Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

She had looked for Sister Carmela when she returned to the school in the early fifties, but they told her she had gone away, and they didn’t know where or didn’t want to tell her. The Sisters were not allowed to form affectionate relationships with pupils. She had gone back to see the bed where she had slept and the window from which a hundred times she had looked out at the far-off fields and the pile of sheaves that had grown smaller day by day and the low-flying swallows, and where she had smelt the fragrance of field balm and hay. Her life seemed marked by absences: her mother Stefania, Sister Carmelina, and then her Emanuele, always intent on climbing the cherry tree.

As she lies stretched out trying to fall asleep she tries to imagine Sister Carmelina on a farm looking after the chickens. She remembers hearing her say that her people had a farm in Friuli. Who knows what she told her beloved hens in that raucous voice of hers? Or perhaps she ended up in Africa looking after lepers. That too was something Amara had heard her say: ‘When I leave here I shall go and look after lepers.’ It had been hard to understand at the time how she could plan to dedicate her life to looking after lepers. But now it was different; Amara seemed to understand it had not just been an ideological project, but an imaginative choice. Fantasising about a hospital required in the middle of the desert, where children die of hunger and women give birth standing up surrounded by mud, where water is precious and life not worth a cent; a way of feeling alive and somehow useful. But at the same time Amara shuddered to realise that she might have done nothing but bend over wounds watching them ooze pus and search for disinfectant and bandages where none could be found, and try to bring a little unpolluted water to the lips of a dying man. The power of a ravenous and distant God found expression through the humble Sister Carmelina. But it was precisely because of that voracious appetite for souls and that distance characteristic of all omnipotent beings, that the nuns allotted Carmela/Carmelina her personal destiny and personal suffering with such extravagant generosity. There is something senseless and yet magnificent in self-sacrifice, and that is what Sister Carmelina was looking for: a sign to make her life precious rather than superfluous.

Amara has unconsciously if timidly camouflaged herself against a curtain at the far end of the hall and unnoticed watches the scene: the nuns are helping the chronic sick to take their places round the roughly laid table. There is water in gigantic opaque glass jugs. Bread, weighed out and cut into equal slices, stands before each place. Fishing in the steaming cauldrons with ladles, the nuns serve the boiling soup onto the metal plates. But why metal, as if they are prisoners? So they can’t break them, perhaps? To make them last longer? Or perhaps to humiliate them like prisoners, to make it clear that no one trusts their hands or their movements?

The old people have eyes only for their soup. They count the beans floating amid the islands of fat, and the pieces of carrot and potato that slither through the boiling broth. The elderly women are wearing ankle-length dark wool skirts, with blue, grey or brown cardigans buttoned at the front. Some have a white blouse with a coloured lace collar under their cardigans, and some a rolled scarf round their necks. Nearly all the men are in slippers and walk badly. A bustling nun gets them to take off their hats and stick their napkins into their shirt-collars. They obey with bad grace.

Sister Adele stands and reads a passage from the Gospels: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This is the Sermon on the Mount, as reported in the Gospel of the Apostle Matthew, amen.’

The sick people half-listen, fiddling with their bread and crumbling it on the tablecloth. They wait impatiently, not daring to move their faces any nearer to their plates. Finally a nun with a sharp voice proclaims from the kitchen door: ‘ Ora pro nobis, amen ! You may start eating!’ And suddenly all the spoons dive into the soup to re-emerge full and head for trembling, greedy, clumsy mouths.

Amara watches little Amintore who, even if his head is not entirely under control, behaves with dignity and a certain astute courtesy. He inserts his spoon in his soup nonchalantly as if at the very moment when the others are betraying impatience and greed, he himself has lost his appetite. Then, with a slow movement of the wrist, he dips his spoon into the soup again, fills it and waits for it to cool a little; then lifts it first to his nostrils to breathe in the warm, greasy aroma of the broth, and only then to his lips which he opens slowly and gracefully. With nearly all the others, the rising and falling of the spoon causes a little broth to fall on the table and the cloth, or worse still on trousers or skirt, but Amintore doesn’t lose a drop. With calm, slow movements he bends forward and sucks again and again without ever letting his elbow slip, his little finger raised like that of a minor prince at a royal table. He never lifts his eyes from his plate, a slight smile on his unmarked face.

As she is about to leave, Amara sees him lift his head with a sly flash of mischief and fix his eyes on her as if he had known she was there all the time and had deliberately ignored her. His smile spreads affectionately. Putting down his spoon he waves. ‘Ciao, Stefania!’ he calls loudly, then turns back to his soup without giving her another look.

Who knows why the train is such a familiar friend. It carries her, enfolds her and protects her. Imposes a rhythm on her thoughts. Never a discordant rhythm, thinks Amara, sucking the end of her pencil as she turns the pages of Conrad. The sliding door opened and Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin came in. A young man dressed entirely in black, his tight jacket making him look thinner than he really is. His ravaged yet naïve smile pushing him towards the precipices of the world. How familiar that man has been to her! Perhaps more familiar than Nastasya Filippovna or even Aglaya. The splendour of meekness. The inexpressible wonder of idiocy and compassion. Is not that the reason she has followed him step by step? For the way Myshkin, the idiot, runs into his future almost by chance and is marked for life by it. He sees Nastasya for the first time in a portrait, as happens with fateful premonitions. A portrait that has fallen into his hands by chance. When she herself enters headlong, throwing open one door and pushing another, the idiot can’t summon up the courage to speak to her. She doesn’t even notice him. She takes him for a servant and throws her fur to him, running off at high speed. In that running, in that careless indifference, the whole relationship between Myshkin and Nastasya is outlined. A relationship composed of cruelty on one side and silent expectation on the other. A relationship that will make them into friends and enemies, mutual slaves and unhappy lovers. Leading them to the murderous night in which the idiot finds himself once again with Rogozhin, the man who has killed the woman he loves, and they discuss absurd things at the bedside of the little dead woman. Only the little marble foot looking on from under the sheet reminds us that someone has murdered an innocent and perverse girl. They talk and talk, all night long. Is this what friendship between men is? Myshkin, inspired by absolute and thus irrational compassion, utterly pure and therefore splendid, considers Rogozhin even more his friend, despite the delicate corpse of the infatuated girl lying there between them as proof of the irrationality of love.