Erzsi listened with delight. The actual history of Tuscany did not for one minute interest her, but she adored him when he came alive like this. She loved the way that at these moments, in his historical day-dreams, precisely when he reached the furthest point from actual living people and the present world, his remoteness left him and he became a normal person. Her sympathy soon merged with more powerful feelings, and she thought with pleasure of the expected sequel later that night, all the more because the night before he had been in a bad mood, and fell asleep, or pretended to, the moment he lay down.
She knew that Mihály’s exalted mood could easily be diverted from history towards herself. It was enough to put her hand in his and gaze deep into his eyes. He forgot Tuscany, and his face, flushed as it was with wine, grew pale with sudden desire. Then he began to woo and flatter her, as if trying to win her love for the very first time.
“How strange,” Erzsi thought. “After a year of intimacy he still woos me with that voice, with that diffidence, as if totally unsure of success. In fact the more he wants me, the more distant and fastidious his manner becomes, as if to embellish his desire, to give it the proper respect — and the greatest intimacy, physical intimacy, doesn’t bring him any closer. He can only feel passion when he senses a distance between us.”
So it was. Mihály’s desire spoke to her across a distance, in the knowledge that she would leave him. Already she had become for him a sort of beautiful memory. He drank heavily to sustain this mood, to make himself believe that he wasn’t with Erzsi but with the memory of Erzsi. With Erzsi as history.
But meanwhile Erzsi drank too, and on her wine always had a strong effect. She became loud, jolly and extremely impatient. This Erzsi was rather new to him. Before their marriage she had had little opportunity for unguarded behaviour when with him in public. He found this new Erzsi extremely attractive, and they went up to the bedroom with equal haste.
That night, when she was at once the new Erzsi and the Erzsi of history, Erzsi-as-memory, when Zoltán Pataki’s letter, with its implicit reminder of the Ulpius days, had so deeply shaken him, Mihály forgot his long-standing resolution and admitted elements into his married life which he had always wanted to keep away from Erzsi. There is a kind of lovemaking fashionable among certain adolescent boys and still-virgin girls, which lets them seek pleasure in a roundabout way, avoiding all responsibility. And there are people, like Mihály, who actually prefer this irresponsible form of pleasure to the serious, adult, and, as it were, officially approved variety. But Mihály, in his heart, would have been thoroughly ashamed to acknowledge this inclination, being fully aware of its adolescent nature, of its adolescent limitations. Once he had arrived at a truly serious adult relationship with Erzsi he had determined it would express itself only along the ‘officially approved lines’, as befitting two serious-minded adult lovers.
That night in Florence was the first and only derogation. Erzsi was filled with wonder, but she accepted him willingly and reciprocated his unaccustomed gentleness. She did not understand what was happening, nor did she understand afterwards his terrible depression and shame.
“Why?” she asked. “It was so good that way, and anyhow I love you.”
And she fell asleep. Now he was the one who lay awake for hours. He felt that finally, definitively, he was facing the bankruptcy and collapse of his marriage. He had to acknowledge that here too he had failed as an adult, and, what was even worse, he had to concede that Erzsi had never before given him so much pleasure as now, when he made love to her not as a partner in adult passion but as an immature girl, a flirtation on a springtime outing.
He climbed out of bed. As soon as he was sure she was still asleep he went to the dressing table where her reticule lay. He rummaged in it for the cheques (Erzsi was their cashier). He found the two National Bank lire cheques, each for the same amount, one in his name, the other in hers. He withdrew his own, and in its place smuggled in a sheet of paper of similar size. Then, very carefully, he put it in his wallet, and went back to bed.
VI
THE NEXT MORNING they continued on their way to Rome. The train pulled out of Florence into the Tuscan landscape, between hillsides green with spring. It made slow progress, stopping for ten minutes at every station, where the passengers disembarked until it was ready to leave, then drifted back, chattering and laughing, at the comfortable pace of the South.
“Just look,” observed Mihály. “You see so much more from the window of a train, here in Italy, than you can in any other country. I don’t know how they do it. The horizon is wider here, or the objects smaller, but I bet you can see five times as much in the way of villages, towns, forests, rivers, clouds and sky here, than you would from a train window in, say, Austria.”
“Indeed,” said Erzsi. She felt sleepy, and his worship of all things Italian was beginning to irritate. “All the same, Austria’s more beautiful. We should have gone there.”
“To Austria?!” cried Mihály. He was so offended he couldn’t continue.
“Put your passport away,” said Erzsi. “Once again you’ve left it out on the table.”
The train stopped at Cortona. When he saw the little hilltop town Mihály had the feeling that once, long ago, he had known many such places and was now savouring the pleasure of renewing old acquaintance.
“Tell me, why do I feel as if I spent part of my youth among these hilltop towns?”
But Erzsi had nothing to say on the subject.
“I’m bored with all this travelling,” she remarked. “I wish I was already in Capri. I’ll have a good rest when we get there.”
“What, Capri! It would be so much more interesting to get off here in Cortona. Or anywhere. Somewhere unplanned. For example, the next stop, Arezzo. Arezzo! It’s just incredible that there really is a place called Arezzo, that Dante didn’t make it up when he compared their gymnasts to devils because they used their backsides as trumpets. Come on, let’s get off at Arezzo.”
“I see. We’re getting off at Arezzo because Dante wrote that sort of rubbish. Arezzo will be just another dusty little bird’s nest, doubtless with a thirteenth-century cathedral, a Palazzo Communale, a bust of the Duce on every street-corner, with the usual patriotic inscriptions, several cafés, and a hotel called the Stella d’Italia. I really am not very interested. I’m bored. I just wish I was already in Capri.”
“That’s interesting. Perhaps you no longer swoon at the sight of a Fra Angelico or a Bel Paese because you’ve been to Italy so often. But I still feel I am committing a mortal sin at every station where we don’t get off. There’s nothing more frivolous than travelling by train. One should go on foot, or rather in a mail-coach, like Goethe. Take me, for example. I’ve been to Tuscany, but I haven’t really been there. Oh yes, I travelled past Arezzo, and Siena was somewhere nearby, and I never went there. Who knows if I will ever get to Siena if I don’t go there now?”