On Don Juan’s Secret
Genius never desires what does not exist.
— Soren Kierkegaard
Is there life before death?
— Anon. Hungarian
I don’t want to create the impression that my one-sided romance was an altogether useless exercise in self-deception. This was the time of capricious terrorism in Hungary, when not only high government and Party officials but also writers, scholars, students, theatre directors, even ballet dancers and film-extras were in great demand by the Security Police. As a university student who had published a few poems, I knew a great many people who were taken during the night. Indeed, the temptations to rave with fright were formidable, and I doubt that I could have remained relatively calm through all this if it hadn’t been for my obsession with Ilona.
As you may recall, I lived in the same apartment house as my first lover, Maya. After a year or so of awkward hello’s whenever we chanced to meet in the carved-wood and glass elevator, I began to pay occasional visits to the Horvaths again. Béla had evidently broken off with his young mistress and now spent his evenings at home with his wife. They lived together like two old friends bound by their common exhaustion with extra-marital affairs. Maya was as beautiful as ever, but somehow less vibrant, and she no longer had her warm, ironic smile. On the other hand, Béla, a sturdy little man with broad gestures, seemed full of energy. He dropped his measured politeness toward me and, ignoring the particular background of our relationship, we ended up rather liking each other. A born actor, though not by profession, he enjoyed telling stories and impersonating people. He had been with the social democrat underground during the war, and we talked mostly about politics and the recent wave of arrests.
One evening as we sat in their book-lined living room, which held such different memories for me, Béla described his meeting with a former underground contact, Deputy-Minister György Maros, shortly before the latter’s disappearance. Maros appealed to Béla to stay with him in his office, for old time’s sake, while he phoned the head of the Security Police to protest about the fact that he was being followed. The Chief of Security insisted that his dear friend Maros, one of his most trusted comrades, must be hallucinating, but that if he was in truth being followed it must be the result of some stupid mistake. He said that he would check on the matter right away and call back. Maros hardly had time to relay this other end of the conversation to Béla when the phone rang. It was a brief conversation this time, and the unlucky man didn’t even bother to replace the receiver.
“What did he say?” asked Béla.
“He just said, ‘You were right — you are being tailed.’”
As Béla described the scene, he demonstrated how Maros got up from behind his desk, how he strode up and down the room, shaking his fists. “Why, Béla? Why?” he demanded to know. This man had helped to liquidate his party in 1948 when the socialist parties disappeared all over Eastern Europe, and I couldn’t help laughing at the poetic justice of his downfall, and at Béla’s perfect rendering of his bitter bewilderment.
“Why?!” Béla repeated the futile question, and ended up laughing along with me.
Maya remained serious. “I can’t see what you two think is so amusing,” she said darkly. But we found the Deputy Minister’s demand for an explanation more and more hilarious. “Why?! Why?!” Béla kept repeating as he paced the floor and raised his arms to heaven, mocking the wronged man with obvious relish. “Why?!”
This was the last time I saw Béla. Several days later he himself was arrested. Maya got a job teaching in a high school. Whenever I went to see her, she was fretting about the weather, or the lack of good movies, or the difficulty of getting eggs and meat. Once when I asked her what I could do to help, I saw her eyes light up once again.
“Come and kiss me,” she said.
She was wearing her old yellow housecoat and, while I went toward her, she unfastened the top buttons, letting me know that she remembered how I used to start making love with her by kissing her sweet breasts. She kissed me violently as if she was searching for our past with her tongue. However, she soon drew back.
“I’m frigid when I’m miserable,” she concluded with quiet despair.
A few weeks after her husband’s arrest, Maya left the apartment house and moved in with one of her female colleagues at the school.
As for myself, I was a regular at student gatherings where we used to argue about the future of Hungary after the demise of communism. I heard that the Security Police had marked me as an unreliable element and were asking questions about me from our janitor and from fellow students at the university. After a brief spell of horror, when I used to turn to stone at every unexpected noise, I convinced myself that I couldn’t be worse off if they beat me to pieces than I was just thinking about it. I continued to see Ilona whenever I could, and feared nothing so much as her bad moods.
