I leaned forward once more. My gaze sought out the eyes in the painting and met them, lost in anticipation—a summons that refused to die out. “Your painted face clouds over the moment I look at you, yet your eyes are begging for life.” These were words I whispered to the painting, but what did they mean? There was a subtle exchange between us. “Your gaze is insisting on the life it lacks.” I concluded: Yes, it’s as if she were begging me, and I closed my eyes, utterly in love.
Deprived of a model for several centuries, the figure in the painting was crying out for a live woman. The relationship between face and portrait had in this case been reversed. Time itself, like some inept god, had been annulled. “Caterina!” she was saying, “Let your face come forth; let it agree to correspond to mine feature by feature!” A crazy request, which I was at a loss to answer, but which I sensed as I stood before her. I addressed the portrait in person. A voice rang out in the silence of the gallery, filled with joy and anguish. It was not my own.
Later, I turned around. The visitors were passing by Caterina Cornaro. Nobody was looking in my direction. They didn’t know that a painting was in the process of awakening, engaged in a freakish argument with time. The ancient gaze was calling out to me. But it was not entirely aimed at me. Instead, it stared right through me and sought out a woman—the model who was yet to come and who would at last appease the portrait by finally offering up its lost resemblance to it.
Feeling like a rejected lover, my eyes left her face to wander over the patrician interior of the museum, inspecting its furnishings, its wall hangings, its dimmed bedrooms—the prison space that kept the deceased Caterina from stepping out of her frame and rejoining me in the here and now.
Then I turned away from her portrait. On the wall facing it were windows opening onto a lighted space. I made my way out onto the cold street, just barely tinged by the November air, and headed for Kálvin Tér.
Unable to focus my attention, I walked around for a long time. The painted face wouldn’t leave me alone. I tried to act decisively, but went on one fool’s errand after another. At one point, I bought some Serbian and Bulgarian periodicals, although I didn’t know a word of either language. In another place, I bought a pocket mirror I would never use. Several times I took the same bus in both directions—the number nine, from Kálvin Tér to Déak Tér, from Déak Tér to Kálvin Tér. I was humiliated by the painting; I needed to find a life that was less haunted, a life made up of ordinary things. Finally I got back to my hotel and went to bed without dinner, exhausted by my errancy and the endless stream of cars.
The next morning, I was glad to meet up with the painter Bálint in Szentendre. We walked slowly through the alleyways; he showed me the designs on the windows, the wrought-iron decorations, the statuettes, pointing out the various architectural details of the houses. The old man often halted in the middle of his sentences to catch his breath. We drank some coffee as we spoke of painting; then he left, making me promise to come see him before I left Budapest. I was planning on buying two of his drawings. They are in my study as I write this: a tumbril for the dead, the seventh arcanum joined to the thirteenth, both the color of dawn—black, blue, white.
One hour later, I settled into a börözo (a cellar tavern) and ordered some excellent kéknyelü from Badacsony, some bread, and some fruit. I had brought along a book of short stories by Kostolány and picked out a quiet spot in a corner.
I found the reading so riveting that I lost track of time, and when I looked up it was getting dark. The börözo was filled with customers who had just finished their workday. Glancing behind me, I saw a group of young people and two lovers who were kissing passionately. A drowsy old man was trying in vain to raise his head, and next to him, on the other side of a pillar, a young woman was writing letters. She had seen me arrive, had smiled at me, and had forgotten me the whole time I was reading (though I was watching her, distractedly, while appearing absorbed in my book). When I finally closed the book, I studied her features, her fine, long hands, and, as I looked at her pointedly, trying to remember where I had previously met her, she got up, arranged her letters in a blue canvas bag, approached my table, and introduced herself in German: “Ich bin die Katalin Koszorú. Hallo, François.”
I invited the young woman to sit down, looking for a way to let her know—without appearing ridiculous—that I had already made her acquaintance. She picked up my book and leafed through it, putting on a serious air, as if to make fun of me.
