A Soldier of the Great War (10 page)

When the princess sat down, everyone did. The little girl, whose hair was braided and piled in the local style, was at the end of the royal table. Her legs dangled, too, but not quite as far off the floor as Alessandro's. She nervously played with her knife, which led the attorney Giuliani to note that when people play with silverware it is usually with the knife.

The waiters charged from the kitchen to serve the princess first, but she waved away practically everything. Though in the end her plate held nine or ten peas, a lettuce leaf, and a piece of meat the size of a minnow, her wine glass was properly filled and she drained it in one swoop. It was immediately taken away and another put in its place. The second had champagne, or beer—it was hard to tell—and this she sipped slowly.

As the waiters carved up sides of venison and served vegetables and roasted potatoes from copper salvers, the village orchestra of Vols trooped into the room and took up position in front of a glowing tile stove as high as the ceiling. Of the eight musicians, six were remarkably corpulent, and they had all walked up the mountain not long before. To make the room itself a perfect temperature, the stove was stoked up and burning like a forge. Standing next to it was absolutely unbearable, especially in a wet goat-hair cloak. The trumpet player lit up like a brand. His face could have served the railroad as a signal light for stop. Still, when the orchestra started to play, he followed. Some people nodded, because they recognized the first selection as the regimental hymn of the
Landesschützen,
and they wanted everyone to know that they knew. Nothing seemed amiss until, at the end of the second song, "
Die lautlose Bergziege
" ("The Noiseless Mountain Goat"), the trumpeter was taken ill.

He had great trouble breathing, and, to conceal his agony, he smiled until he seriously distorted his embouchure. Then he keeled over, spinning as he fell, and landed flat on his back against the floor amidst the crashing and clattering of instruments.

The princess exhibited her concern by laying her fork upon her plate. The hut master ran from the kitchen with the officer of the guard. They loosened the trumpeters clothing and carried him out, after which the hut master returned immediately and tapped his baton on one of the overhanging beams. "Is a doctor present?" he asked. "Is a doctor in any of the parties now registered?" No doctors were present. Nonetheless, the hut master, one of the most famous mountaineers in the world, surveyed his clientele with the willful and acquisitive efficiency of a climber seeking a hold. It was as if the doctors were merely hiding, and he had determined to smoke them out. His gaze settled oh Alessandro.

"Me?" Alessandro asked in soundless pantomime, pointing to his chest with his thumb. The hut master continued to stare. Alessandro looked to his father to assure him that he was not a physician or a nurse. The attorney Giuliani squinted at the hut master, trying to fathom his motives. It was clear. The famous guide, who was known to be sane, and who desperately sought a physician, had fixed his eyes on Alessandro.

"He's only nine years old," Alessandro's father said.

The hut master turned on his heels and left. Alessandro breathed in relief. Next, the princess looked his way and smiled. He smiled back as best he could, and she laughed because he had been mistaken for a physician. Then she speared a pea and put it into her mouth, at which point everyone in the vast dining room picked up his fork and started to eat, and the musicians began to play a second, trumpet-free version of "
Die lautlose Bergziege.
"

Soon the music absorbed even the music makers, and seemed to convince them that all would be well with their comrade. The climb from Vols had been difficult, then the waiting outside in the cold, then the hot stove and the gravity of playing for a princess. He was undoubtedly in the kitchen, a cloth on his head, sipping whiskey. As thoughts of their friend's sudden collapse faded, they played with more energy. The fires in the stove and in the fireplaces
leapt in time to the music. Alessandro started his attack on a sizzling slab of venison that had been placed before him by a sweating cadet who had also ladled out an enormous amount of roasted potatoes and vegetables. A pitcher of beer was on the table. Neither the attorney nor his son would have any part of it.

Alessandro almost asked his father to cut the meat for him, but decided that this could not be done in the presence of the blonde girl he had thought to be the princess. After several minutes he managed to separate a small piece from the rest and was about to eat it, when the hut master re-entered and strode across the floor.

The princess was interested in both of them, her entourage was interested in what she was interested in, and the hall grew quiet.

Alessandro dropped his cutlery on the plate.

