Journey by Moonlight (10 page)

One evening he arrived in one of the larger hill towns. By then he was in such a surreal state of mind that he never enquired after the name, being all the more reluctant to do so since he had
realised
, around midday, that he could not remember a single word of Italian—so we need not record the name of the town. In the main square stood a friendly-looking
albergo
, where he called in, and dined with a perfectly good, normal appetite on
gnocchi
in tomato sauce, the local goat’s cheese, oranges and white wine. But when the time came to pay he noticed the waitress looking at him
suspiciously
and whispering with two other people sitting in the room. He instantly rushed out, then roamed restlessly up and down on the scrubby
macchia
-covered hill above the town until, forced to leave by a howling wind, he let himself down a steep hillside.

He ended up in a deep, well-like valley where the wind was less fierce. But the place was so closed-in, so dark and desolate it would have seemed to him quite natural to come upon a few skeletons, with a royal crown amongst them, or some other bloody symbol of ancient dignity and tragedy. Even in his normal mind he was highly susceptible to the mood of place: now he was ten times so. He ran headlong out of the deep recess, then became exhausted. A pathway led him up a gentle hill. Arriving at the top he stopped at the base of a low wall. It was a friendly, inviting place. He
jumped up on to the wall. So far as he could see, by the weak light of the stars, he was in a garden, in which fine cypress trees grew. A small mound beside his foot offered itself as a natural pillow. He lay down and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

Later the starlight grew much stronger. The stars became so bright it was as if some strange disturbance filled the sky with energy, and he awoke. He sat up, looked hesitantly around in the eerie luminosity. From behind a cypress tree, pale and melancholy, stepped Tamás.

“I must go back now,” Tamás said, “because I can’t sleep under this terrible starlight.” Then he moved away, and Mihály wanted to rush after him, but could not get onto his feet, however much he struggled.

He awoke at dawn, with cold and the first light, and looked sleepily around the garden. At the foot of the cypress trees,
extending
in all directions, stood crosses marking graves. He had slept in the town’s garden of rest, the cemetery. Nothing could have been more horrible. By day, and perhaps also by moonlight, the Italian cities of the dead were indeed perhaps more friendly and inviting than those of the living, but for Mihály the episode had a horrific symbolic meaning. Again he fled in terror, and from that moment one might properly date the onset of his illness. What happened to him afterwards he was unable to recall.

On the fourth, fifth or perhaps sixth day, on a narrow mountain path, he became aware of the sunset. The pink and gold hues of the setting sun were, to his fevered condition, quite overwhelming, even more so perhaps than when he was rational. In his saner moments he would have been ashamed to respond so strongly to the familiar, banal and utterly meaningless colours of the sky. But as the sun went down behind a mountain he suddenly clambered impulsively onto a rock, seized with the feverish notion that from its top he would be able to watch for a little longer. In his clumsiness he took a wrong hold and slithered down into the ditch beside the road, where he no longer had the strength to get up. There he remained prostrate.

Luckily, towards dawn some peddlers came by on mules, saw him lying in the moonlight, recognised the genteel foreigner and with respectful concern took him down to the village. From there the authorities sent him on, with many changes of transport, to the hospital at Foligno. But of this he knew nothing.

W
HEN HE RECOVERED
consciousness he was still unable to speak a word of Italian. In a weary, timorous voice, using Hungarian, he asked the nurse the usual questions: where was he, and how had he got there? The nurse being unable to reply, he worked out for himself—it was not very difficult—that he was in hospital. He even remembered the strange feeling he had
experienced
in the mountains, and grew calmer. All he wanted to know was, what was wrong with him? He felt no pain, just very weak and tired.

Luckily there was in the hospital a doctor who was half English, and who was called to his bed. Mihály had lived in England for many years and the language flowed in his veins, so much so that it did not desert him now, and they could communicate fully.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” said the doctor, “just
horrendous
exhaustion. What were you doing, to get yourself so tired?”

“Me?” he asked, meditatively. “Nothing. Just living.” And he fell asleep again.

When he woke again he felt a great deal better. The English
doctor
visited him again, examined him, and informed him there was nothing wrong and he would be able to get up in a few days.

The doctor was interested in Mihály and talked with him a great deal. He was keen to establish the cause of his extreme
exhaustion
. He gradually became aware how little comfort Mihály took in the thought that he would be well in a few days and would have to leave the hospital.

“Do you have business in Foligno or the area?”

“Not at all. I had no idea there was such a place as Foligno.”

“Where will you go? Back to Hungary?”

“No, no. I’d like to stay in Italy.”

“And what would you want to do here?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Do you have any relations?”

“No, no-one,” said Mihály, and, in his state of nervous
debilitation
, burst into tears. The tender-hearted doctor felt extremely sorry for this poor abandoned soul and began to treat him with
even greater kindness. But Mihály had not wept because he had no relations, just the opposite—because he had so many—and he feared he would not long be able to preserve the solitude he so much enjoyed in the hospital.