Professor Hargitay was less distracted by his wife’s charms. He began to get jumpy and no longer looked people in the eye. “You’re fond of Ilona, aren’t you?” he asked me once when she was out in the kitchen. “I don’t mean to embarrass you,” he added hastily, “I just want to know. I wouldn’t blame you for being attracted to her — after all, she’s attractive. But I beg you, András, I beg you to tell me, please, if you come here because you’re set up to spy on me.”
“Really, Laci,” protested Ilona, who came back to us in time to hear his final plea, “don’t be idiotic.”
Laci ignored her. “I beg you, András,” he entreated me in all seriousness, even sweating slightly, “tell me what they want to know about me.
Ilona tried to pass it off as a joke. “Leave my boy friend alone!”
“They want me to find out,” I told him, “why you never had a girl friend who’s a Party member.”
“That’s ridiculous! They keep files on things like that ? It’s sick.”
“Well, you asked me what they want to know.”
“But their file isn’t complete!” he protested. “As a matter of fact, I did have a girl friend who was a Party member. We went out together for nearly a year!”
“Exactly. They want me to find out why you left her.”
He believed me, and it took Ilona some time to bring him back to anything like his old placid self again. “I’m sorry,” he said at last, apologizing by way of a thoughtful observation. “The worst thing about this whole business is what never happens, but could happen. That’s what unnerves me.”
Ilona’s apology for his mistrust gave me much greater satisfaction. She wanted to place a kiss on my forehead, but I was quick and she found herself kissing me on the mouth. There’s a peculiar ecstasy in the brief touch of dry, unprepared lips.
“You’re a clever agent-provocateur, all right,” Ilona commented, relapsing into her usual derisive manner.
It’s said that there’s a way to every woman and, as I thought I had good looks and charm, I assumed that my lack of success with Ilona was due to some failure of my character or understanding. I still had the habit of consulting books on my problems, and I tried to fathom the mystery of irresistibility by studying the literature on Don Juan. It didn’t help. Moliére’s Don Juan had pride and daring, but was a rather boorish trouble-maker; and Shaw’s version suggested that to be successful with women one must dislike them and flee from them. The only artist who really understood Don Juan, I felt, was Mozart. In the libretto, Mozart’s Don wasn’t so different from Moliére’s, but the music spoke of a great man. The trouble was, I couldn’t translate music into psychological insights — beyond Don Giovanni’s love of life and the wide range of his sensibilities. The psychoanalytic essays on Don Juan were no use at all. They presented him as a repressed homosexual, or an egomaniac with an inferiority complex, or a psychopath who had no feeling for others — in short, as an emotional cripple who would find it difficult to seduce a girl on a desert island. I didn’t see how I could get closer to Ilona by emulating his example.
I owe my reco
very from hopeless love, and my discovery of the secret, to a woman who took me for a Don Juan.
Zsuzsa was an unattractive housewife of forty. I used to see her at parties, where she would unnerve other guests by greeting them with cries of relief. “I’m so glad to see you! I heard rumours that you’d been arrested!” She also reminded us of the possibility of the Chinese taking over Hungary, and warned us of our imminent obliteration by American nuclear bombs. “I ask you,” she said loudly once as the party was warming up and her husband was patting the bottom of another woman, “I ask you — what has the fight against communism got to do with the incineration of this country? Why are the Americans going to bomb us ? Haven’t we suffered enough from the Russians?” Her husband was an outstanding construction engineer, a handsome tall fellow with an easy manner and varied interests — a great conversationalist and a favourite with both men and women. At his side, his plain and disregarded wife could hardly have been anything else but anxious. My friends said that Zsuzsa was a neurotic, but I thought that her constant fretting about general calamities was in fact an artful display of self-control. If she couldn’t suppress her very natural discomfiture, at least she channelled her personal desperation into discussable conversational topics. However, she was bound to come to the point where she herself didn’t know what she was really upset about.