“François, I saw you at the National Museum yesterday morning. You were standing in front of Gentile Bellini’s Catarina Cornaro, and I was behind you, against the window that you noticed just as you were leaving. Take a good look at me, I’m asking you.”
I complied with her request somewhat reticently, for I knew I would have to admit that I was here faced with a striking resemblance to the woman in the portrait. I was thinking about leaving as soon as possible, I was looking for any pretext, but Katalin interrupted me, placed her hands on mine, and said with a smile, “Relax, I’m just going to sit here and read.”
She opened the book, more or less in the middle, and told me how I had spent the previous day, dredging up the most minute details I had remembered. Alarmed, I heard her pronounce, word for word, the very sentences I would have formulated had I been asked to describe my disarray in front of Bellini’s portrait. I protested halfheartedly.
“You made it up. That’s not in the book, believe me.”
“Come on, you know very well I’m not joking.” She took up Kostolány’s book again and began to read from the same tale—the tale of how I had spent yesterday.
“Katalin, the tale you’re telling me isn’t in that book.”
“On a certain level, I understand you, François. What I’m saying isn’t in any book. All the same, here, just take a look….”
With her finger, she showed me page seventy-eight, where I read “All these rows of paintings are unbearable for me: bloodless nudes, idiotic portraits, nauseating crucifixions, ponderous battles….” I paled. Katalin leaned over and kissed me.
“So, do you recognize me now?” She drew nearer, placed her mouth to my ear, and murmured: “Katalin, Caterina, Katalin, Caterina …” She laughed at my confusion, then began to speak very rapidly about her work, about her hobbies, about her life. Her family lived in Pécs; she had two brothers and two sisters; she was taking business classes, but she really liked painting and cinema. When speaking of her everyday life, she made use of the words “my daily routine”—mein Alltagsleben in German—which hardly reassured me.
A few minutes later, she took my hand and placed it on her belly. “I’m expecting a baby; you can feel him, can’t you?” I touched her belly. My hand shook. “Yes, yes, I can feel him.” I ran over in my mind the first name of the woman whose belly I was now touching: Catherine, Katharina, Katalin, Caterina. “Come to my house,” she said.
We left the cellar and walked in the dark, without uttering a word. In front of her house, Katalin looked for her keys under the flagstone at the doorstep, opened the door, and pushed me ahead of her. “Go upstairs, François. I’ll follow.”
In the bedroom, Katalin proudly raised her dress up to her breasts, and in a low voice uttered this command: “Kiss my belly, François, and take me slowly, very slowly.”
At the back of the bedroom, on a dimly lit wall, hung the effigy of Caterina Cornaro. Her glance was calm now, but the image was empty. The woman who was offering herself to me had gently assumed the ardor of that ancient face.
I withdrew from Katalin; then she said in a hoarse voice, “Kiss the little one, François, kiss him with all your heart, or he’ll die.”
I placed my mouth between her legs, and there I spoke, there I sang. It wasn’t in the tongue of Goethe or of Bembo, but in a tongue—Katalina’s—whose meaning escaped me:
Fölfedett engem balra-jobbra
leomló társak kártya-szobra
elém tárul a tér ragyok
min úgy
se változtathatok
“That’s enough! Now get up and leave, François! You must forget me forever.”
7
Aseroë
THERE ARE PROCESSIONS of words; beneath every funereal word the dead are gathered, beseeching us to lend them the power of saying “I” one last time. Is this voice our own?
The words travel from mouth to mouth, from book to book; a murmur arises and grows progressively louder as it disappears. Over the course of this process, stories fall to pieces; others, patched together, arise to replace them. Tawdry metaphors abound; in order to come up with a single decent image, the spoken word lacks a true road on which to travel from its origin to its final destination. I know nothing about this road; in the end, I allow myself to be led along by a language I do not know. Though I don’t really understand it, at times it seems to offer itself to me without my noticing.
