Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

I noticed you can’t remember the names of streets.

Maybe I don’t want to because I’m not interested.

But why take it so much to heart. I think it’s very sweet the way you can’t get your tongue around my name. It disgusts me anyway. Vér. Blood. Blood on the streets of Budapest, in your panties when you menstruate, wherever, I don’t care, but not in one’s name.

You’re saying rather strange things, I don’t understand them, said Ágost patiently, though hearing these phrases brought him to the verge of retching.

And that first part, gyöngy, too, I think gyöngy is disgusting.

And I think you chatter too much. Maybe you should look up the history of the name, stop wriggling.

At least on your tongue you make my ugly name prettier. Especially if I’m not wriggling.

And down there you open up, grow treacherously wide, and properly enfold me inside you, lock me up within you. Maybe that’s how one could say it in Hungarian.

More, yes, go on, please, I beg you. I’m not interested in the history of anything.

The way they do it to birds, to their legs. You put a ring around my cock, the poet would say.

Oh my, how you talk, said Gyöngyvér, and her voice dropped from the top of pleasure’s register to the bottom. Breaking into laughter, they both sneezed and laughed at the same time, showering each other with spittle, which made them laugh more. Don’t you dare fly away, Gyöngyvér squealed. I’ll put my ring around you and catch you.

I won’t give up my independence, don’t raise your hopes.

More, please.

You won’t catch me with anything.

Please say cock one more time, please.

But the man fell silent, and from then on he would have preferred not to say anything. He enjoyed the words around them; it was as if they helped him evoke the atoms of darkness; he felt a strong urge to speak, yet he thought the storyteller in him was strange and naïve. Who wanted to tell everything, absolutely everything. He would have been hard put to find a nondangerous subject in his life, and this may have irritated him. Something unusually childish also appeared in his narration, hovering over every sentence, and it might have been pleasurable to savor it, though until now he hadn’t noticed much of a distance between childhood and adulthood. It was good to tell everything, it would be better to tell even more, even though it was unpleasant to hear what he was saying; his words made him recognize the distance between the events being related and their present recounting.

They were telling their tales directly into each other’s mouth with their eyes wide open, yet their bodies’ center of gravity shifted. They could not hold one position for long, because now an arm, now a leg would go numb from the weight of the other’s body and would have to be liberated. Slowly they’d roll about a bit. This made Gyöngyvér open up more; with her thighs she involuntarily slid up on his thighs and with her strong lower legs embraced his waist, her hands reluctantly let go of the cheeks of his buttocks, taut and dented with the effort, and pressed his wide, relaxed back to cover her. At least her arms felt better. The man’s benumbed arm hesitated as if unsure what to do next. If he wanted to keep something of their symmetry, he could wander downward to grasp the woman’s small ass in both hands, to feed her into himself with his palms, to guide her by her ass.

His hands would have wanted her ass, his loins wanted to be more inside, his cock and testicles wanted him to lift her even more irretrievably into himself, though there was nowhere further to go. At this moment, the issue was indeed his independence. That he shouldn’t have to surrender to the woman’s rhythm, that what they were doing should not become destructively monotonous and should not end with an ordinary unguarded ejaculation, as the woman would like, that it should have no end.

Stupid. How infinitely stupid can this woman be. In the meantime her opened-up lap carried him along, smooth and unhindered, so that he had nothing to do; he had no way to resist. It is probably not by chance that little boys want to marry their mothers. She cheated on me with my father. Monotony, the winding spiral of uniformly increasing speed, was stronger than he. What convinced him was the lightness, smoothness, suppleness of the woman’s body.

A little common, he thought to himself, a bit conventional for my taste, but this disturbed him for only a few moments.

She’s too fast, doesn’t understand her own physical interests, but he enjoyed her greedy impatience.

And now I will take my leave, he thought to himself, and he meant taking leave of the woman’s demanding rhythm.

Yet he did not take his leave.

No doubt Gyöngyvér wanted to get to the end of something they had not even begun. He was not certain there was anything that might restrain this woman in her urgent excitement. She’s on fire, though she is full of inhibitions and being so passionate doesn’t become her. It’s no accident that she’s a contralto, not a soprano. Alto is rarer but she’d like to be like everybody else. She is working on it. This is what they expect of her, and these same conventions hold sway in the theater too; they can’t wait for anything to ripen by itself. And that means she’s completely hopeless with him as well. These sorts of things crossed his mind, but he had little interest in his mind’s activity. And his hands were longing for her weight probably because the woman felt weightless to him, he was making love to a feather. Boorish, has no upbringing, yet she’s not, since boorishness would make her heavy. Dans la grosse paysanne la petite bourgeoise . And she is weightless. With the rhythms of his thrusts, he could not shake the thought that this was a peasant woman, this is a peasant. There were no barriers between them. And that is what tipped the scale.

They were the secret semblances of each other.

If he did not want to slip out of her, he had to get on his knees between her spread thighs.

And if they hit gracefully on this exceedingly advantageous position, then finding it must have been the more important task.

Now he could not slip out of her.

No reason to worry about that: he was deep inside her.

The senses still need some kind of preparedness. And taking into account loose sofa springs, grating squeaks, their delicate and predictable moves when arms would cross and maybe bump into each other, he decided to prop up his arms on the pillows. Even though what he wanted was the woman’s little ass.

He would have preferred to lick everything on it, or out of it.

To enjoy the humiliating service. To mix the saliva accumulated in his mouth with the mucous strong-smelling urine-spiced excretion that overflowed her cunt and in which he was now splashing about with his overhardened, aching cock as in a bottomless swamp full of dead fish and yellow lilies in bloom. To reach inside it with his pointed tongue, to slide upward between the strong fleshy labia into her elongated vulva.

He scared himself with the image. He never dared do it for more than brief moments, dip into it quickly, as with a spoon. To make discoveries about a woman via the quality of her cavities.

He had done it with Gyöngyvér once before, for a very short time, and now his mouth longed to repeat it. Meanwhile he was happy that he was finally forgetting she was just a country girl, a peasant. Which of course brought the thought back to mind.

As though with his tongue he could truly understand her fleshy labia. To stumble into the strong pointed arch of the pudendal cleft and then return to her deep vagina, to lick the dense bud of her clitoris all around, everything that is in such contrast to the airy lightness of her limbs and their movements, and where it is so hard to penetrate. To melt it all with his mouth, to dissolve the primal aroma in his mouth. And then to do the most meaningful thing: with a single unexpected movement to turn her around and knock her on her stomach — so that his nose could hang into her arching, sweet little ass. To pry open the cheeks of her ass, lick again her cunt spread open on the sheet, suck in and keep licking the brownish, wrinkled, tightly closed, and mildly shit-tasting asshole, sin itself, to commit the greatest sin, until it would blossom in the warmth of the sticky saliva dragged over from her cunt, so that with his cock he could enter there too. To do violence to the instinct of reproduction and to hand it over to finality, to beautiful death. But he didn’t risk it. Wanting to enter everywhere. To discourage her from even dreaming of this, he brutally pinned her shoulders under him with his sharp elbows. An agitated face with bulging eyes lay on the pillow in the vise of his arms, and in the waning twilight it seemed that her lips were turning blue.