The reality-content of Erzsi’s news had run through his whole system like a poison. He thought endlessly, and with ever-increasing anxiety, about his father, whom his own behaviour and the impending financial crisis had surely reduced to a dreadful state of mind. He could see the old man before him: presiding disconsolately over the family dinner, twirling his moustache or rubbing his knee in his distress, struggling to act as if nothing was wrong, his forced jollity making the others even more depressed, and everyone ignoring his sallies, becoming gradually more silent, eating at double speed to get away as fast as possible from the miseries of the family gathering.
And if Mihály did occasionally manage to forget his father, his thoughts turned to Éva. That Éva would leave for an impossibly distant country, perhaps for ever, was worse than anything. Because, dreadful as it was that she had no desire to know about him, life was nonetheless bearable so long as one knew she was living in the same city, and that they might chance to meet, or at least she might be glimpsed from afar … But if she went away to India, there was nothing left for him. Nothing.
One afternoon a letter arrived from Foligno, from Ellesley.
Dear Mike,
I have some very sad news for you. Father Severinus, the Gubbio monk, recently fell seriously ill. More precisely, he had a long-standing tubercular condition which got to the stage where he could no longer remain in the monastery and they brought him to the hospital here. During those hours when neither his illness nor his devotions claimed him, I had the opportunity to talk with him, and gained some small insight into his remarkable state of mind. I have no doubt that in earlier centuries this man would have been venerated as a saint. He spoke of you often and in terms of the greatest affection, and I learnt from him — how mysterious are the ways of Providence — that in your youth you and he had been close friends and always very attached to one another. He asked me to let you know when the inevitable happened. This request I now fulfil, for Father Severinus died in the night, towards dawn this morning. He was alert to the last, praying with his fellow Franciscans seated by his bed, when the moment of departure came.
Dear Mike, if you had the absolute faith in eternal life that I have you would take some comfort in this news, because you would trust that your friend was now where his fragmentary mortal existence received its deserved complement, the Life Eternal.
Don’t forget me completely. Write sometimes to your devoted
Ellesley
P S Millicent Ingram duly received the money. She finds your apologies absurd between friends, sends you many greetings and thinks of you with affection. I can now also mention that she is my fiancée.
The day was appallingly hot. In the afternoon Mihály walked in a daze round the Borghese gardens, went to bed early, fell asleep in his exhaustion, and later woke again.
In a half-dream he saw before him a wild, precipitous landscape. The prospect seemed somehow familiar and, still in his dream, he wondered where he could possibly have known that narrow valley, those storm-tossed trees, those seemingly stylised ruins. Perhaps he had seen them from the train, in that wonderful stretch of country between Bologna and Florence, perhaps in his wanderings above Spoleto, or in a painting by Salvator Rosa in some museum. The mood of the landscape was ominous and heavy with mortality. Mortality hung over the tiny figure, the traveller, who, leaning on his stick, made his way across the landscape under a brilliant moon. He knew that the traveller had been journeying through that increasingly abandoned landscape, between tumultuous trees and stylised ruins, terrified by tempests and wolves, for an immense period of time, and that he, and no-one else in all the world, would roam abroad on such a night, so utterly alone.
The bell rang. Mihály switched on the light and looked at his watch. It was past midnight. Who could it be? Surely no-one could have rung. He turned on his other side.
The bell sounded again. Troubled, he got up, put something on, and went out. At the door stood Éva.
In his embarrassment he forgot even to greet her.
That’s how it is. You yearn for someone, maniacally, mortally, to the verges of hell and death. You look for them everywhere, pursue them, to no avail, and your life wastes away in nostalgia. Since coming to Rome Mihály had never stopped waiting for this moment, had prepared for it, and had only just come to believe that never again would he speak with Éva. And then suddenly she appears, just at the moment when you’ve pulled on a pair of cheap pyjamas, are ashamed to be so unkempt and unshaven, ashamed to death of your lodgings, and you’d actually rather this person, for whom you’ve yearned so inexpressibly, were simply not there.
But Éva paid no attention to any of that. Without greeting or invitation she stepped quickly into his room, sat down in an armchair, and stared stiffly in front of her.
Mihály shuffled in after her.
She had not changed in the slightest. Love preserves one moment for ever, the moment of its birth. The beloved never ages. In love’s eye she is always seventeen, her dishevelled hair and light summer frock tousled for the rest of time by the same friendly breeze that blew in the first fatal moment.
Mihály was so discomposed all he could ask was:
“How did you find my address?”
Éva motioned restlessly with her hand.
“I telephoned your brother, in Pest. Mihály, Ervin’s dead.”
“I know,” he said.
“How did you know?”
“Ellesley, the doctor, wrote to me. I know you also met him once, in Gubbio, in the house where the door of the dead was open.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“He nursed Ervin in his last hours, in the Foligno hospital. Here’s his letter.”
Éva read the letter and fell into a reverie.
“Do you remember his enormous grey coat,” she said, after a while, “and how he always turned the collar up as he walked along, with his head bowed? … ”
“And somehow his head always went in front of him, and he came after it, like those big snakes that throw their head forward and their bodies slither along behind … And how much he smoked! No matter how many cigarettes I put in front of him, they all went.”
“And how sweet he was, when he was in good humour, or tipsy … ”
Father Severinus vanished. In the dead man of Foligno only Ervin had died, the remarkable boy and dear friend and the finest memory of their youth.
“I knew he was very ill,” said Mihály. “I tried to persuade him to get himself seen to. Do you think I should perhaps have tried a bit harder? Perhaps I should have stayed in Gubbio and not left until something was done about getting him well?”
“I think our concern, our tenderness, our anxiety would never have got through to him — to Father Severinus. For him the illness wasn’t as it would be for other people — not a misfortune but rather a gift. What do we know about that? And how easy it would have been for him to die.”
“He was so used to the ways of death. In the last few years I think he dealt with nothing else.”
“All the same, it might well have been horrible for him to die. There are very few people who die their own, proper death, like … like Tamás.”
The warm orange glow from the lampshade fell on Éva’s face and it became much more like the face she had shown in those years in the Ulpius house when … when they played their games and Tamás and Mihály died for her, or at her hands. What kind of fantasy, or memory, might now be stirring in her? He clutched his hand to his aching, pounding heart, and a thousand things flitted through his head: memories of the sick pleasure of the old games, the Etruscan statues in the Villa Giulia, Waldheims’s explanations, the Other Wish and the death-hetaira.