Train to Budapest (11 page)

When Emanuele disappeared Amara had been stopped in her tracks. She had lost an arm, perhaps more, and she did not know if she could survive. She no more wanted to play, to adventure into unknown worlds, to climb trees, to laugh, or to eat. It was seven years before she had been able to take any interest in another man. This was Luca Spiga, who worked in an architects’ studio and was twenty years her senior. She liked the calm, adult, discreet and perhaps rather timid way he caressed her; as she warmed to his caresses, she seemed to rediscover a body she had thought dead for ever. Luca did not press her with sexual demands. At first he just watched her, then very gently began to stroke first her hair, then her face and neck and shoulders, and his gentleness had seemed a sign of her reawakening. When he asked her to marry him she at once said yes. But she knew now that they had never shared any deep feeling, only the coming together of two chilled bodies that needed to be warmed. And once warm, they accepted the boredom of living together. By good luck they conceived no children, even though they had assumed that they would. She was sure that Luca Spiga never loved her, but he did introduce her to the cinema. He bought them a subscription to the Charlie Chaplin film club where each evening the great classics were shown: the Marx brothers’ comedies, Buster Keaton,
Battleship Potemkin
,
Casablanca
,
Obsession
,
Rome Open City
,
Bicycle Thieves
. They were two good companions in adventure, not much more. When he was away, she didn’t miss him. Rather, she was often happy to forget him. Then, to punish herself, she would spend two hours waiting near a public telephone for the chance to spend three minutes talking to him. Never more than three minutes; it would
have cost too much. She had to watch her money and always think twice before spending any.

When her husband told her he had fallen in love with a woman younger than herself she had been hurt, but had said nothing. By now she had got to know Luca, and she knew he only required the preliminaries of love. The rest did not interest him. He liked to stroke, smell and kiss his beloved, and whisper sweet nothings into her ear. He was so convincing that women were not just deceived but trapped and fascinated. In time, thinking over his constant absences and escapes, Amara realised that the closer their relationship became, the more he needed to run away and find new bodies to caress. He was too much in love with love to dedicate himself fully to any one woman. To him, lasting commitment was unbearable imprisonment. She never understood why he had ever asked her to marry him. Perhaps for once he had believed the caresses would last. Or perhaps he had seen marriage as a way of not falling in love, so that as soon as he had felt there was a danger he might fall in love he had hurried to propose to her, just as Swann, that sophisticated creation of Proust, proposes to Odette in the firm belief that marriage will kill desire. Who knows? He was a man who knew how to listen and be tender, and he drove women mad.

The fact that she had seen through him in no way diminished the intensity of her delusion. She may never have believed in his love, but she had certainly believed in his caresses. And when his caresses were absent she dreamed of his hands. Large hands with broad, flat fingers, the balls of his thumbs sensitive, always warm, his palms dry and smooth. He knew how to caress without wanting to possess, without wanting to press on to the relief of a quick orgasm. He would start with her face: ploughing her forehead with his fingers like a tired field, smoothing and dividing her hair, letting it slip like water through his hands. Then her mouth and neck, where his thumbs would slowly search out her veins and press them lightly as if to feel the slow flow of her blood. Then her shoulders which he released from their many burdens with delicate little taps. He would fill his hands with her breasts and sometimes suck them as if to reach milk closed inside. Then he would warm her sides and belly, pressing them gently with the heat of his closed fists. He would skim lightly over her sex because the moment had not yet come for that secret nucleus of naked flesh.
Then he would pass down her back pressing as he counted each individual vertebra, in sheer wonder at the architecture of bone on which the physical equilibrium of the body depends. Then her legs and feet, first separating her toes before bringing them together again in a warm, affectionate gesture; running his knuckles over the arches of her soles, knocking against her mercurial restlessness in tribute to the grace of her walking.

