He sat down and finally penned the letter. He wrote not to his father, but to his youngest brother, Tivadar. Tivadar was the bon viveur and prodigal of the family, a friend of the turf, reputed to have had a liaison with an actress. He perhaps would understand and take a tolerant view of the case.
He told Tivadar that, as he no doubt already knew, he and Erzsi had separated, but quite amicably, and that as a gentleman he would soon put everything to rights. Just why they had separated, he should say straight out, was too complicated to put in a letter. The reason he had not written earlier was that he had been lying in hospital, very ill, in Foligno. Now he was well again, but the doctors absolutely advised rest, and he would like to spend the period of convalescence here in Italy. So he really had to ask Tivadar to send him some money. In fact, as soon as possible, and as much as possible. His money had run out, and he had had to borrow three hundred dollars from a local friend, which he would like to repay as soon as possible. The money should be sent direct to his friend, at Dr Richard Ellesley’s address. He hoped everyone was well at home, and that they would see each other again soon. Any letters should be sent to the Ellesley address in Foligno, because he was moving on but did not yet know where he would be spending any length of time.
The next morning he sent the letter by airmail, and hurried off to Millicent’s room.
“So you thought it through and you’re coming, Mike?” she asked, radiantly.
Mihály nodded and with furious blushes accepted the cheque. Then he went to the bank, and to buy himself a good suitcase. The two of them bade farewell to Ellesley and set off.
They were alone in the first-class compartment and exchanged uninhibited kisses, the way the French do. For both, this was a legacy of their student years in Paris. A little later on a somewhat patrician old gentleman joined them, but by then they were past caring, and exercised the privilege of barbaric foreigners.
By evening they had reached Siena.
“Will the signore and signora require a room?” was the obliging inquiry of the porter of the hotel outside which their hansom-cab had stopped. Mihály nodded in affirmation. Millicent, unaware of the significance of the exchange, simply went up, but registered no protest on arrival.
It may perhaps seem from a distance that Millicent was not quite as innocent as Doctor Ellesley had imagined. But for just that reason she was, in her amorous mode, every bit as fresh-tasting and quietly awe-struck as at other times. Mihály found that his journey to Siena had been most worthwhile.
X
SIENA was the most beautiful Italian city Mihály had ever seen. It was more beautiful than Venice, finer than aristocratic Florence, lovelier even than dear Bologna with its arcades. Perhaps an element in this was that he was there not with Erzsi, officially, but with Millicent, and on the loose.
The whole city with its steep, pink streets undulated over several hills in the shape of a happy-go-lucky star. On the faces of its people you could see that they were very poor, but very happy — happy in their inimitable Latin way. The city had the quality of a fairytale, a happy fairytale, lent it by the fact that from everywhere you could see, at its highest point, the cathedral hovering over it like a towered Zeppelin, in the livery of a pantomime zebra.
One of the walls of the cathedral stood away from the main mass of the building, a good two hundred metres distant, as a grotesque and wonderful spatial symbol of the failure of the most grandiose human plans. Mihály loved the feckless way the old Italians set about building their cathedrals. “If Florence has one, then we must have one, and as large as possible,” they said, and then built the longest wall in existence in order to fill the Florentines with panic about the intended size of their project. Then the money ran out, the builders naturally downed tools and lost all interest in the cathedral. “Yes, yes,” thought Mihály, “that’s the way to go about a church. If the Ulpius set were ever to go about building a church, that is exactly how they would do it.”
They went down to the Campo, the main square, the scallop shape of which was like the city’s smile. He could not tear himself away, but Millicent overruled him:
“Miss Dwarf said nothing about it,” she argued, “and it isn’t Primitive.”
In the afternoon they worked their way round the sequence of city gates. They stopped before each one, and Mihály inhaled the view, the sparse sweetness of the Tuscan landscape.
“This is the landscape of humanity,” he told Millicent. “Here a hill is exactly the size a hill should be. Here everything is to scale, tailored to the human form.”
Millicent thought about this.
“How would you know exactly what size a hill should be?” she asked.
Over one gate was an inscription which read: Cor magis tibi Sena pandit—Siena opens its heart to you. “Here,” Mihály thought, “the gates still utter wisdom and truth: ‘Siena opens its heart’ so that life can be filled with the simple delirium of yearning, in harmony with the veiled beauty of the season.”
The following day he woke at dawn, rose and stared out of the window. The window looked out from the city towards the hills. Slight, lilac-coloured clouds were sailing over the Tuscan landscape, and a tinge of gold slowly and timidly prepared for dawn. And nothing existed but lilac and the gold of first light over distant hills.
“If this landscape is reality,” he thought, “if this beauty really exists, then everything I have done in my life has been a lie. But this landscape is reality.”
And he loudly declaimed Rilke’s verses:
Denn da is keine Stelle,
Die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern.
Then he turned in alarm towards Millicent, who was still sleeping peacefully. And it occurred to him that there was no reality in Millicent. Millicent was no more than a simile, a random phenomenon of the mind. And she was nothing. Nothing.
Cor magis tibi Sena pandit. Suddenly he was seized by a mortal yearning, the kind of yearning he had felt only as a young child. But this was both more specific and more urgent. He now yearned for that same childhood emotion, with such intensity that he had had to shout his feelings aloud.
Now he saw that his little adventure, his return to the vagabond years, was merely a transition, a step leading him downwards, and backwards, into the past, into his private history. The ‘foreign woman’ remained a foreigner, just as his years of wandering had been a time merely of pointless locomotion, before he had had to turn home, back to those who were not strangers. But then they … were already long dead, and the stray winds blowing round the four corners of the world had swept them away.
Millicent was awakened by the sensation of Mihály sinking his head on her shoulder and sobbing. She sat up in the bed, and asked in horror: “What’s the matter? Mike, for God’s sake, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” he replied. “I dreamed that I was a little boy, and a huge dog came and ate my bread and butter.”
He embraced her and drew her towards him.
That day they could find nothing to say to each other. He left the girl to study the Siena Primitives on her own, and, at noon, listened with only half an ear to her charming stupidities on the subject of her experiences.
He did not leave the room all afternoon, but simply lay on the bed, fully-dressed.
“ … My God, what is the whole civilisation coming to if they have forgotten what even the modern Negroes know: summon up the dead.”
This was how Millicent found him.
“Have you a fever?” she asked, and put her large lovely hand on his brow. At her touch, Mihály turned slightly towards her.