Portraits of a Marriage (17 page)

Let me give you a kiss, my dear. Good-bye. Shall we meet here again next Tuesday? … It was such a nice conversation. About a quarter after seven, if it suits you … not much later than that. I’ll be sure to be here before a quarter after seven.

Part II

See the pair just leaving, there by the revolving doors? That woman there. The blond one in the round hat? No, the tall one in the mink, yes, the tall brunette, without a hat. The one getting into a car. That stocky fellow is helping her into it, isn’t he? They were sitting at that table in the corner earlier. I spotted them as soon as we came in, but I didn’t want to say anything. They never even saw me. But now that they’ve gone I can tell you that that was the man with whom I had that stupid, embarrassing duel.

On account of the woman? … Well, of course because of her.

I’m not sure I’m putting that quite right. There was definitely someone I wanted to kill at the time. But maybe it wasn’t our stocky friend. He was nothing to do with it really. He was simply the nearest object.

Can I tell you who this woman was? … Oh, I can tell you all right, old man. That woman was my wife. Not the first, but the second. We’ve been divorced for three years. We divorced immediately after the duel.

Another bottle of wine? After midnight this place suddenly empties out and grows rather chilly. Last time I was here I was still an engineering student—it was at the time of the carnival. These famous old rooms were full of women then: colorful, glittering creatures of the night, laughing all the time. I didn’t come back for many years. Time passed;
they dolled the place up, and the customers changed too. Nowadays it’s the cosmopolitan crew out for a night’s entertainment … you know, what they call cosmopolitan. I had no idea my wife was a regular here, of course.

Nice wine. As pale green as Lake Balaton before a storm. Cheers.

Will I tell you the story? If you like.

It might not be a bad thing if I did once actually tell it.

Did you know my first wife? No, I don’t think so, because you were in Peru then, building the railroad. You were lucky to find yourself in a big wild country straight after finishing the course, when we both got our diplomas. I must confess I envied you sometimes. If fate had taken me abroad I might have been happier than I am now. As it worked out I stayed at home, taking care of things … Well, one day I got tired of all that, so I’m not taking care of anything now. What was I taking care of? Was it the factory? A way of life? I really don’t know. I used to have a friend, Lázár, the writer, do you know him? You’ve never heard of him? Aren’t you the happy man! I knew him well. At one time I thought he was my friend. This man kept arguing that I was a rare representative of a vanishing form of life, the pick of my class, a model citizen. According to him, that was why I stayed at home. But I can’t even be sure of that.

It is only facts you can be sure of; they are what matter … All those explanations we give to account for the facts are pure, irredeemable fiction. Literature. I should tell you that I am no longer a great admirer of literature. I used to read a lot in the past, everything I could lay my hands on. I suspect it is bad literature that fills men’s and women’s hearts with lies and false feeling. It is the false teaching of dubious books we have to thank for most of the contrived tragedies of human life. Self-pity, false sentiment, all those artificial complications are, to a great extent, the direct consequence of fake, ignorant, or simply mischievous fiction. You find it under banner headlines in the press and in smaller articles on other pages: the seamstress who drinks lye because the joiner has left her, or the female representative involved in an accident after she’d taken Veronal, all because the famous actor failed to turn up for a date. The glorious fruits of literature! Why are you looking at me like that? Surprised? You want to know what I most despise? Literature? The tragic misunderstanding that goes under the name of love? People
in general? That’s a hard question. I don’t despise anyone or anything, I have no right to. But in what remains of my life I intend giving myself over to a passion. A passion for truth, that is. I will not have people lying to me anymore, neither books nor women, and I will have no patience at all with the lies I tell myself.

