[...] There was simply this woman on the other side of the tracks, going about her business, waiting and aging, as I was … and there I was on my side, not knowing why my life lacked something, why it was unbearable, or what to make of the feeling that haunted my days and nights, those feelings that worked their way into my bones like some wicked, mysterious radiation, the sense that things were not quite right … I knew nothing about my husband or Judit. But there are moments in life when we understand that the most unlikely, the most impossible, most incomprehensible things are actually the simplest and closest to hand. Suddenly life’s mechanism is laid bare before us: those we considered important vanish as through a trapdoor and out of the background step figures about whom we know little that is certain but for whom—we suddenly understand—we have been waiting, as they, with their own burden of fate, have been waiting for us, for this precise moment …

I understood that this was the truth and that it was carved in stone. Neither of them was a liar. I began to feel sick with fear, with the shock. I felt generally unwell. There could be nothing worse than the news that they had never spoken since. That they had remained silent for twelve years: that told me everything. And all the time one of them went about with a locket round her neck with the other’s photograph in it, and the other carried around a strip of lilac ribbon that he had cut away and hidden in the deepest recesses of his wallet. And one of them got married, taking me as wife, and when he came home not all of him arrived, because someone else was waiting for him. That said everything. My hands and feet were frozen. I began to shiver.

[...] You know how it is: you wake up in the morning like an asthmatic, gasping for air. You put a hand out in the dark seeking another hand. You can’t understand how the other person is no longer there, nearby, in the next house or the next street. You walk down the street but the other person is not there to meet you. There’s no point in having a telephone; the papers are full of news that means nothing to you—items of no consequence, such as that a world war has broken out, or that in a capital city of some one million inhabitants whole rows of streets have been destroyed … You hear out the news politely, as it goes in one ear and out the other, and say things like: “Really? … Imagine! … How interesting!” or “How sad!” But you don’t feel anything. [...]

[...] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 whoever 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.