Portraits of a Marriage

by Sándor Márai

  This one was different. She wasn’t a bag of nerves. She told me straight from the start, no beating about the bush, that the only thing she wanted of me was that I should let her adore me. She wasn’t insisting on full-blown romance with hearts and flowers. Cigarettes were all she needed—that is, apart from adoring me and making a fuss of me.

  At first I thought she had fallen for the artist in me. I’m not one to boast, I’m simply recognizing the fact that there’s something irresistible about me … especially now that I’ve had the bottom set of my teeth fixed. What you laughing at? It’s just as I said. They don’t come to me because I look good. I’m not like those snotty kids with one-track minds who hang around in bars … It’s the artist in me, that I still am, though they can’t know my true quality … The Irish widow I’m currently fixed with will tell you the same. It’s the artist that’s the draw, that knocks them out.

  It took me time to find out what her trouble really was. Because there’d been someone, someone who was and wasn’t there … Her husband? No, he’d vanished from her life, she wasn’t interested in him. It was someone else, another one who left the country. So then she followed him from Budapest. But she missed him—the guy had popped it before the kid arrived in Rome. The useless bastard had died on her, he wasn’t going to wait for her. He’s dust now in the Roman cemetery, like Sweetheart. At least they’re together now. When she discovered her knight-at-arms hadn’t waited for her, she got real depressed. She was so lonely in Rome, she was like a virgin widow mourning for a guy who’d died before they could get married.

  We met in a café in Rome. A Hungarian paper was sticking out of my pocket. It caught her eyes. Because back then I’d buy a Hungarian newspaper or some such thing when I was feeling a bit nostalgic. Then we got together. I don’t want to make it seem smoother than it was. She was a bit cool at first, but she soon came to. Neither of us were doing anything in the evening so I invited her to the bar. Next day I moved in with her at the hotel, and it became our love nest. Fall was real nice in Rome that year, nice weather. The good life didn’t last that long, but long enough for me to discover the truth. One evening when we were down to our last penny she told me everything.

  Was it the truth? Can’t be sure of that—I mean, you never know with women. But I felt she was kind of emptying herself out, holding nothing back. She was no shy violet, not a giggly little girlie given to blushing. For once in her life she wanted to tell someone the truth, or whatever she thought was the truth. It might have been all fantasy, as it always is when a woman is really hard pressed. She started with her husband, who was still alive somewhere but was no longer her husband. And she finished with this bald guy, the one she followed to Rome … she followed him like someone with a real itch. Because by that time she could no longer stick the people’s democracy.

  So I heard her through, right till dawn. It was kind of exciting, a bit criminal, talking through the night. She spilled the beans on what life with the gentry was like.

  I was prepared to take it with a pinch of salt, if you know what I mean. But she convinced me, because, well, the kid was like me, she’d worked her way up into high society, starting lower than even I did, me, a boy from Zala! She came from the underclass. Literally. She pushed her way out of the mud the way a zombie does in a graveyard. She spent her childhood in a ditch in the wetlands along with the rest of her family. Her dad was an occasional farmhand, but then Sweetheart went to work as a maid for the gentry. For some time she was just a scullery maid, a nobody with bad shoes, someone to wash the toilet out after Their Lordships had used it. But eventually one of the crazy boujis started getting the hots for her, and it turned out to be the master’s son. She made him wait for it until he married her. Pretty soon she became Her Ladyship.

  Then, one night, she told me what it was like living in this oh-so-refined, well-mannered house once the world was stood on its head. The old order was going right down the drain. I liked hearing about that. I was sure she was telling the truth. But it was like a fairy tale too, like something from another world, a world I wouldn’t have minded taking a peek in, what they call “the rich man’s playground.” But I only got to first base. The ladies I went with never invited me into their parlors or to their social affairs.

  This particular story stuck in her mind. Because at that time, and even now, there’s a lot said about the end of the class war because it’s over now that we proles are winning. The upper classes are just ticking over, playing extra time before the game is up.