He told the doctor that all his life he had longed to be in bed in a hospital. Of course not seriously ill or suffering, but as at present, just lying there in passive and involuntary exhaustion, being nursed, without purpose or desire, far from the normal business of men.

“It’s no use. Italy has everything I ever longed for,” he said.

It became apparent that the doctor shared his love of
historical
connections. By degrees he came to spend all his free time at Mihály’s bedside, in historical discussions that flitted about lethargically. Mihály learnt a great deal about Angela da Foligno, saint and mystic, the most famous daughter of the town, who was virtually unheard of in Foligno itself. And he came to know a lot about the doctor, since, as with all Englishmen, his
family
history proved rather colourful. His father had been a naval officer who had caught yellow fever in Singapore, was tormented in his delirium with terrible visions, and on his recovery turned Catholic, thinking that would be the only way he could escape the torments of the devil. His family, a religious one consisting for the most part of Anglican clergymen, rejected him, whereupon he became fiercely anti-British, left the Navy, joined the Italian merchant service, and later married an Italian woman. Richard Ellesley—that was the doctor’s name—had spent his childhood in Italy. From his Italian grandfather they inherited a considerable fortune, and his father had educated the young Ellesley at Harrow and Cambridge. During the war the old man went back into the British Navy, fell at the battle of Skagerrak, the fortune
evaporated
, and Ellesley had to earn his living as a doctor.

“The only thing I inherited from my father,” he said with a smile, “was the fear of damnation.”

Here the roles were reversed. Mihály lived in terror of a great number of things, but hell was certainly not among them. He had little feeling for the afterlife. So he undertook to cure the doctor. A cure was urgently needed. About every third day the little English doctor would be seized by terrible fear.

The terror was not induced by bad conscience. He was a
virtuous
and kindly soul, with no obvious cause for self-reproach.

“Then why should you think you’ll be damned?”

“My God, I’ve no idea why I should be damned. It won’t be because of what I am. They’ll just take me.”

“But devils have power only over the wicked.”

“That we can never know. Even the prayer says it. You know: ‘Saint Michael Archangel, defend us in our struggles; be our shield against the wickedness of Satan and his snares. As God
commands
you, so we humbly beseech you; and you who command the Heavenly Armies, with the strength of the Lord deliver unto eternal damnation Satan and all the evil spirits who lead us into danger’.”

The prayer reminded Mihály of his school chapel, and the
horror
its words had always conjured up inside him as an adolescent. But it was not Satan and damnation that disturbed him. It was the prayer with its bleak reminder of bygone days. He generally thought of Catholicism as a modern phenomenon, which indeed it is, but that one prayer seemed like a relic of buried ages.

Whenever the terror of Satan seized him, Ellesley would hurry off to priests and monks for absolution of his sins. But this was of little use. For one thing, because he did not feel himself to be in sin, the act of forgiveness did not help. Another problem was that his confessors, for the most part, were simple country priests who
persisted
in carefully and repeatedly drawing his attention to the
horrific
nature of Satan, which merely made his condition worse. But at least the amulets and other magic charms were a help. On one occasion a saintly old woman blessed him with a sacred incense, and that kept him calm for two whole months.

“But what about you?” he asked Mihály. “Aren’t you afraid? What do you think happens to the soul after death?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“And you have no hope of survival after death, and eternal life?”

“The names of great men live forever. I am not great.”

“And you can endure life on those terms?”

“That’s another question.”

“I don’t understand how anyone can believe that when a man
dies he vanishes completely. There are a thousand proofs to the contrary. Every Italian can tell you that. And every Englishman. In all these two nations there isn’t a single person who hasn’t met with the dead, and these, after all, are the two most honest races. I had no idea Hungarians were so cynical.”

“Have you met with the dead?”

“Of course. More than once.”

“How?”

“I won’t describe it, it might just upset you. Although, one
occasion
was so straightforward it shouldn’t disturb you. I was a pupil at Harrow before the war. One day I was lying in my bed—with the ’flu—and staring out through the window. Suddenly I saw my father standing on the window sill in his naval uniform, saluting me. The only strange thing was that his officer’s cap had two wings, as in pictures of Mercury. I jumped up from the bed and opened the window. But he had gone. This was in the afternoon. That same morning my father was killed. That was the time it took for the spirit to get from Skagerrak to Harrow.”

“And the other occasion?”

“That was much more mysterious. It happened in Gubbio, not long ago. But that I really shouldn’t tell you about.”

“Gubbio? Why does that name seem so familiar?”

“Presumably from the legend of Saint Francis in
The Little Flowers
.”

“Of course, yes, the wolf of Gubbio … the one Saint Francis made a pact with, that he wouldn’t trouble the townspeople, and they in return provided him with food? … ”

“And every evening the wolf could be seen, with two baskets round his neck, going about the houses of Gubbio one after the other, collecting love-gifts.”

“Is this Gubbio still in existence?”