"We need the boy," the hut master said to the attorney Giuliani, in Italian.

"For what?" was the answer.

"I'll tell you outside."

They went into the kitchen. Under a huge copper hood, a whole side of venison was turning above a fire that begged and devoured its drippings. Cauldrons bubbled over with boiling things that surfaced as if to scream, and then were pulled under before they could express themselves. The cadets worked at tables, handling crusts and dessert plates and refilling tureens. In the center of the floor, a stretcher holding the stricken bandsman lay cater-cornered between a pastry table and a bin of onions. One of the soldiers, bent over the sick man, was kneading his chest as if he were preparing dough.

Alessandro knew he was not a doctor. What if they expected him to cure the man? The sole remedy with which he was familiar was hot tea, lemon, and honey, and when he was sick his mother baked chocolate cookies and sat by the bedside, watching him for hours and hours. These were the only medical procedures in his experience.

"I think he had a heart attack," the hut master declared, "but he's still alive, and he may survive if we can get him to a lower altitude and to the doctor in Vols. When I say 'doctor,' I speak loosely, but he will have to do."

"Perhaps," the attorney Giuliani said, "but what do I have to do with all of this?"

"Not you, him," the hut master said, pointing at Alessandro. "He's the only one who can save him."

Alessandro felt horribly inadequate.

"The victim's heart must be massaged, or it will stop. The gondola has no room for two grown men."

"Absolutely not!" Alessandro heard his father say. "Are you out of your mind? You want him to ride on that thing, that, that thing, with a dying man?"

"It's perfectly safe. We'll rope him in. It will be impossible for him to fall off. Even if he did, he wouldn't go anywhere."

"I won't even consider it. The cableway was not made for the transportation of human beings," the attorney Giuliani said, in a sentence perhaps more at home in Italian than in any other language.

"Exactly!" the hut master replied. "It's made to carry loads of stone and slate, plinths of a thousand kilos—ten times their combined weights. The cable is inspected every week. It's five centimeters in diameter. It could hold a fully loaded wagon with ease, a railroad car...."

"The Baths of Caracalla?"

"Yes, one stone at a time. I've ridden it for years. When my daughter was sick, we sent her down on it." He took the elder Giuliani aside and whispered. "Don't tell anyone, but today the princess came up in the gondola. She was quite comfortable."

"If my son is willing, and you'll stake your life on the outcome. When he's on the gondola, I'll hold a rifle on you. If anything happens to him..."

For a moment, the turning of the spit and the boiling of water were the only sounds other than that of the brass band in the dining room. "What rifle?"

"Ask one of the soldiers. I insist. It's the only way to make sure you're telling the truth. I'm not bluffing. I'll kill you if anything happens to him."

"All right."

"And only if he agrees."

"Of course."

The attorney Giuliani took Alessandro aside. "Sandro, if you don't want to do this, you don't have to. The hut master is a great mountaineer. People entrust their lives to him every day. Each time we ride in a train, or stand on a balcony, we are exhibiting the same kind of trust. What do you say?"

"Can we go home tomorrow if I do it?"

"We can do anything you want, even if you don't do it."

"I will. Why shouldn't I?"

"Get a heavy sheepskin," the hut master commanded a cadet, "and fill a vacuum flask with hot tea."

After Alessandro and his father had gone to get warm clothing they and a dozen men went out into the night, with the bandsman on the stretcher. As they made their way through the mist to the cable terminus, the soldier continued to knead the trumpeter's chest, announcing periodically to those in train that the trumpeter was still alive.

The hut master tied Alessandro securely to the steel bracket with which the wooden gondola was hung from the cable. He and the attorney Giuliani checked and rechecked the climbing harness and the knots. "Even if you fall from the gondola," the hut master told Alessandro, "you'll just hang off the side. You're tied in doubly. I've taken people up the Marmolada with far less than what you have here. Nothing to worry about."

Alessandro's father took a rifle from one of the soldiers. Embarrassed by his mistrust of the famous mountaineer, and by what he
knew the Germans would consider his overly Italianesque response, he understood that he had to make good on his stated conditions. Though he didn't train the weapon on the hut master, he loaded it, and the hut master heard the unmistakable sounds of a rifle bolt opening, a cartridge rising, the cartridge rammed into the barrel, and the locking of the bolt.