His caresses were an end in themselves, possessed of an angelic sensuality. She had loved them for that. But in order to caress, Luca needed to feel a dedication that could not last. It was not his ambition to transform this ceremony of delights into a permanent habit. And practising the daily routine carelessly was not even conceivable. A perfectionist cannot be expected to turn into a slipshod repeater of predictable gestures when it comes to the adorable art of caressing.

In fact his caresses were over after barely a year of marriage. And with the end of his caresses, something changed in his character. Tenderness gave way to resentment, a subtle brutality that insinuated itself into his words and gestures. Had this been the meaning of his caresses? To use the intelligence of his hands to restrain a cruelty hidden in some part of his soul? Maybe. But he had been generous and she was grateful to him for that.

14

In the train with the man with the gazelles. On the way to Vienna. Amara had packed her suitcase in a hurry. She was happy to leave Kraków and her room at the Hotel Wawel with its brown wallpaper, the corridor with its smelly threadbare moquette, and the bathroom with its red and yellow tiles and seatless lavatory bowl. The Russian train moves slowly on its widely spaced rails. They have slept in a twin-bed compartment because the single ones were all taken. The table which folds against the wall at night is raised by day and covered with an immaculate white cloth. Hanging above is a lamp with a crimson shade surrounded by gilded pendants that tinkle lightly at each lurch of the train. The beds form a pair, not one above the other as in the trains she is used to, but side by side, with military covers and very clean sheets that smell of perfumed soap. The white curtains have a gilded trimming. An extremely ancient train perhaps once reserved for luxury passengers, but now within the reach of all.

While Amara was undressing Hans had gone out and she did the same when he took off the jumper with the flying gazelles and the white shirt he hung on a clothes-hook along with his corduroy trousers. He put his worn-out shoes side by side under his bed with his socks rolled up inside them. Amara came in to find him sitting in his pyjamas on the edge of his bunk, cigarette in hand. To avoid embarrassment they scarcely looked at each other and slept back to back. The train stopped twenty times during the night, puffing and panting, gurgling and hissing. Men’s voices could be heard in the corridor exchanging information in Czech. They slept little and badly. In the morning, tired and drowsy, they reached Vienna. At last they had arrived. At six the conductor knocked on their door. Did they want coffee? They did. It turned out to be an improbable violet colour and smelled of burned sawdust. But it was hot and they drank it at a single gulp.

‘Vienna is a city offended and wounded by war. There are many ruins, but some intact corners too,’ says Hans. ‘I can take you to a clean if humble boarding-house run by a woman I know, Frau Morgan.’

At the Pension Blumental Amara is faced with choosing between two rooms: a very noisy large one facing the road, and a smaller and more modest one that overlooks a yard and rooftops covered with pigeons. Which would Frau Sironi prefer? Amara decides on the smaller one. Silence before luxury. Frau Morgan helps her carry her luggage to her room. Soon after she knocks and places on the bedside table a small vase containing a scented rose.

‘I have a garden the size of a handkerchief but it’s full of flowers. I’ve sown mint, mallow, chives and rhubarb too. From the mint I also make liqueur, and from the rhubarb tarts. One day I’ll let you taste one.’

Frau Morgan seems anxious to please. Even so, Amara leaves her suitcase open, in case Frau Morgan might like to assess her moral status from the condition of her underwear.

In the afternoon Hans takes her to the Maria Theresia Platz museum, the Kunsthistorisches gallery with its endless rooms full of masterpieces. It is not long since the great paintings were once more hung on its walls and people again began coming from all over the world to admire the ever-popular works of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Brueghel, Rubens and Dürer. Hans and Amara stop in front of one particular painting, as if under a kind of spell. The work of an unfamiliar modern artist. A large, spacious picture, in which people swarm like ants. The huge canvas depicts a day in a Nazi concentration camp. On one side an armoured train is steaming in, on the other huts are set obliquely, of a naïve yet at the same time profoundly wise design. You can make out the beds, though to describe them as beds would be an abuse of language; they are wooden shelves each holding at least five inmates, with no mattresses, covers or pillows, with nothing at all. In the foreground is a morning roll call. It is known that these took hours, with the prisoners forced to stand in the cold wearing only striped pyjamas, their bare feet in clogs. Two or three hours of torture, depending on how many inmates there were to count. In another place, right against the barbed wire, dozens of corpses lie piled up like refuse. People who died in the night and will be dragged
roughly by their arms and legs to a common pit by their still living fellow prisoners.

