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.
About the Author
One of Italy’s foremost women writers, DACIA MARAINI is the author of more than fifty books, including novels, plays, collections of poetry and critical essays. Her second novel, The Age of Discontent, won the international Prix Formentor, and she has been the recipient of two of Italy’s highest literary honours, the Premio Campiello and the Premio Strega. Her novel The Silent Duchess, an international bestseller, was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
SILVESTER MAZZARELLA has been translating Italian and Swedish prose, poetry and drama professionally since 1997. He learned English from his mother, Italian from his father and his love of Italian opera, and Swedish in Finland, where he taught English for many years at Helsinki University.