Portraits of a Marriage

by Sándor Márai

  The idea was that joy had somehow drained from life in the process, though now and then it might emit the odd spark. Deep in the human heart there lay the memory of a bright, sunlit, happy world where even duty was pleasure, where struggle was delight and everything was worthwhile. Maybe the Greeks were happy—for all that they slaughtered each other, murdered strangers, and put up with extraordinarily long and terrifyingly bloody wars, they were nevertheless radiant with a cheerful communal feeling. They were happy in a deeper, preliterary way; even the tinkers were happy tinkers … But we, according to the idea, don’t have a proper cultural life: our civilization is uniform, secretive, mechanical. Everyone has a share in it, but nobody is truly happy. Everyone can have a tubful of hot water to bathe in, everyone can gawk at pictures, listen to music, make long-distance telephone calls; our laws defend the rights and interests of the poor as well as of the rich—but just look at our faces. Wherever we live, whether it be in small communities or in wider society, our faces are troubled. How suspicious we look, how tense; how much unresolved insecurity and furious antagonism there is among us. It’s all the product of anxiety and loneliness. You can offer various explanations for loneliness, and every explanation would address some specific associated question, but not one of these answers would give you a convincing reason … I know mothers with six children who suffer loneliness, mothers whose faces wear the same furious antagonistic expressions, and I know middle-class bachelors who take off their gloves with an affected, careworn laboriousness, as though they were somehow forced to do so. As for politicians and prophets, they divide us into far more artificial groups and subgroups, and the more they try to educate children in the ways of this new world, the more unremitting the sense of essential loneliness becomes. You don’t believe me? I know. I could talk about this forever.

  If I had the gift of eloquence, if I were a priest, or an artist, or a writer, so that people listened to me, I would beg them, encourage them, to look for joy. Let’s forget loneliness. Let it go. It may be no more than illusion. It’s not a question of society. It is a matter of something we learn in early childhood. It’s a matter of awakening. People just look glazed: it’s as if they were wandering about in a trance. Glazed and suspicious. It seems I have no gift of joy myself.

  But once, just once, I did come across a face without that glazed look, a face that did not wear that intense, dissatisfied, suspicious, sickly pall of tension.

  Yes, it’s the one you saw just now. But the face you saw was only a mask, a dramatic mask for a character in a play. When I first saw it, the face was open, full of expectation and patience, radiant and open, the kind of face that must have been there at the world’s beginning, before people had eaten of the fruit of knowledge, before they knew pain and fear. The face grew more solemn later, graver and more solemn. The eyes became more watchful; the lips, those open lips she forgot to close, did close, and hardened. Her name was Judit Áldozó. She was a peasant girl. She came to us when she was fifteen as my parents’ servant. We never had a relationship. Do you think that might have been the problem? I don’t think so. People say such things, but life is not very forgiving of incidental comment, of wisdom after the event. In all likelihood it is no accident that we never became lovers before I took her to wife.

  But she was my second wife. You want me to tell you something about the first. Well, my friend, that first one was a splendid creature. Clever, honest, beautiful, cultured. You see, I am talking about her as though I were advertising her in some column. Or as though I were Othello when he set off to murder Desdemona, “so delicate with her needle … she will sing the savageness out of a bear …” Should I add that she loved music and nature? Because I can talk about her and remain perfectly calm. It’s the way retired head gamekeepers out in the country advertise their younger sisters in the local press, small physical imperfections included. But this one, my first wife, had no physical faults. She was young, beautiful, and sensitive … So what was the problem? Why couldn’t I live with her? What was lacking? Sensual pleasure? I’d be lying if I said that. I had as much pleasure with her in bed as with any other woman, including those with a vocation. I don’t believe in the Don Juan ideal; I don’t believe it is right to live with several women at the same time. Our task is to create a perfect musical instrument out of just one, the kind of instrument on which any song can be played … Sometimes I feel sorry for people, the way they snatch and grab at things so stupidly, so hopelessly … one sometimes wants to smack their hands and tell them: “Don’t snatch! Don’t grab! Sit down properly and have some manners. You’ll get what you want if you wait your turn!” Really, they are just like greedy children. They don’t know that contentment in life is sometimes simply a matter of patience, that the harmony they are so feverishly seeking and which they think of, wrongly, as happiness, depends entirely on one or two points of technique … Why don’t schools teach you about relationships between men and women? Why not? I’m not joking. It’s a perfectly serious question. Contentment depends as much on such things as on morals and grammar. It shouldn’t be treated as a frivolous subject … I mean, there should be intelligent people—poets, doctors—to introduce one to the ways of joy, to the various possibilities of coexistence between men and women before it’s too late. I don’t mean “sex education”: I mean joy, patience, modesty, and satisfaction. If I do feel a contempt for some people, it is chiefly on account of their lack of courage in such things—the lack of courage that leads them to conceal the secrets of their lives, not only from the outside world but from themselves.

