She was wearing cheap city clothes, black shoes with low heels. Everything about her was so consciously and modestly assembled. She was like a peasant girl who had dressed for town and didn’t want to be put to shame by city girls. I looked at her hands. I was hoping to find something unattractive in them. I hoped to find stubby fingers and palms rough and red from agricultural work. But her hands were white, her fingers long and graceful. Those hands had not been broken by labor. Later I discovered she had been spoiled at home, that her mother never put her to hard manual work.
There she stood, content to have me gaze at her under the bright lights. She looked directly into my eyes with a simple curiosity. There was nothing flirtatious about her, neither her eyes nor her posture. There was no invitation. She was not a little tart who finds herself in the big city and makes eyes at young gentlemen hoping to ingratiate herself to them. No, she was a woman willing to look a man in the eye because she thinks she might have something in common with him. But she didn’t overdo it, not then nor later. The relationship between us was never a fixed one of necessity for her. When I could no longer eat, sleep, and work without her, when she had got under my skin and penetrated my reflexes like a fatal poison, she remained calm and perfectly self-possessed, irrespective of whether she came or went. You think she didn’t love me? … I too thought so for a while. But I don’t want to judge her too harshly. She loved me, but in a different way, in a more cautious, more practical, more grounded sort of way. That, after all, was what the situation allowed. That’s what made her a working woman, and me a middle-class boy. That’s what I wanted to tell you.
And then what happened? Nothing, old man. Phenomena like my time under the spell of Judit Áldozó are not to be explained in terms of “events,” the way things happen in novels or plays. The key events of our lives take place in time, in other words, over a period, very slowly. They hardly appear to be events at all. People go on living … that is the nature of events, of any act of importance to us. I can’t tell you that Judit Áldozó appeared in our house one day and that the next day, or six months later, this or that other thing happened. I can’t even claim that as soon as I saw her that first time I was immediately consumed by a passion that deprived me of both sleep and appetite, that left me dreaming of a stranger, a peasant girl, who now lived in close proximity to me, who entered my room on a daily basis, whose conduct was ever the same, who answered any question I put to her, who lived and matured the way a tree does, who conveyed any information of importance in her own characteristically simple and surprising manner, who trod the same earth and breathed the same air as I did … Yes, it was all as I describe it, but none of these conditions constitutes an event. In fact, for a long time, there were simply no events.
Nevertheless I recall that initial period in keen detail. The girl did not hold a particularly important position in our household and I rarely saw her. My mother trained her to be a housemaid, but she was not to serve us at the table, because she knew nothing of our family rituals. She tended to trail after the servant as he was cleaning, like a clown in a circus imitating the main act. I would occasionally bump into her on the stairs or in the drawing room; sometimes she even came to my room and greeted me, stopping on the threshold to deliver some message. I should have said that I was thirty-two years old when Judit Áldozó joined us. Thirty-two years old, and an independent adult in many respects. I was a partner in the factory, and my father, albeit carefully, was training me to stand on my own feet. I had a substantial income, but I did not move out of the family home. I lived on a separate floor, in two rooms. I had my own personal door. In the evenings, if I had no other business, I would dine with my parents. I tell you all this to show I had few opportunities to meet the girl. And yet, from the moment she first entered the house and I spotted her in the hall, a certain tension existed between us, a quite unambiguous tension.
She always looked me straight in the eye. It was as if she were always asking me a question. She was not some house-trained domestic kitten, not an innocent fresh from the village, the kind who lowers her eyes when meeting the young master of the house. She did not blush or preen. Whenever we met, she would stand a moment as if someone had touched her. Just like the moment when I turned on the light to see her better that first time, where she obediently turned her face so I could see it better. She looked straight into my eyes, but in such a strange way … not in a challenging manner, nor inviting, but seriously, quite solemnly, her eyes wide open as if she had asked me something. She was always looking at me with those wide-open, questioning eyes. It was always the same question. There is a fundamental question in all of creation, said Lázár, a question that lies at the very root of consciousness: it is the question “Why?” It was the same question Judit Áldozó was asking me. Why am I living; what is the meaning of it all? … It did sort of come down to this. The only odd thing was that it happened to be me that she was putting the question to.
And because she was terrifyingly beautiful, full of dignity, and utterly complete in her virginal fierceness, like a masterpiece of creation, a unique, perfect specimen of which only a single design and prototype existed, her beauty did, of course, exercise an influence in our house, in our lives, constituting an insistent, silent, uninterrupted music. Beauty is probably a form of energy, the way heat, or light, or sheer willpower are forms of energy. Nowadays I am starting to think there is something constructed about it — not in terms of cosmetics, of course, since I have no great respect for beauty artificially arrived at, something pinched and poked into existence, the way people pamper animals. No, there is something behind beauty, which is, after all, compounded of fragile, mortal matter that suggests a fierce will. It takes the heart and all the other organs, intelligence and instinct, bearing and clothing, to bind together the fortunate, miraculous formula that makes up the compound that ultimately leads to and has the effect of beauty. As I said, I was thirty-two years old.
I can tell from your expression that you are asking the age-old, worldly-wise male question “What was the problem?” Isn’t it the simplest thing for a man to follow his instincts and inclinations? A thirty-two-year-old man is, after all, aware of the facts of life. He knows that there is no woman he may not bed providing she is free, that there is no other man in her heart and thoughts, that there is no physical issue or matter of culture between them, and that they have the opportunity of meeting and getting to know each other. It’s true. I myself knew it was true, and frequently put that knowledge to use. Like any man of my age whose appearance is not altogether repulsive and is, on top of that, possessed of means, I met many women who made themselves available to me, nor did I refuse their offers. A man of promise is as much the center of attention as an attractive woman. It’s not a matter of personality: women too get lonely, have desires, and want affection and entertainment: every European capital has a surplus of women, and, well, I was neither ugly nor stupid. I lived a life of refined gentility, and it was generally known that I was rich. What with all this, I did exactly as any other man in my position would. I am sure that, following the preoccupations and confusions of the first few weeks, one kind word would have tamed her and inclined her affections to me. But I never did say that kind word. From my point of view, this familiarity, if the presence of a young servant in one’s parental home might be regarded as familiarity, roused my suspicions, and presented a danger. It became mysterious and exciting only once I realized that it was not as a lover I desired her, not as someone to bed, like all the others before, that I was not interested in purchasing and consuming fifty kilos of human flesh. No. So what did I want? It took me some time to find out. I didn’t bother her, because I was hoping for something from her. Expecting something. Not a brief thrill. But what, then? The answer to a question I had been asking all my life, that’s what.