Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

It could not have been hallucination, because no trace of happiness was left between them.

But at least the gift of hell’s enjoyment, if his life could provide nothing else.

The situation was intolerable. They both suffered terribly from each other, from their own selves when in the presence of the other. The more they tried not to wound each other, the more infernal the enjoyment became, giving it to each other at the cost of restraining their aversion and suppressing their emotion. They slowed down. As if love’s utmost value, passion, were draining out of their raw desire and pleasure. Mutual tolerance and consideration made it pale and more tender; it slowed down but spread out, flooding everything, and it did not cease or grow calm.

As if in place of passion they had reached the combustible matter slumbering at the very bottom of their minds, as if they had touched the body’s glowing magma.

How could she have left him.

They did torture each other all right, but they would have been hard put to find two other people with the same perseverance, strength, and irrepressible liveliness whom they could have tortured.

Elisa’s new whim seemed to be that she had left him and that was that; now she needed love to cling to, to the end. As if the female called Mária Szapáry did not even exist and Elisa had merely invented her so that she could torture him the more.

He did not understand it, though he did comprehend it.

She had thrown him into an unknown circle of hell so they could live through the very depth of the relationship they were now going to lose forever.

Much as if he had to undergo a final or great test simply in order to fail it.

Earlier on, one of them had to escape, now he, now she, so that both could gather strength and return.

How could he have thought that she’d left him or could have left him.

Or what would have weakened their mutual attachment. Did that terrible female know more about Elisa than he did; what was it that she knew, and what were the two of them doing at this very moment. He could see before him what they were doing. Although he was not curious to know, did not want to see it, could not escape it, with every fiber of his muscles he experienced what they were doing. And he trampled himself so deeply into pain that his loss was greater than death; from lack of pleasure and from pain he grew ill, feverish, shaking with a permanent fever, and his illness so sensitized him that his clear-sightedness was no mere delusion presumably.

Clear-sightedness struck him like lightning.

He had considered it but did not know when it would fell him.

It came upon him, and then he knew what was happening between them, and what the end of everything would be like; he did not have to see it to feel it and experience it. Here he is, sobbing, knocking himself against the floor and howling with his head swaying, so he won’t have to see what he can’t see anyway; won’t have to think about it, look at it with his eyes wide open, sense it in his testicles, in the roots of his hair, on the aching skin of the soles of his feet, in the hollow spaces of his penis, in his tumescence; but whatever happens he must remain silent so that their little boy won’t notice anything and won’t awaken from his sweet dreams.

The pleasure the two women were giving to each other now appeared as a physical sensation.

Because he patterned what he was imagining on what happened between him and his wife only weeks earlier when in their pain and prompted by their pain they had enjoyed each other. What was peculiar was that now he felt it very differently, in a way he couldn’t have imagined before. There was no such reality in his sensual experiences or there could not have been such reserves.

After a while he could not help thinking that he was experiencing not his own nervous fits but the women’s attacks; after all, he wasn’t seeing what he felt. Thrusts were coming from outside like gusts of wind; his ability to experience them was absent from his imagination, and the two women were doing this to him deliberately. Elisa was torturing him from the outside. Indeed, she could have had no greater revenge. With their bodies stuck together and trembling with happiness, they were sending Morse signals, would waken him deliberately when he finally managed to doze off, magnetize him with their mutual bodily reality and irradiate him with their happiness.

He must realize he could expect nothing from Elisa anymore; the two of them had become one, and they used this to torture him because his unhappiness made them enjoy each other even more.

Time became endless during those weeks. He could not interrupt it by sleeping; at best a sedative helped a little, but there was no starting anew, he kept shaking with exhaustion, became greatly agitated. His testicles had swollen to worrisome proportions and become ruddy, which he found especially disgusting in himself. He averted his face from the sight as if nature were slapping him in the face with this prank. He was so disgusted with his own corporeality and with his blinded sensual excitements that he stayed dressed even at night to avoid having to see his body; he would not wash up to avoid touching it. Elisa had a bone-handled, gilded pair of scissors in the bathroom. Mesmerized, he looked at it for a long time. But he wanted to save himself from this, if only because of his little boy; not to let blood spurt, not to let the boy find him like that.

He did not go to confession, even though he wanted to be free of the shame and degradation, no matter how high the price.

He felt that he could hardly restrain his own hand. When he writhed on the parquet floor of the living room, glowing in sunshine or lamplight, he saw himself from the outside, silently, as if he were an epileptic.

He had nothing to live for.

Silently, whimpering, occasionally whining.

Yet the next day he might shower normally, wash the bulb of his penis, stinking under the foreskin from the continuous erections, and with nothing woeful in his face he would go to Vienna, knock off another five days of service on the Carolina . He pleaded with God but could not pray to him; he called on that goddamn God, though he knew that something else, not the scissors, not self-mutilation, not self-punishment, but only one thing would satisfy him.

Only murder.

He was very cautious, he did not go to confession and did not go near a church. Lest Jesus Christ or the saints or Mary or the Franciscans get involved. He knew there was another, incomprehensibly sober and mendacious life that his church supported. He had fallen out of it, out of this sober and mendacious world, but because of his little boy he would have to force himself back into it. He did not go to his confessor because he did not want to be diverted. To take his coat, not to stay here as they irradiated him with their happiness, that’s what he wanted, to go when they rushed at him with their pleasure, to break down the apartment door on them and bump them off in their great, noisy happiness like two mad dogs.

By the time his muscles tired of the rhythmic spasms, his completely purposeless and disgusting erection had become so strong and painful that he had to free himself of it somehow.

If he had to touch it with his hand, he would have vomited.

But after a while, even without a sedative, his limbs relaxed with fatigue, his enormous arms and thighs as well as his furrowed features. These parts of his body had to rest for a while to preserve the pain. He lay stiffly, like an uprooted tree. He breathed loudly so he wouldn’t shout even more loudly. Actually, he could not hear his own rhythmic howls. His consciousness still had a clean spot in which he could comprehend the lovely entirety of his existence. He was so dehydrated that he had no more saliva, snot, or tears. And still he had no answer to the question why Elisa had done this to him.