by Peter Nadas
The reason was not necessarily their timidity but rather their squeamishness or their exceptional needs.
It was impossible to understand everything.
Perhaps this was one reason he’d have been glad to exchange his life for that of the bravest ones, so as to understand at least something of the indifference of those who didn’t care whom they were with so long as they could go on being with someone. If only he could accept every stranger’s approach and understand it; if only he could let them have his way with him but without his touching anyone. Which would mean remaining untouched himself.
If only he did not suffer so shamelessly from lack of bodily contact.
He could not touch himself, because here that gesture’s meaning was unequivocal: it meant that you were offering up your body as free prey, and your every move would be watched from every direction, just as he was watching others. One enticing signal was all that was needed for two men to fall on each other and quickly satisfy each other, or to engage in the act for a while, careful not to reach gratification, and then part—with a gesture a little like a thank-you or good-bye—and vanish without a trace into the very depth of the night, only to resume with others. As though they believed permanent attachments to be superfluous and mawkish. They were conspirators, ready to initiate him into their most jealously guarded and dangerous secrets, but only if he first swore to uphold their principles. He probably should have turned his body over then and there. But he could not find the required submissiveness or this kind of self-abasement in himself. Yet the situation was not unpleasant, even though he was excluded and inexperienced, because the fear and trembling kept him in a constant state of excitement. He’d have liked to become completely shut up in himself, but he had to keep himself open. It was important to behave as if he belonged with them, to show that if he wanted to he could give up this tenacious defense of his body’s integrity at any time. Otherwise they wouldn’t put up with him. His sperm kept on seeping. His erection referred not to just anyone but precisely to that someone who might pop up at any moment, that someone whom everyone here idolized and worshipped, that someone whom he too was looking for but hadn’t yet found. Or rather, though he did profoundly understand them, it would be better and he’d complete his knowledge if he sacrificed himself; but—and here’s the rub—he does not understand that here no one is looking for a real person; everyone is chasing his own imagination.
His desire was directed at all of them, almost all of them, but the moment one man stepped forward and approached him, his desire no longer focused on a single person; it focused on no one.
And that is why he would then flee.
He ran from the encroaching figures, from having to respond to this magical attraction; his feet pounding on the hard trail, he ran ahead of them like a wild animal, trusting himself to his sharpened senses, his feet carrying him blindly. Shrubs with branches like sharp arms hit him in the face and wrapped themselves around his body, cracking and snapping as he dragged them along and broke free of them. They were embracing him with their tendrils and tentacles, meaning to pull him back and punish him for refusing to surrender to reality as he must for even the shortest moment of gratification.
He found their roughness, avidity, and brutality frightening; in fact he was not so much frightened as painfully sober when near them. Yet he appreciated the insane bravery with which, if only for a moment, they offered up their entire ecstatic being along with their secret desires, or served other men’s ecstasies with their mouths, their attentive hands, or their carefully lubricated and open rectums.
Their freedom seemed beautiful and dazzling to him. He saw himself as tied down by tethers of convention.
He despised himself for his servility; he was repelled not by them but by himself. Yet he was the one who had done so much against himself, almost everything. He quickly realized that one couldn’t sink lower than this to attain freedom, or at least he hoped he wouldn’t have to sink lower. His heart, beating happily and anxiously, now almost exploded in his chest; from the inner tension of fear and stupefaction he nearly stopped breathing. He probably couldn’t have endured sinking deeper, though he knew that now there was no stopping, he was sliding ever lower. He couldn’t possibly touch anyone like that, not as the others did, he kept telling himself scornfully. He excused himself for not reaching a climax in such wretched circumstances; he couldn’t, even if he found out that every man did it this way. Because then he’d have to give up his frenzied search. He needs affection, he told himself. Out of cowardice he couldn’t accept the ecstatic affections, and he reproved himself for this. Or came to terms with the thought that there was no human being in the world he was looking for. No such man and no such woman either. Yet he couldn’t give up the notion of mating, he couldn’t relinquish the vain or naïve idea that, like a songbird, he’d find his mate, for his sentimental hope had not left him.
Very vaguely, timorously, he hoped that fate would summon someone here, the right person, just as it had sent him here, that fate would not abandon him here. At the same time, he felt that he, with his petit-bourgeois sentimentality, was ridiculous. To imagine that he would meet his total-stranger doppelganger, differing from him only proportionately. He couldn’t imagine this other person except as an exact likeness, which is why it couldn’t be a girl. But this person should be more perfect than he, rather like that giant from whom he’d been fleeing, but not so perfect as to humiliate him with physical and mental superiority.
He couldn’t imagine kissing the giant on the mouth; at most he went as far as envisioning the giant naked, to the point where one naked skin encounters the warmth and exhalations of the other’s naked skin.
Nor did he let the tribal warriors—those strange loud-mouthed beings, all his age or younger—distract him from what he envisioned in his mind. There should be somebody for him, and not just anybody. This is what he thought, even though he always lost his equilibrium when faced with the warriors. He had good reason to fear them, not only because they were quick to come to blows, but because they could see into his most secret intentions, even those still unknown to him, could see into an area he was not too keen to visit by himself.
