He thrust his hands in his pockets and quickly made his way back.
He decided that he would travel home the next day. It was too late to leave that day, because Tivadar’s letter had not arrived much before noon. He would have to wait until morning to change the cheque he had been sent, and to despatch the money he owed to Millicent. He was spending his last night in Rome. He wandered around the streets with an even greater sense of surrender than before, and found everything even more charged with significance.
He was bidding farewell to Rome. It was not particular buildings that had found their way into his heart. The overwhelming experience was of the life of the city itself. He wandered aimless and uncertain, with the feeling that tucked away in the city were still thousands upon thousands of districts he would now never see. And again he had the feeling that the really important things were happening elsewhere, where he was not; that he had missed the secret signal. His road led absolutely nowhere and his nostalgia now would gnaw him eternally, remain eternally unquenched, until he too departed, Die Pyramide vorbei, leise zum Orcus hinab …
The light was fading and Mihály walked with lowered head, hardly noticing even the streets, until, in a dark alleyway, he bumped into someone, who muttered, “sorry”. Hearing the English word, he looked up and saw before him the young Englishman who had so struck him at Keats’s grave. There must have been something in Mihály’s face as he looked at the Englishman, for he raised his hat, murmured something, and hurried off. Mihály turned and stared after him.
But only for a moment. Then, with determined footsteps, he hurried after him, without thinking why he did. As a boy, under the influence of detective novels, one of his favourite pastimes had been to fall in suddenly behind some unknown person and to track him, taking great care not to be noticed, sometimes for long hours. He would not follow just anyone. The chosen person had to have been revealed to him by some means, some cabalistic sign, as had this young Englishman. It could not have been by empty chance that in all this vast city he had met him twice on the same day, and that day such a significant one, and that in both of them the meeting had produced such unprovoked astonishment. Some secret lay hidden in this, and he would have to follow it to its end.
With the excitement of a detective he tracked the Englishman through the narrow streets to the Corso Umberto. He had not lost his boyhood skill. He could still follow unobserved, like a shadow. His quarry walked up and down the Corso for a while, then took a chair on a café terrace. Mihály also sat down, drank a vermouth, and watched him in a fever of anticipation. He knew that something must happen. He had the impression that the Englishman was no longer as calm and expressionless as he had been at the graveside. Under the regular lines of his face and the alarming clarity of his skin some strange life seemed to be throbbing. Of course the restlessness showed on his impeccable English surface no more than the wing of a bird brushing the surface of a lake. But restless he certainly was. Mihály knew that the man was waiting for someone, and he too was infected with the apprehension of waiting, which was amplified in him like a voice through a megaphone.
The Englishman began to glance repeatedly at his watch, and Mihály could hardly bear to remain in his seat. He fidgeted, ordered yet another vermouth, then a maraschino. This was no time for economising. Anyway, he was going home the next day.
At last an elegant limousine drew up outside the café, the door opened and a woman glanced out. Instantly the Englishman sprang up and disappeared into the car, which moved off smoothly and silently.
It took but an instant. The woman had appeared in the open car door for no more than a moment, but Mihály had recognised her, as much by intuition as by sight. It was Éva Ulpius. He too had leapt to his feet, had seen her glance fall on him for just a moment, and caught the very faint smile that appeared on her face. But it was over in a flash, and Éva had disappeared inside the car and vanished into the night.
He paid for his drinks and staggered out of the café. The omens had not lied. It was for this that he had been summoned to Rome: because Éva was here. Now he understood that she was the source and object of his nostalgia. Éva, Éva …
And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, he had sensed this meaning everywhere, in the streets, houses, ruins and temples of Rome. It could not be said of the feeling that it was ‘filled with pleasurable expectation’. Rome and its millennia were not by nature associated with happiness, and what Mihály anticipated from the future was not what is usually conjured up by ‘pleasurable expectation’. He was awaiting his fate, the logical, appropriately Roman, ending.
He wrote at once to Tivadar to say that his state of health would not permit an extended journey. He did not send the money to Millicent. Millicent was so rich she could manage without it. If she had waited all this time she could wait a bit longer. The delay was Tivadar’s fault for not sending more money.
That evening, in his elation, his nervous excitement after the feverish waiting, he got drunk on his own, and when he woke later in the night with a violently palpitating heart he again knew the terrible feeling of mortality which in his younger days had been the strongest symptom of his passion for Éva. He well knew, now even more clearly than he had the day before, that for a thousand and one reasons he really had to go home; and that if despite that knowledge he remained in Rome because of Éva — and how uncertain it was that he actually had seen her — he was putting everything at risk, perhaps doing irreparable offence against his family and his own status as a bourgeois, and that very uncertain days lay ahead. But not for one minute did it occur to him that there was anything else he could do. All this, the great gamble and the death-haunted feeling, was so much part of those adolescent games. Not tomorrow, and not the day after, but one day he and Éva would meet, and, until then, he would live. His life would begin anew, not as it had been during all the wasted years. Incipit vita nova.
XIV
EVERY DAY he read the newspapers, but with rather mixed feelings. He enjoyed the paradox that they were written in Italian, that potent and voluminous language, but (in their case) with the effect of a mighty river driving a sewing-machine. But the contents deeply depressed him. The Italian papers were always ecstatically happy, as if they were written not by humans but by saints in triumph, just stepped down from a Fra Angelico in order to celebrate the perfect social system. There was always some cause for happiness: some institution was eleven years old, a road had just turned twelve. So someone would make a monumental speech, and the people would enthusiastically applaud, at least according to accounts in the press.