“In Arco I heard my father’s voice and understood that I had inherited his fate, that I was of the same kind he was, whereas my mother, you, and Krisztina stood on the far bank beyond our reach … One can achieve everything in life, wrestle everything around one to the ground, life can offer up every gift, or one can seize them all for oneself, but one cannot change another’s tastes or inclinations or rhythms, that essential otherness, no matter how close or how important the bond. That is what I feel for the first time in Arco as Krisztina is walking around the house in which her mother died.”
Ie, He lets his head drop, leaning his forehead on his hand with the gesture of helpless resignation of a man finally faced with the evidence of the intractability of human relations. “Then we come home from Arco and start our lives here,” he says, “The rest you know. It was you who introduced me to Krisztina. You never let drop the slightest hint that you were interested in her yourself.
Our meeting, to me, was unmistakably the most significant thing that had ever happened to me. She was of very mixed descent, with German, Italian, and Hungarian blood in her veins. Perhaps also a trace of Polish, on her father’s side of the family … she was quite uncategorizable, beyond race or class, as if nature for once had tried to create a self-sufficient, independent, free creature untrammeled by family or social position. She was like an animaclass="underline" her protected upbringing, her boarding school, her father’s culture and delicacy, had all shaped her behavior, but underneath she was wild and untamable.
Everything that I could give her, my fortune and social position, was really not of great importance to her, and because of her need for freedom, which was so fundamental, she could not make herself a part of my social world … Her pride, which was quite different from that of people who parade their position, their family ties, their wealth, their place in society, or their particular personal talents-Krisztina’s pride rested on her splendid independence, which coursed in her as both an inheritance and a poison. She was, as you well know, an inborn aristocrat, and that is something very rare these days: you find it as seldom in men as in women. It is not a question of family or social position. It was impossible to offend her, there was no situation from which she shrank, she tolerated no kind of limitations. And there was something else that is rare in women: she understood the responsibility to which she was committed by her own inner sense of self Do you remember-yes, of course you do — our first meeting in the room with the table where her father’s music sheets lay: Krisztina came in, and the little room was filled with light. She didn’t just bring youth with her, she brought passion and pride and the sovereign self-confidence of her unsuppressed nature. Since then I have never met a single person who responded so completely to everything: music, an early morning walk in the woods, the color and scent of a flower, the well-chosen words of an intelligent companion. Nobody could stroke a beautiful piece of cloth or an animal like Krisztina. Nobody took such pleasure in the world’s simple gifts: people, animals, stars, books — everything interested her, not in any exaggerated way, not with a pedantic outpouring of learning, but with the unprejudiced joy of a child reaching for everything there is to see and do. As if everything in the world was relevant to her, you know? Yes, you do know … She was unprejudiced and open and humble because she recognized what a blessing life was. I still see her face sometimes,” he says confidingly.
“You won’t find any portrait of her in this house, there are no photographs of her, and the large painting of her done by the Austrian, which used to hang between the portraits of my parents, has been taken down. No, you will not find any picture of her here anymore,” he says, with a kind of satisfaction, as if reporting on a small act of heroism.
“But sometimes I still see her face when I’m half asleep, or when I walk into a room. And now, while we’re talking about her, we two who knew her so well, I see her face as clearly as I did forty-one years ago, on that last evening as she sat between us. For you know, that was the last evening that Krisztina and I dined together. Not only was it your last dinner with Krisztina, it was mine also. That was the day when everything happened that was inevitable between the three of us. And as we both knew Krisztina, certain decisions were inevitable: you left for the tropics, Krisztina and I did not speak again. Yes, she lived for another eight years. We both lived here under one roof, but we could no longer talk with each other,” he says calmly, and looks into the fire.
“That is how we were,” he says simply. “Gradually I came to understand a part of what had gone on. There was the music. There are certain elements that recur in people’s lives, and music in my life was one.
Music was the bond between my mother, Krisztina, and you. It must have spoken to you in some way that is beyond words or actions, and it also must have been the conduit through which you communicated with each other-and this conversation, this language of music which the three of you shared, was inaudible to us others, to my father and me. That is why we were lonely even when we were with you. But because music spoke to both you and Krisztina, you could continue to communicate with each other even after all conversation between her and me had been silenced.
I hate music.” His voice rises, and for the first time this evening he speaks with a hoarse intensity. “I hate this incomprehensible, melodious language which select people can understand and use to say uninhibited, irregular things that are also probably indecent and immoral. Watch their faces and see how strangely they change when they’re listening to music. You and Krisztina never sought out music-I do not remember you ever playing four-handed together, you never sat down at the piano in front of Krisztina, at least not in my presence. Evidently her sense of tact and shame restrained her from listening to music with you while I was there. And because music’s power is inexpressible, it seems to carry a larger danger in that it has the power to arouse the deepest emotions in people who come together to listen to it and discover that it is their fate to belong to each other. Do you not agree?” “Yes, I do,” says the guest. “That eases my mind,” says the General politely. “Krisztina’s father also thought so, and he really was a connoisseur of music. He was the only person to whom I once, just once, spoke about all this, about music, about you and Krisztina. He was already very old; he died shortly afterwards. I had returned from the war. Krisztina had already been dead for ten years. Everyone who had ever mattered to me-my father, my mother, you, Krisztina-was gone. The only two people still alive were Nini, my nurse, and Krisztina’s father, both of them with that remarkable strength and indifference that old people have, and some mysterious purpose still in life … like the two of us today. Everyone was dead, I myself was no longer young, more than fifty years old, and as lonely as that tree in the clearing in my forest, the one left standing when a storm felled all the surrounding timber on the day before war broke out. That one tree remained standing in the clearing, near the hunting lodge. Now, almost fifty years later, a new forest has grown up around it. It, too, is one of the ancients, after an act of will, which nature calls a storm, destroyed everything that had once surrounded it. And out of sheer will, inexplicably, the tree is still alive. “What is its purpose? … It has none. It wants to stay alive.