Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

It was no mistake or a sensory illusion that made me think just now of having stood like this in a doorway once before; Mother's unfinished sentence conjured up part of an even earlier image, only a flash, really, just her feet, her head on the pillows, but enough to make the abyss I could now look into appear even more attractively bottomless, an image that, while standing in the bathroom door, only my instincts could recall— groping blindly for traces of an existing and carefully stored memory, knowing precisely its time and place, savoring its many flavors, and still unable to locate it — but now, unsummoned and unannounced it appeared, hanging into the other image, the pictures of nakedness affirming the connection between the two: when Father, leaning out of the bathtub, opened the door, my astonished face appeared in the steamy bathroom mirror, he loomed enormous, standing in the tub and leaning toward the door handle, his back, like a red blotch, reflected in the mirror streaked with running drops of condensed steam; both my face and his back were in the mirror; Mother was sitting in the water, rubbing her heavily shampooed hair; she smiled at me, blinking because the shampoo stung, and then, closing her eyes, she dunked her head to wash out the shampoo under the water; then, as now, I felt the same dazed helplessness, as if the pajamas were my body's only defense against feelings that would otherwise leave me naked, the pajamas were more real than I was, and then, too, I started walking in the direction of a remote, hollow, almost inaudible yet very penetrating voice; it was night, I got up to pee, and heard this voice, unfamiliar but not at all frightening, on a silent winter night lit by a cold moon, when the light refracted by the window frames into sharp angles and planes seems to float, and soft shadows seem to soak up all the familiar objects so that you are afraid to cross the sharp border of light, a voice coming from the hallway; my face turned a frightful blue by the moon, I saw it flash for a second in the hallway mirror, I thought someone was screaming or sobbing, but there was no one out in the hall, the voice was coming from the kitchen; I moved on, guided by my own amazement, my bare feet squishing on the stone floor; nothing, the kitchen was dark, something squeaked under the opening door, but then silence, no one there either; still, I felt or imagined the silence of living bodies, as if not only pieces of furniture soaked in the night were standing there and the quiet I heard was not just my bated breath; then, from behind the open door of the maid's room I heard a deep hoarse rattle, and with it the rhythmic creaking and groaning of bedsprings, each creak and groan and thrust seeming to let loose, from deep inside a throat, a high-pitched, ever-rising scream, a cross between a sob and a shrieking laugh; this was the voice that had attracted me, I wasn't imagining it, after all, and one more step was all it would take to look through the open door, and I wanted to look but couldn't; it seemed that I'd never reach the miserable door, still not there, still far away, even though the voice was already with me, so close, so within me, with all its depths, heights, and rhythms, and I didn't even notice when I finally managed to take that longed-for last step and could also see what I was hearing.

Of course Father did not appear enormous because he really was enormous, in fact he was rather slight and slender; it's things like the incorrect use of the word "enormous" that now make me realize the powerful inhibitions and self-deceptions, over long decades, that I must grapple with when speaking of things one ordinarily doesn't, or perhaps shouldn't, talk about but which, since they are linked inextricably with the so-called inner life of the boy I once was, are unavoidable; so let's take a deep breath and relate quickly, before one's voice flags, that quite apart from that very early incident which for better or worse had dropped out of my memory for a long time and resurfaced unexpectedly and vividly only when Mother told me about the meadow — yes, the memory of Father's body in the scissors of two female legs on the bed of the maid's room did come back, like a well-kept secret that I mustn't tell Mother even now; I couldn't see the face, but I could see that the squeals of pleasure and pain were muffled because with his outspread fingers Father had thrust a pillow over the head below him; the legs entwining his waist told me that this woman was not my mother, how could she be, what would she be doing there? and because we can just as easily recognize a thigh, a foot, the curve of a calf as we can a nose, a mouth, or a pair of eyes, it isn't surprising that I knew those legs were not hers, and it wasn't her voice I heard from under the pillow — I knew very well who lived in the maid's room — what was startling was that I half expected them to be Mother's legs, not as if I had the vaguest notion of what was actually taking place but awareness yielded to unawareness in my assuming that in such close proximity of mutual pleasure there could be no room for anyone but Mother, thus, what I saw before me, no matter how pleasurable and therefore perfectly natural it may have seemed to a small child, was still repellent; yet all this was not directly related to the perception of Father as someone enormous, an impression that was made on me when, in his usual unsmiling, humorless way, he leaned out of the bathtub to open the door and, as he did, also blocked my way with his wet naked body glistening in the strong bathroom light, towering over me so that my eyes were focused on the darkest part of him, his loins, one might say right under my nose; and I knew, saw, and felt that, as always, not a single unguarded glance or move I made would escape his notice; his wet hair clung to his scalp, his forehead left clean and open, and his gaze — normally tempered and sheltered by strands of straight blond hair and thus engagingly attractive, almost beautiful, though his steely blue eyes made it strong and stern, but the thick mass of hair, which he combed straight back but which kept falling forward as he moved, lending him a casual, boyish look — this piercing gaze dominated his face, an open, attentive, cool, and threatening gaze, as if challenging the world, demanding an explanation from it; it seemed that he wasn't only towering over me but forever looking down from some unapproachable peak, from the heights of his undisputable certainties, from which he could afford to tolerate others' preoccupation with petty desires, instincts, gooey emotions, while he watched and judged, even if he didn't often put his judgments into words; viewed from this perspective, straight on and a bit from below, his body seemed perfect, at any rate what we usually call the perfect male body, and I deliberately used this emotionally neutral word, modestly avoiding the slightest suggestion of a natural attraction, so that I needn't call it beautiful, let alone exceptionally beautiful or, perish the thought, overwhelmingly beautiful — by calling it beautiful we'd have to admit being defenseless, at its mercy, and then, by the nature of things, we'd want to be at its mercy, indeed our greatest desire would be to immerse ourselves in it, to travel down the byways of this body, if only by tracing its lines with our fingers, to make our own with our touch what our eyes can only see: the broad shoulders that years of rowing and swimming had turned so firmly muscular that the otherwise charming protrusions of the shoulder and chest bones were barely visible; the firm shoulders leading smoothly, fluidly yet firmly, to the more articulated musculature of the arms and the well-toned, undulating plane of the chest, where the pregnability of the bare surface was both accentuated and toned down by a profusion of blondish hair, more attractive when wet, for the clinging strands encircled the nipples' darkened areolae like improvised wreaths, guiding our glance farther, to follow either the contours of the torso, narrowing at the waist, or the gently rippling sinews sheathing the ribs, and linger perhaps on the firm bulge of the belly, where the dark hollow of the navel and especially the wedge of pubic hair, pointing upward, might impede a farther descent of our glance, but this delay is far from final, because eyes, independent of will, always pick out the darkest and lightest points, they're created like that by nature, as are all our instincts, and so we finally reach the loins, and if we have a chance to linger, if our glance is cautious enough and he doesn't notice — but of course he will, because in a similar situation his eyes would do the same, but he may be generous and pretend he didn't mind, or, if he did he might turn away and put something there, or drop a word, meant to be casual but inappropriate enough to reveal his embarrassment — or, if his knowledge of human nature was so secure that, suspending all moral considerations, he'd simply let us tarry, then we'd love to linger for a while, scrutinizing this rather intricate region, hoping to savor every detail, to assess its possibilities, knowing well that our eyes' journey thus far had been but a deferment, anticipation, and preparation: now we have reached the most intimate object of our curiosity: this is our place, this is what we'd been longing for, only from here can we draw the knowledge necessary to evaluate the whole body; consequently, it would be no exaggeration to claim that even from a moral standpoint we have reached the most critical spot.