Jaume Cabré - Winter Journey

"You're supposed to get married? You?"

"In two weeks."

"Married to whom?"

"To my future husband."

"You have…?" Zoltan's mouth was still hanging open.

"Yes."

"But you love me!"

"Yes. And him too. 1 have to marry him." She hesitated and said, "1 can finally see things clearly." And after a loaded pause, "I'm sorry.

Now it was Zoltan's black gaze that looked towards infinity. She didn't dare to reproach him; she'd let him get his hopes up because she wouldn't have missed those twenty-eight days of limitless dreaming for anything in the world.

"You're making a mistake, Margit."

"No. 1 know what I'm doing." She turned to him and put her hand on his knee. "And 1 know I've hurt you. But it's that 1…"

Zoltan made her stop by putting his hand flat over her mouth. And they sat for as long as it took for the shadow of the monument to Mozart to move silently from one side to the other. Suddenly the piano and conducting were of no interest whatever and Pest was no longer a place to be longed for. Suddenly Vienna had become the site of longing, because after three in the afternoon Margit would be gone from there, and the timid luminosity of December would become sad and the streets would no longer make sense because they would lose the trace of his beloved's step. When the shadow of the monument was on the other side, Zoltan, in a hoarse voice:

"We won't see one another again."

"No."

"Where will you be living?"

"1 don't know. Venice. And you?"

"Vienna will be unbearable.

"Go back to Budapest." She corrected herself right away. "1 mean… do whatever you think you should do…"

Zoltan covered his face with his hands and wept miserably. She let the minutes go by, unhurried, looking at the little puff of steam from Zoltan's breath, though it was almost time for her to leave for the train. He raised his head and tried one more time:

"Fine. But you don't know if you're making a mistake by marrying whoever this is."

"No. We never know if we're making a mistake until we're in it."

"So promise me something."

"What?" Margherita, cautiously.

"If things don't work out…, I'll leave you an address and…"

"No." She cut him off. "1 don't want to go behind my husband's back."

"1'm your husband!"

"1 don't want to go behind anybody's back."

"You've been going behind my back!" Without looking at her, "What did you do, all those days at the Hochschule?"

"1 went in one door and out the other." She said it straight out, but with a kind of gentle humility.

"And then?"

"1'd walk. Think. Until you came."

Zoltan looked away, incredulous, and he didn't say, You shouldn't have lied to me, and she didn't respond, which was a way of accepting that he was right. The sun, saddened by the news, disappeared silently behind a thick layer of white clouds, and the shadow of the monument was extinguished. They didn't notice.

"So promise me something else."

She looked at him, curious, and waited for him to continue.

"Promise me that… twenty-five years from now," he looked at his watch, "on the thirteenth of December at twelve noon… we'll meet in front of Schubert's tomb."

"Why?"

"After twenty-five years everything's over. But, if we're alive, we can say if we've made a mistake."

She thought it over for a while and then sighed.

"See one another so we can say if we've made a mistake," She smiled from far away. "Fine," she decided.

"Do you promise?"

"1 promise."

"Swear it."

"1 swear."

Neither of them had the energy to say anything else. The trip back to Vienna on the 72 was even more silent than the trip out. The first snow was threatening to fall from the recently clouded sky. Strangely, it hadn't yet snowed, and the Viennese were casting suspicious glances at the sky as they walked. Margherita got off the streetcar silently, without turning her head, and although they'd gotten to the end of the line, Zoltan kept on looking from the streetcar as she went away, barefoot in the snow, working the hurdy-gurdy, the alms plate quite empty, alone and sad as well.

The rain was streaming down on Vienna's Zentralfriedhof and splattering on Zoltan's umbrella. He stood motionless, looking ahead of him; there was no one in front of Schubert's tomb. Do you really think anybody would be silly enough to honor a pledge made twenty-five years ago? Maybe she's dead. Maybe she lives in Canada. Zoltan didn't want to admit that what bothered him the most was that she might not have come because she hadn't remembered. He knew that forgetfulness was the most painful death.

Zoltan went up to the tomb. A bunch of red roses, destroyed by snows and bad weather, an anonymous tribute, made a note of color against the darkened stone. Layers of old snow were being melted by the rain that tempered the early winter chill, which would turn to cold eventually, though not as slowly, the meteorologists recalled, as a quarter of a century ago when it had been so unseasonably warm.

Anna had died five years ago and he hadn't visited her grave even once. Poor Anna, who never knew that though he loved her tenderly, Zoltan's obsessive gaze passed right over her and focused on the precious memory of Margit, the woman I've been unable to get out of my head because she was framed in just twenty-eight days of breathless love.

Zoltan Wesselenyi had been incapable of leaving Vienna after Margit had disappeared. He rented an apartment in the Donaustadt, on the banks of the Danube, to be able to weep and watch the water flow in the Donau, which would become the Duna. He played a couple of memorable recitals at the Konservatorium and became close friends with a couple of fellow students, especially the youngest student in his year, a phenomenon, a music machine who never made a mistake, always tense, his eyes bright, his body almost vibrating. He would say to him, Hey, Peter, music is supposed to make us happy. If happiness grabs you, give up music. And Peter stared at him without understanding or taking his advice, and he called Zoltan a coward, as did the other students, when he decided to stop studying piano on the very day when Herr Reubke was about to tell him that, if he kept on improving at this rate, he would accept him as a student for the following year. But his hands were clenched with sorrow and his soul was dry, and the effort of the classes left him exhausted. So as not to be overwhelmed by unhappiness, he didn't give up conducting, though he knew he'd lost the spark that helps to make the gestures more beautiful and precise, and that allowed him to understand a score at a glance. He went to his classes but he no longer enjoyed them, except for musicology, which allowed him to go through old papers, from centuries before Margit, which was a way of running away without having to go back to Pest emptyhanded and hopeless. To make a living he hired himself out as a rehearsal pianist in a little opera theater in Stockerau, met Anna in the office there, married her, and didn't stop thinking about Margit for a single moment in his life.

"You're always sad."

"It's from watching the Duna go by. It makes me melancholy."

"Let's go to Budapest. Your mother would be delighted."

"No. We went there for Christmas. 1 don't want to spoil her."

"Then let's move."

"No. 1 want to see the Duna from the balcony."

"What are you thinking about?"

Poor Anna. All the times she asked, not once was he brave enough to tell her that he was thinking about a woman who was both real and a fantasy. He preferred to keep quiet and hold in his sorrow for as long as he could. And Anna was troubled by her husband's dejection, which had no natural explanation. After a few years, Zoltan was supplementing the rehearsal playing by doing research for Professor Bauer of the Vienna Musikwissenschaftzentrum, and earning a pittance which he didn't know how to spend.