At one after-dinner party which Zsuzsa attended without her husband, she tried to alert people to the upsurge of hooliganism in Budapest. The usually cheerful Party press, which confined unsettling reports to the foreign-news section, had recently reported the story of a bus driver who was attacked on his way home from work late at night and robbed of all his belongings, even his underpants. As this was the only domestic atrocity officially acknowledged by the newspapers, and as it took place on one of the first frosty nights of October, the stripped bus driver’s plight caught the public imagination. Within days, if all the rumours were to be believed, there were few fully dressed men or unraped women left in the capital. Yet Zsuzsa tried in vain to create more than a passing concern about the hoodlums who were lurking on the dark streets. She finally decided to leave the party before anyone else was going, about eleven o’clock, and she wanted someone to see her home.
She drifted among the guests, addressing everyone but no one in particular. “I should be leaving — but I just don’t dare to go out by myself.” She was a small, colourless woman, who must have liked sweets: her body was flabby and loose and she had no waistline. By contrast, she had a thin, anxious face which reminded me of nothing so much as a poor mouse. Someone advised her to call a taxi, but she ignored the suggestion. “Is anybody going my way?” she kept asking, all the while casting thoughtful glances in my direction.
I was the only unattached man present, sitting by myself in a corner, and waiting hopefully for Ilona to show up.
“You look as though you’re feeling sorry for yourself,” Zsuzsa said, drifting toward my chair.
“I am,” I replied gravely.
She sat down on the edge of a neighbouring sofa. “That’s wonderful,” she added, with a timid yet condescending smile. “It’s wonderful that you can still feel sorry for yourself. It means that you’re still at the stage where you think you deserve to be happy.”
“Everybody deserves to be happy,” I stated with tight-lipped finality, trying to put her down.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She drew out her words. “I don’t think I do.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I’m not much to look at.”
“Nonsense. You’re very pretty.”
“It’s kind of you to say so, András. But if I were really pretty,” she added with a tempting smile, “I don’t think I’d have so much trouble finding someone to see me home.”
I couldn’t make up my mind whether Zsuzsa was afraid of hooligans or was trying to flirt with me. I decided that I would have a chance with her. Yet the thought of being unfaithful to Ilona — and with such an unattractive woman — was just too humiliating to contemplate for long.
As I remained silent, Zsuzsa added glumly, “My husband’s working at home. I didn’t want to disturb him, but I guess I’d better phone him and ask him to pick me up.”
There was nothing to do but oblige and get rid of her.
I regretted my gallantry as soon as we stepped out into the freezing November wind. “I wouldn’t let you walk me home in this weather,” Zsuzsa said, “but I’m terrified with all these stories going around. I don’t want to be assaulted by some criminal.” We were walking through the best-lighted streets in the whole city and, apart from a solitary policeman, we didn’t see a single soul. “It’s not quite four blocks,” she remarked defensively, as I turned up the collar of my overcoat and tried to let as little cold air into my mouth as possible. Yet my sullenness seemed only to stimulate her. She became coy.
“I guess a boy like you must have lots of girl friends.”
“It depends,” I answered, with the arrogant casualness of a man who hasn’t touched a woman for nearly two years. I disliked her for trying to flatter me when I was so unresponsive.
She asked me questions about myself, which I answered curtly but in a slightly kidding tone. It struck me that I was treating her in exactly the same way Ilona treated me. Though I was trying to take the edge off my manner with teasing, just as Ilona did, my dislike of Zsuzsa was genuine. Even when I had taken Ilona’s rudeness to heart, I had always found consolation in the absolute certainty that she couldn’t quite mean what she said. Now it suddenly hit me that indeed she could, that she must feel toward me as I felt toward Zsuzsa, walking beside her in the icy wind and finding her a nuisance. I began to listen to her with a despairing sense of kinship.
