by Antal Szerb
“You probably imagine that I’m not thinking about anything. But…” And she went on to some highly intelligent observation or other.
And she loved me the way a clever woman loves a clever man. Wise Americans have a saying that women are much more sensible and calculating than we are. Cynthia did not expect any material advantage from me, least of all that I should marry her (which her family would never have consented to, given my dubious forebears and their origins in so many different countries) and because, in erotic terms, I interested her about as much as a native of Patagonia, that is to say, not at all. Mostly she loved me because she was a woman with ‘interests’—an intellectual ‘vamp’. She kept little notebooks about her in which she recorded words she did not know, and came to consult me as the highest lexical authority. If we were alone together, there would be a few kisses, as a sort of preliminary, then out would come the notebooks and the questions. At first, of course, I simply told her nonsense. I advised her that Copernicus’ Christian name was John Nepomuk, that I had compiled a vast collection of works about Ivan the Terrible and translated the Metempsychosis for the Microscope. But when I saw that she believed my every word I became too lazy to lie and gave her the correct answers, didactically, like a good schoolteacher. And besides, she was so stupid. My God, she was stupid!
1932
A GARDEN PARTY IN ST CLOUD
YES, INDEED, ‘a garden party in St Cloud, in summer’… but, splendid as that may sound, the reality won’t prove quite so grand—as with this friend of mine who never uses his aristocratic Hungarian middle names because of the ‘intolerable poesie’ of his life. A ‘garden party in St Cloud’ has an air of ‘tea with Rasputin in the Hermitage in the days of the old carnival’ or ‘one of those fine days in Aranjuez’. This tale has nothing to do with such wonders of the past. The garden in question is not the famous one with the green-bearded marble steps, nor is there the slightest hint of snobbery in my thoughts. This particular party had been organised by a gentleman named Robinet (the name means ‘tap’ in English) who ran a boarding house, and quite how I came to be there is not at all clear. Marcelle had been invited, and I trailed along—or it may have been the other way around.
The lamp-lit veranda was crammed with guests speaking every sort of language. Among the Spanish and South Americans was the only person I recognised, a little girl called Concepción. She had once had a fiancé, a gallant Jewish boy from Temesvár in Transylvania, who had undertaken to do what no one had done before—ride his horse across the Amazon. He raised the money for his trip, bought a steed and a gun, had his picture in all the major South American papers… and promptly vanished. Concepción had since overcome her grief in Paris. Also present was an elderly Russian lady, a countess I need hardly add, as was only to be expected when every Hungarian in Paris had prefixed a ‘de’ to his or her barbaric-sounding name. There was also a well-known young man, a friend of the same wealthy Comtesse to whom Napoleon III had declared just four days before his coronation: “Madame, as long as there are still ladies like you in France, it will be worth being Emperor.”
But present in the greatest numbers were English-speaking girls, from that veritable League of Nations the United Kingdom and its associated Dominions. Monsieur Robinet had in fact spent some years as a boots in a little hotel in London, studying the peculiar tastes of the Anglo-Saxons and learning how to satisfy the more basic needs of his English guests. He could moreover profess a wife and a niece, presently attired as monkeys. In the boarding house for five guests the three of them carried out all the daily renewed Herculean tasks collectively known as ‘service’ and, indefatigable and resolute in their money-making Frenchness, they never wearied of it. True, there was also a waiter from Alsace, but he was still very young and able to make himself understood to the guests only through myself as interpreter. I was the poor fellow’s sole channel of communication with the non-German-speaking world, and the channel was mostly one-way. I was like the disciple of a reclusive scholar who, though loyal, nonetheless finds his situation impossible, for I in my turn couldn’t follow his dreadful regional dialect.
