We were standing on either side of the car and I was watching, with confused longing and in search of a saving idea, the lit-up buses and the shadows of men drinking in the old familiar light of the bar. I did this also so I wouldn’t have to look at Simon’s repulsively thin figure.
He did not take his belligerent eyes off me; he saw something I didn’t know in myself.
He was leaning on the half-open car door with one arm, his elbow on the roof, his chin propped up on his thumb. As if he knew what I was thinking about, with what moral doubts I was struggling. His self-satisfaction was a slap in the face because what I sorely lacked was a healthy dose of self-confidence.
Although I held so many things against him, his openness, flexibility, and slimness, there was nothing I could do about or say against his complacency. There was no direct relationship between the physical presence of this other human being and my opinion of him, I understood that perfectly well. One keeps forgetting and therefore must repeatedly bring together these two kinds of experience and knowledge. In the darkness of the old car, I had first noticed the adolescent fragility of his neck. Now, unhindered and from close up, I had to cope with the reality of his face.
And why shouldn’t I want to comprehend with all my senses this person from whom I must tear Klára away.
What virtues should I have, how could I be completely different from what I am, to win her away from this miserable character. It was almost like asking how I might make myself as repulsive as he seemed. But the provocative reality of his face disturbed me and kept me captive — independently of the woman. As if with his features he was playing a game, and I had to accept unconditionally the rules of this game. While I was thoroughly ashamed for him and had no idea what to do about it. Still, I felt I was accepting something unfamiliar, willingly entering something I knew nothing about. Thin men like him seem always to wear shirts at least two sizes larger than their neck requires, which makes them look very vulnerable and fragile. But your surprise is all the greater when you come up against their tenacity, shrewdness, and aggressiveness. At the same time, I discovered that what until then I had thought was just a dark shadow on his forehead was a black spot full of ominous little lumps. As he leaned forward, his elbow still resting on the car’s roof, his dark shiny hair fell over the hideous blotch on his forehead. As if it explained the dread he aroused in me, although I could not think of the name of the skin disease.
The streetlamp on its cable was swinging in the wind directly above us. Shadows from the hair fallen over his forehead stretched into his face, long fingers reaching into him at the whim of the swinging lamp. Occasionally, light flared up on the dark surface of his eyes. As if he were saying something in tune with the swinging lamp, nodding along with its rhythm, but then it turned out he’d said nothing, after all. As if he wanted to ask which of us would put up with this situation longer. Come on, push your beaver up just a little. It was a provocation but not a challenge because he was without armor too. Let’s see how far we get, he seemed to say, how far with each other. Which to some extent referred to the woman but not completely, because with his look he touched my face, reached in among the various layers of my character. His posture called to me, his sheer gaze commanded that I do the same. As if both of us were looking into the same mirror, and in my surprise I had no choice but to lean closer, yet what I saw was not my own disgustingly familiar mug.
I can’t deny that the beauty of the face surprised me. It probably surprised me with the keenness of its intelligence. Some profiles say nothing; the sudden turning face-to-face is what takes your breath away. Or the other way around: you are disappointed when an impressive profile belongs to an unimpressive face. His beauty looked out at me from the drawn, bony face of a day laborer. As if he were looking at me from the depth of several centuries. He wore a white shirt buttoned to the very top, as road workers on the Great Hungarian Plain do on holidays; he was flaunting his stubbly chin and his gauntness. His features were symmetrical and harmonious; a long face, somewhat oriental, with almost motionless eyes. It was surprising how much undisguised suffering had been carved into his features. He seemed like a reticent man, or at least he wanted to seem like one. And not only the suffering of the soul had been carved undisguised into his features, but also deprivations of the body, penury, his inhibitions, the stifled, freewheeling fury of his possessiveness.
I had not had experiences like that, yet all this was not unknown to me, not distant, because the secret passion of sufferance brought me close to him. To a person who perhaps denied his feelings as passionately as I did. Denial had written horizontal wrinkles into the skin of his forehead. It was enough to raise his eyebrows a bit, as he did just now, looking inquisitive, to have his forehead show a piling up of centuries-old furrows, darkened by the spot of the skin disease. His eyebrows were beautiful, thick, dense, dark, very strong and manly. This man is a wolf. As I searched my mind for the name of the skin disease, I remembered that it had something to do with the wolf or with legends of bloodthirsty wolves.
Denial and experience left nothing distrustful or indistinct on his face; they planted radially expanding dry lines at the corners of his eyes and surrounded his thin lips with two aggressively sharp grooves. The features that denial and experience had drawn on his face did not allow him to hide his emotions or his affections. He must have been too sensitive to be truly reticent and negative. His intentions and his faculties were separate. I wanted to lean closer to him just as he too seemed to be offering himself up; with the flexibility of thin people, and with his openness, he somehow wound up closer to me. I wanted to have a glance between the dark shadows; I put my elbows on the car, with a movement meant to be as effortless as the ones his body had suggested.
He could not have anticipated that my interest in the characteristics of men was so uninhibited; I surprised and astonished him, but he accepted it immediately, with no revulsion. But I felt I was in danger, I’d got myself into danger, now I would abandon my upbringing, give up something to hold on to. It may have seemed to him that I was deliberately imitating his movements when the opposite was the case: I was guided by the raw feeling of attraction as, leaning on my elbows just as he was, I stared into his face or into the core of his soul. The only difference was that I put my chin in the palm of my hand instead of propping it up with my thumb.
He must have enjoyed managing to bend me this way.
That’s how we were staring at each other; the wet car roof glittered dully.
If his skin had not been so translucently tender and at the same time his stubbly cheekbones had not been so strong and wild, if his aggressive chin had not been marked by a charming cleft, if he did not have finely cut eye sockets, if no winding, lumpy, coarse vein ran down from his temple, and if his visage had not been buffeted by contradictory emotions, then he would have remained painfully vulnerable: a face on which every secret feeling and every humiliating experience may be quickly seen. However, as things were, one could see all the things which the man felt but which, in his own well-conceived interest, he deliberately, stubbornly, and brazenly denied.