“Possibly,” he replied, with a proper concern, cautious like the good doctor who has seen a great deal and prefers not to give a careless answer. “Such things happen. Do they happen often? … No.”
“What happens inside a person when they’re in love?” I asked like a naïve schoolgirl. “What do they feel in their soul?”
“Feel in the soul?” he immediately answered. “Nothing. Feelings don’t happen in the soul. They work through some different system. But they can pass through the soul and submerge it, the way a flood covers a floodplain.”
“Could we stop the flood if we were really wise and clever?” I asked.
“Well, now,” he replied, clearly interested, “that is indeed an interesting question. I’ve given the matter considerable thought. My answer would have to be: yes, up to a point. What I mean is … intelligence in itself can neither produce nor end feeling. But it can regulate. Should our feelings become a source of common danger, we might be able to contain them.”
“You mean cage them up, like a tiger? …” I blurted out.
“Yes, a tiger, if you like,” he shrugged. “Once enclosed, our poor wild feelings can stride round and round the cage, roar, grind their teeth, claw at the bars … but in the end they’ll be broken, their fur and teeth will fall out, and eventually they’ll grow melancholy and obedient. That’s quite possible … I’ve seen it happen. That’s the product of intelligence. You can control and tame emotions. Though one has to be careful, of course,” he warned. “One mustn’t open the doors of the cage too early. Because the tiger can get out, and if it is not completely tamed, it can cause a great deal of inconvenience.”
“Can’t you be plainer than that?” I asked. “I need to know quite explicitly.”
“I can’t be much plainer than that,” he retorted. “You want to know if intelligence can overcome feeling. In plain words, the answer is no. But I do offer you some comfort. I suspect that occasionally, with a bit of luck, we can tame our emotions and allow them to atrophy. Take me, for example. I managed to do it.”
I can’t tell you what I felt at that moment, but I couldn’t bear to look into his eyes. I suddenly remembered the evening I first met him and I grew quite red. I remembered that peculiar game … I was blushing like a schoolgirl. Nor did he look at me, but simply stood in front of me leaning against the table, his arms folded, looking toward the window as though examining the house opposite. This mutual embarrassment lasted a little while. It was the most awkward moment of my life.
“Back then, when all this was going on,” I started again, gabbling nervously, wanting to change the subject as quickly as possible, “you didn’t suggest to Peter that he should marry the girl, did you?”
“I was against it,” he said. “I opposed it with all my heart. I was utterly against the marriage. At that stage I still had influence over him.”
“No longer?”
“No.”
“Does that woman have more power over him than you do now?”
“The woman?” he asked, and tipped his head back while his mouth moved silently, as if he were counting, trying to gauge the true balance of power. “Yes, I do believe so.”
“Was my mother-in-law of any help then?”
He shook his head as if recalling a bad memory.
“Not a lot.”
“But surely you can’t imagine,” I asked indignantly, “that a woman as proud, as refined, as extraordinary as she is, would have agreed to such an act of madness?”
“I don’t imagine anything,” he replied with care. “I only know that this proud, refined, extraordinary woman, as you put it, had lived for years in a state of suspended feeling. She lived not so much in an apartment as in cold storage. People as thoroughly frozen through as she was are readier to understand someone desperate for warmth.”
“And it was you who prevented Peter warming himself — as you put it — in the fire of this strange attraction?”
“I did so,” he explained, like a patient teacher, “because I don’t like people who offer a certain warmth to some but roast others alive.”
“Did you think Judit Áldozó was as dangerous as that?”
“In herself? … That is a hard question. Not in herself, probably. But the situation to which her very being might give rise: that was dangerous, yes.”
“And the alternative, the situation which did then arise — you considered that less of a danger? …” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.
“Easier to control, in any case,” he replied.
I really didn’t understand that. I listened and stared.
“I see you don’t believe what a traditional, old fashioned, law-abiding man I am, madam,” he said. “We writers may be the only law-abiding people on earth. The middle classes are a far more restless, rebellious bunch than is generally thought. It is no accident that every revolutionary movement has a nonconforming member of the middle class as its standard bearer. But we writers can’t entertain revolutionary illusions. We are the guardians of what there is. It is far more difficult to preserve something than to seize or destroy it. And I cannot allow the characters in my books — the characters my readers love — to rebel against the established order. In a world where everyone is in a veritable fever to destroy the past and to build the new, I must preserve the unwritten contracts that are the ultimate meaning of a deeper order and harmony. I am a gamekeeper who lives among poachers. It’s dangerous work … A new world!?” he declared with such agonized and disappointed contempt that I found myself staring again. “As if people were new!”
“And is that why you were against Peter marrying Judit Áldozó?”
“That wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t allow it, of course. Peter is bourgeois, a valuable member of the bourgeoisie … there are few like him left. He embodies a culture that is very important to me. He once told me, by way of a joke, that my role was to be the chief witness to his life. I answered, equally by way of a joke, but not altogether as jokingly as you might at first think, that I had to look after him out of sheer commercial interest, because he was my reader, and writers have to save their readers. Of course it was not the size of my readership I meant to preserve, but those few souls in whom my sense of responsibility to the world I know continues to exist … They are the people for whom I write … If I didn’t, there would be no sense in anything I wrote. Peter is one of the few. There are not many left, not here, not anywhere in the world … I am not interested in the rest. But that was not the real reason — or to put it more precisely, this wasn’t the reason, either. I was simply jealous because I loved him. I have never liked surrendering to my feelings … but this feeling, this friendship, was much more refined, much more complex than love. It is the most powerful of all human feelings … it is genuinely disinterested. It is unknown to women.”
“But why were you jealous of that particular woman?” I persevered. I was listening to everything he was saying but still felt he was not being straight with me, that he was avoiding the real issue.
“Because I don’t like sentimental heroes,” he eventually admitted, as if resigned to telling the truth. “More than anything else, I like to see everyone and everything in its proper place. But it wasn’t only the difference in class that concerned me. Women are quick to learn and can make up centuries of evolution in a few moments … I do not doubt that with Peter at her side this woman would have learned everything in a trice, and conducted herself as perfectly as you or I did at that grand house last night … Women generally are far superior in culture and manners to the men of their own class. Nevertheless, Peter would still have felt like a sentimental hero to himself, a hero who was a hero from the moment he rose to the moment he went to bed, because he was doing something the world did not approve of, embarking on a mission that is entirely human and perfectly acceptable to God and man, but one whose undertaking required him to be a hero, a sentimental hero. And that’s not all. There was the woman. This woman would never forgive Peter for being middle-class.”