A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  The first is the nervous, fragile, excitable, soulful, and sentimental adolescent type that is quick to take offense and is forever passionately in love; this type withdraws at once, indignantly, breaks down, starts hitting me with her fists and yelling that she knew it, she knew it, she knew I wanted only one thing from her, she calls me a liar and threatens to jump out of the window this minute. I should love her. But no one can love another if it means doing violence to himself. Still, calming women of this type or gratifying them tempestuously is not very difficult. If I can rape them at the height of their hysteria, if I choose the right moment to attack, then everything turns out all right between us. They are masochists waiting for the kind of sadistic animal that of course I am not. Their orgasm is brief, sharp, fitful, and they experience it not at the peak they strive for but on a far lower, rougher ground. These women I like the least. The second type is given to quiet submission. If they trust my body's tyranny, then their otherwise delay-prone pleasure tends to increase, slowly passing through ever higher peaks, until they reach a climax that shakes the very foundation of their being, and its effects last until the next climax. It's as if every inhibition overcome propels them toward new heights of pleasure, and though pleasure persists, inhibition pulls them back, so ultimately it isn't pleasure alone that dominates them. The process is more like pleasure having to run a stressful obstacle race. These are retiring, unpretentious girls, unhappy over their plain looks, carefully avoiding calling attention to themselves, and made somewhat wily by the charmingly merciless infighting so rampant among women. And even if they don't have faith in my masculine dominance, they pretend nothing is amiss. This is when they are most submissive and show complete devotion. And when it becomes clear that this won't help either, because I respond to their devotion not with gratitude, as they do, but with increased alertness and even more careful precision, then they display their tender humility even more openly. They have an ulterior motive for this: to offset my lack of devotion with their all-too-yielding lips, hoping to cajole mine to respond in kind.

  By making their mouth my body's most humble slave. And as a consequence, these tedious little affairs end then and there. I feel the greatest pity for this type, but in practice I am most pitiless with them. It is the third type I feel closest to. These women are usually heftier, more solid. They are the large ones, cheerful, proud, passionate, stubborn, and fickle. Our preparations are sluggish. The way lumbering beasts circle and size each other up. Our meeting is devoid of emotional complication. Yet the boisterous crescendo of our pleasure is often checked by the frontal clash of two aggressive natures. At such moments, briefly, the din of battle ominously abates. These spacious and luminous plateaus of stopped time are very precious to me. And they keep occurring, capriciously, unpredictably, putting to the test all my sober attempts to control my impulses, creating the impression that we want not to reach a single peak but to scale a seemingly endless mountain range. It seems as if I've reached a plateau where the vegetation is sparse. And this is not merely a rest stop, a way station where one eats, drinks, gathers new strength. It is when reaching these plateaus that these women feel the lack of something. Or a thirst I cannot slake. Realizing in a flash what has happened, they try to save the day by concentrating their overwhelming and now recoiling passion on my mouth. For they have no intention of losing out just because I happen to have this odd quirk. Coming up against my cold intransigence, they seem to be saying: Oh no? Then here, take this! They want what's coming to them, and I can't say I blame them. And in this new situation I can afford to humble myself a little, if only because the game gives me some pleasure, too, and not merely because I know that now it's not their lips I have to touch, but also because, in a few moments, in the throes of their punishing, vindictive game, they will lose all self-control anyway, and with pleasure multiplied and shared, I can be myself again. And that is how their void is filled with my excess. Like me, they are realists, too. They know that the equilibrium needed for life is achieved not by reaching for an ideal but by using whatever comes to hand. In our resourcefulness we are accomplices, comrades. We thumb our noses at the world's ideals, and always feel sorry for those who are still trying for them. I am grateful to these women. And they are grateful to me for not having to conceal their blatant selfishness in front of me. I could do without them, of course, because experience tells me there is no irreplaceable need in this world, yet I'd say they keep me alive.

  About matters such as these, and even more delicate ones, I should be talking only to myself. But man was not made to talk to himself. All such attempts are no more than foolish experiments that hark back to one's mental childhood.

  Of course, I also loved my dead friend's maternal grandfather more than I did the other one. It wasn't really love, more like a flattering tribute to my ego. He treated me and communicated with me as if I were not, mentally and physically, still a gangly adolescent. What provided the opportunity for these conversations was his habit of taking long walks every afternoon in the neighborhood. He ambled along, thrusting his long, ivory-knobbed walking stick carefully before him, and if by chance we ran into each other, he would lean on his cane, tilt his gray head to one side, and listen to me with the attentiveness and empathy he believed was the due of every human being. His interjections, approving nods, pondering hums, and warning exclamations led me down a path I wanted to take only when complying with my innermost wishes. His empathy could be so disconcerting that sometimes I deliberately avoided him or, after a polite but hurried greeting, rushed past him.

  In adolescence one tends to relate to intellectual urges in the same timidly willful way as one does to erotic ones. But he never forced the issue. There was nothing demanding or tempting about him. Yet the possibility of voluntary self-disclosure kept drawing me back to him.

