Portraits of a Marriage (22 page)

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

She told me. It sounded faintly familiar. “Áldozó” is much like the word
áldozat
, meaning sacrifice, so there was something ceremonial in it. Even her given name, Judit, had a biblical ring. It was as if she had stepped out of history, out of some biblical condition of solid simple materiality: like eternal life, real life. It was as if she had arrived not from a village but from some deeper level of existence. I was not much concerned with the propriety of my actions. I stepped over to the door and turned on the light so I could see her more clearly. Even my sudden movement failed to disturb her. Readily and obediently, not like a servant now, but in the manner of a woman acceding to the desires of the one man entitled to demand anything of her, she turned to one side toward the light so I might examine her more closely. She stood there in the lamplight. It was as if she were saying: “There you are, take a good look. This is me. I know I am beautiful. Look as hard as you want, take your time. You will remember this face even on your deathbed.” So she stood there calm, immobile, her bundle in her hand, like an artist’s model, silent and willing.

And I carried on gazing at her.

I don’t know whether you got a decent look at her just now. I alerted you too late. You only saw her body. She is as tall as I am. Her height is in perfect proportion to the rest of her. She is neither fat nor thin, but exactly as she was at the age of fifteen. She has never put on weight, nor ever lost any. You know, there are powerful inner laws that govern the way these things balance out. It was as though her metabolism burned at a constant, steady flame. I looked into her face and found myself blinking at the beauty of it, like someone who had lived for many years in a fog and suddenly found himself in bright sunlight. You couldn’t see her face just now. But she has been wearing a mask for a long time anyway, a cosmopolitan mask made up of mascara, paints, and powders, false eyes emphasized with eye shadow and a false mouth drawn on with lipstick.
But then, in that first startled moment, her face was still new and unscarred, untouched, direct from the Maker’s hand. The touch of her Creator was still fresh on her cheeks. Her face was heart shaped, beautifully proportioned. Each part of it echoed the other to perfection. Her eyes were black, a special kind of black, you know, as if there were a touch of dark blue in it. Her hair was blue-black, too. And one could immediately tell her body was as well proportioned and quite certain of itself. That was why she could stand in front of me with such poise. She had emerged out of anonymity, out of the depths, out of the vast crowd, arriving with something extraordinary: proportion, assurance, and beauty. Of course I was only faintly aware of all this. She was no longer a child, but was not quite a woman yet, either. Her body had developed but her soul was just waking. I have never met a woman since so absolutely certain of her own body, of the power of her body, as Judit Áldozó was then.

She was wearing cheap city clothes, black shoes with low heels. Everything about her was so consciously and modestly assembled. She was like a peasant girl who had dressed for town and didn’t want to be put to shame by city girls. I looked at her hands. I was hoping to find something unattractive in them. I hoped to find stubby fingers and palms rough and red from agricultural work. But her hands were white, her fingers long and graceful. Those hands had not been broken by labor. Later I discovered she had been spoiled at home, that her mother never put her to hard manual work.

There she stood, content to have me gaze at her under the bright lights. She looked directly into my eyes with a simple curiosity. There was nothing flirtatious about her, neither her eyes nor her posture. There was no invitation. She was not a little tart who finds herself in the big city and makes eyes at young gentlemen hoping to ingratiate herself to them. No, she was a woman willing to look a man in the eye because she thinks she might have something in common with him. But she didn’t overdo it, not then nor later. The relationship between us was never a fixed one of necessity for her. When I could no longer eat, sleep, and work without her, when she had got under my skin and penetrated my reflexes like a fatal poison, she remained calm and perfectly self-possessed, irrespective of whether she came or went. You think she didn’t love me? … I too thought so for a while. But I don’t want to
judge her too harshly. She loved me, but in a different way, in a more cautious, more practical, more grounded sort of way. That, after all, was what the situation allowed. That’s what made her a working woman, and me a middle-class boy. That’s what I wanted to tell you.

And then what happened? Nothing, old man. Phenomena like my time under the spell of Judit Áldozó are not to be explained in terms of “events,” the way things happen in novels or plays. The key events of our lives take place in time, in other words, over a period, very slowly. They hardly appear to be events at all. People go on living … that is the nature of events, of any act of importance to us. I can’t tell you that Judit Áldozó appeared in our house one day and that the next day, or six months later, this or that other thing happened. I can’t even claim that as soon as I saw her that first time I was immediately consumed by a passion that deprived me of both sleep and appetite, that left me dreaming of a stranger, a peasant girl, who now lived in close proximity to me, who entered my room on a daily basis, whose conduct was ever the same, who answered any question I put to her, who lived and matured the way a tree does, who conveyed any information of importance in her own characteristically simple and surprising manner, who trod the same earth and breathed the same air as I did … Yes, it was all as I describe it, but none of these conditions constitutes an event. In fact, for a long time, there were simply no events.

