‘Until tomorrow,’ one would say as Sindbad was packing his bags.
‘I’ll bring pictures of the children next time,’ a second promised even as another woman was waiting at some other port of call.
‘Now we shall never leave each other,’ ventured a third.
The sails were already fixed and Sindbad was only waiting for a favourable wind.
What was it they loved?
They liked to be treated well. One should treat the majority of well-disposed females with tenderness, as one would treat a child, approving all their nonsense, greeting each petty remark with delight and noticing each new dress, lavishing praise on the most incidental of new accessories. Do so and your fortune’s made. What is most astonishing is that it is the cleverest of them, those hard-headed professional women, who are the readiest to announce that a man has been wholly captivated by their latest item of footwear!
They liked fine words. They liked music, flowers, sentimental promenades, hours filled with tears, painful farewells; they liked any event, however minor, however common, which could stop the clocks of routine even for a minute.
They liked gestures of self-sacrifice. It is a well-known fact that many women take it as a personal insult if the suitor does not threaten to hang himself from the tree beneath her window. And wealthy women are almost more demanding of little presents than the poor ones who need them. An extremely rich woman once told her lover at their first appointment: ‘What are you to me? My benefactor. Have you bought me anything yet?’ And yet this lady was so respectable and good that all the orphans in town would kiss her hand, and her heart was known to be of such pure gold that it was doubtful whether the jewellery shops of heaven had ever produced anything finer.
They liked the word fiancé and they liked the word lover — they liked to form lifelong relationships at the first meeting and one may be perfectly sure they never seriously thought that love might eventually end. They liked long eloquent letters — and though they frequently did not read them right through they felt insulted if the letter did not look long enough. They liked it when men collected mementos such as locks of hair, garters, handkerchiefs, prayer books, hairpins, shoes, anklets, rings, little slips of paper, railway tickets, dying flowers, pieces of ribbon, leaves of trees with pleasant associations, veils, horseshoe nails (if these were found in pairs), portraits, coins, crumbs from cakes, pebbles, cigarette ends, buttons, shirts, books, strings of corsets and empty matchboxes. There was one woman who was especially kind to Sindbad and trusted him with the management of her estate, accepted his advice on financial matters, gave him her jewellery for safe-keeping and even entrusted him with documents relating to her divorce. At the end of the affair she asked for no bills but that he should return to her a particular number of the evening paper, Az Est, which she had had in her possession in the course of a railway journey between Vienna and Budapest and in the margins of which this elegant lady had drawn curious little pictures such as street children chalk on the walls of houses. She was anxious and unhappy and unable to sleep till the old newspaper was found. ‘See how much I loved you!’ she said with a pained expression and put it to the flame of the candle until it lay in a thousand blackened pieces on the floor.
They liked domesticity. Once Sindbad brought great joy to a very dear lady when he learned from her the art of knitting stockings. Other women radiated happiness when Sindbad knocked a nail into the wall as a picture hook, when he mended a lock in the house, or when, in the course of a stay at some village, he rose early to check that things at the mill were proceeding as they should. There were ladies among his old acquaintance who forgave Sindbad anything providing our mariner ran down to the butcher to buy a few crowns’ worth of smoked meat to supplement an already ample supper. Others kept him locked up quietly and secretly on the ground floor while they slept content on the floor above. There are ugly snub-nosed men who owe their good fortune to their ability to deal with a horse at stud. It is particularly the women who have experienced the love of handsome and refined gentlemen when young who seem happiest to accommodate some slight disfigurement in a man’s nose or other bodily part in later years.
And they liked order. They liked to keep track of all Sindbad’s debts and to frown and fret over the means of clearing them. ‘You’ll see how good it is once your mind is at rest,’ they’d say, especially older women who tried to persuade Sindbad that their love for him was purely Platonic. Ah, these Platonic affairs afforded Sindbad hearty amusement. He bowed his head, smiled to himself, and waited quietly to see what the women wanted of him. They forbade him wine, cards and loose company, kept his underwear in order, and were delighted when he pretended to feel drowsy at dusk. How often did they make him swear to abjure dice and to drink wine only by small glassfuls! Sindbad could repeat every form of vow by now, word for word; he knelt down without being asked and was delighted to get through the ordeal. For the next few days he would feel very well, covering the woman’s hands with grateful kisses, checking over her book-keeping and quibbling with the taxman over a few pennies, then he’d disappear without warning.
He had been loved by blondes, brunettes, slim girls and fat ones, and each time he believed he had found his one true love, just as they believed they had found theirs and never forgot him.
As the years went by there were messages from far away. Women wanted him to come back: they were bored, they felt nostalgic; they wanted to laugh, cry, cackle, fret and be happy. But Sindbad did not go back because he kept account of the lovers that had succeeded him in their affections. The subsequent pain and bitter disappointment prevented him ever forgiving their unfaithfulness. He was a rogue: in the Middle Ages he would have gone the rounds of the prisons where he would have been shorn, first of his nose, then of his ears. Furthermore, he always believed he was speaking the truth and one can ask no clearer proof of a man’s wickedness. He could never forgive women. He thought he perceived miraculous qualities in them, a combination of the fidelity of the saints with the virtues of the martyrs. And how he would rage when one of them took up with another man though it was he who had done the leaving.
Let us therefore close the file on Sindbad’s not altogether pointless and occasionally amusing existence.
Mrs Bánati, the Lost Woman
Where does the story of Mrs Bánati begin? Where does it end? Perhaps it begins like the river’s source, springing from the earth in little runnels. Somebody is playing a thin-toned violin at the window and Mrs Bánati is still in pigtails, looking in the mirror and listening to the violin. The river gathers force and shoulders its way past cities and towers, past ever-fresh landscapes; morning finds it at a well-kept park, by the evening it is washing the banks of a cemetery or toying with the lanterns of the great city. The thin-toned violin has fallen quiet and big-chested men are looking deep into Mrs Bánati’s eyes: one man declaims at her as he might at some public meeting, another sighs and murmurs lovely words at her, and a third hides his intentions under a little black silk cap and keeps repeating how he wishes only to console her, regale her with good advice and make life comfortable for her but never notices what shoes she is wearing. Men come and go like landscapes along a river. Following her fourth marriage Mrs Bánati was engaged in reflecting on the lies told her by men — reflecting on how things were, for no one was currently lying to her. At night the shades of discarded men visited her and sat down beside her but Mrs Bánati peevishly hid her face in the pillow.