Kornel Esti (8 page)

It was almost time to say good-bye. He’d decided, word for word, what he meant to say to her: “Madam, I have an inexpressible respect and deep sympathy for you. Right at the very first moment I felt a remarkable warmth toward you. I noticed on your forehead a sign, such pain as I had never before seen. Near Zagreb you tied up your hair, your ash-blonde hair, in a light black veil. At dawn, when I ran hastily—and ill-manneredly—out of the compartment, I suddenly saw the whole world blackened by that veil. You are a martyr-mother, a sainted martyr-mother, with seven daggers in your heart. I’m very sorry for you. I’m very sorry for your daughter too. She’s a strange girl. Perhaps you should dose her with potassium bromide solution, a teaspoon every evening, and bathe her in cold water. That helped me. As for the—what shall I say—the affair, I’m not offended. I was a little afraid. But now I’m not. I’ve forgotten it. The only thing that worries me is where you vanished to after midnight. I looked for you everywhere and couldn’t find you. Even now I can’t think where you could have been all that time. The idea crossed my mind, madam, that for the sake of your daughter, whom you love so, for the sake of your daughter, who doesn’t live in this world, you’d gone away with her into the realm of fantasy and with her become invisible. That’s not a satisfactory explanation, I know. But it’s a profound poetic thought. And so I’ll take the liberty of telling you. I’m going to be a writer. If once I master that difficult craft—because please believe me, one has to learn to be constantly watchful, to suffer, to understand others and oneself, to be merciless to oneself and others—well, then perhaps I’ll write about this. It’s a very difficult subject. But things like this interest me. I want to become the sort of writer who knocks at the gates of existence and attempts the impossible. Anything less than that I despise—please forgive my immodesty, because I’m nothing and nobody yet—but I do despise it, and profoundly. I’m never going to forget what happened to me here. I’ll keep it among my memories and by it express my ceaseless grief. I no longer believe in anything. But in that I do believe. Permit me now, madam, before I finally take my leave, to kiss your hand as a mark of sympathy and filial homage.” That was what he meant to say, but he didn’t. Eighteen-year-old boys can, as yet, only feel. They can’t compose speeches like that and deliver them. So he only bowed. More deeply than he’d intended. Almost to the ground. The woman was surprised. She looked at the ground, still all the time hiding her eyes, in which there must once have been life but now were only fear and everlasting anxiety. She thought, “Poor boy, poor boy. What a dreadful night you must have had. When you came into our compartment, my first thought was to send you away somehow. I could see that you were trembling. Sometimes you were a little ridiculous too. I wanted to enlighten you. Only I can’t do such a thing. Then I’d have to talk on and on, tell everyone, here on the train, the neighbors at home, people abroad and everywhere what’s happened to us. It can’t be done. So I prefer to say nothing. And then, I’ve truly become a little unfeeling toward people. At midnight, when my daughter and I left this compartment and—somewhere else—a scene was played out such as you’ve never witnessed—you can be eternally thankful—I hoped that you’d change your mind and move somewhere else in the meantime. You didn’t do that. Out of politeness you didn’t. You didn’t want to let me know that you knew more or less what you did. You behaved beautifully. You behaved as a well-brought-up young gentleman should. Thank you. You’re still a child. In fact, you could be my son. You could be my son-in-law. Yes you could, you could be my son-in-law. You see the sort of things that a mother thinks of. But you can’t be my son-in-law. Nobody can. You don’t know life yet. You don’t know what the doctors have diagnosed. The experts in Switzerland and Germany aren’t very encouraging. We’ve come away against their advice. There’s a little island near here. It’s called Sansego. Fishermen live there, simple people. They grow olives and catch sardines. They won’t notice anything. I’m taking her there to hide her away. I want to keep her with me this summer. It may be our last. Then, it seems, I’m going to have to ‘put her away’ after all. The specialists have been recommending that for years, in Hungary and abroad. There are some reliable ‘establishments.’ She’ll get a private room there, her bodily needs will be taken care of. I’ll be able to visit her as often as I like. You don’t know about this sort of thing yet. Don’t ever find out. God bless you. I believe in God. I have to believe in Him, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do my duty. Of you go, my boy. Forget the whole thing. Be happy, my boy.” So she thought. But she didn’t speak either. People who suffer don’t talk much. She merely tossed back her head, raised her ravaged face and now, for the first time, looked at Kornél Esti, and as a reward granted him a long look into her ivy-green eyes.

