I didn’t manage to answer. He had only five minutes to catch the train. He shouted from the bottom of the stairs:
‘Come to Uioara some Sunday. It would make Marjorie happy.’
So, she was here last week. At another time she would have burst into the workshop in the morning and shouted from the doorway: ‘I’m kidnapping you. You’re mine until 22.17.’
… And that stupid lie about the opening lecture, which she didn’t even attend. It’s not your style, Marjorie, to lie.
And I would have bet that in adultery you would have remained straightforward and without cowardice.
Now I understand Dronţu’s sensitivity, his inability to bear Professor Ghiţă’s lecture for fear of it being too rough on the master.
Today, in the office, I said to Marin in passing:
‘Phillip Dunton was here yesterday. We met at the office.’
For a good few seconds dear old Marin kept his thoughts to himself: to hear or not to hear what I was saying? He opted for deafness.
‘Who took my set square?’ he suddenly bellowed. ‘Yesterday I left it here, and now it’s gone. Maybe we’re haunted. It’s unbelievable. You can’t work in this place.’
The louder he bellowed, the falser the outburst sounded to him. Not knowing how to end it, he shouted even louder.
Then he suddenly went quiet, frowning and sombre. He muttered from time to time, shrugged his shoulders, swore by all the saints.
He caught up with me in the street after work.
‘Why don’t we go get a brandy?’
‘Sure.’
‘Come on, then.’
And, later, on the way, apropos of nothing. ‘To hell with women. I’m telling you, there’s no end to the trouble they bring.’
*
A long, despairing letter from young Dogany. Things are not going at all well in Budapest. The university has been closed again, there have been major disturbances, street battles, arrests. He himself received a pretty bad blow to the head.
‘Everything would be fine and I’d put up with it all, if at least I could manage to stay. On Thursday I have to present my papers at the secretariat of the faculty for another review. Will I be allowed to stay? Will I be expelled? My father threatens to cut off my allowance if I don’t return to Satu Mare. But I can’t, I simply can’t. What can I do there, in a country that’s not mine? But is Hungary my country? Yes, absolutely, whatever my father says and however much you might laugh. Only one man could understand me, if he were alive today: Endre Ady. I’d write to him and I’m sure he’d understand me.’
I wrote back:
Dear Pierre Dogany, stay where you are. It’ll pass, you’ll see. Six years ago I went through what you’re going through now. It has passed, and one day I’ll forget. They beat you up? It’s nothing. They’ll beat you up ten times, then they’ll get tired of it. Do I laugh at you? Yes, I admit I laugh and your Hungarian fervour strikes me as comic. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand you. In your place, I’d do the same thing. In your place I did do the same thing.
Today, everything has settled down calmly and nicely. Sometimes I recall my past despairs and I don’t understand them. They seem embarrassingly childish.
Force yourself not to suffer. Don’t allow yourself to indulge your suffering. There’s a great voluptuousness in persecution and feeling yourself wronged is probably one of the proudest of private pleasures. Be vigilant and don’t indulge such pride. Try to take whatever comes with a certain good humour. Think how ridiculous we would be if we were alarmed at every shower of rain that soaked us. Believe me, what’s happening to you now, however sad it may be, is no more than a shower.
*
I’ve tried to remember where I know Arnold Max from but it just won’t come to me. I no longer have any idea of the place or the circumstances of our first meeting.
I’ve so often promised myself to limit my relations with people, but I’m incapable of controlling myself. The ease with which various acquaintances manage to crowd around me is intolerable. At first they’re neither hot nor cold nor black nor white, but eventually, without me realizing it, I become subject to suffocating demands.
One evening I sat and thought of my connections with various people, and was alarmed to realize how many of my friends are superfluous and uninteresting. You just find yourself surrounded by the dramas and farces that pop up in the wake of your indifference and one day make their demands on you. Why? How? When? It’s too late to figure it out and, in any case, too late to put it right.
You’d need to be cruelly vigilant at every moment, to pinch the shoots of all those attempts at cordiality that will eventually make you their victim. I dream of a life reduced to a few carefully chosen relationships, perhaps three or four, and only those I find strictly necessary and which serve my personal needs. The rest held at a distance, in the well-guarded zone of brief greetings in the street, from where no effusions, confessions and emotionalism can reach you. The first concession, the first weakness, is fatal.
Take Arnold Max, for example. Yesterday he spoiled my whole afternoon, dragging me up and down streets, in order to tell me of his endless problems in art and life.
‘Interesting fellow.’ But I, for one, am not a novelist and to hell with all these ‘interesting’ fellows, I’ve no use for them.
Another of those fevered types. He’s thirty-three but looks twenty-two, small, slight, with a face like that of a frightened badger, his raincoat flapping in the wind, pockets stuffed with pieces of paper (laundry receipts, verses, beginnings of poems, love letters, modernist manifestos). I’m curious what logic underlies the association of the ideas he articulates in conversation.
‘Greetings … Lucky I met you, come on Thursday evening to Costaridi’s, everyone will be there … You know, I’ve discovered a great novelist; the greatest of them all, he’s fabulous … Leon Trotsky. The episode of the dead person in Finland from Mein Leben is Dostoyevsky, pure Dostoyevsky … That imbecile Costaridi was telling me about that Moréas of his again … I can no longer breathe with the number of windbags that have sprung up in this generation. Listen, about Moréas … I’ll say it loud and clear: Tardieu’s dead. There’s a scheme involving Herriot and then there’ll be a social revolution … Stănescu told me once that his socks cost 600 lei a pair.’
He talks a tremendous amount, with a strange, nervous volubility, in which you hear a dozen thoughts, ideas and memories muttering at once. Each thought remains uncompleted. He trails them behind him like so much torn paper, snagged on random words or images.
I have the impression that he speaks from a fear of silence, from a fear of finding himself alone.
‘What do you think about when you’re alone?’
‘What do you mean, alone?’
‘Just now, for example, before you bumped into me. You were walking along the street, no? And there was no one with you. Therefore, you were alone. So, what were you thinking about?’
He stops dead for a moment, trying to remember.
‘Wait a minute … What was I thinking about … I don’t know …’
Arnold Max, the-man-whom-nothing-happens-to. He doesn’t love, he doesn’t go to the theatre, doesn’t go out, isn’t interested in people or books. There’s no woman in his life, no friends. Nothing. A desert haunted by moods, by problems.
He’s always writing, adding things, erasing. I wonder if he’s ever calmly and patiently listened to his own verses. He doesn’t have the time. He has to be writing them. His life is plunged in them, immersed in them, besieged by them. Suddenly, in mid-sentence, he pulls a piece of paper or a visiting card from some pocket, from which he reads for half an hour, with a kind of fury or enthusiasm to devour it all, poem and paper. It’s all the same to him whether you listen or not. He reads on with a certain cold illumination, ready to brave an ocean of indifference. Most of all his own indifference, which is greater than his passion for poetry, half-simulated in order to give some sense to the terrible void in which he lives and from which he flees.