of civil disobedience. Going to the Lukács on weekday afternoons was like leaving the country. We shut ourselves off from Stalin’s drab Hungary, behind the ancient and ornate Turkish walls, those magnificent mementos of the perishability of Occupying Powers. The Turks had ruled Hungary for a hundred and fifty years, and where were the Turks? In Cyprus.
After my swim I used to sit by the pool and gaze at the almost naked women, in the moist air drifting out from the steam-baths. A lonely veteran of one glorious but lost affair, I watched their bodies parading by me, their wet skin glittering like an impenetrable armour. On that particular afternoon in January, I had been looking forlornly and impatiently at unconcerned women for hours. And there, suddenly, was Ilona, calling me from the pool. She raised her arm from the water and her friendly wave, like the stroke of a magician’s wand, filled me with a violent sensation of hope. I hardly knew her and didn’t even remember what she looked like, but while she was swimming toward me, a white bathing cap and two long arms, I made up my mind that I was going to make love with her.
“It’s nice to see a familiar face,” she said, unsuspecting, as she pulled herself up from the pool in front of me. “I bet you don’t remember me!”
The fact that she remembered me, even though we had hardly spoken more than a dozen sentences to each other at a party, made me think that I must have made a deep impression on her. Returning the sentiment, I grabbed her with my eyes and had a sudden erection.
She pulled off her bathing cap, bent sideways from the waist to shake the water out of each ear, and flopped down on the marble floor to catch her breath. Then she turned over and lay on her back, looking up. She became fascinated by the shifting white patterns the wind was making over our heads, as it blew the snow back and forth on and off the glass dome. We talked about the varying severities of winter and exchanged university gossip. A librarian on holiday, she was the fiancée of one of my professors.
Although she was in her late twenties, Ilona looked like a teenage girl. She had a slight, firm figure with bouncy little tennis-ball breasts, clear, freckled skin and red hair which she wore in a pony-tail. Yet I had never seen a sexier woman. She had too large a mouth for her delicate oval face, a mouth with a sharp upward thrust, so that her lower lip didn’t quite meet the upper one; and as the lips held slightly apart, they seemed to offer her whole body. Lying close to the edge of the pool, she didn’t have enough room to stretch out, and had to draw up her legs. This position gave an inward curve to her belly and that soft slope emphasized further the rise of her Venus-mount, which was unusually prominent by itself. It pressed upward the black satin bikini pants, and a few escaping hairs, damp red tendrils, curled out from below.
“I wish I could rape you,” I confessed, interrupting my casual small talk.
“I thought you were looking at me too hard,” she answered, as if she had found the answer to a puzzling question. However, it wasn’t a very important puzzle: her voice was unperturbed.
I can’t expect her to fall into my arms right away, I reasoned to myself. After all, how does she know I won’t talk about her on the campus? The talk might get back to her fiancé. I found her prudence reasonable. As yet I didn’t plan on marrying her and I certainly didn’t want to spoil her chances with Professor Hargitay.
“I’m flattered,” she said wryly later on, as I was pressing home some suggestive compliment.
She’s flattered, I thought, somewhat uncertainly.
Whenever I saw a woman who attracted me, the first thing I always did was to look into her eyes, searching hopefully for the inviting glint. But I failed to do so this time. When I looked at Ilona’s face, I looked at her mouth, or her freckled nose, or somewhere around her eyes, but never into them. Crouching beside her at the pool for nearly an hour, I preferred to believe that the occasional movements of her limbs expressed her still suppressed or unconscious desire for me.
As she lay on the faded marble floor with her legs drawn up, she occasionally pulled her knees together and then let them fall apart again. While she hid and then exposed her thighs, the muscles were shifting under her skin as if she were making love. I watched the waves of her body, and did indeed think of raping her. The noise of the other people around the pool, the echo of their laughs and shouts in the closed chamber, reached me as an encouragement to be rough, tough and no nonsense. I thought of grabbing her and striking her right through the black satin. But since I couldn’t rape her, I fell in love with her. I reached out for her slender arm lying motionless between us and began to run my fingers over it, sparingly and lightly. As I reached down to her still hand, the feel of her long, thin fingers affected me as if they were stroking me. I loosened up, relaxed (the short circuit of the body overcharged with violence) and was suddenly filled with a humbling, melancholy sensation of happiness.