Rapidly, and by foreordained necessity, I set about flirting with a little Highland Scots girl, an Arts student. With my usual boyish enthusiasm, and looking for an easy topic we might have in common, I expounded St Thomas Aquinas’ theory of time to her. “Yes, yes,” she replied—pronouncing that ‘yes’ with the wonderfully impenetrable simple-mindedness that makes British girls so attractive. Eighty per cent of Marcelle’s acquaintances were young people, and when I finally caught up with her group the following scene was taking place:
“Actually, I was brought up in a forest. My father was a coal miner, you know. But what do you people know about such a life? I slept in a hollow tree; I found my way home by the stars. I know how to trap rabbits with a necktie—which is no great thing, really. You watch the place the rabbit always goes back to, and then you tie the tie into an open knot to make a noose. The rabbit runs along its usual path and doesn’t look where it’s going: he runs bang into the noose and you’ve got him.”
Everyone listened with a mixture of astonishment and respect, and I feel compelled to say a few words about who Marcelle was. Essentially, she was the girlfriend of my friend Gábor Pilaszanovits, and, as such, mine. The difference lies only in the ambiguity of the word ‘girlfriend’: to say that she was his girlfriend is somewhat to understate the reality; to say that she was mine would be going too far. Besides, Gábor wasn’t my friend in the sense that we had any shared intellectual interests. I loved the way everything about him was so impressive, so flamboyant, from his name to his way of speaking. His tall, somewhat stooping form had the silent dignity of a Transdanubian poplar; his physical movements suggested the graceful lines of a classic limousine, and in his permanent lack of cash I detected the devil-may-care attitude of the true gentry. I adored him for the fact that he despised books and could still like me, which seemed to show that there was something more in me than mere bookishness. I adored him because women doted on him. Wistfully I contemplated that do-or-die quality he possessed that I so clearly lacked. These ‘negative friendships’ do sometimes happen, like that between the crocodile and the ibis in the world of nature.
Marcelle worshipped Gábor, referring constantly to him as her ‘Lord and Master’: such were her feelings about the aristocracy. She was always telling people that she was Swedish, partly because Swedes live so far away, and partly because her hair was ginger-blonde. She spoke that exquisite French you so rarely hear in France. Her sentences came across like so many casual accounts of an aristocratic world she had never been part of. Making impeccable use of the imperfect subjunctive she would assert that she had been raised in the most exclusive girls’ boarding school in the most clericised département of all, and gave you to understand, in a manner not to be gainsaid, that her mother had withered away in mourning for the Bourbons.
This was why the story about the coal miner had produced such astonishment and dismay. What it told me was that she had already started drinking. These occasions had two, somewhat contradictory, endings: she would kiss all the waiters because they ‘reminded her of her uncle’, and then scold her knight errant furiously if he tipped the driver a sou more than was absolutely necessary.
The moment she spotted me she abandoned the young men, dispatched the little Highland Scot at my side with a well-placed remark and hauled me off to the tables.
“Milord,” she said, reverting to aristocratic mode, “you are neglecting your duty to Venus and Bacchus. But tonight I intend to play the role of Venus for you. But not the Venus de Milo, poor thing, who never steps out of her evening dress.”
The reality of her own arms was not in question, and as if to prove it, perhaps a little unnecessarily, she slid one into mine and gripped me by the neck, making me lean over at an angle that can be attained only in Paris. Through the stiffness of my wing collar I discovered the power that lies in a woman’s arms on a summer eve
ning. There are people who, when searching for images of a life of storm and tempest, rhapsodise about cars, machines and surging crowds, but what is an entire industrial city compared to a woman’s arm? I was a prisoner, led by the neck—like a calf, or a man to the gallows, or a husband.
By the time we had knocked back a large bottle of cognac swimming with ice cubes, I had gathered the courage to kiss that arm.
“You were a great success, Marcelle,” I said, for something to say.
“Oh, yes, with all those… Martians and eunuchs.”
“What do you mean?”
“Martians, because they’ll never get any closer to me, and if they did, they might as well be eunuchs, so far as I’m concerned.”
“I’ve been your Martian for a long time now,” I said gently.
“Not any more. Today the good Lord hung the stars up upside down… Look, the English girls are already drunk and you’re still sober. Perhaps that’s rather wise of you.”
