by Antal Szerb
Mihály dreamily picked up a few reddish bits of pottery and put them in his pocket.
“Relics,” he thought. “Real shards, from the age of the Caesars. And no doubt of their genuineness, which can’t be said of every souvenir.”
On the hill young Roman boys, late descendants of the quirites, were playing at soldiers, hurling shards at one another, fragments of pottery two thousand years old, without a trace of emotion.
“That’s Italy,” thought Mihály. “They pelt one another with history. Two thousand years are as natural to them as the smell of manure in a village.”
Night was already falling when he reached the little tavern in the Trastevere quarter where he had met János Szepetneki the evening before. Following the local custom, he pressed his shabby old hat down on his head and stepped into the smoky interior. His eyes could distinguish nothing, but Szepetneki’s voice was immediately audible. As before, Szepetneki was busy with the girl.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you?” Mihály asked with a laugh.
“Disturbing us, what the hell. Sit yourself down. I’ve been waiting for you with mounting impatience.”
Indignation rose in Mihály, then he was overcome with embarrassment.
“Sorry … I just dropped in for a glass of wine. I was passing by and I had the feeling you might be here.”
“My dear Mihály, don’t say anything. Let’s consider the matter settled. I’m very glad you’re here, speaking for myself and for all the interested parties. And now, listen here. This little witch Vannina is wonderful at reading palms. She told me who I am, what I am. Not over-flattering, but she painted a very accurate picture of me. This is the first woman who hasn’t been taken in by me, and she doesn’t believe I’m a crook. All the same she predicts a bad end for me: a long and difficult old age … Now, let her do you. I’m curious what she’ll say about you.”
A lamp was brought and the girl immersed herself in the examination of Mihály’s palm.
“Oh, the signore is a lucky man,” she said. “He will find money in an unexpected quarter.”
“What are you saying?”
“Somewhere abroad a woman thinks often about the signore. A bald man also thinks often about the signore, but this is not altogether good. This line signifies much conflict. The signore can go with women without worrying, because there will be no children.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s not as if you cannot make children, but all the same there will be none. The line of fatherhood is missing. In summer you should not eat oysters. Soon you will take part in a christening. An older man will arrive from beyond the mountains. The dead visit you often … ”
Mihály abruptly pulled his hand away, and asked for wine. He looked more closely at the girl. Her large-breasted thinness he now found much more beautiful than he had the night before. And she was much more frightening, much more like a witch. Her eyes had an Italian glitter, and the whites seem to enlarge as he looked into them. That northern idea again flitted through his head: the whole race was mad, that was their greatness.
The girl seized his hand and continued to prophesy, now in real earnest.
“Soon you will receive very bad news. Beware of women. All your trouble is because of women. Oh … the signore has a very good soul, but not one for this world. Oh, dio mio, poor signore … ”
With that she pulled Mihály to her and kissed him fiercely, with tears in her eyes. János laughed out loud and cried “Bravo!” Mihály was overcome with embarrassment.
“You must come here again, signore,” said Vannina. “Yes, come again, and often. You’ll be happy here. You will come again, won’t you? You will come?”
“Yes, of course. Since you ask so kindly … ”
“You really will come? Do you know what? My cousin is having a baby soon. She’s always longed for a foreign godfather for the infant. It’s such a fine thing to have. Wouldn’t you like to be godfather to the little bambino?”
“But of course, with great pleasure.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
János was a tactful villain. Through all this he had not once mentioned ‘business matters’. Only when it was late, and Mihály was slowly preparing to leave, did he send the girl away and say:
“Please, Mihály. It is Mr Pataki’s wish that you should write to him about this matter, in your own handwriting, in detail, making it absolutely clear that you authorise him to file a divorce in your name against your wife, and that you acknowledge that he will pay you the twenty thousand dollars in two instalments. You see, Pataki somehow doesn’t trust me one hundred percent, and I’m not surprised. He wants to negotiate with you directly. Meanwhile I am to hand over to you, now, five thousand lire as a down payment.”
