Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

They hooked their hurried lips into each other roughly, for which neither of them was prepared.

When Mrs. Szemző stepped out on the seventh-floor gallery, still glimmering in the twilight, they were slipping and sliding over each other’s lips, holding on with their teeth, biting to remain still. Their full-mouthed, slippery kisses made their lips slide up their gums, as if they were eating up the path before them and there was no tomorrow. The two hollows stiffened into one and stuck together. But if they didn’t want to suffocate, their lips had to be pulled apart. By the time Mrs. Szemző, Dr. Irma Arnót, had shut the smooth dark oak door behind her on the silent gallery, airless after a sweltering day, in the maid’s room they were already screaming at the top of their voices.

The bleak walls absorbed nothing.

Quickly, though fumbling, she inserted the key; the nervous double click of the lock reverberated in the glass belly of the stairwell.

With disconnected little rhythms, the woman was slipping from whimpering into screaming in steadily rising tones and increasing volume. She threatened to tear something in her throat. But then she faltered, tried again, now from a much deeper register, with more concentration, while the man matched and covered her sounds evenly with a flat and endless howl; for a while they continued together and then it all turned into bellowing. This was so strong, spreading from the soles of her feet to her chest, his sperm battered her with such powerful thrusts, pounding the swollen gullet of her womb, that she had to toss her head from side to side again, which for a while interrupted her vocal broadcast.

The second impact was the strongest.

The third one came later, after a pause, and somehow managed, fairly benevolently, almost gently, to set the previous two aright, made it natural that earlier it had been swept away and was now becoming part of the current.

It turned into a pebble, a light skiff, a stalk of straw.

She was perhaps most grateful for this. As if it had proved to her that the previous two had indeed happened.

She was screaming, yelling, and this time she could hear herself. Brief shouts, close to bubbling staccato panting, which she so much wanted from herself as well as from the man.

But this could not be heard in the stairwell. Mrs. Szemző’s small steps echoed loudly on the chessboard of black and white tiles.

Anyway, it was as if she were demonstratively reaching, calling after a lost pleasure. No. As if responding to the lost rhythm of the world before tumbling into the dark yawning depths. The sucking and thrusting persisted in her consciousness, but nothing else. In response, the man’s bellowing also ceased.

He was buried in the dark, dumb earth. The price of being ever on the alert was that he saw himself much too clearly. But even with that he could not give meaning to his existence. As if he were being compelled to review all aspects of his life’s futility. La tristesse qui régnait dans la maison vide. He got stuck, was brought to a halt in the midst of producing deep sounds in his throat, the same sounds that only a moment ago were expanding his ribs, inflating his chest to the full.

This whole business of fucking made no sense to him; nothing did. Why was he doing it. Why had he ever done it, and why does he keep repeating it.

In the heat of his skin, he felt the woman’s breasts, because out of this disgusting nothingness, out of this world turned to emptiness, began to appear details he still could not resist. The weakness of the soul. Or perhaps the huge nipples, stiffened to scabrous hardness, made him feel his skin again.

The weakness of his will.

Their bodies were flowing, sliding on and in each other; suddenly they collapsed into each other and breathed aloud in the darkness of the bleak room.

The heat stung and burned them; every part of their bodies was ablaze inside. From the several days of rubbing, the woman’s labia were burning, her vagina ached, and the man again felt the pain of the torn frenum under the tip of his penis. Open sore rubbing against open sore.

They were moaning again because it felt good to give evidence of the pain. They were crying, choking, sighing, panting haltingly, whining, sniveling, wailing, sobbing, whimpering, hissing, and mewling into each other’s ears, unable to subside. And the man kept on thrusting, lazily, filled with his own emptiness and desperation.

They could neither guide nor control what they were doing, though they had regained enough consciousness to see the new impending torrent.

They were biting each other’s ears, nose, lips, even teeth. They were grasping, hugging, stroking, scratching, pressing each other’s back, and prompting each other to go on pressing everything that was so smooth and had dissolved in their heat: bones to press the flesh or flesh to press the bones. As if saying to each other I shall crush you. As if telling each other, oh, why haven’t I eaten you up, I’ll eat you up now, I’ll chew dry all your bones and gristle. But of course they did not have enough air to do this all at once or even to say it. This was, rather, pure joy cleansed by wild desire. And they had good reason. As if after all the pain and finesse of four long days they had finally succeeded in hurdling an incredible obstacle.

They looked back from the other side. Painfully they reveled and sloshed about in their success, which in the final analysis fell into their lap as a blessing of coincidences.

If only Mrs. Szemző hadn’t walked in on them.

It flashed through their minds that yes, she had been there, but it seemed an improbable phenomenon, and they quickly shoved it aside, because they heard their own insane screaming. God, maybe she hasn’t left and is still listening to them.

In fact, thanks to unfathomable providence and destiny, she had actually left. As their pulses returned to normal, their awareness of their bodies’ success became stronger. With its outlines and its pale and confused images, the past reappeared, ready to separate them.

In their contented arrhythmic sounds, slamming into and reborn out of each other, they deepened, increased, and tried to delay the eternal present, somehow to impede its disintegration.

Tension does not decrease at an even pace when the pulse suddenly drops, but rather, seeking the place of the previous contraction, goes back up; not finding it, it drops a bit more, hesitates nervously, trying to steady itself at this lower level. The eternal present, however, snaps in the effort, yet still prevents the past or the future from encroaching on it. And this is happiness, the famed happiness that cannot be independent of physiology though it is not identical with it. Heartbeats extend between the various possibilities afforded by the changing use and genetically defined rhythms of the carotid sinus. On the one side, there is the possibility which the heart is always ready to follow, and on the other side is the ability from which the heart cannot separate itself, the basic rhythm of personality to which it always returns.

And now it was trembling and sliding in both of them, between the different rhythms and levels.

When sensing happiness in another person’s breathing, one’s own breathing becomes happier, and not by chance does one feel that perishing of happiness is imminent. I’m going to die, I love you so much I’ll die of it.

Expanded and sodden pores, their limbs sliding on one another, loosened muscles, memory breaking through in flashes, barely visible outlines, their burning painful loins melted into each other, the penetrating smells.

Outside, evening was coming to life, now pushing shut, now opening wide the window above their heads, sending a lazy, fresh current of air lightly across their naked sweat-covered bodies.