Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Pardon me, my dear, but that is ridiculous.

I do make myself ridiculous with this man, but how can I stay away from him.

Actually, she could not have expressed what she had heard in the night, or what she was looking for, or whether she’d find in her memory what her hearing continually whispered to her from behind her inner speech or offered in place of inner speech — what she desired so ardently that she’d want to sing it.

It’s impossible to sing in general, dear child, you should really understand this and accept it as an axiom.

She’d like to give musical form to her need to weep.

Just because you won’t accept it doesn’t mean it isn’t an axiom. It still remains an axiom that you must give everything a form.

She had no reason to be bitter; she should have been truly happy with this man. She patted her tight little belly several times with her spread fingers to check whether she might have suddenly conceived.

You have to give form even to formlessness, don’t you understand. Why don’t you understand.

You can sing only something and only somehow, Gyöngyvér, and if you don’t find an original form for it, said Margit Huber, raising her voice and pounding wildly on the piano to show this stupid girl what happens to sounds without any original form, chaos, that’s what happens, nothing, nada, and then all your weltschmerz isn’t worth a brass farthing. Your enthusiasm is also worthless, worth nothing, hysteria, zilch, do you understand, dear, nothing, she yelled as she banged frantically on the piano.

But she hadn’t relinquished her ethereal smile, which still managed to enchant Gyöngyvér.

When you take a breath just before a phrase, you should already know what you are going to do with it.

Those two F sharps, for example, slipped away again at the end.

Careful, don’t grasp the sound from below, Gyöngyvér.

Instead of the sought-after forms, Gyöngyvér Mózes found all sorts of things that only made her want to weep more. How can I know why and what I do when I’m singing, or why I can’t do something. For the sake of forming the right sounds, time should be suspended; she was just chasing a little girl’s wishes, empty daydreams. How wonderful it would be to become a famous singer instantly, all her efforts in that direction suddenly and simultaneously to bear fruit, and she, with her grand feelings, appearing on the stage of every great opera house in the world. Little Médi would stare at her with wide eyes, wouldn’t she. She could see herself getting out of the taxi, gathering the collar of her mink coat close about her neck, and not giving a single autograph to anyone.

These grand feelings included the belief that she actually spoke Italian; all that was needed was enlightenment.

No big deal.

Sometimes she tested it; she waited long and patiently for her mind to become enlightened, the mind that used her present feelings to conceal many feelings from her earlier life.

When she concentrated long enough on finding what lurked behind these feelings, she saw clearly that consciousness of things past glimmered through them. It was only from her earlier life that she could summon the idea that she’d once been a man, Italian and castrated, and only infinite modesty and bashfulness kept her from making contact with the genuine knowledge she had accumulated in her former life. All right, she doesn’t know the words in Italian, or doesn’t know their meaning since in her former life she did not know Hungarian, but gradually everything will come to her and then, based on her present Hungarian knowledge, she’ll be able to analyze all the things she’d known before. It’s not a matter of her learning them, because Italian words and Italian grammatical structures are already in her brain. She must find the way to reach them somehow. Whenever she struggled to find her way back to forgotten knowledge, making crude mistakes and discovering silly technical inadequacies in the process, problems appeared in her consciousness that were the very ones to which Margit Huber continuously called her attention and which nonetheless she could not solve.

You’re always after success, my child.

But it’s impossible to note the many things you asked me to, all at the same time, and to remember them.

Stop sniveling. Feeling sorry for yourself won’t help a bit.

If every single day you warmed up your voice by practicing scales several times, you can be sure you’d find it.

If only she could at last sing freely, instead of this eternal practicing of scales.

Maybe if you didn’t make me stop so often I could sing.

After so much uncontrolled shouting, I can’t be expected to have a voice, she thought, very content with her exhausted and naked body. As if in her great self-satisfaction she were saying, all right, so I’m not talented; no matter how much I may blame Médike I’m a complete antitalent, irresponsible, and the laziest person in the world; and it’s true I don’t practice enough, and anyway I imagine I’m a great natural talent who doesn’t need all this practicing. I’ve got a great body and I don’t lose my musicality even when fucking, nobody can doubt that; and this time this guy really fucked me but good, I think in this great fucking session I finally found my match.

No matter how much I rail against him or he pretends he doesn’t want me.

For him, at least, I am one hot female.

You undress them and right away see what you can expect. That’s good for the woman, she can see by looking at their briefs.

And now he’s fucked my brains out and I’ve screamed my voice to pieces because of him. And Jesus, did I ever try to hold myself back. Not to harm his delicate ears, such a gentleman. He was screaming too, like an animal; no wonder I’ve gone deaf.

She felt she did not love this man either, no, not really; she felt only contempt for him. And this stupid feeling was frustrating her intentions. That’s why she does not like what she nevertheless wants so much from him.

If we keep this up much longer, I’ll lose my hearing, not just my voice.

A strong smell of catnip pervaded the warm summer night air trapped in Mrs. Szemző’s rooms.

Now of course he’s fallen asleep exhausted, my sweet, my darling, in his own good smell, oh my God, look at him.

If she could, she’d have run back to be with him on the bed in the maid’s room, this wonderful man who caused her those insane climaxes and whom not one of her nerves could get enough of. No, she couldn’t get enough of him. She encouraged her nerve endings: tomorrow, later, in a minute, next week, everything will come true, ripen, and she is very grateful to him for this, for this promising future. Everything she needed for singing, her heart, her mind, her lungs were full of him, her head and her chest almost exploded with the memory of his fabulous fragrance now emanating mostly from her own skin, her short-cropped hair and her dark, rich pubic hair.

A great singer should be more careful with such unbridled screaming sessions.

Good thing I’m not a great singer yet, she said to herself, and until I am I can fuck to my heart’s content.

As if she had a terrible, strong suspicion that she’d have to squeeze all her stupid artistry into this woeful world so as not to be just a coarse female, a stupid little bitch who doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life.

She wouldn’t even need men. That’s why she should reach the pinnacle of the art of singing, so she wouldn’t need them anymore.

Stay on the hilltop, Gyöngyvér, sweetheart, if you can’t climb Mount Everest, and you can see for yourself you can’t. No backsliding, no constant tripping up on little stupidities.

I’m not Médike’s sweetheart.

Except for her ambition, though, she has nothing; she can’t give up her ambition just because she lacks the necessary technical skills.