Let the little prick get lost in a stinking cunt, they hissed when they saw him slinking along the same trail as before, coming closer yet still refusing to let them have their way.
He refuses everything.
Waiting for the knight of his dreams, the little darling, they laughed in a mock chorus.
Indeed, for them, nothing was sacred; the whole world was but a parody of itself, designed solely for their amusement.
You can’t be waiting for the gallant rear admiral Miklós Horthy, my sweetie, there he is on his great white horse, they lisped, giggling into his ear as he passed them.
In the very same tones ladies use in the fancy Café Gerbeaud.
Let him take you on his huge smoking cock, they yelled to his back.
Or maybe Jean Marais.
Boys, I think he is waiting for Mrs. Béla Kun.*
It was impossible to avoid them; still, he didn’t take them very seriously. He quickly discovered that no matter how powerful and fearless they might seem at night, in reality they were pariahs—servants of others’ pleasure, at everyone’s mercy—which is why he could not help loving them.
He was running from them.
He longed for their inner strength, their naked muscles, the nauseating smell of their face powders, their eyes decorated with artificial lashes, their unbridled parodies, their total boldness, but not for their vulnerability.
As he ran he lost his way in the complicated network of paths, lanes, and trails—nothing but the topography of senseless desires, the imprint of pampered fantasies and futile wishes on this filthy planet. Of course, if he could see everything, if he could observe the entire system of their existence, then he’d definitely understand.
And experience the other’s life without giving up anything of yourself, without touching him at all.
On the very first night, he’d decided to return the next day. In daylight, however, his nocturnal decision lost its validity. It was like returning in daytime as an ornithologist to a research area; the birds were screeching, singing, twittering, chirping, billing, and cooing, some of them offering impudent retorts. He might in daylight see into the secret chambers of a stranger’s conscience here, but he didn’t want anything to do with anyone or thing. The ones who had disappeared from his earlier experience were precisely those who in daylight might have guided him to some useful anthropological discovery, but in daylight no special interest linked him here, so he became a total stranger to his nocturnal self. Living his other life, he could make no contact with the requirements of this one. Or would have to exchange one of his lives for the other so that the totality of his existence would not be so intricately false, to turn the two lives into a single one. To attempt that, he felt, would be the end; he’d be playing with madness. Or perhaps he was already in this situation up to his neck and could no longer distinguish among different levels and planes of reality. Something was unavoidably happening, but it immediately and uncontrollably slipped through his fingers.
When he spoke to someone and at the same time made an effort to distract his own attention from the relentless inner speech within him, he did so with a resigned, permanent smile, which is usually enough for people to consider one endearing. But this is what made him aware of his madness’s reality. Not even with the help of his stronger, more reasonable daytime self could he soften the pain of his duality. With his polite daytime smile he promised more and forgot more than he could keep of his nocturnal promises. For a successful coordination of his selves, he’d first have to whisper to one of them which of the two was his other life. He did not succeed in this because neither the nocturnal nor the daytime life was more realistic or more improbable than the other.
In the meantime, it seemed sensible not to deny himself the nights on Margit Island. He would accomplish nothing by forbidding them to himself, anyway. But he’d stay strictly on the trails; he had to prescribe this for himself. To watch, to see, to observe, but not to mingle with those who meant to possess only his nocturnal self; to be on guard, to preserve his daytime self and, in the spirit at least of mating, to keep himself whole. If not exactly sane, at least on this side of insanity.
To trust himself to his sense of smell.
To discern in the darkness the buffeting and the waves of odors—of tobacco, shit, stale urine, sperm, the hostile or friendly emanations of bodies excited or cooling; these signals always steered him aright. Because of them, he became like an animal, following a scent and letting his feet carry him on. He felt more at home as an animal than as a human, because he recorded and preserved his need for objectivity with senses that worked only on an animal level. This smooth feeling of animality was one of the fascinating discoveries of the night—strong enough to absolve him, to neutralize his feeling of guilt and to erase his moral doubts. However, not even his feet or sense of smell could guarantee him total safety on the dark trails.
And it was not enough to be on guard with all of his senses.
Not far from the pebbled walk that separated the grove hiding the ruined cloister from the rose garden, redolent with aromatic and concentrated sweetness, were some polluted areas. During the day, people relieved themselves on its trails and brought their children and dogs, screaming, whimpering with impatience and stamping their feet, to pee and shit; women who needed to would quickly exchange their bloody cottons for clean ones. If in his excitement he did not lose his scent—that is, if an unexpected emotional agitation did not reduce his olfactory alertness—these smells warned him well in advance.
Not that way.
This is where I’ve got to, this is where I am now, he scolded himself in the conventional human way; I’ve immersed myself in the stench of excrement, perspiration, menstruation, and urine; I must discover my only, unvarnished reality while roaming around among shitty papers and bloody bunches of cotton.
Enjoyment of the search and of self-torture replaced pleasure, though he knew that with his constant seeking he was only trying to find a priggish sentimental way around his own brutality. Seeing others’ brutality, he wanted to conjure up his own. Not possible, his body grumbled, dissatisfied; it wouldn’t let him.
