Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Drop by drop I infused in Thea the seemingly improbable hope that despite all appearances Melchior was within her reach; in Melchior, with the subtlest of means, I tried to eliminate the blocks that stood in the way of his dormant yet sometimes powerful and aggressive sensual impulses; oddly enough, though understandably, Thea never became truly jealous of me, for in her eyes, indeed in her entire emotional system, she saw me as the only physical, bodily proof of her hope for Melchior, which, however vague, was impossible to abandon; and Melchior was intellectually dazed by the possibility that through me he could get to know something he hadn't known before; what's more, he knew I couldn't be completely his until he possessed this other thing as well.

Lovers walk around wearing each other's body, and they wear and radiate into the world their common physicality, which is in no way the mathematical sum of their two bodies but something more, something different, something barely definable, both a quantity and a quality, for the two bodies contract into one but cannot be reduced to one; this quantitative surplus and qualitative uniqueness cannot be defined in terms of, say, the bodies' mingled scents, which is only the most easily noticeable and superficial manifestation of the separate bodies' commonality that extends to all life functions; true, the common scent eats itself into their clothes, hair, and skin, and whoever comes into contact with the lovers will enter the sphere of this new physicality, and if the outsider has a sensitive and impartial enough nose not only will he come under the magic spell of the lovers — put more simply, under their influence — not only will he receive a part of their love, but it's also possible that once inside the lovers' private bubble and led by his own olfactory sensations he will become aware of meaningful borrowings, transferences, and displacements in the gestures, facial expressions, and intonations that are the peculiar physical manifestation of the lovers' emotional union.

The place between Thea and Melchior that I was unable to occupy on our first night together at the opera did in fact become mine later on; all I had to do was let Thea enter a little way into this private bubble of ours and from then on the two of them could communicate with each other with my body as conductor, because without being aware of it I took Melchior with me on my afternoon walks with Thea, and if she took part of me for herself, as she had to if she wanted to maintain her emotional balance, then she took a part of Melchior as well, and this was the same in the other direction, too: if Thea gave me something of herself, then Melchior had to sense the lack or surplus thus created, and he did: when I returned to him from my walks with Thea, he would sniff around me like a dog, making scenes of jealousy that I couldn't lighten with horseplay and joking; we had to restore the upset balance and put things back into their right proportions between us, which of course again meant touching Thea somehow.

I never found out what happened between them at the opera, the answers they gave later to my questions were evasive, letting me understand that they both thought their encounter a shameful defeat, but I realized that every defeat was a prelude to a new offensive, so if I wanted to help along the disintegration of their relationship — and I did, believing it was the only chance to ensure decent conditions for Melchior and me to survive — then I had to make sure I understood the situation precisely.

I cannot explain my motives for an honorable retreat in any other way except to say that I was utterly lost in this relationship, both terrified and exhilarated by the knowledge that I, a man, an individual with a specific psychic and sexual makeup, was now intimate with another not of the opposite but of the same sex; and inasmuch as this was so, as it was possible to be so, if in spite of all prohibitions we were allowed to have this relationship, then it must make sense, it must! the idea of love's indivisibility filled me with such excitement that I felt I was reinventing the laws of nature or discovering a deep secret; for if this really was so, then I was really me, I thought triumphantly, a man, a complete being, an indivisible whole, my sex being only one aspect of this whole, and did it follow, then, that this whole could remain whole only in love? and could the ultimate meaning of love be one indivisible whole clinging to another indivisible whole? and should my connection to another be the choice only of my irreducible self, whether I chose someone of my own or of the opposite sex? but however comfortingly my questions were leading me on, I still had to contend with the painful realization that though I might have chosen one who was like me, he was not me but someone else, though the same sex as I, still not me; thus the pleasure and revenge of direct contact with sameness hit home forcefully, making clear that even in one of my own sex I could not make my own the otherness of another man, a bitter realization that so intensified the hopelessness and futility of my whole life, my past, and all my strivings that, yielding to the part of myself that yearned for stability rather than confrontation, I decided I'd better run away from the place, go home, and in this case home meant something old, dull, familiar, and safe, everything that home means when one is abroad.

I wanted to go home, and he knew it; I didn't explain or give reasons, and he didn't ask for any; with the immeasurable superiority of his pain, he let me go, but as if to beat me to my departure, he also wanted to leave, to return to his barely abandoned despair, to escape; I wanted to get back to the safety of my homeland, he to the uncertainties of his desires; and this was as if with a parallel change of locales — which, being parallel, would not allow us to tear ourselves away from one another— we had wanted to take revenge on each other for our own personal stories, and to besmirch each other with the considerable amount of grimy history that met and clashed in us, except that this was no longer a game, a harmless lovers' quarrel; escaping from this place could have dangerous, life-threatening consequences, a prison term at the very least, in those years only a very small percentage of escape attempts ended in success; we didn't talk about this either, Melchior being very mysterious about it, also tense and irritable; he must have been waiting for a sign or message from the other side, and certain indications led me to believe that it was Melchior's French friend, that self-proclaimed Communist, who was making the arrangements for his escape.

Trusting in Melchior and Thea's mutual attraction, especially in Thea's subtle forcefulness, I figured that if I wanted to hasten the disintegration of their relationship that would enable Melchior to forget his senseless escape plan, which for me was rather unpleasant, since I could not morally support it, then I ought to stay as neutral as a catalyst involved in a chemical process that, having no valence of its own, can never be part of the new compound and falls away.

Needless to say, my scheme violated their privacy, in a sense was a sort of emotional crime, but since it seemed workable — its feasibility was clear to all of us at our very first meeting — I went on with my schemes and plots, assuaging my guilty conscience by telling myself that it was they who wanted it, I was only helping them; success would prove that I wanted only what was good for them; this was my way of saying to myself that I wanted not only to remain honest but to win.

Of course I couldn't be sure the plan would work, and I had to keep going back, all too frequently, to our first meeting, and review every moment, every tiny detail of that evening; and the more often I replayed it in my mind, the more it seemed that in the cold, distant space of the stage, in the bodies of singers moved by the music streaming from the orchestra pit, a wild, emotional chaos arose that was closely analogous to the one overwhelming us as we sat in the plush box.