The Parasite
ISBN: 978 0 8574 2 740 3
Publisher: Seagull Books London
Translator: Paul Olchváry
Language: English
Country: United Kingdom
Publication date: 2020
Edition: hardcover

An excerpt

Perhaps it was all decided at the beginning. It’s hard to put a finger on why, but I was always drawn instinctively to illnesses. As a child, for example, I regularly escaped into hospitals with a varying assortment of suspicious complaints, as if I could be secure nowhere else. Hospitals were my world, for no matter how fixedly ordered the outside world purported to be, I felt genuinely free only between those drab olive-green walls. Although after two or three weeks it was invariably determined that there was nothing wrong with me, as I packed my things to go home I knew without a doubt that, soon enough, I would return. That which children fear, that which makes adults uneasy, was soothing to me.

Above all it wasn’t the sundry peculiarities of this or that clinical case that interested me, but the enigmatic aura that illness in general constructs about itself. No sooner would I step into a hospital at my father’s side than I would sense it: I had only to notice the tired face of the plump old man slumped behind the little sliding window of the porter’s booth by the hospital entrance—a face shuttered by a mixture of boredom and the bureaucratic solemnity porters are expected to display. Surely he was among the most important people here; despite his blank stare he wore his darkblue hospital-issue overalls with the pride of someone entrusted with authority, well aware that, here, he was not simply a guard carrying out his duty but a breathing crossing-bar at the front dividing the two worlds. His eyes, glowing sometimes dimly, sometimes almost brightly, seemed to exude an inscrutable light that enveloped all those who entered the hospital. I noticed the difference immediately, as acutely as a virologist senses a sterile laboratory right away while others don’t notice a thing. With deep breaths I inhaled this light. Inhaled? Let me clarify what I mean by ‘light’; for what little light did seep in through the windows was in fact subdued in its effect by that familiar hospital smell most people find so disagreeable. Perhaps I’m not mistaken in now asserting in words what I then sensed: that this glitter I saw was a materialized extension of the illnesses of those suffering in the hospital present and past. This perception of mine was akin to those rare and fortunate occasions when we manage to see behind another person’s smile and notice its supporting pillars—knock those pillars out of place, and what a moment before seemed indestructible is gone, just like that.

I breathed easier on seeing the doctors appear in the hallway. Ah yes, I’m home once again, I thought as my father accompanied me, as usual, to the in-patient receiving office. I was worried only that the doctor who’d been summoned to give me a last-minute look before sending me on to the appropriate ward might reconsider things, and be pleased to inform us that I needn’t stay after all. But vigilance saved me. Unfalteringly I followed through on the symptoms I had come up with a week earlier, so that the doctor, after yet another test, would be ready to hand me over to some darling nurse. How could he have suspected that a ten-year-old boy was playing sick? While he racked his brains over the cause of my constant headaches, recurring dizziness, and fainting spells, I wanly awaited the verdict, worried that my trickery would be uncovered any minute. The sight of my frightened face, however, could hardly have led him to suspect scheming on my part, especially not the sort at issue: my desire to be in a place everyone else would abandon at once if only they could. But I deceived him. When he notified us that they would have to draw a sample of my spinal fluid for testing, I gave a sigh of relief, as if heartened by the promise of a speedy recovery.

Next I was led into the ward and shown my bed. Rarely would I arrive with pyjamas in hand, so my father would ask the nurse to dig me up some standard, hospital-issue nightclothes. When, a little while later, a rosy-cheeked young woman placed the clothing before me, my reaction was not that of other boys; not a bashful stare, but rather, exhilaration. As if only with this ill-matched, overwashed uniform could I become a fully legitimate denizen of the hospital—in contrast with those patients who wore their own pyjamas and robes, and whom I consequently did not consider full-fledged hospital residents but, practically, civilians. I may have looked ungainly in those scraps of fabric, but they were now mine as surely as the guile by which I’d succeeded in deceiving everyone around me. Now I only waited to say goodbye to Father. Oh, he tried cheering me up, he did, saying I shouldn’t be scared, that they’d pay me a visit in no time. But even as he patted me on the head, I was hoping it would take as long as possible for someone to come along and wrench me from the freedom awaiting me. No sooner did Father step from the ward than I gave yet another sigh of relief; this time, a genuine one. My final link with the outside world had disappeared: no longer would Father’s presence disturb my solitude.

In this confinement, the fear I never could have overcome at home or at school began to slowly let up. As if only here—cramped between four walls, separated from the outside world—could I get air. I breathed in what my roommates’ sick bodies and frightened expressions exuded, and doing so was as liberating a sensation as a convict must feel on unexpectedly being granted two days of freedom. It was in this atmosphere, bleak and sad to virtually everyone else, that I found my dubious self-identity. Not only was I soothed by the proximity of my fellow patients, but I also drew strength from within them; I nourished myself on their worries, their uncertainties, and their pains, not unlike those creatures that cull their food from excrement. I didn’t even have to scrutinize the others’ faces to discern their palpable vibration, their marquetry of fear. Fear of their illnesses. Perhaps it was a heightened sensitivity to this shadow play, distinguishable from their bodies, that attracted me to the wards to begin with; for there I had the opportunity to observe that the worseoff someone was, the more this vibration appeared on him or her as something that separated itself from the material world while remaining in contact with it all the while. Later, when my eyes chanced to cross paths with those of some fellow patient, it was this sort of expression I invariably met with, one that had torn through a veil-like drape. And I couldn’t shake the impression that it wasn’t even him or her who was watching me, but that in fact the current, the aura, surrounding this face was descending upon me.