“When will I see you?” I asked Ilona, as she got up to leave the Bath. Having learned on luckier occasions that it was wise to speak my mind, I had paid her compliments that left no doubt about my resolution. But so far they hadn’t earned me so much as a date.
“Well, I come here sometimes. We’ll probably run into each other.”
“What can we do at a swimming pool? I want to be alone with you.”
“Now you’re getting really silly,” she said, covering with her bathing cap the upper halves of her tennis-balls which were about
to roll over the bikini top. She was flustered this time. It was getting late, she had to go, she had a date with her fiancé.
“I’d be glad to meet you afterward,” I countered quickly.
“I don’t make plans that far ahead.”
“You’re not taking me seriously!” I protested.
“Look, you paid me a nice compliment with that business of wishing you could rape me. Don’t spoil it. Let’s just be friends, hm?”
Ilona said this with a tinge of contempt and malice, and she seemed to enjoy saying it. For the time being, I thought, I’ll have to be content with seeing her around the pool.
“At least,” I insisted, “tell me when you’re coming to swim again.”
She sighed impatiently. “If you want to see me so much, I’ll invite you to our wedding.”
However, while I had learned to speak up to women, I hadn’t yet learned to listen to them. I knew Professor Hargitay well, both as his student and as a fellow member of a research group, and I began to cultivate his friendship. I became a frequent visitor to his drab one-room flat, which was so strikingly unsuited to Ilona that it gave me encouragement in my darkest moments. It consisted of a small, airless alcove, a tiny and greasy kitchen, and a bed-sitting-room full of furniture which looked like it had been inherited from an ancient aunt of modest means. There were too many cumbersome chairs and tables, all with shaky legs, and many small lamps with oversize, tasselled shades. The only objects characteristic of the scholarly occupant were the books and loose pages of books which spread over the place from his desk by the window. The fiancé of the redhead with the freckled skin and the invitingly opening and closing limbs didn’t even own a bed. He had an old chesterfield which he must have pulled out for the night. I couldn’t imagine the lively goddess of my dreams in this dusty and dishevelled hole.
Ilona was trying to clean up the place when at last I succeeded in finding her there. I joined Professor Hargitay on the chesterfield, and we both sat and watched her (old European custom) as she struggled to impose some order on the room. In the dim light filtering through the dusty window, she looked like a mysterious sexy angel wrestling with the forces of darkness. Under her white blouse she didn’t wear a bra, and her small breasts rolled about most maddeningly as she bent down and rose again to put things in their places.
“She has a nice figure,” I complimented my host, to remind Ilona how I felt about her.
“She’s attractive,” the professor nodded, showing less enthusiasm than I had. A handsome blond man with blue eyes, he was in his early thirties. Slightly overweight, he had the kind of fleshiness which only made him look more solid and impressive.
“What were you saying about me?” she asked us when she finally sat down, panting, on a chair. In retrospect, it strikes me that our relationship consisted mostly of my watching her while she was catching her breath.
We got into a discussion about her figure, a subject on which Ilona herself was rather voluble. “I don’t know what flat-chested women complain about,” I remember her saying. “Small breasts are just as effective as big ones as long as you don’t wear a bra. Take my pair, for instance — they’re so small you’d think they were going to disappear. But I don’t find this a disadvantage — men just look at me all the harder to catch sight of them.” She probably made these remarks at various points in the conversation, not in one breath as I’ve quoted her. Whichever way it was, she ended up by pointing at me. “Look at András — a living proof of what I mean. He’s straining his eyes so hard, he’s burning holes in my blouse. The sly boy with the hungry eyes.”
“Please, Ilona,” sighed her fiancé, “don’t embarrass András.”
From the day I met Ilona at the Lukács Bath, I stopped trying to get at other women and thought of her continually and with increasing intensity. Whenever I forgot about her for a short time, her image came back to me with the sudden violence of an oncoming heart-attack. I became an irregular third in their company, sometimes joining them to see a play or for dinner at his flat; but it was always Professor Hargitay who invited me. Ilona seemed to tolerate me with condescension bordering on hostility.
“I think your student-friend is shamelessly in love with me,” she complained one evening, while placing wienerschnitzel on our plates. “He’s raping me with his eyes — most revolting. I think you should show some jealousy and throw him out.”
“She’s only joking,” the host reassured me, turning his friendly blue eyes toward me. “Don’t take her seriously.”
