by Antal Szerb
Suddenly there was another girl standing beside her, practically holding out in her right hand a balm, straight from Gilead, for my fevered brow. Yes, from Gilead without question. For Gilead, I believe, is not a place, just a geographical joke in the Bible, and the new girl had also appeared from nowhere—I hadn’t seen her face all evening—she had, as it were, materialised from among the cognacs. I said nothing, but kissed her hand. It was all I could do; she was so wonderful.
She was one of those women the sight of whom fills a man with a choking, pleasurable melancholy. Not the perennially insistent sadness of ‘so many women, and all spoken for’, but the sort of sadness you know when you feel that neither the world—that mediocre, pretentious planet, the killing field of Nature and all Creation—nor humanity itself are worthy of such a face, of such a subtle body, or rather of the Platonic Ideal that emanates from that body. All this might seem a bit exalted, might make me sound rather juvenile, and suggest that my illusions originate and have their life and being on my writing desk, neatly parcelled up with string, among the part-payment receipts. But I threw my illusions away some time ago, in a thoroughgoing clear-out. Nowadays I think rather different thoughts about women, and no longer believe in the Hegelian aesthetic that insists that the ideal shines through the material, like the bosom bursting from a torn evening dress. But in those days I did think such thoughts, especially in summer, in the prime of my youth, in the garden in St Cloud, and I am not ashamed of it.
But if pressed for more precise details of the way the woman in question looked, my memory would desert me. I am not generally an observant sort of person, and not really of this world. I was the person, after all, who took years to realise that our editor, poor Ern Osvát, had a beard.
But this much I can reveal, that she was still very young, perhaps sixteen. She was at the age when you might imagine that in time she might even grow into a boy—which would have been a real waste. She was at the age when a girl is raw and doesn’t know yet how to embody her sweetness to come, and so is modest, quiet and full of promise… like those optical instruments in the physics laboratories at school about which we were never told anything. Besides, she was Anglo-Saxon, endowed by nature with eternal and boundless youth.
When she sat down at my table and simply looked at me, seriously and uncritically, a number of thoughts went through my mind: about what I should say to her and what I should do. I might talk about the kiss as a sonnet form, or about my royal demesnes, now so comprehensively lost; I could show off my extraordinary skill in the palm-slapping game called Red Roast; I might seize her by the arm and dash outside with her to see the starry sky—and other such things. But it would all have been incredibly self-centred and, by the same token, pointless. It proved rather more to the purpose to announce myself as a well-known palmist, of Hindu origin, and get straight to the point. That way I could at least hold her hand in mine. The claim was not entirely bogus, because at that moment I really felt that with my intuitive genius I could penetrate the secret enclaves of nature and see into the inner life of things.
Besides, like everyone who dabbles in historical philosophy, I have a very broad palm. First, as a sly captatio benevolentiae, I intoned a few formulae which have never failed to work:
“You are highly self-centred, but when the need arises a wonderful capacity for sacrifice bursts from your soul. You are a fundamentally good person, but capable of extreme anger against those who have hurt your feelings, and you cannot abide people who behave dishonestly towards you. A rather cold and reserved nature, but sincere and loyal to those you love”… and so on.
This succeeded in arousing her curiosity, in so far as one might use the word of an English girl. She looked at me nervously, waiting for me to announce in the next second something she did not know, something no one could know, the either deeply alarming or entirely wonderful meaning and purpose of her life.
I was then able to describe her days, and the story of those days as they flowed ever on in their miraculously vivid drabness. I talked about postcards, railway stations, hotels, dresses, boys, resentments, all charged with some yet-to-be-explained meaning that she would clearly not wish to spell out directly. About how good it was to lie in bed in the morning and how her little brother was a really nasty piece of work, and all the thousands of little things she had to do, all so trivial and yet so profound—the enclosed, saturated world of the flapper, in her world without men, where the time is always taken up with things but unmarked by any variety: the lake of liquid crystal, in the novels of Jókai, waiting for the pebble to fall into it so that the rows of basalt columns beneath the surface aligned with such astronomical precision could at last be seen: her young girlhood, her purity, secrets, secrets…
But I mentioned none of these wonderful things, because they would have frightened her, like something in Latin—she would have thought I was hinting at some bizarre medical abnormality. So I made an effort to talk about more specific, concrete things, and her replies were equally concrete. She spoke about someone called Fred, a friend since childhood. They called on one another every day, went horse-riding and canoeing together, and understood one another completely—only there was one unresolved source of contention between them: she had a big grey dog called Caius who scientifically speaking did not belong to any of the well-known breeds, but was very good-looking nonetheless. But Fred loved cats. He couldn’t stand dogs and always sent Caius into the water after things like his pocket knives, his pocket Shakespeare and live frogs, which instantly sank and made Caius very sad.