He counted the money out on to the table and Mihály crammed it, with some embarrassment, into his pocket. “There,” he thought, “that’s how the die is cast. That’s how you cross the Rubicon. So easily no-one would even notice.”
“Would you please write to Pataki as follows,” said Szepetneki: “you have received, from me, the money he sent. But you must not specify the exact sum. After all, it shouldn’t really be like a receipt or a business letter. That would be rather indelicate, as I’m sure you’ll understand.”
Mihály understood. In his head he instantly calculated how much Szepetneki had pocketed of the money sent to him. Perhaps fifty percent, certainly not more. Never mind, let him have it.
“Well then, God be with you,” said János. “I’ve done my part in this, and tomorrow I’m leaving. But the rest of the evening I’ll spend with Vannina. A splendid girl, I can tell you. Call on her often when I’m not here.”
XX
IT BECAME STEADILY HOTTER. Mihály lay naked on his bed, but could not sleep. Since he had accepted Pataki’s money and written that letter, he had not been able to settle.
He got up, washed, and set off for a stroll in the summer night. Soon he reached the Acqua Paola and stood delighting in the classical waterfall as, with timeless calm and proud dignity, it exercised its mystery in the moonlight. He remembered the little Hungarian sculptor in the Collegium Hungaricum whom he had got to know through Waldheim. The sculptor had walked from Dresden to Rome along the Via Flaminia, which, as Mihály knew from school, was the route always taken by victorious invaders from the north. Then on his first evening he had come up here, on to the Gianicolo. He had waited for them to clear everyone from the park and lock the gate, then he climbed over the wall and lay down in a bush, high above Rome, with the city at his feet. When morning came he rose, undressed and bathed in the pool of the Acqua Paolo, the classical waterfall.
That was how a conqueror marches into Rome. Perhaps nothing would ever come of the little sculptor. Perhaps his fate would be permanent hunger and who knows what else. Nonetheless a conqueror he was, needing only an army and “simple luck, nothing more”. The road of his life led upwards, even if he perished in the ascent. Mihály’s road led downwards, even if he survived, survived everything and came to tranquil, tedious old age. We carry within ourselves the direction our lives will take. Within ourselves burn the timeless, fateful stars.
He wandered for hours on the Gianicolo, along the bank of the Tiber and down the alleyways of the Trastevere. The night was late, but this was an Italian summer night, with people therefore awake on every side, hammering away or singing without embarrassment. This nation is quite innocent of northern notions of sleep as a time of consecrated stupor. At any moment you might stumble without rhyme or reason upon small children playing marbles in the street between three and four in the morning, or a barber will suddenly open his shop at three-thirty to shave a few merry bridegrooms.
On the Tiber tow-boats glided downstream with a calm, classical dignity: not tow-boats, but pictures from a school Latin book illustrating the word Navis, navis. On one a man played a guitar, a woman washed her stockings, a little dog barked. And behind it sailed another ship, the spectre-vessel, t
he Isola Tiberina, which even in ancient times had been built boat-shaped by men who doubted its fixedness, convinced that it slipped away on occasional night expeditions to the sea, carrying the hospital and all its death agonies on its back.
Across the water the moon rode at anchor over the huge oppressive ruins of the Teatro Marcello. From the nearby synagogue, Mihály seemed to remember, a crowd of long-bearded old Jews, with veils of the dead on their necks, would process to the Tiber bank and scatter their sins on the water with a murmuring lamentation. In the sky three aeroplanes circled, their headlights occasionally stroking one another’s sides. Then they flew off towards the Castelli Romani, like large birds winging to rest on the craggy peaks.
Then with a tremendous rumbling a huge lorry drove up. “Daybreak,” thought Mihály. Shapes clad in dark grey leapt from the lorry with alarming speed and poured through an archway door which opened before them. Then a bell tinkled, and a herd-boy appeared, singing out commands to a miraculous Vergilian heifer.
