Journey by Moonlight

by Antal Szerb

  Whole sets of figurines were displayed in a glass case: dreamy-eyed men, being led onwards by women, and dreamy-eyed women led, or clutched at, by satyrs.

  “What are these?” Mihály asked in amazement.

  “That’s death,” said Waldheim, and his voice took on an edge, as it always did when some serious academic issue arose. “That’s death. Or rather, dying. They’re not the same thing. Those women luring the men on, and those satyrs clutching at the women, are death-demons. Are you with me? The male demons take the women, and the female demons the men. Those Etruscans were perfectly aware that dying is an erotic act.”

  A strange frisson shot through Mihály. Could it be that others had known this, and not just himself and Tamás Ulpius? Was it possible that this most basic element in his own sense of life was once something that, for the Etruscans, could be expressed in art, a self-evident spiritual truth, and that Waldheim’s brilliant scholarly intuition had been able to understand that truth, just as he had so many of the mysteries and horrors of ancient belief?

  The question so troubled him that he said not a word, neither in the museum nor on the tram going back afterwards. But that evening, when he again called on Waldheim, and had been lent courage by the red wine, he managed to ask, taking care not to let his voice tremble: “But tell me, how did you mean ‘dying is an erotic act’?”

  “I meant it just as I stated it. I’m not a symbolist poet. Dying is an erotic process, or if you like, a form of sexual pleasure. At least in the perception of ancient cultures like the Etruscans, the Homeric Greeks, the Celts.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Mihály disingenuously. “I always thought that the Greeks had a horror of death. Surely the afterlife had no consolations for the Homeric Greeks, if I remember my Rodhe correctly. And the Etruscans, who lived for the fleeting moment, would have feared it even more.”

  “That’s all true. These peoples probably feared death even more than we do. Our civilisation presents us with a marvellous mental machinery designed to help us forget, for most of our lives, that one day we too will die. In time we manage to push death out of our consciousness, just as we have done with the existence of God. That’s what civilisation does. But for these archaic peoples nothing was more immediately apparent than death and the dead, I mean actual dead people, whose mysterious para-existence, fate, and vengeful fury constantly preoccupied them. They had a tremendous horror of death and the dead. But then of course in their minds everything was more ambiguous than it is for us. Opposites sat much closer. The fear of death and the desire for death were intimately juxtaposed in their minds, and the fear was often a form of desire, the desire a form of fear.”

  “My God, the death-wish isn’t some archaic thing, but eternally human,” said Mihály, fending off his real innermost thoughts. “There always were and always will be people worn out and weary of life, who long for the release of death.”

  “Don’t talk rubbish, and don’t pretend you don’t understand me. I’m not talking about the death-wish of the weary and the sick, or potential suicides, but about people in the fullness of their life, people who in fact because their lives are so fulfilled yearn for death as for the greatest ecstasy, as in the common phrase, mortal passion. Either you understand this or you don’t. I can’t explain it. But for those ancient people it was self-evident. That’s why I say that dying is an erotic act. Because they yearned after it, and in the final analysis every desire is sexual at base, or rather what we call erotic, in which the god Eros, that is to say, yearning or desire, exists. A man always yearns after woman, according to our friends the Etruscans, so death, dying, must be a woman. For a man it was a woman, but for a woman an importunate male satyr. That’s what those figures tell us, the ones we saw this afternoon. But I could show you other things too: portraits of the death-hetaira on various ancient reliefs. Death is a harlot tempting young men, and she is depicted with a hideously vast vagina. And this vagina probably means something more again. We come from it and we return to it, that’s what they are telling us. We are born as the result of an erotic act and through a woman, and we have to die through an erotic act involving a woman, the death-hetaira, the great inseparable and contrary aspect of the Earth Mother … So when we die we are born again … do you follow? Actually this is what I was saying the other day, in my lecture at the Accademia Reale entitled Aspetti della morte. It was a great success with the Italian newspapers. It just so happens I have a copy with me. Hang on a moment … ”

  Mihály looked around with a shiver at the cheerful chaos of Waldheims’s room. It reminded him subtly of that other room, in the Ulpius house. He was looking for a sign, something specific to focus … perhaps the near-presence of Tamás, Tamás whose inner thoughts Waldheim, with his brilliant scholarly objectivity and clarity, had expressed here, this summer night. Waldheim’s voice was again edged with that sharp, inspired quality it always took on when he talked about the ‘divine essence’. Mihály rapidly downed a glass of wine and went over to the window for a breath of air. Something oppressed him deeply.

