Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Built on shaky emotional ground, the edifices of my sexuality, assiduously maintained for ten years and thought to be sound, were about to crumble; it seemed as if in all my previous love affairs I had merely yielded to the all-powerful instinct of survival, falling back repeatedly and ungratifyingly on pleasures I could always coax out of my body in lieu of one real gesture that might not even be a gesture; I could not grasp the meaning of my exertions, which was why I always had to grab something with my hands and hover over the depths with it, but once the ground had slipped out from under me, I could not regain my footing; that's why I could never really be consoled by physical pleasure, hence the constant, agonizing search for and pursuit of other, restlessly searching human bodies! and I wasn't shocked that through the body of the man sitting next to me I desired Thea, or that in Thea he sought me out, and that in her I found my way back to him, so that both of us were bound to hover over her; we were all trying to establish a relationship for two, but any way we looked at it, there were three of us; and if there were three, there could have been four or five; no, this sort of entanglement was no more surprising than a familiar image ready to become memory except we cannot locate its time and place of origin within ourselves; what did surprise me was that behind our entanglement I seemed to discover, in pure form, the sensual, physical embodiment of the elemental desire squirming around within me, and instead of paying attention to the action onstage, I was concentrating on this! small, sheathed in a bluish membrane, throbbing moistly with a life of its own, quite apart from them and even from me; it was as if I were seeing the bodily home of the pure life force which, regardless of modern theories, is neither male nor female: it has no sex, for its sole function is to allow free communication between human beings.

That evening I was given back some of the old freedom I thought I had lost, freedom of the heart, freedom of feeling, though today I'd say, and not without bitterness, that it was in vain to have regained that freedom, in vain to have all that sensitive perception and observation, because it was in understanding and assessing them that I proved myself a complaisantly foolish child of my times: I had a vague, elusive, but appropriate notion of the state of affairs, but I believed it to be a true discovery and wanted immediately to make it actual, to establish an intellectual position with emotional means, and further, I wanted practical results, success, to influence, run, control things, as though I were a high official of some ministry of love, making decisions based on information provided by available data; the conditioning of ten years spent in sexual manipulation came back to haunt me: I'd trust only what was palpably real, disregard everything that could not be reified and therefore physically enjoyed; in the name of reason I'd shut out of the sphere of reality anything that could not be fully comprehended, distancing myself from everything that could be perceived and validated only by the senses, which made up my personal, subjective reality; yet the opposite was also true: for the sake of my personal reality, I had to deny the existence of a larger, impersonal reality; and though my guilty conscience and a sense of my own unreality tried to tell me I was making a fatal mistake, I did not believe them.

I felt it necessary to relate all this before resuming my narrative and returning to our afternoon walk so I'd have a chance to set the intellectual and mental context in which to see two people interact, two people each of whom was not above using the other as a means to achieve specific ends, though their walk bound them together: to be metaphorical about it, they were walking along the same path that others had taken before them.

What was the point of honorable intentions, of the pursuit of neutrality, if continually, with every step we took, we sank into each other's emotional mire, and if that could not be separated from the living substance of our bodies; we may have confined ourselves to speaking in allusions, with intimations — never touching, at most falling into long silences — but even our words developed meanings that referred only to the two of us, leading us where we wanted to go, drawing out of us precisely what we honestly and not unreasonably wanted to achieve.

That's more or less how things were then; such were the emotional conditions in which we were moving out there in nature, as she began walking in front of me on the well-worn path toward the distant woods, and I, still surprised and pleased, was mulling over her quiet, bitter, terse confession, believing that her real aim was not to remind me of the true purpose and nature of our friendship — just at the point where our relationship turned too intimate and threatened to be impossible for both of us — but to draw me closer to her, take me into the deepest, most secret sphere of her life.

I could barely contain myself; I would have liked to toss all complications aside and reach after her and, moved by gratitude and the need to reciprocate, to pull her slender, fragile body to mine; I sensed her yielding even as she was moving away, although a moment earlier she had said that her whole life was a stupid waste, but for all the stupid things she might do, there were two people in her life, her girl friend and her husband, that she could always go back to; this, in our mutually developed language, meant that we could do anything we wanted to! I shouldn't be afraid of her, she felt safe, she could even abandon them and still they'd be there for her.

Too honest confessions, those that touch what we believe to be the most meaningful centers of our emotional life, are also betrayals.

If, for example, someone tells us why he dislikes his homeland, his confession will inevitably be an expression of his love for it and his desire to act on this love, while earnest, passionate affirmation of loyalty to one's country usually betrays loathing, suggesting that this country has caused one much pain, worry, despair, deep doubts, and paralyzing helplessness, and the crippled desire for action must retreat into enthusiastic expressions of loyalty.

Her restraint, laconic responses, and ambiguous yet well-formulated words made me realize that I wasn't wrong, Frau Kühnert was: Thea had changed during the past few weeks, and she was standing on a borderline; her confession to me was possible only because the bond that was the one certainty of her life had become burdensome and intolerable for her, and she shared this with me because she wanted me to thrust her across that border, so that she would break that bond — she did want to break it.

The most obvious means to do this, using my hands, perhaps my body, to give her that push, was out of the question, it would have been too much and inappropriate.

Just as on that memorable Sunday afternoon, when Melchior's heartrending, animal-like sobs had taught me that the body alone would not suffice as consolation, he at the time wanted more, he was asking for my body's future, something I'd have control over only if I were to yield to him completely, unconditionally, and perhaps it was cowardice, but I did not have that kind of control and so I did not give him my body.

And I felt that my body was both insufficient and inappropriate for the task, though with the darkest, most instinctive knowledge that can be extracted from this same body, I sensed the possibilities in Melchior's and Thea's bodies, possibilities where my body could serve only as mediator; all I wanted was to serve them.

In the cause of achieving a distant goal, I offered myself as a neutral means of mediation, and they, obeying the rules of selfishness, accepted and used me as such; what we did not take into account was that no moral interest or romantic self-denial can neutralize the sex of any human body; all I had left was my own self-control, but this gave me the pleasurably turbulent excitement of a criminal before his act, so that the desire to help was no longer motivated by love but by the urge to murder love and banish the lovers from my heart.