Antal Szerb - Love in a Bottle

“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 right, 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.