Zsuzsa evidently perceived my increased interest in what she was saying: her voice lost its dull monotone and aquired a melody of cautious delight. She was talking about her children: she had a four-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son, and the boy’s schoolwork was quite a problem. “And I can’t help him as much as his father could, especially with arithmetic,” Zsuzsa said, stopping by a street lamp, suddenly out of breath. “He has so little time for his children — he’s always travelling. He’s away this week again, fixing some caved-in dam.” At first I thought I hadn’t heard her properly (the wind was muffling her voice) but then she added casually: “Yes, I spend quite a few evenings by myself.”
Standing under the street lamp, and against the background of the deserted avenue and the broad and stately apartment buildings, Zsuzsa looked slimmer in her overcoat than she had without it at the party. I put my arm around her shoulder.
“Just as I thought,” she said, with a trace of spite. “I told myself, as soon as he finds out my husband isn’t home, he’s going to change his manners.”
I let my arm drop. “As a matter of fact, I’m in love with a woman and I can’t even get a date with her. She’s in love with her husband.”
“I don’t believe you,” Zsuzsa retorted with a nervous laugh. It obviously bothered her that I had withdrawn my arm. “You’re making that up,” she went on resentfully. “I never heard of a wife who was unfaithful to her husband if they were in love with each other. You’re too much of a Don Juan to waste your time on a woman like that. I know your type — you only go after women you know you can get.”
“Maybe I’m not as calculating as all that.”
“You don’t even see a woman until you think you have a chance.”
“I told you at the party that you were very pretty, didn’t I?”
We went on haggling this way over the amount of consideration we would charge for swallowing our pride. I gave in first.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked wistfully, stepping closer to Zsuzsa. She put my head between her gloved hands and stood on tiptoe to kiss me. Then she withdrew her hands, and putting them behind her back, took off her gloves while still pressing herself against me. I could feel her heart beating even through our overcoats. In the light of the street lamp, she sudd
enly looked pretty: her feverishness rounded out her thin face. After getting rid of the gloves she unbuttoned my coat and trousers and reached for my penis. As she touched me, she began to shiver. I felt humbled, attracting her so much.
“It’s ridiculous what men can do to me!” she sighed, as if in pain, disapproving of her own behaviour.
Some time later she stepped back, frowning. “You shouldn’t be kissing me here. Anybody who comes by is likely to know me.” It turned out that we were standing next to the house she lived in, right under the street lamp, and I couldn’t help admiring her obliviousness. Yet even after this forthright declaration of her intentions, she gave me a conventionally casual invitation: “It’s so cold — why don’t you come in the house and have a drink?”
As we entered their apartment, she led me to the kitchen, where she began to take various bottles out of a cupboard. “I don’t drink,” I confessed. “When I was a kid I got very drunk once and ever since I can’t touch the stuff.”
“You’re making that up too. You’re not the type to be a teetotaller.”
In their shiny white kitchen, I felt confused, like a patient in a hospital who needs the doctor to tell him what to do. I wished I could just leave. Wasn’t I in love with Ilona? Hadn’t I found Zsuzsa unattractive only half an hour ago? She may have known my type but I didn’t, so I decided to let her know best. I took the glass of brandy she offered me, gulped it down and began coughing violently.
“Be quiet!” Zsuzsa hissed, turning off the light. “You’ll wake up the children!”
As I stopped coughing, she put her head on my shoulder. “I’m not as uninhibited as you are. I need a drink.” She ran her fingertips over my face as if she wanted to see me with her hands. “It’s lucky we met each other tonight. Gyuri’s been away for two weeks — I so much looked forward to something happening! But nothing did. And he’s coming back tomorrow.”
She was telling me in so many words (and her caresses only made it worse) that all she wanted was some man before her husband came home. I guess she knew I wouldn’t mind.
In Praise of Older Women Page 8