Now the door of a tavern opened and two workmen came up to him. They asked him to order some red wine for them and to tell them his life history. Mihály ordered the wine, indeed helped them finish the bottle, and even sent for some cheese to accompany it, though his difficulties with the language prevented the telling of his tale. Yet he felt an immense friendliness towards these people, who really seemed to sense his abandonment and grappled him to their hearts, and said such kind things it was a pity he could not understand what they were. But then, quite suddenly, he became afraid of them, paid, and made his escape.
He was in the Trastevere quarter. In the narrow alleyways with their myriad places of ambush, his mind filled again with images of violent death, as it had so often in his adolescence when he ‘played games’ at the Ulpius house. What absurd rashness to get into conversation with those workmen! They could have murdered him and thrown him in the Danube, the Tiber, for his thirty forints. And to be wandering around in the satanic Trastevere at such an hour, where under any of the gaping archways he might be struck dead three times over before he could open his mouth. What madness … and what madness to harbour in his mind the very thing that lured him on, tempting him towards sin and death.
Then he found himself standing outside the house where Vannina lived. The house was dark, a small Italian house with a flat, tiled roof and window-arches faced with brick. Who might be living there? What deeds might lurk in the darkness of such a house? What horrors might befall him if he went in? Would Vannina … yes, Vannina had surely had a purpose in inviting him there so often and so insistently in recent days. She could well have known he had had a lot of money from János. All her prospective husbands had been locked up … yes, Vannina would be quite capable … And when he knew that for certain, he would go in.
He stood for a long time outside the house, plunged in sick imaginings. Then suddenly a leaden weariness seized him, and again he felt the nostalgia that had haunted him at every stage of his journey through Italy. But his weariness told him that now he was near the last resting place of all.
XXI
THE NEXT DAY he received a letter. The handwriting was familiar, very familiar, though he found, with some sense of shame, that he couldn’t quite place it. It was from Erzsi. She informed him that she had come to Rome because she wished absolutely to talk to him, on a matter of great importance, great importance concerning him. He would be able to appreciate that this was not a question of some womanly caprice. Her self-respect would not permit her to seek a connection with him if she did not wish to defend his interests with respect to an extremely painful matter; but she considered she owed him that much. Therefore she strongly desired him to call on her, at her hotel, that afternoon.
Mihály was at a loss what to do. The thought of a meeting with Erzsi filled him with dread. His sense of guilt was particularly bad at that moment, and besides he could not imagine what she might want from him. But this soon gave way to the feeling that he had hurt Erzsi so much in the past he could not hurt her yet again by not meeting with her. He took his new hat, bought out of the money received from Pataki, and hurried off to the hotel where she was staying.
Word was sent up to her, and she soon came down to greet Mihály unsmilingly. His first impression was that he could expect little good from this meeting. Her brows were knitted into the frown she wore when she was angry, and she did not relax it. She was beautiful, tall, in every matter of taste elegant, but an angel with a flaming sword … After a few terse inquiries about the journey and one another’s health, they walked together in silence.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“It’s all the same to me. It’s so hot. Let’s sit in a pâtisserie.”
The ice-cream and aranciata brought momentary relief. But they soon got to the point.
“Mihály,” she said with suppressed anger, “I always knew you were pretty useless, and had no idea about anything going on around you, but I had thought there was a limit to your stupidity.”
“That’s a good start,” said Mihály. But he was secretly rather pleased that she considered him a fool and not a villain.
She was surely right.
“How could you have written this?” she asked, and placed on the table the letter he had written to Pataki at Szepetneki’s behest.
Mihály reddened, and in his shame felt such weariness he could not speak.
“Say something!” shouted Erzsi, the angel with the flaming sword.
