Portraits of a Marriage (26 page)

There was peace then … though not proper peace, not really. We were between two wars. The borders were never completely open, but the trains did not stop too long at the variously colored international barriers. People asked each other for loans, not only people but countries, as if nothing had happened, going about their lives with miraculous
confidence. And, what was still more miraculous, they received the loans—long-term loans—and they built houses, big ones, small ones, and generally behaved as though they had seen the back of painful, terrible times forever, as though it were an entirely new era, so that now everything was as it should be: they could plan far ahead, bring up their children, and give themselves over to individual pleasures that were not only delightful but even a touch superfluous. That was the world in which I started traveling—the world between two wars. I can’t say that the feeling I set out with, and which I experienced at various stopping places on my journey, was one of absolute security. We behaved like people who had, to their surprise, been robbed of everything: our whole lives were tinged with suspicion during the brief period between two wars in Europe: we, all of us, individuals and nations, made enthusiastic efforts to be generous and great-hearted, but—secretly, at any rate—we carried revolvers in our pockets and would occasionally reach, in a panic, for our wallets in the pocket above our hearts. Not just for our wallets, probably, but for our hearts and minds too, because we feared for them also. Nevertheless, one could at least travel again.

Everywhere people were building new houses, new estates, new towns, and, yes, new nations too. I headed north first, then south, then west. Eventually I spent several years in the cities of the West. The things I loved and in which I most earnestly believed were most directly to hand there. It was like when we learn a language at school and then travel to the country where the book language is the mother tongue of real people. In the West I lived among the members of a truly civil society, people who clearly did not regard membership of their class as a form of acting or sloganeering, nor a chore, but simply lived in the manner befitting those who had inherited the house they lived in from their ancestors, a house slightly too small, a little too dark and old-fashioned perhaps, but the house they best knew, one not worth demolishing in order to build another. Their way of life was as it was, needing the odd spot of repair and upkeep. We, at home, were still busy building that house, a home worthy of the civic being; between palaces and cottages we were constructing a wider, more compendious way of life in which everyone might feel at home: Judit Áldozó, myself, both of us.

Judit was only a shadow in my thoughts during those years. At first she was primarily the memory of a fierce, fevered condition. Yes, I had
been ill and beside myself, ranting. My eyes were not clear. I had become deeply conscious of my loneliness; a freezing wave of loneliness had swept into my life. Fearing loneliness, I fled from it to a person whose being, whose energy, and whose smile suggested that this loneliness might be shared. That was what I remembered. But then the whole world opened up and it proved very interesting. I saw all kinds of statues, gas turbines, and other forms of loneliness; I saw people who felt joy hearing the music of a single line of verse; I saw economic systems that promised dignity and generosity; I saw vast cities, mountaintops, beautiful medieval wells, little German towns, their main squares surrounded by sycamores; cathedral towers, beaches with golden sand and dark blue oceans; women bathing naked on the shore. I saw the world. The memory of Judit Áldozó couldn’t compete with the wonders of the world. She was less than a shadow compared to this new reality. Life showed me, and promised me, everything in those years. It offered me liberation from the narrow confines and melancholy clutter of our house. It stripped me of the clothes I had to wear in order to perform my parts back home, and let me lose myself in the traffic of the world. It offered me women too, an army of women, the women of the entire world, from Flemish brunettes with hot-dreamy looks, through bright-eyed French women, to meek German girls … all kinds of women. I moved in the world. Women revolved around me as they do around every man, sending messages, calling: the respectable who promised me their entire lives; the flirtatious who offered lives of simple, sensuous, wild abandon—nothing permanent, but something long enough, something more mysterious than a quick fly-by-night affair.

“Women.” Have you noticed the wary, uncertain way in which men pronounce the word? It is as if they were speaking of a not completely enchained, ever rebellious, conquered but unbroken tribe of discontents. And, really, what does the everyday concept “women” signify in the hurly-burly of existence? What do we expect of them? … Children? Help? Peace? Delight? Everything? Nothing? A few moments of pleasure?

We carry on living, desiring, meeting, and falling in love, and then we marry, and, with that one woman, we experience love, childbirth, and death, all the time allowing our heads to be turned by a neatly formed ankle, and ready to face ruin for the sake of a hairdo or the hot
breath emanating from another’s lips. We lie with them in middle-class beds, or on sofas with broken springs, in cheap no-questions-asked hotels, down filthy side streets, and feel a very brief satisfaction. Or we grow drunk on high-flown sentiment with a woman, weepy and full of vows. We promise to face the world together, to assist each other, to live on a mountaintop, or in the heart of some great city … But then time passes, a year, or three years, or two weeks—have you noticed how love, like death, has nothing to do with clocks or calendars?—and the grand plan to which both the woman and the man have agreed is not carried through, or only partially carried through, not quite as either had imagined. And so the man and woman part, with anger or with indifference, and once again they set out, full of hope, ready to start again with someone new. Alternatively, they might stay together out of sheer exhaustion, draining the lifeblood from each other, and so sicken, killing each other little by little before dying. But then, in that very last moment, just as they are closing their eyes, what is it they understand? What had they wanted from each other? They seem to have done nothing except conform to an old, blind law, the law of love, at whose bidding the world must constantly renew itself, because the world requires the lust of men and women to perpetuate the species. So was that all? What, poor things, had they been hoping for? What have they given each other? What have they received? What a terrifying, secret audit! Is the instinct that draws one man to one woman personal? Isn’t it just desire, always, eternally, simply desire, that occasionally, for some brief interval, is incarnated in a particular body? And this strange, artificial excitement, the fever in which we live: might that not have been nature’s fully conscious way of preventing men and women feeling utterly alone?

Look around you. There’s no escape from sexual tension: it’s there in literature, in paintings, on the stage, and out in the street … Go into a theater. There are men and women sitting in the auditorium watching men and women conspiring onstage, chatting, making promises, and taking vows. The audience coughs and croaks and is clearly bored … but let the words “I love you” be spoken by the actors, or “I want you,” or anything that refers to love, possession, parting, and to the happiness or misery associated with them, the auditorium immediately falls deathly silent: thousands upon thousands, all over the world, are holding
their breath. Writers spend their lives cooking such things up: they use the emotion to blackmail the audience. And wherever you go, this whipped-up excitement continues unabated: perfumes, bright dresses, expensive furs, half-naked bodies, skin-colored stockings. It’s the same desire at work—the desire to show off a silk-stockinged knee or, in the summer, on the beach, to go practically naked, because this way the feminine presence becomes more teasing, more exciting, not to mention the makeup, the scarlet basque, the blue eye shadow, the blond highlights, all the cheap rubbish they apply and pamper themselves with—it’s all so unhealthy.

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.