A Soldier of the Great War (12 page)

The cry that escaped from the massive young woman made the rare golden song of her imagined swan as common as a streetcorner ditty. It had the force and power of a great railroad horn. It sounded so terrible that the entire Schlernhaus awoke. Each and every mountaineer, the cadets in their barracks in the fog, the attorney Giuliani, the royal party, and everyone else sat bolt upright in their beds as if they had been struck by lightning. Even little Patrizia began to scream.

"
Was ist es!Mach es tot!Mach et tot!
—What is it? Kill it! Kill it!" Lorna cried, and resumed her mad howling.

Never before had the lamps of the Schlernhaus been lit simultaneously or so fast. The light that flashed against the fog suggested the work of either a photographer or a cannon. Four soldiers in heavy boots charged through the hallway, bayonets unsheathed. They were so excited that rather than lift the latch they kicked down the door. When it hit the floor it sounded like a bomb. Members of the royal party, born and bred on assassination, gave out a collective moan.

Alessandro sought refuge by wrapping himself up in a ball in the quilt. Patrizia was weeping. Lorna, backed up against the bedposts, was completely silent. Her outstretched finger pointed accusingly at the bundle on the bed.

"What is it? Is it an animal?" asked the officer of the guard, drawing his saber.

"It has
horrible fangs?
Lorna shouted.

Alessandro peeped from behind a mass of satin. The soldiers were temporarily stunned as he extricated himself from it, stepped off the bed, and started to walk away, intending to return to his room. He was not sure, however, that he was going to be able to do this.

Two sergeants took hold of his ears and dragged him down the hall. He vaguely understood that they had been humiliated, that he had affronted the holiness of order, and that at this moment it was distinctly disadvantageous to be Italian. "Papa!...Papa!...Papa!" he screamed rhythmically, afraid that he was going to be killed.
As
the whole world collapsed, his tears flowed silently. He was no longer Patrizias lover or Garibaldi's son, but the chief criminal of the Hapsburg Empire, an assassin, an animal with fangs.

"What are you doing!" the attorney Giuliani shouted at the armed soldiers, even though he was in his dressing gown and they seemed to be twice his height. "Let him go!"

Alessandro saw in his father all the light of the world, but the soldiers still held him.

"Are you mad?" the attorney from Rome asked the officer of the guard. "Is this how you treat children?"

"Our children are decent, clean, and well behaved," the officer shouted in a voice so full of hate and rage that the senior Giuliani and his son were silenced. The officer then proceeded to narrate to the assembled onlookers his version of what had happened. Even though he understood little of this, Alessandro trembled.

The princess appeared, scowling in anger, a palsied hand dancing upon her hip. "This child tried to violate my granddaughter," she announced. And then, shaking feebly, she added, "In other times, I would have had him shot."

The attorney Giuliani whitened. He was afraid for Alessandro's life, and he had to take the initiative.

"Sandro," he asked, "is this true?"

Alessandro, who had not understood the accusations, had nonetheless understood their tone, and he knew that his embrace of Patrizia had been the finest and purest thing in the world. "No," he said.

Still, his father raised his hand, and brought it down against Alessandro's face. The sound was heard throughout the hallways as Alessandro collapsed onto the floor.

Then the attorney Giuliani picked up his son. "We're leaving in the morning," he said, and carried the boy back to their room.

Once inside, he lifted Alessandro into bed, and covered him. They were obliged to whisper.

"I'm all right," Alessandro said.

"It wasn't my hand," his father told him. "I was terrified of what they might do. They're not like us."

"I know," Alessandro answered.

"You have to understand," his father begged. "I've never hurt you before, and I'll never hurt you again. The soldiers were armed. Their bayonets had been unsheathed. These people punish their children severely. I didn't want to hit you...."

"I know," Alessandro said, touching his father's face, as his father often touched his. Though he was staring at the attorney Giuliani, he saw the wheel steadily turning in the sunlight, almost with a will of its own.

"Papa? When we go home tomorrow, the wheel will be turning, won't it."

"What wheel?"

"The cable wheel."

"Yes, it turns all the time."

"Even when we don't see it? Even if we're not there?"

"Of course. It has nothing to do with us."

"Even if we're dead?"

"Yes."

"Then, Papa," Alessandro announced, "I'm not afraid to die."

 

"A
RE YOU
all right?" Nicolò asked. "We've been here for hours. The moon is headed down. Maybe we should go on, unless you want to sleep."

"Help me up and we'll go," the old man said.

As they took to the road, Nicolò asked, "What were you thinking? I could see that you weren't asleep."

"I wasn't asleep. I was thinking of something that happened a long time ago."

"What?"

"The way history, geography, and politics influence love. And the way it, in turn, influences them."

"That doesn't sound like much. I mean, you could make up a hundred stories to show that, couldn't you."

"You could."

"And that's not very imaginative—making things up—is it."

Alessandro closed one eye and lowered his head almost like a bull. "I suppose not," he said, "Mr. Sambucca."

