by Sándor Márai
I couldn’t even say our lives were frigid or entirely without warmth. Our major family occasions were lovingly, punctiliously, commemorated. There were four or five “Christmases” each year. These occasions, which were not officially red-letter days, were more important in the family’s unwritten Gregorian calendar than Easter or Christmas itself, though the family did in fact have a properly kept written calendar where births, wedding anniversaries, and deaths were duly noted, noted so precisely and in such detail that even a registrar would have examined them with admiration. This book, the book of the clan, the golden book—call it what you will—was in the exclusive care of the head of the family. My great-grandfather had bought the book a hundred and twenty years ago, Great-Grandfather in his furs and braids, the founder of the dynasty, the first worthy begetter in the family, who had been a miller out on the Great Hungarian Plain. It was he who first inscribed the family name in the gilt-edged, black-leather-bound volume packed solid with ivory paper. “In nomine Dei.” He was “Johannes II” … miller and founder. It was he who was first given a state rank.
Once, and once only, did I write in that book, and that was when my son was born. I will never forget that day. It was a beautiful sunlit day in late February. I returned from the hospital in a helpless state of joy and pain, a state one experiences but once in life, when one’s son is born. My father was no longer alive. I went into my study, a room I used as infrequently as my father used his, looked out the locked book in the lowest drawer of the diplomat table, opened it, took out my fountain pen, and very carefully inscribed the letters “Matthias I” along with the date and time. It was a great moment, a symbolic moment. How much there is of vanity, of the second-rate, in the range of human feeling! This was the family marching on, I felt. Suddenly everything had a meaning: the factory, the furniture, the pictures on the wall, the money in the bank. My son would take my place in the house, in the factory, in the society of two hundred … But that was not to happen. I have thought long and hard about this. We can’t be sure that having a child, an heir, is the solution to the deeper crisis in any individual’s life. The law says it does, of course, but life is not a product of law.
That’s how we lived. That was my childhood. I know, there have been far worse. But this is all relative. It was Judit Áldozó I really wanted to talk about, but here we are talking about my childhood.
We celebrated all anniversaries, particularly the family ones. There were Father’s birthday, Mother’s name day, and others like these, all of them redder-than-red red-letter days, complete with gifts, music, dinner, toasts, and flickering candles. Our nurses would dress us up in little sailor’s costumes made of velvet, with lace collars—you know, à la milord. All these occasions were conducted in perfect order, according to unwritten military regulations. Father’s birthday was the grandest occasion, of course. We had to learn verses by heart. The entire household gathered in the parlor, everyone dressed to the nines, eyes sparkling, the servants shiftily, raptly, kissing my father’s hand and thanking him for something, I really don’t know what. Most likely for the fact that they were servants and my father was not. Who knows? They kissed his hand nonetheless. Then came a grand dinner or supper. The most precious plates and the best silver cutlery were fished out of the family vaults. Relatives arrived to celebrate the birthday of the illustrious head of the family with due deference and, naturally, seething envy. We were the head of the clan. Poorer relatives received a monthly donation from Father, a proper stipend or pension. None of them thought it enough in private. There was an old lady, a certain Auntie Maria, who so complained about Father’s meanness that she always refused to join us at the highly ornate celebratory dinner. “I’ll be just fine in the kitchen,” she said. “A small cup of coffee in the kitchen will do me.” That’s how poorly she thought of the money my father voluntarily gave her each month, even though there was absolutely no obligation that he should give her anything. We had to drag her into the dining room and give her the best place at the table. It is very hard striking a balance between the desires and demands of poor relatives. The fact is that it’s impossible. It requires great spirit, an exceptionally great spirit, to suffer the success of a close relative. Most people are incapable of it, and it would be a foolish man who would be angry to see the whole family turn against him, the successful one, in a spirit of wounded sensibility, or mockery, or hostility. Because there’s always someone in the family with money or reputation or influence, and the rest, the tribe, gather round this individual to hate and rob him. My father knew this, and he gave them as much as he thought right while indifferently tolerating their hostility. Father was a strong man. The possession of money made him feel neither sentimental nor guilty. He knew exactly how much each person should have and would not give more. Not in terms of feeling, either. His favorite sayings were “They’ll get that” and “They’ll not get that.” It was a carefully considered judgment every time. And once he had pronounced his verdict he stuck by it, as to a papal decree. There was no arguing with him. I am sure he too was lonely, and had to forgo many things he desired or that would have pleased him, in the interests of the family. But he suppressed such desires and stayed strong—firm on his feet. “They’re not getting that,” he said sometimes after a long silence when my mother or some other member of the family put a request to him, the party in question having already mentioned it several times and dropped various hints. No, Father was not tightfisted or hard-hearted. He simply knew people and understood money, and that’s all there was to it.
Cheers.
Excellent wine this, old man. What wit, what strength this wine has! It’s just the right age, six years old. Six is the best age for dogs and for wine. White wine is dead after seventeen years: it loses color and aroma, and is no more animated than the glass it’s stored in. I discovered this very recently, in Badacsony, from a vintner. You should not be impressed when snobs offer you very old wine. All this takes time to learn.
