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 … ”