Portraits of a Marriage

by Sándor Márai

  Solitude is hard at first: it’s like being sentenced. There are times when you find it unbearable. And perhaps that severe sentence might seem lighter if you could, after all, share it with someone, it doesn’t matter who: with rough companions, anonymous women. There are such times, times of weakness. But they pass, because slowly the loneliness enfolds you, takes personal possession of you, like a mysterious force of life—like time, time in which everything happens. Suddenly you understand that everything that has happened has happened according to its own timetable. First came curiosity, then desire, then work, and finally, here comes loneliness. There’s nothing you want now: you have no hope of consolation in a new woman, no hope of a friend whose wise counsel might heal your soul. You find all human talk vanity, even the wisest. There is so much selfishness in every human feeling. It’s all empty promises, refined forms of blackmail: all helpless, hopeless attachment! Once you know this, you no longer hope for anything from people; you don’t expect women to be of help, you recognize the price and terrifying consequences of money, power, and success, and you no longer want anything of life but to huddle up in some mean corner, without companionship, assistance, and comfort, and listen to the silence that slowly begins to lap at your soul as it does at the shores of time … Then, and only then, you have the right to leave: because leaving is something you do have a perfect right to.

  Every man has the right to prepare himself for his own leave-taking, for a solitary death in his own sepulchral silence; to void his soul for the last time, to turn his soul into as empty and hallowed a place as it was at the beginning of time, in childhood. That was the way Lázár one day took the road to Rome. I myself have only now arrived at the point of loneliness. I too had a long road to travel. I must admit I had hoped for another way. But there isn’t another way. In the end, or shortly before the end, one must be alone.

  But first I married Judit Áldozó. That’s just how things worked out.

  One day, at four in the afternoon, the telephone rang in my room. My wife picked it up. By that time she knew everything: knew that I was sick with the delirium of waiting. She treated me like a helpless invalid, ready to sacrifice everything for my sake. But when it came to herself, to her own condition, she was quite incapable of genuine sacrifice: she fought it to the bitter end. She wanted to keep me. But by that time the other woman had proved stronger, and I went away with her.

  She picked up the receiver and asked something. I was sitting with my books with my back to the phone, reading. I could tell from the shakiness of her voice that something important was happening, that this was the moment at which the waiting and the tension had come to an end, the moment we had all been preparing for all those years. She came over to me with the phone in her hand, silently put it down on the table, and left the room.

  “Hello,” said a familiar voice, Judit’s voice. She said it in English, as if she had forgotten Hungarian.

  Then silence. I asked her where she was. She gave me the address of a hotel near the railway station. I put the phone down, found my hat and gloves, and went down the stairs, my head full of all kinds of thoughts, except the thought that this would be the last time I would go down these particular stairs. I still had a car then, the car always parked in front of the house. I drove over to the slightly shady, third-class hotel. Judit was waiting in the lounge among her luggage. She was wearing a checkered skirt, a pale-blue woolen jumper, expensive gloves, and a traveling hat. She sat so comfortably in the lounge of that third-class establishment it seemed the whole situation—her departure and homecoming—was part of some long-discussed mutual arrangement. She extended her hand to me, quite the lady now.

  “Should I stay here?” she asked, looking round, indicating the hotel, uncertainly, as if she had decided to let me make all the decisions.

  I slipped the porter some money and told him to put her luggage in my car. She followed me without a word, sat beside me in the passenger seat. Her luggage was nice—leather cases, English manufacture, complete with the labels of not entirely familiar foreign hotels. I remember how, in those first few moments, this handsome luggage filled me with a sort of monstrous satisfaction. I was happy because I had no need to feel embarrassed by Judit’s luggage. I headed for the grand hotel on the island and booked a room for her. I myself took a room on the Danube embankment and phoned home from there, asking to have my clothes and suitcases sent on. I never entered our house again. For six months we managed like this, my wife at home, Judit at the island hotel, I at the hotel on the embankment. Then the divorce came through, and I married Judit the next day.

  I had no contact with the world at all during those six months. I broke all those contacts I had been so careful to maintain not so long ago. It was like breaking with a family. I went about my business at the factory, but as for the rest, the social circle, and that turbulent form of the world we call society, I saw neither hide nor hair of them. I continued to receive invitations for a while, invitations issued in a spirit of false generosity, of barely hidden schadenfreude and curiosity. Everyone wanted to see the rebel, the man who had kicked over the traces. They wanted to drag me through salons where the conversation was always of something else but where they kept a wary ironic eye on you as though you were some sort of madman who might any moment say or do something shocking: such guests are a little frightening but can entertain the company. People who called themselves my friends sought me out with an air of mysterious solemnity: they seemed to have made a grave promise to “save” me. They wrote me letters, visited me in my office, and talked to me soul-to-soul. Eventually they all took offense and left me to my fate. In no time at all people talked of me as if I had committed fraud or some other crime.