  “The death-yearning was one of the strongest sources of myth,” Waldheim continued, talking now rather to himself than to Mihály in his excitement. “If we read The Odyssey aright, it speaks of nothing else. There are the death-hetaira, Circe, Calypso, who from their caves lured men on to the journey towards the happy islands and never let them go; the whole empire of death, the Lotus-Eaters, the land of the Phaia. And who knows, perhaps the land of the dead was Ithaca itself? Far to the west … the dead are always sailing by day into the west … and Ulysses’s nostalgia for and his journey back to Ithaca perhaps represents the nostalgia for non-being, signifying rebirth … Perhaps the name Penelope actually carries its latent meaning of ‘duck’, and originally was the spirit-bird, but for the time being I can’t be sure of that. You see this is the sort of idea that really should be looked into without delay. And you … You could do the groundwork for a section, so that you can get into the professional way of doing things. For example, it would be really interesting if you wrote something about Penelope as the spirit-duck.”

  Mihály politely declined this commission. For the moment it did not much interest him.

  “But why was it only the ancient Greeks who were so aware of this death symbolism?” he asked.

  “Because the nature of civilisation everywhere was such that, even with the Greeks, it diverted people’s minds away from the reality of death, and compensated for the yearning for death just when the basic appetite for life was declining. It was Christian civilisation that did this. But perhaps those peoples Christianity had to subdue brought with them an even greater death-cult than existed among the Greeks. The Greeks were not in fact a particularly death-centred race. It was just that they were able to express everything so much better than other people. The real death-cultists were the races of the north, the Germans, woodsmen of the long nights, and the Celts. Especially the Celts. The Celtic legends are full of the islands of the dead. These islands later Christian observers, in their usual fashion, transformed to islands of the blessed, or happy isles, and simple-minded folklore-collectors generally followed them in this error. But tell me, was that an island of the ‘blessed’ that sent its fairy envoy to Prince Bran with such overwhelming constraint? Or was it, I ask, from ‘happiness’ that a man was turned to dust and ashes the moment he left the island? And why do you think they laughed, those people on the island, the ‘other island’? Because they were happy? Like hell they were. They were laughing because they were dead, and their grins were nothing more than the hideous leer of a corpse, like those you see on the faces of Indian masks and Peruvian mummies. Sadly it isn’t my field, the Celts. But you should take them up. You would have to learn, quickly and without fail, Irish and Welsh, there’s no other way. And you would have to go to Dublin.”

  “Fine,” said Mihály. “But say a bit more, if you would. You’ve no idea how much this interests me. Why did it come to an end, this human yearning for th
e islands of the dead? Or perhaps the feeling is still with us? In a word, where does the story end?”

  “I can only answer with a bit of home-made Spenglerism. When the people of the north came into the community of Christendom, in other words European civilisation, one of the first consequences was, if you remember, that for two hundred years everything revolved around death. I’m referring to the tenth and eleventh centuries, the centuries of the monastic reforms begun at Cluny. In early Roman times Christianity lived under constant physical threat, so that it became the darkest of death-cults, rather like the religion of the Mexican Indians. Later of course it took on its truly Mediterranean and humane character. What happened? The Mediterraneans succeeded in sublimating and rationalising the yearning for death, or, in plain language, they watered down the desire for death into desire for the next world, they translated the terrifying sex-appeal of the death-sirens into the heavenly choirs and rows of angels singing praises. Nowadays you can yearn comfortably after the glorious death that awaits the believer: not the dying pagan’s yearning for erotic pleasure, but the civilised and respectable longing for heaven. The raw, ancestral pagan death-desire has gone into exile, into the dark under-strata of religion. Superstition, witchcraft, Satanism, are among its manifestations. The stronger civilisation becomes, the more our yearning for death thrives in the subconscious.

