Portraits of a Marriage

by Sándor Márai

  That was when Judit Áldozó entered my fortress of loneliness.

  Here, have a light. How do you get on with the tobacco habit? It’s a struggle, isn’t it? Myself, I couldn’t go on—not with the smoking but with the struggle. There’ll be a day when that too has to be faced. One adds up the facts and decides whether to live five or ten years longer by not smoking, or to surrender to this petty, shameful passion that no doubt kills but, until it does so, offers you such a peculiar calming yet exciting experience. After fifty years it becomes one of life’s major questions. My answer to that question was angina and the decision to carry on exactly as before until I die. I’ll not stop poisoning myself with this bitter weed, because it’s not worth it. You say it’s not so difficult to give up? Of course it’s not that difficult. I’ve done it before, more than once, while it was worth it. The trouble was, I’d spend the whole day “not smoking.” That’s something else I’ll have to face one day. People should resign themselves to certain weaknesses, to their need for a soporific of some sort, and be prepared to pay the price. It’s so much simpler that way. Yes, but then they say: “You should have more courage.” My answer to them is: “I may not be the bravest of men, but I am courageous enough to live with my desires.”

  That’s what I think, anyway.

  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.

  So I did it.

  Let me tell you what it was like the morning when Judit Áldozó first appeared at the door of our dingy yet magnificent abode. She was like the poor girl in the fairy tales—she arrived carrying nothing more than a small bundle of possessions. Folk tales are generally pretty reliable. I had just returned from the tennis courts, had stepped into the hall, thrown the racket onto a chair, and stood there flushed, about to pull off my sleeveless knit sweater, the kind people wear for exercise. That was the moment I noticed that there was a strange woman standing in the gloom beside the Gothic chest. I asked her what she wanted.

  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.

  But not straightaway, because she hadn’t answered my question and I felt a little insulted, inclined to be high-handed. We stood dumbly in the hall for a few moments, facing and staring at each other.

  We gazed at each other the way people do when coming across something rare and strange. What I was gazing at that moment was nothing like a new servant. I was gazing at a woman who, in some way, for completely mysterious reasons, because of certain impossible factors, would play a major role in my life. Do people realize when this happens? I’m sure they do. Not intellectually but with their whole being. And at the same time they go on thinking other things in an absentminded sort of way. Consider for a moment how unlikely a situation this was. Imagine that, in those moments, someone had come up to me and told me that this was the woman I would one day marry, but that much would have to happen before that came about; that I would first marry someone else, another woman, who would bear me a child, and that the woman standing opposite me then in the dingy hall would go abroad, vanish for years, then return, at which point I would divorce my wife and marry her instead; that I, the persnickety bourgeois boy, the rich, polished gentleman, would marry this insignificant servant girl clutching her bundle while anxiously staring at me just the way I was staring at her … scrutinizing her as if I were seeing something I had never seen before, something I really had to take into account … Well, all this seemed most unlikely back then. If anyone had predicted it, I would have laughed at him and dismissed the very idea. But now, afterwards, from the distance of a few years, I’d like to answer my own question as to whether I knew how it would work out. And also the issue of whether we know when we meet someone that the meeting is of vital importance, a turning point in our lives … Is there a moment when someone steps into the room and we know, yes, this is the one? The one intended, just for us, exactly as in novels?

  I don’t know the answer. I can only close my eyes and recall the moment. And as I do so, I see that, yes, something happened back then. An electric charge? A form of radiation? A secret intuition? These are just words. But of course people don’t communicate their thoughts and feelings through words only. There are other forms of communication between people, other ways of conveying a message. The term people tend to use now is “shortwave.” Apparently human intuition is no more than a form of shortwave transmission. I don’t know … I have no desire to con you, nor indeed myself. For that reason the best I can say is that the moment I first saw Judit Áldozó I was transfixed, and however impossible the situation, I stood there facing this unknown servant figure quite unable to move. So we carried on gazing at each other for quite some time.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  She told me. It sounded faintly familiar. “Áldozó” is much like the word áldozat, meaning sacrifice, so there was something ceremonial in it. Even her given name, Judit, had a biblical ring. It was as if she had stepped out of history, out of some biblical condition of solid simple materiality: like eternal life, real life. It was as if she had arrived not from a village but from some deeper level of existence. I was not much concerned with the propriety of my actions. I stepped over to the door and turned on the light so I could see her more clearly. Even my sudden movement failed to disturb her. Readily and obediently, not like a servant now, but in the manner of a woman acceding to the desires of the one man entitled to demand anything of her, she turned to one side toward the light so I might examine her more closely. She stood there in the lamplight. It was as if she were saying: “There you are, take a good look. This is me. I know I am beautiful. Look as hard as you want, take your time. You will remember this face even on your deathbed.” So she stood there calm, immobile, her bundle in her hand, like an artist’s model, silent and willing.

  And I carried on gazing at her.

  I don’t know whether you got a decent look at her just now. I alerted you too late. You only saw her body. She is as tall as I am. Her height is in perfect proportion to the rest of her. She is neither fat nor thin, but exactly as she was at the age of fifteen. She has never put on weight, nor ever lost any. You know, there are powerful inner laws that govern the way these things balance out. It was as though her metabolism burned at a constant, steady flame. I looked into her face and found myself blinking at the beauty of it, like someone who had lived for
many years in a fog and suddenly found himself in bright sunlight. You couldn’t see her face just now. But she has been wearing a mask for a long time anyway, a cosmopolitan mask made up of mascara, paints, and powders, false eyes emphasized with eye shadow and a false mouth drawn on with lipstick. But then, in that first startled moment, her face was still new and unscarred, untouched, direct from the Maker’s hand. The touch of her Creator was still fresh on her cheeks. Her face was heart shaped, beautifully proportioned. Each part of it echoed the other to perfection. Her eyes were black, a special kind of black, you know, as if there were a touch of dark blue in it. Her hair was blue-black, too. And one could immediately tell her body was as well proportioned and quite certain of itself. That was why she could stand in front of me with such poise. She had emerged out of anonymity, out of the depths, out of the vast crowd, arriving with something extraordinary: proportion, assurance, and beauty. Of course I was only faintly aware of all this. She was no longer a child, but was not quite a woman yet, either. Her body had developed but her soul was just waking. I have never met a woman since so absolutely certain of her own body, of the power of her body, as Judit Áldozó was then.

