Portraits of a Marriage

by Sándor Márai

  So I went on: despairing, a little theatrical perhaps. Passion always has a touch of theatricality.

  Just then someone passed through the conservatory, someone in military uniform … He stopped, startled, looked back, and hurried on, shaking his head.

  I felt ashamed. In a quieter, more apologetic tone, I repeated.

  “A whole person, someone not to be shared with others. Is that so impossible?”

  “No,” he said, examining the potted palm with great care. “It’s simply very dangerous.”

  “And our lives, our life together, is that not dangerous the way it is? … What do you think? It’s deadly dangerous,” I declared, and now, having put it like that, I went pale, because I felt it was true.

  “The nature of life,” he replied, now courteous and cool, like someone back in his element, leaving the world of passion, returning to the milder climate of precise thoughts and concepts, employing the appropriate formulations. “Deadly dangerous is what life is. But people live with danger in various ways. There are those who live as though they were proceeding along an eternally level plain, walking stick in hand. And there are those who are constantly wanting to leap headfirst into the Atlantic. Dangers are for surviving,” he said very seriously. “It is the most difficult thing, sometimes the most heroic thing, anyone can do.”

  There was a small fountain in the conservatory, the water warm to the hand. We listened to its living music as well as the music inside, the music of worldly fashion, a primitive belching.

  “I don’t even know,” I said after a while, “who it is I am supposed to share him with. A person or a memory?”

  “That’s not important,” he said, shrugging. “It’s the memory of someone rather than a living being. There’s nothing the other one wants, it’s just …”

  “Just that she exists,” I said.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “In that case we have to get rid of her.” I stood and started looking for my gloves.

  “Of whom? The person? …” he asked and slowly unwillingly stood up.

  “The person, the memory, the life,” I said. “Can you conduct me to this person?”

  “I won’t,” he said. We moved toward the dancers.

  “Then I’ll find her by myself,” I said. “There are a million people in this city, several million in the country. I have no evidence to go on, only the lilac ribbon. I have never seen her photograph; I don’t know her name. And yet I am as certain as a water diviner of finding water on an endless plain. Or a prospector who can feel the ore beneath his feet … I am absolutely sure I will find her, this someone, this memory or flesh-and-blood being who is an obstacle to my happiness. Do you doubt me?”

  He shrugged. He looked at me carefully, with his sad, searching eyes.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I generally believe in people who let their instincts have free rein. I believe in all their miracles and mischief … I believe you will find someone among all those millions, who will answer your call the way one shortwave radio station responds to another. There’s nothing mysterious in this. Powerful feelings reach out to each other … But what do you think will happen then, when you have succeeded?”

  “Then?” I asked uncertainly. “Everything will be clearer then. I have to look her in the face, take stock of her … And if it is indeed she …”

  “She?” he asked impatiently.

  “Just she,” I retorted, just as impatient. “The other one, the enemy … If it is indeed she who prevents my husband’s happiness, if she is the reason why my husband cannot be entirely mine, because of some desire that ties him to her, some memory, some sentimental misunderstanding, whatever it is … well, then, I’ll leave them to their fates.”

  “Even if it means the end of Peter? …”

  “Too bad. If that’s what finishes him off, let him lump it,” I angrily replied.

  We were already in the doorway of the great hall.

  “He has done everything possible. You have no idea how much effort it has been for him these past years. You could move mountains with the strength he has spent in denying that memory. I think I know everything there is to know about it. I marveled at it sometimes. He tried to do the most difficult thing in the world. Do you know what he was doing? He was consciously trying to alienate himself from his feelings. It was like someone talking and reasoning with a stick of dynamite, persuading it not to go off.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I answered in confusion. “That’s impossible.”

  “Almost impossible,” he solemnly replied. “And yet he tried. Why? … To save his soul. To save his self-respect, without which no man can live. And he did it for you too; and when the child came along, he did it for the child, straining every nerve and sinew … Because he loves you. I hope you understand that?”

  “I know,” I said. “I wouldn’t be fighting for him if he didn’t … But he doesn’t love me completely, unconditionally. There’s someone between us. Either that other person goes or I go. No doubt this person in the lilac ribbon is powerful, and terrifying? …”

  “Should you find her,” he said, blinking and looking into the far distance, “you will be amazed. You will be amazed how much simpler the truth is than you imagine, how much closer to hand, more ordinary, and at the same time more grotesque and dangerous.”

  “And on no condition will you tell me her name?”

  He said nothing. I could tell from his eyes and voice that he was uneasy, unable to decide.

  “Do you like going to your mother-in-law’s house?” he suddenly asked.

  “My mother-in-law?” I asked, astonished. “Of course, delighted to. But what has that to do with anything?”

  “All I am saying is that Peter feels at home at his mother’s house too,” he mumbled. “When people are looking for something, they always look at home first … Life sometimes arranges things as artfully, as arbitrarily, as in detective fiction … You know how it is: the police are feverishly looking for clues here and there, sticking pins into the wall, while the letter they are looking for is lying in front of them, on the victim’s desk. But nobody thinks to look there.”

