Journey by Moonlight Page 7

  Erzsi listened with delight. The actual history of Tuscany did not for one minute interest her, but she adored him when he came alive like this. She loved the way that at these moments, in his historical day-dreams, precisely when he reached the furthest point from actual living people and the present world, his remoteness left him and he became a normal person. Her sympathy soon merged with more powerful feelings, and she thought with pleasure of the expected sequel later that night, all the more because the night before he had been in a bad mood, and fell asleep, or pretended to, the moment he lay down.

  She knew that Mihály’s exalted mood could easily be diverted from history towards herself. It was enough to put her hand in his and gaze deep into his eyes. He forgot Tuscany, and his face, flushed as it was with wine, grew pale with sudden desire. Then he began to woo and flatter her, as if trying to win her love for the very first time.

  “How strange,” Erzsi thought. “After a year of intimacy he still woos me with that voice, with that diffidence, as if totally unsure of success. In fact the more he wants me, the more distant and fastidious his manner becomes, as if to embellish his desire, to give it the proper respect—and the greatest intimacy, physical intimacy, doesn’t bring him any closer. He can only feel passion when he senses a distance between us.”

  So it was. Mihály’s desire spoke to her across a distance, in the knowledge that she would leave him. Already she had become for him a sort of beautiful memory. He drank heavily to sustain this mood, to make himself believe that he wasn’t with Erzsi but with the memory of Erzsi. With Erzsi as history.

  But meanwhile Erzsi drank too, and on her wine always had a strong effect. She became loud, jolly and extremely impatient. This Erzsi was rather new to him. Before their marriage she had had little opportunity for unguarded behaviour when with him in public. He found this new Erzsi extremely attractive, and they went up to the bedroom with equal haste.

  That night, when she was at once the new Erzsi and the Erzsi of history, Erzsi-as-memory, when Zoltán Pataki’s letter, with its implicit reminder of the Ulpius days, had so deeply shaken him, Mihály forgot his long-standing resolution and admitted elements into his married life which he had always wanted to keep away from Erzsi. There is a kind of lovemaking fashionable among certain adolescent boys and still-virgin girls, which lets them seek pleasure in a roundabout way, avoiding all responsibility. And there are people, like Mihály, who actually prefer this irresponsible form of pleasure to the serious, adult, and, as it were, officially approved variety. But Mihály, in his heart, would have been thoroughly ashamed to acknowledge this inclination, being fully aware of its adolescent nature, of its adolescent limitations. Once he had arrived at a truly serious adult relationship with Erzsi he had determined it would express itself only along the ‘officially approved lines’, as befitting two serious-minded adult lovers.

  That night in Florence was the first and only derogation. Erzsi was filled with wonder, but she accepted him willingly and reciprocated his unaccustomed gentleness. She did not understand what was happening, nor did she understand afterwards his terrible depression and shame.

  “Why?” she asked. “It was so good that way, and anyhow I love you.”

  And she fell asleep. Now he was the one who lay awake for hours. He felt that finally, definitively, he was facing the bankruptcy and collapse of his marriage. He had to acknowledge that here too he had failed as an adult, and, what was even worse, he had to concede that Erzsi had never before given him so much pleasure as now, when he made love to her not as a partner in adult passion but as an immature girl, a flirtation on a springtime outing.

  He climbed out of bed. As soon as he was sure she was still asleep he went to the dressing table where her reticule lay. He rummaged in it for the cheques (Erzsi was their cashier). He found the two National Bank lire cheques, each for the same amount, one in his name, the other in hers. He withdrew his own, and in its place smuggled in a sheet of paper of similar size. Then, very carefully, he put it in his wallet, and went back to bed.

  VI

  THE NEXT MORNING they continued on their way to Rome. The train pulled out of Florence into the Tuscan landscape, between hillsides green with spring. It made slow progress, stopping for ten minutes at every station, where the passengers disembarked until it was ready to leave, then drifted back, chattering and laughing, at the comfortable pace of the South.

  “Just look,” observed Mihály. “You see so much more from the window of a train, here in Italy, than you can in any other country. I don’t know how they do it. The horizon is wider here, or the objects smaller, but I bet you can see five times as much in the way of villages, towns, forests, rivers, clouds and sky here, than you would from a train window in, say, Austria.”

