The next day, Monday the fifteenth of April — you see how precisely I remember these days; it’s a matter of life or death remembering such things! — I woke at dawn and went down to that little church in the Tabán district I had last visited some ten years before. My usual church was the one in the Krisztina where we also got married. It was where Count István Széchenyi vowed to be true to Crescence Seilern. If you didn’t already know that, I am telling you now. The marriage, they say, was not a great success. Not that I believe in such tittle-tattle, but people must always be gossiping.
The church in the Tabán was completely empty that morning. I told the sacristan I wanted to make a confession. I waited for a while in one of the pews of the dimly lit church. Eventually an old, unfamiliar, solemn-looking, white-haired priest appeared, entered the confessional box, and gestured for me to enter and kneel. It was to this unknown priest whom I had never seen before, nor have seen since, that I revealed everything.
It was a confession the like of which you make only once in your life. I spoke of myself, the child, my husband. I confessed I wanted to regain my husband’s heart and that I didn’t know what to do, that I was calling on God to help me. I told him I had led a moral life, that I never even dreamed of any lover but my husband. I told him I didn’t know where the fault lay, in me or in him … In other words, I told him everything. Not as I am telling you now. I couldn’t talk about everything now, I would even be wary of doing so … But in that dim church, that morning, before that unfamiliar old priest, I stripped my soul bare.
The confession took a long time. The priest listened.
Have you visited Florence? Do you know Michelangelo’s statue — you know, that wonderful sculptural group with four figures in the Duomo … wait a minute, what is it called? Yes, the Pietà. The main figure is a self-portrait, the elder Michelangelo. I was there once with my husband; it was he who showed me the statue. He said that the face there was a human face without desire, without anger, a face purged by fire, one that knew everything and wanted nothing, not even revenge, not even to forgive — nothing, absolutely nothing. Standing before the statue, my husband told me that was what we should be like. That this was ultimate human perfection, this sacred indifference, this absolute solitude and deafness to both joy and sorrow … That’s what he said. As I was confessing, I stole the odd glance at the priest’s face and with tears in my eyes I saw how terrifyingly similar his face was to the marble one in the Pietà.
He was sitting with half-closed eyes, his arms folded across his chest. He hid his hands in the folds of his habit. He wasn’t looking at me. His head was slightly tipped to one side, listening almost like a blind man, keeping strangely silent, as if he weren’t listening at all. It was as if he had heard all this many times before; as if he knew that everything I said was superfluous and hopeless. That was how he listened. He listened hard, gave me his complete attention, his entire strange, squat being. And his face, yes … his face was that of someone who knew it all anyway, who knew everything, having heard all kinds of people talk about their suffering and misery, and he still knew something more that could not be said. When I finally stopped, he remained silent for a while.
“You have to believe, child,” he said eventually.
“I do believe, Most Reverend Father,” I mechanically replied.
“No,” he said, and that calm, almost dead-looking face began to come alive, his watery old eyes briefly flashing. “You have to believe differently. Don’t spend your time concocting schemes. Just believe. That’s all you have to do. Believe,” he muttered.
He must have been very old by then, and my long speech must have exhausted him.
I thought he didn’t want to, or could not, find anything else to say, so I waited for my penance and absolution. I felt we had nothing more to say to each other. But after a long silence, just as he seemed to be nodding off, he opened his eyes wide and began to talk animatedly.
I listened to him and was filled with amazement. No one had talked like that to me before, certainly not at confession. He spoke in simple words in a natural conversational tone, as if he were not in a confessional box but holding forth in company somewhere. He spoke in simple words, without unctuousness, sighing occasionally as though lamenting, like a kindly, very old man. He spoke as naturally as if the whole world were God’s church and all things human belonged to God, so one didn’t have to put on special airs for God, turn eyes to heaven or to beat one’s breast, only to tell the truth, but the whole truth, the full truth … That’s how he talked.
Talked, I said? I tell you, he not so much talked as chatted in a relaxed low voice. His accent sounded faintly Slavic. The last time I heard that lilt, that regional dialect, was in Zemplén in my childhood.
“Dear soul,” he said. “I would like to help you. Once, a long time ago, a woman came to me who was in love with a man so much she killed him. She did not kill him with a knife or poison, but with her love, because she wanted that man completely, because she wanted to remove him from the world. They fought a great deal. The man got so tired of this that one day he died. The woman knew this. He died because he had had enough of fighting. You know, my daughter, people exercise various forms of power over each other. They have many ways of killing each other. It is not enough to love, dear soul. Love can take a very selfish form. One must love humbly, with faith. Life as a whole only makes sense when there is faith. God gave people love so they might bear the world and each other. But those who love without humility place a great burden on the beloved’s shoulders. Do you understand, child?” he asked so tenderly he was like an old teacher teaching a child the alphabet.
“I think I understand,” I said, a little frightened.
“You will understand it eventually, but you will suffer a great deal. Passionate souls like yours are proud and suffer greatly. You say you want to possess your husband’s heart. You also say your husband is a genuine man, not a fickle womanizer but a serious, pure-hearted man with a secret. What could that secret be? That is what you are determined to find out, dear soul; it is what you want to know. Don’t you know that God gave people individual souls, each his or her own? Each soul is full of secrets, each as great as the universe. Why do you seek a soul that God has created secret? It may be the meaning, the mission of your life to put up with it, to bear it. Who knows, perhaps you might injure your husband in the process, even ruin him if you succeeded in laying his soul bare, if you forced him to adopt a life, or to assume feelings, that he feels bound to resist. One shouldn’t love by force. The woman I was talking about was young and beautiful, like you, and did all kinds of stupid things to recover her husband’s love; she flirted with other men to make him jealous, she lived a fast life, tried to make herself still more beautiful, spent a fortune on Viennese outfits, high-fashion dresses, the way unfortunate women sometimes do when there is no faith in their hearts and they lose their spiritual balance. That having failed, she rushed out into the world, to clubs, to parties, everywhere where there are crowds and bright light, where people seek to escape the emptiness of their lives and their vain and hopeless passions, places where people go to forget. How hopeless it all is,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “There is no forgetting.”
That’s how he talked. I was all ears now. But it was as if he hardly noticed I was there. He was muttering away as if to someone else, the way old people mutter. It was as if it were the world he was trying to convince. Then he went on: