Not step off it.
According to local custom, the trail provided a measure of safety, respite, and protection; staying on it meant, for the others, that I hadn’t yet decided. As if I were saying to them, hold your horses, I’m still searching, waiting for the great unknown, and I’d like not to be touched by you until I find my right to self-determination or voluntarily relinquish it.
I also feared stepping into shit, another reason it was dangerous to go off the trail.
There were others also, who, driven by unrealizable desires, roamed the trails endlessly, went away, and then came back — quite a few like that.
They searched in vain, all in vain; they found no one.
The reason was not necessarily their timidity but rather their squeamishness or their exceptional needs.
It was impossible to understand everything.
Perhaps this was one reason he’d have been glad to exchange his life for that of the bravest ones, so as to understand at least something of the indifference of those who didn’t care whom they were with so long as they could go on being with someone. If only he could accept every stranger’s approach and understand it; if only he could let them have his way with him but without his touching anyone. Which would mean remaining untouched himself.
If only he did not suffer so shamelessly from lack of bodily contact.
He could not touch himself, because here that gesture’s meaning was unequivocaclass="underline" it meant that you were offering up your body as free prey, and your every move would be watched from every direction, just as he was watching others. One enticing signal was all that was needed for two men to fall on each other and quickly satisfy each other, or to engage in the act for a while, careful not to reach gratification, and then part — with a gesture a little like a thank-you or good-bye — and vanish without a trace into the very depth of the night, only to resume with others. As though they believed permanent attachments to be superfluous and mawkish. They were conspirators, ready to initiate him into their most jealously guarded and dangerous secrets, but only if he first swore to uphold their principles. He probably should have turned his body over then and there. But he could not find the required submissiveness or this kind of self-abasement in himself. Yet the situation was not unpleasant, even though he was excluded and inexperienced, because the fear and trembling kept him in a constant state of excitement. He’d have liked to become completely shut up in himself, but he had to keep himself open. It was important to behave as if he belonged with them, to show that if he wanted to he could give up this tenacious defense of his body’s integrity at any time. Otherwise they wouldn’t put up with him. His sperm kept on seeping. His erection referred not to just anyone but precisely to that someone who might pop up at any moment, that someone whom everyone here idolized and worshipped, that someone whom he too was looking for but hadn’t yet found. Or rather, though he did profoundly understand them, it would be better and he’d complete his knowledge if he sacrificed himself; but — and here’s the rub — he does not understand that here no one is looking for a real person; everyone is chasing his own imagination.
His desire was directed at all of them, almost all of them, but the moment one man stepped forward and approached him, his desire no longer focused on a single person; it focused on no one.
And that is why he would then flee.
He ran from the encroaching figures, from having to respond to this magical attraction; his feet pounding on the hard trail, he ran ahead of them like a wild animal, trusting himself to his sharpened senses, his feet carrying him blindly. Shrubs with branches like sharp arms hit him in the face and wrapped themselves around his body, cracking and snapping as he dragged them along and broke free of them. They were embracing him with their tendrils and tentacles, meaning to pull him back and punish him for refusing to surrender to reality as he must for even the shortest moment of gratification.
He found their roughness, avidity, and brutality frightening; in fact he was not so much frightened as painfully sober when near them. Yet he appreciated the insane bravery with which, if only for a moment, they offered up their entire ecstatic being along with their secret desires, or served other men’s ecstasies with their mouths, their attentive hands, or their carefully lubricated and open rectums.
Their freedom seemed beautiful and dazzling to him. He saw himself as tied down by tethers of convention.
He despised himself for his servility; he was repelled not by them but by himself. Yet he was the one who had done so much against himself, almost everything. He quickly realized that one couldn’t sink lower than this to attain freedom, or at least he hoped he wouldn’t have to sink lower. His heart, beating happily and anxiously, now almost exploded in his chest; from the inner tension of fear and stupefaction he nearly stopped breathing. He probably couldn’t have endured sinking deeper, though he knew that now there was no stopping, he was sliding ever lower. He couldn’t possibly touch anyone like that, not as the others did, he kept telling himself scornfully. He excused himself for not reaching a climax in such wretched circumstances; he couldn’t, even if he found out that every man did it this way. Because then he’d have to give up his frenzied search. He needs affection, he told himself. Out of cowardice he couldn’t accept the ecstatic affections, and he reproved himself for this. Or came to terms with the thought that there was no human being in the world he was looking for. No such man and no such woman either. Yet he couldn’t give up the notion of mating, he couldn’t relinquish the vain or naïve idea that, like a songbird, he’d find his mate, for his sentimental hope had not left him.
Very vaguely, timorously, he hoped that fate would summon someone here, the right person, just as it had sent him here, that fate would not abandon him here. At the same time, he felt that he, with his petit-bourgeois sentimentality, was ridiculous. To imagine that he would meet his total-stranger doppelganger, differing from him only proportionately. He couldn’t imagine this other person except as an exact likeness, which is why it couldn’t be a girl. But this person should be more perfect than he, rather like that giant from whom he’d been fleeing, but not so perfect as to humiliate him with physical and mental superiority.
He couldn’t imagine kissing the giant on the mouth; at most he went as far as envisioning the giant naked, to the point where one naked skin encounters the warmth and exhalations of the other’s naked skin.
Nor did he let the tribal warriors — those strange loud-mouthed beings, all his age or younger — distract him from what he envisioned in his mind. There should be somebody for him, and not just anybody. This is what he thought, even though he always lost his equilibrium when faced with the warriors. He had good reason to fear them, not only because they were quick to come to blows, but because they could see into his most secret intentions, even those still unknown to him, could see into an area he was not too keen to visit by himself.
Let the little prick get lost in a stinking cunt, they hissed when they saw him slinking along the same trail as before, coming closer yet still refusing to let them have their way.
He refuses everything.
Waiting for the knight of his dreams, the little darling, they laughed in a mock chorus.
Indeed, for them, nothing was sacred; the whole world was but a parody of itself, designed solely for their amusement.
You can’t be waiting for the gallant rear admiral Miklós Horthy, my sweetie, there he is on his great white horse, they lisped, giggling into his ear as he passed them.