Portraits of a Marriage by Sándor Márai

had nothing to do with what I really felt. That’s much harder. I put up with it all my life, and you see, here I am. That’s always the case with life. Romantic, passionate people expect more, of course. I was never passionate. But, believe me, your situation is better. I almost envy you.”
    She tipped her head to one side and looked hard at me.
    “But don’t you go thinking I had a hard life. My life was no different from anyone else’s. I only tell you this because you asked, and because you are muddled with fever. Well, so now you know. You were asking if your marriage was as bad as it could be. I don’t think it is. It’s a marriage,” she declared, as if pronouncing judgment.
    “Would Mama advise us to stay together?” I asked in fear.
    “Of course,” she answered. “What are you thinking of? What do you think marriage is? A mood? A bright idea? It’s a sacrament, one of the laws of life. One shouldn’t even think about it,” she admonished me, apparently insulted.
    We said nothing for a long time. I gazed at her bony hands, her clever, nimble fingers, and the knitting pattern; I looked at her pale, calm face with its smooth features, ringed by white hair. There was no sign of suffering there. Even if she had suffered, I thought, she has succeeded in achieving the greatest of human triumphs: she had passed the test of life with distinction. She has not been broken by it. What more can anyone do? Everything else—desire, dissatisfaction—is nothingcompared to this. That’s what I told myself. But deep inside me I felt I couldn’t simply accept the situation. So I told her:
    “I can’t deal with his unhappiness. If he can’t be happy with me, let him go and seek happiness elsewhere, with someone else. With
her.”
    “Who?” my mother-in-law asked me, closely examining the stitches in her knitting, as if there could be nothing more important.
    “With his true wife,” I answered harshly. “You know. The real one. The one intended for him.”
    “What do you know about her?” my mother-in-law asked, her voice quiet, still not looking at me.
    It was I who was embarrassed again. Whenever I argued with these people, with mother and son, I always felt like a child, someone who had not been granted admittance to the serious adult rooms of life.
    “About who?” I asked greedily. “Who is there I should know about?”
    “Her,” my mother-in-law cautiously responded. “The real wife you were talking about … the intended one.”
    “Why? Is there an intended? Does she exist somewhere?” I asked, very loudly now.
    My mother-in-law bent over her knitting. Her voice was quiet.
    “There is always an intended one somewhere.”
    Then she fell silent. And I never heard her talk of this again. She was like her son: there was something final about her.
    But then, a few days after this conversation, I had gotten myself into such a condition of terror, I got better. I hadn’t understood my mother-in-law’s words straightaway. It was hard to feel seriously jealous at first, since she had spoken in general terms, in a kind of symbolic fashion. Well, of course, the intended always must live somewhere. But what about me,
me
, what was my role? I asked as I recovered. Who is his real wife, his intended wife, if not me? Where does she live? What is she like? Is she younger? Is she blond? How much does she know? I was utterly terrified.
    I panicked. I quickly recovered, went home, had dresses made, hurried to the hairdresser, played tennis, went swimming. I found everything in order at home … so much so I thought someone had moved out of the house. Or it was something else: you know … the realization that my life had, in the last few years, been relatively happy—thatdespite the suffering, the restlessness, and all I had thought intolerable, now that it was gone, all was well, better than it had even been? It was an odd feeling. Everything in the house was in its place, but the rooms felt empty, as