She sat back down on the rim of the bathtub and again carefully took hold of and raised Mária’s strong hand with its injured finger.
You know damn well I don’t know what to do with such concentrated social psychology, replied Mária quickly. She judged these dictators to be very dangerous and they might take Irma away from her.
She shrugged a little, as if to indicate that she was aware of the riskiness of her own moral relativism.
They can follow right behind or go where they please for all I care. My starting point is that there is a given surface and if I want something, I should be moving inward on that surface. Or downward, or upward, hell-bound or heavenward to the angels, anywhere.
And you are always doing the very opposite.
I can’t presume that people have character or can possess any traits. What I have to follow is a man’s shape. For me that is his only trait — the surfaces, curves, configurations, the limbs. All of which is flesh, only flesh, and form. What might happen, at best, is that after a while you discover that another human being has something you wouldn’t mind being attached to, has, let’s say, something properly constituted that determines his behavior, that has some sort of permanence and keeps making him repeat some sentence or gesture. But this is rare. In other cases, what you discover is that the person’s behavior has no iconography at all, and then that becomes the person’s characteristic feature. That’s what makes people adaptable, my dear. Whatever happens, they must remain flexible.
Nothing can compel them, or at least they feel no moral compulsion. That’s what produces their blissful chaos. You can stare at me like that all you want, but yes, this is your average human being. You talk as if everything had been already decided, and that’s why everything can be arranged. Well, nothing is decided.
No, no, generally, I talk about two things at once, but people usually hear only one.
Two is too many for me too.
Your monologue is very nice, maybe a bit much even for you.
It sometimes happened that one of them offended the other.
They were watching something on the surfaces of each other’s eyes that in good conscience could not be called personal yet was not impersonal.
Like lamplight reflected in the eyes.
At which both could change course. Mária could get over being offended, and they could both hear from the other side of the door Elisa’s odd, rhythmically repeated little whimpers. They never wanted to reach a conclusion in their conversations, never, and perhaps that is why their contact was so powerful.
The moments they bestowed on each other kept them captive, but this did not explain why they hadn’t spent their lives together.
Why must they part again and again.
Just look at it, look right into it, continued Mrs. Szemző, in a seemingly indifferent voice, cleansed of all passion.
You’ll understand what I’m talking about.
But under the influence of some unnamed shame, she was the one who had to turn away from Mária’s wide-open eyes. She didn’t want to betray Elisa, whimpering on the other side of the door, with Mária, not even symbolically.
And if she had to leave the illuminated surface of Mária’s eyes, she peered at her open flesh again.
Her head had a tendency to tremble, lowering and adjusting itself to spoken words, but she did not let this tic have free rein. It was an embarrassing, uncomfortable matter. When alone with it before a mirror, she would study the tic for a long time, trying to find ways to eliminate or tame it, to make this little professional fiasco of hers as unnoticeable as possible.
The flesh itself is what’s strange, she said quietly. Even though she was thinking of something other than what they were talking about.
Mária couldn’t divine how closely connected everything Irma was saying was to everything that she herself was ruminating on. Most people are unsuspecting toward each other in this way.
Irma was busy thinking about that strange man’s tightly packed back muscles shining with perspiration, the coiling grooves of his spine, his surprisingly round, powerful buttocks with its cleft open all the way to his anus and immersed in slow-moving thrusts, its sides at the base of his thighs made concave by tension, she was thinking about his straining thighs and his hard testicles flashing in their slipperiness.
For a single instant, he even rolled his head back over his well-defined shoulder to see who had surprised him.
Because in itself, perhaps it’s not so interesting that humans are the only beings whose behavior and thinking are completely imbued with the continuous, relentless desire for possible copulation, along with all the attendant fantasies, that’s what she was thinking about, that’s what she was weighing while talking with her friend about something else entirely. The image was sharp and immovable, but the fantasy or memory of it was probably more important for her than the reality of the act. This only shows how unlikely it is that one can individualize the actual act. Acknowledging this might be a turning point in one’s life.
Everyone strives to individualize the act of lovemaking because otherwise one would miss the proper share of its pleasures, and everyone fails at this because the act exists only in reciprocity. If there’s enough mutual pleasure in the act, one will not find one’s own person; if one strives for the personal, one becomes stuck on the other person’s personality and the pleasure is broken, uneven, or perhaps totally inadequate.
The search for the act, then, is directed not by instinct alone, but by the need to individualize and, at least equally, by the inevitable failure, big or small depending on the level of individualization.
One must move on, hoping that the individualization will succeed with someone else.
Religions and myths are not mistaken on this question, she continued aloud, your own flesh is impersonal, only the imagination is personal. Though frankly I don’t know why your cut from that stupid glass is so deep.
I’m not going to look at it, so you might as well stop trying to make me.
But you could, said Irma, with obvious relish. There are ugly wounds, but this one is handsome, an extremely well turned-out injury.
I believe you.
It probably doesn’t hurt now, but it may throb later.
Please forgive me, but we must look in on Elisa, I may have alarmed her with that racket. She’ll keep up this whimpering until I kick her around a little.
Keep pressing on it a little longer.
It feels too tight.
Don’t worry, that’s how it has to be.
They stood up simultaneously, to put an end to their unpredictable shared moment.
Mária was ready to withdraw her decision, however, even though she had been the one to suggest it.
Irmuska, I’d like to ask you something, she said suddenly, and, very uncharacteristically, she blushed.
Come on, out with it, and then I’ll tell you something I have a hard time keeping to myself.
Something one doesn’t like to talk about, or ask. But this I just can’t swallow.
Before she spoke, for a flash it occurred to her that maybe this was the moment to tell Irma about Erna Demén’s request.