  Directly or in veiled, metaphoric terms, we discussed political issues, and he told me once that according to a very clear-minded philosopher, whom I would not be able to read since he wrote his works in English, what is important in human societies is not that the majority have as much right as the ruling minority. That's just how it is, and it's inevitable. But if this were the only social principle regulating societies, there would be only strife in the world. There would be no possibility of reaching any agreement between individuals or societies. But we know that this isn't so. And the reason for that is that there is also an infinite goodness in this world, and everyone without exception, rulers as well as subjects, would like to have an equal share. This goodness exists, he said, because our desire for equality, symmetry, and harmony is as strong as is our lust for power, our need for total victory over a foe. And we must understand that the lack of this symmetry and harmony in us is also evidence of the existence of this goodness.

  I couldn't then have possibly remembered, let alone understood, this complex thought, but later, when I came upon the book of this very significant philosopher, I rediscovered it with a surprise that took my breath away.

  And if now, after so many years, I take out these photographs and spread them before me, I am again reminded of this same, seemingly complex thought, and begin to suspect why I shied away from the symmetry that other people found so very attractive in my grandfather's features.

  Grandfather's straight, almost rigid posture, which gave an unpleasant first impression, need not be taken as a peculiarity of his own. It has as much to do with the fashion of his day as with his profession, which made this kind of bearing almost compulsory. And there may have been another reason for the stiffness: in those days the long exposure time of cameras demanded that, with the help of all sorts of invisible supports, the subject be completely motionless. However, there are also two snapshots among the photos. One of them was taken at the Italian front in an improvised trench. They must have picked part of a ravine for the purpose, because you can see that two sides and the bottom of the trench are made of flat, layered blocks of limestone. Sandbags are piled on top of the stones, and you can tell the bags a
re loosely filled, they probably didn't have enough sand. Flanked by two fellow officers, my grandfather sits in the foreground of the picture. His long legs, elegant even in heavy boots, are crossed, his torso is bent forward, and his arms are supported on his elbows; with his mouth slightly open and his eyes wide, he is staring into the camera. The faces of the other two, lower-ranking officers are worn and haggard, their uniforms seem neglected, but the look in their eyes is fearlessly determined, if somewhat artificial. In this setting my grandfather looks like a self-indulgent playboy who can enjoy himself even in such circumstances because he has nothing to do with anything or anyone there. The other snapshot is one of the nicest pictures I have ever seen. It must have been taken at sunset, on top of a hill where only a single puny little tree stood. In between the sparse leaves, the sun shines right into our eyes, or rather into the lens of the long-gone amateur photographer. Grandfather is chasing two young girls in long dresses and straw hats; they are my aunts. One of the girls, my Aunt Ilma, has apparently gotten away; waving her ribboned hat, she is running, on her way out of the picture. Her triumphant grin is therefore very blurry. The other little girl, Aunt Ella, is in an odd pose, leaning out from behind the slender tree, and Grandfather catches her just as the photographer clicks his shutter. Grandfather is wearing a light summer suit, he either unbuttoned his jacket or it had opened by itself. He is coiling out from behind the tree while still clinging to it, like a well-groomed but momentarily disheveled satyr. In this picture, too, his mouth is half open and he is wide-eyed, but not only is there no sign of pleasure in his eyes, it almost appears as if he were carrying out some painful duty, although in the snatching, clutching movement of his hand there is something of the supple greed of a predator. In other photos, I can see only his harmoniously motionless face, photographed frontally, concealed by his rigid posture.

  In old novels such faces are called ovoid. It's a full, well-proportioned, oval face, strongly, smoothly articulated, easing into a forehead framed by irrepressibly wavy locks of hair. His high-bridged nose has sensitive nostrils, his eyebrows are dense, his lashes long, his irises surprisingly light, almost luminous, against the generally dark tones of his features. His lips are almost vulgarly thick, and on his aggressively protruding chin there is the same hard-to-shave cleft I have on mine.

  The face, like the brain or the whole body, has two hemispheres. The common peculiarity of these two hemispheres is that their symmetry is only approximate. The unevenness discernible in a person's body or face stems from the fact that impressions received by our more or less neutral sense organs are separated in two unevenly developed hemispheres of the brain, and which side of a person's body or face seems more striking to us depends on which side of the person's brain is more developed. The right hemisphere processes the emotional connotations of the impressions, while the left hemisphere deciphers the meaning of the same impressions, and only afterward, as a second step, does the brain establish a direct relationship between the intellectual and emotional aspects of the same impression. One perceives a phenomenon with one's eyes, ears, nose, and fingers as an unprocessed whole, then breaks it down to its components and, based on the relations between the different components, re-creates for oneself the whole that one first came to know through sensory perception. But, because of the uneven development of the brain's two hemispheres, the perceived whole can never be identical with the analyzed and assimilated whole, which in turn means that there is no such thing as a perfectly harmonious emotion or a perfectly harmonious way of thinking.

  Anyone can observe this phenomenon in himself when talking to another person. People in conversation never stare directly into one another's eyes—only madmen do that—rather, they move their eyes from one hemisphere of the face to the other, back and forth. The glance oscillates between thought and feeling, and if it is fixed on any one point, it will inevitably be the left side of the face, the one expressing emotions, it is this side of the face that the neutral glance, taking in the whole of the impression, uses to check whether the words it comprehended mentally are identical with the emotions elicited by the interlocutor's words.