  But when there’s no one to talk to in the bar, I sit and think. Did I, a prole, really come out on the winning side? My boss there in the back room is a nicer guy than the bailiff was back in Zala. I’ve got a car, an Irish widow, a TV, an icebox—I’ve even got a credit card. In other worlds I’m a dude, a proper dzhentleman. And it’s all on the plan. If I ever got curious about culture, I could afford to buy a book. But I hold back, because I had a hard time of it and I’ve learned to be modest. I don’t need a book to tell me the class war is not being fought out in the streets now. But a prole remains a prole and the cream remains the cream, it’s just that we avoid each other in different ways now. A long time ago, the devil knows how, it came about that the poor guy had to sweat to produce everything the rich guy needed. Today, though, the rich guy has to rack his brains to see how he can get me, the poor guy, to buy everything some middle guy produces. He wants to force-feed me, to cram me like a fattened goose. He needs to fatten me up, because the only way the middle guy can remain the middle guy and the rich guy the rich guy is if I buy whatever the middle guy tries to palm off on me. The middle guy’s job is to hand me all kinds of crap on credit. It’s a mad world, friend, and its rules are pretty hard to figure out. Take my car! It’s parked there on the corner. It’s brand-new. Whenever I get in it and turn the key, I remember what it was like when I was a kid—a car! my God!—I ran around barefoot and was dazzled any time a trap with a couple of horses trotted past me, a trap with the driver up front with shiny metal buttons on his vest, a ribbon hanging off his top hat, cracking his whip like a cop handing out a beating. Two horses! That was the dude back then. But now it’s like my cart has a hundred and fifty horses pulling it along—that’s horsepower for you! And sometimes when I draw up alongside a bus I think I’m the hundred-and-fifty-first, because I could get home easier by subway or the bus. Some Saturdays, the widow and I and a few pals get in the car and drive out to the sea, where we eat a burger, but we don’t get out, because why should we? Then we go home. But I need the car, because it’s status. Same with the tape recorder. I’ve recorded everything from singing “Yankee Doodle” through to reciting Our Father so the world can keep my voice for posterity … but now it just sits in a corner gathering dust and I can’t think what else to do with it. I don’t even have to multiply and divide, I let the gizmo do that for me. There’s a computer guy who comes in here who sold me one those pocket calculators. You just press the buttons and up come the numbers. That makes me as smart as Edison, right? And there’s that other machine where you don’t have to write out everything, you just photocopy your Dear John letter and hand it to the mailman. And there’s the shaver—I mean, it scrapes the monkey off you. And the toothbrush—electricity again—see the ones I’ve just had done, I could pass for a bishop. On credit. And … I lose track. I’ve got a newfangled camera where you just push a button and it spits out your picture, just like that. You can have endless fun with your girlfriend this way and be confident your fun won’t pass through someone’s developer, you can keep your screwing in the house the way my mother used to keep soup. And this is all mine, me, a prole! My mama, who all her life washed the underpants in a tub, wouldn’t believe her eyes if she were here. I’d buy her one of those pants washers—and dryers too. Electric! Because all this is mine now, it belongs to the working-class boy! Not to mention the world—the whole wide world is mine, because … see here, the bellboy, a snotty-nosed kid, has just taken his bride on a flight to Africa,
to Kenya, on credit, on installments … I could do it myself … And should I want to really indulge myself, I could pay for sex with as many people as I like. I could join a club. It’s like the stud farm back in Zala, when they lead the bull in. I could join and become a member. Certainly opens your eyes! Quite a life, eh? But look around, use your own eyes. When I first arrived in this enormous gut of a country, I didn’t have a nickel. And today? Take a good look at me, look me up and down—believe it or not, I swear to God I am in debt to the tune of eight thousand greenback dollars! Go out and do it yourself, sucker! And don’t leave your mouth hanging open, I can see you don’t believe me. Ask anyone in the neighborhood, they’ll all tell you. Just hang round awhile and you too can have a lawn mower and an electric cooker with a red light to fry your burgers in a proper scientific manner. And everything is there on tap, because your middle-class middleman is waiting there, his tongue hanging out, just dying to make a lord out of your bottom-line prole. You too will get consumer fever, the way I did, the way a sheep gets fleas.

