Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Without formulating a single thought, then, the events sensed with my shoulders, seen with my eyes, and heard with my ears, occurred in duplicate, becoming their own metaphors, and they affected me in a way I can describe as nothing less than an emotional earthquake; later I could not escape the memory of this profound effect, even if I hadn't intended to exploit it for my own purposes; today I'd say that the smooth, hard ground of my emotions, packed firm in the thirty years of my life, moved under my feet, the magma of instincts was jolted, edifices erected with the stones of mastery and knowledge and self-protecting morality began to crumble during the heartbreaking overture; entire streets of allegedly omnipotent experience suddenly shifted, and almost as if to prove that emotions also had material substance, in the throes of struggling with contradictory emotions arising from a familiar unfamiliarity, I began to sweat so profusely I might as well have been chopping wood, yet I was sitting motionless; as often happens, I pretended I was being carried away by the music, but that did not help either, for like any obvious lie, it made my body, used to self-discipline and self-denial, swim in sweat.

It would seem that by the age of thirty one achieves a certain deceptive security; it was this security that began to fall apart that evening; but the moment before the collapse, all my edifices held their original forms, although not at their usual places; nothing remained at its original location, and therefore these forms, symbolizing their own emptiness, were unaware of the tectonic forces they were now exposed to; my feelings and thoughts were in their old, cracked forms, squeezed between old borders, wandering on worn paths, and simultaneously were the empty symbols of these very forms; in this landslide I was given a moment of grace: in a single bright flash before the moment of collapse I caught a glimpse of life's, or my own life's, most elementary principles.

No, I did not take leave of my senses, not then and not now as I grope for a string of metaphors to help me approach my feelings at that moment; I sensed quite clearly that what for me was a real prison, the prison of my senses and ideas, for the Frenchman on my left was merely a stage set smelling of greasepaint; after all, the only thing that was going on was that in that stage prison uncouth Jacquino was pursuing charming Marcellina, who had no use for his bumbling masculine charms because she pined for Fidelio, and this apparently kind and gentle young man — who was really a woman in disguise, working hard to free her beloved husband, Florestan, languishing in an underground dungeon — without too much thought, though with rueful sadness, Fidelio put up with Marcellina's misplaced affection so as to attain her politically and personally commendable goal, thus perpetrating the most outrageous or hilarious fraud of all: pretending to be a boy while she was a girl, which of course proves nothing except that the end justifies the means, since everybody loved or would love to love somebody else, but somehow managed to find their true loves, so we could suspend our moral considerations; in the meantime, my shoulder could not and did not want to break free of feeling the shoulder of the man on my right, whose indecent proximity surprised, humiliated, and frightened me no less than his turning away did, offending my vanity; and though I knew that this turning away was temporary, a transparent love ploy, and that he was using Thea as shamelessly as Fidelio in her male disguise was using charming Marcellina's not altogether pristine sentiments, for she should have noticed that that was no man in those clothes! Melchior, with his convenient bisexual approach, exploited and turned to his own advantage what in all this ambiguity was quite real, Thea's real feelings; by withdrawing attention from me, he was actually calling attention to our closeness, which he could do convincingly only by really turning away, by displaying real or potentially real feelings for Thea, giving her what he took from me; and this was just what was happening onstage, where Fidelio had to become a real man, a perfect prison guard, and pretend to seduce Marcellina, in order to be able to free her true love from captivity.

I felt, then, that Melchior was showing Thea something surprising and genuine in himself that had been hidden even from himself, and because I sensed his emotional turmoil, his boyish helplessness, I felt what Thea must have felt, and as she responded to his advances the only way one could in such circumstances, with sighs, altered breathing, glances, I felt that what was going on between them was something of complete mutuality.

In my intricate jealousy I didn't want Melchior, feared him, found his closeness intrusive, or, I should say, I didn't want only him, for I felt that my own desire, mediated by his body, was taking me toward Thea; it would be fair to say that I yielded to Melchior's approach to the extent that it allowed me to approach Thea.

This went on for the entire length of the performance: the closer Thea got to Melchior, the closer I got to her and the more and more palpably I felt his physical presence; I kept feeling I should put my hand on his knee, which surprised me, since as far as I knew it had never in my adult life occurred to me that I could put my hand on a man's knee and have the gesture suggest anything other than harmless friendship, yet I had this almost uncontrollable urge to touch him, and thought of this not only as a seductive gesture, a single gesture with a double purpose, to let him know that his advances were being returned, but also, at the moment more important, as a move with which to draw him away from Thea so that I could regain her for myself.

If then and there I'd thought of anything at all, I'd have thought of my adolescence; of course a great many thoughts crossed my mind, but not that; even if I hadn't thought of my own younger years, I might have reflected in general on the experiences accumulated during adolescence, which one hastens to forget, after one's harrowing initiation into adulthood with its fierce pains and hard-won pleasures.

I should have recalled that in the dreadful needs of adolescence the only way to escape the paralyzing and frustrating sensual urges; gropings, ignorance, is to choose the communally prepared, sanctioned, and delimiting forms of sexual behavior that, though not coinciding with our own preferences — by definition, predefined practices limit our personal freedom and at that age we find them excessive, burdensome, and morally unacceptable — help us within limits to find an optimal middle ground, ways of loving that enable us, by keeping to accepted sexual roles, to fulfill ourselves in another individual who also is undergoing similar crises in self-control; in return for the loss of our real needs and wants, we offer each other the almost personal, almost physical intensity of a passable sex life, and not even the gulf that opens up moments after physical fulfillment, not even the terrible void of impersonality seems unbridgeable, for the most impersonal union may produce something very personal and organic — a child, and there's nothing more real, organic, or complete than that; a child for us, we say to ourselves, out of the two of us, like and unlike us, to compensate us for all our barrenness until now, a child is duty and care, a source of sadness and joy and concern, all of it real, tangible, instead of motiveless anxiety it brings us purpose and meaning.

A shipwrecked person whose feet desperately seek something solid to keep him afloat will grab at anything, anyone, the first available object, and if it buoys him up he won't let go, he'll swim with it, and after a time he'll see he has nothing else! just this? and the object will grimly concur, yes, just this, nothing else! and the implacable impulse of self-preservation, joined of course by rationalization and mystification, will have him believe that the object that drifted his way by chance was really his, it chose him and he chose it, and by the time the sheer force of unrelenting waves casts him onto the shore of mature adulthood, his faith and gratitude will have made him worship what was accidental and adore fortuity, but can his rescue from destruction be really accidental?