Where was I? Oh yes, the money.
Tell me, why are writers so slipshod when it comes to the question of money? They write about love, glory, fate, and society; it’s just money they never mention, as if it were some kind of second order of existence, a stage property they deposit in their characters’ pockets so that the action may proceed. In real life there is much more tension about money than we are willing to admit to ourselves. I am not talking about the economy now, or poverty: in other words, not about basic concepts, but about actual money, the everyday, infinitely dangerous and peculiar substance that, one way or another, is effectively more explosive than dynamite; I mean those few coins or fistfuls of banknotes that we manage to grasp or fail to grasp, that we give away or deny ourselves, or deny someone else … They don’t write about that. Nevertheless, the everyday anxieties and tensions of life are made up of a thousand such common conspiracies, misrepresentations, betrayals, tiny acts of bravado, surrender, and self-denial: tragedies can develop from the sacrifices involved in working to a tight budget, or else avoided, if life offers another way of resolving the situation. Literature treats economics as though it were a kind of conspiracy. That’s exactly what it is, of course, though in a deeper sense of the word—real money exists within the spaces of abstractions such as “the economy” and “poverty.” What really matters is people’s relationship to money, a character’s timidity or bravado concerning money: not Money with a capital M, but the everyday money we handle morning, afternoon, and evening. My father was rich: in other words, he respected money. He spent a dime with as much care as he would a million. He once spoke of not respecting someone because the individual was forty but had no money.
It shook me when he said this. I thought it heartless and unjust.
“He is poor,” I defended him. “He can’t help it.”
“That’s not true,” he sternly replied. “He can help it. After all, he is not an invalid, he’s not even ill. Whoever gets to forty without having made any money—and he, in his circumstance
s, could undoubtedly have made some—is a coward or lazy or simply a bum. I can’t respect such a man.”
Look here, I am over fifty now. I’m getting older. I sleep badly and lie on the bed half the night in the dark with my eyes wide open, like a beginner, like someone practicing to be dead. I am a realist. Why, after all, should I fool myself? I am no longer in debt and owe nothing to anyone. My only obligation is to be true to myself. I think my father was right. One doesn’t understand such things when one is young. When I was young I considered my father a ruthless, unbending man of finance whose god was money, and who judged people—unfairly—according to their capacity for making it. I despised the concept and felt it to be mean and inhumane. But time passed and I had to learn many things: romance, love, courage and fear, sincerity, and everything else—in other words, money too. And now I understand my father, and I can’t find it in myself to blame him for the severity of his judgment. I understand that he looked down on those who were neither ill nor invalid and had passed the age of forty but were too cowardly or lazy or shiftless to have made money. Naturally, I don’t mean a lot of money, since there is considerable luck involved in that: great guile, sheer greed, or blind chance. But the kind of money that lies within a person’s power to get—that is to say, given one’s opportunities or horizons in life—that is wasted only by those who are cowardly or weak. I don’t like refined, sensitive souls who, faced with this fact, immediately point to the world, to the wicked, heartless, greedy world that wouldn’t allow them to spend the twilight of their lives in a pretty little house with a watering can in their hands, tending their garden on a summer evening, with slippers on their feet and a straw boater on their heads, like any small investor who has happily retired from working life to rest on the rewards of industry and thrift. It’s a wicked world, wicked to everyone equally. Whatever it gives, it sooner or later takes away, or at least tries to take away. Real courage consists of the struggle to defend the interests of oneself and one’s dependents. I dislike the mawkish sensibility that blames everyone else: those ugly, greedy financiers, those ruthless investors, and the “terribly crude” idea of competition that prevented them turning their dreams into small change. Let them be stronger, more ruthless if they will. That was my father’s code. That’s why he had no time for the poor, by which I don’t mean the unfortunate masses, but those individuals who weren’t clever or strong enough to rise from their ranks.
That is a pretty heartless perspective, you say. It’s what I myself said for a long time.
I don’t say that now. I have absolutely no desire to pass judgment on anyone. I just go on living and thinking; it’s all I can do. The truth is, I have not made a single penny in all my life. I barely looked after that which my father and his fathers passed on to me. Mind you, that is no easy matter, either, looking after money, because there are vast powers out there constantly at war with the concept of private property. There were times I fought these powers—enemies both visible and invisible—as vigilantly and fiercely as my ancestors, the founders of our fortune. But the truth is that I was not myself a maker of fortune, because I was no longer really in touch with money. I was of the penultimate generation, whose only desire is to keep what they have been given out of a sense of honor.
