Sunflower (24 page)

Pistoli placed a hand on the wine jug and spoke in a most solemn tone, as if what followed was a matter of life and death:

“Sir, I'll tell you who shouldn't drink: those whom alcohol turns into swine. Let'em swill water from the trough, like farmyard animals. For there's nothing more digusting than a drunk. (Though I did come across a certain kind of woman who favored only drunks, she could make'em satisfy her every last kink.) Yes, wine can be full of ghosts, or else lissome, high-life chorus girls. A sinister sign marks the forehead of the man who imbibes only the ghosts.

“All those staggerers with bloodshot eyes collapsing in a tearful heap by the ditch; pillaged hearts clutching a knife; those hollering at their reflection in the well's suicidal depths, or laying themselves down across the cities' thoroughfares; those who rend women's hair; the jealous ones who stink of bitter mineral water; those trembling hands ready to commit murder; all those unfortunates who must guzzle wine to find the courage to stumble through life's vast night—well, they had all better plop down by the puddle, because this is one party you won't be recovering from on a prison straw-mat, or in the confessional cage of conscience's accusing
agenbite of inwit
. The drunk that regrets drinking, and in his sorrow scrawls German verses on the white planks of the summerhouse, kneels at the foot of the wronged woman, and must pawn his lynx jacket after an all-night binge, vows promises to lonesome trees, and spends half his life trying to make up for the mistakes he made—he should stay at home, within the confines of his four walls, toss the doorkey into the river, and never leave the house, not even if he wakes dreaming that the place is on fire. The solitary drinker should tie one hand to the bedpost, so he'll find instant refuge among the eiderdown quilts when the good Lord's golden vintage turns dark inside his wicked guts. That would be the finest farmers' almanac, in which the rhymester would immortalize the solitary drinker's thoughts and feelings in this land! The desolate village manors ready to collapse, and only that last jug of wine to light up the gloom inside! The way the prematurely old and lonely man talks to parts of his body when the wine goes down the hatch and you must converse with your own broken leg, since there's no one else to talk to! The lugubrious glug of the solitary swig, and that meaningless crooning when the head crashes to the tabletop in a room! Women long since dead calling out from carefully saved photographs and ghosts of friends lurking in corners! Small and large coffins, packed full of memories, now returning on the surging flood of inebriation, bobbing and dancing like a gatepost carried off by the springtime Tisza's high water! That would make a fine almanac, if you wrote down the thoughts of the solitary toper! I did try once, when I was still able to suffer.”

Kálmán listened with distaste to his host's words. By now, he had had almost enough of the eccentric village squire. He liked to look on life with dry eyes, as a strict business proposition.

“No matter how your lordship entices me, I'm not interested in drunkenness. I don't intend to clamber up on the kettle-drum like a circus monkey. I want to breathe free, and seek favorable passage on life's river with a cool heart and sober mind. I prefer to calculate, just like a businessman.”

Pistoli smiled inwardly and thought, “This young whipper-snapper thinks he's so very smart, but I'll show him his place!” And he took a prolonged draught from the smoky jug, just like a thirsty forest in a May downpour.

“Well, a solitary man needs his bit of ecstasy to put up with life,” he mused on. “Take for example me, who always believed that in the matter of brains no one in the county could come close to me. If need be, I could always muster the wiliness of a snake. And still, there came nighttime hours when, in spite of all my wisdom, I didn't relish my solitude. The company of people bored me, for I had the misfortune of always detecting their true selves, their real voices behind the false front of small talk. Oh, I never fell for people whose fluting voices warble nothing but white-gloved courtesy, kind flattery and fraud. I always knew their innermost thoughts. Filtering through the pious, holier-than-thou psalms, I could always hear the dull thud of the drumroll at the execution ground. And so I was never crazy about the company of my fellow humans. Even women I desired only as long as I didn't tire of them.”

(“Why, oh why does this old fool insist on boring me to death with the story of his life?” Kálmán secretly wondered.)

