Train to Budapest

by Dacia Maraini

  Amara pulls abruptly away from her father as he touches her legs and her sex.

  ‘Papà, it’s me, Amara!’ she says more loudly, angrily. But he doesn’t hear. He gives her a dark look and reaches out to draw her closer again. ‘Where are you?’ he shouts, worried now. ‘Why are you moving away?’

  ‘Papà, I’m Amara, your daughter, I’m Amara!’

  At last he seems to understand and releases his grip. His eyes fill with tears. With his mouth open he turns a more comprehending look on her, but seems unable to find words.

  ‘What did you come for? To make fun of me?’

  ‘I came to see you, Papà. Such a long time since we met.’

  ‘You’ve always been rather plain and dull. Are you trying to pass yourself off as your mother who was far more beautiful and intelligent than you could ever be?’

  ‘No, no, Papà, I just wanted to say hello.’

  ‘I don’t need you or your visits,’ her father says harshly, holding her eye. ‘You’re coming to spy on my death, I know.’

  Suddenly Sister Adele is there to help, swift and silent as if she has sprung from a hole in the ground. Who knows where she has been or whether she followed the whole scene? She seems to have been prepared for what would happen. And now here she is, solicitous and maternal. She picks up the rug which Amara’s father had flung away in a fit of rage, and wipes the saliva dribbling from his mouth. She says a few affectionate and reassuring words to him, then takes in both hands the bar at the back of his chair and pushes it, still talking softly to him, towards the end of the loggia. Amara follows sadly. She is not sure whether this is the end of the conversation, or just a brief interruption.

  They come into a great hall with high windows reaching up to the ceiling. In it are other wheelchairs and other nuns. In the middle a long table with a flowered cloth. Metal plates with rough edges and metal beakers. A powerful smell of cooking fat and unwashed hair. Two young nuns come and go from the kitchen with steaming cauldrons.

  Sister Adele pushes the wheelchair up to the table and arranges the furious Amintore in front of a full plate. She hands him a large spoon made from bright metal and moves away. Perhaps I should go now, Amara tells herself. But something keeps her in that distressing place that reminds her of the year she spent with Ursuline nuns at a convent at Calenzano when she was a little girl. The same brusque, essential gestures, efficient and sometimes even a bit brutal. Yet she had loved Sister Carmela. She had asked her to be her mother and she had agreed, always with the same no-nonsense efficiency, but not without humour. ‘I’m not really your mother, remember that,’ she had said with a laugh. Her soft eyes had a slight squint; you could never tell where they were looking. Her cheeks, red as two apples, and her smile overcrowded with teeth gave her a slightly clownish look. But Amara became very fond of her. She got her to wash her hair and mend her socks, and ran to throw her arms round her waist when she felt anyone had been treating her badly. Strangely, Sister Carmela, so ready to cut her nails or sew a patch on her jumper, became touchy and sharp when Amara tried to learn more about her life. ‘I was abandoned in a basket on the Nile,’ she would say, giggling. ‘Why the Nile?’ Sister Carmela wouldn’t answer. Or else in a very low voice she would murmur, ‘Les jardins du Nil.’ ‘You know French, Sister Carmelina?’ ‘I know nothing, I’m tired,’ the nun would say brusquely, and send her about her business. Then at table she would make sure Amara got a double helping of tomato jam. Amara didn’t at all like the tomato jam the sisters were so proud of. She would end up swapping it for a piece of hard bread or half a glass of milk.

  When her father came to take her home again, Amara cried for days. She could not forget the apron with its good smell of basil that Sister Carmela wore over her habit, or the patient hands that lingered over her hair, pulling but never hurting, to loosen the knots. She couldn’t forget Sister Carmela’s raucous, almost aphonic voice. Or how once, when she had a high temperature, Sister Carmela had held ice against her head and stayed up with her all night as she sweated in delirium.

  She had looked for Sister Carmela when she returned to the school in the early fifties, but they told her she had gone away, and they didn’t know where or didn’t want to tell her. The Sisters were not allowed to form affectionate relationships with pupils. She had gone back to see the bed where she had slept and the window from which a hundred times she had looked out at the far-off fields and the pile of sheaves that had grown smaller day by day and the low-flying swallows, and where she had smelt the fragrance of field balm and hay. Her life seemed marked by absences: her mother Stefania, Sister Carmelina, and then her Emanuele, always intent on climbing the cherry tree.

