Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

To disregard physicality.

Klára did not reciprocate his admiration for her body with equivalent attention or passion. It did not occur to her to ask whether her body might not be the object of Simon’s worship. Or how she might look for an object of reciprocity in a man’s body if she had not already found it; frankly, she did not think she’d find anything or had to look for anything, or should serve him in any way.

Perhaps the process of male erection interested her, or anyway that’s what she showed some interest in. The way the rising blood level makes the otherwise impalpable affect of the other person perceptible. First, it tightens and then slowly pulls back the foreskin across the increasing glans penis to bare it and expose it to the outside world, to the point of possible injury.

The emblem of universal functioning in reference to a single individual.

I shall be the almighty outside world; let my inner world be his outside world.

And so on.

Perhaps the man’s pathological bashfulness and penchant for concealment hindered her in the free admiration of the erection process. Or perhaps her profound distrust of pathos, her own inexplicable disgust at the sight of any organic function, any throbbing or pulsing anywhere in the circulatory system. They also sensed that they most misunderstood each other in this area, genteel prudery not understanding proletarian prudery; this they understood well. Moreover, Simon’s glans penis was not alabaster, not pale red and not deep purple but flaming red, which is not rare among black-haired, white-skinned men.

It bloomed garishly above his body like a scarlet flower.

They would have liked to stay away from the terrain of their constant misunderstandings, but given their constant compulsion to have contact, they could not help getting things wrong all the time.

They anticipated fear, yet they flooded each other with pure goodness and willingness to conform — to the point where they did not know what they were afraid of, what frightened them so much; perhaps their fear was groundless.

As if an evil angel were forcing them to name what was bad in the other and pay no attention to what was good.

When emotional words slipped out inadvertently, Simon quickly retracted them — no, beat them back, superstitiously trying to protect their shared perfection. He was protecting her not from pathos but from rotten petit-bourgeois expressions, which he could not tolerate. He would have been happy to bite them in half, along with his tongue, filter them out or swallow them; he did not cosset her with words, he left that to his tongue and his hands, and that way he could adore himself even more immoderately for being so infinitely firm and manly.

Klára very much needed this strong cosseting, though at heart she did not appreciate that it referred to her body. But there was no word to express what made her happy, it also being the source of her unhappiness. Or the other way around. Why would her happiness, of all things, stop her from relinquishing her unhappiness. There were no common, useful expressions for this feeling, and the most frequently used ones disgusted her. Why call her sweet; she was not sweet, or darling. She was not an angel; she was everything but an angel, even as a little girl she had never wanted to be an enchanting fairy. She was nobody’s little squirrel or ladybug, and most definitely nobody’s better half.

It is possible that the man’s gaunt, lean, powerful, and almost pathologically bony body did not impress her. Or men’s ungainly bodies in general. She would cautiously check which sensation belonged to which particular body part. As if she were indifferent only to those parts of the body that aroused her and made her feel passion. But she did not consciously recognize this; it was as if she diverted her attention, as it were, from certain parts of the body. The man’s sharp critical intellect, his microscopically focused attention which enabled him to retain the smallest details, that was all right, as were his rough manners, swearing, vulnerability, and brutality, which one could not take very seriously, all of his cheap proletarian mentality, his prudery, garrulousness, and even occasional physical violence, which she endured with a certain spiritual enjoyment as part of her rebellion; but no less than these, his openness, bluntness, analytic power, and tactical sense deeply excited her. She had no objection to his indecent jockeying for position, his intrigues, his elbowing aside of competition; not only did these traits fail to blur the overall picture, but she positively liked the man’s fighting spirit. Even his fist excited her. Love was stronger than physical pain; it was also capable of evoking humiliation or, put another way, it showed her what life without humiliation might be like. They broke up several times because of his seriously beating her; she would not live with a man who beat her, but she could not manage without him. She was lost. The objects of the world stared senselessly at her.

She could go to bed with other men only when she had the chance, beforehand and afterward, to make love to Simon; and she had to know in advance that there was a before and there would be an afterward.

She increased and later released with him the tension of her experiences with others, because she was in love with him and not with the others.

As if ephemeral physical pain were the price of constancy.

But she did not take the mental humiliation concealed in their physical fights lying down, and she avenged it many times over. At such times the man justified himself by claiming she had provoked him simply so that she could avenge herself. He banished his sober or drunken rages by pummeling her. And she did love his fists, oh, how she loved them, she kept biting them; she especially loved his hands, adored the strong pads on the palms of his hands. She was not the only one Simon beat up; he roughed up others even worse, men, and it was good for Klára to know all the little details of these beatings. Where he’d let them have it, what the fuck he’d knocked them against, how noisily they rammed into a wall or door. She preferred this open free life with him; she definitely did not want the kind of life her wretched mother or the tamed females in her circle had had, complete with fastidious good manners and compulsive mimicry.

She had no desire to repeat that kind of life, ever.

If Simon hit her, she hit him back; without complaining, she went at him. If Simon, partly justified, laughed at this, she laughed also or cried in her anger and threw every object she could lay her hands on at him, or she broke the objects.

She had to take her life into her own hands, and, his eyes widening, the man enjoyed seeing how brave she was.

They could not have managed without the detailed physical pampering that covered every inch of her body.

Physical fights did not seem to be enough, though; they seemed, indeed, to increase their secretive silences.

Sometimes she would hit back with the first object that came to hand, without thinking where the blow would land, crash it into his face, tearing his skin. They might well have feared eventual police involvement, because with this sort of fighting they were bound to need medical help.

Simon had more reason to fear Klára than the other way around.

But regardless of who secretly initiated these fights, their unruliness became so childish that they didn’t have to fear each other or anything.

Simon could not count on Klára’s relieving his brutality with bouts of tenderness. He knew his way around her better than she did hers around him, and this particularly annoyed her. The man was always surprising her. Whereas Klára remained almost completely predictable for him. He did not let any manifestation of her life go by without commentary; that was his gratification.