My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  ‘I shall not enumerate to you the categories into which dear Marfa classified men, comparing some to male sparrows which, after a few seconds’ fun, shake their feathers and disappear as if they had never been there; others to silk-moths that insist on endless, deadly love-making; others again to rabbits enjoying the pleasures of life without pretension or discrimination. She spoke of the type that selects mistresses not from an erotic but from a social point of view and regards them merely as objects of prestige; of the lovers of environment who can devote themselves to the delights of love only between damask curtains, surrounded by crystal vases with purple roses swimming in them, or, on the other hand, prefer rocky hillsides, lie among nettles, as close as possible to the footpath used by a host of tourists… I should like to call your attention to just one tiny point in illustration of dear Marfa’s astounding finesse and wonderful instincts.

  ‘We were talking about the colour of the female nipple. Dear Marfa told me that she had to ask only middle-aged men endowed with extraordinary intellectual capacities what colour of nipple they preferred. With the others she always knew, from their manners, their character, their occupation, their appearance; and men were always flabbergasted when she told them straight away whether they liked red, pink or brown nipples, small, medium or large. Here, dear Marfa gave me a few interesting pointers: according to her, high-class intellectuals and complex sensualists usually want women with small, pink nipples; strong male animals prefer brown nipples, while men who have once been orphan children or are sorrowing widowers, liked to rest in the shadow of large, red nipples. The real stags – those who don’t care what kind of woman they embrace – have, of course, no preferences. Dear Marfa emphasized, however, that the problem of nipples was merely secondary, even the most sensual of men regard the physical-spiritual qualities of a woman as more important than the colour and size of her nipples. Yet the nipple of a woman is like the buffer of a train; when you run after a train it is the buffer you see, and when you recall one or the other of your mistresses it is, at least subconsciously, her nipple to which you react.

  ‘Dear Marfa found that in the analysis of the highly complex relationship between man and woman the not so very important nipple supplies the only fixed point. . Given this fulcrum, to use Archimedes’ words, she lifted love out from its orbit and classified men into precise categories according to the nipple they preferred. To be exact – she explained with a very happy simile – all she had to do was to find the coat to go with the button. And this brilliant intellectual feat provided her with the perfect guide in the intricate trade of procuring.’

  ‘Stop vomiting obscenities,’ Bandi exclaimed impatiently. ‘Get down to brass tacks and tell us how you got here from Bayonne.’ Then he turned to the hovering waiter. ‘Bring Mr Lorsy a triple espresso!’

  Lorsy poured the coffee down his throat, then wiped the wet, somewhat reddened corners of his eyes with his handkerchief.

  ‘You are quite right,’ he said, ‘I lost my way in the maze of nipples like Hafiz in the rose-garden. Let me, however, remind you of the alleviating circumstance that in this, as in so much else, I am like Gargantua and Pantagruel who were always discussing but never practising the art of love. What cognac? Courvoisier, naturally. Napoleon’s brand! For aren’t we after Waterloo? Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni,’ he said and reached for his glass. But Bandi pushed it from his reach.

  ‘No more guzzling! Talk!’

  Lorsy spread his fat, white hands on the table and related the story of his sea voyage and the days spent in the harbour of Casablanca.

  ‘Two weeks ago we were put on shore and herded into barracks erected on the pier. When I learned that the French state was providing us with living quarters I knew I was at the gates of Hell. As I told you before, my shirt was stolen from me on board ship with my last ten thousand francs in its pocket. I was on my way to an internment camp with a bare chest under my black jacket and a shoe-box under my arm. But these details did not deter me. The exit from the barracks was blocked by a big Senegalese sergeant with a gun. I pushed him aside with my elbow, simply flipped him off without even looking at him, stepped out into the street with the dignity of a Paris cardinal when he comes out of the Notre-Dame to bless the people, and cried loudly: “Taxi!”

