“I’m afraid there may be too many people in the world.”
Having said this, it was as if he had answered any possible further questions. He set off for the bridge. I hurried to keep step with him, because I didn’t understand what he meant. Quite enough people had died needless deaths at that time. Hadn’t they always? Why should he be worried about there being too many people? But he didn’t elaborate, just walked on like a man in a hurry, too busy to answer. I suspected he was joking or playing a trick on me. I remembered the two of them, my ex-husband and his bald friend, and how they used to play games where they pretended to be dull people saying the most obvious things. There are people who insist on calling a spade a spade and nothing else, people who when it’s hot and everyone is dripping with perspiration, when the very dogs are dropping dead in the street, frown and point to the sky and pronounce in stern, magisterial tones: “It’s hot!” And, having pronounced this, they look inordinately proud, the way everyone does when they have said something particularly obvious and stupid. That was a game they played. So now, having declared that there were too many people, I wondered if he was mocking me. He was right in the sense that the crowd on the bridge had the look of a natural disaster, that they looked like Colorado beetles in a potato field. The thought startled me and I changed the subject. “But really, what will you do?” I asked him.
I always used the impersonal vous form of “you” with him, maga, not te. He, on the other hand, addressed me familiarly, as te. I never dared address him that way. For other people he always used the more formal, impersonal manner, even for his first wife, his parents, and his friends. He never liked the stupid, overfamiliar way people of the same class and same type went straight to te in the hope of demonstrating their mutuality, as if to prove they were members of the same important club. But he always addressed me as te. It wasn’t anything we talked about; it was just the way things worked between us.
He took off his glasses, drew a clean handkerchief from his cigar pocket, and carefully cleaned the lenses. Once he had put them back, he looked over to the bridge, where the queue was growing ever longer. Quite calmly, he said, “I’m leaving, because I’m superfluous: it is me that is the one too many.”
His gray eyes gazed steadily ahead. He didn’t blink, not once.
There was no pride in his voice. He spoke in matter-of-fact tones, like a doctor diagnosing an illness. I didn’t ask him anything else, because I knew he’d not say anything, not even under torture. We walked on toward the bridge. Once there, we bid each other a silent farewell. He carried on along the embankment toward Krisztinaváros. As for me, I took my place in the slow, winding queue and shuffled my way toward the steps leading onto the bridge. I saw him just once more, hatless, his raincoat over his arm, slowly but deliberately making his way, the way people do when they are absolutely certain where they are going — that’s to say, to their own annihilation. I knew I’d never see him again. There is something about knowing such things that seems the first step to madness.
What did he mean? Maybe that a man is only alive as long as he has a role to play. Beyond that, he is no longer alive: he merely exists. You won’t understand this, because you do have a role in the world: your role is to love me.
There! I’ve said it. Don’t look at me so archly. It’s getting toward dawn, you’ve just come back from the bar, and here I am, your Roman odalisque, fussing over you in a hotel. If anyone could hear our conversation, someone suspicious by nature, someone who could observe and listen to us, they’d think we were a pair of conspirators. They’d see a common woman who once found herself among the lords of the world, gossiping with her pretty lover about all she has seen there, betraying their secrets, and there you are, drinking it all in, because you want to know what tricks the rich get up to. It’s a wicked world, he’d think. Don’t go frowning and wrinkling that lovely brow. Go on, laugh. After all, we know the truth about each other. You’re not just a pretty boy, you’re an artist through and through, my one and only benefactor, the man I adore, who is helping me through what remains of the farce of my life. You help by selling the jewels my wicked husband left me. You help because you are kind and soft-hearted. And I am not really a common woman, nor ever was, not even when I took money from my husband the only way I knew, not because I needed the cash but because I needed justice. What are you grinning at? It’s a secret between the two of us.
So yes, my husband was quite a peculiar man. I watched him leave and suddenly felt curious. I would love to have known what the man lived for, why he felt superfluous now, and why he was going away to be a house painter in Australia or an odd-job man in America. Wasn’t the stuff he believed in so firmly, the role he was playing, just a ridiculous charade? I don’t read the papers. I glance at the headlines when some bigwig gets murdered or a movie star is divorced; that’s all I read, nothing else. All I know of politics is that no one trusts anyone, and everyone thinks he knows better than the next man. As I watched him walk away I saw a troop of Russian soldiers march past, rifles slung over their shoulders, bayonets fixed, big strapping lads who were in Hungary, whose presence meant everything would be different from now on, different from the time when my husband thought he had a role in the world.
I shuffled along in the queue, over the bridge, over the yellow, dirty, end-of-winter Danube. The river was high. There were planks, blasted remains of ships and corpses washed along the tide. No one paid any attention to the corpses; everyone looked straight ahead, carrying things in backpacks, bowed under the weight. It was as if all humanity had set out on a long, penitential march. So we wound over the bridge, hordes of us, each of us laden down by our own guilt. And, suddenly, I no longer felt myself to be important, no longer in a hurry to get to Király utca to trade my tattered paper money for nail-polish remover. Suddenly I saw no point in going anywhere at all. The meeting had upset me. Although I never loved the man, I was horrified by the idea that I didn’t resent him, either, not really, not the way you are supposed to hate your enemy. The thought hit me hard: it was like losing something valuable. There comes a time, you know, when people realize it’s not worth being angry. That is, let me tell you, a very sad moment.
It’s almost dawn. The light suddenly becomes so hot, so effervescent! In Rome there seems to be no transition between night and dawn. Wait, let me raise the blinds. Look at those two orange trees outside the window. They’ve produced two oranges each, all four wrinkled and withered — the kind you only get in this town. Those two trees are like old people: the wrinkled oranges are the feelings they have struggled to produce.
Doesn’t the light hurt your eyes? Myself, I like these Roman mornings, this sultriness. The light comes on so suddenly and so bright it’s like a young woman throwing off her nightgown and going over to the window naked. There’s nothing immodest about her then: she’s simply naked.
What’s that mocking laughter about? Am I being too poetical for you? Yes, I know I tend to talk in comparisons. I see you must be thinking I got this from the bald man. Versifiers and scribblers, you think. We women are always imitating the men that interest us.
No point in leafing through the album. You won’t find anything. I don’t have a picture of him.
I see the light is bothering you. I’ll let the blinds down halfway. Is that better? The street is still deserted. Have you noticed how empty our little Via Liguria is even during the day? He lived here, you know. Who? Him — the bald man. Move over, I want to lie down. Pass me the small cushion. And the ashtray. You want to sleep? I’m not sleepy, either. Let’s lie here quietly for a while. I like just lying still at daybreak, not moving at all but staring at the ceiling in this old house in Rome. When I wake up at three in the morning and you are still out at the bar, I lie like this for a long time.