  As she lies stretched out trying to fall asleep she tries to imagine Sister Carmelina on a farm looking after the chickens. She remembers hearing her say that her people had a farm in Friuli. Who knows what she told her beloved hens in that raucous voice of hers? Or perhaps she ended up in Africa looking after lepers. That too was something Amara had heard her say: ‘When I leave here I shall go and look after lepers.’ It had been hard to understand at the time how she could plan to dedicate her life to looking after lepers. But now it was different; Amara seemed to understand it had not just been an ideological project, but an imaginative choice. Fantasising about a hospital required in the middle of the desert, where children die of hunger and women give birth standing up surrounded by mud, where water is precious and life not worth a cent; a way of feeling alive and somehow useful. But at the same time Amara shuddered to realise that she might have done nothing but bend over wounds watching them ooze pus and search for disinfectant and bandages where none could be found, and try to bring a little unpolluted water to the lips of a dying man. The power of a ravenous and distant God found expression through the humble Sister Carmelina. But it was precisely because of that voracious appetite for souls and that distance characteristic of all omnipotent beings, that the nuns allotted Carmela/Carmelina her personal destiny and personal suffering with such extravagant generosity. There is something senseless and yet magnificent in self-sacrifice, and that is what Sister Carmelina was looking for: a sign to make her life precious rather than superfluous.

  Amara has unconsciously if timidly camouflaged herself against a curtain at the far end of the hall and unnoticed watches the scene: the nuns are helping the chronic sick to take their places round the roughly laid table. There is water in gigantic opaque glass jugs. Bread, weighed out and cut into equal slices, stands before each place. Fishing in the steaming cauldrons with ladles, the nuns serve the boiling soup onto the metal plates. But why metal, as if they are prisoners? So they can’t break them, perhaps? To make them last longer? Or perhaps to humiliate them like prisoners, to make it clear that no one trusts their hands or their movements?

  The old people have eyes only for their soup. They count the beans floating amid the islands of fat, and the pieces of carrot and potato that slither through the boiling broth. The elderly women are wearing ankle-length dark wool skirts, with blue, grey or brown cardigans buttoned at the front. Some have a white blouse with a coloured lace collar under their cardigans, and some a rolled scarf round their necks. Nearly all the men are in slippers and walk badly. A bustling nun gets them to take off their hats and stick their napkins into their shirt-collars. They obey with bad grace.

  Sister Adele stands and reads a passage from the Gospels: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This is the Sermon on the Mount, as reported in the Gospel of the Apostle Matthew, amen.’

  The
sick people half-listen, fiddling with their bread and crumbling it on the tablecloth. They wait impatiently, not daring to move their faces any nearer to their plates. Finally a nun with a sharp voice proclaims from the kitchen door: ‘Ora pro nobis, amen! You may start eating!’ And suddenly all the spoons dive into the soup to re-emerge full and head for trembling, greedy, clumsy mouths.

  Amara watches little Amintore who, even if his head is not entirely under control, behaves with dignity and a certain astute courtesy. He inserts his spoon in his soup nonchalantly as if at the very moment when the others are betraying impatience and greed, he himself has lost his appetite. Then, with a slow movement of the wrist, he dips his spoon into the soup again, fills it and waits for it to cool a little; then lifts it first to his nostrils to breathe in the warm, greasy aroma of the broth, and only then to his lips which he opens slowly and gracefully. With nearly all the others, the rising and falling of the spoon causes a little broth to fall on the table and the cloth, or worse still on trousers or skirt, but Amintore doesn’t lose a drop. With calm, slow movements he bends forward and sucks again and again without ever letting his elbow slip, his little finger raised like that of a minor prince at a royal table. He never lifts his eyes from his plate, a slight smile on his unmarked face.

  As she is about to leave, Amara sees him lift his head with a sly flash of mischief and fix his eyes on her as if he had known she was there all the time and had deliberately ignored her. His smile spreads affectionately. Putting down his spoon he waves. ‘Ciao, Stefania!’ he calls loudly, then turns back to his soup without giving her another look.

  26

  Who knows why the train is such a familiar friend. It carries her, enfolds her and protects her. Imposes a rhythm on her thoughts. Never a discordant rhythm, thinks Amara, sucking the end of her pencil as she turns the pages of Conrad. The sliding door opened and Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin came in. A young man dressed entirely in black, his tight jacket making him look thinner than he really is. His ravaged yet naïve smile pushing him towards the precipices of the world. How familiar that man has been to her! Perhaps more familiar than Nastasya Filippovna or even Aglaya. The splendour of meekness. The inexpressible wonder of idiocy and compassion. Is not that the reason she has followed him step by step? For the way Myshkin, the idiot, runs into his future almost by chance and is marked for life by it. He sees Nastasya for the first time in a portrait, as happens with fateful premonitions. A portrait that has fallen into his hands by chance. When she herself enters headlong, throwing open one door and pushing another, the idiot can’t summon up the courage to speak to her. She doesn’t even notice him. She takes him for a servant and throws her fur to him, running off at high speed. In that running, in that careless indifference, the whole relationship between Myshkin and Nastasya is outlined. A relationship composed of cruelty on one side and silent expectation on the other. A relationship that will make them into friends and enemies, mutual slaves and unhappy lovers. Leading them to the murderous night in which the idiot finds himself once again with Rogozhin, the man who has killed the woman he loves, and they discuss absurd things at the bedside of the little dead woman. Only the little marble foot looking on from under the sheet reminds us that someone has murdered an innocent and perverse girl. They talk and talk, all night long. Is this what friendship between men is? Myshkin, inspired by absolute and thus irrational compassion, utterly pure and therefore splendid, considers Rogozhin even more his friend, despite the delicate corpse of the infatuated girl lying there between them as proof of the irrationality of love.

