That day she chose the wooded path after all. She stepped out onto the road and stopped. If my memory captures her image precisely, and I think it has, she was wearing a red skirt with white polka dots and a white blouse, both of them heavily starched and ironed to a shine, so that the rigid fullness of the blouse concealed the mounds of her small breasts and the stiff cotton skirt swished against her skinny knees. Each piece of her meager wardrobe displayed or concealed different parts of her body, and for this reason I had to keep track of each item — skirts, dresses, blouses, everything that she herself, while dressing and possibly even thinking of me, must have considered extremely important; craning her uncovered neck, she looked around, slowly, carefully, the only movement she allowed herself; peering out from under the mask of her coy reserve, first she looked to the left, then to the right, and while turning her head, her glance would come to rest on me as if by accident, very often for no more than a fraction of a second, and then I tried in vain to catch her eye; at other times she looked at me more boldly for quite a few seconds, and once in a great while for an absurdly long time, but of this I'll have more to say later — in any case, I knew her eyes were looking for me, because if it happened that I wasn't standing at my usual place, if, say, I dropped down on my stomach or stood behind a tree so she would not notice me right away and I could extract some small advantage thereby, then her gaze grew uncertain, her face showed the deep disappointment which I hoped to wheedle out of her with my little game of hide-and-seek, and which, given her reserve and aloofness, could be considered blatant flirtatiousness; one single glance a day was my due, nothing more, while I stood helpless behind the fence, in the stifling shade of the bushes.
She wasn't beautiful, a statement that needs immediate clarification, for with mixed shame and regret I had to admit this even to myself while, however, she did seem beautiful to me, and once she disappeared in the bend of the street I almost felt I had to be ashamed in front of certain people that the girl I had fallen in love with was not beautiful, was ugly, or, however charitably we'd want to put it, not very beautiful; in any case, the doubt, the inexplicable shame was strong, and since I spent so many days in agonized waiting, I couldn't protest, couldn't prevaricate, in the end had to admit to myself and to say out loud, to shout it to the world— in the hope of regaining my freedom I screamed into the air that I was in love, was in love with her, but only the shouting itself made me happy; when I was through, I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that now I would have to start waiting again, and go on waiting until two-thirty, and when she finally did come, I'd have to wait for her to be gone so that I could wait for her the next day, and that really seemed perverse and even more senseless than trying to avoid meeting Krisztián only to lessen the pain of seeing him.
But if things had to be this way, if I had to see her, then why couldn't she be beautiful at least, that's what I would have wished, for if she were beautiful, then her beauty would have lingered in me even after she was gone and I wouldn't have to be ashamed about my feelings: her beauty in some way would absolve me, I thought; as it was, I was forever entangled in the same agony — today I would call it the agony of longing for beauty, an agony so dark and dismal it must be hidden from the eyes of strangers, just as I had to conceal my love for Krisztián — for different reasons, of course — and still he managed to humiliate me, because my silent love for him made me memorize his quick gestures, his awkward smiles, and his wild laughter, his untouchable sadness, the transparent flash of his green eyes and the nervous twitch of his muscles, and not only did I absorb all this but I made it my own, so that he could surface in me anytime, in the most unexpected situations, as if replacing my body with his and pretending I was he; thus, with a single imagined gesture, look, or smile he could destroy anything that might be very important to me but also help me with problems I would have found hard to solve on my own, so that his constant presence was two-faced, benevolent, or hostile, but always unpredictable; he never left me, he was my crutch, my secret model, almost as if I no longer existed or did only as his shadow: and he was here now, hanging about me, drifting in and out, shrugging, grinning, pretending slyly not to notice me yet watching me all the same; I may have found this girl terribly exciting, her very sight may have swept away my fatuous doubts, but I was not alone, not the only one looking at her, and even if strictly speaking I was, I couldn't form a clear opinion based strictly on my own feelings but was of two minds, influenced by a critical faculty that, in matters of beauty, I found eminently competent; in truth, whose judgment could I trust more than his?
In the meantime, it was still I who was watching her — who else could it be? — I who was waiting for her, happy when she showed up, and I who have seen no more profoundly exciting face and body since, or, to be more precise, ever since and in every woman who appeals to me, I seem to be looking always for what I finally got from her — nothing she actually gave me, but this nothing was painfully real, and later I tried to fill it without even knowing it; today I know that it was beauty, her own unique perfection, which every day she revealed to me, and only me, if only for a few moments, for what is beauty if not the involuntary giving away of what is hidden even from ourselves? and if in spite of this I still couldn't consider her beautiful, then strangely enough it was only because, despite all appearances, I couldn't ever be alone with her, not even for a moment; there were always others standing with me in the bushes who interfered, held down my arms, gave me goose pimples, warned me not to yield to my feelings — maybe they did the right thing, I say philosophically today, mindful of the pain that teaches us what we can and cannot do; and he wasn't the only one who argued against her — absurdly enough, I even experienced the jealousy my phantom Krisztián would have felt, had he loved me, about the real Livia, and strangely, very strangely, there were several of us inside me who were watching her — I, who would have loved to love this girl, wasn't alone, and even if I wasn't fully conscious of this at the time, the other boys were there, too, disturbing me, standing behind me, watching the same girl, and they didn't think she was beautiful, didn't even think she was ugly — because I believe that besides me no one had ever even noticed her before.
I was the first and only one, and this couldn't but make an impression on her.
I knew she also was ashamed of her ugliness; everything about her spoke of this: her walk, her skin, her compulsively clean dresses, her shy cautiousness, her bashfulness; yet this did not make her weak, but, on the contrary, perhaps made her beautiful, and she let me understand with an earnestness bordering on defiance that, though she might think herself the ugliest of girls she must still come by my spot — and let's add that her defenselessness was made even more emphatic, almost absurd, by the stoic dignity of the poor; all the same, a curious shiver of excitement ran through me when I thought of the cellar where she lived.