His beastly self worked in a system parallel to his emotional self.
The stench of others could not touch him.
At most, he would go not this way but that way. He would not give up discovering and understanding the functional principles of his own body on behalf of mere trifles; he could not relinquish his need to know. Now his beastly self, now his emotional one reported on its painful sense of something lacking, and he could not resolve questions of morality for either of them. He could not accept, could not take possession of something he did not know; yet how could he reject it if he did not even know whether it belonged in his personality, with which he was just becoming acquainted. And what could he do with his frigid self, which had nothing to do with either of his two lives, neither the emotional daytime self nor the bestial nocturnal self, for he had no appropriate sentiments for either, and about pleasure and suffering he remained as indifferent as he had been about generally accepted moral principles.
As if his thinking or his soul had characteristics that were outside his personality. Or characteristics that he sensed or perceived as having little to do with the struggles raging within him that, depending on their final outcome, would form the conditions of his personality’s life.
Hands reached after him from out of the darkness; unexpectedly they were thrust between his legs and thighs to feel the quality of his flesh, the state of his cock, and, mainly, the size of his cock. Somebody gently took hold of his wrist—he couldn’t see the man’s face because he was so close with his hot breath—and quite unexpectedly placed it in his palm while at the same time trying to touch him with his wet lips. He rejected this, quickly brushing everything and everybody off him. Yet he could not reject the surprising feel of the hot, unfamiliar cock—well proportioned, with its swelling veins, taut frenum, and foreskin jammed up before the rim of the bulb—or the intense, profound feeling that another human being had placed his pulsating fate in his hand just like that. Indeed, he grabbed it as a baby would grab a rattle. This he could not forget and therefore could not deny his awareness of the cock’s exceptional qualities or uniqueness either. He learned this from his own cautious, stiff, frightened little hands, and a few overbearing forceful men and happenstance sufficed for the lesson.
Every cock differs from every other cock the way men do from one another, though each cock is always surprisingly different from the man it belongs to. The memory of these oddities kept coming back to him, but he did not know what it meant to uncover them. It was impossible to forget these differences even among fully dressed people. From then on, he knew that clothing concealed something about which everyone wants vital information. As if with men’s cocks the philosopher’s stone had been placed forcefully in his hands but he did not know what to do with it because he was stupid. And it was no help that the very idea of touching a strange person, especially a man, filled him with disgust—touching his lips, his stubbly skin, the first, slippery drops of sperm oozing out after a prolonged erection and leaving stains everywhere. He also refrained from closely inspecting his own prick. While washing, he deliberately looked elsewhere. When erect, his prick became so sensitive that he could no longer separate pain from pleasure. Once, after an erection of several hours, it became stuck in his underpants and he had to pull it free.
Once he’d discovered the playing field, he could not resist returning to it, tempting and challenging the insurmountable disgust he had for his own body no less than for those of all other men. He had no such disgust for women’s bodies—these experiences did not affect his feelings for women—yet even regarding women he could not erase the knowledge culled from his new experiences. As had happened bef
ore, it was hard for him not to go down to the subway toilets during the day and not to pay close attention to everything while around him the men pretended to be only urinating.
He did likewise.
The truth is, I had two interrupted lives, he would say later of himself, one proved to be not enough, the other promised to be too much, and in both I felt very much like a stranger. But now I knew it was the end, while I was running from the enormous, athletic older man, his chest and shoulders almost bursting out of his checkered shirt, his fist like a hammer. I must get away from here at any cost, my other self kept repeating desperately to itself like a mantra. If I can get out of the yellow-flowered Japanese acacia grove and reach the riverside promenade, I’m saved.
He ran toward the lights, saw himself running toward the lights.
In no situation in his life could he have escaped this always-watching icy countenance. He will never come back here again, he promised this countenance. It cannot be that I’m repeating my mother’s life.
When he unexpectedly cleared the thicket.
He stopped at the end of the trail and panted, freely, aloud. He was safe.
He inhaled deeply the heavy fragrance of the river water; he had won. And once again he had to acknowledge that the moment contradicted his previous expectations. No one blocked his way and nobody kissed him on his neck. And this he regretted. He could be more ashamed of his ridiculousness, but he could not sink deeper in his shame than this. No one’s steps were heard on the path along the riverbank, packed hard with black slag. An ordinary night on the island, far from both halves of the city, between the two huge arms of the river; if only a huge flood would cover and carry away his body. His stomach, his testicles hurt. It must be very late. Once again long hours must have passed like minutes with meaningless activity; he could never properly gauge the relationship between time and action. He would stay another half hour, he said to himself, and then go home. There is no such thing as good expectations. Again, he’d go home with many experiences, many things lived through, but the repeatedly granted half hours quickly filled the entire night, and he failed to meet a single soul. I have nobody, and I’ll never find anybody either. He was thirsty, sweaty, and hungry, he should have gone to one of the drinking fountains because he was all dried out. One solitary human being, he prayed, begged, and implored, like a monk.