By this time the train had crossed a Fiume street between lowered barriers. Porters stormed the carriages. Esti picked up his own basket and deposited it in the left luggage office, as he didn’t intend, for the sake of economy, to take a room in Fiume; he would only be there until eight that evening when his ship, the
Ernő Dániel
, left for Venice.
O navis referent in mare te novis fluctus …

Among the cabs in the square outside the station building a private carriage was waiting. Mother and daughter got into it. Esti stared after them. He watched them until they disappeared in the dreaming lines of plane trees on Viale Francesco Deák.

He too set of along that shady, sun-dappled avenue, light of heart, with his raincoat over his shoulder. Shopkeepers called out “
latte, vino, frutti,
” as he passed, passersby said “
buon giorno
” to one another. “
Annibale,
” shouted a mother after her son, and a market woman selling figs at a street corner scolded her little daughter, “
Francesca, vergognati.
” Everyone was chattering in that language, that language which is too beautiful for everyday use, that language of which he wasn’t ignorant, which he had taken to his heart in the cramming torments of schoolboy nerves. There was in the air a ceaseless din, a happy racket, a great and unrestrained street merriment. While people were alive they made a noise, for they wouldn’t be able to later.

A barrow loaded with fish was pushed along, big sea fish and crabs. Cake shops exhaled a scent of vanilla. He saw bay-trees and oysters. In front of the dangling glass bead curtain of a hairdresser’s shop stood the coif eur, splendidly accoutred like a divine actor, setting an example to his customers with a white comb stuck in his high-piled, pomaded black hair. Toilet soap:
italianissimo
. All was exaggeration, superlative, ecstasy.

Esti sat down on the terrace of a café. He hadn’t eaten or drunk since the previous afternoon. But more than food or drink, he was yearning at last to speak Italian to a real Italian for the first time in his life. He prepared for this with a certain amount of stage fright. Very slowly the waiter approached him, an elderly Italian with a pointed white beard.

He knew that the Budapest express had arrived, and so he addressed his guest in Hungarian, with an almost spicy accent: “Breakfast, sir?” Esti didn’t reply, waited a moment, then said, “
Si, una tazza di caffé.
” The waiter happily reverted to his native language: “
Benis-simo, signore,
” and was about to go. In his delight at having passed that test with flying colors, Esti called after him: “
Camariere, portatemi anche pane, acqua fresca e giornali. Giornali italiani,
” he added nonchalantly and unnecessarily. “
Sissignore, subito,
” replied the waiter, and hurried away with his indescribably pleasant
s
-es.

Esti was happy. Happy that he had been taken for something other than what he was, perhaps even for an Italian, but in any case a foreigner, a person, and that he was able to continue to play his role, escaping from the prison in which he had been confined since birth. He sipped his espresso, which the waiter poured into his glass from a large aluminum jug, devoured six croissants and four rolls, then, as if he’d been doing it all his life, buried himself in the
Corriere della Sera
.

While he was thus reading a voice rang out: “
Pane.
” A ragged, filthy street urchin was standing by his table, a four-year-old child, barefoot, and pointing most determinedly at the basket of bread. Esti gave him a roll. But the little boy didn’t go away. “
Un altro,
” he exclaimed again. “
Che cosa?
” inquired Esti. “
Un altro pane,
” said the child, “
due,
” and held up two fingers as is customary in those parts to show that he was asking for not one but two, “
per la mamma,
” and her too he indicated, standing a few yards away on the road as if on stage, to be seen and exert influence as in a tear-jerking farce, but even so, dignified. She was a youthful, weather-beaten mother, also barefoot, wearing a chemise but no blouse. A wretched skirt hung from her, and her hair was unkempt, but the skin of her face was that olive shade that one sees in Abruzzo. Her eyes gleamed darkly. She and her child watched, standing erect, not bending, watched what the
straniero
would do. Esti held out another roll to the little boy. He and his mother, his
mamma
, whom he must have loved so much, strolled slowly on. Neither of them thanked him for his kindness.