  “Indeed,” said Erzsi. She felt sleepy, and his worship of all things Italian was beginning to irritate. “All the same, Austria’s more beautiful. We should have gone there.”

  “To Austria?!” cried Mihály. He was so offended he couldn’t continue.

  “Put your passport away,” said Erzsi. “Once again you’ve left it out on the table.”

  The train stopped at Cortona. When he saw the little hilltop town Mihály had the feeling that once, long ago, he had known many such places and was now savouring the pleasure of renewing old acquaintance.

  “Tell me, why do I feel as if I spent part of my youth among these hilltop towns?”

  But Erzsi had nothing to say on the subject.

  “I’m bored with all this travelling,” she remarked. “I wish I was already in Capri. I’ll have a good rest when we get there.”

  “What, Capri! It would be so much more interesting to get off here in Cortona. Or anywhere. Somewhere unplanned. For example, the next stop, Arezzo. Arezzo! It’s just incredible that there really is a place called Arezzo, that Dante didn’t make it up when he compared their gymnasts to devils because they used their backsides as trumpets. Come on, let’s get off at Arezzo.”

  “I see. We’re getting off at Arezzo because Dante wrote that sort of rubbish. Arezzo will be just another dusty little bird’s nest, doubtless with a thirteenth-century cathedral, a Palazzo Communale, a bust of the Duce on every street-corner, with the usual patriotic inscriptions, several cafés, and a hotel called the Stella d’Italia. I really am not very interested. I’m bored. I just wish I was already in Capri.”

  “That’s interesting. Perhaps you no longer swoon at the sight of a Fra Angelico or a Bel Paese because you’ve been to Italy so often. But I still feel I am committing a mortal sin at every station where we don’t get off. There’s nothing more frivolous than travelling by train. One should go on foot, or rather in a mail-coach, like Goethe. Take me, for example. I’ve been to Tuscany, but I haven’t really been there. Oh yes, I travelled past Arezzo, and Siena was somewhere nearby, and I never went there. Who knows if I will ever get to Siena if I don’t go there now?”

  “Tell me: when you were at home you never showed what a snob you are. What does it matter if you don’t get to see the Siena Primitives?”

  “Who wants to see the Siena Primitives?”

  “What else would you want to do there?”

  “What do I know? If I knew, perhaps it wouldn’t be so exciting. But just to say the name Siena gives me the feeling that I might stumble across something there that would make everything all right.”

  “You’re daft. That’s the problem.”

  “Perhaps. And I’m hungry. Have you got anything to eat?”

  “Mihály, it’s appalling how much you’ve been eating since we came to Italy. And you’ve only just had breakfast.”

  The train pulled in to a station called Terontola.

  “I’ll get out here and have a coffee.”

  “Don’t get off. You’re not an Italian. The train might start at any moment.”

  “Of course it won’t. It always stands for a quarter-of-an-hour at every station. Cheers. God bless.”

  “Bye, silly monkey. Do write to me.”r />
  Mihály left the train, ordered a coffee, and, while the espresso machine coaxed the marvellous steaming liquid out of itself, drop by drop, he began to chat with a local about the sights of Perugia. Finally he drank the coffee.

  “Come, quickly,” said the Italian, “the train’s going.”

  By the time they got there the train was half way out of the station. Mihály just managed to clamber onto the last coach. This was an old-fashioned third-class carriage, with no corridor. Every compartment was a separate world.

  “Never mind,” he thought. “I’ll move up to the front at the next station.”

  “Will this be your first visit to Perugia?” asked the friendly native.

  “To Perugia? I’m not going to Perugia, unfortunately.”

  “Then you must be going on to Ancona. That’s not a good idea. Stop off at Perugia. It is a very old city.”

  “But I’m heading for Rome.”

  “For Roma? You are joking.”

  “I’m what?” asked Mihály, thinking he must have misheard the word in Italian.

  “Joking,” shouted the Italian. “This train doesn’t go to Roma. My, what a witty fellow!” (using the appropriate idiom).

  “And why shouldn’t this train go to Rome? I got on at Florence with my wife. It said Rome on it.”

