It was on our second date, about the middle of January, that I began to make verbal passes at my guide. She was leading me through a small museum, and I kept insisting that she was more beautiful than any of the paintings or statues she pointed out to me. In her reddish-brown dress, with her blonde hair combed sleekly upward from her slim, impassive face, she looked like a royal Egyptian mummy, enamelled in russet and ochre — whatever period she conjured up, it was never the present. She didn’t acknowledge my flattery, except by raising her eyebrows. Was it a childhood habit of hers, I wondered, to express surprise and disapproval in this way? Had she tried for years to get rid of the habit, and finally given up in despair? I imagined everything I could that might have made her more human and likeable.
When we were about to part, in front of the museum, I tried my luck.
“Do you know, I’ve never been invited for a meal in an Italian home?”
“You haven’t missed anything — the hotels have the best food in Rome.”
“Still, it’s not the same as a home-cooked meal.”
“What’s got into you today? For one thing, I’m married. For another, if I want to have you for dinner, I’ll ask you.”
That was definitive. I held out my hand. “Well, it was nice knowing you, maybe we’ll meet again if I stay in Italy.”
Paola took my hand, but didn’t let it go. Some women shouldn’t be rude, if they don’t want to end up being kind, out of uneasiness over their bad manners. “I suppose if I don’t invite you for dinner you’ll think it’s because you’re a refugee.”
“Not at all,” I protested, pressing her long, smooth fingers. “I realize it’s simply because you don’t like me personally.”
She withdrew her hand and looked around to see whether any of the passers-by were watching us. “I’ve nothing at home but canned food.”
“I love canned food.”
She narrowed her eyes this time, though it may have been on account of the sharp sun. “All right, but remember — you asked for it.”
As Paola led me into her apartment, I kissed the back of her neck. Her skin was so fair that it seemed to radiate light in the windowless alcove. She stood still for a moment, then removed her body and the smell of her perfume to a bright, modern kitchen.
“I’d be the wrong woman for you,” she said firmly, “even for a casual affair.”
Still, our situation was becoming more intimate. She heated up some canned ravioli and we sat down at the kitchen table to an uninspired meal, just like an old married couple. Which reminded me that Paola had said she was married. “Where is your husband?” I asked anxiously. I’d quite forgotten about him.
“We haven’t been living together for the past six years,” she admitted with an apologetic half-smile. “We’re legally separated — that’s what we have in Italy instead of divorces.”
“Why did you leave him?”
“He left me.”
The answer didn’t invite further questions, and it was just as well, for had Paola told me more I would probably have lost my nerve and retreated to the Albergo Ballestrazzi. We began to talk politics and she explained to me the differences between the various factions of the ruling Christian Democratic Party, in a relaxed manner, as if she’d taken for granted that I understood that all I was going to get was canned food. Inspired both by piqued pride and by the smell of her perfume (I’d somehow been unaware of it on other occasions, though now it overpowered even the ravioli), I could hardly wait for the end of the meal, and I declined her offer to make coffee, as it would have involved an intolerable waste of time. I asked her to show me the apartment, but it impressed me only as a blue and green background to her figure, until we came to a huge round bed. Paola let me kiss and hold her, without responding; but when I began to unbutton her dress, she tried to push me away with her elbows and knees. The tight dress frustrated her efforts as much as I did, and at last I succeeded in releasing her breasts, which swelled up as they emerged from the brassiere. Neither of us had spoken, but when my head bent over her white bosom she remarked, with a tinge of malice in her voice, “I’m frigid, you know.”
What was I to do, standing against her, with her bare breasts cupped in my hands? “I’ve just come from a revolution,” I declared manfully, but without showing my face, “you can’t scare me.”
At that Paola raised my head and gave me a strong, passionate kiss. While we were undressing each other, I began to suspect that this mysterious Italian woman had been lying to test me. Hadn’t Nusi warned me that she wouldn’t sleep with me for at least a month, not an hour before we first made love?
Unfortunately, there are few happy parallels in life. When we had got rid of our clothes, Paola gathered hers together, piled them neatly on the bureau, and hung her dress in the closet. Then she went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. I watched her with a mixture of disbelief, fear and longing. Naked, her buttocks were larger than they had seemed under the dress, but they only gave an exciting, firm center to her tall, slim body. As she turned from the washbasin, the combination of her long blond hair and the short blond tuft between her thighs brought back the painful cramps of my boyhood. But she walked toward me, in the glorious strangeness of her naked body, as casually and deliberately as if we’d been married for ten years. She stuck out the tip of her tongue — then walked right past me to take off the bedspread, which she folded three times and deposited on the chair. Terrified that she would spend the whole night puttering about like this, I grabbed her by her cool buttocks.
“They’re too big,” she commented soberly.
I squeezed them with the violence of my frustration and it must have hurt, for she bled me in turn, sinking her teeth into my tongue. Only the fact that I’d been without a woman for over two months enabled me to get through the next quarter of an hour. Paola behaved more like a considerate hostess than a lover: she raised and twisted her body so attentively that I felt like a guest for whom so much is done that he can’t help knowing that he’s expected to leave soon. I didn’t feel at home in her, and couldn’t come for a long time. At the end, I ran my hands over her body, still not quite believing that there could be such perfect form without content.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asked.