We were friends within minutes, and the pretext of palm-reading melted away. Without it I could never have held her hand in mine, but now we did so out of genuine mutual liking. The conversation that ensued took us, on a summer’s day, in a motorboat aflutter with little flags, to visit some islands of fresh coral. Half an hour later, we were onto the central problem of her life: how to reconcile her complicated mind and problematic national identity with the instinctive order of being, and how to choose between Fred and the dog—in other words: was it possible for an English girl to have two friends? But the Fates, ever adept at dividing and separating, did not want it that way. So she had to split either her manner of life or her inner consciousness into two compartments, as people did nowadays, or have it out with Fred face to face.
A general dancing erupted around us. Someone asked her to join them, and I made no objection. Somehow I had lost my sense of the night passing. I was in a world where there was no time, and I thought she’d come back. But that never happened.
Because suddenly Marcelle sat down beside me. Marcelle herself, my beloved, sitting there like the personification of Chaos, that horror of classical scholarship. And not just beside me but somehow all around me, sitting and drinking, steadily drinking, laughing loudly and waving her hands about. There were sundry random items of clothing on her person, but essentially she was naked. Suddenly every carefully repressed anarchic desire rose up in me, and, in the utterly childish images of my fantasy, I pulsed with the urge, as I always do when I see women drunk, to seize them by the arm and drill a hole through them with my head, then look out the other side and put out my tongue, and say to M. Robinet: “do this after me”—or some such impulse. I was filled with a quite uncharacteristic daring.
“I slapped the old Duchess’s pimp across the face,” she announced lightly. “Just imagine, he said he’d had an affair with me when I was still a ten-franc woman. I told him that it wasn’t true. I remember everyone I’ve had a relationship with, and there haven’t been that many.”
“And is that why you slapped him?”
“It just isn’t true that I was a ten-franc woman. But then he also said I’m not Swedish. That’s when I smacked him.”
“Come into the garden, Marcelle. The air would do you good.”
She looked at me in wonderment, as if to say: “How long have you known how these things are done?”
Then she pursed her lips and added: “All righ
t, I don’t mind.”
And she was already there.
It would be a mistake to describe a woman who would flirt with me on such a basis as ‘easy’. What happened was that Love interposed its effect. It’s just as it is with light and sound and every other form of wave motion: when different impulses meet in the heart, the energy level of one side is raised while the other is reduced. Once, when I was in love with two different women, the two loves unfortunately met in my soul in phases that completely cancelled each other out, and I was forced to transfer my affections to a third woman. The opposite happened in St Cloud: the wholesome, nourishing flames of passion kindled in me by that wonderful young girl happened to vibrate in a phase that simply amplified those aroused by Marcelle, and my earlier success in taking the young girl’s hand now emboldened me to attempt rather more decisive action with her. It’s like that sometimes, with these interference patterns.
I led her outside, to a place where thick bushes clustered around a little courtyard. The area housed M. Robinet’s pride and joy, the Champion of All France, an unsurpassably handsome chow chow with a lion’s mane. But now its only manifestation was a loud barking: the night blotted out everything else, and even the barking I didn’t hear for very long. I was attending to my inner voices and trying to calculate, from the movements of Marcelle’s body, how far I might take this.
We made it successfully to the first kiss. It was wet and brandy-flavoured and tasted wonderful, like an alcoholic drink infused with sugar chocolate, and I came once again to the conclusion that our forebears who first discovered how sweet a kiss can be were great poets indeed.
Only one little thing was missing: that the universe had not been blown apart. Look, I had actually kissed Marcelle, the Marcelle I had never believed I ever would be able to—and here I was, not in the least surprised. But the kiss was a fact that could not be undone, and the French champion, the chow chow, carried on happily barking and made no move to erupt out of the desert of the night with his ferocious lion mane standing on end, as he might so easily have, in which case the lion inside my soul would have shrunk to the size of a cur.
After the second kiss, in the eye of the storm, I paused for a moment, following my old custom, and delivered a short speech to myself along the following lines:
“Tamás, ‘these few precepts in thy memory / See thou character’: that these feelings of touch and smell and taste, and to some extent seeing, that now assail your nervous system, do not amount to Woman in general, but to Marcelle, Marcelle herself, your beloved and the beloved of your wonderful friend Pilaszanovits. And never forget that all these feelings put together stand for France; that they are what bring this drunken St Cloud night into life and being; and that you are now taking revenge on Marcelle’s for those long months of cold ‘friendship’, and committing a base act as regards Pilaszanovits. You are a grown man, and though you now partake in the exquisite bliss you have dreamt about so much, you will also feel ashamed when towards evening you wake from your mid-afternoon dream with your whole being filled with a dull drumming.”
But it was no use. I could feel none of the lofty sentiments I rattled off to distract my feelings. Our feelings are probably feminine creatures and totally unpredictable. Sometimes my inner life is driven to distraction by the melancholy tones in which the train conductor intones those marvellous words: “Nogent—Le Perseus—Bry-sur-Marne”. And sometimes the kisses of people like Marcelle, with her exquisite lips, knock on the door in vain. “I’m dreaming,” I tell myself. I register the sensation without enthusiasm, and turn away.
“Do you love me?” I asked doubtfully, and stupidly.
