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Péter Esterházy My Mother, Her Husband, and Caravaggio On January 1 1956 Milán Füst wrote the following in a letter to a friend: “Before Christmas a young lady who introduced herself as Erzsébet Lakatos-Lőwy produced proof of her identity and offering securities, received a loan of a hundred and twenty forints from us. We refused the securities because she cited you as a reference, saying that she is the daughter of your older sister, and therefore you are her uncle. We were of course glad to help her out and she promised she would repay the loan with lemons bought at the local Russian shop, which you would bring to Pest before Christmas.” A week later Füst wrote: “My dear Friend, thank you very much for your letter. They tricked me, and that’s all there is to it. I do not intend to report her to the police; I look upon this affair as having helped out a needy human being with a hundred and twenty forints. In the name of Christ or the Anti-Christ.” And six months later: “I regret that you did not read my recent novella, which appeared in this month’s issue of Csillag. For one thing, I regret it because I did a good job, and for another, because I’ve raised Erzsébet Lakatos-Lőwy in it to the status of heroine.” Füst really did a good job. Just as the initial starting point is clear and simple (its contour is simple), everyday and banal, so… So… What is the book like? Well, to begin with, it is surprising that he would allow his life to enter his work – or so it would seem. A man who liked to stress that he does not have an autobiography, only a work biography. I began leafing through the volume of his Collected Correspondence to see if the same thing is true there that is true of The Story of My Wife, to wit, that he keeps the world that intrudes on his life most dramatically at a distance. He keeps the world at a distance, and he does not. Another way of putting this is to say that he invents what is, and so the above-mentioned distance loses its significance. The same thing happens here that he describes in a self-confession: “I wrote when good luck sided with me, when a sound or a word appeared and I could say – I will write this down now, we’ll see about the rest later.” We’ll see about the rest later: we discover this beautiful and inevitable (!) uncertainty in every piece by Füst, in this one, too. Cherchez la femme? Not exactly. The obscure object of desire remains obscure. Yet there is the ‘cherchez’, and there is also the ‘femme’. The mystery is in the way we conceive of the object. And to make use of another French quote, György Somlyó drew attention to the fact that Füst’s most basic experience is the same as Rimbaud’s, “La vrai vie est ailleurs.” But not only life is mysterious and hard to fathom, not only this woman and not only this lack in the shape of a woman, but Milán Füst’s language as well. We can still hear the remote multi-lingual (Hungarian and German) din of 19th century Pest from which Füst concocts his unique natural, yet markedly constructed, finely wrought style, a sort of unremitting loftiness and agitation, which most of the time attempts to capture the banality of everyday life and the persistent attacks of ennui. It is a kind of singing voice, Sprechoper-like, an ongoing recitative, a melodious declamation. At times it is as if one were able to discover among the countless exclamation points and dashes the breathlessness, the panting of Gombrowicz’s prose, which seems to be enhanced by Füst’s orthography, taken to the point of affectation. Needless to say, Füst is aware of the problems and possibilities inherent in modern prose, one might say from the guts; his body is aware of it, his stomach. He knows that prose is situated on the borderline of silence, in a sea of muteness. It is not surprising that in one place he writes: “I wanted to make Tolstoy’s profound silence my own at all cost, and I studied this silence for twenty whole years.” By way of an aside, basically everything Füst has ever done or written reveals his enormity. Enormous lights, enormous shades. His own lines reflect the first lines of Gombrowicz’s famous diary (Monday Me. Tuesday Me. Wednesday Me. Thursday Me): “When will I forget this bleak and accursed monotonous melody that goes me, me, me? Remembering ourselves, it’s not even a pleasant experience. Let us talk about something else instead.” And isn’t this “something else” what every 20th century writer wishes to capture? Isn’t this what evades them in their triumphant defeat? The story begins in the great (and eternal!) shadow of a majestic mother, and it is immediately apparent that what the title promises is true; this is the story of one person’s solitude. Füst unabashedly takes upon himself the direct treatment of perhaps the only theme of modern man, solitude. At one point the hero declared (pro domo: p. 279): “What has my life been like till now? Nothing but loneliness. (…) Who would I have had to think about? My mother, her husband, or Caravaggio?” Let us be honest. Who among us has not entertained these same thoughts in the same words? Solitude and imagination. Who, then, is this woman? Whose object and subject? What is the source of the surprising strength within her and around her? We might as well know, she is like the ocean. Well, I don’t know… A French reader has more knowledge and more magical knowledge of the sea at his disposal than does a Hungarian writer of prefaces. The book avows that proximity to the seashore teaches a person to laugh. Be that as it may, a woman is an awesome mother to us all, and she talks about the relationship between bodies of water in a different key (p. 305): “You can just as easily drown in a swamp as in the Niagara.” Milán Füst was already an old man at the age of twenty, he spent his time inside old age; here, an old man is laughing at himself and at the world. And meanwhile, he weeps. And it is impossible to distinguish between tears and pretend-tears. Perhaps this impossibility is what we should call art. And perhaps it is superfluous for me to add that the woman – in some mysterious manner! – could even speak French. Péter Esterházy (who used to include in his autobiography that along with Imre Kertész, in 1983 he was awarded the Füst Milán Prize) Translated by Judith Sollosy
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