By this time the train had crossed a Fiume street between lowered barriers. Porters stormed the carriages. Esti picked up his own basket and deposited it in the left luggage office, as he didn’t intend, for the sake of economy, to take a room in Fiume; he would only be there until eight that evening when his ship, the Ernő Dániel, left for Venice. O navis referent in mare te novis fluctus …
Among the cabs in the square outside the station building a private carriage was waiting. Mother and daughter got into it. Esti stared after them. He watched them until they disappeared in the dreaming lines of plane trees on Viale Francesco Deák.
He too set of along that shady, sun-dappled avenue, light of heart, with his raincoat over his shoulder. Shopkeepers called out “latte, vino, frutti,” as he passed, passersby said “buon giorno” to one another. “Annibale,” shouted a mother after her son, and a market woman selling figs at a street corner scolded her little daughter, “Francesca, vergognati.” Everyone was chattering in that language, that language which is too beautiful for everyday use, that language of which he wasn’t ignorant, which he had taken to his heart in the cramming torments of schoolboy nerves. There was in the air a ceaseless din, a happy racket, a great and unrestrained street merriment. While people were alive they made a noise, for they wouldn’t be able to later.
A barrow loaded with fish was pushed along, big sea fish and crabs. Cake shops exhaled a scent of vanilla. He saw bay-trees and oysters. In front of the dangling glass bead curtain of a hairdresser’s shop stood the coif eur, splendidly accoutred like a divine actor, setting an example to his customers with a white comb stuck in his high-piled, pomaded black hair. Toilet soap: italianissimo. All was exaggeration, superlative, ecstasy.
Esti sat down on the terrace of a café. He hadn’t eaten or drunk since the previous afternoon. But more than food or drink, he was yearning at last to speak Italian to a real Italian for the first time in his life. He prepared for this with a certain amount of stage fright. Very slowly the waiter approached him, an elderly Italian with a pointed white beard.
He knew that the Budapest express had arrived, and so he addressed his guest in Hungarian, with an almost spicy accent: “Breakfast, sir?” Esti didn’t reply, waited a moment, then said, “Si, una tazza di caffé.” The waiter happily reverted to his native language: “Benis-simo, signore,” and was about to go. In his delight at having passed that test with flying colors, Esti called after him: “Camariere, portatemi anche pane, acqua fresca e giornali. Giornali italiani,” he added nonchalantly and unnecessarily. “Sissignore, subito,” replied the waiter, and hurried away with his indescribably pleasant s-es.
Esti was happy. Happy that he had been taken for something other than what he was, perhaps even for an Italian, but in any case a foreigner, a person, and that he was able to continue to play his role, escaping from the prison in which he had been confined since birth. He sipped his espresso, which the waiter poured into his glass from a large aluminum jug, devoured six croissants and four rolls, then, as if he’d been doing it all his life, buried himself in the Corriere della Sera.
While he was thus reading a voice rang out: “Pane.” A ragged, filthy street urchin was standing by his table, a four-year-old child, barefoot, and pointing most determinedly at the basket of bread. Esti gave him a roll. But the little boy didn’t go away. “Un altro,” he exclaimed again. “Che cosa?” inquired Esti. “Un altro pane,” said the child, “due,” and held up two fingers as is customary in those parts to show that he was asking for not one but two, “per la mamma,” and her too he indicated, standing a few yards away on the road as if on stage, to be seen and exert influence as in a tear-jerking farce, but even so, dignified. She was a youthful, weather-beaten mother, also barefoot, wearing a chemise but no blouse. A wretched skirt hung from her, and her hair was unkempt, but the skin of her face was that olive shade that one sees in Abruzzo. Her eyes gleamed darkly. She and her child watched, standing erect, not bending, watched what the straniero would do. Esti held out another roll to the little boy. He and his mother, his mamma, whom he must have loved so much, strolled slowly on. Neither of them thanked him for his kindness.
This, however, pleased Esti beyond words and made him feel good. “See,” he thought, “these people don’t beg, they demand. They’re an ancient free people, glorious even in penury.” He sat on at the table of life. He knew that life was his, as the bread was. “I ought to live here. This sensitivity, this sincerity, this sunlight that permeates everything, this easy-going exterior which must conceal all sorts of things, all excite me. No blood relationship can be as strong as the attraction that I feel to them. They alone will be able to cure me of my muddled sentimentality.”
When the time came to pay, a few problems cropped up, as Esti failed to understand a couple of Italian words, and the waiter, who had immediately realized from Esti’s accent that he wasn’t an Italian, began to ask, with the frankness that is permissible with the young, what his nationality was. He listed numerous possibilities—Austri-aco? Tedesco? Croato? Inglese? — and Esti just shook his head. Then the waiter inquired where he lived, from what town he came, where he was from. With a stern gesture Esti dismissed the old man, who withdrew behind a pillar not far from the table and from there continued to assess this inscrutable boy.
“Where am I from?” recited Esti to himself, intoxicated by the espresso and lack of sleep. “Where everybody’s from. The purple cavern of a mother’s womb. I too started out from there on an uncertain journey, and neither destiny nor destination are stated in the passport. A pleasure trip? I hope it will be, because I very much want to enjoy everything. Or a study trip? If only I could know all that has been known until now. Or just an affaire familale? I wouldn’t mind that either, because I adore children. So, I’m an earthworm, a man like you, my dear old Italian, good and bad alike. Above all, however, sensitive and inquisitive. Everything and everybody interests me. I love everything and everybody, every nation and every region. I’m everybody and nobody. A migrating bird, a quick-change artist, a magician, an eel that always slips through your fingers. Unfathomable and unattainable.”