I drank and marvelled at her chameleon-like nature. To tell the truth, she had always deeply attracted me: I loved both her wonderful two-sidedness and its very transparency, in the same the way that I had always been secretly attracted to walking sticks that could turn into umbrellas, slide rules that could be used as laryngoscopes, and the symbols in Ibsen. I was also drawn to her for the reason that men are generally attracted to women: that is to say, I have no idea why. But this particular attraction I had dismissed as just another of the hopeless loves with which I serially embellished my young life.
I knew that Marcelle adored Pilaszanovits with the tragic fidelity of a midinette, which tempted me to believe that La Dame aux camélias might not be entirely nonsense. But Pilaszanovits treated her with the tender casualness of a con man fingering a dud chequebook. (Though, later, when Marcelle left him for a rayon manager in a morning coat at the Galeries Lafayette, Pilaszanovits killed himself. Every year I laid flowers on his grave in the Montparnasse cemetery, the ones which featured in his favourite song: lilies of the valley, purple carnations, common larkspur, sweet marjoram. But that’s a long way in the past now, and experience tells me no one would believe the story anyway.)
But how could I, or perhaps more precisely in this context, how could my humble self, have believed for a moment that Marcelle might think me worthy of a single glance, in the meaningful sense of that phrase, when Pilaszanovits could treat me as follows in her presence: “Tamás, old chap, you’re a terribly clever man. You’re so clever you’re quite unlike anyone else. You’re so clever no normal woman will ever understand you. So clever that women invariably treat you as a bit of a joke.”
And if I ever did ever mention one of my conquests, however tentatively, he would be secretly convinced that the woman in question must be a hunchback, only I had failed to notice this fact, being so caught up in my wonderful rationalising myths.
The only reason I’m telling you this is to emphasise how totally unforeseen it was, that summer evening, when Marcelle suddenly took me by the arm, after countless light years of the cosy, eunuch-like friendship in which she had so hopelessly confined me. But when I looked about myself, under the Chinese lanterns theatrically lighting the great Corot-like trees from below, with all the summer stars out in the sky above, it was a really miraculous summer night. One of those nights when dumb animals open their mouths and utter wise sayings.
Whether I had been drinking—or everyone else had—is hard to determine. A French gentleman in a hat was telling stories in which St Denis entertained his Gallic contemporaries before valiantly gathering up his decapitated head under his arm. The ugly Spanish girls around him were shrieking with laughter. I didn’t see the Spanish boys, because they had already vanished into the darkness of the shrubbery. M. Robinet was giving his magic show, with an egg, some bicarbonate of soda and the ship’s hooter with which his brother-in-law the captain had signalled the presence of his vessel as it made its way placidly along the Louvre-Suresnes, and which he had subsequently bestowed on M. Robinet during a family picnic. The famous young man gave a display of solo dancing, his legs apparently detached from the rest of his joints and twisting about in the wild rhythms with such daring that they were more like electrified trousers than actual legs. Music sounded, like a madness. Everyone was on his or her feet, and only the Alsatian waiter stayed sitting gloomily beside a large bottle of beer. But the English girls—my God, the English girls!—set aside their native cold-bloodedness and really let themselves go, the protective powder slipping from their faces and those faces becoming even more babyish than usual. There was electricity in the air, forgotten jealousies and secrets spilling out—it was another Koriandolis, where snake-like desires for other men’s women boiled over, as if everyone had staked all their emotions, heads or tails, on this one hour; and when M. Robinet in his endless benevolence extinguished the light, there seemed every possibility for sexual adventure.
On the veranda where we were sitting the darkness seemed to increase as the music fell away. It was made all the more intense by tumultuous voices coming at random from every side. How could I deny that my first action was to feel around with my hand in the blackness for Marcelle, with no particular purpose in mind but with a happy smile on my face? But Marcelle was most decidedly no longer there. I set off in frantic haste to look for her. The light might be switched on again at any time.
