For the lower managerial class, culture is an inseparable part of the whole package: not experience but accomplishment. It is the top layer of the middle class that provides the artists, the creative types. I was a member of that group. That’s not a boast but an admission. Because, in the end, I did not create anything. Something was missing in me … what was it? Lázár called it the Holy Spirit. But he never explained what he meant by that.
But back to the problem with my first wife. What was it? Hypersensitivity and pride. It’s what lurks under every human frailty, every complaint, every mishap. We are afraid because pride prevents us accepting the gift of love. It takes great courage to allow oneself to be loved unconditionally. Courage is required, an all-but-heroic courage. Most people can neither give nor accept love, because they are cowardly and vain and afraid of failure. They are ashamed of giving themselves, and are even more ashamed of surrendering to someone else in case that means revealing a secret … the sad, human secret that one needs tenderness and cannot live without it. I believe that to be true. At least I did believe it, for a long time. I don’t argue it so much nowadays, because I’m getting old and have failed.
In what respect did I fail? I failed in precisely the respect I’m talking about. I lacked the courage to accept the tenderness of the woman who loved me. I resisted. I even looked down on her a little for it, because she was different from me—une petite bourgeoise with different tastes, wanting a different pace of life — and I was afraid I would eventually have to give in to some high-minded and extremely complex form of blackmail meant to drag the gift of love from me. I did not know then what I know now … I didn’t know that there was nothing positively shameful about anything in life. Cowardice is the one shameful thing, cowardice that prevents us giving and accepting the feelings of others. It’s practically a matter of honor. And I believe in honor. One can’t live in disgrace.
Your health! I like this wine, though there is a faint air of sweetness about the taste. I’ve got rather fond of it recently and tend to open a bottle most nights. Can I offer you a light, old man?
Briefly, then, the problem with my first wife was that our pace of life was different. There is something in the lower-middle-class soul that is always somewhat stiff, startled, artificial, horrified, overfond of pretense, and easily offended, especially once it is removed from its home and natural habitat. I can’t think of another class whose children creep through life in such a state of startled suspicion. As concerns that woman, the first one, she might have given me everything a woman can give a man if only she had been a little more fortunate in her birth, had she been born one rung up or one rung down: in other words, if she had been born into a state of greater psychological freedom. She was aware of everything, you know, and understood everything … She knew what flowers to display in the old Florentine vase in the spring and in the fall; she dressed correctly, with proper modesty; I never had the least reason to be embarrassed by her in society; she always answered and spoke precisely as she should; our household was exemplary; our servants went about their tasks without fuss, as she taught them to. We lived model lives. But there was another part of life, a more obscure corner of it, the corner that is reality, that is like a cataract or a jungle, that was less than perfect. I’m not thinking of the bedroom exclusively … though, naturally, I include it. The bedroom is a jungle too, after all. It contains the memory of an experience so primitive and absolute that its meaning and content is life itself. If we tend and weed this jungle, we produce a beautiful, cultivated, charming place, full of scented flowers, attractive trees and shrubs, and ringing, rainbow-colored fountains, but leave nothing of the jungle to which we desire to return but no longer can.
It’s quite a role to play, being a respectable citizen, a solid bourgeois, as they say. No one pays a higher price for culture than we do. It is a grand dramatic role, and as with every heroic part, you have to pay every penny of the cost. You need courage, the courage required for happiness. Art is an experience for an artist. For the solid citizen art is a miracle of training. You probably didn’t talk too much about this in Peru, where life is a matter of whatever bubbles up and displays itself as species. But I lived in Pest, in the exclusive suburb of Rózsadomb. People should take the climate into which they are born into account.
Then a lot of things happened I can’t talk about. The woman is still alive and lives alone. I see her sometimes. We don’t meet, because she still loves me. You know, she wasn’t the sort of woman from whom one separates, to whom you send alimony punctually on the first of the month, and a gift of furs or jewelry at Christmas or her birthday, and think you have done your duty by her. This sort of woman still loves you, nor will she ever love anyone else again. She is not angry with you, because her outlook is that once people have loved each other, there isn’t, nor can there ever be, real anger. Fury, the desire for vengeance, yes; but anger, that long-simmering, expectant sort of anger … no, that’s impossible. She may no longer be waiting for me. She is living and slowly dying. She will die in good taste, in properly refined fashion, as befits her class, quietly, and without fuss. She will die because there is no new way of lending meaning and content to her life, because she cannot live without feeling that she is needed by someone, by the one, special, individual being who has absolute need of her. She might not know this. She might think she has come to some sort of compromise. Some time ago, I ran into a woman with whom I had had an overnight fling, a friend from my first wife’s school days, who had recently returned from America. It was the night of the carnivaclass="underline" we met and, almost without being invited, she came back to my apartment. Some time in the morning she told me that Ilonka had spoken about me once. You know how diligent girlfriends can be … Well, she told me everything, as they all do. She told me, there in her friend’s ex-husband’s bed, the morning after just having met me, that she had always been jealous of Ilonka, that she had seen me once in a café in town, where she was sitting with my first wife, and I’d suddenly come in and bought some candied orange peel for my second wife, and that I took my money from a brown crocodile-skin wallet. That wallet was a gift from my first wife on my birthday. No, you can wipe that ironic, detective-like smile off your face, I really don’t use it anymore. So that’s how it was. And these two women, my first wife and her friend, had thoroughly discussed everything. What my wife said to her friend was that she loved me very much, had almost died when we parted, but then grew reconciled to it, because she had discovered I wasn’t her one, true, intended love; or, more precisely, that given all the other possibilities, I was one of the many who were not her true, intended loves; or, still more precisely, if greater precision is possible, that there was no such thing as the one, true, intended, real love. That’s what her friend told me in the morning, in my bed. I rather looked down on her because she knew all this and still leapt into my bed. When it comes to love I have my doubts about female solidarity, but just then I felt a little contemptuous of this woman, and subtly, politely, I threw her out. I thought I owed that much to my first wife. But I kept thinking about it. As time went by I started to feel that Ilonka was lying. It’s not true that one’s real love, the intended one, does not exist. That is, after all, what I was for her, that unique being. For me, on the other hand, there wasn’t anyone of such overwhelming importance, not her, not my second wife, nor the rest. But I didn’t know that at the time. We are such slow learners.