“Of course. It’s quite near here. You must visit it when you are better. It’s very interesting, not only for the wolf legend … ”

They talked a lot about England, Doctor Ellesley’s other home, which he greatly missed. Mihály too was very fond of England. He had spent two very serious, dreamy years there, before going on to Paris and home. In London he had wallowed in an orgy of solitude. Sometimes he went for weeks without speaking to
anyone, just a few working men in suburban pubs, and then only a few words. He loved the appalling London weather, its foggy, watery softness, in which one can sink as low as the temperature in solitude and spleen.

“In London November isn’t a month,” he said, “it’s a state of mind.”

Ellesley readily agreed.

“You see,” Mihály continued, “now it comes back to me: in London one November I also experienced something which, with people like yourself, would no doubt have strengthened their belief that the dead somehow survive. In me it only strengthens the
conviction
that there is something wrong with my nervous system. Listen to this. One morning I was working down in the factory (as I said, this was in November) when I was called to the telephone. An unknown woman asked me to go without fail that afternoon, on important business, to such and such a place, and gave me an unfamiliar name and address. I protested that there must be some error. ‘Oh no,’ said this unknown female voice, ‘I’m trying to
contact
a Hungarian gentleman who works in the Boothroyd factory as a volunteer. Is there another one of that description?’ ‘No-one,’ I replied, ‘and you have my name correctly. But tell me, what is it about?’ She couldn’t say. We talked about it for some time and eventually I agreed to go.

“I went because I was curious. Is there any man who wouldn’t respond to the dulcet tones of an unknown woman on the
telephone
? If women really knew men they would ask us for
everything
over the telephone—in unfamiliar voices. The street, Roland Street, was in that rather forbidding bit of London behind Tottenham Court Road, just north of Soho, where the painters and prostitutes live who can’t afford Soho proper or Bloomsbury. I don’t know for certain, but I think it very likely that this is the part of London where you find the founders of new religions, Gnostics and the seedier kinds of spiritualist. The whole area gives off an aura of religious dereliction. Well, anyway, that’s where I had to go. You have to understand I am incredibly sensitive to the
atmosphere
of streets and places. As I made my way through the dark streets looking for Roland Street in the fog—it was mist rather than fog, a white, transparent, milky mist, typical of November—
I was so overcome by this sense of spiritual abandonment I was almost seasick.

“I finally found the house, and a plate beside the door with the name given me by the strange voice on the telephone. I rang. After some time I could hear shuffling, and a sleepy slattern of a maid opened the door.

“‘What do you want?’ she asked.

“‘Well, I’ve no idea,’ I said, and felt rather embarrassed.

“Then someone shouted down, as from a long way off. The maid pondered this and for some time said nothing. Then she led me to a grubby little stairway and said, in the usual English way, ‘Just go straight up.’ She herself remained below.

“At the top of the stairs I found an open door and a room in semi-darkness. There was no-one in it. Just then the door
opposite
closed, as if someone had just that instant left the room. Remembering the maid’s instructions, I crossed the room and opened the door that had just closed. I found myself in another semi-dark, old-fashioned, dusty and tasteless room, with no-one in it, and again the door across the way closed, as if someone had just that instant gone out. Again I crossed the room and entered a third room, then a fourth. Always a door quietly closing before me, as if someone was walking ahead of me. Finally, in the fifth room … well, it’s an overstatement to say finally, because although there was no-one in that fifth room, there at least was no door closing before me. In this room there was only one door, the one I had come through. But whoever had been walking ahead of me was not in the room.

“There was a lamp burning in the room, but no furniture apart from two armchairs. On the walls pictures, rugs hanging
everywhere
, every sort of worthless old-fashioned lumber. I sat down rather hesitantly in one of the armchairs and prepared to wait. Meanwhile I kept glancing restlessly about me, because I was quite sure something very strange was happening.

“I don’t know how long I had been sitting like that, when suddenly my heart began to knock horribly, because I had realised what I had unconsciously been looking for. From the moment I entered this room I had had the feeling that I was being watched. Now I had found who it was. On one of the walls hung a Japanese
rug, depicting various sorts of dragon and other fantastic animals, and the eyes of these animals were made of large coloured-glass buttons. I now saw that one of the animals had an eye that wasn’t glass, but a real eye, and was staring at me. Presumably someone was standing behind the rug looking at me.

“In any other circumstances it would have seemed to me like something out of a detective novel. You read so much about
foreigners
vanishing in London without trace, and this seemed just the sort of start you would imagine for such a story. I tell you, the natural thing would have been for me to panic, suspect criminal intent, and put myself in a defensive posture. But I didn’t. I just sat there, stock-still, frozen with terror. Because, you see, I recognised the eye.”

“What do you mean?”

“That eye was the eye of a friend of my youth, a certain Tamás Ulpius who died young in tragic, although rather unclear,
circumstances
. For a few moments my fear was suspended, and a sort of pallid ghostly happiness filled me, a sort of ghost of happiness. I called out, ‘Tamás,’ and wanted to rush over to him. But in that instant the eye vanished.”