Journey by Moonlight

by Antal Szerb

  The next day Mihály and the girl went for a long walk. They ate their fill of pasta in a modest village tavern, then lay down in a classical-looking wood and slept. When they awoke, Millicent observed:

  “There’s an Italian painter who painted trees just like these. What was his name?”

  “Botticelli,” replied Mihály, and kissed her.

  “Ooooh,” she said, with horror on her face. Then she kissed him back.

  Now that he held the girl between his arms, Mihály decided happily that she did not disappoint. Her body was as elastic as rubber. Oh the ‘foreign woman’ made flesh—how much she means to the man whose passion pursues fantasy and not physiological fact! The pleasure of the preliminary and quite innocent kiss suggested that every detail of Millicent’s body would prove foreign, other, wonderful. Her healthy mouth was entirely American (Oh, the prairies!), the little hairs on her neck were foreign, the caresses of her large strong hands, the transcendent cleanliness of her well-scrubbed body (Oh Missouri-Mississippi, North against South, and the blue Pacific Ocean!) …

  “Geography is my most potent aphrodisiac,” he thought to himself.

  But in the evening a letter was waiting for Millicent at the post-office, forwarded from Perugia. It was from a Miss Rebecca Dwarf, Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of Cambridge (Mass.), Millicent’s tutor and chief spiritual adviser. Over dinner Millicent tearfully explained that Miss Dwarf was very satisfied with her previous letter in which she had spoken about the progress of her studies, but deemed it absolutely essential that she should now travel forthwith to Siena, to see the famous Primitives.

  “But it was so good to be with you, Mike,” she sniffled, and put her hand in his.

  “So you must go without fail to Siena?”

  “Of course. If Miss Dwarf says in her letter … ”

  “To hell with the old cow,” Mihály broke in. “Look, Millicent, listen to me. Don’t go and see the Siena Primitives. The Siena Primitives are probably almost identical to the Umbrian Primitives you saw in Perugia. And anyway, does it really matter whether you see ten pictures more or less?”

  Millicent looked at him in astonishment and withdrew her hand. “But Mike, how can you talk like that? I really thought you felt so strongly about painting, for a European.” And she turned away.

  Mihály saw that he had struck the wrong note. He was obliged to go back to the stupid type of voice. But he could not think of stupid arguments with which to reason with her. He tried sentimentality.

  “But I shall miss you terribly if you go now. Perhaps we’ll never meet again in this life.”

  “Sure,” said Millicent. “I’ll miss you horribly too. And I’ve already written to Philadelphia, to Doris and Ann Mary, telling them how wonderfully well you understand me. And now we have to part.”

  “But stay here.”

  “That isn’t possible. But you come with me to Siena. You’re not really doing anything here.”

  “That’s true. I could leave what I’m doing here.”

  “Then why not come?”

  After some hesitation, he confessed:

  “Because I haven’t any money.”

  Which was true. By now his money was almost entirely spent. It had gone on the few decent items of clothing he had bought the day before, out of respect for Millicent, and on buying her meals, which were very substantial and extremely well-chosen. True, it would be gone in a day or two even if he stayed in Foligno … but if you stay in one place you don’t feel the lack of money as much as when you are travelling.

  “You’ve no money?” she asked. “How’s that?”

  “It’s run out,” he said with a smile.

  “And your parents don’t send you any?”

  “Oh yes. They’ll send some. When I write to them.”

  “Now look. Until then I’ll make you a loan.” And she took out her cheque book. “How much do you need? Will five hundred dollars be enough?”

  The amount shocked Mihály, as did the offer itself. Every bourgeois scruple in him, and indeed every quiver of romantic sensibility, protested against borrowing from the object of an amour, from the heaven-sent stranger, whom he had kissed for the very first time that day. But Millicent, with charming innocence, insisted on the offer. She was always lending money to her boyfriends and girlfriends, she said. In America it was quite natural. And besides, Mihály would pay her back soon. They finally left it that Mihály would think about it overnight.

  Mihály very much wanted to go to Siena, even without considering Millicent. Foligno by now bored him to death, and he really longed to go to Siena because, now that his apathy had lifted, the Italian cities once again began to press their sweet, terrible claim, that he should see every one of them and experience their secrets before it was too late. As at the start of his honeymoon, he again carried inside him the mystery Italy stood for, like a great delicate treasure he might at any moment let slip from his hands. Moreover, ever since he had kissed her, Millicent had become much more desirable, and it is in the nature of such adventures that a man likes to see them through.

  But could a serious adult, a partner in a well-known Budapest firm, actually borrow money from a young girl? No, a grown-up, serious partner could not. Of that there could be no doubt. But was that what he still was? Or had he, with his desertion, his exile, returned to that earlier level, that way of life in which money was just paper and bits of silver? To put it plainly, had he reverted to the ethics of the Ulpius household?

  Mihály was appalled at the thought. No, he couldn’t. It would mean that the paradise of youth had succumbed to the reality it had always denied, the reality whose chief manifestation was money.

  But the conscience is easily placated when we really want something. Of course it was just a matter of a very short-term loan, a small sum. He wouldn’t take five hundred dollars: one hundred would be enough. Or, let’s say, two. Perhaps after all we should say three hundred … He would write home straightaway, and pay the money back very shortly.

  He sat down and finally penned the letter. He wrote not to his father, but to his youngest brother, Tivadar. Tivadar was the bon viveur and prodigal of the family, a friend of the turf, reputed to have had a liaison with an actress. He perhaps would understand and take a tolerant view of the case.