  Nevertheless, these six months were a calm oasis in my life. The truth is always simple and calming. Judit lived on the island, and we dined together every evening. She was patient and prepared to wait. She was in no hurry. Sometimes people understand something and know it’s not worth hassling or panicking, because everything will happen in due course anyway. We observed each other like opponents before a duel. At that time we still thought this duel would be the chief concern of our lives … a life-or-death affair, and that at the end of it, however scarred and patched by then, we would declare an armistice, a gentlemen’s agreement. I had surrendered my social rank, my class loyalty, my family, and indeed the woman who loved me, for her. She had not given up anything for me, but she was perfectly prepared to sacrifice everything. She had made the move. She had acted. One day it happens: expectation turns to action.

  It took me a long time to understand what the true state of affairs between us was. It took her a long time too. There was nobody near us, around us, who might have warned us. Lázár was living abroad by that time like a person who had been offended in some way and had chosen to die. And then, one day, he actually did die, in Rome, at the age of fifty-two. There wasn’t anyone left to act as a witness to my life, to watch over me or constrain me.

  From the moment we met in that third-class hotel near the station, we lived like émigrés, émigrés who had arrived in an utterly alien country in which they tried to emulate its manners, to assimilate, to blend in with the great mass of people, doing everything possible not to stand out, and if possible not to give in to sentimentality, not to think of the homes they had left and those they had loved. Neither of us spoke about it, but we both knew that whatever lives we had lived before were now finished, quite over. We waited and watched.

  Should I tell you the story just as it happened? I’m not boring you? I’ll stick to the essentials as far as I know them. After the initial shock when I was left alone in my embankment hotel and my baggage had been brought over, I fell asleep. I slept a long time, exhausted. It was late in the evening when I woke. The telephone had not rung, not once; neither Judit nor my wife called. What could they have been doing in those hours when one of them finally knew for certain that she had lost me and the other had cause to believe that she had won this sm
all, silent war that had started so long ago? They sat at opposite ends of town, each in her room, thinking, naturally, not of me but of each other. They knew there never was a complete end to things, that their own duel was just approaching its most difficult period. I slept as if drugged. It was evening before I woke and rang Judit. She answered calmly. I asked her to wait, told her that I was on my way, that I wanted to speak to her.

  It was that evening I first began to really know this extraordinary woman. We went to a restaurant in the city center, somewhere I was unlikely to bump into anyone I knew. We sat down at the set table, the waiter brought the menu. I ordered the food and we talked in hushed voices of ordinary things. Throughout the meal I was watching Judit’s movements. She knew I was watching her, and occasionally broke into a mocking smile. She never quite lost that mocking smile. It was like saying: “I know you are watching me. Well, watch closely. I have learned what there is to learn.”

  And indeed she had learned to perfection, maybe even a little too well. This woman, if you please, had made herself study, in a few bare years, everything that people regard as correct behavior, good manners, and social graces—all that we had received as a given and had learned by simply being creatures of our environment and education: properly trained animals. She knew how to enter, how to greet people, how not to look at the waiter, how not to take notice of the service, while at the same time understanding how one should be served by maintaining an air of studied superiority. Her manner of eating was correct to a fault. She handled her knife, her fork, her napkin, everything, like someone who had never dined any other way or used different cutlery, under different circumstances. I marveled at her dress sense too, not just that first night but the rest of the time. Not that I am an expert in women’s fashions; it is just that, like any other man, I know whether the woman I am stepping out with looks right in her clothes or has made an error of taste, given way to some personal quirk. She, in her black dress and black hat, was so beautiful, so simply and terrifyingly lovely, that even the waiters gawked at her. The way she moved, the way she took her place at the table, drew off her gloves, and listened, smiling and nodding over her shoulder, as I read her the menu, agreeing on the choice of food, then immediately changed the subject of conversation, charmingly leaning toward me: all this was one hideously difficult test, a test she passed that first night, like the brilliant student she was, with flying colors.

  I, for my part, was full of anxiety, inwardly willing her on, and once she passed I was wild with joy, satisfied and relieved. It was, you know, as when we understand that nothing happens without a reason. Everything that had happened between us had happened for a reason, and what it showed was that this woman was a truly extraordinary being. I immediately felt ashamed on account of my earlier anxiety. She herself sensed this, and sometimes—slightly mockingly, as I have already said—she smiled at me. She behaved like a lady in the restaurant, like a woman of the highest rank who had spent her life in places like this. No, wait—she behaved much better than that. Upper-class ladies don’t eat as faultlessly as she did, cannot hold their knives and forks with such refinement or maintain such firm discipline of gesture and posture. People born into a rank tend to rebel a little against the constraints of rank. Judit was taking her exam, not so as you’d notice, of course, but she was following all the rules.