  “But that wasn’t this train,” the Italian replied with glee, as if this was the greatest joke of his life. “The train to Roma went earlier. This is the Perugia-Ancona train. The line forks at Terontola. Wonderful! And the signora is happily on her way to Roma.”

  “Terrific,” replied Mihály, and stared helplessly out of the window at Lake Trasimene, as if an answer might come paddling across it towards him.

  When he had taken his cheque and passport the night before he had thought—of course, not really seriously—that they might perhaps find themselves separated during the journey. When he got off at Terontola it had again flitted across his mind that he might leave Erzsi to continue on the train. But now that it had really happened he was amazed and disturbed. But at all events—it had happened!

  “And what will you do now?” urged the Italian.

  “I shall get off at the next station.”

  “But this is an express. It doesn’t stop before Perugia.”

  “Then I’ll get off at Perugia.”

  “Didn’t I just say you were going to Perugia? You’ll get there, no problem. A very old city. And you must visit the surrounding countryside.”

  “Great,” thought Mihály. “I’m on my way to Perugia. But what will Erzsi do? Probably go on to Rome and wait there for the following train. But she might also get off at the next station. Perhaps she’ll go back to Terontola. And she won’t find me there. It won’t be easy for her to work out that I left on the Perugia train.

  “Yes, that’ll fox her. So if I now get off at Perugia, it’ll certainly be a day or two before anybody finds me. It will take even longer if she doesn’t stop in Perugia but carries on from there on God knows what line.

  “Lucky that I’ve got my passport with me. Luggage? I’ll buy myself a shirt and whatnot—underwear is good and cheap in Italy. I was going to buy some anyway. And money … how are we off for money?”

  He took out his wallet and in it discovered his National Bank lire cheque.

  “Of course, last night! … I’ll change it in Perugia, there must be a bank there that will take it.”

  He snuggled into his corner and fell deeply asleep. The friendly Italian woke him when they reached Perugia.

  PART TWO

  IN HIDING

  Tiger, Tiger, burning bright

  In the forests of the night …

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  VII

  THE SCENE is the great Umbrian plain. In one corner, on its high table of rock, stands Perugia. In the other, propped against the vast hill of Subasio, Assisi gleams white, or, for a few days every year, is ablaze with flowers. Everywhere teeming fruit-trees filled the air with their annual jubilation: the strange, twisting-branched mulberries, the pale Italian-green olives, and those great lilac-coloured trees whose name Mihály could learn from no-one. By day one could go about in shirt-sleeves. The evenings were still rather cool, but not unpleasantly so.

  Mihály went on foot from Spello to Assisi, and thence up to the town’s highest point, the Rocca. There he listened while a wise and beautiful Italian boy explained its history, sat on a wall of the old fortress, gazed for long hours across the Umbrian landscape, and was happy.

  “Umbria is totally different from Tuscany,” he thought: “more rustic, more ancient, more holy, and perhaps a shade bleaker.

  “The land of the Franciscans, and the true hilltop town. Back home, they always built down in the valleys, under the hills. But here they build up on the hills, above the plain. Did those early founders harbour some obscure race memory of enemy attack? What was the terror that drove them ever upwards to the protection of steep rocks? Wherever a hill rose up out of the plain they immediately built a town on it.

  “And here every town is in fact a city. Spello, for example. Back home it would be a mean little village. Here it’s a real city, with a cathedral and a coffee-house, much more so than, say, Szolnok or Hatvan. And no doubt some great painter was born here, or some great battle took place nearby.

  “The Italian landscape isn’t as simply friendly and merely pretty as I had imagined it. Certainly not here in Umbria. Here there is something desolate, something dark and rugged, like the bay-tree: that exactly epitomises the harsh attractiveness of Italy. Perhaps it’s the great barren hills that do it. I would never have thought there were so many barren and really high mountains. There are still patches of snow on Subasio.”

  He broke off a branch of the tree whose name he did not know and, bedecked with flowers, cheerfully made his way down to the town. In the piazza, opposite the ancient temple of Minerva—the first ancient temple Goethe saw on his Italian travels—he sat down outside a little café, ordered vermouth, and asked the waitress the name of the tree.