  He told Tivadar that, as he no doubt already knew, he and Erzsi had separated, but quite amicably, and that as a gentleman he would soon put everything to rights. Just why they had separated, he should say straight out, was too complicated to put in a letter. The reason he had not written earlier was that he had been lying in hospital, very ill, in Foligno. Now he was well again, but the doctors absolutely advised rest, and he would like to spend the period of convalescence here in Italy. So he really had to ask Tivadar to send him some money. In fact, as soon as possible, and as much as possible. His money had run out, and he had had to borrow three hundred dollars from a local friend, which he would like to repay as soon as possible. The money should be sent direct to his friend, at Dr Richard Ellesley’s address. He hoped everyone was well at home, and that they would see each other again soon. Any letters should be sent to the Ellesley address in Foligno, because he was moving on but did not yet know where he would be spending any length of time.

  The next morning he sent the letter by airmail, and hurried off to Millicent’s room.

  “So you thought it through and you’re coming, Mike?” she asked, radiantly.

  Mihály nodded and with furious blushes accepted the cheque. Then he went to the bank, and to buy himself a good suitcase. The two of them bade farewell to Ellesley and set off.

  They were alone in the first-class compartment and exchanged uninhibited kisses, the way the French do. For both, this was a legacy of their student years in Paris. A little later on a somewhat patrician old gentleman joined them, but by then they were past caring, and exercised the privilege of barbaric foreigners.

  By evening they had reached Siena.

  “Wi
ll the signore and signora require a room?” was the obliging inquiry of the porter of the hotel outside which their hansom-cab had stopped. Mihály nodded in affirmation. Millicent, unaware of the significance of the exchange, simply went up, but registered no protest on arrival.

  It may perhaps seem from a distance that Millicent was not quite as innocent as Doctor Ellesley had imagined. But for just that reason she was, in her amorous mode, every bit as fresh-tasting and quietly awe-struck as at other times. Mihály found that his journey to Siena had been most worthwhile.

  X

  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.

  “ … My God, what is the whole civilisation coming to if they have forgotten what even the modern Negroes know: summon up the dead.”

  This was how Millicent found him.

  “Have you a fever?” she asked, and put her large lovely hand on his brow. At her touch, Mihály turned slightly towards her.

  “Come for a walk, Mike. It’s such a beautiful evening. And everyone’s out in the streets, and they’ve all got children with such marvellous names, like Emerita and Assunta. Such a tiny little girl and she’s called Annunziata.”

  With the greatest difficulty he struggled to his feet and went out. He walked heavily and uncertainly. It was as if he was seeing everything through a veil, and listening to the sounds of the Italian evening through ears filled with wax. His feet were heavy as lead. “When have I felt this way before?” he wondered.

  They went down to the Campo, and he stared at the, Torre del Mangia the huge tower of the city hall that rose over a hundred metres, like a needle piercing the evening sky. His gaze slowly followed the tower upwards to its dizzy height. And the tower itself seemed to go on and on, soaring into the reverberating dark-blue sky.

  Then it happened. The ground opened up around a deep well, and again he stood before the whirlpool. It must have lasted only a moment, then vanished. Everything was back in its place. The Torre del Mangia was again merely an extremely tall tower. Millicent had noticed nothing.

  But that evening, when their sated bodies finally turned away from each other, and he was alone in that profound solitude that a man feels after he has embraced a woman with whom he has nothing in common, the whirlpool opened again (or was he just remembering it?) and this time it remained. He knew he had only to stretch out his hand to feel the presence of the other person, the comforting reality of the friendly body. But he could not bring himself to reach out, and he lay in solitary distress, by choice, for endless hours.

  The next morning his head ached and his eyes were horribly red from sleeplessness.

  “I’m ill, Millicent,” he told her. “The problem has come back, the one that kept me in bed in Foligno.”

  “What sort of illness is it?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I can’t exactly say. Some sort of sporadic cataleptic apodictitis,” he declared nonsensically.

  “I see.”

  “I must get back to Foligno, to the good Doctor Ellesley. Perhaps he can do something. At least I know him. What will you do, Millicent?”

  “Well naturally I’ll go with you, if you’re sick. I won’t just leave you on your own. In any case I’ve seen all the Siena Primitives.”

  He kissed her hand with emotion. They reached Foligno late that afternoon.<
br />
  They took separate rooms, at his suggestion. “On the whole, it’s better that Ellesley shouldn’t know,” he explained.

  Ellesley called on Mihály towards evening. He listened thoughtfully to his complaints, and made humming noises over the whirlpool sensation.

  “It’s a kind of agoraphobia. For the time being, simply rest. Then we’ll see.”

  He spent several days in bed. The whirlpool did not recur, but he had no desire to get up. He felt that if he did it would return. He slept as much as possible. He took every tranquilliser and mild sedative Ellesley brought him. If he slept, he might manage to dream of Tamás and Éva.

  “I know what’s wrong with me,” he told the doctor. “Acute nostalgia. I want to be young again. Is there a cure for that?”

  “Hmmm,” said Ellesley. “Certainly, but not one I can tell you about. Think of Faust. Don’t hanker after youth. God gave you manhood and old age too.”

  Millicent visited him regularly and dutifully, though she seemed rather bored. She would call in on Ellesley towards evening, and they would also leave together after the visit.

  “Tell me honestly,” the doctor asked one day, in her absence, as he sat on Mihály’s bed. “Tell me honestly, is there some dead person who is very dear to you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think about them nowadays?”

  “I do.”

  From that point onwards his methods became less medically orthodox. On one occasion he brought a Bible with him, on another a garland of roses, then a Virgin Mary from Lourdes. Once Mihály became aware as he was talking with Millicent that Ellesley was drawing crosses on his door. And one fine day he produced a string of garlic.

  “Tie this round your neck when you go to sleep. The smell of garlic is very good for the nerves.”

  Mihály burst out laughing.

  “Doctor, even I have read Dracula. I know what garlic is supposed to do: keep the vampire at bay, who sucks human blood in the night.”