The Testament of Orpheus, germinal words, a guardian angel, an aphasic Cassandra, a witness to lightning, the portrait of a young woman at once innocent and perverse—all these figures of forgetting guide my sentences. The procession of words goes from oblivion to oblivion. Each word, a sign of death and of life, of defeat and annunciation, relates the return of Orpheus, but his full story—barely glimpsed—escapes. I may collapse before finding what needed to be said in order to secure solace. Orpheus does not exist—which is why he so disturbs us.
Orpheus, precisely. I traveled to Laon with B. in the early fall to see a fourth-century mosaic on which an anonymous artist had represented the god, his lyre, and the beasts charmed by his song. The forms seemed naïve, but I liked the composition and the palette of colors—blues, greens, golds, blacks.
For the unknown author of this work, the Orphic songs were already nothing more than simple nursery rhymes, but they still preserved the glamor of magical formulas. A few centuries earlier, Apollonius of Rhodes—at the beginning of his Argonautica—attributed this double mission to Orpheus:
… To say what I had never before set forth …
… To insist above all on the dire necessity of the Chaos of yore …
What can song still mean when the memory of a disaster as old as the world is mingled with the urge for an originating word? Those who wish to listen are few in number. The shops, the churches, the streets, the loudspeakers all speak at every moment of the death of Orpheus—hands clapping at the announcement that “The Price Is Right,” tinny slogans, canned laughter. I no longer hear common nouns. Have meanings been stripped from every verb, have names been removed from every object? So many real yet invisible wounds. Zombie words wandering here and there, looking in vain for their correspondence to things.
In the thickness of lies, oblivion precedes every memorable deed; poems are nothing more than thin fissures—cracks that refuse a world where the violation of light and song announces nothing but atrocities to come. On the road to Laon, I heard shouts in broad daylight. I was overcome with anguish. Cries calling out, me unable to answer.
The Laon mosaic occupied a wall in the great hall of the municipal building. We asked for a key from the concierge, who told us, “Except for a few foreign tourists, I don’t get many visitors. It’s a room where children go to draw.” On the other walls, we saw gouaches and collages, with bright colors, guarded by a row of antique busts—Cicero, Demosthenes, Caesar—which hadn’t been used as models for decades.
Before leaving the room, I saw a dog at Orpheus’s feet. This unobtrusive dog had neither the grace nor the radiant colors of the wild beasts and birds summoned by the master of song. The dog was listening without drawing attention to himself. I should have noticed him sooner, for this animal belongs, like the lyre and the Phrygian cap, among the attributes of Orpheus. What sort of role could such a dog play in the legend? Was he capable of following his master into Hell and returning unharmed? The ancient poems say nothing about this; but the moment I saw the mutt, so modest, so attentive, I ceased to imagine the celestial transports caused by some primordial sound-and light- show (Chaos, Night, Day, the original Logos …) and I said to myself, My place is among the eternity of beasts! We humans are now lower than the animals. Dumbed down by our modern surroundings, we no longer understand a single thing. I should be like this dog; that would be ideal! To become as Orpheus’ dog—this, luckily, still remains a possibility. Rilke, my most constant companion, would not greet the idea with sarcasm. In his Eighth Elegy, the song rises to its apogee the moment he recognizes in animals the VISION OF THE OPEN:
What IS outside we know solely by the face of the animal; as for children, already too early on, we turn them backwards and force them to see, from behind, readymade forms, and not what is open, which, in the faces of animals, is so profound, so free from death.
Yes, act like a dog, before writing a single line of verse. Several weeks later, in Montpellier, at a time when I had an appointment with “Captain Hatteras,” I was dragging around my carcass here and there. I felt too low to appear in public, and at one point I started following a mongrel dog, a cross between a pointer and a terrier, who had obviously lost its master. I followed it step by step through the Peyrou garden, down the length of its beautiful alleyways, around the trees at its corners, and wound up in front of a balustrade, where the dog agreed to nuzzle up to me. From there I observed the Roman aqueduct, which extended beyond the central lane all the way, so I imagined, toward Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert.
