Journey by Moonlight

by Antal Szerb

  “Mihály … you promised to tell me how Tamás Ulpius died. And you haven’t told me why he died.”

  “I haven’t told you how he died because I don’t know. And why he died? Hmmm. Perhaps he was bored to death. Life can be really boring, no?”

  “No. But let’s get some sleep. It’s very late.”

  V

  IN FLORENCE their luck ran out. It rained the whole time they were there. As they stood outside the Cathedral in their raincoats Mihály suddenly burst into laughter. He had just understood the complete tragedy of the building. There it rose in its unparalleled beauty, and no-one took it seriously. For tourists and art-historians it had become a landmark, and no-one gave it a second thought. No-one believed in it, or that its purpose there was to proclaim the glory of God and the city.

  They went up to Fiesole, and watched a storm hurrying with busy speed over the hills to overtake them. They retreated inside the monastery and viewed the copious oriental bric-a-brac which the pious brothers had brought back from their missions over the centuries. Mihály stood in wonder for some time over a series of pictures from China. It took him several minutes to work out what they represented. In the upper part of each an alarmingly ferocious Chinaman sat enthroned, with a large book before him. What gave the face its special ferocity was the hair flaring upwards from the temples on either side. In the lower half, all sorts of gruesome events were taking place: people being tossed with pitchforks into some ghastly liquid; some having their legs sawn off; someone whose intestines were being drawn out, very carefully, like a rope; and in one a contraption like an automobile, driven by a monster with flying hair, attacking a crowd of people and chopping them up with blades attached to its snout.

  It suddenly struck him that this was the Last Judgement, as seen by a Chinese Christian. What craftsmanship, and what objectivity!

  He began to feel faint and went out into the square. The landscape, so magical when viewed from the train between Bologna and Florence, was now damp and hostile, like the face of a weeping woman with the make-up peeling off.

  When they arrived back in Florence Mihály went to the main Post Office. Since Venice, their mail had been directed there. On one of the envelopes addressed to him he recognised the hand of Zoltán Pataki, Erzsi’s previous husband. Thinking it might contain something better not seen by her, he sat down with it outside a café. “There’s male solidarity for you,” he thought, with a smile.

  The letter ran as follows:

  Dear Mihály,

  I know it’s a bit much, my writing you a long and friendly letter after you ‘seduced and ran off with’ my wife, but you never were a conventional sort of chap, and so perhaps you won’t be shocked if I too disregard convention just this once, even though you’ve always branded me an old conformist. I’m writing to you because I won’t be at rest until I do. I’m writing to you because, quite honestly, I don’t see why I shouldn’t, since we are both perfectly aware that I’m not angry with you. We only keep up the appearance because it’s better for Erzsi’s self-esteem to have the romantic situation where we are locked into deadly enmity over her. But between ourselves, my dear Mihály, you are well aware that I always thought highly of you, and this hasn’t changed simply because you ‘seduced and ran off with’ my wife. Not as if this ‘crime’ of yours hasn’t left me absolutely distraught. I needn’t deny—this of course is strictly between us—how much I still adore her. But I realise you aren’t responsible for that. As a general fact—don’t take this amiss—I don’t believe you’re responsible for anything I can think of in the whole world.

  It’s precisely for this reason that I am writing to you. To be honest, I’m rather anxious about Erzsi. You see, after all these years I’ve got used to looking after her, always making a careful note of things so that I could provide her with everything she needed (and often with things she didn’t), making sure she was dressed warmly enough when she went out in the evening, and I can’t just give up all that concern, from one day to the next. This concern is what binds me so strongly to her. I must tell you, a few nights ago I had a silly dream. I dreamed that Erzsi was leaning far out of a window, and that if I hadn’t caught her she would have fallen. Then it occurred to me that you wouldn’t have noticed if she was leaning too far out the window, you’re such an absent-minded and introverted fellow. And so, I thought, I’ll make a few requests, so you can take special care of her, and I wrote them down in note form, as they came to me. Don’t be offended, but we can’t get away from the fact that I’ve known her so much longer than you have, and that does give me certain rights.

  1 Make sure she eats enough. Erzsi (perhaps you’ve already noticed) is terrified of putting on weight. This fear sometimes gets her in a panic, when she will starve for days, and then she has attacks of hyper-acidity, which in turn are bad for her nerves. It occurred to me that perhaps the fact that you (touch wood!) have such a good appetite might encourage her to eat. I myself, sorry to say, am just an old man with a weak stomach, and could never set her a good example.

  2 Take special care over her manicurists. If she requires their services while you are travelling, make it your personal business and use only the best establishments. Ask the hotel porter for details. Erzsi is extremely sensitive, and it has happened more than once that her fingers have gone septic because of an unskilled practitioner. Which you certainly wouldn’t want.

  3 Don’t let her get up too early. I know that on one’s travels there is strong temptation to do that sort of thing. When we were last in Italy I made this mistake myself, because in Italy the inter-city coaches leave at the crack of dawn. To hell with the coaches. Erzsi goes to bed late and gets up late. Early rising does her no good—she takes days to get over it.

