Portraits of a Marriage (7 page)

An explorer might feel something of the sort when he decides to go to Africa or to the North Pole, caring little about what wild animals or climate he might encounter there, if in so doing he might discover something, find something previously undiscovered or unknown, something no explorer had ever come across before … Yes, the project of a woman setting out to discover a man’s secret is as enormous as that. But she will get that secret even if she has to go through hell for it. That was what I had decided to do.

Or it could be that it was my decision that decided
me …
you never really know how these things happen. People do whatever circumstances allow them to do. It’s like being a sleepwalker, a water diviner, the local witch doctor, someone the tribe avoids out of a superstitious awe. And not just the tribe, either, but the authorities too, because there is something frightening in their eyes, something not to be trifled with. It’s as if there were a kind of sign on their brow to show that they are about a uniquely dangerous business and will not rest until it has been completed … That was how I felt when, having realized the situation and made a conscious decision, I waited for him to come home that day. That was my state of mind at noon when he returned from his Sunday stroll.

He had been down the valley, walking that dog he was so fond of, the tan-colored Vizsla he took wherever he went. He opened the garden gate and came in. I watched him, arms folded, from the top step of the veranda. It was spring, the light was strong, and the breeze that was tossing the boughs was ruffling my hair. I will never forget that moment, the cold light on the distant landscape, on the garden, and in me too. I felt possessed.

Master and dog came to a wary, involuntary stop, the way people instinctively do when confronted by anything strange, somewhat on the defensive. “Come on, then,” I thought calmly. “Come on, all of you—other women, friends, childhood memories, family, the whole hostile human world—come on. I am going to take this man from you.” So we sat down to eat.

After lunch I had a slight headache. I went to my room, drew the curtains, and lay down, remaining there till the evening.

I am not a writer, like Lázár, so I can’t describe my condition that afternoon, what I was thinking, what thoughts ran through my head … All I could see was the task ahead; all I knew was that I could not afford to be weak, that I had to do what I had decided to do. At the same time I knew that no one could help me, that I had no idea how to go about it or where to begin … You understand? There were moments I thought I was being ridiculous letting myself in for such an impossible task.

“What can I do?” I kept asking myself over and over again. I mean, I couldn’t write to the newspapers asking for advice and encouragement, signing myself “Cheated Wife.” I know those kinds of letters and the answers they receive from editors, encouraging the cheated woman not to give up, saying her husband is probably laden down with work, that she should look after the house, use this or that ointment and powder at night because that will keep her looking fresh, and her husband will fall in love with her all over again. Well, that sort of thing would not help me. I knew ointments and powders would not do the trick. And anyway, I had always done a first-rate job of housekeeping, everything in the house being absolutely where it ought to be. And I was beautiful then too, more beautiful that year than ever, perhaps. You goose, you silly goose, I thought, even to think of this. This was something altogether different.

There were no soothsayers or sages I could consult on the matter, I could not write to famous writers for advice, nor was it something I could openly discuss with women friends or members of the family—not this apparently unimportant issue that was nonetheless of ultimate importance to me, which was: how to take possession of a man … My mild headache had become the usual raging migraine by the evening. But I took two doses and said nothing to my husband, going out to the theater, followed by supper.

The next day, Monday the fifteenth of April—you see how precisely I remember these days; it’s a matter of life or death remembering such things!—I woke at dawn and went down to that little church in the Tabán district I had last visited some ten years before. My usual church was the one in the Krisztina where we also got married. It was where Count István Széchenyi vowed to be true to Crescence Seilern. If you didn’t already know that, I am telling you now. The marriage, they say, was not a great success. Not that I believe in such tittle-tattle, but people must always be gossiping.

The church in the Tabán was completely empty that morning. I told the sacristan I wanted to make a confession. I waited for a while in one of the pews of the dimly lit church. Eventually an old, unfamiliar, solemn-looking, white-haired priest appeared, entered the confessional box, and gestured for me to enter and kneel. It was to this unknown priest whom I had never seen before, nor have seen since, that I revealed everything.