  “Think about it. In civilised society death is the most absolute of all taboo-subjects. It isn’t done to mention it. We use circumlocutions to name it in writing, as if it were some sort of ridiculous solecism, so that the dead person, the corpse, becomes the ‘deceased’, the ‘dear departed’, the ‘late’, in the same way as we euphemise the acts of digestion. And what you don’t talk about, it isn’t done to think about either. This is civilisation’s defence against the potential danger of a contrary instinct working in man against the instinct for life, an instinct which is really cunning, calling man towards annihilation with a sweet and strong enticement. To the civilised mind this instinct is all the more dangerous because in civilised man the raw appetite for life is so much weaker. Which is why it has to suppress the other instinct with every weapon available. But this suppression isn’t always successful. The counter-instinct breaks surface in times of decadence, and manages to overrun the territory of the mind to a surprising degree. Sometimes whole classes of society almost consciously dig their own graves, like the French aristocracy before the Revolution. And, I’m afraid, the most current example today are the Hungarians of Transdanubia …

  “I don’t know if you’re still following me? People usually get me spectacularly wrong whenever I talk on this subject. But I can do a little test. Do you recognise this feeling? A man is walking on a wet pavement and slips. His one leg collapses under him, and he starts to fall backwards. At the precise moment when I lose my balance, I am filled with a sudden ecstasy. Of course it lasts only a second, then I automatically jerk back my leg, recover my balance, and rejoice in the fact that I didn’t fall. But that one moment! For just one moment I was suddenly released from the oppressive laws of equilibrium. I was free. I began to fly off into annihilating freedom … Do you recognise this feeling?”

  “I know rather more about this whole business than you think,” Mihály said quietly.

  Waldheim suddenly looked at him in surprise.

  “Eh, you say that in a strange voice, old chap! And you’ve gone so pale! What’s wrong with you? Come out on to the balcony.”

  Out on the balcony Mihály recovered himself in an instant.

  “What is this, damn you?” said Waldheim. “Are you hot? Or hysterical? You should consider that if you were to commit suicide under the influence of what I’ve said I shall deny that I ever knew you. What I am saying is of a completely theoretical significance. I really detest those people who like to draw practical conclusions from scholarly truths, who ‘apply learning to real life’, like engineers who turn the propositions of chemistry into insecticides for bedbugs. It translates, in Goethe’s words, as: ‘life is grey, but the golden tree of theory is always green’. Especially when the theory itself is still as green as this is. Now I hope I’ve restored your equilibrium. Here’s a general rule … don’t try to live the life of the soul. I think that’s your problem. An intelligent person doesn’t have a spiritual life. And tomorrow you must come with me to the garden party at the American Institute of Archaeology. You’ll have a bit of fun. Now go to hell, I’ve still got work to do.”

  XVI

  THE AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE occupied a resplendent building set in a large garden on the Gianicolo hill. Its annual garden party was a major event in the social calendar of Rome’s Anglo-Saxon community. Its organisers were not just the American Archaeologists, but more importantly the American painters and sculptors living in Rome, and the guests all those closely or loosely connected with them. It was always a particularly varied and particularly interesting group of people who assembled on the night.

  But Mihály experienced little of the variety and interest of the company. He was again in that state of mind in which everything seemed to reach him through a veil of fog—the scented enchantment of the summer night, blending with the dance-music, the drinks and the women he chatted to, he had no idea about what. His Pierrot costume and his domino mask and cape completely distanced him. It wasn’t himself there, but someone else, a dream-locked domino mask.