My hand came upon someone at random and I took her firmly by the arm. The girl I was holding said, “Ooh,” ending in the final ‘u’ of the English. I cut it short by kissing her, with uncharacteristic vigour, full on the mouth.
That kiss was an even finer instrument of self-expression than the sonnet, and at moments like this much more promising. The opening lines of the kiss said little: more important than the technical aspect was the simple joy felt in them, the joy of the mischievous adolescent and the woman’s delight in the unexpected. But the second strophe, with its daring seriousness, was already establishing a theme. In a spirit of reverence, and with a yearning that drew on my most distant memories, I paid homage to the stranger who embodied the beauty of the night, the Unknown Goddess in my arms, as the kiss proclaimed her to be through its ecstasies of pain. The third strophe concluded the theme: because I cannot see you, because I don’t know who you are—because you are Everywoman—you are the Supremely Beautiful, the She who smoulders at the base of all my passion, and my devotion to you is, like the night, eternal. But the final strophe… was no longer a strophe, and the sonnet was no more—it was nothing, simply a kiss, without duration, and I was so immersed in it, with every atom of my being, that my head spun, and I let go of that mysterious someone. When I came to again, she was no longer there, and I “thrice embraced the empty air”, as Virgil puts it so beautifully, in his Latin.
Besides, the light had suddenly come on again.
Monsieur Robinet was standing by the switch like a convivial old Satan, delighting in his guests’ damnation. The Russian Duchess grabbed the Frenchman by the shoulder and shook him:
“You’re quite mistaken,” she yelled, with a display of energy that was quite shocking. “Love can do anything. There are people out there who swim the Channel for love, and people who die in suicide pacts for love, and everyone forgives them.”
“It seems Madame is not a native of this country,” the Frenchman exclaimed, his face white with anger.
The English girls were noisily pestering a beautiful young man with a large behind, like the fantasy object of some elderly female civil servant. The Alsatian waiter had fallen asleep. But Marcelle, the perfidious Marcelle, was standing in rather intimate proximity to the famous young man. Then she sat down with him, and a few others of his kind, at a table. I turned away from them, in a whirlpool of grief.
I went over to the little Highland Scot. I was tormented by the fear that it might have been her in the darkness. It was not as if she were ugly, rather… But, even viewed from a distance, she could never have been the Unknown Goddess. Could any girl one had actually met
be that? I took her by the left arm and right hand, and felt her even farther back. It hadn’t been her. Every woman’s body has a different feel in a man’s hand. Hers was not the one.
For a moment I was horrified by the thought that malicious Fate, with its love of confusion, had made me take Concepción in my arms, while she was perhaps all the while thinking of the gallant Jewish boy from Temesvár. True, I had seen her, just as the lights came on again, materialising at the far end of the veranda and sidling up, with a seductive look, to the Greek gentleman who had only half a skull—the other being made of silver (whereby, according to craniology, he must have been a martyr to previously unknown nervous disorders). But then the knowledge latent in my hands reassured me: anyone they had found beautiful could not have been Concepción.
Filled with mournful amiability I caught up with the Highland Scottish girl and declared, with stormy subjectivity, how much, ever since childhood, I had adored the Celts, the plaintive verses of Ossian and the one-eared dogs that in Ireland symbolised desire—and also that I happened to know that pen is the Gaelic word for ‘head’: something she in fact did not.
By this time I was so grief-stricken and ecstatic that I found myself not only using English with absolutely unshakeable confidence, I even felt—for some minutes—that I might do the same in Gaelic, and indeed in all manner of tongues, like the Apostles at Whitsun. I won’t go so far as to say that the girl carried boundless feminine intuition in her dear little bosom, but she looked at me like someone who realised that the tempestuous, world-annihilating possibilities I was blathering about might well have been had been imbibed along with the cognac, and the same for my tears, no doubt, and she was clearly wondering if there was any sort of Balm in Gilead for such Dadaist angst. There is indeed a balm for everything in Gilead, and not just for the torments of the School of Solemnity, and the blessed heart of the little Celtic girl found it.