  Language, in certain set phrases, also follows this functional peculiarity of the human body. If, for example, referring to a given phenomenon I say that I couldn't believe my eyes, what I'm admitting is that neither intellectually nor emotionally could I process the received impression as a whole, or more precisely, I tipped so far toward either a mental or an emotional evaluation that I could no longer establish a connection between the two poles. I saw something but could not reconcile it with my inner sense of order and balance; therefore, although I may have seen it as whole, I could not comprehend it whole, therefore could not assimilate it. The reverse phenomenon takes place when we say that we are trying to stare somebody down. In this case the searching glances of the speakers come to an absolute standstill. For two reasons. Either the glance finds harmony, perfect agreement between the emotional and intellectual spheres—and harmony always comes as an unexpected surprise, for it is a theoretical whole with, theoretically, no differentiated parts. Or, since the contradiction is irreconcilable between the emotional and intellectual aspects of the phenomenon, it intends to settle at the dead center of this unachievable harmony, fixed on the other person's neutral organ of perception, his eyes, trying to deprive itself of any further impressions and, with its impassivity, to force the other to decide in which direction it wishes to tip its own scale.

  Of course, the state of I-couldn't-believe-my-eyes can last but a few seconds, just as you can't stare someone down for too long. The appearance of a harmony coming into being, or lacking totally, cannot be sustained for long, and not only because the relationship between emotion and intellect is disharmonious, even physiologically, but because the internal image we want to assimilate is not identical with the image our sense organs perceive in a neutral, unprocessed form. At the same time, the face as a whole reflects quite faithfully this complex triple relationship. We can confirm this phenomenon, too, by examining with the aid of a pocket mirror both our profiles, and then comparing them with the frontal view of our face.

  The two profiles appear completely different. One of them expresses the emotional, the other the intellectual aspect of our character, and the greater the disparity, the smaller the likelihood that they will blend harmoniously in the frontal view. Yet blend they must, a natural necessity that excludes the possibility of the two being totally different from each other—just as they cannot be totally identical either.

  Logically it should follow that we should consider a face in which emotion and intellect appear to be in radical imbalance just as beautiful as one in which the two are in perfect harmony. But this isn't so. Insofar as we can choose between two near-perfect forms, we always choose the near-perfectly-proportionate over the near-perfectly-disproportionate one.

  If I were to take any of my grandfather's photographs showing him from the front, and with a pair of scissors cut it in two along the line between the cleft of his chin and the bridge of his nose, and then superimpose the pieces, one half of his face would cover the other near perfectly, like two geometric constructs. The reason for this unique trait must be that in individuals like him the two hemispheres of the brain developed evenly. Assessing the physical appearance of such people, one is tempted to conclude that neither emotion nor intellect predominates in them, pulling them in one direction or the other; and whoever looks at them cannot but be intrigued by the magical possibility of perfect symmetry.

  If the brain's two hemispheres could indeed assimilate with a perfect blend of feeling and thought what the sense organs had already perceived as a neutral whole, if there were no differences between parts and the whole, if an individual's unique image were not formed in accordance with the brain's inevitable biases, if each individual could reproduce a perfect whole comprehensible to all, then it wouldn't even occur to us to differentiate between beautiful and ugly, good and bad, because there would be no difference b
etween emotional and intellectual properties. This would be the ultimate symmetry we all strive for, which the man of ethics calls infinite goodness and the man of aesthetics calls beauty.

  The only reason I've thought it necessary to explain all this is to demonstrate what an unbridgeable gap separates ethical thinking, which even in the absence of ultimate symmetries finds certainties, or aesthetic thinking, which cannot survive such an absence, from the kind of thinking I can also call my own. In my youth, because of my attractive physical appearance, people thought of me as exceptional and treated me accordingly. The advantages stemming from their admiration and devotion made up for the social disadvantages I had to endure on account of my family background. But in my thinking, perhaps for this very reason, I have remained the epitome of the average person. I did not become a believer like the ethical ones, or a doubter like many aesthetically sensitive people I know, because I never longed for the impossible but learned to make good use of the qualities I possess. Of course my own secret torments do enable me to empathize with the certainties of ethical believers and the uncertainties of skeptical aesthetes, with their happiness and tragedies, but my thinking is not directed at realizing hidden possibilities or at grasping metaphysical insights born of contemplating the impossible; my thinking deals only with real possibilities, things within reach of my two hands.

  My activities don't touch on any systematic philosophy of life. I am guided by the conviction that whatever appears as debit on one side will show up as credit on the other. Despite my well-developed theoretical bent, I occupy myself only with the practical organization of my life. I draw on my credit, I make up my debit. And while doing so, I never forget that symmetries thus gained are valid only for the moment of their creation.

  And if I said before that studying those photographs, whose allusion to ultimate symmetry filled me with such distaste, was one of my favorite pastimes as a child, then my statement is in need of further clarification.