  Don’t misunderstand me. I myself am no fan of the “confession,” all that sickly, crippled displaying of oneself and the slobbering and frothing at the mouth that goes with it. But I do like truth. It is truth we most like to hear, of course, because superfluous self-revelation is the province of invalids, egotists, and people of an effeminate nature. Nevertheless, it is better to listen to the truth than to speak lies. Unfortunately, wherever I’ve looked in life, it was chiefly lies I heard.

  You ask me what I mean by truth, by healing, by the ability to feel joy? I’ll tell you, old man. I’ll tell you in two words. Humility and self-knowledge. That’s all there is to it.

  Maybe humility is too grand a concept. For humility you need grace too, and that is an exceptional state of being. In everyday life we can achieve what I am talking about by exercising a certain modesty and striving to discover our own true desires and inclinations. And by seeking a compromise between our desires and the world as it exists.

  I see you are smiling. You are thinking that if everything is so simple, if there really is some universal template, why isn’t my life a success? Well, you see, in the end there happened to be these two women, and I tried to live first with one, then the other; I mean really live, as a matter of life and death. I can’t complain about them as people, as marvelous people in fact. All the same, I failed, failed with both, and here I am, alone. Self-knowledge, humility, all those great oaths and promises; it was all in vain. I failed, and now all I can do is sit here and sermonize … That’s what you are thinking. Am I right?

  In that case I had better tell you what my first marriage was like and why it failed. My first wife was perfect. I can’t even say that I didn’t love her. She had but one small fault, and it wasn’t something she could do anything about. It wasn’t any kind of psychological problem—nothing of the sort. Her problem was that she was a middle-class girl, poor thing, a middle-class woman. Don’t misunderstand me: I myself am middle-class. I am conscious of being so, a conscientious member of that class, someone who knows its faults and limitations, content to shoulder the responsibilities of middle-class existence. I don’t like drawing-room revolutionaries. One should keep faith with those to whom one is tied by origin, education, interest, and communal memory. It is the middle class I have to thank for everything: my upbringing, my way of being, my desires, the very finest moments of my life, and that common culture which offers such a dignified entry t
o such moments … Because there are many who say this class has had its day, that it has grown feeble, that it has fulfilled its mission, that it can no longer take the leading role in human affairs the way it did in the past. I can’t speak about that. I don’t understand it. I have a feeling that the middle class is being buried a bit too enthusiastically, a little too impatiently; I think there may be some power left in it, that it might still have a role in the world. Perhaps the middle class will form the bridge on which the forces of revolution meet the forces of order … When I say my first wife was a middle-class woman, that is not a criticism; I am simply establishing a certain condition. I too am middle-class, quite hopelessly so. I keep faith with my class. I will defend it when it is attacked. But I won’t defend it blindly or from a prejudiced position. I want to see quite clearly what it was I received as my portion of social destiny. I have to know, in other words, what our faults were, and to discover whether we have been attacked by a kind of social virus that has drained us of vigor. Not that I ever talked about this with my wife.

  So what was the problem? Wait a minute. Let me get my thoughts in order.

