Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

And it was not enough to be on guard with all of his senses.

Not far from the pebbled walk that separated the grove hiding the ruined cloister from the rose garden, redolent with aromatic and concentrated sweetness, were some polluted areas. During the day, people relieved themselves on its trails and brought their children and dogs, screaming, whimpering with impatience and stamping their feet, to pee and shit; women who needed to would quickly exchange their bloody cottons for clean ones. If in his excitement he did not lose his scent — that is, if an unexpected emotional agitation did not reduce his olfactory alertness — these smells warned him well in advance.

Not that way.

This is where I’ve got to, this is where I am now, he scolded himself in the conventional human way; I’ve immersed myself in the stench of excrement, perspiration, menstruation, and urine; I must discover my only, unvarnished reality while roaming around among shitty papers and bloody bunches of cotton.

Enjoyment of the search and of self-torture replaced pleasure, though he knew that with his constant seeking he was only trying to find a priggish sentimental way around his own brutality. Seeing others’ brutality, he wanted to conjure up his own. Not possible, his body grumbled, dissatisfied; it wouldn’t let him.

His beastly self worked in a system parallel to his emotional self.

The stench of others could not touch him.

At most, he would go not this way but that way. He would not give up discovering and understanding the functional principles of his own body on behalf of mere trifles; he could not relinquish his need to know. Now his beastly self, now his emotional one reported on its painful sense of something lacking, and he could not resolve questions of morality for either of them. He could not accept, could not take possession of something he did not know; yet how could he reject it if he did not even know whether it belonged in his personality, with which he was just becoming acquainted. And what could he do with his frigid self, which had nothing to do with either of his two lives, neither the emotional daytime self nor the bestial nocturnal self, for he had no appropriate sentiments for either, and about pleasure and suffering he remained as indifferent as he had been about generally accepted moral principles.

As if his thinking or his soul had characteristics that were outside his personality. Or characteristics that he sensed or perceived as having little to do with the struggles raging within him that, depending on their final outcome, would form the conditions of his personality’s life.

Hands reached after him from out of the darkness; unexpectedly they were thrust between his legs and thighs to feel the quality of his flesh, the state of his cock, and, mainly, the size of his cock. Somebody gently took hold of his wrist — he couldn’t see the man’s face because he was so close with his hot breath — and quite unexpectedly placed it in his palm while at the same time trying to touch him with his wet lips. He rejected this, quickly brushing everything and everybody off him. Yet he could not reject the surprising feel of the hot, unfamiliar cock — well proportioned, with its swelling veins, taut frenum, and foreskin jammed up before the rim of the bulb — or the intense, profound feeling that another human being had placed his pulsating fate in his hand just like that. Indeed, he grabbed it as a baby would grab a rattle. This he could not forget and therefore could not deny his awareness of the cock’s exceptional qualities or uniqueness either. He learned this from his own cautious, stiff, frightened little hands, and a few overbearing forceful men and happenstance sufficed for the lesson.

Every cock differs from every other cock the way men do from one another, though each cock is always surprisingly different from the man it belongs to. The memory of these oddities kept coming back to him, but he did not know what it meant to uncover them. It was impossible to forget these differences even among fully dressed people. From then on, he knew that clothing concealed something about which everyone wants vital information. As if with men’s cocks the philosopher’s stone had been placed forcefully in his hands but he did not know what to do with it because he was stupid. And it was no help that the very idea of touching a strange person, especially a man, filled him with disgust — touching his lips, his stubbly skin, the first, slippery drops of sperm oozing out after a prolonged erection and leaving stains everywhere. He also refrained from closely inspecting his own prick. While washing, he deliberately looked elsewhere. When erect, his prick became so sensitive that he could no longer separate pain from pleasure. Once, after an erection of several hours, it became stuck in his underpants and he had to pull it free.

Once he’d discovered the playing field, he could not resist returning to it, tempting and challenging the insurmountable disgust he had for his own body no less than for those of all other men. He had no such disgust for women’s bodies — these experiences did not affect his feelings for women — yet even regarding women he could not erase the knowledge culled from his new experiences. As had happened before, it was hard for him not to go down to the subway toilets during the day and not to pay close attention to everything while around him the men pretended to be only urinating.

He did likewise.

The truth is, I had two interrupted lives, he would say later of himself, one proved to be not enough, the other promised to be too much, and in both I felt very much like a stranger. But now I knew it was the end, while I was running from the enormous, athletic older man, his chest and shoulders almost bursting out of his checkered shirt, his fist like a hammer. I must get away from here at any cost, my other self kept repeating desperately to itself like a mantra. If I can get out of the yellow-flowered Japanese acacia grove and reach the riverside promenade, I’m saved.

He ran toward the lights, saw himself running toward the lights.

In no situation in his life could he have escaped this always-watching icy countenance. He will never come back here again, he promised this countenance. It cannot be that I’m repeating my mother’s life.

When he unexpectedly cleared the thicket.

He stopped at the end of the trail and panted, freely, aloud. He was safe.

He inhaled deeply the heavy fragrance of the river water; he had won. And once again he had to acknowledge that the moment contradicted his previous expectations. No one blocked his way and nobody kissed him on his neck. And this he regretted. He could be more ashamed of his ridiculousness, but he could not sink deeper in his shame than this. No one’s steps were heard on the path along the riverbank, packed hard with black slag. An ordinary night on the island, far from both halves of the city, between the two huge arms of the river; if only a huge flood would cover and carry away his body. His stomach, his testicles hurt. It must be very late. Once again long hours must have passed like minutes with meaningless activity; he could never properly gauge the relationship between time and action. He would stay another half hour, he said to himself, and then go home. There is no such thing as good expectations. Again, he’d go home with many experiences, many things lived through, but the repeatedly granted half hours quickly filled the entire night, and he failed to meet a single soul. I have nobody, and I’ll never find anybody either. He was thirsty, sweaty, and hungry, he should have gone to one of the drinking fountains because he was all dried out. One solitary human being, he prayed, begged, and implored, like a monk.

I really can’t go lower than this, he threatened himself.