Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

But when I tried at this point to summarize what I did and didn't know about this mysterious and beautiful youth who over Dryope's shoulders was looking out of the picture, gazing longingly at someone, while Salmakis was watching him, filled with the same longing, and when it also became clear to me that neither of them would ever possess the object of their longing, then all I could ask was: Ye gods, what's the point of it all? if such a foolish question may be put to you, I felt as lost about my own feelings as the figures in the painting seemed to be confused about each other and themselves; stripped of my usual artful deceptions, I had no choice but to recognize in Salmakis' gaze, plain and direct, the gaze of Helene, my fiancée, as she tried with great longing, sadness, and understanding to absorb and make her own my every thought and gesture, while I, accursed and doomed, incapable of love no matter how much I loved her and, like the youth in the picture — alas, my beauty no match for his — not looking at her, not only was I not grateful for her love, but it downright irritated and disgusted me, and I was looking at someone else, of course someone else! and that someone, I might as well risk the highfalutin claim, excited me more than Helene's palpable love, because that someone promised to lead me not into a cozy family nest but into the murkiest depths of my instincts, into a jungle, into hell, among wild beasts, into the unknown, which always seems more important to us than the known, the reasonable, and the comprehensible; yet, while observing this emotional chaos within me, I could have thought of another story, no less plainly and directly out of my own life — to hell with these ancient tales and legends! I could have thought of a sweet-smelling woman whose name I must keep secret so as not to ruin her reputation, a woman who, in spite of my will, resolve, even desires, was at the center of my secret life, standing there as firmly, enchantingly, and coldly as fate is usually depicted in stylish pseudo-classical paintings, a woman who reminded me of Dryope most of all, the one who could not return my love, not with the same burning love I had for her, because she was in love, as deeply as I with her, with the man whom in these memoirs I mentioned rather misleadingly as my kind paternal friend and to whom I gave the name Claus Diestenweg, concealing his real identity because I was determined to reveal that it was not this woman whom he loved, with the kind of fervent love with which I could have loved her or the hopeless love she bore him, but I was the one he loved and wanted with an insane passion; and if on occasion he submitted to the woman's ardent desires, it was only to taste something of my love for her, to be my surrogate, as it were, to partake of something I had denied him; he loved me in the woman, while I, if I wanted to keep something of her for myself, was forced to love him, at least as a friend or a father, and thereby to feel what I would have to be like for that woman to love only me; although this incident took place in my early youth, we became deeply involved in it only after my arrival in Berlin, following Father's horrible deed and subsequent suicide, but then occurred another terrible tragedy which, though it could not eliminate the effects of the first, ended the story of our curious threesome, and then, because I lacked the strength or courage to die, I had to start a new life; but how dreary and empty, conventionally bourgeois, petty and false this life turned out to be! Or could it be, I wondered, that the story in which man is brought closer to what is divine in him is made of just such, or similar, human muddling and confusion, or just such a frightful tremor in the unattainable? is there nothing but tragedy? but then, what's the use of all this accumulated material, research, notes, all this paper, all these ideas? once past tragedy, we tend to admonish ourselves as if we were gods, but of course we're not even close to being gods; consequently, I could not tell who the youth in my picture was and couldn't even understand why the whole thing interested me so much; how could I possibly get beyond what only the gods can get past?

Still, I couldn't get the painting out of my mind.