  Okay, slide me that glass. There … you know, every so often, despite being a prole, I sometimes feel this big emptiness in me. It’s like the way His Ex-Lordship suddenly feels homesick. The worst thing is the way they won’t leave you in peace. There’s advertisements everywhere—buy this, order that. I’ll order up a one-way ticket to heaven next, just so I get some peace. When I was in Rome I heard how back in the old days, when the Caesars were around, the top Roman guys used to tickle their throats with a peacock feather so they could heave up in order to make room for the next delicious thing. That’s what those advertisements are: peacock feathers. They get you all excited, and I don’t mean just me, but the dog and the cat besides, since they can see what great things the dogs and cats on TV fill their bellies with. That’s the class war today! We’ve won, buddy! It’s just that I have to touch my head to check it’s still there, and to see if I can stuff any more into it.

  When Sweetheart was cleaning out the john back home, being rich meant something different. She spent a whole night telling me about it.

  I can’t remember everything she said. We talked like we were trying to spin out a never-ending good-bye. But some of those things come to mind now and then. It was like it wasn’t her speaking at all those times, not Sweetheart at all, the girl who’d made her way up from the very bottom—I mean, she never went to school, not like Her Ladyship, the one she served. And Sweetheart could really talk, talk like a tape recorder, like recorded speech. Her mind was like a narrow strip of sound tape: it preserved every little thing, every bit of background noise. Every syllable stuck to it the way a fly does to flypaper. You say it: it stays there. Maybe all women have a spool of tape inside them like that. And maybe, once in their lives, they find just the right set of equipment, one that catches their voices just so, and then they say everything they’ve been saying to themselves, inside themselves, all those years … It’s quite a fashion item now, the recorder, and women soon catch on to fashion. Sweetheart quickly extracted the important information from the stuff the gentry used to chat about in their own secret language, the kind of language only the invited and members of the family spoke. It’s like the way only Gypsies understand Romany, the horse dealers and the guys in caravans. The gentry had their own self-made language too. It’s like not saying what you really think but doing a kind of dance around it while smiling sweetly all the time. The times people like us curse, they keep quiet. And they eat different stuff. And they get rid of it differently too, not like us proles. But Sweetheart saw all this and was a quick learner. By the time she met me, she could have been a professor at some institution where they teach civilization to the spiritually deprived. From the moment she started scrubbing out the john she learned everything from the gentry, things she could never have dreamt of in the ditch. Believe it or not, it turned out that later she had not only jewels, not only furs, but her own nail-polish remover. What’s up? You don’t believe me? I tell it as it is. Mind you, she herself spoke about it in an embarrassed kind of way, as if the deal weren’t quite straight.

  She paid attention to everything; she was like a sparrow that pecks up grains in horseshit. That was till she met the bald guy, some kind of writer, who was highbrow, like the big shots here in the bar, but in a different way. He was the sort of writer who didn’t want to write anymore. And some of the things he said got under Sweetheart’s skin—they excited her. She told me in a shaky voice that she had never slept with him, that they only had soul-to-soul chats, that’s all. It might have been so, I guess, otherwise she wouldn’t have followed him to Rome. The clown must have given her some ideas that made her feel a little giddy. He rambled on about how there was something that couldn’t simply be demanded at the barricades or extorted by threatening to bomb people. It was something really extra, like the shivers you get when you’re at it in bed. And when it comes to things like that, a prole like me begins to suspect that it’s pointless having every bargain going, that there’s no real happiness to be got till he’s wrestled some special magic from the old master’s fist.

