Journey by Moonlight

“A crook,” Erzsi thought to herself, as she lay without sleeping. “That’s just what he is.” All her life she had been the model of a good girl, adored by her nannies and fräuleins, her father’s pride and joy, the best pupil in the form, sent abroad to academic competitions. Her whole life had been sheltered and ordered, the good bourgeois life consecrated to a sternly supervised moral order. In due course she married a wealthy man, dressed elegantly, took on a grand house and presided over it as a model housewife. She always wore the identical hat sported by every other woman of the same rank in society. She took her summer holidays where fashion dictated, held the same opinions about theatrical productions, uttered the turns of phrase currently de rigueur. In everything she was a conformist, as Mihály would say. Then she began to get bored. The boredom developed into a full neurosis, and then she chose Mihály for herself, because she felt that he was not entirely conformist, that in him there was something utterly alien to the conventions of bourgeois existence. She believed that through him she too could get beyond the walls, into the badlands, the wide flood-plain and what lay there in the unknown distances. But Mihály was simply trying, through her, to become a conformist himself, using her as a means to become a regular bourgeois, only stealing out into the badlands, into the bushes, furtively and alone, until conformity no longer bored him and he was used to it. Now if János Szepetneki, who had no wish to conform, who lived more or less as a professional bandit beyond the walls, who was so much more untamed and vigorous than Mihály … if he … “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright/In the forests of the night … ”

The Sunday afternoon at Auteuil was elegant and dull. The actress-types were not there this time, and the company entirely mondain and well-heeled, typical of the French grande bourgeoisie. But this world did not interest Erzsi, being even more conformist and devoid of tigers than its Budapest equivalent. She began to breathe freely only when, on the way home, they called to take János Szepetneki out to dinner, and then went on to dance. János was demonic. He drank, showed off, recited poetry, wept and was at times extremely manly. But all this was really quite superfluous. He was thoroughly overdoing his part because, not to put too fine a point on it, Erzsi was without doubt already disposed to spend the night with him, following the inner logic of events, and in quest of the burning tiger.

PART THREE ROME

Go thou to Rome — at once the Paradise

The Grave, the City, and the Wilderness.

SHELLEY: Adonais

XIII

MIHÁLY had now been in Rome for several days, and still nothing had happened to him. No romantic leaflet had fallen out of the sky to direct him, as he had secretly expected after what Ervin had said. All that had happened was Rome itself, so to speak.

Compared with Rome, every other Italian city was simply dwarfed. Venice, where he had been with Erzsi, officially, and Siena, where he went unofficially with Millicent, paled in comparison. For here he was, in Rome alone, and, as he felt, on higher instructions. Everything he saw in Rome seemed to symbolise fatality. The feeling that, in the course of a morning stroll, or late one special summer afternoon, everything would suddenly be filled with a rare and inexpressible significance, was one that he had known before. Now it never left him. He had known streets and houses to stir in him far-reaching presentiments but never with the force of these Roman streets, palaces, ruins, gardens. Wandering among the vast walls of the Teatro Marcello, gazing into the Forum with wonder at the way little baroque churches had sprung up between the ancient columns, looking down from some hill at the star-shape of the Regina Coeli prison, loitering in the alleyways of the ghetto, passing through the different courtyards from Santa Maria sopra Minerva to the Pantheon, with its great millwheel of a roof open to the dark blue summer sky: these filled his days. And in the evening weary, weary to death, he would fall into bed in the ugly little stone-floored hotel room near the station, where he had scuttled in terror on the first evening, and then lacked the energy to change it for something more suitable.

From this general trance he was awakened by a letter from Tivadar, which Ellesley had forwarded from Foligno.

Dear Misi,