She burst out laughing—with the same unfathomable drunken laughter that had so charmed me earlier. It did not charm me now. Back on the veranda, that earlier laugh had somehow soared into the summer sky, an endearing cry for help addressed to some far-off Dionysus. But now she was laughing at me, and into me, the way any woman might laugh at any man held in an embrace of perhaps half an hour. It was a common, rather vulgar, laugh, an utterly godless laugh, one that could have been heard a thousand times at that moment in any of the parks of Paris and the banlieue—and how was I any different from the thousand other poor wretches who at that precise moment were preparing for the stereotypical games of love?
I thought perhaps the ecstasy would come if I acted as if it were already there. I put a great deal of muscular energy into my movements of embracing and pulling, twisting my boring face about in sexual expressions, and made her sit back on the bench. Oh, what would I have given at this moment for her to slap me on the face! It would have made everything right again: she would have become the old Marcelle in an instant, the moral order would have been re-established, like the pattern of stars in the sky above. But the slap never came—it had gone on a pilgrimage to some purer land—and the malicious little amours from the broken horn of plenty sprinkled every blessing on me: kisses, choice embraces, every pleasure of touch and taste, pleasures which would never be pleasures if our fantasy did not run with blood of ichor.
And my body played out its instinctive games towards their end, while my soul turned away in shame and muttered:
“This is not me. I have no connection with this angry person sitting here on the bench.”
Now that it was absolutely unstoppable, I did what was required and fulfilled my duty as a man, all the while thinking how good it would be the following afternoon in the Bibliothèque nationale, where the formaldehyde-permeated air hints at the eternal and sublime purity of scholarship, and where I would sit enthroned among the sweet-smelling productions of the sixteenth century, immersed in textual problems arising from Montaine’s critical essays, high above every kind of base filth.
As I gazed numbly at her face, asking myself how it could for so long have seemed beautiful to me, I couldn’t suppress another question—one I would have done anything rather than ask a Frenchwoman:
“Why did you let me, if you don’t love me?”
“Pour te faire plaisir,” she said simply and decisively. I had had three and a half months to learn this much about French women—that they could pronounce such a sentence as if it were completely self-explanatory, and not give it a second thought.
Dull of soul, I accompanied Marcelle back to the veranda. It was now perfectly clear to me that, with a bit more courage and the right occasion, I could have got to this point with her long before, and it wouldn’t have taken a Casanova-like daring or her wonderful Day of Judgement clearance sale. The impressive Latin clarity of mind with which she had given herself to me—the way she might have offered me a peanut—had killed every feeling of ecstasy and pleasure. My heart was wan and lustreless as the dawn clouds tearing across the sky, and I was left with only one burning desire—to forget the whole thing, to write the whole business off. Because by now it had become just a business, and Marcelle, the wonderful Marcelle, my beloved, was now just one more Parisienne among all the others whom I did not love.
I do not love coquettes. I can’t help it—I just don’t like them. According to Flaubert this is one of the chief characteristics of the bourgeoisie. But I don’t believe him. I don’t feel free to speak ill of one of the dead lions of literature before he is rehabilitated… but my thoughts run the opposite way. The people who love coquettes are precisely the managers of smaller banks and the fathers of families, because for them the coquette stands for some secret, disturbing, alternative world in whose darkness the atavistic lust of the male for the Mysterious Woman can find a home. But in my view the coquette is no more mysterious than an actress or an eminent ecclesiastical lawyer: all three life forms are akin to my own. Whenever, in those long evenings spent in coffee houses, I have found myself talking with my friends’ girlfriends about the more worrying financial problems in their lives (it’s rather like talking to a civil servant about the differences between mystically graduated levels of staff remuneration), or again when, simply ignoring the ladies’ presence, I have taken up the ongoin
g debate with my friends about whether or not Jóska Erdélyi is a great poet, I have often thought that if in the course of some naturally occurring process people were divided into two sorts, the coquettes and the intellectuals would both end up on the same side, the side of those who have no faith in God. I love coquettes as my fellow creatures, and sometimes as personal friends, like shadowy younger sisters—but that I don’t like them as women, as hidden secrets, or indeed as enemies, is not a question.
Meanwhile day had broken, with deep colours invading the sky, if rather pallid on people’s faces as they set off shivering towards their beds. By this stage most of us were completely sober, and our mutual farewells contained some embarrassing memories. I shook hands with M. Robinet and whispered in his ear: “You’re a real pimp, old fellow”—which pleased him immensely. I said a few simple words to the elderly Russian Duchess about humility and suffering, and sent my greetings via the English girls to their uncles the majors. I assured the little Scottish girl that ‘my heart was in the Highlands, my heart was (indeed) not there’.
So far, so easy. It was only when I found myself facing the young girl, now standing serenely beside the Highland Scot, that the pain wrenched my guts. The lies I had told, my drunkenness, Marcelle, my bad conscience, everything fell away. I became unusually human as I asked her, in the rising dawn wind:
“Shall I see you again?”