It was here, too, that I learnt another thing: silence lays the path for our understanding of those people who, for whatever reason, we deem interesting. For days on end I lay near these wordless bodies, for that was the only way to truly map them. Now, most people believe that we can get to know others best through conversation. My experience on this point differs. A breathing body near us transpires something of singular essence as surely as the blood of the newly executed might suddenly release its still-vital scent on touching freshly fallen snow; one need only note the person-specific ‘messages’ that emanate from pleasant or unpleasant smells. Perhaps my job was made easier because illness rendered the bodies of my fellow patients vulnerable, having torn away the armour they’d earlier built around themselves through steady practice in the outside world. Here, on the hospital beds, bodies touched as imperceptibly as the individual flavors of vegetables and sauces commingling on a dinner plate served up by a master chef.

Not even if he’d told me in words could I have grasped the dreadful powerlessness emanating from the man in the bed next to mine. His body seemed bound to the mattress with invisible ropes, and before I knew it I too had been sapped of strength. Through the arm’s length of space between us I accepted this man’s immobility into myself, and soon enough, whatever had slowed his blood pressure had done the same to me. Let’s just say I’d wormed my way to the heart of the life force that held his system intact: suddenly I was overcome by a warmth of unknown origin. Why shouldn’t I assume that the human body, this skin-draped mass of breathing flesh, this vessel stuffed with cells and tissues, this receptacle filled with fluids at or about 98.6°, submits under given circumstances to a wholly different gravitational force than the one we’re used to? Say, to the magnetism that fuses two bodies without their ever touching? When we are under the influence of this force, we perceive things in much the same way as those dogs that, even from a great distance, seem capable of sensing that their masters are in danger.

Had I paid attention only to the words of grievance uttered by this or that roommate of mine, never could I have understood the gloom written all over their blank faces and folded hands, the self-resignation woven into every detail of their bearings. Simply by observing how the man across from me was lying on his bed, for example, I could discern his thinking as regards his illness. When he buried his head in the pillow or clasped his hands around the nape of his neck, I knew that he was back to worrying himself silly over the next day’s operation, although only a moment before, each of us in turn had told him just how groundless his fears were. Having listened to all of our encouraging words, all at once he seemed as tired as could be. But there was no deceiving me. Only now was he truly distressed. I saw this plainly from how he clasped his hands. When, after a while, he’d had enough of his solitary fears and got to talking once again, how different an effect his sentences had! It wasn’t the meaning of the words as they struck my ears one after another that I now found myself interpreting, but rather the mysterious relationship that accommodated his words to the back of his hand, the way he held his head and his ever-changing expressions. He seemed indeed to be involuntarily breathing in reverse, in order to first introduce to his body the sounds he was so busy formulating, and in so doing to give news of his distress. His words consequently brought to the surface the broken fragments of fear lurking in his cells and tissues. Perhaps I perceived the workings of this exceptional process only because I’d already spent days silently studying the body this man inhabited.

Surely this impression of mine was due partly to the fact that when people are confined together in a tight space for a very long time, their minds sometimes take faint presentiments about what the other minds (as well as their own) are up to, and turn them into torrential certainties. At any rate, it can safely be said that illness sweeps us into a radically new if temporary paradigm of being. What happens is this: our internal sense of time overwhelms our usual perception of the clock on the wall, of the world outside us. Oddest of all, while we hardly even noticed this mental bellwether of ours before, within moments we are on the most intimate of terms. Unknown yet familiar, it severs us indiscernibly from the outside world. This is, I believe, a force equal in potency to intelligence, and one whose presence is revealed by illness. If only for seconds, it can return us to a unity that, we thought, wrongly, we had forever lost.

Blurb

Marked by powerful and evocative prose, Ferenc Barnás’s novel tells the fascinating story of a young man’s journey through his strange obsessions towards possible recovery. The unnamed narrator is the parasite, feeding off others’ ailments, but he is also a host who attracts people with the most peculiar manias. He confesses, almost amiably, his decadent attraction as a young adolescent to illnesses and hospitals. The real descent into his private, hallucinatory hell begins after his first sexual encounter; he becomes a compulsive masturbator, and then a compulsive fornicator. But to his horror, he realizes that casual sex is not casual at all for him—each one-night stand results in insane jealousy: he imagines previous lovers hovering over him every time he makes love to a woman.

When he gets to know a woman referred to as L., he thinks his demons may have finally subsided. But when he hears of her past, the jealousy returns. He seeks relief through writing—by weaving an imagined tale of L.’s amorous adventures. What will he do with this strange manuscript, and can it bring him healing?

A breathtaking blend of Dostoevskian visions, episodes of madness, and intellectual fervour, all delivered in precise, lucid prose, The Parasite is a novel that one cannot escape.

‘Ferenc Barnás is a legend among those who know him.’ — László Krasznahorkai, winner of the Man Booker International Prize and National Book Award

‘This narrative evinces the language of a master, its instrumentation comparable, to my mind, to that of the greatest writers. It occupies an ontological position on a triangle whose points include Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, and Herman Broch’s The Death of Virgil, and given its themes, it also bears comparison with William Bourroughs’s Naked Lunch.’ ⎯ József Szili, Kalligram, on the Hungarian original