Portraits of a Marriage (46 page)

I’m very hot now! Just look how red my cheeks are—all the blood has rushed to my head. That’s because I have never spoken to anyone about this. Maybe it has been preying on my mind without my knowing it. And now I get a hot flush as I am talking about it.

There was no need to wash this man’s feet, my dear; he washed them
by himself in the morning, in the cellar, you may be sure. He didn’t need anyone to tell him that something had changed—he needed no sedative, no consolation. From start to finish he insisted that life had only one meaning, one point. It was courtesy. Good manners meant invulnerability. It was as if he had guts of marble. And this marble-inside, flesh-and-blood-outside figure, dressed in touch-me-not armor, would not come an inch closer to me. The recent earthquake that had shaken and shifted whole countries had no effect at all on his stony constitution. I felt he would sooner die than say a single word other than “I think” or “I’m afraid.” Had he actually inquired how I was, or if I needed anything, I would have told him, and he would, I’m sure, have done anything to help: he’d immediately have taken off his coat or given me the wristwatch some Russian had absentmindedly forgotten to steal, and he’d have smiled just to show me he was no longer angry with me.

Now listen. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone. It is not true that people are invariably greedy and feral. Sometimes they are very willing to help each other. But doing people favors is nothing to do with goodness or empathy. The bald man was probably right when he said that people are sometimes good because there are too many obstacles to them being bad. The best we can say is that we are good simply because we’re afraid of being bad. That’s what the bald man said. I’ve never said it to anyone myself. Only to you now, my darling, my dearest love.

We couldn’t sit at the cave entrance, opposite the natural springs, forever. After a while my husband coughed, cleared his throat, and said “he thought” it might be best if we stood up and, seeing it was nice weather, walked about the ruined villas of Mount Gellért for a while. And, yes, “he was afraid” that he would not have many more opportunities to talk to me in the near future. He thought we should use the time left to us. He didn’t say it quite like that, but there was no need to, as I myself knew this would be our last conversation. And so we set off on our walk up Mount Gellért, along the steep roads, among ruins and dead animals. It was a sunny winter’s day.

We strolled about for roughly an hour. I have no idea what he was thinking as I walked the slopes beside him for the last time. He spoke calmly, without apparent feeling. I asked him tactfully how he had got here and what had happened to him, and wasn’t the world extraordinary
and topsy-turvy? He replied very politely that everything was fine just as it was. It was all as it should be. What he meant was that he was utterly ruined, had nothing left, and was preparing to go abroad to make his living doing manual work. I stopped on one of the bends of the winding road and very carefully asked him—I did not dare look directly at him—what he thought might happen, how the world would turn out.

He stopped too, looked at me solemnly, and thought for a while. It seemed he took a deep breath before answering. He tipped his head to one side, gazed sadly, first at me, then at the bombed house in whose gateway we were standing, and said:

“I’m afraid there may be too many people in the world.”

Having said this, it was as if he had answered any possible further questions. He set off for the bridge. I hurried to keep step with him, because I didn’t understand what he meant. Quite enough people had died needless deaths at that time. Hadn’t they always? Why should he be worried about there being too many people? But he didn’t elaborate, just walked on like a man in a hurry, too busy to answer. I suspected he was joking or playing a trick on me. I remembered the two of them, my ex-husband and his bald friend, and how they used to play games where they pretended to be dull people saying the most obvious things. There are people who insist on calling a spade a spade and nothing else, people who when it’s hot and everyone is dripping with perspiration, when the very dogs are dropping dead in the street, frown and point to the sky and pronounce in stern, magisterial tones: “It’s hot!” And, having pronounced this, they look inordinately proud, the way everyone does when they have said something particularly obvious and stupid. That was a game they played. So now, having declared that there were too many people, I wondered if he was mocking me. He was right in the sense that the crowd on the bridge had the look of a natural disaster, that they looked like Colorado beetles in a potato field. The thought startled me and I changed the subject. “But really, what will you do?” I asked him.

I always used the impersonal
vous
form of “you” with him,
maga
, not
te
. He, on the other hand, addressed me familiarly, as
te
. I never dared address him that way. For other people he always used the more formal, impersonal manner, even for his first wife, his parents, and his friends.
He never liked the stupid, overfamiliar way people of the same class and same type went straight to
te
in the hope of demonstrating their mutuality, as if to prove they were members of the same important club. But he always addressed me as
te
. It wasn’t anything we talked about; it was just the way things worked between us.