All this is seen from a certain distance, as if the painter has been viewing the camp through binoculars from a window a hundred metres away. A lugubrious collective vision yet at the same time intense and radiant. The bodies have been painted with quick, firm lines, in which white and black alternate and run into one another. There is something very cruel yet at the same time affectionate in this presentation of a monstrous and ferocious daily existence as everyday normality. The painter seems to have had intimate knowledge of these camps. He seems to have reproduced with his eyes closed his memory of those numbed and mutilated bodies.

A bell rings. An attendant passes, rapidly waving a hand as if to indicate closing time. Hans and Amara go down the infinite stairs of the museum to a tiny eating-place, where they sit down at a table covered with a waxed cloth. They order Hungarian goulash, the cheapest thing on the menu, which is written in chalk on a blackboard hanging on the wall.

‘Would you like a beer?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Impressive, that picture.’

‘But that’s all we looked at. We missed my beloved Vermeer.’

‘We’ll come again.’

‘Who do you think painted that camp?’

‘Someone who must have known it from the inside.’

‘Don’t you think a painter might have imagined it and described it without having been an inmate there?’

‘Not with that precision of detail.’

‘So for you art is only direct reportage?’

‘I think so.’

‘How would you compare that to Goethe or Dante?’

‘Goethe tells ominous fables. Dante invents. No one believes in his
Inferno
. It’s the delirium of a catastrophical mind. What enchants is his language.’

‘And Sebastopol for Tolstoy?’

‘Tolstoy lived through that war; he was there, even if only as an observer.’

‘What about Manzoni and the seventeenth century?’

‘When a writer writes about something not experienced directly, he sets in motion the artifice of the imagination. An artifice that remains indigestible to the reader.’

‘So we should throw away half the literature of the world. And nearly all modern painting.’

‘The Vermeer you love so much describes his own world, his time, his spaces.’

‘And Rembrandt’s
Saul?
’

‘Painters love mythology, but they have a trick. They make it into direct reportage by introducing their wives and children. Saskia is there in all Rembrandt’s paintings. That’s how he constructs his mythology. But in the long run tricks are boring.’

‘So according to you no one can tell a story unless they have lived it directly.’

‘No, what I’m saying is that imagination leads to fables and fables to mental regression. Nothing can have as much force as what you have lived in your own skin.’

‘Then you want artists to be egocentric narcissists. With any outward-looking perspective on the world, on past times, or on faraway stories, becoming a profanation and a crime.’

‘I wasn’t talking of crimes. Let’s leave those to Stalin who sent so many artists to their deaths because they presented a sad and contradictory reality that he disliked. But even if they had painted the optimistic and triumphalist world he wanted from them, they would still have been capable of eventually changing their minds, so he got rid of them before they even had time to regret being his friends.’

‘Isn’t that too reductive?’

‘I remember a story once told me by a friend who was a sculptor. It seems that one day, at the celebrations at a great provincial factory in the Soviet Union that had achieved maximum productivity, a famous painter brought along a work that had been commissioned from him: he had been asked to paint the factory at work, in a happy festive atmosphere with several Stakhanovites receiving prizes. Stalin himself had been invited to the celebrations and although he had not promised to come, he arrived unexpectedly in a helicopter from Moscow, creating enthusiasm and panic. The painter was terrified of showing his enormous new canvas. Even though he had put into it everything expected of him: the
workers, the machinery, the prize-giving, and even a beautiful big symbolic figure of Father Stalin with a benevolent smile on his lips.’

‘The painter had agreed to do all this?’

‘Not voluntarily, but he had no choice. If he’d refused, he would have risked death. That was the climate of the times.’