  4 Don’t let her eat scampi, frutti di mare, or any other disgusting sea creature—they give her a rash.

  5 A rather delicate matter. I don’t know how to put this. Perhaps I should just assume you’re aware of it, but I really don’t know if such an absentminded, philosophical sort of person is aware of such things as the incredible frailty of women, and how much they are at the mercy of certain physical functions. But I beg you to take careful note of Erzsi’s times of the month. A week before the onset you must be patient and tolerant in the extreme. At such times she is not fully responsible. She will pick quarrels. The wisest course is to stand your ground. It gives her an outlet for her irritation. But you mustn’t quarrel in earnest. Remember, it’s just a physiological function you’re dealing with. Don’t get carried away, and don’t say anything you might later regret. Above all, don’t let Erzsi say anything that she might later regret, as that’s no good for her nerves.

  Now, don’t be offended. There are a thousand things I should write about—a thousand little details for you to attend to—these are just the most important—but I can’t at this moment think of them. I really lack imagination. All the same, still in confidence, I am extremely worried, not only because I know Erzsi, but, more to the point, because I know you. Now please don’t get me wrong. If I were a woman, and had to choose between the two of us, I too would have chosen you without hesitation, and Erzsi surely loves you for being just the sort of person you are—so utterly withdrawn and abstracted that you have no real relationship with anybody or anything, like someone from another planet, a Martian on Earth, someone who never really notices anything, who cannot feel real anger about anything, who never pays proper attention when others speak, who often seems to act out of vague goodwill and politeness as if just playing at being human. Now, this is all very well, and I too would appreciate it if I were a woman. The only problem is, you are now Erzsi’s husband. And Erzsi is used to a husband who looks after her in every detail, shielding her from the very wind, leaving her nothing to think of but her mind, her inner life, and, by no means least, care of her person. Erzsi is by nature a lady of leisure. That’s how they brought her up at home, and I respected it—and I don’t know if, being with you, she will now have to face up to the r
ealities her father and I carefully protected her from.

  There is another delicate matter I have to touch upon. I realise that you (or rather your father whose firm you work for) are well off, and your wife will lack for nothing. But I do sometimes worry, because I know how pampered Erzsi has been, and I fear that someone as absent-minded as you might not take proper account of her needs. Your own nature is that of an amiable bohemian, undemanding, always bound up in your own solid existence, on a rather different level to what Erzsi is accustomed to. Now one of you is going to have to adapt to the other’s standard. If she adapts to yours, that will sooner or later create trouble, because she is going to feel herself déclassée the moment she comes into contact with the old set. For example, in Italy you might meet one of her girlfriends, who pulls a face when she hears you’re staying at a hotel that isn’t exactly top notch. The alternative is that you move up to Erzsi’s level, and this, sooner or later, will have material consequences because—if you will forgive me—I probably know the strength of the firm better than you do, you being such an abstracted sort of fellow—not to mention that you are four brothers, and your respected father a somewhat conservative, rather puritanical old gentleman who believes in saving rather than using his income … in a word, to be brief, you are hardly in a position to maintain Erzsi’s standard of living on your own account. And since it is a matter close to my heart that she should never want for anything, I beg you not to take it amiss when I tell you that should the need ever arise I am absolutely at your disposal, should you ever ask for help in the form of a long-term loan. Quite frankly, I would much prefer to pay you a regular monthly sum, but I know that would be an impertinence. But in any event this much I have to tell you: if ever you are in need, just turn to me.

  Now please don’t be angry with me. I’m a simple businessman with nothing better to do than to make money, and that, thank God, I do pretty well. I think it’s only fair that I should be able to give it away to whoever I choose, if I want to, no?

  Well, once again, nichts für ungut. Keep well and happy.

  With affectionate greetings and true respect,

  Zoltán.

  The letter left Mihály very angry. He felt nauseated by Pataki’s effete ‘decency’, which, properly speaking, was not ‘decency’ but unmanliness, or, if it was genuine, then hardly more acceptable because he had rather a low opinion of that quality. And such obsequiousness! It was no good. Pataki, for all his acquired wealth, still had the soul of a shop-assistant.

  If Zoltán Pataki was still in love with Erzsi after she had treated him so truly shamefully, then that was his affair, and his problem. But it wasn’t that that made Mihály angry. It was those parts of the letter that bore on himself and Erzsi.

  First of all, the financial considerations. Mihály had an extreme respect for ‘economic necessity.’ Perhaps precisely because he had so little talent for it. If someone said to him, “material considerations compel you to this or that course of action,” he would immediately fall silent, and see the justification for every form of baseness. For just that reason, this aspect of the matter made him particularly uneasy. It had arisen as an issue long before the present, but Erzsi had always treated it as a joke. From a materialistic point of view she had made a very poor choice in him. Previously married to a man of substance, now the wife of a modest bourgeois—this sooner or later was bound to make itself felt, as the cool-headed and worldly Zoltán Pataki had already seen so clearly.