  ‘Fortunately there was one right in front of me. I ordered the driver to take me to the best hotel in town, whereupon he brought me here, to the Hotel Anfa. I walked up to the desk, my bare chest exposed. “A room!” I commanded. “We haven’t any,” the man at the desk replied indifferently. “Call the owner. Tell him State Councillor Lorsy wishes to see him!” I don’t have to tell you that I was immediately shown to a room. I made the porter pay the taxi and sent him out to purchase six silk shirts for me. Then I walked into town. I couldn’t enjoy my walk as I should have liked because I was tormented with petty anxieties. What if they should send up a bill? Thanks to my meditation I was nearly run down by an automobile on the corner of the Boulevard des Quatres Zouaves. “Ox!” I shouted at the bald-headed driver, and in my distrait condition I said it in Hungarian. He looked at me, got out of the car, threw his arms about me and called me his saviour. Then he asked me whether I had completely forgotten him: Sandor Ujvary?

  ‘At the time of the Hungarian dictatorship of the proletariat, in 1919, this Ujvary had played a rather important role. I had known him ever since we were children. After the fall of the Commune he visited me one night at my flat, told me that the police were at his heels and that if they found him, they would hang him under martial law. I was then departmental head at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I hid him in my house, gave him money and helped him escape from the country. He came straight to Casablanca. Although he remained true to his convictions he rose, owing to hard work and intelligence, to be one of the wealthiest merchants of the country.’

  ‘This sounds as if you were quoting from The Arabian Nights!’ I said.

  ‘A nabob,’ Lorsy turned to me, ‘that is what he is. He knows your name and he is eager to meet all of you, Tomorrow he will come to your hotel to pay his respects. He will then buy you clothes and footwear, furnish an apartment for you and surround you with every luxury. He regards this as his most pleasurable duty.

  I live,’ he continued, ‘like an ancient Greek itinerant scholar in the house of a Latin nobleman in Cicero’s days. I teach the Ujvary children but also advise their parents in all their dealings. They are extremely kind people but somewhat prudish, even the word “love” makes them blush. As old communists they are also teetotallers, believing that alcohol kills, besots and turns you into a pauper. And yet, the contrary is true: it is intellectual oppression, exploitation or stupidity that makes you an alcoholic. Like my forerunner, Philodemos the Epicurean at the Pompeii house of the Pisos, I am forced into a sort of play-acting. When sitting at the table of these blessed people I lecture on the repulsiveness of alcoholic beverages and dismiss from my mind the frivolous thoughts and off-colour jokes that flash through it. But after dinner I walk out into the garden, sit down under the fig-tree and bring out my bottle of red wine from under the myrtle bush. While I consume its contents I let my mind wander among the most hair-raisingly lewd ideas. Give me back my cognac, Bandi, old man. Now at last I have friends with whom to drink and talk smut!’

  He lowered his lids and wetted his lips with the cognac.

  ‘For the first time in my life I am happy,’ he said piously. ‘I have been roaming the world for over fifty years and, had I wanted to save myself from starving, I should have had to work. I always chose the lesser evil: starvation. But now I have found Eldorado. Never again shall I permit myself to be chased from this Garden of Eden. And let me advise you to do likewise. This is where I shall terminate my life. Amen …’

  ‘And the Gestapo?’ Bandi asked mildly. ‘Has it arrived in your Eldorado yet?’

  ‘You are crazy!’ Lorsy exclaimed. ‘It never will!’

  ‘We are caught in a mouse-trap, no matter how loudly
you squeak!’ Bandi shouted, baring his huge teeth. ‘But apparently the smell of cheese has deprived you of your reason.’

  When Lorsy took us back to our hotel I felt that the night was still young and, as fortunately no one offered to come with me, I set out alone towards the Arab town.

