There’s nothing more I can tell you about my first wife.
That part no longer hurts, and I don’t feel guilty thinking about it. I know we killed the marriage: I myself, life, chance, the death of the child — all these played a part in killing it. That’s the way life kills. The stuff you read in the press is crude exaggeration, cheap muck. Life is more complicated, and prodigiously wasteful. It doesn’t care about this or that Ilonka … collectives and aggregates are what interest it: all the Ilonkas, all the Judits, all the Peters. What it wants to tell us, to articulate to us, concerns the lot of them, as a package. It’s no great revelation that this should be the case, but it takes a long time to learn it and reconcile oneself to it. I kept thinking, and eventually all feeling, all passion vanished. Nothing remained except responsibility. That’s all that ever remains for a man, whatever the experience. We move among the living and the dead, and are responsible … There’s nothing we can do to help. But I wanted to talk about my second wife. Yes, the one who has just left with the stocky gentleman.
Who was the second? No, that was not a middle-class woman, old chap. She was a prole. A working-class woman.
Do you want to know about her? Fine, I’ll tell you. And I want to be perfectly truthful with you.
She was a servant. She was fifteen when I first met her. She worked in our household, as a maid. I don’t want to bore you with adolescent love affairs. But I’ll tell you how it began and how it ended. As to what came between, I myself am not sure about that yet.
It began with the fact that no one in my family dared love anyone else in it. My father and mother lived a theoretically connubial existence; in other words, it was pretty abominable. They never raised their voices. It was alclass="underline" “What would you like, my dear?” “What can I do for you, darling?” That was how they lived. I don’t even know whether it was a bad life. It’s just that it wasn’t a good life. My father was proud and vain. My mother was a respectable middle-class woman in every sense of the word. Responsibility and discretion. They lived, died, loved each other, gave birth to me, and brought me up as if they were both priest and congregation at some kind of superhuman sacrament. Everything was ritual with us; breakfast and supper, social life, the contact between parents and children — even the love between them, I believe, or what tends to be called that, took the form of an impersonal rite. It was as though they had constantly to be accountable for something. Our lives were strictly planned. There are new and powerful states that prepare four- and five-year plans they carry out, with a ruthless, furious devotion, not caring whether their citizens like it or not. Because what matters to them is not the happiness of this or that individual but the happiness, at the end of those four or five years, of the collective, the nation, the people. There are many recent examples of this. And that is the way it was with us at home, only not with four- or five-year plans, but with forty- or fifty-year ones, quite irrespective of each other’s and our own personal happiness. Because all those rituals, all that work, the engagements, even death itself, had a deeper meaning: the preserving of order in the ranks of both class and family.
When I consider my memories of childhood I sense an anxious, grim sense of directedness behind everything. We worked like robots, going about our rich, refined, ruthless, emotionless, robot work. There was something we had to save, something we had to prove, every day, in everything we did. We had to prove we were of a certain class. The middle class. The guardians. We were doing an important job. We had to embody the notions of rank and manners. We were to suppress the revolt of the instincts, of the plebeians; we were not to run scared, not to succumb to the desire for individual happiness. You ask whether this is a conscious project.… Well, I wouldn’t exactly say my father or mother sat down regularly at the dinner table every Sunday to announce that week’s program of action or make speeches in which they outlined the next fifty-year family plan. But I couldn’t exactly say that we merely accommodated ourselves to the idiotic demands of class and occasion, either. We knew perfectly well that life had singled us out for a difficult series of tests.
It was not only our home, our carefully wrought way of life, our dividends, and the factory we had to protect, but the spirit of resistance that constituted the imperatives and deeper meaning of our lives. We had to keep up our resistance to the attractive powers of the proletariat, the plebs who wanted to weaken our resolve by continually tempting us to take various kinds of liberties, whose tendency to revolt we had to overcome, not in the world, but also in ourselves. Everything was suspect: everything was dangerous. We, like others, were careful to make sure the delicate machinery of a persnickety and ruthless society should continue to work undisturbed. We did this at home, judging the world on appearances while suppressing our desires and regulating our inclinations. Being respectable requires constant exertion of effort. I am referring here to the creative, responsible layers of the middle class — in other words, not the pushy lower orders who simply want a more comfortable, more diverse kind of life. Our ambition was not to live in greater comfort, or more diversely. Under all our acts, manners, and forms of behavior there was an element of conscious self-denial. We experienced it as a kind of religious vocation, being entrusted with the mission of saving a worldly, pagan society from itself. The task of those who perform this role, under oath and in accordance with the rules of the order, is to maintain that order and to keep secret that which should remain secret when danger threatens the objects of their care. We dined with that responsibility in mind. Every week we dutifully went to a performance — to the Opera House or to the National Theater. We received our guests, other responsible people, in the same spirit: they came in their dark suits, they sat down in the drawing room, or at the candlelit dining table with its fine silver and porcelain, where we served good, carefully chosen food and made empty conversation about sterile subjects, and believe me, there was nothing more sterile than our conversation.
But these empty conversations had a function, a deeper purpose. It was like speaking Latin among the barbarians. Beyond the polite phrases, the banal, meaningless arguments and ramblings, there was always the deeper sense that we responsible middle-class people had come together to observe a ritual, to celebrate an honorable compact, and that the codes we were speaking in — because every conversation was about something else — were ways of keeping a vow, proof that we could keep secrets and compacts from those who would rise against us. That was our life. Even with each other, we were constantly having to prove something. By the time I was ten years old I was as self-conscious and quiet, as attentive and well behaved, as the president of a major bank.
I see you’re looking amazed. You didn’t know this world. You are a creative man, someone who makes things happen. You and your family have only just begun to learn this lesson. You are the first of your family to move up a class … You are ambitious. I had only memories, traditions, and duties. For all I know, you might not understand any of this. Please don’t be cross if you don’t. I’m doing the best I can.
The apartment was always a little on the dark side. It was a nice apartment, a proper house with a garden, always something being built and improved. I had my own room upstairs where I lived, my tutor or governess sleeping in the room next door. I don’t think I was ever completely alone, not in all my childhood. I was taught to be amenable both at home and at school. They tamed the wildness in me, the human part, so I should be a proper member of my class and put on a decent show. That may be why I so obstinately, so desperately, craved solitude. I have been living alone now, without even a single servant, for some time now. There’s just a woman who comes in occasionally when I am not at home, who tidies my room and generally disposes of the flotsam and jetsam of my life. At last there is no one breathing down my neck, checking on me, keeping an eye on me: no one to whom I am responsible … There are considerable joys and satisfactions in life. They often come late, in the wrong, unexpected forms. But they do come. When, having left the family house, after two marriages and divorces, I found myself alone, I felt — for the first time in my life — a kind of melancholy relief on having at last achieved something I actually wanted. It was like serving a life sentence in prison, then being released on account of good behavior … for the first time in decades you sleep without fearing the guard patrolling the night corridor who looks in on you through the peephole in the middle of the night. Life has its blessings, even blessings like this. You have to pay heavily for them, but in the end life hands them to you on a plate.