by Peter Nadas
There is probably no perfect symmetry in the world; it would be insanely utopian, vain, to hope for one, yet they might have come close to it precisely because at this moment, even with the indifferent imaginations, they succeeded in complementing each other harmoniously. No, not quite yet, the last obstacle would be overcome in a moment. They were pushing it before them and rolling along with it.
Their body positions did not change yet did not remain as before.
Cautiously, just a bit, as if he were not doing it at all, the man began to slide, as if he had to keep this little action a secret not only from the old woman making noises in the hallway but also from himself and the woman in bed with him. After a brief pause that was more like a brief surprise, he slid back to his former position, and because of the sharp clash of the two merging sensations, he had to reconsider everything. Which the woman’s countermoves and carelessness did not permit.
He could not resist repeating it.
Again and again.
But exact repetitions didn’t work, because the woman’s challenges grew longer and her almost arbitrary carelessness sharpened the clash of merging sensations. What they were doing made no sound because it could not. They and they alone could hear the dim thuds of their thrusts, the slurps of sucking, the sloshing of slimy secretions, the resounding thumps of their colliding abdominal walls. But the knot that tied to each other what they saw and heard was loosening. Being surprised at themselves seemed to fix their eyes and glue their eyelashes in one position. They saw things from different places.
The sounds around them receded and slid down beneath the horizon.
A face in ecstasy is frightening; the reason one can look at it without aversion and disgust is that in the distortions of another person’s face one can catch a glimpse of what one’s own greediness and selfishness look like. It is like stepping into a hall of mirrors. A person can see his or her own visage even if it is stronger and more violent, or perhaps weaker and gentler, than their own self-image. At the same time, their inner pictures were becoming so powerful that looking at each other steadfastly was to no avail; seeing each other so exposed, so devoid of dignity, beauty, and charm; they couldn’t keep their independent inner pictures from ceasing to refer to—no, almost completely excluding—each other. And there was more. They were both thinking very actively and clearly, and this also seemed to have little to do with their amorous activities, or in any case they could no longer locate and secure the contact points of thoughts and sensations. The redoubled double worlds of sensation and thinking, which otherwise blend, seep, flow, soar, vanish, or absorb each other, so that one can make way for the other or, put another way, so that the stronger may gain ascendancy and the weaker humbly relinquish its position, these worlds were progressing by clambering over each other, making their way forward over and inside each other like a coarse greased cogwheel, or like fine clockwork whose gears and levers unconsciously drive a system much larger than itself, something with no name, something the mind cannot comprehend, whose boundaries are invisible and whose enormous mass cannot be measured.
From a very short distance, Gyöngyvér could see into the depths of two strange dark eyes, or rather, she could look out to an abyss with no physical dimensions or light of its own, if only because it blended into the lighter sight of her own nose. No matter how strange the man’s childhood had been, she still managed to find something mutual at the bottom of their differences, in the face dripping with perspiration that shone around her darkly, or brightly, along the steep line of his sparkling eyebrows.
His eyebrows, she said to herself. And that could have been one explanation. Because their eyebrows were indeed as similar as if they had been siblings.
And she was thinking about this with her tongue while spreading and pressing herself over him and licking the beads of sweat dripping off his brow, because what she tasted was very different from what she’d anticipated from the smell of his sweat. Which, translated into normal human language, meant that she probably didn’t understand or misunderstood the other person after all, and was again chasing an illusion of her desires. And the ceiling was arching over her more imperiously than ever, which brought on another thought association—the ceiling’s little cracks and ominous reflections of light.
A fine time for the ceiling of her rotten little room to come crashing down; let it, let the whole rotten room fall apart. It would too, if she let it, if she didn’t cheer herself up, find an antidote. Every little interior movement was a protest. A place she couldn’t break out of; they wouldn’t let her. Because she’s not happy, because she ruins everything.
She was pushing it, stretching it; let her room crack wide open, its walls have always been too confining and have always chafed her skin. If only the old woman would drop dead soon, she could put in a request for the whole apartment.
She sank a little, and then rose a bit, all right, let it be, the way he wants it, all right; she yielded to the man again.
It will never end.
But she couldn’t tell where her glances, thoughts, furtive looks, her very countenance roamed; where, on which level of sights or sensations, she was with those fractions of words and sentences. She was floating in the glittering water murky with mud, and was sitting in the dusty courtyard, sitting where they dumped her, and she could hardly breathe.
It was almost completely dark.
She didn’t know where she was.
She had been looking for this place or this sensation. Now she couldn’t see any cracks in the ceiling. I’ve always been looking for them, she thought, though she had no idea what she was referring to. Surely not to the man. Strangely enough this man no longer interested her. A moment just after twilight yet before evening descended, and the man had become part of that moment. Perhaps with her countenance she had brought something to a halt, thus lighting up for herself an otherwise invisible landscape.
