It was fear that had driven him to the mountains, as it once had the builders of those towns. Up there, in the wilderness of ice and snow, they would not find him. He wasn’t thinking now of Erzsi. Indeed he felt that Erzsi, as an individual, had been disarmed by his telegram. But Erzsi was only one of many. It wasn’t so much people that were following him as whole institutions, and the whole dreaded terrorist army of the past.
For indeed, what had been his life during the past fifteen years? At home and abroad he had been schooled in mastery. Not self-mastery, but the mastery of his family, his father, the profession which did not interest him. Then he taken his place in the firm. He had really tried to learn the pleasures befitting a partner in the firm. He had learnt to play bridge, to ski, to drive a car. He had dutifully entangled himself in the sort of love affairs appropriate to a partner in the firm. And finally he had met Erzsi, who was sufficiently talked about in high society for the level of gossip to satisfy what was due to the young partner in a fashionable firm. And he had ended by marrying her, a beautiful, sensible, wealthy woman, notorious for her previous affairs, as a partner should. Who knows, perhaps it needed only another year and he would become a real partner: the attitudes were already hardening inside him like calluses. You start off as Mr X, who happens to be an engineer, and sooner or later you’re just an engineer who happens to be called Mr X.
He made his way on foot up into the hills and meandered around the villages. The natives remained peaceful, did not pursue him. They accepted him as just another crazy tourist. But a middle-class person meeting him on the third or fourth day of his wanderings would have taken him not for a tourist but a madman. He was unshaven, unwashed, and sleeping in his clothes: he was simply a man on the run. And inside, he was utterly in turmoil, up there among the harsh outline of pitiless mountains, the inhuman solitude, the utter abandonment. The faintest shadow of purpose never flickered across his consciousness. All he knew was that there was no going back. The whole horde of people and things pursuing him, the lost years and the entire middle-class establishment, fused in his visionary consciousness into a concrete, nightmarish shape. The very thought of his father’s firm was like a great steel bar raised to strike him. At the same time he could see that he was slowly ageing, his body was somehow caught up in slow but visible processes of change, as if his skin was shrivelling at the speed of a minute hand ticking round a clock. These were the first signs of a delirious fever of the nerves.
His doctors later agreed that the nervous fever was the result of exhaustion. It was little wonder. For fifteen years Mihály had systematically driven himself too hard. He had forced himself to become something other than what he was, to live never after his own inclination but as he was expected to. The latest and not least heroic of these exertions had been his marriage. Then the excitement of travel, and the wonderful series of unwindings and unfoldings which the Italian landscape had induced in him, together with the fact that throughout his honeymoon he had drunk practically non-stop and never taken enough sleep, all had contributed to the collapse. Essentially, it was a case of a man not realising how tired he is until he sits down. The accumulated exhaustion of fifteen years had begun to overwhelm him from that time in Terontola when he involuntarily, but not unintentionally, took the other train, the train that carried him ever further from Erzsi, towards solitude and himself.
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.
VIII
WHEN 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.