Portraits of a Marriage Read Online Free Page A

after that with my husband, and then we separated.
    I’m quite sure now that we’d have separated in the third year of themarriage had it not been for the child. Why? … Because by that time I knew I could not live with my husband. There is no pain like the pain of knowing you love someone but cannot live with them.
    “Why?” I asked him once, and he told me what he thought the problem was.
    “You want me to give up my humanity,” he said. “I can’t do that. I’d sooner die.”
    I immediately understood and replied: “Then don’t die. Live on and remain a stranger to me.”
    He always meant what he said: he was that kind of man. He didn’t always do it straightaway—sometimes it took a few years for words to become deeds, but sooner or later deeds followed. Other people talk about hopes and plans after supper by way of conversation, then immediately forget what they’ve said; when my husband talked of such things, action followed. It was as if he were bound to his words in some visceral way: what he said once remained with him and would not let him go. If he said “I would sooner die,” then I was to know he meant it, that he would not surrender himself to me but would rather die first. It was part of his character, his fate … Sometimes, in the course of a conversation, he would let fall a few words, criticizing somebody, or suddenly reveal a plan—then time would pass without further mention until, one day, I’d notice that the person he’d criticized had vanished from our lives; that the plan mentioned in passing had two years later turned into reality.
    By the third year I knew our marriage was in deep trouble. My husband treated me with courtesy and tenderness. He loved me. He did not cheat on me. He was not involved with any other woman, only with me. And yet—please look away a moment, I think I am blushing—I felt that in the first three years of marriage, and especially in the last two of being together, that I was not so much his wife as …
    He loved me, no question about it. But at the same time it was as if he were merely tolerating me in his house, in his very life. There was patience and tolerance in his manner, but it was as though he had no choice in that matter and he’d simply resigned himself to living with me, to sharing a home with me, sharing one room of his life. That’s how it felt. He carried on talking to me as charming and affectionate as ever, taking off his glasses, listening, giving advice, sometimes even joking,and we’d go to the theater and lead a social life—and I’d watch him lean back, his arms folded, taking good-natured stock of the others, with just a hint of suspicion visible in his mocking, doubtful expression. Because he did not entirely yield himself to others, either. He listened to them seriously, fully sensible of his obligations to them, then answered them politely; but there was in his voice, I saw, a patronizing note, a certain pity, as if he did not quite believe them, as if he was aware that under even the most sincere human declarations there remained unarticulated layers of despair, fury, lies, and ignorance. It wasn’t something he could actually tell people, of course, and that was why he listened through to them with that deprecating forbearance, with that serious skeptical expression, smiling occasionally and shaking his head, as if telling the other person: “Do carry on. I know what I know.”
    You were asking me earlier if I loved him. I suffered a great deal with him. But I know I loved him—and I even know why I loved him … I loved him because he was sad and solitary; because he was beyond anyone’s help, even mine. But it took a long time, and a lot of suffering, before I realized and understood this. For years I thought he was looking down on me, that he had a low opinion of me … but it was something else.
    At forty years of age that man was as isolated as a monk in the desert. We lived in a world capital, in fine