I would like to have made peace between them. But that could only be when they were not cross with each other! I tried to probe the nature of the relationship, proceeding very carefully, the way you’d probe a wound. But the first touch frightened them and they immediately started talking about something else. What could I have said? … Neither accusation nor complaint had any clearly visible, tangible object. Might I have suggested that mother and son had injured each other some time in the past? I couldn’t, because both were, perfectly properly, “fulfilling their obligations.” It was as if they had been constructing alibis their whole lives. Our name days, birthdays, Christmas, those lesser and greater tribal rituals common to all families, were properly conducted, down to the minutest detail. Mama received a present; Mama gave a present. My husband kissed her hand; she kissed his forehead. At dinner or supper Mama took her place at the head of the family table and everyone conducted respectful conversations with her, on the subjects of family and the world at large, never arguing, listening to Mama’s precise, courteous, quietly stated views — and then they ate and talked of something else. Oh, these family dinners! Those silences between conversations! It was this talking-about-something-else, this polite silence, forever and ever! This wasn’t something I could talk about with them between soup and main course, between birthday and Christmas, between youth and aging. I couldn’t say to them, “You are always talking about something else.” I couldn’t say anything because even with me, my husband was always talking about something else, and I suffered the same silences, the same shutting out as my mother-in-law, and sometimes I even thought that we were both to blame, his mother and I, because we didn’t know how to go about it: we had not succeeded in 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 feel now 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 to see 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 was strict and mindful of his rank, because he did not recognize any other kind of rank. No social rank, in his opinion, was higher than his own. The only other people he admired were artists. They have chosen the most difficult path, he said. They were God’s children. Only real artists, no one else, were superior to him.
And because he was a gentleman, he tried, when the child was born, to alleviate that frightening sense of detachment in his soul that was so painful to me. He made genuinely moving efforts to get closer to me and the child. It was like a tiger deciding to go on a vegetarian diet or to join the Salvation Army. How hard life is, how hard it is to be human …
That’s how we lived for two years. Not entirely well, not happily. But quietly. Those two years must have cost him dear. It needs a superhuman effort to go against one’s nature. He sweated blood for happiness. Starting from a position of absolute paralysis he tried to become relaxed, carefree, easygoing. The poor thing! … He might perhaps have suffered less if I’d released him psychologically, so all my needs, all my demands for love, could be satisfied by the child. But something was changing in me too, something I didn’t understand then. My love for my child was, exclusively, through my husband. Maybe that is why God decided to punish me.