  There rushed into his mind a host of details which, even on their honeymoon, had sharply exposed the difference in their living standards. One needed to look no further than the hotel where they were staying. Having discovered in Venice and Ravenna that Erzsi’s Italian was so much better than his own, and that she dealt so much more competently with hotel staff, of whom he had a particular horror, Mihály had in Florence delegated the hotel and all other practical considerations to her. Whereupon Erzsi, without further ado, had taken a room overlooking the river, in an old but extremely expensive little hotel, on the grounds that if one is in Florence one simply must lodge on the banks of the Arno. The cost of the room, Mihály felt vaguely, because he was too lazy to work it out, was generally out of scale with the amount they had set aside for their Italian accommodation. It was much more expensive than their room in Venice, and that for a moment had shocked his habitual thriftiness. But then he had driven the mean thought from him in disgust, telling himself, “after all, we’re on our honeymoon,” and thinking no more about it. Now, having read Pataki’s letter, it rose before him as a sign.

  But the greatest problem was not financial but moral. When after six months of agonised deliberation he had finally decided to detach Erzsi, with whom he had been having an affair for a full year, from her husband, and take her as his wife, he had taken that momentous step in order to ‘atone for everything’, and indeed, through a serious marriage, to enter at last into man’s estate and become a serious person on the same level as, for example, Zoltán Pataki. So he had pledged to try with all his might to be a good husband. He wanted to make Erzsi forget what a fine spouse she had left on his account, and in particular he wanted to ‘make amends’ retrospectively for his adolescence. Pataki’s letter had now shown him the hopelessness of this undertaking. He could never become as good a husband as this man, who could look after a wife, so unfaithful and now so distant, with more care and skill than he, who was actually with her, but so unused to the role of protector that he had already had to load her with the responsibility of their hotel and other practical arrangements on that most transparent of pretexts, that she spoke better Italian.

  “Perhaps it’s true what Pataki says,” he thought. “I am so abstracted and introverted by nature. Of course that’s a simplification—no-one can ever be so neatly categorised—but this much is certain, that I am singularly useless and incompetent in all practical matters, and generally not the man in whose calm superiority a woman can trust. And Erzsi is precisely the sort of woman who loves to entrust herself to someone, who likes to know that she belongs completely to someone. She isn’t one of those motherly types (perhaps that’s why she has no children) but one of those who really want to be their lover’s child. My God, how deceived she is going to be in me, sooner or later. I could more easily become a Major-General than play the role of father. That’s one human quality I completely lack, amongst others. I can’t bear it when people depend on me, not even servants. That’s why I did everything on my own, as a boy. I hate responsibility and I always come to despise people who expect things from me.

  “The whole thing’s crazy: crazy from Erzsi’s point of view. She would have been better off with ninety-nine men out of a hundred than she is with me. Any average, normal fellow would have made a better husband than me. Now I can see it not from my own point of view, but purely from hers. Why didn’t I think of all this before I got married? Or rather: why didn’t Erzsi, who is so wise, think it through more carefully?”

  But of course Erzsi couldn’t have thought it through, because she was in love with Mihály, and, when it came to him, was not wise, had not recognised his shortcomings, and still, it seems, did not recognise them. It was just a game of feelings. Erzsi with raw, uninhibited appetite was seeking the happiness in love she had never found with Pataki. But perhaps once she had had her fill, because such passionate feeling does not usually last very long …

  By the time he got back to the hotel, after a long rambling walk, it seemed inevitable to him that she would, one day, leave him, and do so after horrible crises and sufferings, after squalid affairs with other men, her name ‘dragged through the mud’, as the saying goes. To a certain extent he took comfort in the inevitable, and when they sat down to dinner he could already, a little, look upon her as a lovely fragment of his past, and he was filled with solemn emotion. Past and present always played special games inside Mihály, lending each other colour and flavour. He loved to relocate himself in his past, at one precise point, and from that perspect
ive re-assemble his present life: for example, “What would I have made of Florence if I had come here at sixteen?” and this reordering would always give the present moment a richer charge of feeling. But it could also be done the other way round, converting the present into a past: “What fine memories will I have, ten years from now, of once having been in Florence with Erzsi … what will such memories hold, what associations of feeling, which I cannot guess at at this moment?”

  This sense of occasion he expressed by ordering a huge festive meal and calling for the most expensive wine. Erzsi knew Mihály. She knew that the fine meal signified a special mood, and she did her best to rise to the occasion. She skilfully directed the conversation, putting one or two questions bearing on the history of Florence, prodding him to think about such matters, because she knew that historical associations, together with wine, drew him out of his solemnity, and were in fact the only thing that could overcome his apathy. Mihály poured out enthusiastic, colourful, factually unreliable explanations, then with shining eyes tried to analyse the meaning for him, the wonder, the ecstasy of the mere word: Tuscany. “Because there is no part of this land that hasn’t been trodden by the armies of history. The Caesars, the gorgeously apparelled troops of the French kings, all passed this way. Here every pathway leads to some important site and one street in Florence holds more history than seven counties back home.”