Journey by Moonlight

Just then a very young and startlingly handsome little fascista stepped up to him and asked for a light before he threw down his cigarette.

“Ecco,” said Mihály, and offered him the cigarette. He was entirely off his guard. Especially now that the train had come.

“You’re a foreigner,” said the fascista. “I can tell from the way you said ‘ecco’. I’ve a sharp ear.”

“Bravo,” said Mihály.

“You’re Hungarian,” the little man beamed up at him.

“Si, si,” said Mihály, smiling.

In that instant the fascista seized him by the arm, with a strength he would never have thought possible in such a small person.

“Ah! You’re the man the whole of Italy is searching for! Ecco! This is your picture!” he added, producing a piece of paper. “Your wife is looking for you.”

Mihály jerked his arm away, pulled out a calling card, and quickly scribbled on it, “I am well. Don’t try to find me,” and gave it, with a ten lire note, to the little fascista.

“Ecco! Send this telegram to my wife. Arrivederci!”

Once again he tore himself away from the man, who had renewed his grip, jumped onto the moving train, and slammed the door behind him.

The little train went up to Norcia, in the hills. When he disembarked the Sibilline mountains stretched out before him with their two-thousand-metre peaks. To the right lay the Gran Sasso, Italy’s highest range.

It was fear that had driven him to the mountains, as it once had the builders of those towns. Up there, in the wilderness of ice and snow, they would not find him. He wasn’t thinking now of Erzsi. Indeed he felt that Erzsi, as an individual, had been disarmed by his telegram. But Erzsi was only one of many. It wasn’t so much people that were following him as whole institutions, and the whole dreaded terrorist army of the past.

For indeed, what had been his life during the past fifteen years? At home and abroad he had been schooled in mastery. Not self-mastery, but the mastery of his family, his father, the profession which did not interest him. Then he taken his place in the firm. He had really tried to learn the pleasures befitting a partner in the firm. He had learnt to play bridge, to ski, to drive a car. He had dutifully entangled himself in the sort of love affairs appropriate to a partner in the firm. And finally he had met Erzsi, who was sufficiently talked about in high society for the level of gossip to satisfy what was due to the young partner in a fashionable firm. And he had ended by marrying her, a beautiful, sensible, wealthy woman, notorious for her previous affairs, as a partner should. Who knows, perhaps it needed only another year and he would become a real partner: the attitudes were already hardening inside him like calluses. You start off as Mr X, who happens to be an engineer, and sooner or later you’re just an engineer who happens to be called Mr X.

He made his way on foot up into the hills and meandered around the villages. The natives remained peaceful, did not pursue him. They accepted him as just another crazy tourist. But a middle-class person meeting him on the third or fourth day of his wanderings would have taken him not for a tourist but a madman. He was unshaven, unwashed, and sleeping in his clothes: he was simply a man on the run. And inside, he was utterly in turmoil, up there among the harsh outline of pitiless mountains, the inhuman solitude, the utter abandonment. The faintest shadow of purpose never flickered across his consciousness. All he knew was that there was no going back. The whole horde of people and things pursuing him, the lost years and the entire middle-class establishment, fused in his visionary consciousness into a concrete, nightmarish shape. The very thought of his father’s firm was like a great steel bar raised to strike him. At the same time he could see that he was slowly ageing, his body was somehow caught up in slow but visible processes of change, as if his skin was shrivelling at the speed of a minute hand ticking round a clock. These were the first signs of a delirious fever of the nerves.