  “Should I be seeking help in finding the woman with the lilac ribbon from Peter’s mother?” I asked, ever more confused.

  “All I can say,” he answered cautiously, not looking at me, “is that before you set off into the wide world to look for Peter’s secret, you should look round Peter’s other home, his mother’s. I am sure you’ll find something there to help you. The parental home is always, to some extent, the scene of the crime. You’ll find everything you need to know about a man there.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Tomorrow morning I will visit her and have a look around … Only I don’t understand what I am supposed to be looking for.”

  “It’s the way you wanted it,” he said, as if disclaiming all responsibility.

  The music began to howl. We entered the hall among the dancers. Men talked to me; then, after a while, my husband took my arm and led me away. We went straight home. This all happened on the fifteenth of April, on Monday evening, in the fifth year of our marriage.

  I slept deeply that night. I was like a burned-out element. The electricity sometimes runs through things and burns the resistance away. The soul darkens. When I woke and went into the garden—it was early spring and the mornings were warm with a touch of the sirocco, so some days I had breakfast set in the garden—my husband had already gone. I breakfasted alone, sipping bitter tea, not feeling hungry.

  There were newspapers lying on the table. For lack of anything else to do, I read one of the headlines. A small state had just disappeared off the map. I tried to imagine how the people in that foreign country might feel, waking up at dawn to discover that their lives, their customs, everything they believed or had sworn by, had disappeared from one day to the next, had ceased to matter, and that they were now on the threshold of something entirely new—maybe better, maybe worse, but something that, at any rate, was utterly
different from the country they knew, which might just as well have sunk beneath the waves, and that was where they had to live thenceforth, under entirely new conditions, underwater. I thought about it, and also about myself, and what I wanted … What divine commandment had I received, what was the message from heaven? What was the meaning of this continuous excitement in my heart? What was my anxiety, my humiliation, my sorrow compared to the anxiety and sorrow of those millions upon millions of people who were waking this morning to find they had lost what was most precious to them, that had been the center of their lives, the sweet, secret, familiar order of their homeland? … But I kept leafing distractedly through the papers, unable to give world affairs my full attention. I asked myself what right I had in a world like this to worry so intensely about myself, to be so obsessed by what would happen to me and whether I had any right to care so much about my own life … With so many millions of people living in fear and misery, should I really be worrying about whether I really owned every last little bit of my husband’s heart? What was my husband’s secret, or my personal happiness, compared to the world’s secrets, the world’s misery? What was I doing playing detective in a world that is savage enough, frightening and mysterious enough, already? … But these were pseudo-questions, you know, pretenses … One woman’s feelings don’t amount to an entire world. Then I thought back to what the old priest had said, and wondered if he was right. Maybe I didn’t have enough faith, enough humility … Perhaps there was something arrogant about me, something unworthy of a Christian, a woman, indeed of a human being; something arrogant about this crazy project, this amateur-detective attempt to scrape away the surface of a private world and reveal my husband’s secret; something unworthy about trying to find that certain mysterious person with her lilac ribbon. Perhaps … but I was so overwrought at the time I can no longer explain my feelings clearly.

  I sat in the garden, the tea got cold, the sun was shining. The birds were already restless, chattering away. Spring was coming on. I thought how Lázár didn’t like the spring: all that fecundity, all those emissions, he said, affect the gastric juices and upset the balance between feeling and reason … That’s what he said. And then I remembered all we had talked about just a few hours ago at night, with the music in the background, beside the fountain, in that rich, cold, grand house, in the suffocating jungle smells of the conservatory. I remembered, and now it seemed as though it were all just something I’d read.

  Do you know the feeling you get when you are beyond pain and despair, beyond the most tragic events, and suddenly become very sober, indifferent, almost cheerful? For example, when the person you loved best is being buried, and you suddenly remember that you have left the refrigerator door open back home and the dog is probably eating the cold meat you had saved for the wake? … And the very moment when everyone is singing and standing around the coffin, you start arranging things, whispering, as calm as you like, something about the refrigerator? … Because we are quite capable of that: we live between such infinitely divided shores, in a world of such vast distances. I sat in the sunlight and it was as if I were contemplating someone else’s bad luck, thinking quite coldly and rationally about all that had happened. I recalled what Lázár had said, word for word, but his words did not strike me now with the force they had then. The tension of the previous day had dissolved. I recalled sitting in the conservatory with the writer but it was as if it hadn’t been me. I thought of the lilac ribbon the way you might of a piece of society gossip. By the end, the content and nature of my life might have been summed up by others over tea or supper as follows: “Do you know the Xes? … Yes, the industrialist and his wife. They live on the hill at Rózsadomb. Things aren’t going well for them. The wife has discovered that her husband is in love with someone else. Just imagine, she found a piece of lilac ribbon in his wallet, then it all came out … Yes, they’re separating.” That would have been a way of putting it, what had happened to me, to us. How often had I heard this kind of thing about other couples, stray remarks overheard in company, and not even bothered with it … Could it be that one day we too would become subject to society gossip, my husband and I and the woman with the lilac ribbon?

