Portraits of a Marriage by Sándor Márai

Author:Sándor Márai [Márai, Sándor]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-59538-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

You see, dear boy, I was hoping for a miracle. What kind of miracle? Well, simply that love might prove to be eternal; that its mysterious, superhuman power might overcome loneliness, dissolve the distance between two people, and break down any artificial barriers that society had erected in the form of education, money, history, and memory. I felt in mortal danger and was looking for a hand to grasp. I longed for reassurance that there really was such a thing as empathy, as companionship: that all this was still humanly possible. So I reached out for Judit.

Once the first phase of confusion, tension, and anxious waiting had passed, we naturally turned to each other for love. I married her and waited for the miracle.

I imagined the miracle to be quite simple. I thought the differences between us might dissolve in the great melting pot of love. I lay down in bed with her as if I had finally arrived home after a long exile, at the end of a voyage. Home is much simpler, but more mysterious and more important, than abroad, because not even the most exotic foreign place can offer the experiences a few familiar rooms can. I mean childhood. It is the memory of expectation that lies at the bottom of all our lives. It’s what we recall when, much later, we see the Niagara Falls or Lake Michigan. We see the light and hear the sound of surprises, joys, hopes, and fears locked away in childhood. That is what we love, what we are forever seeking. And for an adult, perhaps only love can conjure something of that tremulous hopeful sense of waiting … love—in other words, not just bed and all that bed entails, but those moments of searching, waiting, and hoping that throw two people together.

Judit and I lay down in bed and made love. We made love passionately, expectantly, in wonder and hope. We were probably hoping that what the world and mankind had ruined might be put right by the two of us eye-to-eye in this other, purer, more ancient realm, in that eternal country without and beyond borders. I mean in bed. Any love preceded by an extended period of waiting—though maybe it’s not exactly romantic love when just a few cinders remain unconsumed by the purgatorial fires of waiting—hopes for a miracle from both the other and itself. Neither Judit nor I was exactly a youngster by then, but we were not old, just man and woman, in the complete, most basic sense of those words. We reach an age when it is not purely sexual satisfaction we desire of each other, not full-blown happiness or release, but a simple and solemn truth that vanity and falsehood had previously hidden from us, hidden from us even when we were in love: it is the truth that we are human beings, we men and women, and that we share a common enterprise or responsibility on earth, a responsibility that may not be quite as personal as we think.

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