After another hearty swig as soothing for Mr. Pistoli's throat as a glass of water at dawn for the feverish invalid, he went on: “Let me repeat, I have never craved the company of men, but still there were times when I couldn't do without it. Therefore I had to conjure them up, lure their shadows here, their sunken footprints, their veiled voices. I seated their disembodied forms around my table, and we conversed about life and death, as well as works and days. The good old wine jug always brought them here, no matter how far away they were. The wineglass pulled them up from the bed where they lay with a hand on the wife's belly.

“Each swallow of wine brought out their innermost feelings, clandestine thoughts and never-before-confessed misbehavings. They told me what they do at home when they believe no one is watching. They had opened up the blind windows of their souls' dank cellars, and let out the cold blast of egotism that filled their miserable lives. After these gatherings not one of my acquaintances remained unfathomed. I had reconsidered all their voluntary actions and reviewed the deeds they had committed without themselves knowing the whys and wherefores. I inspected them from all sides as one would a bullock at the marketplace. Did they possess any redeemable human value, and what was it? What was the key to their makeup? Did they really merely dangle from the hair of women's private parts, like rancid little crumbs, while claiming they were connected umbilically to the eternal feminine, the Mother of us all? And so I examined them like an apothecary does his poisons. I often laughed out loud when I discovered new sights. In my solitary investigations I had to slap my forehead when I came upon the key to the behavior of one of my friends. I calmed down and made peace with myself. The life I had lived thus far, like a surly badger, was surely the best, for I had lost nothing by avoiding men. I became as cheerful as a fallen girl after her confession. My heart filled up with the joys of life. And the wine jug welled up with women who were never unfaithful, never evil. They were women who gave me joy. So I played cards with them till daybreak, the stakes were nose-tweaking and making love. The winner would receive my dream for the day, for dreams were all I ever paid to women.”

“The scoundrel,” thought Kálmán Ossuary, from whom a woman was lucky to receive, at the most, his condescending agreement to accept her presents.

“You think I didn't see Eveline leaving the garden earlier this evening?” Mr. Pistoli asked with a sudden flash of his eyes, and gave Kálmán Ossuary a penetrating glance.

The latter, a bit discomposed, bit his lip, and racked his brain for the ugliest epithets regarding Mr. Pistoli.

“But let's return to the women in the chalice. (Alas, Miss Eveline has never complied with my summons, even though in my boredom I had more than once appealed for the young lady with the doelike tread who happens to be the chatelaine of this neighborhood. Naturally she bathes far more often than the chateleines of old, about whom I had once read that on Good Friday they washed the feet of beggars, but never their own. They used to wear egret feathers in their hats, although their necks were not exactly immaculately clean. Those heavy, brocaded skirts and leather undergarments concealed unwashed limbs, that's why itinerant peddlers hawking perfumes did such roaring trade. Still, the scent of ambergris and frankincense was often overcome by the natural body odors of those ladies of yore. That's why I could never go in a big way for women of earlier times. I never welcomed guests from the other world, for I happen to be blessed with a most sensitive olfactory organ.) My women were always live ones, hot, full-blooded, full of zest for life—although they would usually turn up in the dead of night. They stuck their bare toes in my mouth, grabbed ahold of my hair, straddled my shoulder and rode me, and stuffed their hands in my pockets. They would shift me around and knead my muscles, banish me under the bed, chase me with flashing teeth, and nibble me like puppies. The hefty ones danced around on the tabletop; the skinny ones stood on their head.

“The petite ones tumbled about like sleepydust on eyelashes. The big solemn bony ones cracked my waist as if they were in love with my bones. I can't understand why I never became conceited, since my women stuck by me even when I returned from one of my binges infested with vermin. Why, they even helped me get rid of the bugs. No, no, I never would have believed they'd keep me company all my life, and not get tired of my speechifyings, my ailments, my whims, my ravings. On the contrary, I was always expecting to be stabbed to death in the constant sparring...But at night, when I settled down by the wine jug, all my women proved to be most accomodating. They never threatened to murder me.”

“And tell me, your excellence, how far did you get with these fantasy women?” asked Ossuary, quietly sarcastic.

