As a matter of fact I myself am a miser and always have been. I am like anyone who is no longer capable of building and creating and is reduced simply to looking after that which he has inherited from his family. My father was not a miser, he simply had a respect for money: he made it, he accumulated it, and then, when the time was right, he calmly spent it with full confidence in his own judgment. I once saw him write out a check for a million, his hand assured as he put his simple signature to it, as if it were no more than a tip to a waiter. And when the factory burned down and the insurers weren’t paying because it had been caused by some kind of negligence, my father decided to rebuild it. He could have left it and shared the proceeds, then lived in comfort on the interest. He was no longer young by this time. He was over sixty. There would have been plenty of good reasons for not rebuilding. It was perfectly within his means to live an independent life, to spend his remaining days strolling about, reading books, and going to see things. But he didn’t hesitate a moment: he settled with the investors and the foreign engineers, then wrote out the check and handed it over to the engineer who would build up and head the new venture. And he was right. My father died two years after that, but the factory is still there, still productive, doing useful work. That’s as much as we can hope for in life, that we leave something useful behind us, something people value.
Ah yes, but none of this is of much consolation to the builder and maker, you think. I know — you are thinking of the loneliness. The deep, dense loneliness that is the lot of any creative spirit, a product of the restricted atmosphere in which he must move, the oxygen he must breathe. Well, yes. Busy people are lonely people. But we can’t be altogether certain that this loneliness is the cause of suffering. I have always suffered more from close human presence and social life than from genuine loneliness. There are times when we regard loneliness as a punishment: we are like children left alone in a dark room while the adults carry on chattering and enjoying themselves next door. But one day we too grow up to be adults and learn that loneliness — genuine, fully conscious solitude — is not a punishment, not a wounded, sickly retreat from life, not isolation, but the one and only truly fitting condition for man. And then it becomes less hard to suffer it. It is like breathing pure mountain air.
That’s what my father was like. That is what the world was like back then. Money, work, order: it was a solid bourgeois world. It was as if the house and the factory were ordained to us forever. The rituals associated with work and life were organized, as it were, from a position outside life. It was quiet at home. I learned that quiet early, the keeping silent. People who talk a great deal have something to hide. People who hold their peace are sure of something. That was another thing I learned from my father. As a child these lessons were a source of suffering for me. I felt something was missing from our lives. Love, you say … The love that is ready to sacrifice itself. Look, it’s far too easy to say that. Later I discovered that love, poorly articulated, clumsily demanded, kills more people than poison, car accidents, and lung cancer. People kill each other with love as with some invisible death ray. They want ever more love and demand constant acts of tenderness; they want it all, all to themselves. They want the whole heart; they want to suck the life energy from their surroundings and are as greedy for it as those enormous plants that drain water, scent, and light from other shrubs. Love is a monstrous selfishness. Is there anyone alive capable of surviving under that reign of terror called love? Look around you, look through the windows that you pass. Look into people’s eyes, listen to their complaints, and you will discover everywhere the same despairing anxiety. They can’t live with the demands that love imposes on them. They put up with it for a while, they bargain with it, but eventually it exhausts them. Then follow stomach upsets, gastric ulcers. Diabetes. Heart murmurs. And death.
You have seen peace and harmony? Once, in Peru, you say … Well, yes, it may be possible, in Peru. But here, in our more temperate climate, the miraculous flower is not allowed to bloom. It may put out a few petals now and then, but it quickly languishes. Maybe the climate of civilization is too much for it. Lázár once told me that civilizations based on the machine must churn out loneliness like a conveyor belt. He also told me the abbot Paphnucius was less lonely in the desert, on top of his column, with guano in his hair, than a million citizens of the great metropolis crowded into cafés and movie palaces on a Sunday afternoon. He was lonely too, but conscientiously so, like a monk in a monastery. The one time anyone got close to him he quickly ran off. I suspect I know this better than he does, or the person who got close to him. But these are private matters, other people’s affairs, and I have no right to speak of them. Back home, a lofty, solemn, sacramental kind of loneliness pervaded everything. The loneliness of my childhood sometimes comes back to me like the memory of a sad, frightening dream … you know, the kind full of anxiety, the sort one dreams before a test. My childhood was a matter of eternal preparation for some desperately important, dangerous exam. It was an examination in responsible citizenship. We were forever studying. We crammed. We learned by rote. Each day there was a new exam paper to face. We were constantly tense: our acts, our words, even our dreams were fraught with tension. We were walled in by a loneliness so dense even the servants and those who only dropped in at the house for a few minutes — mailmen, delivery boys — they all felt it. Childhood and adolescence were spent waiting in dim, curtained rooms. By the time I got to eighteen the loneliness, anxiety, and waiting had exhausted me. I longed to try something I hadn’t tried before, something not entirely within the rules. But I had to wait a good while before that happened.
That was when Judit Áldozó entered my fortress of loneliness.
Here, have a light. How do you get on with the tobacco habit? It’s a struggle, isn’t it? Myself, I couldn’t go on — not with the smoking but with the struggle. There’ll be a day when that too has to be faced. One adds up the facts and decides whether to live five or ten years longer by not smoking, or to surrender to this petty, shameful passion that no doubt kills but, until it does so, offers you such a peculiar calming yet exciting experience. After fifty years it becomes one of life’s major questions. My answer to that question was angina and the decision to carry on exactly as before until I die. I’ll not stop poisoning myself with this bitter weed, because it’s not worth it. You say it’s not so difficult to give up? Of course it’s not that difficult. I’ve done it before, more than once, while it was worth it. The trouble was, I’d spend the whole day “not smoking.” That’s something else I’ll have to face one day. People should resign themselves to certain weaknesses, to their need for a soporific of some sort, and be prepared to pay the price. It’s so much simpler that way. Yes, but then they say: “You should have more courage.” My answer to them is: “I may not be the bravest of men, but I am courageous enough to live with my desires.”
That’s what I think, anyway.
You’re looking at me very skeptically. I see, you want to ask whether I always had the courage to follow my desires? As regards Judit Áldozó, for instance? Indeed I had, old man. And I proved it. I paid my whack, as they say on the street. It cost me my peace of mind for the rest of my life, and someone else’s peace of mind too. It may be that one can’t do much more than that. And now you want to know whether it was worth it? That is what you call a rhetorical question. You can’t judge the great decisive moments of life by the standards of a commercial transaction. It’s not about whether something was or was not worth it: sometimes people have to do things just because it is their fate to do so, or because that is the given situation, or because their blood pressure demands it, or because their entire body insists on it. It’s bound to be some combination of all those factors at work … Whatever the case, the result is that they don’t act like cowards, they just go ahead and do it. Because nothing else matters. The rest is theory.