Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘So you’ve lost the deposit, have you?’

‘I’ve lost it, yes.’

‘Why did your blonde leave you?’

‘Who knows? You women are unpredictable and strange. You can never be trusted.’

‘What did you do to her?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I bet you started fooling around with the maid. Or something of the sort.’

‘A neighbour. Actually the owner. A very elegant little woman. But I wasn’t short-changing my partner. I was head-over-heels in love.’

‘You were head-over-heels in love with your partner but you were caressing another woman.’

‘Well, you know how it is with me. Faced with a beautiful woman, I can’t resist. But I was doing nothing wrong. Just a little flirtation on the side. Neither of us took it seriously.’

‘But as luck would have it your flame … what’s her name?’

‘Angelica.’

‘As luck would have it, Angelica took it badly and left you.’

‘Too jealous. But I wouldn’t have stood for that in any case.’

‘Has it never occurred to you that exclusiveness might be essential for love?’

‘Seems a vulgar idea to me.’

‘Vulgar it may be, but it must have some foundation in reality since most people think it an absolute necessity.’

‘Exactly, absolute. I’m against everything absolute.’

‘You’d even be capable of flirting with death himself, you would.’

‘And would that make life jealous?’

‘Life would have good reason to be, don’t you think? If you’re really flirting with death, you have to be irrevocably abandoning life. Like with your little heart attack.’

‘Well, the metaphor’s spot on.’ He laughs, becoming once again the Luca of long ago whose smile bewitched so many women.

‘Have you never been jealous yourself?’

‘I don’t want to own anyone, you know that. For me it’s enough to caresss another body and feel it respond to my caresses. What need is there for exclusivity?’

‘If you ever really did fall in love you might even get jealous.’

‘I believe in the peaceful sharing of property. Exclusive property doesn’t tempt me. I’m a real democrat.’

‘But when women fall in love they assume you’ll be faithful to them. At least during the short time when you tell them you love them.’

‘They get that wrong. I make no claims on exclusivity but I don’t guarantee it either. I’m a free man.’

‘A free man, with the freedom of a tree in a desert.’

‘I’m not afraid of being alone.’

‘Liar! When all you do is ask me to keep you company.’

‘The contradictions of a fearless spirit like my own. I’m not afraid of being alone but I enjoy company, especially the company of young women like you.’

‘Goodbye, Luca. I’m off to see my father. We’ll meet again tomorrow.’

Amara opens the French window to the little balcony overlooking Via Alderotti.

The roses have withered and their leaves are yellow. Despite the fact that she stuck two full bottles of water upside down in the vase. And covered it with fine river-gravel left to soften in water beforehand for two days. But it has been hot and the plants have dried up. With her fingers she detaches a dead rose, straightens a bent corolla, agitates the parched soil and gives the little plants a lot of water while a gecko shoots between her feet and goes into hiding under the edge of a saucer that holds a vase.

Go back to Luca? Why not? asks an insistent little voice. But it would be like reliving something already known and experienced. Perhaps he is right to call preferring a ghost to a living body perversion. Yet Emanuele’s head continues to present itself persistently to her imagination. God is with us, that’s what the name Immanuel means. But is Immanuel with us?

She must find out whether he is dead or alive before she can decide anything. She wishes she was already back in Vienna. She has sent in four articles from the city of Mozart. And her boss has seemed satisfied. It’s not easy to describe the cold war. Perhaps it’s best to start from particular moments, from insignificant details that reveal a common feeling, a smell or a climate. And to expand from there all the way to reflections on history. But she doesn’t always succeed. Sometimes it feels like trying to grind water in a mortar. She has told her readers about her train journey, about the Pension Blumental, about Frau Morgan. She has described Kraków and Auschwitz. She must do some interviews that lie outside her inquiries about Emanuele. Her longing to return to Vienna gets more intense every day. She hasn’t finished her work as a witness to what has happened in that country numbed and impoverished by Nazism and the war. But at the same time she will resume her search for Emanuele. The man with the gazelles is waiting and there is nothing to keep her here in Florence. Her father? Yes of course, the sick Amintore shut up in the care home run by the Ursuline nuns of Villa Cisterna. I must go and see him, she tells herself, steeping a black teabag in a cup of boiling water.

She eats a biscuit sitting on a rush-seated chair in the small single room into which have been crammed a bed, a cooker fixed to the wall on a bracket, a basin that also serves as a bath and, hidden by a curtain, a toilet. How is it possible to inhabit just ten square metres? By using the kitchen table as a writing desk and adding books to the shelves full of food and pans. The house in Via Alderotti that once belonged to grandfather Sironi and later to her father, and is now divided into four flats for the children of her Aunt Miriam. An extra toilet projects from the outside wall like a fungus. All Italy is poor, even if noisy reconstruction work disturbs the sleep of those who have other things to think about.

At night Amara settles happily into the solitary bed where she has so often let her mind wander. She quickly falls asleep from accumulated exhaustion. No sooner are her eyes closed than she sees Emanuele reaching out a hand to her from the cherry tree. Come up, he says, come up because bombs are on the way. Here we’ll be safe.

Next morning she hurriedly washes and dresses to go to the Ursulines where her father has been living for nearly two years now, victim of a degenerative illness. The streets are empty. A fresh breeze is blowing from the north. Sister Adele greets her with an abrupt nod, considerate but uncommunicative.

‘How is my father?’

The nun doesn’t answer immediately. Perhaps she hasn’t heard; she heads into the damp entrance hall with its smell of soup for the poor.

‘How is my father?’ Amara repeats, struggling to keep up on the steep stone stairs.

‘You’ll find him a good deal changed.’

‘How changed?’

‘Not really with us.’

‘Is he very ill?’

‘No, he’s well enough, but his mind tends to wander. Sometimes I hear him singing to himself. He hammers in imaginary nails and beats time by clicking his tongue. He was a shoemaker, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘He thinks he’s still in his shop.’

Turning a corner, she sees him. Amintore Sironi, in a wheelchair, at the end of the loggia. His illness has bent and stiffened him. He has a rug over his knees, and a yellow and black check beret pulled down on his head. She goes up to him and smiles. But he looks at her as if he does not know who she is. When she bends to kiss him he explodes angrily:

‘So you’ve come at last after all this time!’

‘How are you feeling, Papà?’

‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

Amara takes his hand in both hers and lifts it to her cheek. She is suddenly stricken by guilt; he was waiting for me, she tells herself, and there was I busy far away, wasting time when he needed me.