Journey by Moonlight

by Antal Szerb

  “That’s right. I’m glad you understand. Because there’s no point in your insisting that the dead don’t exist in some form or other. They are what is making you ill. They visit you and suck your life out. Medical science can’t help you with that.”

  “Then take your garlic back home. My dead can’t be kept away by that sort of thing. They’re inside me.”

  “Naturally. Nowadays they work with psychological instruments. But their nature hasn’t changed in the least. It’s just that you have to be on your guard against them.”

  “Leave me in peace,” said Mihály, with mild exasperation. “Tell me that I have cerebral anaemia and prescribe iron tonic and bromide for my nerves. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

  “Of course it is. I can’t do anything more for you. Medicine can’t help against the dead. But there are stronger, supernatural weapons … ”

  “You know I’m not superstitious. Superstition only works if you believe in it … ”

  “That’s a very outmoded point of view. At any rate, why not try it? You’ve nothing to lose.”

  “Of course not. Just my self-respect, my pride, my integrity as a rational being.”

  “Those are long meaningless words. You really should try. You should go to Gubbio. There is a monk up there, in the Sant’ Ubaldo monastery, who works miracles.”

  “Gubbio? You spoke to me about it once before. If I remember rightly, you said that you had some supernatural experience there.”

  “Yes. And now I will tell you about it, because the story might persuade you. It’s about that very monk.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “You know how I was a city doctor in Gubbio before I came to the hospital here. One day I was called out to a patient who seemed to be suffering from some deep-seated nervous condition. She lived in the Via dei Consoli, one of those completely medieval streets, in a dark old house. She was a young woman, not from Gubbio, not even Italian, I don’t know in fact what her nationality could have been, but she spoke excellent English. A very good-looking woman. The people of the house, where she lived as a paying guest, explained after a while that she was suffering from hallucinations. She had the fixed idea that at night the door of the dead was open.”

  “The what?”

  “The door of the dead. You see, these old houses in Gubbio had two doorways, the usual one for the living, and next to it a second one, rather narrower, for the dead. This door is opened only when a corpse is taken out of the house. Then they wall it up again, so that the dead won’t return. Because they know that the dead can only come back in the way they went out. The door isn’t on the same level as the paving, but about a metre higher, so you can pass a coffin out to people standing in the street. The woman I mentioned lived in one of these houses. One night she was woken by the realisation that the door of the dead was open, and someone was coming in, someone she greatly loved, who had been dead a long time. And from then on the dead person came every night.”

  “But it would be easy to cure that. She would simply have to move house.”

  “That’s what we said, but she didn’t want to move. She was very happy to be visited by the dead person. She just slept all day, as you do, and waited for the night. Meanwhile she was rapidly losing weight, and the people of the house were very worried about her. And they weren’t exactly pleased about a dead man calling at the house every night. It was a rather patrician family with strict moral views. The truth was, they had sent for me so that I would use my authority as a doctor to make her leave.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I tried to explain to her that she was having hallucinations, and that she should seek a cure. But she laughed at me. “How could I be having hallucinations,” she asked, “when he’s here every night, truly, beyond all doubt, just as you are now? If you don’t believe me, stay here tonight.”

  “This was not exactly what I would have wanted, because I am perhaps a little too impressionable in these matters, but I really had no alternative than to stay, out of my duty as a doctor. The waiting was not otherwise unpleasant. The woman was neither terrified or crazed. She was remarkably calm, indeed rather cheerful. In fact, though I don’t wish to seem boastful, her behaviour was frankly quite flirtatious towards me … I almost forgot why I was there, and that midnight was approaching. Just before midnight she suddenly seized my hand, took a night-light in the other, and led me down to the ground floor room, the one into which the door of the dead opened.

