Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

For a moment Amara sees again the desolate streets of Vienna. The sensual footsteps of Alida Valli. Did she wear a raincoat and a hat?

‘Who directed The Third Man ?’

‘Carol Reed,’ replies Hans confidently.

‘Do you like the cinema?’

‘I often go to see films.’

‘And who was the lead actor?’

‘Orson Welles, I think.’

‘And she was Alida Valli, wasn’t she?’

But Hans seems disinclined to discuss the film. He concentrates on his glass of frothy beer and says quietly: ‘Let’s think, Amara.’

‘Let’s think.’

‘You’re still determined to find your Emanuele? How old would he be now?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

‘And you’re certain you want to find him, dead or alive?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I’ll help you.’

‘No need. I can manage on my own.’

‘And what about the languages? Do you know Polish?’

‘No.’

‘And Czech?’

‘No.’

‘I think you need me.’

‘But I warn you, I’m not going to fall in love with you. And gratitude won’t make me feel obliged to sleep with you.’

‘Is that what I’ve been asking?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you think I might be genuinely interested too?’

‘Why?’

‘Because everything to do with the Nazis disturbs me. Because by now I’ve learned enough to be seized by curiosity: I want to find out whether your Emanuele is alive or dead. This is a chance to understand a bit more about what happened to the few who survived. If you’ll let me follow you, I’ll help. And in return all I want is your friendship. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

‘But how will you manage financially? Travel, hotels?’

‘I have some money saved. But what about your daughter Agnes and little Hans waiting for you in Poznań?’

‘My daughter is no longer alone as I thought. She’s found a companion, a Party member I frankly dislike. But at least she’s got someone. They have a slightly larger house, and something to live on.’

Amara returns to the modest hotel named after the famous castle that dominates the city: the Hotel Wawel on Karmelicka Street. The young porter with red hair is sitting with his head resting on folded arms, sleeping or meditating. Amara asks for her key. He lifts his head and smiles sleepily. His face is extremely beautiful. Luminous blue eyes. A small freckled nose, a shapely mouth. A delight to look at, Amara thinks, taking the key the boy holds out to her. She goes towards the lift with a sense of peace. Can beauty give peace? Can beauty, in the very moment when you limit yourself to the pleasure of seeing, put you in harmony with the world?

Reflecting on beauty, Amara gets into the lift, presses the third-floor button and leans on the lift wall, closing her eyes. Can there be justice in beauty, or do those two truths oppose each other, each exclusive of the other? Is not beauty also equilibrium, the harmony of reason? Isn’t disinterested intelligence a form of beauty? And does not thought, when generous and just, become beauty?

Her room is at the far end of a corridor of threadbare wall-to-wall carpeting. She struggles to turn the heavy key in the lock. Her room is small and smells of smoke. There is an iron bedstead against the wall, an unnecessarily high bedside locker of discoloured wood, a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling and a handbasin with a rusty mirror over it. The bathroom is across the corridor, some twenty metres from the bedroom. Best go there at once so as not to have to come out again in her nightdress. The doors of the wardrobe in which she puts her jacket and bag are nearly off their hinges and squeak in a sinister way. Not easy to think about beauty in such unfriendly surroundings.

The bathroom is tiled in red and yellow; a strange contrast with the insipid brown of her room. The toilet has no seat. She has to balance delicately so as not to touch the bowl that goodness knows how many guests must have used. Amara is a bit squeamish even after living through a war in which she suffered all kinds of discomforts. She remembers the house in the mountains of Tuscany where they spent a few months as evacuees. A peasants’ home; its rooms oozed moisture, the beds were very high and the lavatory was outside in the yard, a stinking enclosure used by at least twenty people. You were pestered by flies by day and by ravenous mosquitoes at night. Back in Rifredi where Amintore had to return to his work as a shoemaker, they had suffered hunger, and would spend all day looking for something to put into their mouths. Often she had ventured near the hospital dump, knowing that frequently whole bags of boiled potatoes left by the patients were thrown out. She would take them home to be boiled a second time and they would eat them greedily. Just like Pinocchio with the pear skins. Before the war she hadn’t dared go anywhere near the hospital dump; the mere sight of those bloodstained pieces of gauze mixed with scraps of food had disgusted her. But you could not be fastidious and pernickety when you were really hungry. She would rummage among the high piles of refuse in her rubber boots, among broken glass syringes, medicine bottles, dirty gauze and greasy rags, without so much as holding her nose.

Now sleep fogs her thoughts even though, once in bed, she can’t get to sleep: what is she doing in a cheap hotel in this unfamiliar country? Is it really so important for her to find Emanuele? Thirteen years since he disappeared. Why go on struggling to find someone when she no longer knows anything about him? She could meet him in the street and not recognise him, have him before her eyes and not know it. And this man who seems so attached to her? Could that be just a trap for … for what? You’re getting much too suspicious, Amara, she tells herself, half asleep, searching in her memory for the face of the man with the gazelles on his chest. His body will always now be tied to that image even though she has not since seen him wearing the jumper with gazelles running across it.

When she wakes next morning, she spends a few minutes trying to remember where she is. Her mind has emerged fresh from a vivid dream in which she has seen Emanuele up in their usual leafy tree in the garden of Villa Lorenzi, picking cherries. The bitter scent of wild fruit brushed delicately against her nostrils. She remembers spending a long time watching him climb the trunk with his grazed knees and then, agile as a monkey, move from one branch to another. Watching him she felt again the sensation she had known as a little girl. Not so much passion as a blessedly secure sense of unity. He was part of her and she was part of him. They did not need to speak to understand one another. They knew they would go on belonging to one another. They were in no hurry to make love. It was as if they were afraid of becoming adults too quickly with no chance to go back. Though they did kiss, lips locked together, rolling in each other’s arms in a field. Or sitting up in the cherry tree, with leaves whisking their cheeks and threading their hair.

When Emanuele disappeared Amara had been stopped in her tracks. She had lost an arm, perhaps more, and she did not know if she could survive. She no more wanted to play, to adventure into unknown worlds, to climb trees, to laugh, or to eat. It was seven years before she had been able to take any interest in another man. This was Luca Spiga, who worked in an architects’ studio and was twenty years her senior. She liked the calm, adult, discreet and perhaps rather timid way he caressed her; as she warmed to his caresses, she seemed to rediscover a body she had thought dead for ever. Luca did not press her with sexual demands. At first he just watched her, then very gently began to stroke first her hair, then her face and neck and shoulders, and his gentleness had seemed a sign of her reawakening. When he asked her to marry him she at once said yes. But she knew now that they had never shared any deep feeling, only the coming together of two chilled bodies that needed to be warmed. And once warm, they accepted the boredom of living together. By good luck they conceived no children, even though they had assumed that they would. She was sure that Luca Spiga never loved her, but he did introduce her to the cinema. He bought them a subscription to the Charlie Chaplin film club where each evening the great classics were shown: the Marx brothers’ comedies, Buster Keaton, Battleship Potemkin, Casablanca, Obsession, Rome Open City, Bicycle Thieves . They were two good companions in adventure, not much more. When he was away, she didn’t miss him. Rather, she was often happy to forget him. Then, to punish herself, she would spend two hours waiting near a public telephone for the chance to spend three minutes talking to him. Never more than three minutes; it would have cost too much. She had to watch her money and always think twice before spending any.