As all else had failed, I tried to soften her with words. “It was wonderful.”
“Oh, I’m glad, glad, glad.”
“I love you.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Paola protested, her gladness gone. She pulled the blanket up to her neck, preventing me from hovering over her body. “You make me feel I should tell you the same thing. And I can’t say I love you. It wouldn’t be true.”
“Let’s lie then!”
“Maybe you can lie, but I can’t.”
While thinking out some polite way of leaving, I reached down between her legs and began playing with her, almost mechanically — only to discover that she liked this better than our lovemaking.
“Aren’t we having a good time without making things up?” she asked comfortably.
Was she one of those women who could only come in a roundabout way? Never one to leave well enough alone, I hopefully pulled off the blanket and turned myself around to reach the source of her mystery. But she pushed my head away and shoved me violently in the chest, almost rolling me off the bed.
“Don’t do that. It’s unclean to do a thing like that.”
“What do you mean, unclean? Haven’t you ever done it the French way?” I asked the question out of idle curiosity rather than personal interest, while looking around for my clothes on the gray broadloom. It was getting dark.
“I’m not a pervert — I like it the normal way.”
“What’s the normal way?”
“Well, when you’re above me.”
I got up and began to dress. “Your trouble isn’t that you’re frigid, it’s just that you’re shy and unimaginative.”
“Why are you getting dressed?” she asked with some surprise.
“I think
I should be going — it’s getting late.”
Paola was silent for a while, then burst out unexpectedly. “You men are all vain monkeys. You don’t enjoy women, you don’t even enjoy your own orgasm. The only thing you really want is to make a woman go off with a big bang. It had to be men who invented the atomic bomb.”
“Maybe you’d have a bang, if you’d only try.”
“Oh, God, I’m thirty-six years old, Andrea. I’ve tried enough.”
I turned on the light to find my shoes. “What did you try? Having a man above you?”
“Did I tell you about my husband?” she asked, propping her head on her elbow, ignoring my sarcasm. “He’s a lawyer — he ran for Parliament twice on the monarchist ticket, and was defeated, of course. He thought it was all because I was frigid. I was supposed to have destroyed his self-confidence. He read a lot on psychoanalysis and decided that I must be a masochist, so he took to beating me with a wet towel, each time before we made love. I got so sick of that towel, I finally told him maybe we should find out whether I was a sadist instead.”
“What did he say?”
“He actually wanted to try it. I did hit him one evening, he insisted, but I didn’t enjoy that either, in fact I hated it. So I said there’d be no more experiments.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed to tie my shoelaces. “None of your lovers were any better?”
“Oh, it’s always on the basis of friendship. There’s an editor on the paper, he comes up sometimes. But he doesn’t want to mess around like you do. He’s fifty-one.” I hated the idea of trespassing on an elderly gentleman’s territory, and it must have showed. “What are you thinking about?” she asked, reaching out to brush my hand affectionately. A most contrary woman.
“I was wondering what’s going to happen when the Italian government gets tired of keeping us in the hotel,” I lied. But when I’d said the words I did begin to fret again about what was going to become of me. “The worst of it is, I really don’t have the faintest clue. I got a list of Italian universities from the Red Cross and sent off a bunch of applications — but even if they accept my degrees here, they probably won’t let me teach, with my Italian. And I want to be a teacher, I’ve been preparing for it too long to give it up now.” I already saw myself as a waiter in a cheap café, taking small tips.
“Oh, you’ll get something. And in the meantime, you’re in Rome, staying in a hotel that would cost you ten thousand lire a day, if you had to pay for it. Why don’t you just relax and enjoy yourself? I noticed you’re awfully tense.”
How would I be otherwise, in her company? “It’s easy for you to talk,” I complained bitterly. “You have a steady job, you’re in your own country, you don’t have to worry what’ll happen to you tomorrow.”
Paola got up and began to dress. “Nobody knows what’ll happen to him tomorrow. You like to feel sorry for yourself.” Now that we were discussing a problem that she could handle with pure reason, she regained her confident manner. And she must have felt relieved, as I did, that we both had our clothes on again: it was certainly more appropriate to the nature of our relationship. “A lot of people,” she added briskly, “would commit murder to have your problems.”
“I shouldn’t be talking to you, you only remind me that I’m absolutely alone in this world.”
“Who isn’t?”
For some reason — perhaps because she went back to the bathroom to comb her hair, with slow dreamy movements of her arm, as if we’d had a great time — I felt compelled to convince her that I had every reason to feel rotten. I’d made my whole past simply irrelevant by leaving Hungary, didn’t she understand that? Nothing I’d done in my life meant anything any more. I told her about the Russian tank which drove over me every night.
“Because you keep brooding over what you’ve been through. You spend all your time feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I wouldn’t dare in your presence.”
“You’re a student of philosophy — you should know that life is chaotic senseless and painful most of the time.”
“That’s exactly why I’m so miserable,” I protested.
“At twenty-three, aren’t you too old to get upset about such obvious things?”
