Portraits of a Marriage (21 page)

That is a pretty heartless perspective, you say. It’s what I myself said for a long time.

I don’t say that now. I have absolutely no desire to pass judgment on anyone. I just go on living and thinking; it’s all I can do. The truth is, I have not made a single penny in all my life. I barely looked after that which my father and his fathers passed on to me. Mind you, that is no easy matter, either, looking after money, because there are vast powers out there constantly at war with the concept of private property. There were times I fought these powers—enemies both visible and invisible—as vigilantly and fiercely as my ancestors, the founders of our fortune. But the truth is that I was not myself a maker of fortune, because I was no longer really in touch with money. I was of the penultimate generation, whose only desire is to keep what they have been given out of a sense of honor.

My father would sometimes speak of “poor people’s money.” His respect for money was not based on mere accumulation. He told me that a man who is no more than a factory hand all his life but who, by the time he has finished, owns a small plot, a little house, and a few fruit trees, and can live there on what he has earned, is a more heroic figure than any general. He respected the miraculous willpower shown particularly by the poor—the healthy and the exceptional among them—who, through fierce, stubborn effort, succeeded in grabbing a share of the good things of the world. They had a patch of the earth they had the right to call theirs; there was a house they had bought with their own pittance: they had a roof over their heads. He admired these people. Apart from them he admired nothing and no one. “He was good for nothing,” he’d say sometimes and shrug when the fate of the weak and helpless was described to him. The conviction with which he pronounced “good for nothing” was itself a form of contempt.

As a matter of fact I myself am a miser and always have been. I am like anyone who is no longer capable of building and creating and is reduced simply to looking after that which he has inherited from his family. My father was not a miser, he simply had a respect for money: he made it, he accumulated it, and then, when the time was right, he
calmly spent it with full confidence in his own judgment. I once saw him write out a check for a million, his hand assured as he put his simple signature to it, as if it were no more than a tip to a waiter. And when the factory burned down and the insurers weren’t paying because it had been caused by some kind of negligence, my father decided to rebuild it. He could have left it and shared the proceeds, then lived in comfort on the interest. He was no longer young by this time. He was over sixty. There would have been plenty of good reasons for not rebuilding. It was perfectly within his means to live an independent life, to spend his remaining days strolling about, reading books, and going to see things. But he didn’t hesitate a moment: he settled with the investors and the foreign engineers, then wrote out the check and handed it over to the engineer who would build up and head the new venture. And he was right. My father died two years after that, but the factory is still there, still productive, doing useful work. That’s as much as we can hope for in life, that we leave something useful behind us, something people value.

Ah yes, but none of this is of much consolation to the builder and maker, you think. I know—you are thinking of the loneliness. The deep, dense loneliness that is the lot of any creative spirit, a product of the restricted atmosphere in which he must move, the oxygen he must breathe. Well, yes. Busy people are lonely people. But we can’t be altogether certain that this loneliness is the cause of suffering. I have always suffered more from close human presence and social life than from genuine loneliness. There are times when we regard loneliness as a punishment: we are like children left alone in a dark room while the adults carry on chattering and enjoying themselves next door. But one day we too grow up to be adults and learn that loneliness—genuine, fully conscious solitude—is not a punishment, not a wounded, sickly retreat from life, not isolation, but the one and only truly fitting condition for man. And then it becomes less hard to suffer it. It is like breathing pure mountain air.

