Whenever he turned up in one of the noisy cafés — in the Sas (Eagle) on Újvilág Street, in the Vadászkürt (Hunting Horn), where he read foreign newspapers, in the Kávécsarnok (Coffee Hall), where he would confer with suspicious characters about obscure political matters, or once in a while in the luxurious Angol Királynő (Queen of England), because of a scandalous adventure that linked him with a lady of the highest social circles — then, with his dashing figure and impeccable attire he immediately captured and for long moments held the attention of the public. People who knew him made fawning or stinging remarks; people who did not know him wanted very much to know who he was.
At the door, the waiter would courteously, complying with police orders, take his walking cane, while he, pulling at the fingers one by one, with the same ceremoniousness removed his tight-fitting chamois gloves as he absentmindedly and majestically let his gaze sweep over the place. He could have been taken for a famous foreign artist or aristocrat, of whom onlookers would say, what a distinguished-looking man; he is of course not from among us and not like us. He would take off his top hat, hand his gloves and hat to the waiter, who only then would lead him to his table or to the company waiting for him at his table.
His steps were always deliberate, his gestures smooth and pliable. A fastidiously well-bred wild animal passed between the tables.
The magic would last until he lowered himself to a chair or until, leaning out from the depths of an overstuffed chair, he began to speak. Everything on him was finely wrought; everything was long, longoid, bony though not without some flesh, like his fingers; at the same time wild and unruly, like the fine strands of his shiny black hair that spilled out from under his headgear. No less wild were his eyebrows, which with disobedient hairs on the slightly bone-yellow skin grew together above the bridge of his nose; his lips were almost offensively thick and on their upper rim he sported a tiny mustache trimmed to a thin line. With his mere appearance, with a confident and spoiled-child smile playing at the corner of his lips, with his gestures and skin color, with his dark, nervously darting or, alternately, lingering gazes, he could ingratiate himself with anyone. And it would take him an equally short time to pulverize the disconcerting attraction others felt for him and make people wonder where they stood with him.
He was born under the sign of Aquarius, and nature had fatally granted him all the traits associated with his constellation but, alas, nothing else. He was a man of the spectacle, or rather of the spectacle of visual illusions; he knew everything that had to do with spectacle, he knew what he owed to harmony, what to disharmony; he was well versed in the measurement units of symmetry and asymmetry: he preferred symmetry without insisting on it, because he opposed the monotony of proportions. However, these aptitudes did not function in him as acquired engineering skills but reached down to, were in touch with, his viscera; they drew nourishment from his guts. Yet he was not untrained; no one could put his skills to better use. He could also manage colors, shapes, materials, the rhythms of lines, and he instinctively sensed their mutuality and reciprocity, but where the territorial waters of visualization ended, he was considered a lost man.
Complete tone-deafness is probably as rare as the possession of absolute pitch. The problem was not that he could not distinguish a waltz from a mazurka, though sometimes he couldn’t do that — and that’s nothing to worry about; he proved to be morbidly insensitive to any auditory proportions and perhaps because of that was incapable of listening to others or hearing himself properly.
He had no friends, only admirers and enemies. Samu Demén did not comprehend fine tensions and shades of emphasis or meaning. He did not hear out anyone to the end, could not argue well; he would quickly shout down, interrupt, and pounce on anyone, break into the conversations of others, occasionally talk over another speaker’s words. He felt in his element when he could hold forth in a freewheeling monologue. His refined gestures notwithstanding, few people forgot that at table he ate noisily and smacked his lips. A beautiful body in which probably there was never silence, a body that did not desire silence.
Some people simply avoided him.
Of course, he sensed this, but ever since leaving the family home, he hadn’t understood why things happened so that he wound up being alone in the end.
On his buildings there were no traces of disagreeable extremes. He built not from the outside in but from the inside out. As if he saw the inner courtyard before envisioning the facade, or first saw a single room that would determine the proportions of all the others and not the other way around. He became convinced, nay, obsessed with the notion that a living space is successful only when its ground plan is an elongated rectangle like that of a Greek temple, and its individual rooms almost regular squares. He wanted living spaces to be intimate, gentle, and friendly; they should not stifle desire, but neither should they feed ambition or conceit. The height of the rooms depended on their width and length in the floor plans. From which it followed not only that he would not design overly large rooms, because he couldn’t call for senselessly high ceilings, but that all the rooms had to be about the same size, in the end not much larger than the service spaces.
All his designs might well have been for comfortable, intimate, restful, substantial, and cheerful spaces, but they could not be reconciled to the spirit of the age, and therefore he could not implement them; they usually remained on paper. His ideas did not turn his colleagues against him; they merely smiled at his plans. Samu Demén drafts pretty little country houses, they would say, but hasn’t the vaguest notion what a city apartment building should be like. And his plans scared away potential customers. In buildings that his colleagues designed the interior proportions were indeed different. Rooms in the front — drawing rooms, studies, smoking rooms, and dining rooms — were larger and high-ceilinged, in the rear quarters all the spaces, dark corridors, pantries, dens, recesses, and alcoves became narrower, which made their interior height alarming. As for the apartments on the courtyard, their proportions were even less convenient; everything was crowded, intruding on everything else. Kitchens encroached on rooms, rooms on windowless alcoves and sleeping recesses; there were public toilets on the rear stairwell landings; in short, the city’s dense and impure atmosphere invaded the living space.
As opposed to all this, Demén dealt with space so generously that on any given floor he could put no more than two apartments, which of course found no favor with developers, who balked at the prices of building lots or looked for more profitable deals. And when he might have stood up for his ideas by arguing courteously and cleverly, everyone could see that he nearly exploded with anger when crossed.
Please understand that when you draw a line across the topmost point of the tympanum parallel with the crepidoma — that’s the terraced substructure of an ancient temple — and then connect the two at each end, all right, I see you don’t understand, you’ve probably never seen a Greek temple, well, that would give you an almost regular square, and that’s the essence of the thing. Well then, please note that this is what we call a classical proportion. A virtual square tending toward a flat rectangle. And I would go further, but please understand that I can go only as far as is optically tolerable. I won’t go past that, trust me; I simply won’t. Now then, if we put another floor on this building, or two or three floors, as you would like me to do, then we would stand the world on its head.