I tried to prove that I knew more aboul the absurdity of existence than she did, and we began to argue about Camus and Sartre. While we talked I wandered from room to room, so as not to be too close to that mean woman. When would I have an apartment like hers, I wondered. It was a truly extraordinary place. There was none of the oppressive stinginess of most modern apartments about it, although the building was only a few years old. The ceilings were high, the rooms enormous, and they had the most exciting layout. The bedroom was round and had a big semi-circular window, at which stood a half-moon-shaped desk with a portable Olivetti on it. The only other furniture was the huge round bed, which Paola had quickly made up again with its gold quilted cover. The adjoining gray-marble and gilt bathroom was the size of a small public bath. The blue and green living room was shaped like a capital S. and this wavy line gave it an illusion of movement, in spite of the large and solid armchairs and chesterfields, which were made to fit the curves of the wall.
“I’m not surprised,” I told Paola, “that you can accept the absurdity of existence with such equanimity.”
“I’ve had to move out of this place twice because I couldn’t afford the rent. And I haven’t got a car.”
“Doesn’t your husband pay you any alimony?”
“Well, he’s supposed to according to the law, and he can certainly afford it, but I couldn’t very well go to court and force him to support me, considering the miserable time I gave him.”
I wasn’t inclined to contradict her. The time had come to say good-bye, but before I could introduce the subject of our parting, she put her arm through mine with a confident gesture. “Let’s go for a walk, Andrea.”
Did she think I planned to go on seeing her? When we were in the elevator, she drew my head to hers and whispered, “You know, I enjoy it in my own little way. You make me feel like a real woman.” This was Paola’s best argument to convert me to a stoical view of life: instead of feeling sorry for myself, I began to feel sorry for her.
But I showed up on our next date mainly because I had received a letter from the Monsignor at the University of Padua. He informed me that Italian universities in general required more credits in Christian philosophy than I seemed to have; that at the moment they had no funds available to grant me a scholarship for the time I would require to perfect my Italian and complete my doctoral thesis; and that I should perhaps apply to the American foundations. The Monsignor also advised me, since I spoke German and English, to inquire at universities in West Germany and the English-speaking countries. It didn’t sound as if Italy had any use for Signor Andrea Vajda with his cum laude degrees from the University of Budapest.
As I was reading and re-reading the letter, I had a sudden desire to hear Paola telling me that it was nothing to complain about, and that there were people starving to death in Sicily. Besides, I began to wonder about the fact that, in all her thirty-six years, no man had been able to get through to her. What if I could make all the difference? Back home in Budapest, I wouldn’t have conceived such an ambition. By the time I recovered from my hopeless love for Ilona, I had learned that there were more important obstacles to overcome in this world than a difficult woman. As I began to take my studies seriously, I invested my ego in becoming a good teacher and, possibly, the author of a few worthwhile philosophical essays; and my masculine craving for excitement, conflict and danger was satisfied by the Security Police. Much as I loved women, all I wanted from them was straight affection, and I came to avoid those whose behaviour suggested complications. But in Rome, where I was fed, housed and bored, reduced to the uncertain and purposeless life of the undisposed refugee, Paola offered the happiness of constant challenge.
We began to spend most evenings together — and sometimes the night, in Paola’s apartmen
t. Being with her was like living on a high plateau. The air was clear but thinner, one had to slow down one’s responses, breathe lightly, be cool and careful and avoid excitement. For obvious reasons, conversation was a very important element in our affair.
Once when we were in bed and I wanted to try a way which she found strange, Paola leaped out of bed and returned with a pile of books by and about Sartre. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “you must be depressed, with nothing to do here. You must work on something. You know, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t write your thesis, just because you don’t know yet where you’re going to submit it. And I can help you to get the journals and papers you need.” It was impossible not to see that Paola had brought me the books to evade a struggle on the bed, but this didn’t make her suggestion any less appealing. We spent the rest of the evening poring over the books, and the next day I began to make notes on Sartre’s theory of self-deception as it applies to the body of his own philosophy , for which the University of Toronto granted me a Ph.D. three years later. It appeared in the second issue of The Canadian Philosophical Review (Volume I, Number 2, pages 73-158) gaining me whatever standing I have in my profession. At any rate, thanks to Paola’s way of evading our most personal problem, I became involved in something I enjoyed doing and thought useful — which did a great deal to steady my nerves. I stopped having nightmares, and began to fit into the world again.
However, the novelty of my spiritual well-being wore off after a while. No longer starved for either sex or companionship, I missed increasingly what Paola couldn’t give, and began to lose hope of ever changing her. At the beginning we used to leave the lights on in her bedroom, but we gradually got into the habit of turning off all the switches before touching each other. I was especially incensed by her violent throes and sighs. As she grew fond of me, she wanted to show that I made her enjoy herself in her own little way, but her pretenses only served as incessant reminders that she was having an indifferent time, and going to the trouble of acting for it. I was bitterly conscious of being a joy-parasite, a sexual freeloader. All of which made me obsessed with her stubborn vagina, that pine-smelling fountainhead of our predicament. I often tried to kiss it, but she always pushed me away. If I argued, she became desolate.
In Praise of Older Women Page 14