  “I have to admit I did not see the dead man. But that was my fault. I was too scared to wait. I just felt that it was getting horribly cold, and the flame from the wick was guttering in the draught. And I felt—somehow I felt this with my whole body—that there was someone else in the room. And I tell you sincerely, this was more than I could bear. I rushed out of the room, all the way home, shut the door, and buried my head in the eiderdown. Of course you will tell me that I had succumbed to her powers of suggestion. It could be … ”

  “And what happened to her?”

  “Ah, I was just coming to that. When they realised that a doctor, or rather my sort of doctor, was no use, they called in Father Severinus, from the Sant’ Ubaldo monastery. This Father Severinus was a very special and holy person. He had turned up in Gubbio from some faraway country, no-one could discover which. He was rarely seen in the town. Apart from major festivals or funerals he never left the mountain, where he lived his life of strict self-denial. However he was now somehow prevailed upon to come down and visit the disturbed woman. The meeting between them, they say, was harrowing and dramatic. When she caught sight of him she screamed and collapsed. Father Severinus himself turned pale and staggered on his feet. It seems he realised what a difficult case it would be. But he did succeed in the end.”

  “How?”

  “That I don’t know. It seems he exorcised the ghost. After he’d talked with her for a full hour in some strange tongue, he went back up the mountain. She calmed down and left Gubbio. And after that nobody ever saw her again, or the ghost.”

  “Very interesting. But tell me,” asked Mihály, giving way to a sudden suspicion, “this Father Severinus, did he really come from some foreign country? Do you honestly not know where he was from?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t. Nobody does.”

  “What sort of person, I mean, in outward appearance?”

  “Quite tall, rather gaunt. As monks usually are.”

  “And he is still up there, in the monastery?”

  “Yes. You should go and see him. Only he can help someone in your condition.”

  Mihály thought profoundly. Life was full of inexplicable coincidences. This Father Severinus could be Ervin, and the woman Éva, haunted by the memory of Tamás …

  “You know what, doctor? Tomorrow I’ll go to Gubbio. For your sake, because you are such a kind person. And because, as an amateur of religious history, I am curious about these doors of the dead.”

  Ellesley was delighted with this outcome.

  The next day Mihály packed his things. When Millicent arrived to visit him he told her: “I have to travel to Gubbio. The doctor says that only there will I get better.”

  “Truly? Then I’m afraid it means we shall have to part. I’m staying on here for a time in Foligno. I really love this place. And at first I was so angry with that Frenchman, who tricked me into coming here, do you remember? But now I don’t mind. And the doctor is such a nice man.”

  “Millicent, I am sorry, I still owe you money. I feel really bad about it, but you know, back home it has to be channelled abroad through the National Bank, and the banking machinery is very complicated. Do please bear with me. Truly, it should come in the next few days.”

  “Don’t mention it. And if you see any good pictures, do write to me.”

  XI

  GUBBIO is reached by the narrow-gauge motor-train that runs between Fossato di Vico and Arezzo. Despite the shortness of the distance, it is a tedious journey. It was also hot, and M
ihály was exhausted by the time he arrived. But the city, as it came into view a little way up the road from the station, filled him, from the very first glance, with delight.

  It cowered on the side of a huge, barren, typically Italian hill, as if it had collapsed while fleeing upwards in terror. As you looked at it, not a single house seemed less than hundreds of years old.

  At the centre of a topsy-turvy tangle of streets, there towered an incredibly high building. Quite why it had been erected in the centre of this godforsaken place, and by whom, he could not imagine: a vast, gloomy medieval skyscraper. It was the Palazzo dei Consoli, from which the consuls ruled the little community of Gubbio until the fifteenth century, when it came under the sway of the Montefeltri, princes of Urbino. And above the town, almost at the peak of the Monte Ingino, stood a long, vast white block of a building, the monastery of Sant’ Ubaldo.

  Meanwhile down below, on the road leading up from the station, Mihály found an inn that appeared to be of the better sort. He took a room, had lunch, rested a little, then set out to explore Gubbio. He inspected the interior of the cavernous Palazzo dei Consoli, which reminded him somewhat of a vast studio, with its extremely ancient tavole eugubine—bronze tablets dating from pre-Roman times and preserving the sacred texts of the Umbrian people. He also looked round the old cathedral. There was not much else to see. The main sight here was the city itself.

