Look around you. There’s no escape from sexual tension: it’s there in literature, in paintings, on the stage, and out in the street … Go into a theater. There are men and women sitting in the auditorium watching men and women conspiring onstage, chatting, making promises, and taking vows. The audience coughs and croaks and is clearly bored … but let the words “I love you” be spoken by the actors, or “I want you,” or anything that refers to love, possession, parting, and to the happiness or misery associated with them, the auditorium immediately falls deathly silent: thousands upon thousands, all over the world, are holding their breath. Writers spend their lives cooking such things up: they use the emotion to blackmail the audience. And wherever you go, this whipped-up excitement continues unabated: perfumes, bright dresses, expensive furs, half-naked bodies, skin-colored stockings. It’s the same desire at work — the desire to show off a silk-stockinged knee or, in the summer, on the beach, to go practically naked, because this way the feminine presence becomes more teasing, more exciting, not to mention the makeup, the scarlet basque, the blue eye shadow, the blond highlights, all the cheap rubbish they apply and pamper themselves with — it’s all so unhealthy.
I was almost fifty before I understood The Kreutzer Sonata. It seems to be about jealousy, but that is not the true subject. Tolstoy’s masterpiece talks about jealousy presumably because Tolstoy himself was painfully sensitive and had a jealous nature. But jealousy is nothing more than vanity. Jealousy is pitiful and contemptible. Oh, yes, I know the feeling quite well … all too well. I almost died of it. But I am no longer jealous. Do you understand me? Do you believe me? Look at me. No, old man, I am no longer jealous, because — at considerable cost — I overcame that vanity. Tolstoy still believed in some kind of balm for it, so he assigned to women a role that is half animal; they should give birth and dress in sackcloth. But that is the sickness, not the cure. The alternative, of course, is no better. It proposes women as bits of décor, masterpieces of emotion. How can I respect, how can I give my heart and mind to, someone who, from the moment of rising to the hour of lying down, does nothing but dress and preen herself as if to say, “Here I am …” Someone who apparently wishes to make herself attractive to me by means of feather, fur, and scent. But that is too simple. It’s more complicated than that. She wants to be attractive to everyone, you see; she wants to lodge the spore of desire in the whole world’s nervous system. Movies, theaters, the street, the café, the restaurant, the baths, the hills: everywhere it’s the same unhealthy excitement. Do you think nature really needs all this? No, dear boy! Not at all. Only one social arrangement, one mode of production, requires it: it’s the one in which women regard themselves as items for sale.
Of course you’re right, I don’t myself have a better answer, a better system of production and social exchange … all the alternatives have failed. I have to admit that in our system, a woman constantly feels obliged to sell herself, sometimes consciously, more often subconsciously. I don’t say every woman is conscious of being a commercial object … but I daren’t believe that exceptions don’t prove the rule. I don’t blame women: it’s not their fault. This presentation of the self as something “on offer” can feel like death, especially the foolishness, the haughtiness, that ironically flirtatious performance of giving herself airs when a woman feels under pressure because she is surrounded by others more beautiful, less expensive, and more exciting. What is a woman to do with her life, both as woman and as a human being, when, as today, women outnumber men in every part of Europe, when competition has assumed a terrifying intensity? They offer themselves, some virtuously, with downcast eyes, like tremulous, highly delicate bouquets who continue trembling in private in case time passes and no one carries them away; others more consciously, setting out each day like Roman legionaries fully aware of their imperial mission to vanquish the barbarian … No, my friend, we have no right to condemn women. The only right we may have is to pity them, and perhaps not even them, but ourselves, we men, who are incapable of solving this long, painful crisis in the great free market of civilization. It is constant anxiety. Wherever you go, wherever you look. And it is money that is behind all the human misery — not all the time, maybe, but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. That is the subject the saintly, wise author of The Kreutzer Sonata never mentions, not once, in his furious indictment …
The story is about jealousy. Tolstoy cursed women, fashion, music — all the bewitchments of social life. The one thing he fails to mention is that inner peace is not to be achieved by changes in social order, or by changing the means of production, but by ourselves alone. How? By overcoming vanity and desire. Is that possible? … It’s all but impossible. Maybe later, at some stage in the future, it may happen. Time does not diminish desire; but fury, jealousy, greed, the hopeless excitement and disgust that are key elements in desire and its satisfaction, might gradually fall away or wear away. One simply grows tired, you see. There are times even now when I am glad to feel old age knocking at the door. What I sometimes desire now are rainy days when I can sit by the fire with a glass of red wine and an old book that speaks of past desires and disappointments.
But back then I was still young. I spent four years traveling. I woke in women’s arms, with my own hair tangled and matted, in the rooms of other cities. I learned my craft to the best of my ability. I was lost in the beauty of the world. I didn’t think about Judit Áldozó. At least not often, not consciously, only the way one thinks, when abroad, of streets back home, of rooms, of people one has left behind; people who emerge from the golden glow of memory in a state so refined they’re practically dead. There was, I reflected, one hour of madness when I, a lonely, middle-class young man, met a wild, beautiful young woman and we fell to talking in the midst of that loneliness … then I forgot it all. I traveled. The years of wandering passed, then I went home. Nothing happened.
It was just that, in the meantime, Judit Áldozó was back there, waiting for me.
She did not say as much, of course, when I got home and we met once more. She took my coat, my hat, and my gloves and gave me a polite, reserved smile such as is due to the young master of the house when he returns after an absence: it was the official smile a servant gives. I addressed her correctly, smiling and unflustered. I stopped just short of patting her cheek in good-humored paternal fashion … The family was waiting for me. Judit went off with the servant to prepare the dinner that was to welcome the lost prodigal. Everyone was effusive with delight, as indeed was I, glad to be finally at home.
My father had retired that year, and I took over the factory. I moved away from home, rented a villa on a hillside near the city. I saw less of my family now — weeks went by without meeting Judit. After another two years my father died. My mother left the big house and let the old staff go. Judit was the only one she kept with her, she being housekeeper in all but name by then. I visited Mother once a week, for dinner on Sunday, and saw Judit on those occasions, though we never talked to each other. Our relationship was warm and courteous. I occasionally addressed her in a more familiar way as “Juditka,” “Judi,” in a spirit of kindly, slightly patronizing benevolence. It was the way one might talk to a still-young but rapidly aging spinster. Yes, there was a moment, back in the long-distant past, one mad occasion, on which we had talked of all kinds of things, the kind of things a person can, later, only smile about. It was youth and foolishness. That’s what I thought each time I recalled it: it was the way I chose to view it. It was very comfortable. False but comfortable. Everything was in its proper place: everything was as it should be. And so I got married.