Instead of keeping me company, the dog abandoned me. Bereft of my new companion, I followed a winding path through the narrow streets of the city, which took me all the way to the Place de la Comédie and rue de la Loge. It’s silly, but I was depressed because of a book. I needed to trace out this particular route because I was stuck on one of its pages, endlessly bogged down in an Orphic proclamation whose enigma continued to resist me:
THOU SHALT FIND A SPRING TO THE LEFT AND A WHITE CYPRESS. TAKE CARE NOT TO APPROACH THIS SPRING. THOU SHALT FIND ANOTHER FROM WHENCE FLOW THE COOL WATERS OF THE LAKE OF MEMORY. BEFORE IT STAND THE GUARDIANS. AND THOU SHALT SAY UNTO THEM …
I had sworn to fill in the ellipses of this final mutilated command (from a golden plaque on a sixth-century BC tomb), but I despaired of ever succeeding.
The probable conclusion of the fragment must be a password—the formula without which Orpheus would never have succeeded at his task. “I AM A CHILD OF THE EARTH / AND OF THE STARRY SKIES.” I admired this sentence, but my familiarity with it did little to diminish my anxiety. Its words had lost any clear meaning: the way they were used in ancient Greek signifies that we (as humans) belong both to this Earth and to the far-reaching heavens, that we are the children of an Earth rendered fertile by the light, but the Greek words that once meant Earth, Sky, Light possessed spiritual overtones that have long been lost.
Today, numerous barriers block out the echoes of even the simplest song. How was I to restore the ancient text? By skipping over the time-out demanded by Buchenwald and Dachau? By delivering myself of the occasional poem that attempted to bemoan this disaster? By executing a sheer leap of the soul?
I wept as I walked, keenly aware of the ridiculous dead end I had reached in my attempt to decode The Testament of Orpheus. I was thinking of an idiotic dream I had had several days earlier: The Poets’ Society had summoned me; the event was taking place in a shabby room (an attic room?), a cramped room bursting at the seams, with distinguished poets squeezed together, each one remaining, in spite of the presence of the press, aloof from all the others. Some of them were declaiming while pretending not to, others were weeping, still others were snoring, but upon my arrival there was an outburst of sarcasm: “The cur! The cur! How wretched he looks with his short hair!” I wasn’t proud; I was gripping in my pocket a very wrinkled piece of paper onto which, that very morning on the train, I had scribbled this quotation from Virginia Woolf, lifted from one of her journals: “Art is inadmissible. Yet the absence of art would mean that society as a whole had turned into a nightmare without end—the boundlessness of thought up
ended into the boundlessness of horror.”
At that point, a dismaying idea occurred to me—of the sort that always causes me to rise up in revolt. Instead of wasting your time mucking around in some ancient text, why not spend your time on worthwhile and socially beneficial causes? You’re getting all stirred up over nothing; you’d be better off spending your energies on taking some sort of immediate action against everything it is you loathe. That’s when I felt like hitting somebody. I needed a scapegoat to justify the miserable fact that I had decided to give up writing, Any journalist or pollster or top-notch executive would do. It could be just about anybody: the arbitrariness of my action would be matched by arbitrariness of their misdeeds—just as long as I had the opportunity of slugging someone for no reason whatsoever. No, that was too cowardly; what I needed was a real victim, a completely innocent bystander.
I espied an old man, oddly dressed, hunched over, carting around his shopping basket. He was shuffling along quite quickly on his bandy legs. Just a flick of a finger would be enough to topple him over. Then I would courteously come to his aid and pick him up again, casting the blame for my assault on some imaginary passerby. Here was a real challenge, worthy of our times. After which, I would do away with myself—assured of not suffering any consequences.
I was about to proceed as planned but was held back by a ludicrous detail: my intended victim was talking to himself aloud as he shuffled along. I caught up with the poor wretch; when I held out my arm to touch his shoulder, he turned around as if he had sensed me coming all the while and shouted out at the top of his lungs:
“She told me so.”
Aseroë Page 5