Life, you know, becomes increasingly mechanical. Things chill down. The rooms are as well heated as ever they were, your temperature remains normal, your blood pressure is exactly as it was, you still have money in the bank or in your business. Once a week you go to the opera or to the theater, preferably where they are playing something cheerful. You eat light meals at the restaurant; you mix your wine with sparkling water because you have taken note of all the healthy advice. Life presents no problems. Your local doctor — that is if he is only a good doctor not a true one; the two are not the same — shakes your hand after the half-yearly checkup and says you’re fine. But if he is a true doctor — that is to say, a doctor bred in the bone, in the way a pelican is nothing but a pelican and a general is a general even when he is not engaged in a battle and is simply trimming his hedge or doing the crossword — if he is a doctor of this sort, he will not be satisfied with shaking your hand after the half-yearly examination, because despite the fact that your heart, your lungs, your kidneys and liver are all in perfect working order, he recognizes your life is not so, and can sense the chill of loneliness as it works through you, exactly the way a ship’s delicate instruments can detect the mortal danger of the approaching iceberg even in warm waters. I can’t think of another analogy, that’s why I return to the iceberg. But maybe I could just add that the chill is of the kind you feel in the summer, in houses emptied of occupants who have departed for their holidays, having sprinkled camphor here and there and wrapped their furs and carpets up in newspapers, while outside it is summer, scorching hot summer, and behind the closed shutters the lonely furniture and the shadowed walls have soaked up all the cold and loneliness that even inanimate objects register, that everyone feels is there, that all who are lonely, objects as well as people, breathe in and radiate.
People remain alone because they are proud and will not dare accept love’s slightly jealous offerings; because they are fulfilling a role that seems more important than love; because they are vain; because every proper member of the bourgeoisie, everyone who is truly bourgeois — that is to say, a solid respectable citizen — is vain. I don’t mean the petit bourgeois, people who regard themselves as respectable because they have money or because somehow or other they find themselves socially elevated to some position of rank. They are just churls in bourgeois dress. I mean the creative guardians of that proper and respectable class, the truly solid bourgeoisie.
There comes a time when loneliness begins to crystallize around them. They begin to feel the cold. Then they turn ceremonial, become artifacts like Chinese vases or Renaissance tables. They turn to ceremony, start to collect stupid, pointless titles and distinctions, do everything they possibly can to achieve dignity and grace, filling their days with all kinds of complicated affairs in order to earn a medal or ribbon or a new title, such as vice president, or president, or honorary president, of this, that, or the other. That is what loneliness means, the being there. Happy people have no history, we are taught; happy people have neither rank nor title, no superfluous role in the world.
That’s why mother feared for me. Maybe that is why she tolerated Judit Áldozó in the house even after she noticed the danger her whole being radiated. As I said, nothing “happened” … I might qualify that by saying, “regrettably” nothing happened. It was just that three years went by. Then one evening, at Christmas, I was on my way home from work and decided to call in on my then lover, a singer, who was alone at home that afternoon in the lovely, warm, and boring apartment I had fitted out for her, and I gave her a present that was as lovely and as boring as she, the singer, was, and indeed as all the other lovers and apartments and presents that I had frittered away my time with had been. But as I was saying, I came home, because the family was to dine at my place that evening. And then it happened. I entered the drawing room. The Christmas tree was on the piano, fully decorated and sparkling, otherwise the light was dim, and there was Judit Áldozó kneeling in front of the fire.
It was Christmas, the afternoon, and being in my parents’ place, in the hours before the Christmas Eve dinner, I felt tense and alone. I also knew that this is how it would always be from now on, for the rest of my life, unless something miraculous happened. At Christmas, you know, one always tends to entertain a faint belief in miracles, not just you and I, but the whole world, all humanity as they say, for that, after all, is why we have festivals, because without miracles we cannot live. This afternoon had, of course, been preceded by many other such afternoons and evenings and mornings, days when I had seen Judit Áldozó without feeling anything unusual. If you live by the sea you are not always thinking that you could sail to India, or that you could drown yourself in it. Most of the time you just live there, read, and go in for a swim. But that afternoon I stood in the dimly lit room and gazed at Judit. She was wearing her black housemaid’s uniform, just as I was wearing my gray industrialist’s suit, preparing to go to my room and put on my black dinner suit evening uniform. That afternoon I stood in the twilit room, looked at the Christmas tree, the kneeling female figure, and suddenly understood all that had happened in the last three years. I understood that the decisive events of our lives are moments of stillness and silence, and that behind the visible, sensible events there lies another level, where something lazy is slumbering, a sleeping monster lodged under the sea or deep in the forest, in the heart of man, a dozy monster, some primeval creature, that rarely shifts itself, that yawns and stretches but rarely reaches for anything, and that this too is you, this monster, this otherness. And that there is a kind of order under the commonplace events in life, the kind you find in music or mathematics … a slightly romantic kind of order. Is that so hard to understand? It’s how I felt. As I said before, I am an artist without a medium, a musician without an instrument.
The girl was arranging the kindling in the grate and felt me standing behind her, watching her, but she did not move. She did not turn to face me. She knelt and bent forward, a position that registers, that means something emotionally. A woman kneeling and bending forward, even when she is working, cannot but register as a sentimental phenomenon. I couldn’t help laughing. But it wasn’t a frivolous laughter, simply good-natured, like someone rejoicing that even in those overwhelming, decisive, crucial moments we can’t forget that there remains in us and in our relationships with each other a kind of vulgar humanity, a sort of stumbling awkwardness associated with grand passions and feelings of pathos brought on by certain movements of the body, such as, for example, those of that woman kneeling in that dimly lit room. I know it’s regrettable. Ridiculous. But great and powerful feelings that are part of the world’s self-renewing energy, to whose workings every living being is a slave or a cog in the machine, must always be combined with the ridiculous in order to become the dazzling phenomena they are. That was another thought that occurred to me in that moment. And, naturally, I recognized not only the feeling that I desired this body, but also the tension and apprehension of the fact that this was fated to be, that while there was something low and contemptible in this fact, it was, nevertheless, a fact: that the truth was that I desired her. It was no less true that it wasn’t her body alone I desired, the body that was just now displaying itself in this almost buffoonish manner, but that which lay beneath the body, her condition, her feelings, her secrets. And because, like many wealthy and relatively idle young men now, I had spent a great deal of my time among women, I was also aware that there are no permanent or long-lasting sentimental arrangements between men and women; that sentimental moments renew themselves from within and when they vanish, they vanish into thin air due to habitual proximity and indifference. I understood that this lovely body, that solid rump, that slender waist, the broad yet proportionate shoulders, that charming, slightly bent neck with its chestnut-colored down, and those fleshy, pleasantly formed legs, this female body, was not the most beautiful in the world, and that I myself had known, taken possession of, and carried into bed, bodies better proportioned, lovelier, and more exciting than hers — but that this wasn’t the point. I understood equally well that the ebb and flow of desire and satisfaction, of longing and nausea, were constantly at work in people, attracting and repelling them, and that there was no answer to it, no peace to be found. I understood all this, though not as clearly or with as much certainty as I do now, being older. It may be that I maintained some hope, some hope at the bottom of my heart, that there would be a body, one single, unique body, that would move in perfect harmony with mine, that would succeed in quenching the thirst of desire and the nausea of satisfaction and result in a condition of relative peace, in an idyll that people generally refer to as happiness. But I wasn’t to know at that age that there’s no such thing in real life.