by Sándor Márai
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.
Because hope persists for a long time. People are very reluctant to resign themselves to lack of hope, to the thought of being alone; mortally, hopelessly alone. Very few can live with the knowledge that there is no end to loneliness. They carry on hoping, snatching at things, taking refuge in relationships to which they bring no genuine passion, to which they cannot surrender and so take recourse to distractions, to giving themselves artificial tasks, feverishly working or traveling with grand itineraries, or investing in big houses, buying the affections of women with whom they have nothing in common, becoming collectors of ornamental fans, or precious stones, or rare beetles. But none of this is of the least help. And they know perfectly well, even as they are doing these things, that they don’t help. And yet they carry on hoping. By that time, they themselves have no idea what it is they have invested their hopes in. They are fully aware that more money, a more complete collection of beetles, a new lover, an interesting circle of friends, and garden parties even more splendid than your neighbors’, none of them help … That is why, first and foremost, in the midst of their suffering and confusion, they are desperate to maintain order. Their every waking moment is spent in ordering their lives. They are continually “making arrangements”—seeing to some contract or attending some social event, or making a sexual assignation … As long as they are not alone, not for a second! As long as they never have to catch a glimpse of their own loneliness! Quick, bring on company! Fetch the dogs! Hang those tapestries! Buy those shares, or those antiques! Get a new lover! Quick, before the loneliness has to be faced.
That’s how they live. It’s how we lived. We took a great deal of trouble dressing. By the time he was fifty my father dressed with as much care as a church elder or a Catholic priest preparing for mass. His servant knew his habits to a T and by dawn had prepared his suit, his shoes, and his tie as if he were a sacristan. It was all because my father—by no means a vain man and never too particular about his appearance before—resolved to be dignified in his old age and, from that moment on, decided to pay minute attention to his clothes, with not a speck of dust on his sleeve, not one unwonted crease in his trousers, not one stain or crinkle on his shirt or his collar, his tie perfectly knotted … yes, just like a priest dressed for mass, as careful as that. And then, having dressed, the second ritual of the day began: breakfast. Then the car waiting to take him somewhere, the reading of the papers, the mail, the office, the efficient and respectful clerks rendering accounts, the meetings with business contacts, the club and the social round … and all this conducted with such constant close attention to detail, such anxious care, it was as if there were someone watching all this, someone to whom he himself had to render accounts of every part of his sacred duties. That is what my mother feared. Because behind all this ritual, this dressing up, this tapestry collecting and club calling, behind the socializing and entertaining, the terror of loneliness had raised its head like an iceberg in a warming sea. Loneliness, you know, tends to appear in certain modes of individual and social life like an illness in an exhausted body. It’s the kind of condition that doesn’t suddenly leap to attention. The real crises—sickness, breakups, the terminal things—don’t just turn up to be announced or established or noticed at any particular hour of any particular day. By the time we have noticed them, those decisive moments of our lives, they are usually already past, and there is nothing left for us to do but accept them and send for the lawyer or the doctor or the priest. Loneliness is a form of sickness. Or, more precisely, not a form of sickness, but a condition in which who
ever is fated to suffer it finds himself displayed in a cage like a stuffed animal. No: sickness is the process that precedes loneliness, a process I’d compare to slowly freezing over. My mother wanted to save me from that.
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 tho
se 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.
In real life it does happen, though rarely, that the tension of desire and the succeeding nausea is not followed by an equivalent dose of inward self-monitoring, the depression of satisfaction. There are also people who are like pigs, to whom it’s all the same: desire and satisfaction all occur on some indifferent plane of being for them. Maybe they are the satisfied ones. I do not desire that kind of satisfaction. As I say, I didn’t know all this for certain back then: I might have hoped a little, and I certainly looked down on myself a little, laughed at the whole situation and the feelings associated with it, the feelings that were so strongly associated with that ridiculous situation. There was much I didn’t know then, and I had no inkling that there was little ridiculous about situations where our physical and psychological conditions yield to a relationship with another person. I had no idea about that.