I am back in Oxford after a hot summer in Italy. Early in my stay, I had a meeting with some art historians to discuss my work on the Pregnant Madonna by Piero Della Francesca and I was horrified to realize that they had a deep disgust of ladies that display the results of their ‘sins.’ This is a visceral reaction that seems to affect even their readings of archives that are clear and open to anyone.
How such men cope with their marriages is a mystery to me, and this reminds me that I should say something about this institution, the source of much happiness and of much aggravation for so many. As for me, I was happily married for 64 years until my wife died at 90, having suffered from Alzheimer’s for seven years. But that will be another story.
I was 19 and she 21 when we started to go out and we had a long courtship because we had to finish our University courses in Buenos Aires and I had to do my compulsory military service. After some five years, a cocktail of much happiness and some despondency, we were ready to get married, and here we had our first important decision to take. Both my fiancé and I were non-believers, but my future wife was strongly influenced by her best friends who were typical Argentinian communists, that is, daughters of a very wealthy man who, despite their politics, would not have been able to tell the feet from the head of a worker if they saw one. Naturally, for them, marriage was the right road to divorce. Not for me, though. Divorce was not allowed in Argentina at that time, but across the river, half an hour from Buenos Aires, in Uruguay, it was legal and that is where the truly ‘sophisticated people’ from Buenos Aires would go to start their happy march towards separation.
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