By the time we had knocked back a large bottle of cognac swimming with ice cubes, I had gathered the courage to kiss that arm.
“You were a great success, Marcelle,” I said, for something to say.
“Oh, yes, with all those… Martians and eunuchs.”
“What do you mean?”
“Martians, because they’ll never get any closer to me, and if they did, they might as well be eunuchs, so far as I’m concerned.”
“I’ve been your Martian for a long time now,” I said gently.
“Not any more. Today the good Lord hung the stars up upside down… Look, the English girls are already drunk and you’re still sober. Perhaps that’s rather wise of you.”
I drank and marvelled at her chameleon-like nature. To tell the truth, she had always deeply attracted me: I loved both her wonderful two-sidedness and its very transparency, in the same the way that I had always been secretly attracted to walking sticks that could turn into umbrellas, slide rules that could be used as laryngoscopes, and the symbols in Ibsen. I was also drawn to her for the reason that men are generally attracted to women: that is to say, I have no idea why. But this particular attraction I had dismissed as just another of the hopeless loves with which I serially embellished my young life.
I knew that Marcelle adored Pilaszanovits with the tragic fidelity of a midinette, which tempted me to believe that La Dame aux camélias might not be entirely nonsense. But Pilaszanovits treated her with the tender casualness of a con man fingering a dud chequebook. (Though, later, when Marcelle left him for a rayon manager in a morning coat at the Galeries Lafayette, Pilaszanovits killed himself. Every year I laid flowers on his grave in the Montparnasse cemetery, the ones which featured in his favourite song: lilies of the valley, purple carnations, common larkspur, sweet marjoram. But that’s a long way in the past now, and experience tells me no one would believe the story anyway.)
But how could I, or perhaps more precisely in this context, how could my humble self, have believed for a moment that Marcelle might think me worthy of a single glance, in the meaningful sense of that phrase, when Pilaszanovits could treat me as follows in her presence: “Tamás, old chap, you’re a terribly clever man. You’re so clever you’re quite unlike anyone else. You’re so clever no normal woman will ever understand you. So clever that women invariably treat you as a bit of a joke.”
And if I ever did ever mention one of my conquests, however tentatively, he would be secretly convinced that the woman in question must be a hunchback, only I had failed to notice this fact, being so caught up in my wonderful rationalising myths.
The only reason I’m telling you this is to emphasise how totally unforeseen it was, that summer evening, when Marcelle suddenly took me by the arm, after countless light years of the cosy, eunuch-like friendship in which she had so hopelessly confined me. But when I looked about myself, under the Chinese lanterns theatrically lighting the great Corot-like trees from below, with all the summer stars out in the sky above, it was a really miraculous summer night. One of those nights when dumb animals open their mouths and utter wise sayings.
Whether I had been drinking — or everyone else had — is hard to determine. A French gentleman in a hat was telling stories in which St Denis entertained his Gallic contemporaries before valiantly gathering up his decapitated head under his arm. The ugly Spanish girls around him were shrieking with laughter. I didn’t see the Spanish boys, because they had already vanished into the darkness of the shrubbery. M. Robinet was giving his magic show, with an egg, some bicarbonate of soda and the ship’s hooter with which his brother-in-law the captain had signalled the presence of his vessel as it made its way placidly along the Louvre-Suresnes, and which he had subsequently bestowed on M. Robinet during a family picnic. The famous young man gave a display of solo dancing, his legs apparently detached from the rest of his joints and twisting about in the wild rhythms with such daring that they were more like electrified trousers than actual legs. Music sounded, like a madness. Everyone was on his or her feet, and only the Alsatian waiter stayed sitting gloomily beside a large bottle of beer. But the English girls — my God, the English girls! — set aside their native cold-bloodedness and really let themselves go, the protective powder slipping from their faces and those faces becoming even more babyish than usual. There was electricity in the air, forgotten jealousies and secrets spilling out — it was another Koriandolis, where snake-like desires for other men’s women boiled over, as if everyone had staked all their emotions, heads or tails, on this one hour; and when M. Robinet in his endless benevolence extinguished the light, there seemed every possibility for sexual adventure.
On the veranda where we were sitting the darkness seemed to increase as the music fell away. It was made all the more intense by tumultuous voices coming at random from every side. How could I deny that my first action was to feel around with my hand in the blackness for Marcelle, with no particular purpose in mind but with a happy smile on my face? But Marcelle was most decidedly no longer there. I set off in frantic haste to look for her. The light might be switched on again at any time.
My hand came upon someone at random and I took her firmly by the arm. The girl I was holding said, “Ooh,” ending in the final ‘u’ of the English. I cut it short by kissing her, with uncharacteristic vigour, full on the mouth.
That kiss was an even finer instrument of self-expression than the sonnet, and at moments like this much more promising. The opening lines of the kiss said little: more important than the technical aspect was the simple joy felt in them, the joy of the mischievous adolescent and the woman’s delight in the unexpected. But the second strophe, with its daring seriousness, was already establishing a theme. In a spirit of reverence, and with a yearning that drew on my most distant memories, I paid homage to the stranger who embodied the beauty of the night, the Unknown Goddess in my arms, as the kiss proclaimed her to be through its ecstasies of pain. The third strophe concluded the theme: because I cannot see you, because I don’t know who you are — because you are Everywoman — you are the Supremely Beautiful, the She who smoulders at the base of all my passion, and my devotion to you is, like the night, eternal. But the final strophe… was no longer a strophe, and the sonnet was no more — it was nothing, simply a kiss, without duration, and I was so immersed in it, with every atom of my being, that my head spun, and I let go of that mysterious someone. When I came to again, she was no longer there, and I “thrice embraced the empty air”, as Virgil puts it so beautifully, in his Latin.
Besides, the light had suddenly come on again.
Monsieur Robinet was standing by the switch like a convivial old Satan, delighting in his guests’ damnation. The Russian Duchess grabbed the Frenchman by the shoulder and shook him:
“You’re quite mistaken,” she yelled, with a display of energy that was quite shocking. “Love can do anything. There are people out there who swim the Channel for love, and people who die in suicide pacts for love, and everyone forgives them.”
“It seems Madame is not a native of this country,” the Frenchman exclaimed, his face white with anger.
The English girls were noisily pestering a beautiful young man with a large behind, like the fantasy object of some elderly female civil servant. The Alsatian waiter had fallen asleep. But Marcelle, the perfidious Marcelle, was standing in rather intimate proximity to the famous young man. Then she sat down with him, and a few others of his kind, at a table. I turned away from them, in a whirlpool of grief.