My father would sometimes speak of “poor people’s money.” His respect for money was not based on mere accumulation. He told me that a man who is no more than a factory hand all his life but who, by the time he has finished, owns a small plot, a little house, and a few fruit trees, and can live there on what he has earned, is a more heroic figure than any general. He respected the miraculous willpower shown particularly by the poor—the healthy and the exceptional among them—who, through fierce, stubborn effort, succeeded in grabbing a share of the good things of the world. They had a patch of the earth they had the right to call theirs; there was a house they had bought with their own pittance: they had a roof over their heads. He admired these people. Apart from them he admired nothing and no one. “He was good for nothing,” he’d say sometimes and shrug when the fate of the weak and helpless was described to him. The conviction with which he pronounced “good for nothing” was itself a form of contempt.
As a matter of fact I myself am a miser and always have been. I am like anyone who is no longer capable of building and creating and is reduced simply to looking after that which he has inherited from his family. My father was not a miser, he simply had a respect for money: he made it, he accumulated it, and then, when the time was right, he calmly spent it with full confidence in his own judgment. I once saw him write out a check for a million, his hand assured as he put his simple signature to it, as if it were no more than a tip to a waiter. And when the factory burned down and the insurers weren’t paying because it had been caused by some kind of negligence, my father decided to rebuild it. He could have left it and shared the proceeds, then lived in comfort on the interest. He was no longer young by this time. He was over sixty. There would have been plenty of good reasons for not rebuilding. It was perfectly within his means to live an independent life, to spend his remaining days strolling about, reading books, and going to see things. But he didn’t hesitate a moment: he settled with the investors and the foreign engineers, then wrote out the check and handed it over to the engineer who would build up and head the new venture. And he was right. My father died two years after that, but the factory is still there, still productive, doing useful work. That’s as much as we can hope for in life, that we leave something useful behind us, something people value.
Ah yes, but none of this is of much consolation to the builder and maker, you think. I know—you are thinking of the loneliness. The deep, dense loneliness that is the lot of any creative spirit, a product of the restricted atmosphere in which he must move, the oxygen he must breathe. Well, yes. Busy people are lonely people. But we can’t be altogether certain that this loneliness is the cause of suffering. I have always suffered more from close human presence and social life than from genuine loneliness. 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.
That’s what my father was like. That is what the world was like back then. Money, work, order: it was a solid bourgeois world. It was as if the house and the factory were ordained to us forever. The rituals associated with work and life were organized, as it were, from a position outside life. It was quiet at home. I learned that quiet early, the keeping silent. People who talk a great deal have something to hide. People who hold their peace are sure of something. That was another thing I learned from my father. As a child these lessons were a source of suffering for me. I felt something was missing from our lives. Love, you say … The love that is ready to sacrifice itself. Look, it’s far too easy to say that. Later I discovered that love, poorly articulated, clumsily demanded, kills more people than poison, car accidents, and lung cancer. People kill each other with love as with some invisible death ray. They want ever more love and demand constant acts of tenderness; they want it all, all to themselves. They want the whole heart; they want to suck the life energy from their surroundings and are as greedy for it as those enormous plants that drain water, scent, and light from other shrubs. Love is a monstrous selfishness. Is there anyone alive capable of surviving under that reign of terror called love? Look around you, look through the windows that you pass. Look into people’s eyes, listen to their complaints, and you will discover everywhere the same despairing anxiety. They can’t live with the demands that love imposes on them. They put up with it for a while, they bargain with it, but eventually it exhausts them. Then follow stomach upsets, gastric ulcers. Diabetes. Heart mur
murs. And death.
You have seen peace and harmony? Once, in Peru, you say … Well, yes, it may be possible, in Peru. But here, in our more temperate climate, the miraculous flower is not allowed to bloom. It may put out a few petals now and then, but it quickly languishes. Maybe the climate of civilization is too much for it. Lázár once told me that civilizations based on the machine must churn out loneliness like a conveyor belt. He also told me the abbot Paphnucius was less lonely in the desert, on top of his column, with guano in his hair, than a million citizens of the great metropolis crowded into cafés and movie palaces on a Sunday afternoon. He was lonely too, but conscientiously so, like a monk in a monastery. The one time anyone got close to him he quickly ran off. I suspect I know this better than he does, or the person who got close to him. But these are private matters, other people’s affairs, and I have no right to speak of them. Back home, a lofty, solemn, sacramental kind of loneliness pervaded everything. The loneliness of my childhood sometimes comes back to me like the memory of a sad, frightening dream … you know, the kind full of anxiety, the sort one dreams before a test. My childhood was a matter of eternal preparation for some desperately important, dangerous exam. It was an examination in responsible citizenship. We were forever studying. We crammed. We learned by rote. Each day there was a new exam paper to face. We were constantly tense: our acts, our words, even our dreams were fraught with tension. We were walled in by a loneliness so dense even the servants and those who only dropped in at the house for a few minutes—mailmen, delivery boys—they all felt it. Childhood and adolescence were spent waiting in dim, curtained rooms. By the time I got to eighteen the loneliness, anxiety, and waiting had exhausted me. I longed to try something I hadn’t tried before, something not entirely within the rules. But I had to wait a good while before that happened.