  Four hours later I came back exalted and perspiring, though the night was cool. I didn’t understand myself what had impressed me so deeply. Perhaps it was the perfumes, the smells and odours. It began with the scent of the veiled Arab women walking in the alley-ways. The scent they used did not linger, hovering above the street long after the wearer was gone, like the perfumes used by European women. This scent was attached to the wearer and trailed behind her in an ethereal train three or four yards long; whenever I entered the rarefied gas-haze of one of these comets I discerned the aroma of musk, myrrh and attar of roses. These scents compared to French perfumes as oranges picked from the tree compare to orange-flavoured candy, or Dekobra’s or Pittigrilli’s erotics to those of Catullus. I knew beyond a doubt that these scents were the ancient, the authentic, the true, the only scents befitting the human animal; Europe’s perfumes are but concoctions made by cunning but not really clever alchemists, a refined and sterile collection of distillates that do not even deserve the name of distillate because the very essence, the quintessence of things is missing.

  In the alleys I ran up against veritable shock-troops of smells. It was all there: burnt oil, mint, thyme, familiar and unfamiliar herbs, fruits, the smell of camel and donkey dung; scattered and discreetly fetid goat-droppings shining black in the moonlight, the silky cavities of empty banana-skins like the beginning of the furrow between the buttocks immediately under the tail-bone of a tall, beautiful woman; but there was also a unique, particular smell to the white garden walls, the deep archways, the front doors carved of cedar-wood; what is more, to every single street: an individual smell independent of the sum total of smells invading everything.

  There was a new, unknown component in these smells. This component transformed the basic smells and determined the atmosphere of the entire district. I had discerned this light, coquettish, almost obscene odour of putrefaction emitted by the town while I was still in the harbour. There was nothing disagreeable, nothing repulsive in it; rather it conjured up the fragrant, humid and mystical decomposition of autumn leaves, it was as if it were in some way related to the secret transubstantiation of fermenting grape-juice. Not a sickly sweet, nauseating, cadaverous smell, only its discreet forerunner, a stimulating spice placed by Death on the table of the living.

  All this raced through my mind outside the window of a dirty little café where I stood watching two chess players inside. Never have champions bent over the chessboard with greater concentration. Suddenly one of them, a man with a beautiful white beard, clapped his hands for the waiter and made him reach into the clothes on his back to pick out a flea from somewhere between his shoulder-blades. As I turned away, a funeral procession carrying burning torches ran by me at a pace so fast that I hardly had time to take a look at the corpse or the bearers. Walking on, I was just a second too late to witness a knife-fight; the scene was deserted, as if all these usually idle people had hurried off to attend to some urgent business. Only a pool of blood remained, shrinking slowly in the middle of the concave road. As I was advancing along a narrow alley-way towards a distant gas-lamp, a crouching boy whom I had failed to notice threw his arms about my knees and pressed his face to my hip. I pushed him away, but as I continued on my way I heard him cry after me in broken French: ‘Silly man, you don’t know what you are missing!’

  In this town – I thought to myself – Death sits among the guests at every feast and lies in bed with the lovers. He is present, always and everywhere, like in the woodcuts of Holbein’s Totentanz, but not in the same capacity. In Holbein’s works Death is the uninvited guest whose appearance causes terror and vain despair. Here, he is not regarded as a trap to be avoided by clever men. Here, they do not expect to live to be a hundred and hope to live to be five hundred. Here, no one would dye his hair and beard at the age of fifty, do gymnastics with weights every morning to remain fit. Here they know that even health does not protect against death. Here, death is a welcome guest at the table of friends and when he sits on the edge of the lovers’ bed he does so only to inspire them to even more passionate embraces.

  Here, people have accepted the smell of decay and instead of holding their noses, they draw their conclusions and live more intensely, more greedily and yet more calmly. They do not struggle against death because they know that they are doomed to defeat. They need not make friends with death because they have never quarrelled with it, and they do not demand pious lies from their doctors because they are not afraid of dying. Young, they look death bravely in the eye; old, they walk slowly and with dignity towards the grave, as if it were a comfortable armchair in which to rest. It is very probable that their image of death is entirely different from ours. It is not an old, grinning skeleton with a scythe, because where there is no fear there is no terror, where there is no resistance there is no need for the scythe; death in this place must be a beautiful young boy like the Thanatos of the Greeks, who can be distinguished from Eros only because his torch points downwards instead of up.