  In most of the towns in this part of Italy (as in so many ancient cities elsewhere) the houses give an impression of dilapidation, of being within a few short years of total ruin. This is because where the Italians built with local stone it was not the practice to plaster the outer walls. Consequently an observer from Middle Europe concludes that the plaster has fallen off and the house, and indeed the entire city, been left to desolation and ruin. Gubbio was even more unplastered, even more tumble-down, than other towns in Italy. It was absolutely desolate. It was off the beaten tourist track. There was scarcely any industry or commerce. It was a mystery how the few thousand people hemmed within its walls could make a living.

  Mihály came out of the cathedral and turned into the Via dei Consoli. “This is the street Ellesley talked about,” he thought. It was a street to make the imagination riot: medieval houses, blackened by age, with a bleak, penniless dignity, and, one suspected, inhabitants to match, people living off bread and water in the shadow of a glorious past that had vanished centuries before.

  And straightaway, in the third house along, there actually was a door of the dead: next to the usual door, about a metre above the ground, a narrow gothic door-opening, bricked up. There was one in almost every house along the Via dei Consoli, but almost nowhere else in the town; and, strangely, there was no-one about.

  He went down a narrow back-alley to the street running parallel behind. This was no less ancient, only a little more gloomily patrician, but it did seem that living beings might reside there. And also, it seemed, dead ones. For outside one particular house a group of people met his astonished eye. Had he not immediately realised what was happening he would have thought it was a vision. People were standing outside the house holding candles, their faces covered with hoods. A funeral was taking place, and here, still following the ancient Italian ritual, members of the family, a hooded fraternity, were taking out the dead.

  Mihály removed his hat and edged closer for a better view of the ceremony. The door of the dead stood open. Through it he could see into the house, into a dark room containing the bier. Priests and their assistants stood around the coffin, chanting and swinging censers. After a few minutes they lifted it up and passed it through the door of the dead into the street, where the hooded relatives hoisted it on to their shoulders.

  Then in the gothic doorway a priest appeared in flowing robes. His pale ivory face, with its sombre, all-unseeing eyes, glanced at the heavens. Then with bowed head he placed his hands together in an ancient gesture of inexpressible gentleness.

  Mihály did not rush up to him. For he was now a priest, a pale, serious monk performing a religious duty … No, one couldn’t just run up to him, like a schoolboy, like a little boy …

  The pallbearers set off with the coffin, followed closely by the priest and the procession of mourners. Mihály joined it at the rear, and trod slowly with hat in hand towards the camposanto, up on the hill side. His heart was beating so hard he had to keep pausing for rest. Would they have anything to say to each other, after so many years, journeying along such widely divergent paths?

  He asked one of the people in the procession what the priest was called.

  “That’s Father Severinus,” said the Italian. “A very holy man.”

  They reached the burial ground. The coffin was lowered into the grave, the funeral came to an end, and people began to move away. Father Severinus set off for the town with a companion.

  Mihály still could not make up his mind whether to approach him. He felt that Ervin, now that he had become such a holy person, would surely be ashamed of his worldly youth, and, like St Augustine, would look back upon it with lofty disdain. Surely he would see it all quite differently, and had doubtless dismissed him, not wanting even to think about him. Perhaps it would be better to leave straightaway, and be content with the miracle of simply having seen him.

  Just then Father Severinus left his companions and turned back. He was coming straight towards him. Every adult response deserted Mihály, and he ran towards him.

  “Mishy!” shouted Ervin, and embraced him. Then he offered the right and the left sides of his face to Mihály’s cheeks, with the kindliness of a priest.

  “I saw you at the graveside,” he said quietly. “How did you get here, where no bird flies?”

  But this was mere cordiality. It was clear from his tone that he was not in the least surprised. Rather, it was as if he had long anticipated this meeting.