  It was something like that, she was saying. Sweetheart couldn’t really understand it herself, but I saw how it excited her. And now, much later, I myself am scratching my head trying to work out what it is that bugs us all. The stuff the bourgeois have that still remains to get. It’s hard to get, of course, because the bastards have taken good care to hide it. My insides itch when I think of it. There was a time when only the upper classes allowed themselves to suffer from nerves. But nowadays I see how nervous a guy in jeans gets when someone different from him comes and sits next to him on the subway. Or at the movies. Anywhere. He gets nervous, makes sure he has no body contact, and gives his neighbor—so different from himself—sidelong glances. He suspects that he is not as important as that other guy, the one next to him, the one with the pressed clothes and spectacles. It’s not the guy’s manner that gets to him—I mean, I learned that a long time ago, and I’m as well-mannered and as correct in my behavior as the newly elected chairman of the local council. It’s something else, the devil knows what, whoever invented it.

  Sweetheart quickly learned everything you need for good manners. But the bald guy said something to her that wouldn’t let her be. Right down to when it seemed it wasn’t her speaking. It was someone else speaking through her, the way someone plays an instrument, a violin or a piano. The music is what comes out. When this idiot half-ass scribbler disappeared from her life, from our lovely Budapest, she couldn’t just let him go, so she followed him … Eventually she confessed that he’d died there in Rome, among the statues, in the very hotel, in the very bed in the very room where we were sleeping, that’s when we weren’t making hay. That’s women for you. Take it from me, buddy, listen to experience. They’ll follow whoever they’ve really set their eyes on, providing they haven’t already slept with them. They get all screwed up and twisted with frustration. They are set on the idea that the guy they want should become a part of them. They visit the cemetery and get upset when they see someone else’s flowers on the grave of the poor faithless departed. All because a second-rate poet tells them there’s something better in the world than grub and booze. What is it? They call it “culture.” And the clown goes on to say this culture thing is all a kind of reflex.

  Have you any idea what that is? Neither of us really got it: not her, not me. Afterwards I couldn’t help looking it up in the dictionary … I actually took a walk down to the library and looked up “reflex.” I thought about it, I turned it over and over in my mind till I was quite sick of it, but ended no wiser. It was compulsive, like when someone’s constantly touching their nose to check it’s still there … The dictionary said there was the learned kind and the inherited kind … you ever heard of such a thing?

  But that’s the shit with culture, you need it for status too now. I can’t see why people sweat tears over it, because it’s not like it’s a secret anymore. It’s all there in the big encyclopedias. You jus
t take the book from the shelf and there you are, you got culture. So what is it? Oh yes, it’s a reflex too. Look, I’m a simple guy, as you know. A modest man. So I’m telling you straight, I am genuinely cultured. Just look at me! I know I don’t play the drums anymore, but I still got reflexes … Sometimes, when I’m at home with my Irish widow—she’s religious—I take out the drums and I drum like I see on TV, like that black preacher when he’s whipping up his flock. The widow grows dreamy then, leans her head on my shoulder, and her breath comes short until she too gets the reflex. Nobody could say of me I don’t have a reflex … So am I still a prole? Is there something left for me to take from the gentry that I haven’t yet taken? Something they don’t want to give me? … You and I saw the Commies up close, didn’t we? They can do their song and dance about what it will be like when everything belongs to the masses, the people. The union guys here have worked it out that they get a better deal here with Count Rockefeller and Prince Ford than they’d get from the fruits of their socialist labor. The pay’s better. We know by now that it’s all talk and big words. Is it possible, then, that the class war is still not over? Is there anything the bourgeois has tucked away from us? And should a prole lose his hair over that?

  Wait a moment, I see the lady is crying. I can’t bear to look at her when her eyes are full of tears but her mouth is grinning. I must look after the embalmer too … look how enviously he’s looking at her, because she’s got that holy smile without the use of paraffin.

  Look, this is what she looked like the moment before she got on the plane without a return ticket. Go on, have a good look. I look at it sometimes myself.