  “Salsify,” she lisped, after a slight hesitation. “Salsify,” she repeated, without conviction. “At least that’s what they call it back home, up in Milan. But here everything has a different name,” she added, with contempt.

  “Like hell it’s salsify,” thought Mihály. “Salsify would be the house-leek. This must be the Judas tree.”

  But this detail aside, he felt very content. The Umbrian landscape diffused a general happiness, an unassuming Franciscan happiness. He felt, as so often in his dreams, that the important things happened not here but elsewhere, up there in Milan perhaps, where the sad exile, the little lisping girl, came from, or where Erzsi was … but now he was filled with the happy feeling that he did not have to be where the important things happened, that he was somewhere entirely other, behind God’s back.

  During his walk to Assisi the hope had occurred to him that he might perhaps meet Ervin. In their youth, when Ervin was dominant in the group, they had read everything they could about the great saint of Assisi. Ervin must surely have joined the Franciscan order. But Mihály did not meet him, nor could the Franciscan churches revive the religious fervour of his youth, not even Santa Maria degli Angeli, built around the Portiuncula where the saint died. He decided not to wait around there until nightfall, fearing that anyone looking for him might well find him in such an obvious venue for tourists. He moved on, and by evening reached Spoleto.

  Here he dined, but did not enjoy the wine at all. These Italian reds sometimes end up smelling of methylated spirits, or onions, God knows why, when at other times they can be so unaccountably fine. He became even more depressed when he realised at the counter that, despite every economy, the money he had cashed in Perugia would soon run out, and he had no idea what he would then do. The outside world, which he had been so happy to forget in Perugia and its plain, began here to breathe once more down his neck.

  He took a cheap room in a cheap albergo—there really wasn’t much ch
oice in this tiny place—and then set off for one more little stroll before dinner round the back streets of Spoleto. Clouds veiled the moon. It was dark and the narrow lightless alleys of the sombre town closed around him, but not in the welcoming way the little pink streets had in Venice. Somehow he ended up in the sort of district where, with every step, the lanes grew darker and more menacing, the stairways led to ever more mysterious doors. He could see absolutely no-one about—he had quite lost his way—and then he suddenly felt sure that someone was following him.

  He turned. Just at that moment the person loomed round the corner: a huge, dark-clad form. An unnameable fear seized him, and he stepped hurriedly into an alleyway that proved darker and narrower than any so far.

  But the alley was blind. He could only turn back to where the stranger was already waiting at the narrow exit. Mihály began a few hesitant steps towards him, but, catching a better view of the man, he stopped in horror. The stranger wore a short, black, circular cape, of the sort common in the last century, and over it, a white silk scarf. On his ancient, soft, oddly crumpled face was a sort of indescribable smile. He spread his arms in a little gesture towards Mihály, and screeched in a thin, neutered voice, “Zacomo!”, or some such name.

  “Not me,” said Mihály. The stranger considered this, and a hasty apology passed between them. Mihály could now see that the indefinable smile on the old man’s face was quite witless.

  The fact that his escapade had arisen out of a purely irrational fear and had ended on this somewhat comic note, did nothing to reassure him. Rather, given his readiness to find symbolic significance, he concluded from this foolish episode that he was indeed being pursued, and that someone was indeed close on his tracks. In growing panic, he sought out the way back to his lodging, hurried up to his room, shut the door and blocked it with a chest. Even so, the room remained an alarming place. First of all, it was far too big for one person. Second, Mihály couldn’t bear that fact that in Italy the smaller hotels have tiled floors. He felt like a child who had been banished into the kitchen, a harsh enough punishment in itself (though one that in practice could never have happened to him). Third, the room was on the very edge of the hill town. Below the window the cliff fell sheer some two hundred metres, and, defying comprehension, a glass door had been cut beside it into the wall. Perhaps it had at one time opened onto a balcony, but the balcony had either been removed centuries before, or had collapsed from neglect. Only the door remained, opening into the sky two hundred metres up in the air. For any potential suicide this room would have been certain death. The door would have been irresistible. In addition to this, the vast wall was hung with a single picture, an illustration from some picture-book, of a hideously ugly woman dressed in the fashion of the last century, holding a revolver.