That’s what my father was like. That is what the world was like back then. Money, work, order: it was a solid bourgeois world. It was as if the house and the factory were ordained to us forever. The rituals associated with work and life were organized, as it were, from a position outside life. It was quiet at home. I learned that quiet early, the keeping silent. People who talk a great deal have something to hide. People who
hold their peace are sure of something. That was another thing I learned from my father. As a child these lessons were a source of suffering for me. I felt something was missing from our lives. Love, you say … The love that is ready to sacrifice itself. Look, it’s far too easy to say that. Later I discovered that love, poorly articulated, clumsily demanded, kills more people than poison, car accidents, and lung cancer. People kill each other with love as with some invisible death ray. They want ever more love and demand constant acts of tenderness; they want it all, all to themselves. They want the whole heart; they want to suck the life energy from their surroundings and are as greedy for it as those enormous plants that drain water, scent, and light from other shrubs. Love is a monstrous selfishness. Is there anyone alive capable of surviving under that reign of terror called love? Look around you, look through the windows that you pass. Look into people’s eyes, listen to their complaints, and you will discover everywhere the same despairing anxiety. They can’t live with the demands that love imposes on them. They put up with it for a while, they bargain with it, but eventually it exhausts them. Then follow stomach upsets, gastric ulcers. Diabetes. Heart murmurs. And death.

You have seen peace and harmony? Once, in Peru, you say … Well, yes, it may be possible, in Peru. But here, in our more temperate climate, the miraculous flower is not allowed to bloom. It may put out a few petals now and then, but it quickly languishes. Maybe the climate of civilization is too much for it. Lázár once told me that civilizations based on the machine must churn out loneliness like a conveyor belt. He also told me the abbot Paphnucius was less lonely in the desert, on top of his column, with guano in his hair, than a million citizens of the great metropolis crowded into cafés and movie palaces on a Sunday afternoon. He was lonely too, but conscientiously so, like a monk in a monastery. The one time anyone got close to him he quickly ran off. I suspect I know this better than he does, or the person who got close to him. But these are private matters, other people’s affairs, and I have no right to speak of them. Back home, a lofty, solemn, sacramental kind of loneliness pervaded everything. The loneliness of my childhood sometimes comes back to me like the memory of a sad, frightening dream … you know, the kind full of anxiety, the sort one dreams before a test. My childhood was a matter of eternal preparation for some desperately
important, dangerous exam. It was an examination in responsible citizenship. We were forever studying. We crammed. We learned by rote. Each day there was a new exam paper to face. We were constantly tense: our acts, our words, even our dreams were fraught with tension. We were walled in by a loneliness so dense even the servants and those who only dropped in at the house for a few minutes—mailmen, delivery boys—they all felt it. Childhood and adolescence were spent waiting in dim, curtained rooms. By the time I got to eighteen the loneliness, anxiety, and waiting had exhausted me. I longed to try something I hadn’t tried before, something not entirely within the rules. But I had to wait a good while before that happened.

That was when Judit Áldozó entered my fortress of loneliness.

Here, have a light. How do you get on with the tobacco habit? It’s a struggle, isn’t it? Myself, I couldn’t go on—not with the smoking but with the struggle. There’ll be a day when that too has to be faced. One adds up the facts and decides whether to live five or ten years longer by not smoking, or to surrender to this petty, shameful passion that no doubt kills but, until it does so, offers you such a peculiar calming yet exciting experience. After fifty years it becomes one of life’s major questions. My answer to that question was angina and the decision to carry on exactly as before until I die. I’ll not stop poisoning myself with this bitter weed, because it’s not worth it. You say it’s not so difficult to give up? Of course it’s not that difficult. I’ve done it before, more than once, while it was worth it. The trouble was, I’d spend the whole day “not smoking.” That’s something else I’ll have to face one day. People should resign themselves to certain weaknesses, to their need for a soporific of some sort, and be prepared to pay the price. It’s so much simpler that way. Yes, but then they say: “You should have more courage.” My answer to them is: “I may not be the bravest of men, but I am courageous enough to live with my desires.”

That’s what I think, anyway.