  Mihály was unable to say a word. He simply gazed at Ervin’s face, now so long and so thin, and his eyes, in which the youthful fire still blazed. Beneath the happiness of the moment he could see in that face the same profound sombreness he had found in the old Gubbio houses. He could think of only one word, ‘monk’. It was borne in upon him that Ervin really was a monk, and his eyes filled with tears. He turned his face away.

  “Don’t cry,” said Ervin. “You have changed too, since those days. Oh Mishy, Mishy, I’ve thought about you so much!”

  Mihály was filled with a sudden impatience. He must tell Ervin everything, everything, things he couldn’t tell Erzsi … Ervin would know a balm for everything, now that he was bathed in the glory and the radiance of another world …

  “I knew you would have to come into Gubbio, so I came here. Tell me when I can talk with you, and where. Can you come with me right now, to the hotel? Can we have dinner together?”

  Ervin smiled at his naïveté.

  “That really isn’t possible. I’m sorry, even at this moment I’m not free, my Mihály. I’m busy all evening. I have to be off straight away.”

  “Have you so much to do?”

  “Terrible. You lay people can’t imagine how much. I’ve still got a pile of prayers to get through.”

  “But then, when will you have time? And where can we meet?”

  “There’s only one way, Mishy, but I’m afraid it’ll be rather uncomfortable for you.”

  “Ervin! Do you think comfort matters to me, if it’s a question of talking with you?”

  “Because you’ll have to come up to the monastery. We are never allowed out, except on pastoral duty, like the funeral today, for example. And up in the monastery every hour of the day has its tasks. There’s only one way we could speak together without interruption. You know we go to church at midnight to say psalms. At nine we usually go to bed and sleep till midnight. But this sleep isn’t obligatory. The period isn’t governed by regulation, and silence is not prescribed. That’s when we could talk together. The wisest thing would be for you to come up to the monastery after dinner. Come as a pilgrim. We’re always
receiving pilgrims. Bring a small gift for Sant’ Ubaldo, to please the brothers. A few candles perhaps, that’s the usual thing. And ask the brother at the gate to put you into the pilgrims’ room for the night. You realise it’ll be pretty uncomfortable compared with what you’re used to—but I won’t say anything more. Because, if you left at midnight to go back to the town, I’d be very worried. For that you would have to know your way about the hill. If you aren’t familiar with it, it can be a very unfriendly place. Hire a boy to bring you up. Will that be good?”

  “It will be good, Ervin, very good.”

  “So, until then, God be with you. I must hurry, I’m already late. See you tonight. God be with you.”

  And he set off with rapid strides.

  Mihály wandered back to the town. Beside the cathedral he found a shop and bought some rather fine candles for Sant’ Ubaldo. Then went back to his hotel, dined, and tried to think what sort of accessories to take with him in his guise of pilgrim. He eventually made a neat little package of the candles, his pyjamas and toothbrush, to all appearances the bundle of a genuine pilgrim. Then he commissioned the waiter to find him a guide. The waiter soon returned with a young lad, and they took to the road.

  On the way he enquired after the local sights. He asked what had happened to the wolf Saint Francis had befriended, and the bargain it had made with the town.

  “That must have been a long time ago,” the boy replied thoughtfully, “even before Mussolini. There certainly haven’t been any wolves since he became Duce.” But he did seem to recall, as something he had heard, that the wolf’s head was buried in some faraway church.

  “Is it usual for pilgrims to go up to the monastery?”

  “Of course, often. Sant’ Ubaldo is said to be very good for knee and back pains. Perhaps you have a bad back yourself, sir?”

  “Not so much my back … ”

  “But he’s very good for anaemia and bad nerves. The numbers are specially large on May 16th. That’s the Saint’s day. On that day they carry up the Ceri—figures made of wax—in a procession from the cathedral up to the monastery. But that’s not such a big procession as Corpus Christi or Resurrection Sunday. When they parade the Ceri they have to run.”