Judit and I lay down in bed and made love. We made love passionately, expectantly, in wonder and hope. We were probably hoping that what the world and mankind had ruined might be put right by the two of us eye-to-eye in this other, purer, more ancient realm, in that eternal country without and beyond borders. I mean in bed. Any love preceded by an extended period of waiting — though maybe it’s not exactly romantic love when just a few cinders remain unconsumed by the purgatorial fires of waiting — hopes for a miracle from both the other and itself. Neither Judit nor I was exactly a youngster by then, but we were not old, just man and woman, in the complete, most basic sense of those words. We reach an age when it is not purely sexual satisfaction we desire of each other, not full-blown happiness or release, but a simple and solemn truth that vanity and falsehood had previously hidden from us, hidden from us even when we were in love: it is the truth that we are human beings, we men and women, and that we share a common enterprise or responsibility on earth, a responsibility that may not be quite as personal as we think. Being human beings is not a responsibility we can avoid, but we can, and do, tell an awful lot of lies in trying to fulfill it.
Once people are old enough, it is the truth they want, and they want it in bed, too, in the sheer physical underworld of it. It isn’t beauty we most want — after a while we stop noticing the beauty, anyway. It’s not that the other should be wonderful, exciting, wise, experienced, curious, lusty, and responsive. So what is it that matters so much? It is the truth. In other words, it is exactly the same thing as matters in literature and in all human affairs. This truth is a compound of spontaneity, readiness, and the willingness to be surprised by the miraculous gift of joy that arrives unplanned, unintended. Even when we are being selfish, wanting only to receive, it is the ability to give, to give in an almost distracted, vaguely conscious way, as it were, without planning, without mad ambition. It’s what I think of as “bed truth.” No, old man, there is no Soviet-style pyatiletka, no Five-Year Plan, nor Four-Year Plan, either. The feeling that drives two people together can have no plan.
Bed is jungle, wilderness, a place full of surprises, teeming with the unexpected; there is the same unbearable dank heat, the same extraordinary flowers and lianas with their deathly scent and their ability to twine around you; the same glowing eyes of the same beasts of prey watching you in the half-light, the heraldic beasts of desire and obsession, ever ready to pounce. Jungle and half-light, strange cries in the distance — you can’t tell whether it is a man screaming by a well, his throat ripped open by some predator, or nature itself screaming, nature, which is human, animal, inhuman at once — bed entails all that. This woman knew all there was to be known. She had the secret knowledge: she knew the body. She knew self-control and loss of self-control. Love for her was not a series of occasional meetings but a constant return to a familiar childhood base: a blend of homecoming and festival; the dark-brown light over a field at dusk, the taste of certain familiar foods, the excitement and anticipation, and, under it all, the confidence that once evening came, there would be nothing to fear in the flight of the bat, just the road home at dusk. She was like a child tired of playing, making her way home because the light in the window was calling her to a hot dinner and a clean bed. That was love as far as Judit was concerned.
As I said, I was hopeful.
To hope is to fear what you desire, the things in which you neither trust nor genuinely believe. You don’t place your hopes in what you already have: what is possessed simply exists, as if by default.
We traveled for a while. Then we came home and rented an out-of-town property. It was Judit, not I, who arranged all this. The next natural step would be to introduce her to “society,” if she wanted it. I was looking to bring home intelligent people who were not snobs, who might regard what had happened as more than food for gossip. “Society,” that strange world of which, only a little while ago, I had been a perfectly respectable member — the world in which Judit had only recently been a servant — followed our lives with keen interest and, in its own way, accepted what had happened. People always need something to spice up their lives. When it comes, they immediately sit up, their eyes begin to sparkle, and soon they’re on the phone from morn till night … It wouldn’t have surprised anyone in society if the papers had discussed “the affair” in their leading articles: they brought up the subject, they talked about it, they analyzed it in the minutest detail as if it were a crime of some sort. And who knows? They might have been right according to the rules on which society depends. People don’t tolerate the agonizing boredom of cohabitation for nothing; it’s not for nothing they continue squirming in the sharp-jawed snares of a relationship that has long ago lost interest; and, surely, something must lead them to accept the necessary self-denials involved in the social contract. Nobody, they feel, has the right to seek satisfaction, peace, and joy as an individual while they, the majority, a great many of them, have agreed to censor their feelings and desires in the interest of the grand sum of censorship — civilization. That is why they snort and grunt and set up kangaroo courts and advertise their verdicts in the form of gossip each time they hear someone has dared to rebel, seeking individual recourse against loneliness. But now that I am alone, I sometimes wonder whether they are so wrong in censuring people who venture outside the rules.
I’m just raising the question, you know. Just between the two of us, now it’s past midnight.
Women don’t understand this. Only men understand that there is something else beside happiness. This difference may be that great hopeless gulf in understanding between men and women, the gulf that’s always there, each and every time. Women — real women — have only one true home: the place occupied by the man to whom they are attached. For men there is another home: the great, eternal, impersonal, and tragic place symbolized by flags and borders. I don’t mean to say that women feel no loyalty to the community into which they are born, to the language in which they take oaths, lie, and shop, to the land where they grew up; nor do I say that loyalty, fidelity, the readiness for self-sacrifice, sometimes even for downright heroism on behalf of the man’s other realm, lie beyond them. But women never really die for a country: they die for a man. Every time. Joan of Arc and the others are the exceptions, masculine women. There are ever more of these now. Women’s patriotism is much quieter than men’s. They have fewer slogans. They agree with Goethe, who said that when a peasant cottage burns down, that is a genuine tragedy, but when one’s homeland is devastated, that is, on the whole, a symbolic loss. Home, for women, is always that peasant cottage. That’s the home they jealously guard, the home they live and work for, the home for which they are ready to perform every sacrifice. In that cottage there is a bed, a table, a man, and any number of children. That is woman’s true home.
As I was saying, we loved each other. And now I want to tell you something, in case you didn’t know: love, true love, is always fatal. What I mean is, it does not aim at happiness, at an idyll, at a hand-in-hand eternity of sentimental walks under flowering lime trees, with a gentle light burning on the veranda behind, the house swimming in cool scents. Life can be that, but not love. Love burns with a fierce, more dangerous flame. One day you discover a desire in yourself to encounter this all-consuming passion. It is when you no longer want to keep anything for yourself, when you don’t want love to offer you a healthier, calmer, more fulfilled kind of life, but you just want to be; you know, to exist in a total sense, even at the cost of perishing in the process. This desire comes late in life: some never feel it, never encounter it. They are too cautious, but I don’t envy them that. Then there are the gluttons, the curious, who have to sample everything and can’t pass any opportunity by. They are genuinely to be pitied. There are also the obsessed, the desperate: love’s pickpockets, who, quick as lightning, dip their hands into your heart to steal a feeling, discover some secret physical susceptibility there, then immediately vanish into the darkness, melt into the crowd, snickering with malicious delight. Nor must we forget the cowards, the calculating, who even in love work out everything strategically, as if love were a matter of economics and production deadlines, people who live according to a precise agenda. Most folk are like this: they are true wretches. And then there comes a day when someone really understands what life desires of love, why life has given us sensibility. Does life mean well? Nature is not benign. Do you think it means to make you happy with this feeling? Nature has no need of human pipe dreams. All nature wants is to beget and destroy: that is its business. It is ruthless because its plan is indifferent to the human predicament, beyond the human. Nature has gifted us with passion, but it insists that the passion be unconditional.