  First and foremost, it was that I was a middle-class man, fully acquainted with the rituals of my class. I was rich. My wife’s family was relatively poor. Not that being middle-class is a matter of money. My experience is that it is precisely the poorest members of the class, those with the least financial security, who are most urgently preoccupied with maintaining middle-class standards and values. No one rich ever needs to cling so attentively, so desperately, to social customs, to points of etiquette, to respectable behavior, to all those things the poorest of our kind, the petite bourgeoisie, needs to underwrite its very existence at any given moments of life. There is the assistant manager in the office who watches everything like a hawk, careful that his accommodation, his wardrobe, and all the minute details of his life should keep firmly in step with his salary … The rich are always open to a kind of minor risk-taking. They are prepared to wear a false beard or to shinny down a drainpipe in order to escape, even if only for a little while, the prison of ennui that goes with property. I am secretly convinced that the rich spend every hour of the day being utterly bored of themselves. But the middling man, the middle-class citizen, who holds an office without a great salary or a reservoir of money, will perform acts of heroism fit for a knight errant simply to maintain his position in the existing hierarchy, which means preserving both his rank and his system of values. It is the petit bourgeois who upholds the sacred rituals. From the moment he is born to the moment he dies, he constantly has to be proving something.

  My wife was well brought up. She was taught languages, she had the ability to make sharp distinctions, between good music and a sentimental tune, between literature and cheap hackwork. She could tell you precisely why a painting by Botticelli was beautiful and what Michelangelo had in mind with his Pietà. But wait—let me be accurate about this. She learned most of it from me—travel, reading, the art of intimate conversation. The education she received at home and at school, the culture she absorbed there, remained in her only as the memory of strict teaching. I tried to dissolve the tensions implicit in learning such things by rote; I wanted to transform school learning into warm, living experience. It wasn’t easy. She had remarkable powers of hearing in both the physical and the psychological human sense. She sensed that I was teaching her and was offended. People are offended by all sorts of things. It doesn’t take much. Say one man knows something because of his good fortune in being born who he is and has had the opportunity of inquiring into the mysteries that constitute real art, while the other has only learned it in class. That’s an offense. It happens. But it takes us a whole lifetime to learn this.

  For the lower managerial class, culture is an inseparable part of the whole package: not experience but accomplishment. It is the top layer of the middle class that provides the artists, the creative types. I was a member of that group. That’s not a boast but an admission. Because, in the end, I did not create anything. Something was missing in me … what was it? Lázár called it the Holy Spirit. But he never explained what he meant by that.

  But back to the problem with my first wife. What was it? Hypersensitivity and pride. It’s what lurks under every human frailty, every complaint, every mishap. We are afraid because pride prevents us accepting the gift of love. It takes great courage to allow oneself to be loved unconditionally. Courage is required, an all-but-heroic courage. Most people can neither give nor accept love, because they are cowardly and vain and afraid of failure. They are ashamed of giving themselves, and are even more ashamed of surrendering to someone else in case that means revealing a secret … the sad, human secret that one needs tenderness and cannot live without it. I believe that to be true. At least I did believe it, for a long time. I don’t argue it so much nowadays, because I’m getting old and have failed.

  In what respect did I fail? I failed in precisely the respect I’m talking about. I lacked the courage to accept the tenderness of the woman who loved me. I resisted. I even looked down on her a little for it, because she was different from me—une petite bourgeoise with different tastes, wanting a different pace of life—and I was afraid I would eventually have to give in to some high-minded and extremely complex form of blackmail meant to drag the gift of love from me. I did not know then what I know now … I didn’t know that there was nothing positively shameful about anything in life. Cowardice is the one shameful thing, cowardice that prevents us giving and accepting the feelings of others. It’s practically a matter of honor. And I believe in honor. One can’t live in disgrace.

  Your health! I like this wine, though there is a faint air of sweetness about the taste. I’ve got rather fond of it recently and tend to open a bottle most nights. Can I offer you a light, old man?

