Portraits of a Marriage

by Sándor Márai

  I was almost fifty before I understood The Kreutzer Sonata. It seems to be about jealousy, but that is not the true subject. Tolstoy’s masterpiece talks about jealousy presumably because Tolstoy himself was painfully sensitive and had a jealous nature. But jealousy is nothing more than vanity. Jealousy is pitiful and contemptible. Oh, yes, I know the feeling quite well … all too well. I almost died of it. But I am no longer jealous. Do you understand me? Do you believe me? Look at me. No, old man, I am no longer jealous, because—at considerable cost—I overcame that vanity. Tolstoy still believed in some kind of balm for it, so he assigned to women a role that is half animal; they should give birth and dress in sackcloth. But that is the sickness, not the cure. The alternative, of course, is no better. It proposes women as bits of décor, masterpieces of emotion. How can I respect, how can I give my heart and mind to, someone who, from the moment of rising to the hour of lying down, does nothing but dress and preen herself as if to say, “Here I am …” Someone who apparently wishes to make herself attractive to me by means of feather, fur, and scent. But that is too simple. It’s more complicated than that. She wants to be attractive to everyone, you see; she wants to lodge the spore of desire in the whole world’s nervous system. Movies, theaters, the street, the café, the restaurant, the baths, the hills: everywhere it’s the same unhealthy excitement. Do you think nature really needs all this? No, dear boy! Not at all. Only one social arrangement, one mode of production, requires it: it’s the one in which women regard themselves as items for sale.

  Of course you’re right, I don’t myself have a better answer, a better system of production and social exchange … all the alternatives have failed. I have to admit that in our system, a woman constantly feels obliged to sell herself, sometimes consciously, more often subconsciously. I don’t say every woman is conscious of being a commercial object … but I daren’t believe that exceptions don’t prove the rule. I don’t blame women: it’s not their fault. This presentation of the self as something “on offer” can feel like death, especially the foolishness, the haughtiness, that ironically flirtatious performance of giving herself airs when a woman feels under pressure because she is surrounded by others more beautiful, less expensive, and more exciting. What is a woman to do with her life, both as woman and as a human being, when, as today, women outnumber men in every part of Europe, when competition has assumed a terrifying intensity? They offer themselves, some virtuously, with downcast eyes, like tremulous, highly delicate bouquets who continue trembling in private in case time passes and no one carries them away; others more consciously, setting out each day like Roman legionaries fully aware of their imperial mission to vanquish the barbarian … No, my friend, we have no right to condemn women. The only right we may have is to pity them, and perhaps not even them, but ourselves, we men, who are incapable of solving this long, painful crisis in the great free market of civilization. It is constant anxiety. Wherever you go, wherever you look. And it is money that is behind all the human misery—not all the time, maybe, but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. That is the subject the saintly, wise author of The Kreutzer Sonata never mentions, not once, in his furious indictment …

  The story is about jealousy. Tolstoy cursed women, fashion, music—all the bewitchments of social life. The one thing he fails to mention is that inner peace is not to be achieved by changes in social order, or by changing the means of production, but by ourselves alone. How? By overcoming vanity and desire. Is that possible? … It’s all but impossible. Maybe later, at some stage in the future, it may happen. Time does not diminish desire; but fury, jealousy, greed, the hopeless excitement and disgust that are key elements in desire and its satisfaction, might gradually fall away or wear away. One simply grows tired, you see. There are times even now when I am glad to feel old age knocking at the door. What I sometimes desire now are rainy days when I can sit by the fire with a glass of red wine and an old book that speaks of past desires and disappointments.

  But back then I was still young. I spent four years traveling. I woke in women’s arms, with my own hair tangled and matted, in the rooms of other cities. I learned my craft to the best of my ability. I was lost in the beauty of the world. I didn’t think about Judit Áldozó. At least not often, not consciously, only the way one thinks, when abroad, of streets back home, of rooms, of people one has left behind; people who emerge from the golden glow of memory in a state so refined they’re practically dead. There was, I reflected, one hour of madness when I, a lonely, middle-class young man, met a wild, beautiful young woman and we fell to talking in the midst of that loneliness … then I forgot it all. I traveled. The years of wandering passed, then I went home. Nothing happened.

  It was just that, in the meantime, Judit Áldozó was back there, waiting for me.

  She did not say as much, of course, when I got home and we met once more. She took my coat, my hat, and my gloves and gave me a polite, reserved smile such as is due to the young master of the house when he returns after an absence: it was the official smile a servant gives. I addressed her correctly, smiling and unflustered. I stopped just short of patting her cheek in good-humored paternal fashion … The family was waiting for me. Judit went off with the servant to prepare the dinner that was to welcome the lost prodigal. Everyone was effusive with delight, as indeed was I, glad to be finally at home.