He took off his glasses, drew a clean handkerchief from his cigar pocket, and carefully cleaned the lenses. Once he had put them back, he looked over to the bridge, where the queue was growing ever longer. Quite calmly, he said, “I’m leaving, because I’m superfluous: it is me that is the one too many.”

His gray eyes gazed steadily ahead. He didn’t blink, not once.

There was no pride in his voice. He spoke in matter-of-fact tones, like a doctor diagnosing an illness. I didn’t ask him anything else, because I knew he’d not say anything, not even under torture. We walked on toward the bridge. Once there, we bid each other a silent farewell. He carried on along the embankment toward Krisztinaváros. As for me, I took my place in the slow, winding queue and shuffled my way toward the steps leading onto the bridge. I saw him just once more, hatless, his raincoat over his arm, slowly but deliberately making his way, the way people do when they are absolutely certain where they are going—that’s to say, to their own annihilation. I knew I’d never see him again. There is something about knowing such things that seems the first step to madness.

What did he mean? Maybe that a man is only alive as long as he has a role to play. Beyond that, he is no longer alive: he merely exists. You won’t understand this, because you do have a role in the world: your role is to love me.

There! I’ve said it. Don’t look at me so archly. It’s getting toward dawn, you’ve just come back from the bar, and here I am, your Roman odalisque, fussing over you in a hotel. If anyone could hear our conversation, someone suspicious by nature, someone who could observe and listen to us, they’d think we were a pair of conspirators. They’d see a common woman who once found herself among the lords of the world, gossiping with her pretty lover about all she has seen there, betraying their secrets, and there you are, drinking it all in, because you want to
know what tricks the rich get up to. It’s a wicked world, he’d think. Don’t go frowning and wrinkling that lovely brow. Go on, laugh. After all, we know the truth about each other. You’re not just a pretty boy, you’re an artist through and through, my one and only benefactor, the man I adore, who is helping me through what remains of the farce of my life. You help by selling the jewels my wicked husband left me. You help because you are kind and soft-hearted. And I am not really a common woman, nor ever was, not even when I took money from my husband the only way I knew, not because I needed the cash but because I needed justice. What are you grinning at? It’s a secret between the two of us.

So yes, my husband was quite a peculiar man. I watched him leave and suddenly felt curious. I would love to have known what the man lived for, why he felt superfluous now, and why he was going away to be a house painter in Australia or an odd-job man in America. Wasn’t the stuff he believed in so firmly, the role he was playing, just a ridiculous charade? I don’t read the papers. I glance at the headlines when some bigwig gets murdered or a movie star is divorced; that’s all I read, nothing else. All I know of politics is that no one trusts anyone, and everyone thinks he knows better than the next man. As I watched him walk away I saw a troop of Russian soldiers march past, rifles slung over their shoulders, bayonets fixed, big strapping lads who were in Hungary, whose presence meant everything would be different from now on, different from the time when my husband thought he had a role in the world.

I shuffled along in the queue, over the bridge, over the yellow, dirty, end-of-winter Danube. The river was high. There were planks, blasted remains of ships and corpses washed along the tide. No one paid any attention to the corpses; everyone looked straight ahead, carrying things in backpacks, bowed under the weight. It was as if all humanity had set out on a long, penitential march. So we wound over the bridge, hordes of us, each of us laden down by our own guilt. And, suddenly, I no longer felt myself to be important, no longer in a hurry to get to Király utca to trade my tattered paper money for nail-polish remover. Suddenly I saw no point in going anywhere at all. The meeting had upset me. Although I never loved the man, I was horrified by the idea that I didn’t resent him, either, not really, not the way you are supposed to
hate your enemy. The thought hit me hard: it was like losing something valuable. There comes a time, you know, when people realize it’s not worth being angry. That is, let me tell you, a very sad moment.

It’s almost dawn. The light suddenly becomes so hot, so effervescent! In Rome there seems to be no transition between night and dawn. Wait, let me raise the blinds. Look at those two orange trees outside the window. They’ve produced two oranges each, all four wrinkled and withered—the kind you only get in this town. Those two trees are like old people: the wrinkled oranges are the feelings they have struggled to produce.

