Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

The next day when the two of us showed up at her house, and she saw what an effort it took for us not to let on that something had happened between us in the meantime, and how charmingly solemn and serious we became from all that effort, by then she wasn't jealous, but rather glad, well, maybe not glad, that would be going a little too far.

And did I ever notice, she asked, that women were much more tolerant of male homosexuals than men were?

All right, women would say, it's terrible, unnatural, disgusting, but still, I could be his mother.

She stopped talking, didn't look at me, kept patting and smoothing the ground over the buried cigarette, absently contemplating her fingers' fire-prevention activities.

I had a feeling she was going to say it — it was hard for her, but she would say it — and perhaps that's why I didn't want to interrupt, for this was about her and me, the two of us.

But in the present situation, which was very demeaning for her, she went on, she might have been very difficult and she might torment me and say ugly and stupid things to me, but she was really grateful to me, because just by being there I kept her from doing something that could turn into a tragedy — or a farce.

She fell silent again, still unable to say it.

Then she looked at me.

I'm an old woman, she said.

Her statement, her look, the slight quiver of her voice had not the slightest trace of self-pity and self-indulgence, not even as much as might seem natural and understandable; she looked at me so openly with her beautiful brown eyes that the physical image of her face blotted out the meaning of her sentence.

The inner strength she mustered to utter that sentence, the strength she hurled into my eyes, now did something to her: she was no longer a woman, or old, or beautiful, or anything, but a single human being struggling with the heroic task of self-definition in a universe still enthralling in its infinite possibilities — and that was beautiful.

She certainly could not have done it inside a room; there all this would have turned into sentimental soul-searching or lovemaking; between four walls I would have found her statement comical, too true or too false, either way it was the same, and would have protested vehemently or made light of it; but here, with nothing to echo these meaningful sounds, they left her mouth, came up against my face, I took some into myself, and the rest dissipated, vanished into the landscape, found their proper, final place.

And in that moment I realized that the source of her beauty was always her raw anguish; I had met a human being who did not want to eliminate her own suffering or exploit it either, but simply wanted to retain her capacity for pain, and that was the quality that might explain my attraction to her: she wasn't interested in enlisting sympathy, which was why she objected so strenuously to living-the-part or getting-lost-in-the-part method acting; she had nothing to conceal, since what she showed of herself was something she extracted from me — something I always tried to keep hidden.

And in exchange I was giving her my own pain, so similar to hers and forever obscured by clouds of self-pity and self-deception.

It wasn't her age that made her old, she added quickly, as if wanting to destroy any illusion that her self-pity was meant to elicit my sympathy, or her own; no, counting only her years she could still consider herself young, it was her soul that was old, but that was silly, too, she didn't have a soul, she said, she didn't know what it was, then, something in her or about her.

It was strange that lately she had to play all these lovesick women, vamps and all sorts of seductive females, and she was always good at it, but when she had to fall into the arms of strange men and kiss strange mouths, she found she wasn't there anymore, it was as if someone else were doing it for her, someone else was playing at being in love.

Love and desire in her — and she begged my pardon if she was about to say something stupid — became something no longer directed at another living human being but at everyone, anyone, yes, silly as it may sound, aimed at anything and everything that was humanly impossible to reach, and she was no longer interested in reaching, but feeling this way made her very pitiful in her own eyes.

If she really didn't want to reach it, she wouldn't be able to act, I said quietly, and since she did want to act, she had to reach what she no longer wanted.

Her eyelashes quivered hesitantly; she either didn't understand what I said or didn't want to; she chose to ignore it.

She said she'd be lying if she claimed this was the first fiasco of her life, it wasn't, not by a long shot, she was never beautiful enough or ingratiating enough to rise above a constant state of failure, she got used to it.

But she wouldn't talk about this anymore, she said, interrupting herself abruptly; she found it ridiculous and in bad taste to be discussing this with me, of all people, but then who should she discuss it with?

I didn't want to distract her with questions or friendly, consoling words; anything coming from me would have stifled her; I knew she wanted to talk, but would have understood if she hadn't said another word.

In the fragrant puffs of her voice bouncing off my face I felt she wasn't talking to me, she was sending words to the surface of my body, whose mediating reverberation turned them into the purest form of address directed at her self.

She had to stand up, but she did it as though her body had been filled with a single thought of anger that wouldn't let her straighten out her knees, making her look stooped and ugly.

The skin on her chin grew taut.

No, she said, this wasn't true either.

She said this and then bit off the rest of her words, also squelching the meaning of the unsaid words.

And this may have hurt me more than it hurt her; at least she had the courage to say what she wanted to.

But she wasn't interested in any kind of truth, in anybody's truth.

Sometimes she could make herself believe there was no such thing as humiliation.

There was a time, soon after they got to know each other, when she thought she could throw everything to the winds for him, but fortunately, she was more sensible now.

And for him she could have killed her husband, Arno, who snored away all their nights.

And yes, she admitted, it was she who kept calling Melchior at night.

And she came up with this stupidity about being old because her body was going to pieces in this humiliation which had been going on for months, and her mind could concentrate on nothing else, no matter how much she told herself she was over it; she was becoming like an addle-brained teenager who can only think about how ugly she is.

These stupid feelings would never leave her, and then, on top of it all, she had to look at our disgustingly happy faces.

And then I would have liked to tell her that the happiness she saw was indeed real but that I had never felt a more persistent suffering than this happiness; but of course I couldn't tell her any of this.

She wasn't jealous of me, she said; it was disgust she felt, rather than jealousy, the kind of disgust that makes men scrawl on toilet walls things like Castrate the fags, she said more softly, placatingly; of course she knew it wasn't the same thing, she said, as a matter of fact she felt a certain approval regarding our relationship, and despite all her swearing and rage, she couldn't be jealous of me as she would be of another woman, she took it almost as if I were her substitute, but that was humiliating, because she didn't want to come between us, yet she just had to keep calling him on the phone, she couldn't help it.

Now that she said it, maybe she wouldn't be calling anymore.