  My father had retired that year, and I took over the factory. I moved away from home, rented a villa on a hillside near the city. I saw less of my family now—weeks went by without meeting Judit. After another two years my father died. My mother left the big house and let the old staff go. Judit was the only one she kept with her, she being housekeeper in all but name by then. I visited Mother once a week, for dinner on Sunday, and saw Judit on those occasions, though we never talked to each other. Our relationship was warm and courteous. I occasionally addressed her in a more familiar way as “Juditka,” “Judi,” in a spirit of kindly, slightly patronizing benevolence. It was the way one might talk to a still-young but rapidly aging spinster. Yes, there was a moment, back in the long-distant past, one mad occasion, on which we had talked of all kinds of things, the kind of things a person can, later, only smile about. It was youth and foolishness. That’s what I thought each time I recalled it: it was the way I chose to view it. It was very comfortable. False but comfortable. Everything was in its proper place: everything was as it should be. And so I got married.

  It was a polite and pleasant existence with my wife, though later, after my son died, I felt cheated. Loneliness was eating me away, infecting everything around me. I was becoming seriously ill with it. My mother suspected as much but didn’t say anything. Years passed. Lázár became ever less of a presence. We met occasionally, but we no longer played our old games. We must have grown up, I suppose. To grow up is to become lonely. Lonely people either fail and become resentful, or come to some good-natured accommodation with the world. Since I was lonely within a marriage, within a family, it wasn’t easy coming to a good-natured accommodation. I gave my time to work, to society, and to travel. My wife did everything she could for the sake of a happy and contented life together. She labored feverishly at it, the way a man labors at breaking stones: there was even an air of desperation about her efforts. I was unable to help her. Once, a long time ago, I tried the experiment of taking her away to Merano. It was on the way there I discovered it was hopeless, that there would not be an accommodation. My life—what I had made of it—was certainly tolerable but almost entirely without meaning. A great artist might be able to cope with such loneliness. He’d pay a terrible price for it, but his work might offer him some compensation. No one else could do his work for him, after all. His work would offer something simple and lasting: people would regard it as something miraculous. That’s what they say. It was what I imagined. I spoke to Lázár about it once and he was of a different opinion. He said that the sense of loneliness is bound to lead to premature defeat. There was no escape. Those were the rules. Do you imagine th
at is so? I myself don’t know. All I know is that I wasn’t an artist, so I felt all the more alone, both in my life and in my work. My work was of no vital importance to humanity. I was a manufacturer of utilitarian goods, my job being to provide certain necessities of a civilized life on a production line. Production was a perfectly honorable enterprise, but it was machines, not I myself, that produced the goods: it was what my workforce was employed to do; what they were tamed, taught, and disciplined to achieve; it was their purpose. What was it I did in this factory my father had built up and which his engineers had constructed? … I’d go in at nine like most senior management, chiefly because I had to set an example. I read through the mail. My secretary informed me who had tried to contact me by phone and who else wished to speak to me. After that, the engineers and salesmen arrived, told me how things stood, and asked me for my opinion concerning the possibility of manufacturing some new line. The brilliant, hand-picked engineers and clerks—mostly handpicked by my father—were always ready with new plans. I heard them through, raised some minor problems, suggested modifications. Most of the time I simply agreed and approved. The factory went on producing what it produced morning, noon, and into the evening; the salesmen made sales and demanded their commission; I spent the entire day in my office. All this amounted to a moderately useful, necessary, honest activity. We did not cheat ourselves, our customers, the state, or the world at large. The only person being cheated was I myself.

  That was because I believed that work was an inevitable, unconditional part of my life. “It is my working life,” as people say. I observed the faces of those near to me. I listened to what they said, and I tried to answer the central question as to whether work was fulfilling for them, or whether they secretly felt exploited; that the best part of them, their very essence, was being drained out of them. From time to time there were those less satisfied with their working conditions, people who tried to do everything better or simply differently, not that doing things “differently” always meant a better or more appropriate way. But at least they wanted to do something different. They wanted to change the world in some way. They wanted to find new meaning in their work. And that is the point, I think. It’s not enough for people to earn a living, to support their family, and to do an honest job … no, people want more than that. They want to realize their ideas, bring their plans to fruition. It’s not just bread and jobs; it is a vocation they want. Without that, life has no meaning. They want to feel needed, not just because they supply the necessary manpower in a factory or fulfill an office to other people’s general satisfaction … they want to achieve something, something others could not achieve. Of course it is only the talented who really want this. Most people are lazy. Maybe, in even their souls there flickers the vague thought that life is not entirely about wages, that God had some other purpose for them … but that was all so long ago! And they—this remainder who can remember no sense of purpose—are in the majority. And they hate the talented. They regard those who want to live and work differently from them, those who don’t rush from the robotic life of the workplace to the robotic life of the home as soon as the bell rings, as ambitious, as creeps. They find all kinds of refined, convoluted ways of crushing talented people’s enthusiasm for solitary work. They mock, they tease, they raise obstacles and spread rumors about them.

