Journey by Moonlight

Antal Journey by Moonlight

For Bianca

PART ONE HONEYMOON

Mutinously I submit to the claims of law and order.

What will happen? I wait for my journey’s wages

In a world that accepts and rejects me.

VILLON

I

ON THE TRAIN everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice, with the back-alleys.

Mihály first noticed the back-alleys when the motor-ferry turned off the Grand Canal for a short cut and they began appearing to right and left. But at the time he paid them no attention, being caught up from the outset with the essential Veniceness of Venice: the water between the houses, the gondolas, the lagoon, and the pink-brick serenity of the city. For it was Mihály’s first visit to Italy, at the age of thirty-six, on his honeymoon.

During his protracted years of wandering he had travelled in many lands, and spent long periods in France and England. But Italy he had always avoided, feeling the time had not yet come, that he was not yet ready for it. Italy he associated with grown-up matters, such as the fathering of children, and he secretly feared it, with the same instinctive fear he had of strong sunlight, the scent of flowers, and extremely beautiful women.

The trip to Italy might well have been postponed forever, but for the fact that he was now married and they had decided on the conventional Italian holiday for their start to married life. Mihály had now come, not to Italy as such, but on his honeymoon, a different matter entirely. Indeed, it was his marriage that made the trip possible. Now, he reasoned, there was nothing to fear from the danger Italy represented.

Their first days were spent quietly enough, between the pleasures of honey-mooning and the gentler, less strenuous forms of sightseeing. Like all highly intelligent and self-critical people, Mihály and Erzsi strove to find the correct middle way between snobbery and its reverse. They did not weary themselves to death ‘doing’ everything prescribed by Baedeker; still less did they wish to be bracketed with those who return home to boast, “The museums? Never went near them,” and gaze triumphantly at one another.

One evening, returning to their hotel after the theatre, Mihály felt he somehow needed another drink. Quite what of he wasn’t yet sure, but he rather hankered after some sort of sweet wine and, remembering the somewhat special, classical, taste of Samian, and the many times he had tried it in Paris, in the little wine merchant’s at number seven rue des Petits Champs, he reasoned that, Venice being effectively Greece, here surely he might find some Samian, or perhaps Mavrodaphne, since he wasn’t yet quite au fait with the wines of Italy. He begged Erzsi to go up without him. He would follow straightaway. It would be just a quick drink, “really, just a glass” he solemnly insisted as she, with the same mock-seriousness, made a gesture urging moderation, as befits the young bride.

Moving away from the Grand Canal, where their hotel stood, he arrived in the streets around the Frezzeria. Here at this time of night the Venetians promenade in large numbers, with the peculiar ant-like quality typical of the denizens of that city. They proceed only along certain routes, as ants do when setting out on their journeyings across a garden path, the adjacent streets remaining empty. Mihály too stuck to the ant-route, reckoning that the bars and fiaschetterie would surely lie along the trodden ways, rather than in the uncertain darkness of empty side-streets. He found several places where drinks were sold, but somehow none was exactly what he had in mind. There was something wrong with each. In one the clientele were too elegant, in another they were too drab; another he did not really associate with the sort of thing he was after, which would have a somehow more recherché taste. Gradually he came to feel that surely only one place in Venice would have it, and that he would have to discover on the basis of pure instinct. Thus he arrived among the back-alleys.

Narrow little streets branched into narrow little alleyways, and the further he went the darker and narrower they became. By stretching his arms out wide he could have simultaneously touched the opposing rows of houses, with their large silent, windows, behind which, he imagined, mysteriously intense Italian lives lay in slumber. The sense of intimacy made it feel almost an intrusion to have entered these streets at night.