Starting in the late 1920s, when women began to sunbathe freely, she shed her clothes and pranced about wildly in the joy of absorbing the sunshine, tanning her bare body to dark brown. Men had very little to do with this, just as earlier she had not been charmed by the shy stares of boys. Today, the crown of snow-white hair that radiated above her shiny brown forehead had of course lost some of its firmness. Her eyes glittered brightly when she — carefully, from a lower register, hitting her warmest timbre, with deep resonance and increasing power — made her column of air sing out.
You know, don’t you, Mária, that you’re talking nonsense. How could you move out of here, and where could you move to with Elisa, for God’s sake. But all that aside, why on earth do you have to move from here anyway. You can’t be moving all the time just because your house fills up with dirty dishes. Just wash them, damn it.
After the last phrase, which hung in the air between them, and there was no stronger swearword than this among these friends, Margit allowed a short pause. In her next sentence she meant to raise the volume considerably and give the timbre another twist. The sentence would be long, complicated, the loudness making the articulation harder. In such cases, tongue and lips must shape each and every syllable most precisely.
The only reason you may have pangs of conscience, and there’s no other reason, is that you don’t talk decently to your servants.
To this dramatically enunciated declaration, Mária responded with a laugh. How do you know that. She was giggling.
How do I know, I’ve heard you enough. If you learned how to talk to them, they wouldn’t be leaving you all the time. Damn it, why can’t you make the effort. That’s the only thing you should have qualms about.
She wanted to take the burden off her shoulders.
Though she became ridiculous with these voice-coach techniques.
And indeed she did remove it.
The way she meted out, artificially increased, and then reduced the volume of her voice, the way she puckered her lips vertically to give shape to the words, and the way she never ran out of air, all this held Mária’s attention. Margit flooded Mária with her anxiety, carefully formed in her loins and belly, and the loud, even, slightly rasping throb of her voice involuntarily played counterpoint to the tugboat’s increasing and insidious beats, which reverberated on cobblestones, along subterranean walls, and in dull cellar cavities. As if she were demonstrating the means by which drama can be both intensified and extinguished.
Even when she unashamedly put her substantial, deeply tanned and wrinkled breasts on display as she lifted them and pressed them together, in her bearing there was something profoundly ascetic and humble. Her moral attitude, her appearance, and her work had anointed her as the priestess of her profession, and she elicited devout reverence from her students. Though they couldn’t understand why she smoked so much. When she dispensed those precise portions of air, her feverish flesh undulated and trembled in the frame of her richly embroidered, lace-trimmed, and pleated blouse. To Mária’s critical eyes the more sensual, steamy image proved stronger, even though her resisting body, unnoticed, relaxed and grew peaceful in the currents of that intimately deep voice.
The red, eyelike coral beads danced on the finely trembling necklace.
Delight made her giggle like a little girl. She thought she was laughing at what she was seeing, though in fact it was because of what she was feeling.
To gauge properly one’s actions, one needs a bit of emotional perspective.
She was tittering, enjoying immensely the distance that Médi could open up and then throw a bridge over with her voice.
Being a costume designer, she observed the theatrical banality of Médi’s temperament from the viewpoint of a sister profession; to provide some extra income for herself and Elisa, she worked as a cutter and seamstress for all sorts of minor stars. It was as if she were suddenly saying to herself, but this is great, a white lace blouse over a wrinkled bosom tanned to brown.
But her laughing made the pile of dishes, raised and supported by her arm on the edge of the sink, lose balance and slip.
A red enamel lid was first to slide off, and it seemed to set in motion the rest of the variously sized platters and dessert plates. Clumsily, from the bottom, she reached for the moving dishes with her other hand. She missed, and the dishes went on sliding, gaining momentum on the big chased surfaces of trays. And under all this, a glass broke in her hand, of course; when it cut her finger she cried out and involuntarily gave a forceful shove to the entire pile. Which was followed by a deafening noise. The two women in the doorway moved to jump forward. The clatter, clang, and clangor, and the sliding that in a single second strewed a profusion of bouncing, rolling colorful shards all over the kitchen floor could not be stopped.
Now there was no clear space to which they might jump or advance.
And just as quickly, silence fell over the battlefield.
Rooted, mesmerized, all three stared at the wretched result. Mária, her wounded finger in her mouth, backed away from the shards all the way to the open door to the maid’s room, and the moment she leaned on it, the door slammed against the wall. But what was this sight compared to the devastation they had already seen in their lives. For a few seconds, until the three of them began to laugh, glad that this was nothing compared to the sights in their memory, they could hear the deep, pulsating sound of the tugboat. Though they could also hear in it — in the meantime it had absorbed — another pulsing rhythm. Perhaps another tugboat was approaching. Probably from the opposite direction, from the Árpád Bridge, and the rhythms of the two tugs differed. Mária slid slowly down the smooth door as if pulled by her own weight. And she could have told them that the tugboat has just come abreast of the empty section of the shore in front of the Protestant church on Pozsonyi Road, where it does not echo so loudly.
The only time it was quiet over the river was when it was either frozen or full of drift ice.
You see, Margit Huber bellowed, you see, she chortled, I could have told you it would happen, I saw it, I swear I did.
Oh, let’s see your finger, cried Izabella Dobrovan anxiously, wanting to turn their unsuppressed laughter quickly into sentimental empathy.
It may be a deep cut.
From behind her finger, which she kept sucking, Mária Szapáry cried along with the other two, while shaking with laughter or weeping.
Oh, my entire sixteenth century.
Her mouth filled with the taste of blood. She slid down the door until her buttocks reached the floor. She was clowning for them because she was a little ashamed of her clumsiness and the condition of her kitchen.
My entire sixteenth century is gone.
There she was, legs spread on the kitchen’s checkered tiles, in the midst of the shards that were all that was left of her majolica dishes, true museum-quality dishes from an Urbino workshop, and it was hard to believe that this was, once again, the end of the story.
It wasn’t her finger that hurt.
When someone rang the bell outside, once, briefly, she was thinking that this really wasn’t an act of fate, and it wouldn’t be worth her while to resist it.
Anybody heard the elevator, she asked, and was amazed that she hadn’t heard something she should have.
I haven’t.
No, nothing.