Doesn’t the light hurt your eyes? Myself, I like these Roman mornings, this sultriness. The light comes on so suddenly and so bright it’s like a young woman throwing off her nightgown and going over to the window naked. There’s nothing immodest about her then: she’s simply naked.

What’s that mocking laughter about? Am I being too poetical for you? Yes, I know I tend to talk in comparisons. I see you must be thinking I got this from the bald man. Versifiers and scribblers, you think. We women are always imitating the men that interest us.

No point in leafing through the album. You won’t find anything. I don’t have a picture of him.

I see the light is bothering you. I’ll let the blinds down halfway. Is that better? The street is still deserted. Have you noticed how empty our little Via Liguria is even during the day? He lived here, you know. Who? Him—the bald man. Move over, I want to lie down. Pass me the small cushion. And the ashtray. You want to sleep? I’m not sleepy, either. Let’s lie here quietly for a while. I like just lying still at daybreak, not moving at all but staring at the ceiling in this old house in Rome. When I wake up at three in the morning and you are still out at the bar, I lie like this for a long time.

What? Did the bald man stay in this very room? I don’t know. Don’t go on about it. Run down to the hotel desk and ask the porter if you want to know.

Yes, he might have stayed here.

So what! That I was following him? Mad, quite mad—what on earth
are you thinking of? He’d been dead two months by the time I left home.

It’s not true—you’re talking rubbish. No, it was not his grave I was looking for in the Protestant cemetery. It was the grave of a poet, a poor English writer. The only part that’s true is that the bald man once told me something about these famous graves. He himself is not buried there, though: his grave is in the cemetery on the outskirts, in a cheaper plot. In any case he wasn’t Protestant like the English poet. No, he was not a Jew. What was he? I have no idea. All I know is that he wasn’t religious.

I see from your look that you suspect something. You think I was secretly his lover after all and followed him here, to Rome? Nothing so sensational. There was nothing between us. Everything was very simple as far as he was concerned. God didn’t make him an interesting, artistic figure like you, my darling. No, he was more like a clerk or a retired schoolteacher.

There was nothing glamorous about him at all, nor around him. No woman ever killed herself for him. His name never appeared in the papers; there was no juicy gossip for him to be involved with. A long time ago, I once heard, he did have some kind of reputation. But by the time the war had ended he was quite forgotten. He was dead as a doornail as far as society was concerned.

Believe me, there is nothing at all interesting I can tell you about him. I don’t even have a photo of him. He didn’t like being photographed. Sometimes he behaved as if he were a dangerous criminal in hiding, afraid that someone might find his fingerprint on a glass he drank from. He was like a thief living under an assumed name. Well, yes, he was interesting, perhaps, but only in that he fought tooth and nail against the idea of being thought interesting. He’s not worth talking about.

Don’t blackmail me. I can’t stand it when you do that, begging and threatening at once. Do you want me to give him to you as well? Like the ring, and the U.S. dollars? Am I to give everything away? Do you want to leave me with nothing? Well, all right, I’ll give you this, too. Once you leave me, of course, I’ll be left utterly empty-handed. I’ll have nothing at all of my own. Is that what you want?

Fine, I’ll tell you. But don’t imagine it means you’ve outsmarted me or that you’re stronger than I am. It’s not that you’re stronger: it’s just me being weak.

It’s a hard thing to talk about. It’s as if I wanted to talk about something that wasn’t quite there. I can only talk about tangible things—I mean, what exists in the simpler kind of everyday life. But there are people who live not only in the everyday but in another reality, on some other plane. Such people might be able to tell you about what isn’t there, and make it sound as interesting as a detective story. What this man told me was that everything was reality—not only tangible things you can actually grasp, but concepts too. If nothingness was a concept, he was interested in it. He’d hold nothingness in his hands, turn it about a bit, and look at it from every side, just as if it were an object. Don’t blink at me like that; I can see you don’t understand. I didn’t understand, either, but then, somehow or other, I did start to see my way through to it. Being in his company, I saw how in his hands, and in his mind, even the idea of nothingness was developing a reality; that it was growing and filling up with meaning. It was a trick he had … Don’t you bother with it, it’s too airy-fairy for people like us.