  The hours passed in a pleasant daze. The night was now much advanced, and he stood once more on top of the grassy hillock under the umbrella pine, listening to those strange inexplicable voices which had troubled him again and again in the course of the evening.

  The voices came from behind a wall, a truly massive wall, which as the night went on seemed to grow steadily higher, soaring into the sky. The voices swelled out from behind the wall, sometimes stronger, sometimes fainter, sometimes with ear-splitting intensity, and sometimes no louder than the far-off lamentation of mourners on the distant shore of some lake or sea, under an ashen sky … then they fell silent, were totally silent for long stretches of time. Mihály would start to forget about them and feel again like a man at a garden-party, and allowed Waldheim, brilliantly in his element, to introduce him to one woman after another, until once again the distant voices rose.

  They did so just at a time when the general mood had begun to develop agreeably, as everyone slipped towards the subtler, deeper stages of drunkenness, the effect of the night rather than the alcohol. They had passed beyond the threshold of dreams, the habitual hour of sleep. Now distinctions were becoming blurred, rational morality was in retreat as they surrendered themselves to the night. Waldheim was singing extracts from The Fair Helen, Mihály was busy with a Polish lady and everything was quite delightful, when he again heard the voices. He excused himself, went back to the top of the mound, and stood there alone, his heart palpitating in the tenseness of his concentration, as if everything depended on resolving this enigma.

  Now he could hear quite distinctly that the voices beyond the wall were singing, and there were several of them, probably men, intoning a dirge unlike anything ever heard, in which certain distinct but unintelligible words rhythmically recurred. There was a profound, tragic desolation in the song, something not quite human, from a different order of experience, something reminiscent of the howling of animals on long dark nights, some ancient grief from the great age of trees, from the era of the umbrella pines. Mihály sat back under the pine and closed his eyes. No, the singers beyond the wall were not men but women, and he could already see them in his mind’s eye, a strange company, something out of Naconxipan, the mad Gulácsy painting of the denizens of wonderland in their oppressive lilac-coloured attire, and he thought that this was how one would mourn for the death of a god, Attis, Adonis, Tamás … Tamás, who had died unmourned at the beginning of time, and now lay in state out there beyond the wall, with the sunrise of tomorrow dawning on his face.

  When he opened his eyes a woman stood before him, leaning with her sho
ulder against the umbrella pine, in classical costume, exactly as Goethe imagined the Greeks, and masked. Mihály politely straightened his posture, and asked her in English: “You don’t know who those men or women are, singing through the wall?”

  “But of course,” she replied. “There’s a Syrian monastery next door. The monks chant their psalms every second hour. Spooky, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is,” said Mihály.

  They were silent for a while. At last she spoke:

  “I’ve a message for you. From a very old acquaintance.”

  Mihály promptly stood up.

  “Éva Ulpius?”

  “Yes, a message from Éva Ulpius. That you are not to look for her. You won’t find her anyway. It’s too late. You should have, she says, in that house in London, when she was hiding behind the curtain. But you shouted out Tamás’s name, she says. And now it’s too late.”

  “Even to speak to her?”

  “Much too late.”

  The cry of pain swelling up through the wall as if in grief for the rising dawn, in lamentation for the passing of night, now lost its strength, became a faltering, broken wail, tearing at itself, murderously. The woman shuddered.

  “Look,” she said. “The dome of St Peter’s.”

  Above the grey city the cupola hovered, white and very cold, like unconquerable eternity itself. The woman ran off down the hill.

  Mihály felt an immeasurable fatigue. It was as if he had all the while been anxiously clutching his life in his hands, and had just let it slip away.

  Then he suddenly pulled himself together and rushed after the woman, who had now vanished.

  Down below there was a tight crush of people. Most were taking their leave, but Waldheim was still reading aloud from the Symposium and holding forth. Mihály scurried here and there in the seething crowd, then raced to the main gate hoping to find the girl in the press of people boarding coaches.