  She was wearing cheap city clothes, black shoes with low heels. Everything about her was so consciously and modestly assembled. She was like a peasant girl who had dressed for town and didn’t want to be put to shame by city girls. I looked at her hands. I was hoping to find something unattractive in them. I hoped to find stubby fingers and palms rough and red from agricultural work. But her hands were white, her fingers long and graceful. Those hands had not been broken by labor. Later I discovered she had been spoiled at home, that her mother never put her to hard manual work.

  There she stood, content to have me gaze at her under the bright lights. She looked directly into my eyes with a simple curiosity. There was nothing flirtatious about her, neither her eyes nor her posture. There was no invitation. She was not a little tart who finds herself in the big city and makes eyes at young gentlemen hoping to ingratiate herself to them. No, she was a woman willing to look a man in the eye because she thinks she might have something in common with him. But she didn’t overdo it, not then nor later. The relationship between us was never a fixed one of necessity for her. When I could no longer eat, sleep, and work without her, when she had got under my skin and penetrated my reflexes like a fatal poison, she remained calm and perfectly self-possessed, irrespective of whether she came or went. You think she didn’t love me? … I too thought so for a while. But I don’t want to judge her too harshly. She loved me, but in a different way, in a more cautious, more practical, more grounded sort of way. That, after all, was what the situation allowed. That’s what made her a working woman, and me a middle-class boy. That’s what I wanted to tell you.

  And then what happened? Nothing, old man. Phenomena like my time under the spell of Judit Áldozó are not to be explained in terms of “events,” the way things happen in novels or plays. The key events of our lives take place in time, in other words, over a period, very slowly. They hardly appear to be events at all. People go on living … that is the nature of events, of any act of importance to us. I can’t tell you that Judit Áldozó appeared in our house one day and that the next day, or six months later, this or that other thing happened. I can’t even claim that as soon as I saw her that first time I was immediately consumed by a passion that deprived me of both sleep and appetite, that left me dreaming of a stranger, a peasant girl, who now lived in close proximity to me, who entered my room on a daily basis, whose conduct was ever the same, who answered any question I put to her, who lived and matured the way a tree does, who conveyed any information of importance in her own characteristically simple and surprising manner, who trod the same earth and breathed the same air as I did … Yes, it was all as I describe it, but none of these conditions constitutes an event. In fact, for a long time, there were simply no events.

  Nevertheless I recall that initial period in keen detail. The girl did not hold a particularly important position in our household and I rarely saw her. My mother trained her to be a housemaid, but she was not to serve us at the table, because she knew nothing of our family rituals. She tended to trail after the servant as he was cleaning, like a clown in a circus imitating the main act. I would occasionally bump into her on the stairs or in the drawing room; sometimes she even came to my room and greeted me, stopping on the threshold to deliver some message. I should have said that I was thirty-two years old when Judit Áldozó joined us. Thirty-two years old, and an independent adult in many respects. I was a partner in the factory, and my father, albeit carefully, was training me to stand on my own feet. I had a substantial income, but I did not move out of the family home. I lived on a separate floor, in two rooms. I had my own personal door. In the evenings, if I had no other business, I would dine with my parents. I tell you all this to show I had few opportunities to meet the girl. And yet, from the moment she first entered the house and I spotted her in the hall, a certain tension existed between us, a quite unambiguous tension.

  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.

  I can tell from your expression that you are asking the age-old, worldly-wise male question “What was the problem?” Isn’t it the simplest thing for a man to follow his instincts and inclinations? A thirty-two-year-old man is, after all, aware of the facts of life. He knows that there is no woman he may not bed providing she is free, that there is no other man in her heart and thoughts, that there is no physical issue or matter of culture between them, and that they have the opportunity of meeting and getting to know each other. It’s true. I myself knew it was true, and frequently put that knowledge to use. Like any man of my age whose appearance is not altogether repulsive and is, on top of that, possessed of means, I met many women who made themselves available to me, nor did I refuse their offers. A man of promise is as much the center of attention as an attractive woman. It’s not a matter of personality: women too get lonely, have desires, and want affection and ent
ertainment: every European capital has a surplus of women, and, well, I was neither ugly nor stupid. I lived a life of refined gentility, and it was generally known that I was rich. What with all this, I did exactly as any other man in my position would. I am sure that, following the preoccupations and confusions of the first few weeks, one kind word would have tamed her and inclined her affections to me. But I never did say that kind word. From my point of view, this familiarity, if the presence of a young servant in one’s parental home might be regarded as familiarity, roused my suspicions, and presented a danger. It became mysterious and exciting only once I realized that it was not as a lover I desired her, not as someone to bed, like all the others before, that I was not interested in purchasing and consuming fifty kilos of human flesh. No. So what did I want? It took me some time to find out. I didn’t bother her, because I was hoping for something from her. Expecting something. Not a brief thrill. But what, then? The answer to a question I had been asking all my life, that’s what.