Portraits of a Marriage Read Online Free PDF

getting him to reveal his secret; we had not accomplished our mission, the one real mission of our lives. We simply didn’t understand this man. She had given him life and I had given him a child … is there any more a woman could give a man? You do agree—she can’t give any more? I don’t know. One day I began to doubt. And that is what I want to tell you, today, because we have met, because I have seen him, and I feelnow that everything has built up inside me and I must tell someone, because I think about it all the time. So I’ll tell you now. I’m not boring you? Do you have half an hour? Listen, there may be just time enough.
    He might have respected both of us, even loved us to some degree. But neither his mother nor I understood him. That was the great failure in our lives.
    You say we need not, indeed it is impossible, to “understand” love? You’re wrong, darling. I used to say that, said it for a long time. I said these things were decreed by God. Love just is or is not. What is there to “understand”? … What, after all, is the value of human feeling if it’s just the product of things we can explain? … But then, as we grow older, we learn it’s not like that, it’s different from what we thought: we do, after all, have to try to “understand” things, including love. No, don’t shake your head and smile, it is true. We’re human beings: we are conscious of everything that happens to us. Our feelings and passions become tolerable or intolerable through consciousness. It is not enough to love.
    Let’s not argue about that. I know what I know. And I have paid a considerable price for it. What price? … My life, darling, my whole life. The fact that I am sitting here with you in this patisserie, in this lovely crimson salon, watching my husband buying candied orange peel for someone else. Not that it particularly surprises me, him buying candied orange peel. He had such taste in everything.
    Who is he buying it for? For the other woman, of course. I don’t even like to say her name. The one he went on to marry. Didn’t you know he had remarried? I imagined the news would have spread to Boston too; that you might have heard, even in America. It shows how silly we can be. How silly to think our personal affairs, things really close to our hearts, should be matters of world importance. While it was all happening—I mean the divorce and my husband’s second marriage—events of genuine world importance were taking place, countries were being divided, people were preparing for war, and one day war did break out … Not that it was surprising. When people prepare for something, said Lázár—war, for example—with such assiduity, such determination, such foresight, such calculation, that thing is bound eventually to happen. All the same I wouldn’t have been surprised at that time tosee banner headlines carrying news of my own personal war, my own battles, my defeats, my occasional victories—an entire survey of the front line that was my life … But that’s another story. At the time the child was born that was all in the dim and distant future.
    Perhaps I could put it this way: that in the two years when we still had the child, my husband made peace with the world and with me. Not a proper permanent peace, not yet, just a kind of amnesty, a ceasefire. He waited and watched. He worked to put his soul in order. He was, after all, a man of unimpeachable soul. As I told you before, he was a man. And more than that: he was a gentleman. I don’t mean the sort that goes to gentlemen’s clubs, of course, the sort that fights duels or shoots himself because he cannot pay his gambling debts. He never touched cards, in any case. On one occasion, I remember, he declared that a gentleman does not play at cards because he has no right to money that he has not earned. In other words, he was
that
sort of gentleman. He was polite and patient with the weak. With those who were his equals he