Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

But the bicycle is still there, in the storeroom of the little house in Via Alderotti. And here he comes. He has just opened the gate of Villa Lorenzi and is running towards her steering his own bicycle with one hand. He raises the other in greeting. Smiles. And says something she can’t understand. But here he is. He waits for her to step on the pedal and they’re off! But where are they going? I’ll take you somewhere you’ve never been before. They pedal on and on, sweating and laughing, up a steep slope. Then he stops, leans his bicycle against a tree and signs to her to follow. They set off bent double through brambles that obstruct an almost invisible path between fields and vineyards. The path narrows and it is almost impossible to go on. But he is not discouraged, ignoring the thorns scratching his legs. And she follows, also ignoring the vegetation grabbing at her ankles and tearing her skin.

Finally they arrive. But where? Emanuele pushes some branches aside revealing a sort of heavy iron lid blackened by time. He lifts it and signs to her to follow. Facing them is a narrow black well. He goes forward, carefully placing his feet on the iron steps. Suddenly it feels cold. The light gradually fades then disappears altogether. They are descending in darkness into what seems a bottomless well. Where are we going, Emanuele? she wants to ask but becomes aware that his throat is closed and he can’t produce a single word. She can only follow him.

Now at last the steps end. He puts a foot on the ground and helps her down the last one. Where are we? She tries to speak but it is as if her mouth is walled up. Emanuele embraces her fiercely. For a moment they are again one single body, both lover and beloved. Two kids hugging tenderly. But something disturbs her. Animals are moving on the ground. Snakes? Mice? Something slimy and clammy touches her ankle. She jumps. Emanuele’s mouth is against her ear and she can hear his voice saying softly: now we shall live together for ever, in here, safe from wars and the horror of wars. But I want to go back out, protests Amara silently, I want the open air! She extricates herself from his possessive arms. Reaches a hand towards the stairs but feels the dark clammy wall slither under ther fingers. The stairs have vanished. Then she realises the body hugging her has no warmth, it consists of bones and darkness. She tries to shout. Wakes bathed in sweat. Frau Morgan is sitting on a chair, asleep with her mouth open and a book upside down on her lap.

The icebag slips on Amara’s cheek and her tears begin falling again, no longer in her throat but onto the stuffed pillow that is squashing her hair.

Her luggage is on the floor. Too heavy to lift up to the netting rack. The carriage is empty. Six in the morning and the countryside coming awake under a luminous white carpet.

Amara’s gloved hands are gripped tightly between her legs. She raises her coat collar. She has the carriage to herself but it is unheated. When she opens her mouth, vapour disperses in the cold air. The windows are encrusted with ice. The world all round is alien and frozen.

Too many things have happened in these last few days. The disastrous encounter with Peter or rather Emanuele Orenstein. Her illness, or rather her absence and delirium that went on for three days and nights, according to the worried Frau Morgan. The arrival of a letter informing her of the death of her husband Luca Spiga who, explains her sister-in-law Suzy, has left her two million lire in his bank account. Her decision to return to Florence. Her dinner with Hans who asked her formally to marry him. Her inability to give him any answer. Her visit to Horvath at the library. He promises to come to Florence as soon as he has a visa in his passport.

The newspaper has written to tell her they no longer need her: she has been away too long and contributed no more than a dozen articles. Not good value for money. She missed her scoop on the uprising in Budapest, her reports all arriving later than the dispatches of the international agencies. Appalling! The editor, after many hypocritical expressions of gratitude for her collaboration ‘which I do understand to have been passionately committed if unfortunately at the same time extremely meagre’ informs her that they have already replaced her with a ‘quick and able’ correspondent who will write from Eastern Europe and cost them less than she did.

This too is a new circumstance she will have to face. How long can one survive on two million lire? A year, two at most, then she will have to find another job.

She can’t get the wrinkled, wicked, desperate face of Peter out of her mind and can’t bring herself to call him Emanuele, even though she knows that’s who he is. She found him, which is what she had wanted to do. But in looking for one person she discovered another. As if she had entered by mistake a place ‘of cruel and absurd mysteries,’ as Marlow describes it, ‘not fit for a human being to behold.’ She had been looking for an innocent little boy, persecuted and wounded. And she found a fury. Had the experiments damaged his brain, as he claimed? Or had the cost of survival been too high for him to be able to afford it? He could not trust her, or anyone else. What had been the point of searching everywhere for him? A boy who never had any opportunity to grow, who had married and then separated. Who had assaulted his own infant son. What did they have in common now? How could she ever have believed she could rediscover the Emanuele she had known?

The thoughts go round and round in her head. She must think of something else. Getting up, she opens a suitcase and pulls out a book. Conrad, as usual. ‘He seemed to stare at me […] with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe. I seemed to hear the whispered cry, “The horror The horror!”’ There is something lugubriously comic about the madness going round in her head. She would like to go on reading but cannot. Her eyes lift from the pages to rest on the windows and the frozen panorama unfolding behind them. Firs heavy with snow shake themselves as the train passes and drop white heaps on the already snowed-up countryside. Every so often roofs and a church tower like a proud plume rise above the mass of whiteness. Then a football field just cleared, with young men running about in shorts. One slips and tumbles and the others laugh. For a while a road runs beside the railway with women cycling, their heads in coloured scarfs, skirts lifted free of legs protected by thick woollen stockings. A farm-worker is leading an ox with gigantic half-moon horns.

It’s like being on one of her father’s model trains. In a perfect miniature reproduction of a carriage, travelling round and round on perfect imitation railway lines. But there is no one on board and the engine is pulling its coaches on tiny rails that come and go inside a single room. No stations of arrival or departure. Only a perverse racing towards something unknown, make-believe and unreal.

The absence of Hans, the man with the gazelles, torments her. Why could she not respond to his plea for love? Why did she not tell him to come with her? That was what had been expected. A generous, patient, good-hearted man. I’ll write to him as soon as I arrive, she tells herself, and for a moment her heart shouts for joy. But something has been broken, has been spoilt. After the companionship of Budapest and their journeys together, the discovery of Emanuele hit her like an explosion. Causing another explosion inside herself. She can think of nothing else.

The future opens before her like a precocious flower touched by the first ray of the sun but still frozen on the branch. Because the spring is not yet here and the sun has deceived her.