“What should I say, Erzsi?” he said in a desultory tone. “You’re an intelligent person, you know why I wrote it. I needed the money. I don’t want to go back to Pest, for a thousand reasons. … And this was the only way I could raise money.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t explain such incredible immorality. What an incredible pimp I am. Anyway, I know it. If the only reason you came to Rome, in this heat, was to tell me that … ”
“The devil you’re a pimp,” she said in extreme exasperation. “If only you were! But you’re just an idiot.”
She fell silent. “Really,” she thought, “I shouldn’t take that tone with him, seeing I’m no longer his wife … ”
After a while he asked: “Tell me, Erzsi, how did that letter come your way?”
“What do you mean? So, you still haven’t worked the whole thing out? They conned you, János Szepetneki and that disgusting Zoltán. All he wanted was to show me your total lack of principle, in writing. He sent the letter on to me immediately, but first he made a photo-copy, duly notarised, which he kept.”
“Zoltán? Zoltán does that sort of thing? Duly notarised? Such incredibly dark doings as that, something that would never even enter my mind, such fantastic shabbiness? … I don’t understand it.”
“Well of course you don’t understand,” she said, more gently. “You’re not a pimp, just a fool. And Zoltán, unfortunately, is well aware of the fact.”
“But he wrote me such a kind letter … ”
“Oh yes, Zoltán is kind, but he’s clever. You’re not kind, but you are a fool.”
“But then why is he doing all this?”
“Why? Because he wants me to go back to him. He wants to show me just what sort of lad you are. He doesn’t take into account that I know it anyway, have known it a lot longer than he has, and that I also know what baseness lies behind his goodness and his gentle devotedness. Now if it were simply a question of getting me back, then the whole business has had the opposite result to what he wanted, and that wouldn’t have been so clever. But it’s not just about that.”
“Go on.”
“Listen to this.” Erzsi’s facial expression changed from exasperation to horror. “Zoltán wants to destroy you, Mihály. He wants to wipe you off the face of the earth.”
“Really. But he isn’t big enough for that yet. How do you think he’d try?”
“Look Mihály, I don’t know exactly, because I’m not as cunning as Zoltán. I’m only guessing. First of all, I�
��d do everything I could to make your position in your family impossible. Which, at least for the time being, won’t be difficult, because you can imagine what sort of face your father will make, or has already made, seeing this letter.”
“My father? But you don’t think he’d show it to him?”
“I’m quite sure of it.”
Now he was horrified. A shivering, adolescent dread filled him, dread of his father, the old, old terror of losing his father’s goodwill. He put down the glass of aranciata and buried his head in his hands. Erzsi understood his motives, he knew that. But he could never explain them to his father. He had lost credit with his father, once and for all.
“And after that he’ll get to work in Pest,” Erzsi continued. “He’ll make up such a story about you, you won’t be able to walk down the street. Because, my God, I know that the crime you wanted to commit is not so very unusual. There are hordes of people running around Pest who in one way or another have sold their wives and continue to enjoy general respect, especially if they’re in the money and God’s blessing goes with their businesses—but Zoltán will make quite sure that the weekly press, and other leaders of public opinion, will see it in a way that will mean you won’t be able to walk down the street. You’ll have to live abroad, which won’t worry you very much, except that your family will barely be able to support you, or in fact not at all, since Zoltán will certainly do his utmost to destroy your father’s business.”
“Erzsi!”
“Oh yes. For example he’ll find a way of forcing me to take my money out of the firm. When news of that gets out—and I will have to do it, your father himself will insist—that in itself will be a terrible blow to your people.”
For a long time they sat in silence.
“I’d just like to know,” Mihály said at last, “why he hates me so much. Because he used to be so understanding and forgiving it really wasn’t natural.”
“That’s exactly why he hates you so much now. You really can’t imagine how much resentment was stored up behind his goodness even then, what frantic loathing there was precisely in that forgivingness. No doubt he himself believed he had forgiven you, until the opportunity for revenge presented itself. And then like some wild animal reared on milk, suddenly given its first taste of meat … ”