As if solving a puzzle, considering not only the possible evidence but all the disqualifying factors as well, I concluded again and again that the youth was as beautiful as Eros, his beauty kept me in thrall, yet he could not be Eros, because he was sad like Hermaphroditos, but he couldn't be Hermaphroditos either, since he was holding Pan's pipe and Hermes' staff, then again, I countered, refuting an elusive opposition while fondly observing the youth's phallus, rendered with the delicate strokes found in miniatures, he couldn't really be Pan, if only because the great phallic god is never depicted as being so calmly immodest, his thighs spread apart and seen from the front, we always view him from the side or in a pose that conceals his member, which is logical as well as natural, since from the tip of his horn to the heel of his hoof he is one great phallus, so it would be both impossible and absurd for anyone to use paltry human judgment to decide what this phallus should look like in a painting— small or large, brown or white, thick or slender, dangling sideways over his testicles or stiffening upward like a red bludgeon; in my picture it was more like a handsome little jewel, untouched, like a hairless infant's, like his whole body, whose taut skin glistened with oil; when there was nothing more to ponder, not a single detail which I hadn't thoroughly scrutinized, either with my naked eyes or with a magnifying glass, not a single allusion I hadn't tried to clarify with the aid of scholarly books, to bring light into the dimness of my own ignorance and lack of erudition, I finally realized that it made very little difference to me who was portrayed in that picture; it wasn't their story that interested me, for the stories of Apollo, Hermes, Pan, and Hermaphroditos flow into one another like all the things I had intended to reveal about myself, and that, after all, is as it should be, and it wasn't even their humanly fallible bodies that interested me; it was the subject of my planned narrative, which seemed to be identical with that in the painting and was most clearly present in the eyes of its figures, eyes which, though bound to their bodies, were no longer corporeal, their gaze being somehow beyond their bodies, transcendent; well anyway, to pursue this line of thought I should have set out for the place where the youth's gaze as well as mine were directed, the woods, to see who was standing among the trees, who was it whom this youth loved so much and so hopelessly while he was loved just as hopelessly by someone else? what was this all about? well, we were back at the original question again, but I realized I couldn't make my own life's no doubt foolish questions more momentous by concealing them in some antique mural, because they would keep crawling out from the wall — all right, then, enough! let's talk about things as they are, no pretense, let's talk about what is ours — our own body, our own eyes; I shuddered at this thought, and at the same time I discovered something I'd been blind to up to then, though with a magnifying glass I had gone over the youth's calves, toes, arms, mouth, eyes, and forehead repeatedly, with my ruler measured the angle and direction of his glance, and with intricate calculations identified the spot where the mysterious figure had to be standing; what I hadn't noticed, simply failed to notice, was that the two ringlets falling on his forehead were actually two tiny horns, that's right, which means that he must be Pan after all, yes, Pan, no doubt about it, except this certainty no longer interested me in the least.

And neither did the forest.

Standing at dusk by the window of my flat on Weissenburgerstrasse— feigning even to myself a certain absentmindedness, so that I could always retreat into the wings of the curtain without having to feel ashamed about spying — to be able to witness undisturbed the scene that took place twice a week, I felt the same gently fluttering excitement I had when studying the painting, because, just as in a classical story where there's always an objective, down-to-earth designation of the time and place of the occurrence, however abstracted and rarefied the human events being dealt with, I could be sure that the little interlude on my street would always take place not only at dusk but on Tuesdays and Fridays; my own excitement arrived according to this timetable, I could feel it in my throat, in my belly, and around my groin, and I could no longer tell which image was more important, the one of the antique mural or the one I'd call real and could see come to life by looking through my window; at any rate, this is where I would have begun my narrative, with this scene, though I would have liked to leave out the observer and his creative feelings, so similar to sexual arousal; I didn't want to treat the story as if someone were actually witnessing it, but instead indirectly, as it unfolded of itself, always the same way, repeating itself, beginning with the arrival of the horse-drawn wagon: on nearby Wörther Platz the gas lamps were already burning, but the lamplighter still had to traverse the square, with his forked pole uncover the peaked glass bells, and with the same long fork turn up the bluish-yellow flames before he got to our street; it wasn't dark yet, daylight still lingered when in the shadow of young plane trees lining the street, and just in front of the entrance to the basement butcher shop across the street, the closed white wagon came to a halt and the slim coachman, after throwing the reins over the shiny brake handle, jumped off his seat; in winter, or if a cold wind was blowing, he would quickly pull two horse blankets from under the seat and spread them over the horses' backs, so that while the scene was taking place the sweating animals wouldn't catch cold — this bit with the blankets was omitted in the mild weather of spring or fall or when the ruddy twilight of a warm summer evening still played with the breeze among the trees and on the blackened roofs of the mean tenements; then he would take the whip and, after first cracking it against his boot, stick it next to the reins; by this time the three women would be standing on the sidewalk near the wagon, but since I was watching from my fifth-floor window, from the shadow of the roof, the wagon blocked my view of their shapely figures; moments earlier the three heads had popped up, one after the other, as the women emerged from the depth of the steep staircase leading to the basement; the heaviest of the three, by no means fat, was the mother, who, from a distance at least, hardly looked older than her unmarried daughters, more like an older sister of the twin girls, who in build and movement were perfectly identical, and only from close up could one tell them apart by the color of their hair, one being an ash-blond, the other's blond hair darkened by a tinge of red, but they had the same, somewhat blank blue eyes set in the full, white expanse of their faces; I knew them, though I had never made it down to the cold bowels of their white-tiled shop; once in a while I had seen them on the street when during their lunch break they went for a stroll in the square, arm in arm, their skirts swaying evenly around their waists, or when I peeked through the barred cellar window and they, like two wild goddesses, were standing behind the counter, their blouse sleeves rolled up to their elbows, carving bloody chunks of meat; and thanks to my good old landlady Frau Hübner, who cooked for me and who bought cold cuts and other meats there, I knew everything about these women, everything that could be gleaned from kitchen gossip; not that I wanted to include in my story those intimate details known to everyone on our street; what interested me was the mere unfolding of the scene, its mute choreography, as it were, and the series of exciting relationships it intimated.