I love you: she would have loved to shout that into the landscape. Though she didn’t know to whom. As if for a moment everyone who had ever been inside her made an appearance. To keep the night from crashing down on her, she would have to stop the earth from spinning. She could not return to the person who was filling her up.
She didn’t know who he was.
She still didn’t know.
Like the mouth of her womb, the little room grew gigantic from this loud desire, as if to devour the entire apartment with all its odds and ends.
Rhythmically, they breathed into each other’s mouth.
The man concentrated on her cautious movements, guided by the rhythms of two mouths breathing into each other and not by sensations and certainly not by her feelings. He had an inner countenance with which he saw her. He saw that the relatively long vagina’s angle of inflection and that of his cock, shortened and thickened by excitement, were in virtual opposition. The vagina arced upward while the cock, as if pulled downward by the mass and weight of its blood-filled head, bowed willfully.
They were wedged into each other sternly and stubbornly. With his every thrust forward and every retreat, they mutually increased the tension in each other.
He was managing things economically. Such a tiny movement mustn’t make a noise that could be heard through the wall. Another reason to be on the alert. As if he were controlling two worlds at once. And they were not equally elastic. He knew where he was, and what he had to do if he did not want to injure the real world. He saw how far he had penetrated, the road behind him and the stretch that was still ahead. He could not give in to the woman, who, if he did, would writhe under him in spasmodically interrupted, hysterical rhythms that would not match his. She would pretend dutifully to demonstrate how good it was for her, and with that it’s impossible to get anywhere.
Their hips collided several times, almost unpleasantly. Actually, it was the first thing he had noticed at the swimming pool, the woman’s hips.
How her torso became elongated when she came out of the pool and drops of water rolled down, sticking
to her cold brown skin, around the hip bone. Now the pain claimed his attention. Although he could see with his eyes, he was seeing better with his skin and cock; his body no longer had a separate bulk, independent parts, limbs of its own; and with their parts and limbs thus shared, they could not separate and their mutual sensations could not become independent.
White was the strongest.
He should have pulled his cock out of her at least for a moment, to see it, to delight in it; he missed his sense of ownership. Pain is darkness. The white pillowcase illumined all his senses, its sunken wrinkles and shadows almost irritatingly bright around the expanding and contracting face. Lips opening to the sound of breathing; flaring, finely opening and closing nostrils; a barely audible, painful whistling in his ear.
And she is still doing it.
She’s always doing it, he thought, exasperated. As if she’d been trying to convince him. Or herself. And the enlightening decision was right at hand. I won’t let her. He no longer felt skin, only the heat filtering through it, and he didn’t feel the flesh under the skin either. This was the only remaining task, which was somehow familiar from somewhere. He entered into darkness, into the pervasive odor of the cunt, with its sloshing sounds at every little movement. He must face the task, or at least find appropriate means to deal with it, if he had failed until now. To outwit the woman.
He also saw the white stones sticking or popping out of and falling back into the ground bubbling under him. The water was boiling, producing bubbles on its surface, which was exactly like the sensation of crumbling under his body. He was watching her as the other boys had watched him through the swirling steam. He had to watch his every move to counter the woman’s simulations, to find a small crack. But he felt this more as a challenge to break through to something. He even thought, I should break through to her because alone she cannot free herself or take care of herself.
The probability of succeeding in this was very low.
Or at least someone might call down from the third floor, in an unfamiliar voice, before he’d topple over. You know what I mean. Of course he knew, because the dried-up shrubs he could hold on to only moments earlier were now bending away and disappearing, one after the other, in the depths. Now he couldn’t cling to anything.
When his father left him there alone, the first thing the school principal said was that this area was very lovely, sans doute, but he shouldn’t let it dazzle him, because it wasn’t without dangers, therefore he should never, not in winter or summer, not during the day or at night, take a single step by himself.
And he had understood this.
There was only the ground that was going to swallow him now as it caved in and crumbled. How could he have understood, what could he understand if he had never before seen a landslide or avalanche. He was thinking what enviable images a child has of danger. He did not ask where he wanted to arrive at, where he would like to go or how he would like to go back home from here. Now I’ll be home, he thought when the earth moved under him, even though he couldn’t have understood why it moved. Whenever he’s in trouble, his mind rears in fright but his body acts calmly. He grasped a pillow, but the incredible sensation of crumbling stayed in his hand.
I can break through, of course, but only if I let myself.
The keys clinked in Mrs. Szemző’s hand, but she hadn’t gone out the door.
He kept moving up the ribbing of the vagina, and the higher he moved, the greater the tension became, which he was yet to conquer.
He could see the gray stone steps in front of him, the ones he ran on when he escaped from the boarding school; he followed their lead. He always thought that the safety and decisiveness of his thrusts were more important than their strength, and that they should be free of selfish motive but contain, rather, an alertness, based on being aware of the surroundings, and why he was on the alert.
Critical situations demand the greatest circumspection.