  I closed my eyes, leaned back in the sunshine and, like the wise woman of some primitive village, tried to imagine the face of the lilac-ribboned woman.

  Because that face had a life—in the next street, somewhere in the universe. What did I know about her? What can we know of anyone? Five years I had lived with my husband, believing I knew everything about him, knowing his every habit, every gesture: the way he hurriedly washed his hands before meals, never even glancing at the mirror, combing his hair with one hand; the way he’d suddenly be smiling an absentminded, furious smile, never telling me what he’d been thinking of; and more—all we learn of another’s body and soul through intimate contact, however frightening, indifferent, moving, depressing, wonderful, or dull that might be. I believed it was all there was to know. Then one day I discovered I knew nothing about him … knew less, in fact, than Lázár, that strange, disappointed, sarcastic figure who exercised such power over my husband’s soul. What kind of power? … Human power. It was different from mine: greater than my powers as a woman. I can’t explain it, can only feel it, and have always felt it, from the moment I first saw them together. But that very same man had just told me the day before that he was now obliged to share his power with the lilac-ribboned woman … And now I knew that whatever wonderful or terrible things were happening in the world, it was pointless accusing myself of selfishness, lack of faith, or lack of humility, pointless comparing my problems to those of the world of nations, the problems of those millions suffering their various tragedies, because there was nothing I could do—selfish and petty as I was, obsessed and blind as I was—except get out on the street and search out the woman I had to confront face-to-face, the woman I had to talk to. I had to see her, to hear her voice, look into her eyes, examine her skin, her brow, her hands. Lázár said—and now, closing my eyes in the sunlight, I heard his voice again as clearly as if he were sitting opposite me and we were at the party with the music, back in the dizzying, unreal atmosphere of our conversation—that the truth was dangerous but at the same time far more commonplace, closer to hand, than I could imagine. What might that “commonplace” truth be? What did he mean by that?

  In any case, had he suggested where to look, had he given me a clue as to where I might find her?

  I decided to visit my mother-in-law that very morning and have a serious talk with her.

  I was flushed with heat. Once again I felt as if I had stepped into a hot, dry stream of air. I tried to cool down by deliberately thinking rational thoughts. I was burning up the way I was that moment I first opened—oh so long ago, the same time the previous day—the secret pocket in my husband’s wallet. Lázár had told me not to touch anything and to wait … Could it not all have been some horrific vision? Maybe the incriminating evidence, the lilac ribbon, was of less significance than I imagined? Or maybe it was just Lázár playing games again, the same peculiar, incomprehensible game he had been playing that evening some years ago? Could it be that life was no more than a terrible, extraordinary game to him, something to conduct experiments on as he pleased; that he was a chemist working with dangerous acids and corrosives, who wouldn’t care if one day he blew up the world? … There had been something cold about his eyes, in that ruthless, objective, calm, indifferent, and yet infinitely curious gaze of his, when he said I should go to my mother-in-law’s house and “look for clues” to Peter’s secret there … And yet I knew he was telling the truth, not playing games. I knew that the danger he warned me about was real.

  There are days, you know, when one doesn’t really want to leave one’s room. When the sun, the stars, your environment, everything, speaks to you, when everything is pressingly relevant and wants to say something. No, not just about the lilac ribbon and what lay behind it in my mother-in-law’s house or elsewhere. It’s reality:
the truth they’re after.

  Then cook came out into the garden to give me the housekeeping book and we did our sums and discussed dinner and supper.

  My husband was earning a lot of money at the time, and he gave me as much as I wanted without bothering to keep track of it. I had a checkbook and could spend as and when I liked. Naturally, I was very careful, particularly at that time, to buy only the essentials. But “the essentials” is a rather general concept … I was obliged to notice that for me, “the essentials” meant many things that, just a few years ago, would have been mere vanity—impossible luxuries. Our fish came from the most expensive delicatessen in town, our poultry was ordered, unseen, by phone. It was years since I had visited the market either with or without cook. I couldn’t tell you how much it cost for the first fruit of spring, I simply demanded the staff should buy the best and most expensive … My sense of reality was a little confused back then. And that morning, with the housekeeping book in my hand, the book in which that greedy magpie of a cook had scribbled whatever figures she fancied, for the first time in years it occurred to me that all the unhappiness and despair I felt, everything I took to be of primary importance, might be the product of money and the wicked, terrifying spell it exercised over me … I thought that if I were poor I might worry less about my husband, about myself, and about things like lilac ribbons. Poverty and sickness have this miraculous power of completely changing one’s priorities; one’s sentimental and psychological values go out the window. But I was neither poor nor sick in the strictly medical sense of the term. That was why I told cook: