He saw the sea close to from the Adamich jetty. Fruit peels, old shoes, and fishbones floated on its oil-stained surface. He was incensed at the idea of the majestic ocean being used this way, not just constantly adored. A steamship was leaving for Brazil, for Rio de Janeiro. Gulls screamed in the air, seagulls, kings of the storm.
He ought to send another card home to his anxious mother. But he put off doing that. There wouldn’t have been room on a card for all the adventures that he’d had. All the people that he’d met, all the new people and two more mothers as well. His family had grown.
He went for a swim to wash away the aching head and throbbing heart of the night, the dust of school and everything.
He undressed and sat for a long time on a rock in his bathing costume. He listened to the sound of the water: a different hiss and crackle at every moment. Then he went down to it, befriended it, caressed it. When he saw that he didn’t hurt it he slapped it in the face with both hands, with the treasonable insolence of youth, as recklessly as an infant would a Bengal tiger. He sank into it. He sprang back up spluttering and laughing aloud. He rocked to and fro on its fragile, glassy surface. He rinsed his throat with that salty mouth-wash, spat it out, for the sea is a spittoon too, the spittoon of gods and recalcitrant youth.
Then he flung his body, arms outstretched, into the pearly blue-ness, at last to be united with it. He no longer feared anything. He knew that after this no great harm could come to him. That kiss and that journey had consecrated him for something.
He swam a long way out, beyond the rope that marked the limit, where he thought that there were dangers — sharks, corpses, rusty anchors and wrecked ships — so that everything that was lovely and ugly, everything that was visible and invisible, should be his.
On he swam with the waves and the morning wind, toward where he guessed golden Venice lay in a golden mist, the land which he didn’t yet know but loved even unknown, and as his shoulders rose and rose again from the water he lifted his face passionately toward the distant Latin shore: toward Italy, the holy, the adored.
* Sárszeg was, at the time of the story, a village to the northeast of Nagyvárad, in Bihar county, eastern Hungary. The region was lost in 1920 under the treaty of Trianon, and Sárszeg is now in Romania. Here it is the pseudonym of Kosztolányi’s native Szabadka (post-Trianon, Subotica in Serbia); it is also the setting of his novel Pac-sirta (Skylark, 1924).
* Kosztolányi himself left school and traveled to Italy in 1903.
* The appointed representative of the crown in a Hungarian county, something like the English lord lieutenant.
* Now Rijeka in Croatia.
* De Amicis (1846–1908), Italian novelist allied to Manzoni in the “purification” of Italian. Il Cuore (1886) is his most popular work, much translated and titled in English An Italian Schoolboy’s Journal.
* Gyékényes is in Somogy county, southwest Hungary, near the present Croatian frontier.
* A highly esteemed French variety, introduced to Hungary in the early 20th century.
IV
In which he makes an excursion in the “honest town” with his old friend
“SO YOU’LL COME WITH ME?” ASKED KORNÉL ESTI.
“With pleasure,” I exclaimed. “I’m sick and tired of all this dishonesty.”
I jumped into the aircraft. We roared, we circled.
We swung around with such whirling rapidity that golden eagles became giddy alongside us and swallows felt blood rushing to their heads.
Soon we landed.
“This is it,” said Esti.
“This? It’s just like where we came from.”
“Only on the outside. It’s different inside.”
We strolled into the town on foot to take a close look at everything.
The first thing that struck me was that the passersby scarcely spoke to one another.
“Here people only greet each other,” explained Esti, “if they really like and respect the other person.”
A beggar in dark glasses was crouching on the sidewalk. On his lap a tin plate. On his chest a card: I am not blind. I only wear dark glasses in summer.
“Now, why is the beggar wearing that?”
“So as not to mislead people that give alms.”
On the avenue were shops as bright as could be. In a gleaming window I read:
Crippling shoes. Corns and abscesses guaranteed. Several customers’ feet amputated.
A colorful, eye-catching picture was displayed of two surgeons with big steel saws cutting off the feet of a screaming victim, his blood running down in red streaks.
“Is this a joke?”
“Not a bit.”
“Aha. Does some legal requirement force traders to brand themselves like this?”
“Not at all,” Esti made a gesture of denial. “It’s the truth. Just understand that: it’s the truth. Here nobody hides the truth under a bushel. Self-criticism has reached such a high level in this city that there’s no longer need of anything like that.”
As we went on, one thing after another astounded me.
At the clothes shop this sign shrieked:
Expensive poor-quality clothes. Kindly bargain, because we will swindle you.
At the restaurant:
Inedible food, undrinkable drinks. Worse than at home.
At the patisserie:
Stale cakes. Made with margarine and egg substitute.
“Have these people gone mad?” I stammered. “Or are they suicidal? Or saints?”
“They’re wise,” replied Esti firmly. “They never lie.”
“And doesn’t this wisdom ruin them?”
“Look in the shops. They’re all crowded. All flourishing.”
“How is that possible?”
“Look. Everybody here knows that they themselves, and their fellow men, are honest, sincere and modest, and they’d rather put themselves down than boast, rather reduce a price than raise it. And so people here don’t quite take at face value what they hear and read, any more than you do at home. The difference amounts to this — at home you always have to subtract something from what people tell you, in fact a great deal, while here you always have to add something to it, a little. Your goods and people aren’t as excellent as they say. Here goods and people aren’t as inferior as they say. Actually, the two come to the same thing. In my view, though, the latter way is more honest, more sincere, more modest.”
In the window of a bookshop the proprietors drew attention to a book, framed in colored paper ribbon:
Unreadable rubbish … latest work of an old writer who has gone senile, not a single copy sold up to now … Ervin Hörgő’s most nauseating, most pretentious verse.
“Incredible,” I was amazed. “And will people buy it?”
“Why on earth not?”
“And read it?”
“Don’t they read things like that back at home?”
“You’re right. But there, at least they find out about them differently.“
“I repeat: this is the city of conscience. If somebody knows perfectly well that he has bad taste, and likes thunderous phrases — the sort of thing that’s cheap, inane and overdone — then he’ll buy Ervin Hörgő’s verse, and he won’t be disappointed in it, in fact, it’ll meet his requirements. The whole thing’s just a matter of tactics.”
Reeling, I looked for a café where I could restore myself.
Esti took me to a tasteless, gilded café which a sign described as the favorite haunt of con-men and spongers, and enticed customers in with unafordable prices, rude waiters.