Nevertheless I recall that initial period in keen detail. The girl did not hold a particularly important position in our household and I rarely saw her. My mother trained her to be a housemaid, but she was not to serve us at the table, because she knew nothing of our family rituals. She tended to trail after the servant as he was cleaning, like a clown in a circus imitating the main act. I would occasionally bump into her on the stairs or in the drawing room; sometimes she even came to my room and greeted me, stopping on the threshold to deliver some message. I should have said that I was thirty-two years old when Judit Áldozó joined us. Thirty-two years old, and an independent adult in many respects. I was a partner in the factory, and my father, albeit carefully, was training me to stand on my own feet. I had a substantial income, but I did not move out of the family home. I lived on a separate floor, in two rooms. I had my own personal door. In the evenings, if I had no other business, I would dine with my parents. I tell you all this to show I had
few opportunities to meet the girl. And yet, from the moment she first entered the house and I spotted her in the hall, a certain tension existed between us, a quite unambiguous tension.

She always looked me straight in the eye. It was as if she were always asking me a question. She was not some house-trained domestic kitten, not an innocent fresh from the village, the kind who lowers her eyes when meeting the young master of the house. She did not blush or preen. Whenever we met, she would stand a moment as if someone had touched her. Just like the moment when I turned on the light to see her better that first time, where she obediently turned her face so I could see it better. She looked straight into my eyes, but in such a strange way … not in a challenging manner, nor inviting, but seriously, quite solemnly, her eyes wide open as if she had asked me something. She was always looking at me with those wide-open, questioning eyes. It was always the same question. There is a fundamental question in all of creation, said Lázár, a question that lies at the very root of consciousness: it is the question “Why?” It was the same question Judit Áldozó was asking me. Why am I living; what is the meaning of it all? … It did sort of come down to this. The only odd thing was that it happened to be me that she was putting the question to.

And because she was terrifyingly beautiful, full of dignity, and utterly complete in her virginal fierceness, like a masterpiece of creation, a unique, perfect specimen of which only a single design and prototype existed, her beauty did, of course, exercise an influence in our house, in our lives, constituting an insistent, silent, uninterrupted music. Beauty is probably a form of energy, the way heat, or light, or sheer willpower are forms of energy. Nowadays I am starting to think there is something constructed about it—not in terms of cosmetics, of course, since I have no great respect for beauty artificially arrived at, something pinched and poked into existence, the way people pamper animals. No, there is something behind beauty, which is, after all, compounded of fragile, mortal matter that suggests a fierce will. It takes the heart and all the other organs, intelligence and instinct, bearing and clothing, to bind together the fortunate, miraculous formula that makes up the compound that ultimately leads to and has the effect of beauty. As I said, I was thirty-two years old.

I can tell from your expression that you are asking the age-old,
worldly-wise male question “What was the problem?” Isn’t it the simplest thing for a man to follow his instincts and inclinations? A thirty-two-year-old man is, after all, aware of the facts of life. He knows that there is no woman he may not bed providing she is free, that there is no other man in her heart and thoughts, that there is no physical issue or matter of culture between them, and that they have the opportunity of meeting and getting to know each other. It’s true. I myself knew it was true, and frequently put that knowledge to use. Like any man of my age whose appearance is not altogether repulsive and is, on top of that, possessed of means, I met many women who made themselves available to me, nor did I refuse their offers. A man of promise is as much the center of attention as an attractive woman. It’s not a matter of personality: women too get lonely, have desires, and want affection and entertainment: every European capital has a surplus of women, and, well, I was neither ugly nor stupid. I lived a life of refined gentility, and it was generally known that I was rich. What with all this, I did exactly as any other man in my position would. I am sure that, following the preoccupations and confusions of the first few weeks, one kind word would have tamed her and inclined her affections to me. But I never did say that kind word. From my point of view, this familiarity, if the presence of a young servant in one’s parental home might be regarded as familiarity, roused my suspicions, and presented a danger. It became mysterious and exciting only once I realized that it was not as a lover I desired her, not as someone to bed, like all the others before, that I was not interested in purchasing and consuming fifty kilos of human flesh. No. So what did I want? It took me some time to find out. I didn’t bother her, because I was hoping for something from her. Expecting something. Not a brief thrill. But what, then? The answer to a question I had been asking all my life, that’s what.

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.