Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

I may have planned out my every move, skillfully, sensibly, but there came a moment when I lost all my good sense, and now that I'm long past such matters and try to recall the events of that sunny morning with the detachment of an analyst observing his own activities, I realize that at this very juncture I run into the impassable barriers to free expression and have to crack that stone wall with my skull; and it's by no means modesty alone, obligatory and thus in many ways quite laughable, that makes my undertaking questionable: though it's not easy to call by their name the things that in daily life have their overused and hackneyed appellations, these words, denoting certain organs, functions, and motions, for all their spicy, down-to-earth vitality and expressiveness, cannot be used to describe my experiences, and not because I'd be afraid to transgress against bourgeois propriety — I couldn't care less about that; my task here is to give an account of my life, and middle-class decorum can be only the framework for such a life; if for this final reckoning I wish to chart as precisely as possible the map of my life's emotional events, then I should be able to spread out before me my own body, and no amount of squeamishness should hold me back from scrutinizing it in all its nakedness, just as it would be ludicrous to tell the coroner not to remove the sheet covering the body on his table; in other words, I should be able to remove my robe and pajamas and her fussily beautiful dress here and now, just as I did then and there, while naming every gesture and emotion in the process; but after some reflection, I must say that to use common words to describe the so-called immodest parts of the body — and, since we are talking about a living body and its quite natural functions — would be as ridiculous and false as it would be to change the subject politely; to demonstrate the true dimensions of the problem and the difficulty of finding a solution, if I were to ask myself the question as a kind of test: "So tell me, my dear, on that sunny morning, did you finally fuck your fiancée?" I could answer in the affirmative, but that would be no less a deceptive oversimplification or generalization as it would be to say nothing, because this word of affirmation would help to gloss over crucial details, just as silence would; yet narcissistic curiosity, interested only in details concealed and deemed unworthy of attention, finds it difficult to form a clear picture of its object, which is itself, because the body loses self-awareness precisely at those moments when it could be most revealing; consequently, memory cannot retain what the body had not been aware of, allowing crucial gestures to slip away, though it also endows them with a very special air, as the memory of a fainting spell can preserve only the curious sensations of losing and then regaining consciousness while the fainting itself, most intriguing to us, for it's a state like no other, remains inaccessible, unknowable.

Helene simply enclosed my lips with a bite, and this final decisive act, the only possible response to my little game of studied aloofness, luckily blurred the last sober bit of my consciousness, or so I believe now, after the fact, yes, I believe that the pain caused by this bite was the last sensation whose meaning and significance I could still register with some clarity, and which later enabled me to slip into a now barely remembered state of oblivion, for not only had her mouth abandoned all shyness and reticence by then, it also let me know in no uncertain terms that she wanted me, all of me, and would stand for no more delay or fuss, so it made no sense for me to play the seducer highly skilled in the techniques of love; she wanted me just as I was, she clung to me and would have me forget how I thought I should behave, all she wanted was to press her hips to mine, and not even the formidable layers of lace and silk undergarments could prevent us from feeling each other's body heat— although that, while making me very happy, strangely enough also aroused in me a feeling of humiliation, for by seeming to take control of our fate and by proving that my tongue's predictably unpredictable games were clumsy experiments compared to the eloquent testimony of her teeth, she may have cast doubt on my manhood or anyway deliberately offended my male vanity; as if exchanging roles, she became manfully aggressive, which of course I enjoyed very much, though in light of her decisiveness I appeared to myself as girlishly teasing and flirtatious and thus had to overpower her; my instincts, my conditioning refused to accept the exchange, and perhaps the deeply unconscious motive behind that bite was to arouse in me this wish to reassert myself; even my hatred returned, I felt like snatching her off me as one tears leeches off one's body; I grabbed her hair, the soft material of her dress, maybe even grazed her skin, and with a single jerk of my head I withdrew my mouth from hers; reaching lower with my hand, I grasped her buttocks and thrust her groin brutally against mine, letting her know in the most indelicate possible manner what I had been concealing in my pajama pants, under my robe; with lips and teeth, with bites of my own, I was now ready to take possession of her mouth, pushing in my tongue unimpeded, to which she responded, already on the floor, most tenderly, with even hand strokes and caresses of her tongue — I have no idea how we ended up on the floor, for by then I seemed to have lost the thread of our story, and perhaps this is the juncture after which only her gestures, features, the taste of her saliva, the smell of her perspiration, and the look of her fluttering eyelids allow me to surmise what might have happened to me.

She was lying on her back on the bare floor and I, propped on one elbow and bent over her, watched her closed eyelids, her almost motionless face, while my body was racked by deep, inexplicable, tearless sobs.

I sank my free hand into the red hair spread out before me, and almost as if the hand wanted to remind itself of that old, that very old promise, I began to pull her hair, actually pulling her closer to me by the hair; her face slid almost lifelessly on the floor.

This sobbing was like the memory of a childhood sickness, torrid, shivery, blurred, and it was as if we had been in the deepest of deep darkness and then stumbled upon a sunlit clearing, this room, where familiar yet strange-looking furniture stood silently about, and the heavy rug bunched up by our feet made a high mountain, and every wrinkle and pattern on the wallpaper remained unbearably still; this glaring, empty sight irritated me so much that I had to lay my head on her chest, carefully of course, it was the first time I'd touched her body; I had to close my eyes so that, feeling my own hot breath in the white ruffles of her dress already burning with her body heat, my tremulous sobs could take me back to the darkness from which I had been torn by this silence.

But she seemed to ignore my crying, made no attempt to console me— maybe I killed her, I thought then.

Among the ruffles and lace my lips eventually found her neck, and then I had to open my eyes again; I treasure even now the color of her skin and the smoothness that my mouth and tongue could also feel, for the silence in us might have been very deep, but my mouth, like a foreign body, like a slowly advancing snail, wanted to taste everything it had been forced to abstain from until then; that's why I had to open my eyes again, for though I could take in the sensation of her skin, it might be of some help if I could also see what I had so fervently desired and yet could not make my own, even if this would not compensate for the lost moments.

"I'd like to tell you something," I heard her whisper, and with my mouth I began to move toward her lips, to make her not say but breathe her words into me; I was in no hurry — with my teeth I first caught her sweet, pointed chin, so nice to hold, so firm I could easily bite into it and, like a dog offered a finer bone than the one already in its mouth, I was terribly confused by the choices before me, but her mouth was waiting, and that decided my course of action, though by then my eyes must have closed again, because all I remember is that I got a whiff of her breath along with her words: "Please undress me."