Journey by Moonlight

What was the strange attraction, the peculiar ecstasy, that seized him among the back-alleys? Why did it feel like finally coming home? Perhaps a child dreams of such places, the child raised in a gardened cottage who fears the open plain. Perhaps there is an adolescent longing to live in such a closed world, where every square foot has a private significance, ten paces infringe a boundary, decades are spent around a shabby table, whole lives in an armchair … But this is speculation.

He was still wandering among the alleys when it occurred to him that day was already breaking and he was on the far side of Venice, on the Fondamenta Nuova, within sight of the burial island and, beyond that, the mysterious islands which include San Francesco Deserto, the former leper colony, and, in the far distance, the houses of Murano. This was where the poor of Venice lived, too remote and obscure to profit from the tourist traffic. Here was the hospital, and from here the gondolas of the dead began their journey. Already people were up and on their way to work, and the world had assumed that utter bleakness as after a night without sleep. He found a gondolier, who took him home.

Erzsi had long been sick with worry and exhaustion. Only at one-thirty had it occurred to her that, appearances notwithstanding, even in Venice one could doubtless telephone the police, which she did, with the help of the night porter, naturally to no avail.

Mihály was still like a man walking in his sleep. He was abominably tired, and quite incapable of providing rational answers to Erzsi’s questions.

“The back-alleys,” he said. “I had to see them by night, just once … it’s all part of … it’s what everyone does.”

“But why didn’t you tell me? Or rather, why didn’t you take me with you?”

Mihály was unable to reply, but with an offended look climbed into bed and drifted towards sleep, full of bitter resentment.

“So this is marriage,” he thought. “What does it amount to, when every attempt to explain is so hopeless? Mind you, I don’t fully understand all this myself.”

II

ERZSI however did not sleep. For hours she lay, with knitted brow and hands clasped under her head, thinking. Women are generally better at lying awake and thinking. It was not exactly new or surprising to her that Mihály could say and do things she failed to understand. For a time she had successfully concealed her lack of comprehension, wisely asking no questions and acting as if eternally familiar with everything to do with him. She knew that this wordless assumption of authority, which he thought of as her ancestral, intuitive woman’s wisdom, was her strongest means of holding on to him. Mihály was full of fears, and Erzsi’s role was to comfort him.

But there is a limit to everything, especially as they were now married and on a proper honeymoon. In those circumstances to stay out all night seemed grotesque. For an instant she entertained the natural feminine suspicion that Mihály had in fact been with another woman. But this possibility she then completely dismissed. Setting aside the utter tastelessness of the idea, she well knew how timid and circumspect he was with all strange women, how terrified of disease, how averse to expense, and above all, how little interest he had in the female sex.

But in point of fact it would have been of some comfort to her to know that he had merely been with a woman. It would put an end to this uncertainty, this total blankness, this inability to imagine where and how he had spent the night. And she thought of her first husband, Zoltán Pataki, whom she had left for Mihály. Erzsi had always known which of the office typists was his current mistress. Zoltán was so doggedly, blushingly, touchingly discreet, the more he wished to hide something the clearer everything became to her. Mihály was just the reverse. When he felt guilty he always laboured to explain every movement, desperately wanting her to understand him completely, and the more he explained the more confusing it became. She had long known that she did not understand him, because Mihály had secrets even from himself, and he did not understand her since it never occurred to him that people other than himself had an inner life in which he might take an interest. And yet they had married because he had decided that they understood each other perfectly, and that, for both, the marriage rested on purely rational foundations and not fleeting passion. For just how long could that fiction be sustained?

III