This, however, pleased Esti beyond words and made him feel good. “See,” he thought, “these people don’t beg, they demand. They’re an ancient free people, glorious even in penury.” He sat on at the table of life. He knew that life was his, as the bread was. “I ought to live here. This sensitivity, this sincerity, this sunlight that permeates everything, this easy-going exterior which must conceal all sorts of things, all excite me. No blood relationship can be as strong as the attraction that I feel to them. They alone will be able to cure me of my muddled sentimentality.”

When the time came to pay, a few problems cropped up, as Esti failed to understand a couple of Italian words, and the waiter, who had immediately realized from Esti’s accent that he wasn’t an Italian, began to ask, with the frankness that is permissible with the young, what his nationality was. He listed numerous possibilities—
Austri-aco? Tedesco? Croato? Inglese?—
and Esti just shook his head. Then the waiter inquired where he lived, from what town he came, where he was from. With a stern gesture Esti dismissed the old man, who withdrew behind a pillar not far from the table and from there continued to assess this inscrutable boy.

“Where am I from?” recited Esti to himself, intoxicated by the espresso and lack of sleep. “Where everybody’s from. The purple cavern of a mother’s womb. I too started out from there on an uncertain journey, and neither destiny nor destination are stated in the passport. A pleasure trip? I hope it will be, because I very much want to enjoy everything. Or a study trip? If only I could know all that has been known until now. Or just an
affaire familale
? I wouldn’t mind that either, because I adore children. So, I’m an earthworm, a man like you, my dear old Italian, good and bad alike. Above all, however, sensitive and inquisitive. Everything and everybody interests me. I love everything and everybody, every nation and every region. I’m everybody and nobody. A migrating bird, a quick-change artist, a magician, an eel that always slips through your fingers. Unfathomable and unattainable.”

He saw the sea close to from the Adamich jetty. Fruit peels, old shoes, and fishbones floated on its oil-stained surface. He was incensed at the idea of the majestic ocean being used this way, not just constantly adored. A steamship was leaving for Brazil, for Rio de Janeiro. Gulls screamed in the air, seagulls, kings of the storm.

He ought to send another card home to his anxious mother. But he put off doing that. There wouldn’t have been room on a card for all the adventures that he’d had. All the people that he’d met, all the new people and two more mothers as well. His family had grown.

He went for a swim to wash away the aching head and throbbing heart of the night, the dust of school and everything.

He undressed and sat for a long time on a rock in his bathing costume. He listened to the sound of the water: a different hiss and crackle at every moment. Then he went down to it, befriended it, caressed it. When he saw that he didn’t hurt it he slapped it in the face with both hands, with the treasonable insolence of youth, as recklessly as an infant would a Bengal tiger. He sank into it. He sprang back up spluttering and laughing aloud. He rocked to and fro on its fragile, glassy surface. He rinsed his throat with that salty mouth-wash, spat it out, for the sea is a spittoon too, the spittoon of gods and recalcitrant youth.

Then he flung his body, arms outstretched, into the pearly blue-ness, at last to be united with it. He no longer feared anything. He knew that after this no great harm could come to him. That kiss and that journey had consecrated him for something.

He swam a long way out, beyond the rope that marked the limit, where he thought that there were dangers—sharks, corpses, rusty anchors and wrecked ships—so that everything that was lovely and ugly, everything that was visible and invisible, should be his.

On he swam with the waves and the morning wind, toward where he guessed golden Venice lay in a golden mist, the land which he didn’t yet know but loved even unknown, and as his shoulders rose and rose again from the water he lifted his face passionately toward the distant Latin shore: toward Italy, the holy, the adored.

*
Sárszeg was, at the time of the story, a village to the northeast of Nagyvárad, in Bihar county, eastern Hungary. The region was lost in 1920 under the treaty of Trianon, and Sárszeg is now in Romania. Here it is the pseudonym of Kosztolányi’s native Szabadka (post-Trianon, Subotica in Serbia); it is also the setting of his novel
Pac-sirta
(
Skylark
, 1924).