Gyula Krúdy - Life Is A Dream

‘Let’s go, Galgóczi is waiting for us.’

Galgóczi, clad in a white sheet, stood on the balcony awaiting his visitors.

The white sheet and the balcony were necessitated by Miss Brunszvik’s locking up his clothes, and by her preference for sleeping with the keys under her pillow.

‘Oh you enviable, happy wanderers of Life who fly about propelled by health and good cheer, free as the birds and carefree as only those humans are who can escape from worrisome thoughts! While I, in the night of madness, horrors and hallucinations, call upon death every fifteen minutes to liberate me from my torments!’ exclaimed Galgóczi up on the balcony when in the moonlight he spied his friends who came to rescue him.

‘Speak up, let it all out, my unfortunate friend: at this time of the diurnal cycle no one will curse us; it’s also true that nobody will say mass for us either, even the monasteries are asleep now,’ replied Rimaszombati, briefly appearing in the moonlight before stepping back into shadow, drawing Jolan back there with him, because he did not think it advisable that they should be seen at this hour on White Eagle Place.

‘All I can say is that I am atoning for every sin I have ever committed or will ever commit in my life. My sufferings redeem my existence both in this world and the next. I am fully conscious at all times yet I feel myself to be so deranged that waves of insanity keep tossing me back and forth, willy-nilly. Oh, if I could just once more regain my mind as it was before, my former composure, and courage. I’ve become such a coward! Just like a worm under the stable floorboards. The arms of despicable death reaching for me are my only salvation now.’

Galgóczi went on at length bemoaning his affliction, which can never be understood by those who have not undergone the terrible torment of losing control of their mind and the ability to think rationally. Galgóczi’s derangement belonged to a category of insanity that is accompanied by bodily anguish: a madness that hurts!

Not only was his mind unhinged but also his heart, kidneys, liver, stomach: in a word, everything a man calls his own in this life. Even his feet became hated enemies, not to speak of the hands that he kept wringing as if to tear them out by the root. Instead of food he hungered for rusty nails and hooks that would tear up his innards. Galgóczi had altogether become the devil’s prey.

‘Could wine alone have done this to you?’ asked a doubtful Rimaszombati in the shadows, where, holding Jolan’s hand, he stood watchful.

Now he shouted out at the top of his voice: ‘Hey, Galgóczi! Let me take on most of your sufferings caused by wine. I am an old man and if I go insane so much the better for me, at least I won’t be in my right mind to see myself passing to the next world. But what about your other affairs? Who will take responsibility for unhappy love, jealousies, daydreams, Jolan’s lovely hair? For those you probably suffer just as much as for the wine that’s been forbidden you!’

‘I was planning to kill Jolan anyway,’ replied the man in the white sheet. (Jolan’s hand did not tremble in Rimaszombati’s clasp.)

‘It’s best if Jolan forgets about me and finds herself a better man, worthier than myself. I am sure there are plenty around. I’ll never be a whole man again anyway, so let me just go to my well-deserved doom.’

When Jolan heard these words she stepped forward from the shadows. ‘Easy for you to say this, you poor maniac, you cannot add any more to your sufferings. You have reached the point where there is nothing more to suffer, your cup is full, not another drop of pain can be added, even if the whole town were to burn down around you. So you think you wouldn’t suffer any more even if I left you? But I know my heart would break. Let me continue loving you, I’ll wait it out until these crazy bells stop tolling in your brain.’

‘Don’t sacrifice your beautiful young life to me, what a waste for a flower to ally herself to the worm. I can’t say when I will untangle the web I’ve been stuck in since I lost my mind. I cannot predict how deep the jungle whose thousand perils I must still face in order to regain the sanity I allowed to slip away one unguarded moment. And what will my fugitive mind be like if I ever encounter it again, when I can’t even be sure it will ever come back? Go away, girl, leave this mindless madman behind, as Ophelia left Hamlet,’ replied the ghost from the balcony and he would have certainly shaken his chains, were there any on hand; as it was he ground his teeth.

‘But tell me, Galgóczi, what’s the matter with you, so that I can at least pray for your recovery?’ the girl cried out, when under cover of darkness Rimaszombati whispered this question in her ear.

‘I’m out of my mind!’ replied the miserable young man from on high. ‘There’s no other way to put it, the devil took my brains away. I have contracted an illness that has only one remedy: I must lacerate my heart and worthless being with self-reproach and curses. Only after I exhaust myself with weeping and wailing, tossing and turning, can I catch a few hours of sleep, and I leap out of bed with fresh hatred for myself. I detest myself so much I could smash my brains out against the wall.’

‘You’ve been poisoned, my friend. Somebody must have put poison in your drink, for no one ever went insane from the wine served at the Green Ace!’ responded Jolan (once again following Rimaszombati’s prompt) and joined her hands as if prepared to swear an oath in support of her statement.

‘By now it doesn’t matter how; I lost my mind, the way someone loses a cap. By now it’s all the same when and where my mind went awry. Perhaps I’ll never find out what enchantment dragged me to the window that night, when a sorcerer I had only seen in my worst dreams suddenly appeared in front of my window in the starlight and exhaled his poison into my face and recited his magic spell. Right away I felt lost. My mind was gone. A horrible fear gripped my heart, my teeth were on edge, my heart froze, my throat knotted and everything around me turned evil. Everything turned malevolent, jeering as if I had just then realized how horribly people hated me, for everybody detests the madman.’

As if summoning his last remaining strength, the young man on the balcony pronounced these words with the utmost effort. Rimaszombati and Jolan stood in helpless silence for a while, as if pondering some response that would calm the poor wretch. At last Rimaszombati gathered himself enough to speak up: ‘You said someone looked in your window?’

Galgóczi hugged the balustrade as if to summon his strength. The sheet slipped from his emaciated body and he seemed a skeleton in the moonlight.

‘The window in my old room opened on to the river, and the sorcerer came from the direction of the river one summer night when the moon hung above the water, almost ready to speak. The sorcerer approached with two women on his arm, the way some gentlemen go promenading when unable to sleep. The older one of the two seemed to have plenty of experience in rummaging through men’s pockets. She parted her hair in the middle, like an old-time courtesan whom any man could approach intimately at first sight. This older woman was one who still resents a man who won’t immediately embrace her around the waist or touch her somewhere else. She was the one who urged the sorcerer to destroy me, foolish youth, for failing to recall what I owed a woman who spent her best years pleasing my father and his friends.’

‘What is the name of this respectable lady?’ asked Rimaszombati, as if forgetting he was dealing with a madman.

‘Juli was her name, typical for a woman of her sort. The daughter she was parading in the moonlight, called of course Juliska, had just enough wits to know how to hang on to a man; but she’d learn the rest soon enough, I thought. Just then the old woman and her daughter noticed me standing at the window and hated me at once for seeing, observing, and laughing at their nocturnal stroll with the sorcerer — for I loved a chuckle at women’s doings, observing how they go about having their way with a man, subjugating him to their whims and moods. Old Juli took the sorcerer by one hand, young Juliska by the other. Well well, I thought, if this does not lead to connubiality soon then nothing will, and I was ready to let the stranger know how much I despised him for being the self-oblivious plaything of such mercenary women. But the stranger, this magician, beat me to the punch. He stepped up to my window, blew into my face and pronounced his magic spell. Nor did the two women remain idle meanwhile. At a gesture from the older one they sprang up, exposing legs sheathed in matching canary-yellow stockings, and pranced up the stairs, up to the attic — in a word, overhead — from where they sprinkled water down upon my head to ensure the success of the spell. Ever since then …’