After that I stayed away from them for a month or so. But was I discouraged? On the contrary: the fact that Ilona’s fiancé showed more consideration for my feelings than she did inspired me to believe that if she didn’t leave him for me, he might drop her for some other girl. I felt justified in abandoning myself to joyous contemplation of the days when we would be man and wife. Such domestic daydreams helped me for a while to stay away from her in the flesh. I preferred not to see her during this humiliating in-between period of her engagement to Professor Hargitay.
When I couldn’t hold out any longer, I showed up at his flat at the next-to-worst possible moment. The chesterfield was drawn out, the sheets were damp and crumpled, one of the pillows lay on top of the bookcase and the other on the carpet. It was Ilona who answered the door. She was already dressed, but had no make-up on and, like all women after making love, she looked flushed and misty. I’d never seen her so excruciatingly desirable. Professor Hargitay was sitting by his desk: his feet were bare but he had his trousers and shirt on and was sipping a glass of milk.
“At last, at last,” Ilona exclaimed, “where have you been all this time? Laci missed you. He needs someone to remind him how adorable I am. Or don’t you think of me any more?”
Under the circumstances — with that faint, peculiar smell still lingering around the room — I found her remarks vulgar. “I shall love you hopelessly forever,” I stammered boldly, trying to indicate with a gesture that I was only kidding.
“Why hopelessly?” she taunted me, with a twist of her tantalizing bottom. “If Laci would just leave us alone, we could hop into bed right away. Or don’t you want to?”
I forced myself to turn toward her placid possessor sipping his milk. “When is the wedding going to be?” I asked. I was anxious to appear harmless.
I spent most of my evenings at home, concentrating on Ilona with all my will power, and I began to believe that there was something to extra-sensory perception, that she must know when I was thinking of her. I was sure that my faithfulness to her, in spite of my hopeless situation, would change her feelings toward me. But my only reward was my mother’s satisfaction.
“You’re much more serious than you used to be,” she decided, finding me at home nearly every evening. “You’re really growing up.”
“Mother, I’m in love and it’s hopeless.”
“Good,” she said. “That’s exactly what you need. I was beginning to be afraid that you’d wear yourself out in your teens.”
In point of fact, I was losing weight. The only thing that kept me going was my faith that Ilona and her professor couldn’t possibly love each other forever.
Nor did I change my mind when they finally got married. I was invited to the wedding, just as Ilona had promised me at the Bath. It was an uninspiring civil ceremony performed in the broad room of the district city hall, with the Red Star and the indefatigable Stalin looming over the head of the magistrate who married them. This official also doubled as a marriage-counsellor, a fact which they found hilarious and which I welcomed as a good omen. The depressing surroundings and the foreknowledge that this official, after performing the ceremony, would walk over to another room to worry about divorces convinced me that the wedding actually brought Iiona closer to me. From here on, I reasoned to myself (while attempting to beam now at the groom, now at the bride), from here on she will have to live in that awful flat, instead of just dropping in for the pleasure of throwing pillows on the floor. From here on
, I thought, it will be the dull prose of marriage, that predictable serial of money-worries and dirty underwear, not the brief, varied and witty poems of a love affair. She’ll become bored and disillusioned, and then I’ll have my chance.
I indulged in this sort of reasoning rather frequently, leading myself down the garden path without a guide and with a perfect sense of misdirection. Dreamy and self-absorbed, I became vicious, and even spied on my kind friend in the hope of seeing him with another woman, so that I could tell his wife. I often used to run into Ilona “accidentally” on the street, but I never succeeded in distracting her from her destination.
Late one evening I found her alone in the flat. The chesterfield was already drawn out for the night: there were fresh sheets on it and a new orange blanket, very bright. Ilona had her hair combed out and was about to go to bed, but she told me to sit down and read something while she had her shower and got into her pyjamas. As I paced the floor, listening to the sound of the shower, it came back to me that this was exactly how I had waited for Maya before we first made love. I began to hum Don Giovanni’s Champagne Aria.
Ilona came out of the bathroom with a robe over her pyjamas. “Listen,” she said flatly, “I realize that this is a rather suggestive situation for a depraved juvenile delinquent like yourself. But if you make just one remark, about wanting to rape me or anything like that, I’m going to break one of these old chairs over your head — and I mean it.”
Accordingly, I decided to wait for a more suitable occasion when she would be in a better mood. Not wanting to leave right away, I made polite conversation and kept my eyes on the carpet. I never saw Ilona in her black bikini again, yet I sustained myself in my passion for the greater part of two years.
Nine
In Praise of Older Women Page 7