  It began that evening and so it continued all the days after, over months and years—every evening, every morning, in company or alone, at table or in society, and later in bed, in every possible situation—the terrifying, hopeless, endless exam that Judit passed each day with flying colors. In theory it was wonderful: it was just that we both failed the practical examination.

  I made mistakes too. We watched each other like tigers and trainers in the middle of a performance. Never, not once, did I utter a single word of criticism of Judit; I never asked her to wear something else, to behave or speak in the least differently. I never “educated” her. I received her soul in its maturity, as a gift, the way it was created, and then as whatever life had made of it. I didn’t expect anything out of the usual of her. It wasn’t a “lady” or a glittering socialite I yearned for. I hoped for a woman with whom I might share a lonely life. But she was terrifyingly ambitious, as ambitious as a young, newly appointed officer in the army wanting to conquer and take occupation of the world, one who spends all day mugging up, practicing, training for the part. She wasn’t scared of anything or anyone. There was only one thing she feared: her own hypersensitivity to offense, some mortal wound to the pride glowing in the depths of her life, her very being. That is what she was afraid of, and everything she did by word, silence, and deed was a form of defense against it. It was something I could never understand.

  So we dined at the restaurant. What did we talk about? Well, London, naturally. How did the conversation go? She answered questions exactly as though she were sitting an exam. The answers came pat: “London is a great city. It has a vast population. The poor cook with mutton fat. The English think and act with deliberation.” And then, among the clichés, suddenly something to the point: “The English know it is necessary to survive.” When she said this—it might have been the first personal observation she had ever addressed to me, the first truth she had discovered for herself and revealed for my benefit—the light in her eyes suddenly flashed, then went out. It was as if she couldn’t contain herself and had voiced an opinion, but immediately regretted it, as if she had given something of herself away, unveiled a secret, demonstrated that she too had a view of the world, of herself, of me, and of the English, and that she had been forced to speak out about it. People don’t talk about their experiences in the presence of enemies. I sensed something strange in that moment, but I couldn’t have said what … She fell silent for a moment. Then she was back with the clichés again. The exam clock was running. “Yes, the English have a sense of humor. They love Dickens and music.” Judit had read David Copperfield. And what else? She answered calmly. She had brought along the latest Huxley as travel reading. Point Counter Point was the title. She was reading it on the way and was still reading it … she could lend it to me if I liked.

  So that’s how things were. There I was, sitting with Judit Áldozó in a city restaurant, eating crab and asparagus with a heavy red wine, chatting about the latest novel by Aldous Huxley. Her handkerchief, open before me on the table, had a heavy, pleasant scent. I asked her what scent she used. She mentioned the name of an American beauty product, her English pronunciation perfect. She said she preferred American scents to French ones because the French were a little overpowering. I gave her a skeptical look. Was she teasing me? But no, it was no joke, it was serious, that was her honest opinion. She gave her opinion the way some people pin down facts based on experience. I didn’t dare ask her how a Transdanubian peasant girl came by such experiences, how she could be so certain that French perfumes were “a little overpowering.” And in any case, what else did she do in London apart from being a maid in an English family home? I knew London a little, and had some experience of English households, and I knew that being a servant in London was not a lofty station. Judit looked steadily back at me, expecting more questions. And even then, on that first evening, I noticed something I was to keep noticing right to the end, every evening.

  You won’t guess what it was.

  She would accept any suggestion I made. Shall we go here? Shall we go there? She simply nodded: Fine, let’s go. But then, once we were in the car and on our way, she would quietly say: “But maybe we could …” And we would finish up not at the restaurant I had chosen but at another that was by no means better or finer. And if I chose something from the menu, they would bring the dish, she’d taste it, push it aside, and say, “Maybe it might be better if …” And then the willing waiters would bring some other dish and different wine. She always wanted something different. And she always wanted to go somewhere different. I thought it might be fear and confusion that caused these sudden changes of mind, but slowly
I realized the true problem was that the sweet was never sweet enough, the salty never salty enough for her. She would suddenly push aside the roast chicken roasted by the best chef in the best restaurant and declare quietly but firmly, “It’s not quite right. Bring me something else.” Cream wasn’t creamy enough for her, the coffee never strong enough, never, at any place.

  I thought she might be capricious. Never mind, just observe and keep observing, I thought. So I observed. I even found it amusing, this caprice, this volatility of hers.