“They made me love and desire the live ones. I began to search for their imaginary scents and ungraspable limbs. But in real life I never found the salvation promised by the imagined figure.—But let's go to bed. Tonight I made an appointment to meet Miss Eveline.”

One day
Pistoli made a peculiar discovery around the garden cottage. He saw the imprints of horseshoes on the wet black path that meandered in the far end of the garden like a clandestine love affair.

“Heads up, Pistoli,” he cautioned himself, and swung his head back and forth like some Asian monk. With eyes apparently closed, he stood on his right foot and rubbed the sole of the other foot against his right knee. In his preoccupation he opened the door to the cupboard, then gazed for a long time at his boots lying on the floor—he preferred to take them off during the day. After this he began to finger a swelling that sat like a second, smaller head on top of his cranium; old Hungarian tradition held such small melonlike growths on the head to be a sign of wisdom.

“Watch out, Pistoli,” he growled, while he ambled down the celebrated moldy steps to the cellar, in order to take a great deep breath and in a glass siphon suck up some wine from the barrel. The wine trickling into the stone jug unexpectedly evoked Miss Maszkerádi, who was actually never far from his mind. The trickling wine sounded a feminine note, and Pistoli's eyes bulged.

“You're nothing but a poor little homegrown wine,” he addressed the wine jug in a scornful tone. “And Maszkerádi's made of fire and the noblest
aszú
grape. How dare you, a humble local
vin ordinaire
, dare to imitate the regal Tokay vintage?”

Next he stood, mouth agape, in the middle of his courtyard as if he had never seen the migratory birds that now approached above the rooftops: it was as if rapidly shuttling aerial omnibuses had poured forth the swallows, like so many white-pinafored convent girls let out for summer vacation. Soaring storks inscribed huge circles and giant pretzel-shaped paths in the sky. The wild geese squatted down in the reeds, just like their relatives, the wandering Gypsy girls at the forest's edge, when they cast their spells with twisted stems of grass, leaving behind signs for their lovers—or as it often happens, for the gendarmerie. Along with the birds of passage, it was time for the vagabonds to appear, for, with the thawing of the season, they saddled up shank's mare to hit the highways in their seemingly aimless, tireless peregrinations from one end of the horizon to the other.

There stood Mr. Pistoli as stunned by all this as if he had been hit over the head and unable to find the culprit.

He was suddenly jealous, and as downcast as an ancient sumac tree whose sunlight is cut off by a new wall. He went and sniffed like a keen-nosed vizsla the horseshoe imprints on the loamy, earth-scented, cherry-blossom-strewn path, and thought he could pick up a whiff of Miss Maszkerádi's unique perfume. This exotic and eccentric lady was to be his last great love, and he intended to take her with him to the other world as pure as a rosary wrapped around his wrist in the coffin.

The doves were tumbling in the air above the manor house like distant springtime memories of youth, and Pistoli, in a tragic gesture, interlaced the knobby fingers of his two hands, like branches of a lilac bush. How could Miss Maszkerádi possibly desire some other man in the neighborhood? And of all men, this clean-shaven, cheerless whippersnapper whom Mr. Pistoli secretly despised as thoroughly as he would some fledgling tenor...Pistoli was like a naive housewife past her silver anniversary, who one day discovers straw from a Gypsy girl's pallet on her respectable's husband's shoulder. Yes, those men who never stop talking about women's unfaithfulness are the ones most surprised by it.

The springtime air was as sweet as the waists of young girls bending over their flower beds, seeding, and Pistoli was ready to sob out loud in his desperation, like an old Gypsy, whose brats had got him drunk. The very saliva turned bitter in his mouth when he recalled the scene in Eveline's garden with Miss Maszkerádi in the role of the temptress clad in white linen and the only thing he regretted now was that he had not given a piece of his mind to the confused girl who, with the characteristic unfathomability of womenfolk, had been ready to offer herself that night to any roadside hobo. At least he should have shouted in her face that he condemned her behaviour—and here his throat choked on a very ugly word—and that he despised, detested and disdained her...Instead, he had saved her, put her by like some Easter egg he could crack open whenever he felt like it. And so now he felt cheated.