Alessandro buttoned up his loden coat.

"Do you want the hood?" his father asked.

"No, I want to see what's around me."

He was lifted up into the gondola and he positioned himself on the sheepskin that swaddled the trumpeter. They told him what to do, pinned a note on his back, and pulled a wooden lever that rang a bell in the terminal below.

"Don't stop until someone takes over," the hut master instructed. After a few minutes, the cable shuddered, and the gondola moved off into the dark.

"Why is this here?" Alessandro shouted upon noticing the tea flask tucked between the sheepskin and the sideboard of the gondola.

"Against the cold. Drink it on the way back," they screamed over the wind, but he heard nothing after cold,' for he was already flying through a cloud that seemed as dense as cotton.

He pushed against the bandsman's thick chamois shirt just as the soldier had done. Though he could see nothing, he knew he was still riding across the plateau on the summit, and that the gondola would soon carry him backward over the edge.

He could feel the presence of the abyss the way a blind man feels the presence of the sea beyond a beach. Then he passed over, and he felt a weightless chill when he recognized the irresponsive silence of great height. Because the cable was steeply inclined, he had to lean forward to stay upright. Though his restraints might have saved him had he tumbled over the side, they didn't hold him in place: he accomplished that with his knees and by pressing his feet against the walls of the gondola.

In less than a minute they left the envelope of cloud that covered the mountain and were in the free air. The stars were everywhere, even below, swaying in grand nausea. From the dark outline of peaks and valleys, Alessandro saw that he was a thousand meters above the ground, with not even a ledge nearby. No matter where he might reach out, he would find nothing, and all he could hear was the sound of wheels on the cable.

Suddenly the body under him stirred. Still, he kept pushing as he had been told. "Marie!" the bandsman shouted in painful confusion. Alessandro hoped that the subject of his efforts would understand what was happening.

"Marie!" the trumpeter shouted once again, with disturbing power, as Alessandro realized that he was on a horse without a saddle.

"What are you doing?" the trumpeter asked in German of the local dialect, his eyes as wide as those of an enraged eel.

Alessandro didn't understand the dialect, and guessed that the man had asked for the time. "It's night," he said, not knowing the hour exactly. He felt obliged to make conversation. "No moon, no nightingales, but all is well, and the badger is in his hole."

The thin Italian voice, the heavy odor of sheepskin, the cradle-like rocking of the gondola, the hiss of the air, the darkness, and his own pain and distress were too much for the simple bandsman of Vols. He panicked. This was a nightmare, and all his life, whenever he had had a nightmare, he had thrashed. Now his main object was to rid himself of the little gargoyle that sat upon him with its wings folded like a bat, and continually butted his chest. These devilish creatures, they knew, and they were terribly cruel, because the heart was the place that hurt the most.

"
Waldteufel!
" he screamed. "Forest devil!" He lifted his bulk from the waist up and latched on to Alessandro. Both hands, big fat things like rows of kielbasa, grabbed the boy's fragile neck and locked into rigor mortis, though the bandsman remained very much alive and, apparently, healthy.

As Alessandro felt the blood collecting in his head he remembered what had happened to the mercury thermometer he had put in the kitchen oven. Had he had the reach, he would have pulled the trumpeter's ears, shoved a fist into his mouth, and ripped at his nostrils, but his hands did all this in the air in front of the assailant's face.

"Filthy bat! Hideous creature! Ahhh! Horrible! Horrible!" the trumpeter trumpeted.

Casting about for a weapon, Alessandro found the vacuum flask. He passed it around his back from his left hand to his right. Then he clubbed his tormentor. After a bang and a muffled smashing of glass, nothing changed except that the strangle hold grew tighter.

Knowing that he could not last much longer, Alessandro struggled to unscrew the cap on the vacuum flask. The cadet who prepared it had not taken into account that it was to be opened by a boy of nine. With all the force he could muster, Alessandro turned it. He thought he pulled every muscle in his body, and the cap sailed into the abyss. Steam rose and burned his hands.