“Come for a walk, Mike. It’s such a beautiful evening. And everyone’s out in the streets, and they’ve all got children with such marvellous names, like Emerita and Assunta. Such a tiny little girl and she’s called Annunziata.”
With the greatest difficulty he struggled to his feet and went out. He walked heavily and uncertainly. It was as if he was seeing everything through a veil, and listening to the sounds of the Italian evening through ears filled with wax. His feet were heavy as lead. “When have I felt this way before?” he wondered.
They went down to the Campo, and he stared at the, Torre del Mangia the huge tower of the city hall that rose over a hundred metres, like a needle piercing the evening sky. His gaze slowly followed the tower upwards to its dizzy height. And the tower itself seemed to go on and on, soaring into the reverberating dark-blue sky.
Then it happened. The ground opened up around a deep well, and again he stood before the whirlpool. It must have lasted only a moment, then vanished. Everything was back in its place. The Torre del Mangia was again merely an extremely tall tower. Millicent had noticed nothing.
But that evening, when their sated bodies finally turned away from each other, and he was alone in that profound solitude that a man feels after he has embraced a woman with whom he has nothing in common, the whirlpool opened again (or was he just remembering it?) and this time it remained. He knew he had only to stretch out his hand to feel the presence of the other person, the comforting reality of the friendly body. But he could not bring himself to reach out, and he lay in solitary distress, by choice, for endless hours.
The next morning his head ached and his eyes were horribly red from sleeplessness.
“I’m ill, Millicent,” he told her. “The problem has come back, the one that kept me in bed in Foligno.”
“What sort of illness is it?” she asked suspiciously.
“I can’t exactly say. Some sort of sporadic cataleptic apodictitis,” he declared nonsensically.
“I see.”
“I must get back to Foligno, to the good Doctor Ellesley. Perhaps he can do something. At least I know him. What will you do, Millicent?”
“Well naturally I’ll go with you, if you’re sick. I won’t just leave you on your own. In any case I’ve seen all the Siena Primitives.”
He kissed her hand with emotion. They reached Foligno late that afternoon.
They took separate rooms, at his suggestion. “On the whole, it’s better that Ellesley shouldn’t know,” he explained.
Ellesley called on Mihály towards evening. He listened thoughtfully to his complaints, and made humming noises over the whirlpool sensation.
“It’s a kind of agoraphobia. For the time being, simply rest. Then we’ll see.”
He spent several days in bed. The whirlpool did not recur, but he had no desire to get up. He felt that if he did it would return. He slept as much as possible. He took every tranquilliser and mild sedative Ellesley brought him. If he slept, he might manage to dream of Tamás and Éva.
“I know what’s wrong with me,” he told the doctor. “Acute nostalgia. I want to be young again. Is there a cure for that?”
“Hmmm,” said Ellesley. “Certainly, but not one I can tell you about. Think of Faust. Don’t hanker after youth. God gave you manhood and old age too.”
Millicent visited him regularly and dutifully, though she seemed rather bored. She would call in on Ellesley towards evening, and they would also leave together after the visit.
“Tell me honestly,” the doctor asked one day, in her absence, as he sat on Mihály’s bed. “Tell me honestly, is there some dead person who is very dear to you?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think about them nowadays?”
“I do.”
From that point onwards his methods became less medically orthodox. On one occasion he brought a Bible with him, on another a garland of roses, then a Virgin Mary from Lourdes. Once Mihály became aware as he was talking with Millicent that Ellesley was drawing crosses on his door. And one fine day he produced a string of garlic.
“Tie this round your neck when you go to sleep. The smell of garlic is very good for the nerves.”
Mihály burst out laughing.
“Doctor, even I have read Dracula. I know what garlic is supposed to do: keep the vampire at bay, who sucks human blood in the night.”
“That’s right. I’m glad you understand. Because there’s no point in your insisting that the dead don’t exist in some form or other. They are what is making you ill. They visit you and suck your life out. Medical science can’t help you with that.”
“Then take your garlic back home. My dead can’t be kept away by that sort of thing. They’re inside me.”
“Naturally. Nowadays they work with psychological instruments. But their nature hasn’t changed in the least. It’s just that you have to be on your guard against them.”
“Leave me in peace,” said Mihály, with mild exasperation. “Tell me that I have cerebral anaemia and prescribe iron tonic and bromide for my nerves. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“Of course it is. I can’t do anything more for you. Medicine can’t help against the dead. But there are stronger, supernatural weapons … ”
“You know I’m not superstitious. Superstition only works if you believe in it … ”
“That’s a very outmoded point of view. At any rate, why not try it? You’ve nothing to lose.”
“Of course not. Just my self-respect, my pride, my integrity as a rational being.”
“Those are long meaningless words. You really should try. You should go to Gubbio. There is a monk up there, in the Sant’ Ubaldo monastery, who works miracles.”
“Gubbio? You spoke to me about it once before. If I remember rightly, you said that you had some supernatural experience there.”
“Yes. And now I will tell you about it, because the story might persuade you. It’s about that very monk.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“You know how I was a city doctor in Gubbio before I came to the hospital here. One day I was called out to a patient who seemed to be suffering from some deep-seated nervous condition. She lived in the Via dei Consoli, one of those completely medieval streets, in a dark old house. She was a young woman, not from Gubbio, not even Italian, I don’t know in fact what her nationality could have been, but she spoke excellent English. A very good-looking woman. The people of the house, where she lived as a paying guest, explained after a while that she was suffering from hallucinations. She had the fixed idea that at night the door of the dead was open.”
“The what?”
“The door of the dead. You see, these old houses in Gubbio had two doorways, the usual one for the living, and next to it a second one, rather narrower, for the dead. This door is opened only when a corpse is taken out of the house. Then they wall it up again, so that the dead won’t return. Because they know that the dead can only come back in the way they went out. The door isn’t on the same level as the paving, but about a metre higher, so you can pass a coffin out to people standing in the street. The woman I mentioned lived in one of these houses. One night she was woken by the realisation that the door of the dead was open, and someone was coming in, someone she greatly loved, who had been dead a long time. And from then on the dead person came every night.”
“But it would be easy to cure that. She would simply have to move house.”
“That’s what we said, but she didn’t want to move. She was very happy to be visited by the dead person. She just slept all day, as you do, and waited for the night. Meanwhile she was rapidly losing weight, and the people of the house were very worried about her. And they weren’t exactly pleased about a dead man calling at the house every night. It was a rather patrician family with strict moral views. The truth was, they had sent for me so that I would use my authority as a doctor to make her leave.”