Journey by Moonlight

SIENA was the most beautiful Italian city Mihály had ever seen. It was more beautiful than Venice, finer than aristocratic Florence, lovelier even than dear Bologna with its arcades. Perhaps an element in this was that he was there not with Erzsi, officially, but with Millicent, and on the loose.

The whole city with its steep, pink streets undulated over several hills in the shape of a happy-go-lucky star. On the faces of its people you could see that they were very poor, but very happy — happy in their inimitable Latin way. The city had the quality of a fairytale, a happy fairytale, lent it by the fact that from everywhere you could see, at its highest point, the cathedral hovering over it like a towered Zeppelin, in the livery of a pantomime zebra.

One of the walls of the cathedral stood away from the main mass of the building, a good two hundred metres distant, as a grotesque and wonderful spatial symbol of the failure of the most grandiose human plans. Mihály loved the feckless way the old Italians set about building their cathedrals. “If Florence has one, then we must have one, and as large as possible,” they said, and then built the longest wall in existence in order to fill the Florentines with panic about the intended size of their project. Then the money ran out, the builders naturally downed tools and lost all interest in the cathedral. “Yes, yes,” thought Mihály, “that’s the way to go about a church. If the Ulpius set were ever to go about building a church, that is exactly how they would do it.”

They went down to the Campo, the main square, the scallop shape of which was like the city’s smile. He could not tear himself away, but Millicent overruled him:

“Miss Dwarf said nothing about it,” she argued, “and it isn’t Primitive.”

In the afternoon they worked their way round the sequence of city gates. They stopped before each one, and Mihály inhaled the view, the sparse sweetness of the Tuscan landscape.

“This is the landscape of humanity,” he told Millicent. “Here a hill is exactly the size a hill should be. Here everything is to scale, tailored to the human form.”

Millicent thought about this.

“How would you know exactly what size a hill should be?” she asked.

Over one gate was an inscription which read: Cor magis tibi Sena pandit—Siena opens its heart to you. “Here,” Mihály thought, “the gates still utter wisdom and truth: ‘Siena opens its heart’ so that life can be filled with the simple delirium of yearning, in harmony with the veiled beauty of the season.”

The following day he woke at dawn, rose and stared out of the window. The window looked out from the city towards the hills. Slight, lilac-coloured clouds were sailing over the Tuscan landscape, and a tinge of gold slowly and timidly prepared for dawn. And nothing existed but lilac and the gold of first light over distant hills.

“If this landscape is reality,” he thought, “if this beauty really exists, then everything I have done in my life has been a lie. But this landscape is reality.”

And he loudly declaimed Rilke’s verses:

Denn da is keine Stelle,

Die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern.

Then he turned in alarm towards Millicent, who was still sleeping peacefully. And it occurred to him that there was no reality in Millicent. Millicent was no more than a simile, a random phenomenon of the mind. And she was nothing. Nothing.

Cor magis tibi Sena pandit. Suddenly he was seized by a mortal yearning, the kind of yearning he had felt only as a young child. But this was both more specific and more urgent. He now yearned for that same childhood emotion, with such intensity that he had had to shout his feelings aloud.

Now he saw that his little adventure, his return to the vagabond years, was merely a transition, a step leading him downwards, and backwards, into the past, into his private history. The ‘foreign woman’ remained a foreigner, just as his years of wandering had been a time merely of pointless locomotion, before he had had to turn home, back to those who were not strangers. But then they … were already long dead, and the stray winds blowing round the four corners of the world had swept them away.

Millicent was awakened by the sensation of Mihály sinking his head on her shoulder and sobbing. She sat up in the bed, and asked in horror: “What’s the matter? Mike, for God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “I dreamed that I was a little boy, and a huge dog came and ate my bread and butter.”

He embraced her and drew her towards him.

That day they could find nothing to say to each other. He left the girl to study the Siena Primitives on her own, and, at noon, listened with only half an ear to her charming stupidities on the subject of her experiences.

He did not leave the room all afternoon, but simply lay on the bed, fully-dressed.