Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

But then they irradiated him again; with their bright rapture they alerted his muscles; he thirsted to know what the two of them were doing at that moment, together, against him, as they immersed themselves in each other’s wickedness and milked the last drop of enjoyment from it.

Without me, without me.

He was howling, writhing silently on the floor because they had shut him out of their wickedness, or because he should turn against himself with his own wickedness. The damned parquet floor creaked in his ears with the shared rhythm of their wickedness, their lovemaking — in which he was Mária Szapáry, so he would not have to abandon Elisa. On the floor, he lived through Mária Szapáry’s experience with Elisa, like animals; then he sobbed dryly when he noticed that for some minutes his little boy had been standing in the doorway in his nightshirt, startled awake; he had awakened the boy with his awful condition.

The boy had been watching him with wide-eyed amazement and dread.

If this little boy dares ask again, if he once again opens his mouth and begins his nerve-racking wails, where is his mother, why doesn’t his mother come home, then he’ll kill him. Tear him apart, rip him to pieces with his teeth. It would be best to kill him right away. The little boy knew, his father’s lies notwithstanding. Or it had been useless to tell him the truth, the whole truth, so as not to beat around the bush. The boy did not believe him, did not listen to him, only waited for his mother to return. Just as these horrible women would not let him rest — Szapáry virtually possessed him, dwelt in him — now the two of them had spun him around and his little boy crawled into him, dwelt in his flesh.

He had to see what the little boy would do; he knew, knew everything but also deceived himself.

These days, he and the little boy were like flesh within flesh, like perfect emotional mirror images of each other.

If he stayed a father, he would most certainly kill him, cut him down, so he wouldn’t have to see him and would leave no witness alive, but he had a secret compulsion to metamorphose into a mother for the little boy’s future.

The pleasure that the two women bestowed on each other not only kept his consciousness awake but also alerted his last humane reserves, for their pleasure had grown much larger than his passionate suffering.

He did not know that one could suffer even in a brief, induced slumber.

For that reason alone he had to put an end to this.

He did have a pistol.

But first he would kill them.

And even before that, he wanted to tell Madzar the whole terrible story, from the beginning almost to the very end, leaving out what he was preparing to do lest Lojzi try to hold him back by force; he would not have that.

So that nobody besides him in this fucking world would ever know about it.

He’s the only one I’ve got left.

And this too was not a coincidence; it had to be a secret signal or otherworldly hint that, after so many years and so completely unexpectedly, Madzar was standing before him on the deck of the Carolina , exuding confidence. But of course he’s on his way to America. When he is most needed. How can he be stopped. And then he did not tell him, did not even begin to, because he found no connecting path or witty turn of phrase from their own heavy and worrisome present situation, no opening sentence for his story. And on the next occasion, when again Madzar appeared on the deck or they arrived together, when he had the table set in the command salon and they sat opposite each other in the fluttering candlelight, he blessed his former distrust which had made him not tell the story.

Suddenly he realized there was no living language in which he could tell it to this reticent, vigorous, strong man. He had no one left. Every feeling proved to be an illusion. It would have felt great to squeal on Elisa to this bullheaded man. To spill every one of her filthy little secrets, their infernal happiness, the disgust he felt for her, the hatred and contempt. To tell him that already on their honeymoon in Alexandria he had cheated on Elisa. All he had to do was cross the poorly lit Corniche, with the uniform noise of the waves, and grope his way down a dark, urine-smelling set of stairs.

If he told this story to Madzar, he would have used up the last remaining bit of love or illusion that he and Madzar retained from their childhood or perhaps could not abandon.

It did not help to take an inventory of his acquaintances, lovers, and all the people who had abandoned him. Or those whom he had abandoned, even though they loved him or he loved them; he found no one among them. And in that case, he could not vomit up all the human beauty and all the human filth onto someone’s feet, it would be impossible.

All in vain, it was all in vain.

It would probably be better, morally more correct too, to kill his sleeping little boy first and then do away with himself.

But he could barely catch his breath, saying, well, I’ve calmed down a little and at least half a year has gone by, it’s time for me to accept that she didn’t leave on a whim and will soon be back, but that she’s left for good, she’s gone.

And on top of it all, here is the bright, sunny, life-filled sensation of a horrible summer morning. As he stands in the living room of their apartment with the telephone in his hand, and does not understand.

Bygone seconds were passing.

But he does not understand what Mária Szapáry, at the other end of the line, is saying, what sort of clinic she is talking about. On such an ordinary Sunday morning.

Then she finished what she had to say; there was silence on the line.

Fate had taken its revenge on the women; their fucking fate screwed them but good.

So what had happened, and what was he supposed to do. Revenge had been taken for everything done to him and to his little boy, and it was very nice of fate to have done this, it was wonderful. Life was worth living after all, because there was such a thing as revenge, and God has given us murder as our freedom.

And then he was saved, at least.

At last, at last.

Summoned by Szapáry’s telephone call, now he was mindlessly racing with his car up and down the empty, freshly watered Sunday-morning streets and roads. In his confusion — at once disgraceful happiness and uplifting dread — he felt the breath of freedom on his skin, and he lost his way a number of times before he reached the neurological clinic.

Let it end, if it has come to its end.

Or it shouldn’t depend on him, though everything is already lost. He knew it; he knew what would happen, though his revenge was sweet. There was no hope that one fine day Elisa would return with her little suitcase. Yet she looks at him with her innocently open and indifferent visage as if nothing has happened for more than half a year.

Why must he still love this horrid being so much.

Or why must revenge taste as sweet as honey.

Why does he love this human creature, lacking every moral standard, so much that he can’t give up hope even at the penultimate moment.

She comes back to torture him even more.

He could no longer cherish even this little hope.

There will be no new beginning, there is no such luck, only pure disaster prevails on earth, and everything is lost.

I’ve put my foot in it again.

Lady Erna did not know exactly what she had put her foot in, but she felt in the stiff silence that she had.

Actually, she had a high opinion of her own heft, including her sturdy feet.

And even if she knew what she had done there was no reason to blame her for anything. To her overweening self, the decent Bellardi boy was not an independent figure whose fate one spends time thinking about and possibly even identifying with a bit. He simply belonged to the populous team of young men who performed certain personal and scientific services for Dr. Lehr. They too were considered devotees of tactical conformity. Following the professor’s instruction, they zealously studied the source, the works of Baltasar Gracián. They translated him from the Spanish or Latin originals, from French and German, or made extracts from his writings based on the old texts. They jotted down and then typed out multiple copies of Professor Lehr’s relevant comments. They compiled small catechisms from the original and not easily understood texts of El Discreto , putting them side by side with Dr. Lehr’s aphoristic notes. And as happens with other copied and commentated literature, after a certain time one could not exactly tell where the Gracián text ended and the Lehr interpretation began. At any rate, adages were born from sentences such as, few manage to avoid the guile of Fortuna, or, thus great fortunes usually end in ignominy.