Journey by Moonlight (9 page)

T
HE 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 choice 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.

Mihály decided that he had slept in more reassuring places. What worried him even more was that his passport was downstairs with the grim-faced, but no less sly-looking, proprietor, who had resisted his cunning suggestion that he fill in the registration form
himself
on the pretext that his passport was written in an
incomprehensible
foreign tongue. The innkeeper insisted that the passport should remain in his keeping as long as Mihály continued on the premises. It seemed he had had some bad experiences. The inn was indeed just the sort to guarantee its owner his fair share of those. During the day, Mihály reckoned, probably only
down-
at-heel
revellers frequented the place, while in the evening
horse-thieving
types guffawed over cards in the so-called
sala da pranzo
, an eating area pervaded with kitchen smells.

But in whoever’s hands, for whatever reason, the passport was a potential threat to him, betraying his name to his pursuers. Just to make off, leaving the passport behind, would have been as
distressing
as going out without his trousers on, as we do in our dreams. He lay on the questionably clean bed, feeling very tense. He slept little. A mixture of sleep, dozing and anxious wakefulness blended themselves together into the all-pervasive night-time feeling of being closely followed.

He rose at the crack of dawn, sneaked downstairs, roused the innkeeper after a long struggle, paid his bill, reclaimed his
passport, and hurried off to the station. A half-awake woman made coffee for him at the bar counter. After a while, some sleepy labourers came in. Mihály’s anxiety would not leave him. He was in constant terror that someone would arrest him. The appearance of every soldier or policeman fuelled his suspicion, until, at last, the train pulled in. He began to breathe more freely and prepared to abandon his cigarette and climb on board.

Just then a very young and startlingly handsome little
fascista
stepped up to him and asked for a light before he threw down his cigarette.

“
Ecco
,” said Mihály, and offered him the cigarette. He was entirely off his guard. Especially now that the train had come.

“You’re a foreigner,” said the fascista. “I can tell from the way you said ‘
ecco
’. I’ve a sharp ear.”

“
Bravo
,” said Mihály.

“You’re Hungarian,” the little man beamed up at him.

“
Si, si
,” said Mihály, smiling.

In that instant the
fascista
seized him by the arm, with a strength he would never have thought possible in such a small person.

“Ah! You’re the man the whole of Italy is searching for!
Ecco
! This is your picture!” he added, producing a piece of paper. “Your wife is looking for you.”

Mihály jerked his arm away, pulled out a calling card, and quickly scribbled on it, “I am well. Don’t try to find me,” and gave it, with a ten lire note, to the little
fascista
.

“
Ecco
! Send this telegram to my wife.
Arrivederci
!”

Once again he tore himself away from the man, who had renewed his grip, jumped onto the moving train, and slammed the door behind him.

The little train went up to Norcia, in the hills. When he
disembarked
the Sibilline mountains stretched out before him with their two-thousand-metre peaks. To the right lay the Gran Sasso, Italy’s highest range.

It was fear that had driven him to the mountains, as it once had the builders of those towns. Up there, in the wilderness of ice and snow, they would not find him. He wasn’t thinking now of Erzsi. Indeed he felt that Erzsi, as an individual, had been
disarmed
by his telegram. But Erzsi was only one of many. It wasn’t
so much people that were following him as whole institutions, and the whole dreaded terrorist army of the past.

For indeed, what had been his life during the past fifteen years? At home and abroad he had been schooled in mastery. Not
self-mastery
, but the mastery of his family, his father, the profession which did not interest him. Then he taken his place in the firm. He had really tried to learn the pleasures befitting a partner in the firm. He had learnt to play bridge, to ski, to drive a car. He had dutifully entangled himself in the sort of love affairs
appropriate
to a partner in the firm. And finally he had met Erzsi, who was sufficiently talked about in high society for the level of
gossip
to satisfy what was due to the young partner in a fashionable firm. And he had ended by marrying her, a beautiful, sensible, wealthy woman, notorious for her previous affairs, as a partner should. Who knows, perhaps it needed only another year and he would become a real partner: the attitudes were already
hardening
inside him like calluses. You start off as Mr X, who happens to be an engineer, and sooner or later you’re just an engineer who happens to be called Mr X.

He made his way on foot up into the hills and meandered around the villages. The natives remained peaceful, did not pursue him. They accepted him as just another crazy tourist. But a
middle-class
person meeting him on the third or fourth day of his
wanderings
would have taken him not for a tourist but a madman. He was unshaven, unwashed, and sleeping in his clothes: he was simply a man on the run. And inside, he was utterly in turmoil, up there among the harsh outline of pitiless mountains, the inhuman solitude, the utter abandonment. The faintest shadow of purpose never flickered across his consciousness. All he knew was that there was no going back. The whole horde of people and things
pursuing
him, the lost years and the entire middle-class establishment, fused in his visionary consciousness into a concrete, nightmarish shape. The very thought of his father’s firm was like a great steel bar raised to strike him. At the same time he could see that he was slowly ageing, his body was somehow caught up in slow but visible processes of change, as if his skin was shrivelling at the speed of a minute hand ticking round a clock. These were the first signs of a delirious fever of the nerves.

His doctors later agreed that the nervous fever was the result of exhaustion. It was little wonder. For fifteen years Mihály had systematically driven himself too hard. He had forced himself to become something other than what he was, to live never after his own inclination but as he was expected to. The latest and not least heroic of these exertions had been his marriage. Then the excitement of travel, and the wonderful series of unwindings and unfoldings which the Italian landscape had induced in him, together with the fact that throughout his honeymoon he had drunk practically non-stop and never taken enough sleep, all had contributed to the collapse. Essentially, it was a case of a man not realising how tired he is until he sits down. The accumulated exhaustion of fifteen years had begun to overwhelm him from that time in Terontola when he involuntarily, but not unintentionally, took the other train, the train that carried him ever further from Erzsi, towards solitude and himself.