Circumspection, however, has an unavoidably high price.
These time-pitted steps were unusually steep. As if forcing his tumescent cock to touch the vaginal wall, but just barely, just barely to draw his cock across it, seemingly to make it contract but in reality to fill it to the hilt and, in addition, to mark with special emphases the starting and concluding points of each thrust. They were not worn down, these steps, as if no one had ever stepped on them, that is what was so interesting about them, they had become somewhat spongy. Which meant that time chewed rather than eroded the stone. He quivered himself into the vagina, an act that managed to double the sensation of being inside and of being stiff. He also realized it wasn’t infinity he should try to traverse.
The distances to be traveled are short.
He calmly noted a smooth top, the last of the steps. I am taking off now, he signaled, and gave a ritual emphasis to each thrust, wresting it from the general monotony. He also signaled, I could go further inside you, though in fact there was no moving further, but he had to open the way for imagination. If he wanted to, he could have counted the stairs. The top step reached into the deep gray sky and touched thick clouds, without moving. To meet the requirements of the steps, not to miss them, he had to stretch out the length of the thrusts and unexpectedly change their speed.
They hooked their hurried lips into each other roughly, for which neither of them was prepared.
When Mrs. Szemző stepped out on the seventh-floor gallery, still glimmering in the twilight, they were slipping and sliding over each other’s lips, holding on with their teeth, biting to remain still. Their full-mouthed, slippery kisses made their lips slide up their gums, as if they were eating up the path before them and there was no tomorrow. The two hollows stiffened into one and stuck together. But if they didn’t want to suffocate, their lips had to be pulled apart. By the time Mrs. Szemző, Dr. Irma Arnót, had shut the smooth dark oak door behind her on the silent gallery, airless after a sweltering day, in the maid’s room they were already screaming at the top of their voices.
The bleak walls absorbed nothing.
Quickly, though fumbling, she inserted the key; the nervous double click of the lock reverberated in the glass belly of the stairwell.
With disconnected little rhythms, the woman was slipping from whimpering into screaming in steadily rising tones and increasing volume. She threatened to tear something in her throat. But then she faltered, tried again, now from a much deeper register, with more concentration, while the man matched and covered her sounds evenly with a flat and endless howl; for a while they continued together and then it all turned into bellowing. This was so strong, spreading from the soles of her feet to her chest, his sperm battered her with such powerful thrusts, pounding the swollen gullet of her womb, that she had to toss her head from side to side again, which for a while interrupted her vocal broadcast.
The second impact was the strongest.
The third one came later, after a pause, and somehow managed, fairly benevolently, almost gently, to set the previous two aright, made it natural that earlier it had been swept away and was now becoming part of the current.
It turned into a pebble, a light skiff, a stalk of straw.
She was perhaps most grateful for this. As if it had proved to her that the previous two had indeed happened.
She was screaming, yelling, and this time she could hear herself. Brief shouts, close to bubbling staccato panting, which she so much wanted from herself as well as from the man.
But this could not be heard in the stairwell. Mrs. Szemző’s small steps echoed loudly on the chessboard of black and white tiles.
Anyway, it was as if she were demonstratively reaching, calling after a lost pleasure. No. As if responding to the lost rhythm of the world before tumbling into the dark yawning depths. The sucking and thrusting persisted in her consciousness, but nothing else. In response, the man’s bellowing also ceased.
He was buried in the dark, dumb earth. The price of being ever on the alert was that he saw himself much too clearly. But ev
en with that he could not give meaning to his existence. As if he were being compelled to review all aspects of his life’s futility. La tristesse qui régnait dans la maison vide. He got stuck, was brought to a halt in the midst of producing deep sounds in his throat, the same sounds that only a moment ago were expanding his ribs, inflating his chest to the full.
This whole business of fucking made no sense to him; nothing did. Why was he doing it. Why had he ever done it, and why does he keep repeating it.
In the heat of his skin, he felt the woman’s breasts, because out of this disgusting nothingness, out of this world turned to emptiness, began to appear details he still could not resist. The weakness of the soul. Or perhaps the huge nipples, stiffened to scabrous hardness, made him feel his skin again.
The weakness of his will.
Their bodies were flowing, sliding on and in each other; suddenly they collapsed into each other and breathed aloud in the darkness of the bleak room.
The heat stung and burned them; every part of their bodies was ablaze inside. From the several days of rubbing, the woman’s labia were burning, her vagina ached, and the man again felt the pain of the torn frenum under the tip of his penis. Open sore rubbing against open sore.
They were moaning again because it felt good to give evidence of the pain. They were crying, choking, sighing, panting haltingly, whining, sniveling, wailing, sobbing, whimpering, hissing, and mewling into each other’s ears, unable to subside. And the man kept on thrusting, lazily, filled with his own emptiness and desperation.
They could neither guide nor control what they were doing, though they had regained enough consciousness to see the new impending torrent.