It was a confession the like of which you make only once in your life. I spoke of myself, the child, my husband. I confessed I wanted to regain my husband’s heart and that I didn’t know what to do, that I was calling on God to help me. I told him I had led a moral life, that I never even dreamed of any lover but my husband. I told him I didn’t know where the fault lay, in me or in him … In other words, I told him everything. Not as I am telling you now. I couldn’t talk about everything now, I would even be wary of doing so … But in that dim church, that morning, before that unfamiliar old priest, I stripped my soul bare.

The confession took a long time. The priest listened.

Have you visited Florence? Do you know Michelangelo’s statue—you know, that wonderful sculptural group with four figures in the Duomo … wait a minute, what is it called? Yes, the
Pietà
. The main figure is a self-portrait, the elder Michelangelo. I was there once with my husband; it was he who showed me the statue. He said that the face there was a human face without desire, without anger, a face purged by fire, one that knew everything and wanted nothing, not even revenge, not even to forgive—nothing, absolutely nothing. Standing before the statue, my husband told me that was what we should be like. That this was ultimate human perfection, this sacred indifference, this absolute solitude and deafness to both joy and sorrow … That’s what he said. As
I was confessing, I stole the odd glance at the priest’s face and with tears in my eyes I saw how terrifyingly similar his face was to the marble one in the
Pietà
.

He was sitting with half-closed eyes, his arms folded across his chest. He hid his hands in the folds of his habit. He wasn’t looking at me. His head was slightly tipped to one side, listening almost like a blind man, keeping strangely silent, as if he weren’t listening at all. It was as if he had heard all this many times before; as if he knew that everything I said was superfluous and hopeless. That was how he listened. He listened hard, gave me his complete attention, his entire strange, squat being. And his face, yes … his face was that of someone who knew it all anyway, who knew everything, having heard all kinds of people talk about their suffering and misery, and he still knew something more that could not be said. When I finally stopped, he remained silent for a while.

“You have to believe, child,” he said eventually.

“I do believe, Most Reverend Father,” I mechanically replied.

“No,” he said, and that calm, almost dead-looking face began to come alive, his watery old eyes briefly flashing. “You have to believe differently. Don’t spend your time concocting schemes. Just believe. That’s all you have to do. Believe,” he muttered.

He must have been very old by then, and my long speech must have exhausted him.

I thought he didn’t want to, or could not, find anything else to say, so I waited for my penance and absolution. I felt we had nothing more to say to each other. But after a long silence, just as he seemed to be nodding off, he opened his eyes wide and began to talk animatedly.

I listened to him and was filled with amazement. No one had talked like that to me before, certainly not at confession. He spoke in simple words in a natural conversational tone, as if he were not in a confessional box but holding forth in company somewhere. He spoke in simple words, without unctuousness, sighing occasionally as though lamenting, like a kindly, very old man. He spoke as naturally as if the whole world were God’s church and all things human belonged to God, so one didn’t have to put on special airs for God, turn eyes to heaven or to beat one’s breast, only to tell the truth, but the whole truth, the full truth … That’s how he talked.

Talked, I said? I tell you, he not so much talked as chatted in a relaxed
low voice. His accent sounded faintly Slavic. The last time I heard that lilt, that regional dialect, was in Zemplén in my childhood.

“Dear soul,” he said. “I would like to help you. Once, a long time ago, a woman came to me who was in love with a man so much she killed him. She did not kill him with a knife or poison, but with her love, because she wanted that man completely, because she wanted to remove him from the world. They fought a great deal. The man got so tired of this that one day he died. The woman knew this. He died because he had had enough of fighting. You know, my daughter, people exercise various forms of power over each other. They have many ways of killing each other. It is not enough to love, dear soul. Love can take a very selfish form. One must love humbly, with faith. Life as a whole only makes sense when there is faith. God gave people love so they might bear the world and each other. But those who love without humility place a great burden on the beloved’s shoulders. Do you understand, child?” he asked so tenderly he was like an old teacher teaching a child the alphabet.

