“And what did you do?”
“I tried to explain to her that she was having hallucinations, and that she should seek a cure. But she laughed at me. “How could I be having hallucinations,” she asked, “when he’s here every night, truly, beyond all doubt, just as you are now? If you don’t believe me, stay here tonight.”
“This was not exactly what I would have wanted, because I am perhaps a little too impressionable in these matters, but I really had no alternative than to stay, out of my duty as a doctor. The waiting was not otherwise unpleasant. The woman was neither terrified or crazed. She was remarkably calm, indeed rather cheerful. In fact, though I don’t wish to seem boastful, her behaviour was frankly quite flirtatious towards me … I almost forgot why I was there, and that midnight was approaching. Just before midnight she suddenly seized my hand, took a night-light in the other, and led me down to the ground floor room, the one into which the door of the dead opened.
“I have to admit I did not see the dead man. But that was my fault. I was too scared to wait. I just felt that it was getting horribly cold, and the flame from the wick was guttering in the draught. And I felt — somehow I felt this with my whole body — that there was someone else in the room. And I tell you sincerely, this was more than I could bear. I rushed out of the room, all the way home, shut the door, and buried my head in the eiderdown. Of course you will tell me that I had succumbed to her powers of suggestion. It could be … ”
“And what happened to her?”
“Ah, I was just coming to that. When they realised that a doctor, or rather my sort of doctor, was no use, they called in Father Severinus, from the Sant’ Ubaldo monastery. This Father Severinus was a very special and holy person. He had turned up in Gubbio from some faraway country, no-one could discover which. He was rarely seen in the town. Apart from major festivals or funerals he never left the mountain, where he lived his life of strict self-denial. However he was now somehow prevailed upon to come down and visit the disturbed woman. The meeting between them, they say, was harrowing and dramatic. When she caught sight of him she screamed and collapsed. Father Severinus himself turned pale and staggered on his feet. It seems he realised what a difficult case it would be. But he did succeed in the end.”
“How?”
“That I don’t know. It seems he exorcised the ghost. After he’d talked with her for a full hour in some strange tongue, he went back up the mountain. She calmed down and left Gubbio. And after that nobody ever saw her again, or the ghost.”
“Very interesting. But tell me,” asked Mihály, giving way to a sudden suspicion, “this Father Severinus, did he really come from some foreign country? Do you honestly not know where he was from?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t. Nobody does.”
“What sort of person, I mean, in outward appearance?”
“Quite tall, rather gaunt. As monks usually are.”
“And he is still up there, in the monastery?”
“Yes. You should go and see him. Only he can help someone in your condition.”
Mihály thought profoundly. Life was full of inexplicable coincidences. This Father Severinus could be Ervin, and the woman Éva, haunted by the memory of Tamás …
“You know what, doctor? Tomorrow I’ll go to Gubbio. For your sake, because you are such a kind person. And because, as an amateur of religious history, I am curious about these doors of the dead.”
Ellesley was delighted with this outcome.
The next day Mihály packed his things. When Millicent arrived to visit him he told her: “I have to travel to Gubbio. The doctor says that only there will I get better.”
“Truly? Then I’m afraid it means we shall have to part. I’m staying on here for a time in Foligno. I really love this place. And at first I was so angry with that Frenchman, who tricked me into coming here, do you remember? But now I don’t mind. And the doctor is such a nice man.”
“Millicent, I am sorry, I still owe you money. I feel really bad about it, but you know, back home it has to be channelled abroad through the National Bank, and the banking machinery is very complicated. Do please bear with me. Truly, it should come in the next few days.”
“Don’t mention it. And if you see any good pictures, do write to me.”
XI
GUBBIO is reached by the narrow-gauge motor-train that runs between Fossato di Vico and Arezzo. Despite the shortness of the distance, it is a tedious journey. It was also hot, and Mihály was exhausted by the time he arrived. But the city, as it came into view a little way up the road from the station, filled him, from the very first glance, with delight.
It cowered on the side of a huge, barren, typically Italian hill, as if it had collapsed while fleeing upwards in terror. As you looked at it, not a single house seemed less than hundreds of years old.
At the centre of a topsy-turvy tangle of streets, there towered an incredibly high building. Quite why it had been erected in the centre of this godforsaken place, and by whom, he could not imagine: a vast, gloomy medieval skyscraper. It was the Palazzo dei Consoli, from which the consuls ruled the little community of Gubbio until the fifteenth century, when it came under the sway of the Montefeltri, princes of Urbino. And above the town, almost at the peak of the Monte Ingino, stood a long, vast white block of a building, the monastery of Sant’ Ubaldo.
Meanwhile down below, on the road leading up from the station, Mihály found an inn that appeared to be of the better sort. He took a room, had lunch, rested a little, then set out to explore Gubbio. He inspected the interior of the cavernous Palazzo dei Consoli, which reminded him somewhat of a vast studio, with its extremely ancient tavole eugubine—bronze tablets dating from pre-Roman times and preserving the sacred texts of the Umbrian people. He also looked round the old cathedral. There was not much else to see. The main sight here was the city itself.
In most of the towns in this part of Italy (as in so many ancient cities elsewhere) the houses give an impression of dilapidation, of being within a few short years of total ruin. This is because where the Italians built with local stone it was not the practice to plaster the outer walls. Consequently an observer from Middle Europe concludes that the plaster has fallen off and the house, and indeed the entire city, been left to desolation and ruin. Gubbio was even more unplastered, even more tumble-down, than other towns in Italy. It was absolutely desolate. It was off the beaten tourist track. There was scarcely any industry or commerce. It was a mystery how the few thousand people hemmed within its walls could make a living.
Mihály came out of the cathedral and turned into the Via dei Consoli. “This is the street Ellesley talked about,” he thought. It was a street to make the imagination riot: medieval houses, blackened by age, with a bleak, penniless dignity, and, one suspected, inhabitants to match, people living off bread and water in the shadow of a glorious past that had vanished centuries before.
And straightaway, in the third house along, there actually was a door of the dead: next to the usual door, about a metre above the ground, a narrow gothic door-opening, bricked up. There was one in almost every house along the Via dei Consoli, but almost nowhere else in the town; and, strangely, there was no-one about.
He went down a narrow back-alley to the street running parallel behind. This was no less ancient, only a little more gloomily patrician, but it did seem that living beings might reside there. And also, it seemed, dead ones. For outside one particular house a group of people met his astonished eye. Had he not immediately realised what was happening he would have thought it was a vision. People were standing outside the house holding candles, their faces covered with hoods. A funeral was taking place, and here, still following the ancient Italian ritual, members of the family, a hooded fraternity, were taking out the dead.