  I arrived back at the hotel completely exhausted and lay down on the floor next to Bandi. Long before, when I was still at the university, wrote execrable poems and feared the future, I had a recurring dream. In this dream I was walking along the broadest street of Budapest. Suddenly the houses began to swell, invaded the pavements, drove me into the middle of the road and continued advancing upon me until I was compelled to hold them apart with my extended elbows. I used to wake up panting, bathed in sweat, thinking that my elbows were indeed too weak and could never hold back the walls which were pressing in upon me. I dreamt the same dream now, but with a different beginning and new scenery. I was fleeing from pursuers who were circling above me in aeroplanes and on flapping bat-wings, shooting arrows at me – the Hungarian Nazis were called the arrow-cross party – until I took refuge in the Arab district. The houses joined roofs above my head but underneath there was a tunnel, a kind of shaft, where I could walk undisturbed as if I were walking in the secret corridors of a pyramid. The bat-wings and arrows were left behind, but my advance was blocked by a huge painting. There were two portraits in the picture against a dark green and blue-black background: the portrait of a veiled woman and that of a boy whose arms, however, reached out from the canvas and embraced my waist. The woman was wearing a dark blue veil, like most Arab women, but I, who like all Europeans was used to discerning the figure of a woman under her clothes, saw that her face under the veil was beautiful. The veil – I thought in my dream – is but a second, looser skin and these women wear it only to enhance their mystery and appear more exciting, more beautiful. The boy’s face was also beautiful and bore a strong resemblance to the woman’s. However, it was not his face I saw, but the skull under the skin, just as I guessed the woman’s face under her veil. The skin – I thought in my dream – and the little flesh put on the bones by a miserly hand, serve only to veil the skull, and are worn only to make the skull underneath the more exciting.

  I wanted to chase away the painting but it wouldn’t move. Neither could I. I had reached the end of the blind corridor, as if I had descended into the pyramid on the ground floor of the Louvre, and it didn’t occur to me to turn round. I just stood there, petrified, gazing at the picture which hovered before my eyes until dawn.

  Next morning Bandi and I went to the post office to write to my parents and his brother in Budapest and let them know that we had crawled out from under the ruins of the French collapse and were now safe. Before the entrance to the post office, in the exact centre of the topmost step between two pillars, I noticed a tall, slender young man in a white burnous, white trousers and white leather slippers; only his tie was a pale blue and his fez scarlet. Although he was undoubtedly standing there by chance, without p
articular cause or motive, it seemed as if he were waiting for me. The scene was almost theatrical in the perfection of its staging.

  There was something conspicuous and extraordinary in that young Arab; at first glance I could not make out what it was. Only as I came nearer to him did I understand it. It had not been his beauty so much as the perfect proportions of his body that had caught my eye. His were not the sculptural proportions of a statue, recalling the works of the great masters of ancient Greece; as I looked at him I did not wonder in which museum I had seen his likeness. I felt that here was the original mould of man, the true first edition created by nature in its happiest mood. Since then, forms and proportions have deteriorated, degenerated and become distorted, like a cliché used too often. But even today, though very rarely, someone is born who looks like the original. His beauty was not that of a silly, vain young boy; his features awakened no memories and he seemed, not perhaps self-centred and cruel, but certainly autochthonous, introverted and spiritual.

  I gazed at him, or rather I pushed my glance into his eyes like an electric plug into a wall-socket, until I neither could nor wanted to pull it out again, and would have run straight into his arms had Bandi not held me back at the last minute. While we were writing our letters the young Arab, who had followed us into the building, waited calmly at the end of the long hall. Whenever I raised my head he looked at me unsmiling and without curiosity, humbly waiting. He was standing under a window in the sharp sunlight, on a snow-white marble square, throwing a pale blue shadow on the floor: When we had mailed our letters he joined us, introduced himself politely and invited us to join him for a cup of coffee. Bandi, who believed him to be a procurer, a guide or something even worse, and in addition had a hysterical fear of and hatred for the Arabs – although he would never admit it even to himself because, as a communist, he had no right to such feelings, ergo he could not have them – left us with some flimsy excuse.