In the meantime we carried on in our usual ways, as befitted us. Naturally, I even considered removing this girl from our family circle, educating her, establishing a healthier relationship with her, buying her an apartment, taking her as a lover, and going on like that as best we could. Mind you, I have to tell you that this occurred to me only much later — years after, in fact. And it was too late then — by that time the woman was aware of her power, was highly capable and altogether stronger. That’s when I fled from her. In the first few years I simply felt something stirring at home. I’d return in the evening to a deep silence, silence and order, as in a monastery. I’d go up to my apartment, where the servant had prepared everything perfectly for the night, some cold orange juice in a thermos flask, my reading matter, and cigarettes. I had always had a big vase of flowers on my writing desk. My clothes, my books, my ornaments, everything was just where it ought to be. I’d stand still and listen. The room was warm. I wasn’t always thinking of the girl, of course; I didn’t always feel compelled to consider that she was nearby, sleeping somewhere in the servants’ quarters. A year passed, and then another: I simply felt there was some meaning to the house. All I knew was that Judit Áldozó lived there and that she was very beautiful. Everyone recognized that. The servant later had to be dismissed, as did the cook, a lonely, older woman, because she had fallen in love with Judit and had no other way of expressing her love but by grumbling and quarreling. Not that anyone ever said as much. Maybe only my mother knew the truth, but if so, she kept it to herself. Afterwards I puzzled for ages about her silence. My mother was an intuitive woman and had plenty of experience: she knew everything without having to say it. No one else in the household knew about the secret passion of the servant and the cook, only my mother, who, I am sure, had no special experience of love, nor understood such perverse and hopeless desires as the old cook had for Judit; maybe she never even read about such things. But she understood reality: she recognized truth. She herself was an older woman by then: she knew everything and marveled at nothing. She even knew that Judit presented a danger in the house, danger not only to the servant and the cook … She knew she presented a danger to everyone who lived in the house. Not my father, though, because Father was old and sick by then, and in any case they did not love each other. My mother did, however, love me, and later I wondered why, when she knew everything, she hadn’t got rid of the source of danger in time. A whole life had gone by, or almost vanished, before I finally understood.
Lean closer. Just between us, the truth is, my mother welcomed this danger. She might well have feared that I faced a danger that was greater still. Can you guess what danger that might be? Not a clue? The danger of loneliness, of the terrifying loneliness that constituted our lives, the lives of my mother and father, the loneliness of the whole triumphant, successful, ritual-observing class we belonged to. There is a certain human process that is more to be feared, that is worse than anything … It’s the process whereby we become cut off from each other, when we become little more than machines. We live according to stern domestic codes, work to an even stricter code of duty, surrounded by a social order governed by a thoroughgoing strictness that produces orderly forms of amusements, preferences, and affections, so our entire lives become predictable, knowing what time to dress, to take breakfast, to go to work, to make love, to be entertained, to engage in social refinements. There is order everywhere, a mad order. And in the grip of that order life freezes about us, as around an expedition that is prepared for a long journey to lush shores, but finds both sea and land icebound, so that eventually there is no plan, no desire, just cold and immobility. And cold and immobility are the definition of death. It’s a slow, irresistible process. One day a family’s entire life turns to consommé. Everything becomes important, every least detail, but they can’t see anything of the whole and lose contact with life itself … They take such care in dressing in the morning and for the evening you’d think they were preparing for some dangerous ceremony like going to a funeral or a wedding, or to a court to be sentenced. They maintain their social contacts, have guests over, but behind it all looms the specter of loneliness. And while there is a sense of waiting or expectation behind the loneliness, something for heart and soul to hold on to, life remains tolerable and they go on living … not well, not as human beings should, but there is at least a reason to wind up the mechanism of one’s life in the morning and to let it tick on into night.
Because hope persists for a long time. People are very reluctant to resign themselves to lack of hope, to the thought of being alone; mortally, hopelessly alone. Very few can live with the knowledge that there is no end to loneliness. They carry on hoping, snatching at things, taking refuge in relationships to which they bring no genuine passion, to which they cannot surrender and so take recourse to distractions, to giving themselves artificial tasks, feverishly working or traveling with grand itineraries, or investing in big houses, buying the affections of women with whom they have nothing in common, becoming collectors of ornamental fans, or precious stones, or rare beetles. But none of this is of the least help. And they know perfectly well, even as they are doing these things, that they don’t help. And yet they carry on hoping. By that time, they themselves have no idea what it is they have invested their hopes in. They are fully aware that more money, a more complete collection of beetles, a new lover, an interesting circle of friends, and garden parties even more splendid than your neighbors’, none of them help … That is why, first and foremost, in the midst of their suffering and confusion, they are desperate to maintain order. Their every waking moment is spent in ordering their lives. They are continually “making arrangements”—seeing to some contract or attending some social event, or making a sexual assignation … As long as they are not alone, not for a second! As long as they never have to catch a glimpse of their own loneliness! Quick, bring on company! Fetch the dogs! Hang those tapestries! Buy those shares, or those antiques! Get a new lover! Quick, before the loneliness has to be faced.
That’s how they live. It’s how we lived. We took a great deal of trouble dressing. By the time he was fifty my father dressed with as much care as a church elder or a Catholic priest preparing for mass. His servant knew his habits to a T and by dawn had prepared his suit, his shoes, and his tie as if he were a sacristan. It was all because my father — by no means a vain man and never too particular about his appearance before — resolved to be dignified in his old age and, from that moment on, decided to pay minute attention to his clothes, with not a speck of dust on his sleeve, not one unwonted crease in his trousers, not one stain or crinkle on his shirt or his collar, his tie perfectly knotted … yes, just like a priest dressed for mass, as careful as that. And then, having dressed, the second ritual of the day began: breakfast. Then the car waiting to take him somewhere, the reading of the papers, the mail, the office, the efficient and respectful clerks rendering accounts, the meetings with business contacts, the club and the social round … and all this conducted with such constant close attention to detail, such anxious care, it was as if there were someone watching all this, someone to whom he himself had to render accounts of every part of his sacred duties. That is what my mother feared. Because behind all this ritual, this dressing up, this tapestry collecting and club calling, behind the socializing and entertaining, the terror of loneliness had raised its head like an iceberg in a warming sea. Loneliness, you know, tends to appear in certain modes of individual and social life like an illness in an exhausted body. It’s the kind of condition that doesn’t suddenly leap to attention. The real crises — sickness, breakups, the terminal things — don’t just turn up to be announced or established or noticed at any particular hour of any particular day. By the time we have noticed them, those decisive moments of our lives, they are usually already past, and there is nothing left for us to do but accept them and send for the lawyer or the doctor or the priest. Loneliness is a form of sickness. Or, more precisely, not a form of sickness, but a condition in which whoever is fated to suffer it finds himself displayed in a cage like a stuffed animal. No: sickness is the process that precedes loneliness, a process I’d compare to slowly freezing over. My mother wanted to save me from that.