You’re looking at me very skeptically. I see, you want to ask whether I always had the courage to follow my desires? As regards Judit Áldozó, for instance? Indeed I had, old man. And I proved it. I paid my whack, as they say on the street. It cost me my peace of mind for the rest of my
life, and someone else’s peace of mind too. It may be that one can’t do much more than that. And now you want to know whether it was worth it? That is what you call a rhetorical question. You can’t judge the great decisive moments of life by the standards of a commercial transaction. It’s not about whether something was or was not worth it: sometimes people have to do things just because it is their fate to do so, or because that is the given situation, or because their blood pressure demands it, or because their entire body insists on it. It’s bound to be some combination of all those factors at work … Whatever the case, the result is that they don’t act like cowards, they just go ahead and do it. Because nothing else matters. The rest is theory.

So I did it.

Let me tell you what it was like the morning when Judit Áldozó first appeared at the door of our dingy yet magnificent abode. She was like the poor girl in the fairy tales—she arrived carrying nothing more than a small bundle of possessions. Folk tales are generally pretty reliable. I had just returned from the tennis courts, had stepped into the hall, thrown the racket onto a chair, and stood there flushed, about to pull off my sleeveless knit sweater, the kind people wear for exercise. That was the moment I noticed that there was a strange woman standing in the gloom beside the Gothic chest. I asked her what she wanted.

She didn’t answer. She was clearly confused. I thought at the time she must have been disoriented by the unfamiliar setting, and put her silence down to a simple case of embarrassment not uncommon with servants. Later I found out it wasn’t the unfamiliar setting or the arrival of the young master that confused her but something else. It was the encounter. The fact of our meeting, and that I had looked at her and something happened. I too knew that, of course, knew something had happened that moment, but not as deeply as she did. Women, strong, instinctive women, and she was one, know precisely what is important or decisive the moment it happens, while men, such as ourselves, are always likely to misunderstand events or explain them away. This woman immediately knew, the moment she met me, that our fates were inextricably linked. I knew it too, but I chose to talk about something else.

But not straightaway, because she hadn’t answered my question and I
felt a little insulted, inclined to be high-handed. We stood dumbly in the hall for a few moments, facing and staring at each other.

We gazed at each other the way people do when coming across something rare and strange. What I was gazing at that moment was nothing like a new servant. I was gazing at a woman who, in some way, for completely mysterious reasons, because of certain impossible factors, would play a major role in my life. Do people realize when this happens? I’m sure they do. Not intellectually but with their whole being. And at the same time they go on thinking other things in an absentminded sort of way. Consider for a moment how unlikely a situation this was. Imagine that, in those moments, someone had come up to me and told me that this was the woman I would one day marry, but that much would have to happen before that came about; that I would first marry someone else, another woman, who would bear me a child, and that the woman standing opposite me then in the dingy hall would go abroad, vanish for years, then return, at which point I would divorce my wife and marry her instead; that I, the persnickety bourgeois boy, the rich, polished gentleman, would marry this insignificant servant girl clutching her bundle while anxiously staring at me just the way I was staring at her … scrutinizing her as if I were seeing something I had never seen before, something I really had to take into account … Well, all this seemed most unlikely back then. If anyone had predicted it, I would have laughed at him and dismissed the very idea. But now, afterwards, from the distance of a few years, I’d like to answer my own question as to whether I knew how it would work out. And also the issue of whether we know when we meet someone that the meeting is of vital importance, a turning point in our lives … Is there a moment when someone steps into the room and we know, yes, this is the one? The one intended, just for us, exactly as in novels?

I don’t know the answer. I can only close my eyes and recall the moment. And as I do so, I see that, yes, something happened back then. An electric charge? A form of radiation? A secret intuition? These are just words. But of course people don’t communicate their thoughts and feelings through words only. There are other forms of communication between people, other ways of conveying a message. The term people tend to use now is “shortwave.” Apparently human intuition is no more
than a form of shortwave transmission. I don’t know … I have no desire to con you, nor indeed myself. For that reason the best I can say is that the moment I first saw Judit Áldozó I was transfixed, and however impossible the situation, I stood there facing this unknown servant figure quite unable to move. So we carried on gazing at each other for quite some time.