Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

But once, in a single instance, they both wound up on the other shore, from which, in the moral sense, neither of them could return.

Take everything easy, casually; you can possess only what does not touch you. Don’t bother with forgetting; within three days even pain loses its sting.

Who else in Mohács could say such a thing; given his behavior, nobody but he.

In company, a serious person does not burden his fellow humans with matters they should take seriously. Just touches on them, barely. When he turned serious, he made sure with his style and tone that either the joke or its calculated effect, like a snarl, would surface on cue, revealing his boldest interests or power-hungry aspirations.

Everyone could see what he was up to, and his impudence increased the impact.

Compared to his former condition, however, Captain Bellardi was visibly tired, had become almost dejected.

Because of his studies abroad and his completed projects, Madzar saw perhaps more clearly than others the realistic scale of Bellardi’s role playing. It was as if the other man had always broadcast his aptitudes and characteristics on two parallel programs. He probably did this out of self-defense. His upbringing suited neither his personality nor his actual social standing. But with a few playacting maneuvers he could permanently maintain the appearance of a person enjoying an exceptional, privileged status; and in this lawless, corrupt environment, saturated with hatefulness, insults, humiliations, and petty jealousies, others must have needed him to maintain appearances as much as he did. On one program, his upbringing progressed mechanically from its original source, the royal princess who was his mother; on the other program, his needful personality made headway in the same vacuous manner. And, as befits conditions in a monarchical police state, a third person supervised both mother and son: a secret-police agent.

To keep personality and upbringing from initiating a forbidden dialogue.

Above his white-and-dark-blue uniform glittering with gold braid, he presented a charming adolescent face that had been creased and probably quite tormented. Every time they met, this creased look hit Madzar in the heart; he loved Bellardi for it, and it conjured up their love-filled teenage years. Although time could not change the picture he carried within him, on Bellardi’s real face he viewed the end of his own youth. He also saw with his own eyes that Bellardi’s timeless face had grown stronger while his essential being had not changed at all. Except that in the meantime everything had been decided; the number of open questions had diminished, nothing was retrievable or reparable, and the interwoven links of Bellardi’s life’s deeds could no longer be integrated into his being.

There he was, abandoned, shivering, in the light of day.

Madzar saw this in his mind’s eye as the shivering of his own being.

The inner structure of their suffering could not have been very different, and this increased the aversion they felt for each other. Bellardi’s splendid marriage had collapsed miserably after a few weeks, and, Madzar thought, I cannot find anyone with whom to share my fate.

The difference is not so great, he thought.

As Bellardi approached him, he could see clearly that a humiliated, failing self showed through the eternal cheerfulness, and this aroused the suspicion that Bellardi had used this sort of illusory appearance much earlier, as early as their childhood, in order to conceal his raging suffering.

Nothing can remain a secret, but performing in public was one of Bellardi’s obligations, and so he had probably become accustomed to the possibility that people eyeing him, scrutinizing his features, were in possession of insidious information about him.

As if they were mutely asking what could have happened in Alexandria.

The news of the interrupted honeymoon had quickly reached Mohács, and when Madzar came home it was almost the first story he heard from his mother. The baroness Elisa had left behind only a one-line message when she abandoned Bellardi in their suite at the Hotel Prince de Galles on Alexandria’s Corniche. People dared to speak of what might have happened there only in vague allusions. They read the newspaper reports carefully but did not much enjoy the pervasive tittle-tattle that accompanied them. They would not venture to reinterpret the story with their customary animosity or deploy their eternal malice- and admiration-filled envy for high society. Yet they could not resist making embarrassing, deliberately equivocal insinuations. It began with the charge that before the wedding too much fuss had been made about the celebration, the young couple was too beautiful, there were many too many reports in society papers, and the couple’s fall was too fast and frightening. Had they discussed the matter frankly, the gossipers would have had to jettison their illusions about beauty and elegance and cancel their subscriptions to The Hungarian Ladies’ Journal or New Times ; then they could have acknowledged their own viciousness and profound unhappiness. It wasn’t clear, though, how the Bellardis’ domestic peace was reestablished only a few weeks after the interrupted honeymoon in Africa, or who was to blame when the expectant young wife then left the couple’s new home in Buda. The society papers maintained a deep silence about these events.

In brief, somewhere, for some people, exciting things were happening, and therefore no one could resist talking about them.

In Mohács, women liked to talk not about complications like those in their own lives, but about poor Laci’s mother-in-law, old Baroness Koháry, who had such a peculiar nature that she could never warm to a man. Well, there’s no help for it, one must be careful when picking the family you marry into.

Beauty isn’t everything; a woman doesn’t have to be an international beauty like this Elisa.

It’s not for nothing that the saying goes, you may be looking at the daughter, but you’ll be marrying the mother.

People noted with some relief when this Elisa came to her senses and returned to her abandoned husband along with her baby; but their indignation was all the greater when three years later the news reached Mohács that she had entrusted her little son to the maid and, without a word, left her husband for good. To leave such a handsome, honest man.

And what a good son.

Madzar’s mother could not imagine how there might be so much evil in the world.

A woman like that should be drowned.

As if she knew exactly what she was talking about but didn’t want to say it out loud.

Drown her in water, as you would a cat, for a woman like that has no heart.

Of course, Mrs. Madzar meant this emotional remark only as a stern warning.

Think well, my dear and only son, think carefully about whom you want to marry.

She did not say this aloud, because she was afraid of her son, who often shouted her down, hold your tongue, Mother, stop buzzing in my ear so much. Even so, Madzar never forgot the warning.

As if he deliberately made it sink to lower, deeper layers.

Once he started roaming around the sunlit streets of the city of his birth again, under the round elms that gave so little shade, beneath closed windows and lowered shutters, past the massive gates and formidable fortresslike carriage entrances, his steps accompanied by the implacable frenzy of barking dogs locked in their courtyards and aroused by one another’s rage, Madzar could have no doubts about the local scale of unhappiness.

His interest in urban matters stemmed from the character of this peculiarly settled small town, yet when he had lived abroad he could recall only the broader picture, the ingenuity of the town’s structure, the twittering of swallows under the spacious sky.