  Briefly, then, the problem with my first wife was that our pace of life was different. There is something in the lower-middle-class soul that is always somewhat stiff, startled, artificial, horrified, overfond of pretense, and easily offended, especially once it is removed from its home and natural habitat. I can’t think of another class whose children creep through life in such a state of startled suspicion. As concerns that woman, the first one, she might have given me everything a woman can give a man if only she had been a little more fortunate in her birth, had she been born one rung up or one rung down: in other words, if she had been born into a state of greater psychological freedom. She was aware of everything, you know, and understood everything … She knew what flowers to display in the old Florentine vase in the spring and in the fall; she dressed correctly, with proper modesty; I never had the least reason to be embarrassed by her in society; she always answered and spoke precisely as she should; our household was exemplary; our servants went about their tasks without fuss, as she taught them to. We lived model lives. But there was another part of life, a more obscure corner of it, the corner that is reality, that is like a cataract or a jungle, that was less than perfect. I’m not thinking of the bedroom exclusively … though, naturally, I include it. The bedroom is a jungle too, after all. It contains the memory of an experience so primitive and absolute that its meaning and content is life itself. If we tend and weed this jungle, we produce a beautiful, cultivated, charming place, full of scented flowers, attractive trees and shrubs, and ringing, rainbow-colored fountains, but leave nothing of the jungle to which we desire to return but no longer can.

  It’s quite a role to play, being a respectable citizen, a solid bourgeois, as they say. No one pays a higher price for culture than we do. It is a grand dramatic role, and as with every heroic part, you have to pay every penny of the cost. You need courage, the courage required for happiness. Art is an experience for an artist. For the solid citizen art is a miracle of training. You probably didn’t talk too much about this in Peru, where life is a matter of whatever bubbles up and displays itself as species. But I lived in Pest, in the exclusive suburb of Rózsadomb. People should take the climate into wh
ich they are born into account.

  Then a lot of things happened I can’t talk about. The woman is still alive and lives alone. I see her sometimes. We don’t meet, because she still loves me. You know, she wasn’t the sort of woman from whom one separates, to whom you send alimony punctually on the first of the month, and a gift of furs or jewelry at Christmas or her birthday, and think you have done your duty by her. This sort of woman still loves you, nor will she ever love anyone else again. She is not angry with you, because her outlook is that once people have loved each other, there isn’t, nor can there ever be, real anger. Fury, the desire for vengeance, yes; but anger, that long-simmering, expectant sort of anger … no, that’s impossible. She may no longer be waiting for me. She is living and slowly dying. She will die in good taste, in properly refined fashion, as befits her class, quietly, and without fuss. She will die because there is no new way of lending meaning and content to her life, because she cannot live without feeling that she is needed by someone, by the one, special, individual being who has absolute need of her. She might not know this. She might think she has come to some sort of compromise. Some time ago, I ran into a woman with whom I had had an overnight fling, a friend from my first wife’s school days, who had recently returned from America. It was the night of the carnival: we met and, almost without being invited, she came back to my apartment. Some time in the morning she told me that Ilonka had spoken about me once. You know how diligent girlfriends can be … Well, she told me everything, as they all do. She told me, there in her friend’s ex-husband’s bed, the morning after just having met me, that she had always been jealous of Ilonka, that she had seen me once in a café in town, where she was sitting with my first wife, and I’d suddenly come in and bought some candied orange peel for my second wife, and that I took my money from a brown crocodile-skin wallet. That wallet was a gift from my first wife on my birthday. No, you can wipe that ironic, detective-like smile off your face, I really don’t use it anymore. So that’s how it was. And these two women, my first wife and her friend, had thoroughly discussed everything. What my wife said to her friend was that she loved me very much, had almost died when we parted, but then grew reconciled to it, because she had discovered I wasn’t her one, true, intended love; or, more precisely, that given all the other possibilities, I was one of the many who were not her true, intended loves; or, still more precisely, if greater precision is possible, that there was no such thing as the one, true, intended, real love. That’s what her friend told me in the morning, in my bed. I rather looked down on her because she knew all this and still leapt into my bed. When it comes to love I have my doubts about female solidarity, but just then I felt a little contemptuous of this woman, and subtly, politely, I threw her out. I thought I owed that much to my first wife. But I kept thinking about it. As time went by I started to feel that Ilonka was lying. It’s not true that one’s real love, the intended one, does not exist. That is, after all, what I was for her, that unique being. For me, on the other hand, there wasn’t anyone of such overwhelming importance, not her, not my second wife, nor the rest. But I didn’t know that at the time. We are such slow learners.