Journey by Moonlight

P S Millicent Ingram duly received the money. She finds your apologies absurd between friends, sends you many greetings and thinks of you with affection. I can now also mention that she is my fiancée.

The day was appallingly hot. In the afternoon Mihály walked in a daze round the Borghese gardens, went to bed early, fell asleep in his exhaustion, and later woke again.

In a half-dream he saw before him a wild, precipitous landscape. The prospect seemed somehow familiar and, still in his dream, he wondered where he could possibly have known that narrow valley, those storm-tossed trees, those seemingly stylised ruins. Perhaps he had seen them from the train, in that wonderful stretch of country between Bologna and Florence, perhaps in his wanderings above Spoleto, or in a painting by Salvator Rosa in some museum. The mood of the landscape was ominous and heavy with mortality. Mortality hung over the tiny figure, the traveller, who, leaning on his stick, made his way across the landscape under a brilliant moon. He knew that the traveller had been journeying through that increasingly abandoned landscape, between tumultuous trees and stylised ruins, terrified by tempests and wolves, for an immense period of time, and that he, and no-one else in all the world, would roam abroad on such a night, so utterly alone.

The bell rang. Mihály switched on the light and looked at his watch. It was past midnight. Who could it be? Surely no-one could have rung. He turned on his other side.

The bell sounded again. Troubled, he got up, put something on, and went out. At the door stood Éva.

In his embarrassment he forgot even to greet her.

That’s how it is. You yearn for someone, maniacally, mortally, to the verges of hell and death. You look for them everywhere, pursue them, to no avail, and your life wastes away in nostalgia. Since coming to Rome Mihály had never stopped waiting for this moment, had prepared for it, and had only just come to believe that never again would he speak with Éva. And then suddenly she appears, just at the moment when you’ve pulled on a pair of cheap pyjamas, are ashamed to be so unkempt and unshaven, ashamed to death of your lodgings, and you’d actually rather this person, for whom you’ve yearned so inexpressibly, were simply not there.

But Éva paid no attention to any of that. Without greeting or invitation she stepped quickly into his room, sat down in an armchair, and stared stiffly in front of her.

Mihály shuffled in after her.

She had not changed in the slightest. Love preserves one moment for ever, the moment of its birth. The beloved never ages. In love’s eye she is always seventeen, her dishevelled hair and light summer frock tousled for the rest of time by the same friendly breeze that blew in the first fatal moment.

Mihály was so discomposed all he could ask was:

“How did you find my address?”

Éva motioned restlessly with her hand.

“I telephoned your brother, in Pest. Mihály, Ervin’s dead.”

“I know,” he said.

“How did you know?”

“Ellesley, the doctor, wrote to me. I know you also met him once, in Gubbio, in the house where the door of the dead was open.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“He nursed Ervin in his last hours, in the Foligno hospital. Here’s his letter.”

Éva read the letter and fell into a reverie.

“Do you remember his enormous grey coat,” she said, after a while, “and how he always turned the collar up as he walked along, with his head bowed? … ”

“And somehow his head always went in front of him, and he came after it, like those big snakes that throw their head forward and their bodies slither along behind … And how much he smoked! No matter how many cigarettes I put in front of him, they all went.”

“And how sweet he was, when he was in good humour, or tipsy … ”

Father Severinus vanished. In the dead man of Foligno only Ervin had died, the remarkable boy and dear friend and the finest memory of their youth.

“I knew he was very ill,” said Mihály. “I tried to persuade him to get himself seen to. Do you think I should perhaps have tried a bit harder? Perhaps I should have stayed in Gubbio and not left until something was done about getting him well?”

“I think our concern, our tenderness, our anxiety would never have got through to him — to Father Severinus. For him the illness wasn’t as it would be for other people — not a misfortune but rather a gift. What do we know about that? And how easy it would have been for him to die.”

“He was so used to the ways of death. In the last few years I think he dealt with nothing else.”

“All the same, it might well have been horrible for him to die. There are very few people who die their own, proper death, like … like Tamás.”