“I think I understand,” I said, a little frightened.

“You will understand it eventually, but you will suffer a great deal. Passionate souls like yours are proud and suffer greatly. You say you want to possess your husband’s heart. You also say your husband is a genuine man, not a fickle womanizer but a serious, pure-hearted man with a secret. What could that secret be? That is what you are determined to find out, dear soul; it is what you want to know. Don’t you know that God gave people individual souls, each his or her own? Each soul is full of secrets, each as great as the universe. Why do you seek a soul that God has created secret? It may be the meaning, the mission of your life to put up with it, to bear it. Who knows, perhaps you might injure your husband in the process, even ruin him if you succeeded in laying his soul bare, if you forced him to adopt a life, or to assume feelings, that he feels bound to resist. One shouldn’t love by force. The woman I was talking about was young and beautiful, like you, and did all kinds of stupid things to recover her husband’s love; she flirted with other men to make him jealous, she lived a fast life, tried to make herself still more beautiful, spent a fortune on Viennese outfits, high-fashion dresses, the way unfortunate women sometimes do when there is no faith in their hearts and they lose their spiritual balance. That having
failed, she rushed out into the world, to clubs, to parties, everywhere where there are crowds and bright light, where people seek to escape the emptiness of their lives and their vain and hopeless passions, places where people go to forget. How hopeless it all is,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “There is no forgetting.”

That’s how he talked. I was all ears now. But it was as if he hardly noticed I was there. He was muttering away as if to someone else, the way old people mutter. It was as if it were the world he was trying to convince. Then he went on:

“No, there is no forgetting. God will not allow us to forget the questions life poses to us in a storm of passion. You are in a fever, child. A fever of vanity and selfishness. It may be that your husband’s feelings toward you are not precisely what you would have them be; it may be he is simply a proud or lonely man who cannot, or is afraid to, show his feelings, because they were badly wounded once. There are many such wounded people in the world. I cannot absolve your husband, dear child, because he too lacks humility. Putting two such proud people together can lead to a lot of suffering. But there is such greed in your soul at the moment it reminds me of sin. You want to dispossess another man of his soul. That’s always the case with lovers, it’s what they want. And that is a sin.”

“I didn’t know it was a sin,” I said, still kneeling, and started to shiver and tremble.

“It’s always a sin when we are not satisfied with what the world freely offers us, when people offer us something of themselves, when we greedily want to rob them of their secrets. Why can’t you live more modestly? With fewer emotional needs? … Love, real love, is patient, dear child. Love is endlessly patient and can wait. The course you have embarked on is impossible and inhumane. You want to take possession of your husband. But that is after God has arranged your mortal life to be the way it is. Can you not understand that?”

“But I am suffering, Most Reverend Father,” I said, and was afraid I might burst into tears.

“Then suffer,” he replied quite flatly now, almost indifferently.

“Why do you fear suffering?” he asked after a while. “Suffering is a fire that will purge you of greed and vanity. What is happiness? … And
what gives you the right to be happy? Are you sure that your desire and love are so selfless they deserve happiness? If they were, you would not be kneeling here now, but would be living the life intended for you, going about your tasks, willing to do what life bids you do,” he said sternly, looking hard at me.

It was the first time he had looked at me with those small, bright, glittering eyes. Having done so, he immediately turned away and closed them.

Then, after a long silence, he spoke again.

“You say your husband is angry with you because of the child’s death?”

“That’s what I feel,” I answered.

“Yes,” he said, and turned the matter over in his mind. “It’s possible.”

It was clear the proposition did not take him by surprise; that he thought almost anything was possible where relationships between people are concerned. Almost as an incidental afterthought, he asked me: