In the very same tones ladies use in the fancy Café Gerbeaud.
Let him take you on his huge smoking cock, they yelled to his back.
Or maybe Jean Marais.
Boys, I think he is waiting for Mrs. Béla Kun.*
It was impossible to avoid them; still, he didn’t take them very seriously. He quickly discovered that no matter how powerful and fearless they might seem at night, in reality they were pariahs — servants of others’ pleasure, at everyone’s mercy — which is why he could not help loving them.
He was running from them.
He longed for their inner strength, their naked muscles, the nauseating smell of their face powders, their eyes decorated with artificial lashes, their unbridled parodies, their total boldness, but not for their vulnerability.
As he ran he lost his way in the complicated network of paths, lanes, and trails — nothing but the topography of senseless desires, the imprint of pampered fantasies and futile wishes on this filthy planet. Of course, if he could see everything, if he could observe the entire system of their existence, then he’d definitely understand.
And experience the other’s life without giving up anything of yourself, without touching him at all.
On the very first night, he’d decided to return the next day. In daylight, however, his nocturnal decision lost its validity. It was like returning in daytime as an ornithologist to a research area; the birds were screeching, singing, twittering, chirping, billing, and cooing, some of them offering impudent retorts. He might in daylight see into the secret chambers of a stranger’s conscience here, but he didn’t want anything to do with anyone or thing. The ones who had disappeared from his earlier experience were precisely those who in daylight might have guided him to some useful anthropological discovery, but in daylight no special interest linked him here, so he became a total stranger to his nocturnal self. Living his other life, he could make no contact with the requirements of this one. Or would have to exchange one of his lives for the other so that the totality of his existence would not be so intricately false, to turn the two lives into a single one. To attempt that, he felt, would be the end; he’d be playing with madness. Or perhaps he was already in this situation up to his neck and could no longer distinguish among different levels and planes of reality. Something was unavoidably happening, but it immediately and uncontrollably slipped through his fingers.
When he spoke to someone and at the same time made an effort to distract his own attention from the relentless inner speech within him, he did so with a resigned, permanent smile, which is usually enough for people to consider one endearing. But this is what made him aware of his madness’s reality. Not even with the help of his stronger, more reasonable daytime self could he soften the pain of his duality. With his polite daytime smile he promised more and forgot more than he could keep of his nocturnal promises. For a successful coordination of his selves, he’d first have to whisper to one of them which of the two was his other life. He did not succeed in this because neither the nocturnal nor the daytime life was more realistic or more improbable than the other.
In the meantime, it seemed sensible not to deny himself the nights on Margit Island. He would accomplish nothing by forbidding them to himself, anyway. But he’d stay strictly on the trails; he had to prescribe this for himself. To watch, to see, to observe, but not to mingle with those who meant to possess only his nocturnal self; to be on guard, to preserve his daytime self and, in the spirit at least of mating, to keep himself whole. If not exactly sane, at least on this side of insanity.
To trust himself to his sense of smell.
To discern in the darkness the buffeting and the waves of odors — of tobacco, shit, stale urine, sperm, the hostile or friendly emanations of bodies excited or cooling; these signals always steered him aright. Because of them, he became like an animal, following a scent and letting his feet carry him on. He felt more at home as an animal than as a human, because he recorded and preserved his need for objectivity with senses that worked only on an animal level. This smooth feeling of animality was one of the fascinating discoveries of the night — strong enough to absolve him, to neutralize his feeling of guilt and to erase his moral doubts. However, not even his feet or sense of smell could guarantee him total safety on the dark trails.
And it was not enough to be on guard with all of his senses.
Not far from the pebbled walk that separated the grove hiding the ruined cloister from the rose garden, redolent with aromatic and concentrated sweetness, were some polluted areas. During the day, people relieved themselves on its trails and brought their children and dogs, screaming, whimpering with impatience and stamping their feet, to pee and shit; women who needed to would quickly exchange their bloody cottons for clean ones. If in his excitement he did not lose his scent — that is, if an unexpected emotional agitation did not reduce his olfactory alertness — these smells warned him well in advance.
Not that way.
This is where I’ve got to, this is where I am now, he scolded himself in the conventional human way; I’ve immersed myself in the stench of excrement, perspiration, menstruation, and urine; I must discover my only, unvarnished reality while roaming around among shitty papers and bloody bunches of cotton.
Enjoyment of the search and of self-torture replaced pleasure, though he knew that with his constant seeking he was only trying to find a priggish sentimental way around his own brutality. Seeing others’ brutality, he wanted to conjure up his own. Not possible, his body grumbled, dissatisfied; it wouldn’t let him.
His beastly self worked in a system parallel to his emotional self.
The stench of others could not touch him.
At most, he would go not this way but that way. He would not give up discovering and understanding the functional principles of his own body on behalf of mere trifles; he could not relinquish his need to know. Now his beastly self, now his emotional one reported on its painful sense of something lacking, and he could not resolve questions of morality for either of them. He could not accept, could not take possession of something he did not know; yet how could he reject it if he did not even know whether it belonged in his personality, with which he was just becoming acquainted. And what could he do with his frigid self, which had nothing to do with either of his two lives, neither the emotional daytime self nor the bestial nocturnal self, for he had no appropriate sentiments for either, and about pleasure and suffering he remained as indifferent as he had been about generally accepted moral principles.
As if his thinking or his soul had characteristics that were outside his personality. Or characteristics that he sensed or perceived as having little to do with the struggles raging within him that, depending on their final outcome, would form the conditions of his personality’s life.
Hands reached after him from out of the darkness; unexpectedly they were thrust between his legs and thighs to feel the quality of his flesh, the state of his cock, and, mainly, the size of his cock. Somebody gently took hold of his wrist — he couldn’t see the man’s face because he was so close with his hot breath — and quite unexpectedly placed it in his palm while at the same time trying to touch him with his wet lips. He rejected this, quickly brushing everything and everybody off him. Yet he could not reject the surprising feel of the hot, unfamiliar cock — well proportioned, with its swelling veins, taut frenum, and foreskin jammed up before the rim of the bulb — or the intense, profound feeling that another human being had placed his pulsating fate in his hand just like that. Indeed, he grabbed it as a baby would grab a rattle. This he could not forget and therefore could not deny his awareness of the cock’s exceptional qualities or uniqueness either. He learned this from his own cautious, stiff, frightened little hands, and a few overbearing forceful men and happenstance sufficed for the lesson.