  I witnessed all this in my office whenever my workers, engineers, and business contacts came to see me.

  And I? What did I do? I was the boss. I sat there like a sentry. I took great trouble to be dignified, humane, and just. At the same time, of course, I also made sure that the factory and my staff provided me with what befitted, and was required by, my position. I was very punctilious in working the proper hours at the factory: to put it more precisely, I worked as hard as those I employed. I strove to serve capital and profit in the appropriate manner. But I felt absolutely hollow inside. What was my sphere of action in the factory? I was free to accept or reject ideas, I was free to change working practice, I was free to seek new markets for our products. Did I take pleasure in the handsome profits? “Pleasure” is the wrong word. I took satisfaction at having fulfilled my public obligations, and the money enabled me to live a blameless, fashionable, generous, and disinterested kind of life. At the factory, and in business generally, people regarded me as the very model of a respectable businessman. I could afford to be liberal, to offer a living wage, and more than a living wage, to a good many … It’s nice being able to give. It was just I myself who took no real joy in it. I lived in comfort, but my days were spent doing honest work. My hands were not idle; at least the world did not regard me as either indolent or a waste of space. I was the good boss: that’s what they said in the factory.

  But all this meant nothing; it was just a tiresome, careful, conscientious way of filling time. Life remains hollow if you don’t fill it up with something exciting, some project with a hint of danger. That project can only be work, of course. It is the other kind of work, the invisible work of the soul, the intelligence and talent, whose productions enrich and humanize the world and lend it the air of truth. I read a great deal. But you know how it is with reading too … you only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work. One day I noticed that the books I read had ceased to have anything properly to do with me. I read as I might in some foreign city, to fill the time, the way you go to visit a museum, gazing at the exhibits with a kind of courteous disinterest. I read as if I were fulfilling an obligation: a new book appeared that everyone was talking about, so I read it. Or there was some old classic I had missed reading and so felt my education was incomplete, that something was missing. That was the way I read … There had been a time when reading was an experience. I grabbed new books by well-known authors with my heart in my mouth; a new book was like meeting someone new, an encounter fraught with risk, that might result in happiness and general benefit, but was also potentially threatening: it might produce unwelcome consequences. By now I was reading the way I worked in the factory, the way I went to social occasions two or three times a week, the way I went to the theater, the way I lived at home with my wife, courteously, considerately, with the ever more pressing, ever more upsetting, ever louder, ever more urgently demanding questions pounding at my heart that led me to wonder if I was seriously ill, in great danger, sick unto death, or the subject of some developing plot or cabal, certain of nothing, fearing that one day I might wake to find everything I had worked for, this whole painstaking, careful, orderly enterprise—the respectability, the good manners, and the culminating masterpiece, our polite coexistence—collapsing around me … That was the fraught emotional state I was constantly living in at the time. And one day I discovered in my wallet, the brown crocodile-skin wallet I had been given by my wife, a faded lilac ribbon. That was when I realized that Judit Áldozó had been waiting for me all these years. She had been waiting for me to stop being a coward. But many years had passed since our conversation that Christmas.

  As for the lilac ribbon—I don’t have it anymore, it vanished along with the wallet and everything else in life, like the people who had once worn such significant objects of superstition—I found it in the deepest pocket of the wallet, where I kept nothing except a lock of my little dead son’s hair. It took me some time to understand what the lilac ribbon was doing there, how I had come into possession of it, and when Judit might have smuggled it into the wallet. My wife had gone away to a spa, leaving me alone in the house, and my mother had sent Judit down to oversee the spring cleaning. I must have been in the bathroom when she slipped into my bedroom and hid the ribbon in my wallet, the wallet having been left lying on the table. At least, that is what she told me later.

  What did she mean by it? Nothing. All
women are superstitious when it comes to love. What she wanted was for me to have something of hers permanently about my person, something she herself had worn on her body. That was her way of binding me, communicating with me. Bearing in mind her position and our relationship, this was an act of genuine subversion. She undertook it because she was prepared to wait.

  When I understood this—the lilac ribbon did communicate something of it in its own eloquent way—I felt strangely irritated. I was annoyed by this minor act of sabotage. You know what it’s like when a man discovers that all he has planned has come to nothing, that everything has been knocked sideways. Now I discovered that this woman, who lived just a few blocks away, had been waiting ten years for me. But beyond the irritation I also felt a certain calm. I wouldn’t want to make too much of the feeling. I hadn’t in fact made plans, nor did I prepare new ones. I didn’t say to myself: “You see, that was what you’ve been covering up all these years, the thing you weren’t prepared to admit, that there is somebody or something more important than your normal way of life, your role in society, your work, and your family: some twisted passion you have been denying … but the passion remains and is waiting for you and won’t let you go. And that’s all right. Now the tension is over. Your life and work were not entirely meaningless after all. Life still wants something of you.”