  The train makes every reflection serpentine, humble, wise. Thought assumes the cadence of the wheels and rhythmically works through ideas as if kilometres of reflections must be traversed. Indeed, the train may carry the idea of dragging or pulling away, traîner as the French say. Is that where the word ‘train’ comes from? She immediately gets out the little etymological dictionary she always carries with her. The word is from the Late Latin ‘trenum’, a cart for transporting things. But the most astonishing thing is that ‘trenum’ derives in its turn from the Greek word ‘threnos’ meaning ‘funeral chant’. Which comes first, the cart carrying the provisions for the army or lamentation for the death of a hero? It would be logical to start with war and the impedimenta and provisions and weapons necessary for the soldiers and go on later to funeral lamentations for the deaths of so many young men. But no, the Greek word comes before the Latin one. The contradictions of a language with so many ancestors, all different. She likes to think the train recalls supplies for war but at the same time also carries an ability to console and sing songs for the dead. In the end, every train moves towards the realm of the dead, bearing ideas and meditations that feed on themselves. This is how she likes to think of it, this smoky train travelling through fields still full of land mines and through bombed cities and woods that have given refuge to desperate fugitives, as it heads slowly for Vienna.

  Her father Amintore loved trains. Although he travelled very little himself, on Sundays he would set out on the floor a complicated system of rails and make miniature trains run on them, perfect copies of trains from various past periods, accurately copied from old rolling-stock and from old locomotives with fine long snouts, even with make-believe steam puffing from their chimneys.

  Amintore had never liked real travel. After military service as an Alpinist in the Cadore Mountains, he had been sent to ‘civilise’ black people in Ethiopia, coming home wounded. That had been enough. No, for their honeymoon he took her mother Stefania to Venice. After that horrible act of violence she had insisted on getting married immediately. She couldn’t bear to live alone any longer. Her parents had died young. She was alone in the great house in Piazza Dalmazia. They could have lived together in her parents’ apartment, but Stefania had preferred to adapt herself to the little house in Via Alderotti, near Villa Lorenzi and the park where one day the little Amara would spend so much time running and playing with Emanuele.

  How often Amintore had told her about that trip to Venice! The idea of streets of water had made a profound impression on him. ‘You wear shoes and walk on asphalt, but in fact you’re surrounded by water. You go up on a little bridge and see greenish waves forming beneath you, you go down stairs and see water following you, you get into a boat and the current of liquid goes with you. It was as if I was made of water myself too, liquefied, without a skeleton, moving like a stream.’

  They had been to see a glass factory at Murano. Astonished and delighted like a child, her father Amintore, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, had witnessed the transformation of a huge drop of liquid glass into a solid bulbous vase. He had learned something from that wonderful metamorphosis: was it not the same with their own bodies that started almost liquid and then grew solid, at first shining new only to grow gradually more cracked and fragmentary, to end up broken and thrown away? Even human thoughts, at their birth, often have a miraculous transparency, a luminous liquidity that gradually becomes more opaque and worn out. This is true of religions too, and even of nations. Perhaps even his love for the lovely Stefania would undergo the same transformation; from a limpid and joyous liquid to something familiar and opaque, unrecognisable? So he sadly asked himself, carrying in his mind the image of that glass melting and running and slithering, dissolving only to coagulate like a precious memory as soon as it was held away from the fire. It was an image of the power and fragility of the universe. He had talked about this to his daughter, often, remembering that trip to Venice that had been one of the few memorable events in his humble life as a cobbler. He had discovered the consistency of water outside a bottle or bucket. He had joyfully followed things that run, that silently modify themselves in the purity of matter. And he had thought of his own spirit as having become a broken glass. He had so much longed for a strong young hand to grab it with tongs and put it back in the fire to make it liquid again, mobile and ready to take on new shapes. Why do we stay in a predictable form, always the same? he had asked his lit
tle daughter, certain she would not understand, but hoping she might remember something of his words.

  The memory of all those Sundays sitting on the floor with her father Amintore, busy with his model trains, return to her memory as the train draws her towards the future. Perhaps it is from this, from the imaginary journeys her father took, that she derives her love of trains. Who knows! With a few rapid movements the young Amintore would move aside the two shabby armchairs and the bench that stood round the table. He would close the table’s gate-legs and push it against the wall, clearing a space for his trains to run. He claimed it was for her that he set out his railway, but he himself was the real enthusiast. Hurrying to buy new model engines as soon as they came out. Spending hours coupling carriages to make up trains. Learning the name of every steam or electric locomotive in the world.