You say I have suffered. That I’ve been hurt. That’s true. It might have been that woman you saw just now, my second wife, who hurt me. It might have been the first. Something went wrong in any case, and whatever it was it was a dreadful emotional experience. I’ve become quite solitary as a result. I am angry. I have no faith in women, in love, or in people. What a ridiculous, pathetic creature, you must be thinking. You’d like tactfully to remind me that there are plenty of people who are both happy and passionate; that there is love and patience and participation and forgiveness. You’d like to accuse me of lack of courage, of impatience with the people I happened to have met, of not having the guts, now that I am this solitary wild creature, to admit that it was all my fault. Look, old man, I have heard and considered all these charges. You could torture me and put me on the rack and I’d still think what I think, feel what I truly feel. I have examined the lives of people close to me, I have looked through the windows of other people’s lives; I have not been too shy or too reserved, I searched and listened. I myself thought the fault was mine, that it was in me. I explained it in terms of greed, selfishness, lust, social constraints, the ways of the world. Explained what? Failure. That well of loneliness into which everyone is eventually plunged, the way a traveler might stumble into a ditch at night. We are men: nobody is going to help us in this respect; we have to live alone and have to pay the full price of everything down to the last penny. We have to put up with loneliness, with being who we are, and we have to do so in silence. These are the laws of life as far as men are concerned.

And family? I can see you want to ask me about that. Don’t I think the family is, in abstract terms, the highest meaning in life, a superior kind of harmony? Life is not about happiness. Life is about supporting your family, bringing up your children as honorable people, and not expecting either gratitude or happiness in return. But I want to give you a straight answer, and my answer is, you are right. It’s just that I don’t believe family “makes you happy.” Nothing can “make” you happy.
The family is a vast project, so enormous and important, both for us personally and for the world at large, that it’s worth putting up with all the incomprehensible cares of life, all that superfluous pain, for its sake. Nevertheless, I don’t believe in “happy” families. I have seen families where there was a certain harmony of purpose, a proper set of human relationships, families where each member’s life ran a little against the grain of the others, where every member of the family led a separate life, but where the whole, all the members of the clan, despite fighting each other tooth and nail, still lived for each other and somehow held together.

Family … a big word. Yes, one’s family might sometimes be the whole point of life.

But that doesn’t solve anything. And in any case I never had a family in quite that sense.

So I kept listening and paying attention. I listened to fashionable sermons about how loneliness was a middle-class disease, sermons with twisted ideas that kept referring to “society”—that magnificent thing, society—a society that embraces and elevates the individual so that suddenly he has a purpose in life, because he knows he is not living simply for a narrowly defined family but for the far better, all-but-superhuman concept of society. I listened very hard to such tirades. I thought about their application not just in theory but in the here and now, where I could properly grasp their implications, in life itself. I considered the lives of “the poor”—they, after all, constitute the largest element of society, are in themselves a society. Did they enjoy a fuller, richer, more vital kind of life for the knowledge that they were part of a union—the steelworkers’ union, for example—or of a self-employed workers’ pension scheme? Were they happier for the knowledge that they had representatives in parliament, people who could speak, and write articles, on their behalf? Surely it is just as vital to know that there are an infinite number of steelworkers and self-employed in the world who would like to lead better, more humane lives; that their worldly condition improves only in gradual stages, after bitter conflict, after countless unsatisfactory compromises under which their pay is no longer 180 pengő but 210. Looking down, everything seems bottomless. When you’re near the bottom, you’re very glad of anything that improves your horrible condition. But that’s not happiness. Nor did I find happiness among people
whose employment or vocation placed them at the heart of social affairs. No, what I found there was resentment, sadness, dissatisfaction, rivalry, fury, struggle, resignation, and idiocy: the clever and foolish constantly at war with each other. I found people who believed in amelioration: that, very slowly, after many unpredictable twists and turns, given time, there would be some improvement in human life. It’s nice to believe this. But believing it, or even feeling assured of it, doesn’t make anyone less lonely. It’s not true that it is only the middle class who feel alone. A peasant on a distant farm can be as lonely as a dentist in Antwerp.

Then I went on to read, and believed for a while, that it was the mere fact of civilization that created loneliness.

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.