"What was the real story? I ask you what you were thinking, and you tell me history, geography, politics, love. All I wanted to know was what happened to who. Isn't that enough?"

"It's enough when you're seventeen and most of it is ahead of you, but when most of it has passed, you try to make sense of it. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. I was just thinking of my father. I should have comforted him more than I did. Once, he had to hit me in front of some Austrian soldiers, and it made him unhappy out of all proportion; not only at the time, but for the rest of his life. He believed that he had betrayed me, and I could never convince him that it wasn't so."

"Did they make him do it?"

"In a way."

"You should have killed them."

"I did. And not too much later, either."

"How did you do it?"

"How did I do what?"

"Kill them."

"I shot them with a rifle, and, at close range, I used a bayonet."

"Jesus!" Nicolò said, his eyes wide. "How did you do it? I mean, how exactly do you do that?"

"I'm afraid I'm not going to satisfy your curiosity."

"Why not? You weren't the only one ever to be in a war."

"I know, but I survived. That puts me on a lower plane."

"A
lower
plane?"

"Lower than the one of those who perished. It was their war, not mine. I was able to walk out of it, leave it behind. Though God preserved me, the best stories were theirs, and these were cut short. The real story of a war is no story at all—blackness, sadness, silence. The stories they tell of comradeship and valor are all to make up for what they lacked. When I was in the army I was always surrounded by thousands of men, and yet I was almost always alone. Whenever I made friends, they were killed.

"If I describe what I saw of the war, you'll know it from the point of view of the living, and that is the smallest part of the truth. The truth itself is what was finally apprehended by those who didn't come back."

"Then tell me the smallest part of the truth," Nicolò said, "for how else can I know?"

"There isn't enough time between here and Sant' Angelo for even the smallest part of the truth," was Alessandro Giuliani's reply.

They were walking down into a long valley. The moon was low and full. As it rested on the jagged horizon below them it seemed miraculously close, as if they had risen to it or it had dipped down to earth to take a look. It seemed to be in league with the dawn, glowing pearly and blue at one and the same time.

Though the moon soon disappeared beyond the ridge behind them, most of the world remained in its light, even as they themselves were walking in shadow. Alessandro had begun to shake with fatigue. How stupid, he thought, to have set out on such an expedition. He simply did not have the strength that once he had had, and now Nicolò was setting a fast pace without realizing how difficult it was for the lame old man to keep up. And yet, because the world beyond was illumined in a softening white glow, he kept on, hoping that, even if he did not deserve it, strength would find him as it had so many times before.

If it did, he thought, and by some grace he were to be lifted from his fatigue and pain, he would tell Nicolò what Nicolò had
asked to hear. They hadn't far to go until they parted, and in the time they had he would tell a simple tale in which he would skirt the danger of a lost or broken heart, though he knew that recollection could be more powerful and more perilous than experience itself. What vanity had moved him to think he could walk over the mountains again, pushing forward day and night, like a young soldier?

And then he answered the question he had put to himself. Throughout his life he had suffered periods of despair only to be lifted from them and to rise at the speed of falling. It had happened in footraces, when he had sometimes been slapped awake like a newborn and had burst into the lead effortlessly and without warning. It had happened in climbing, when he was suddenly transformed from a frightened novice into someone who could dance up the cliffs. And it had happened in his doctoral examinations, when the young Alessandro, trembling and afraid, had become the examiner of his examiners.

"Do you want to rest?" Nicolò asked just before dawn, as they began to walk southward through the cultivated valley twenty or thirty kilometers in length. "It's almost morning. We've been making good time, but now you're going very slowly. I think that if we rest again we can better our pace. I know you can walk fast; you almost left me behind going up the mountain. As you said, it was the going down in the morning that was difficult."

"My heart feels bad," Alessandro said. "It's hard for me to breathe. I'm afraid that if I stop I'll get so stiff and tired I won't be able to get going again. Walk slowly, if you can bear with me until I recover. This time of night is always the most difficult. If I can get through it into the daylight..."

A delicate white mist had risen from the irrigation ditches. It covered the fields and tried unsuccessfully to arch over the embankments on either side of the road. The sky had grown light enough to obscure the stars and planets. As night became morning,
it seemed that all the birds of central Italy began to sing and dance in a mounting ecstasy that soon covered the countryside with sound. The trees were as busy as hives, with hopping or swooping birds and dislodged leaves that spiraled down through the still air.

With the swelling light came swelling sound, a swelling breeze, and the rattling and rustling of leaves. Finally beaten down, melted, and conquered by wind, heat, and light, the mist was swept from the fields. Rich colors bloomed in midair from what had been tentative vanishing grays. When the wind roared over the road and lifted the dust, Alessandro knew that something was happening. He shuddered as he saw the inanimate and lifeless world moving, and the dead things, dancing.

The sun rose on the left and turned the glossy leaves of the poplars into a blinding haze of light too bright to behold until the wind coursed through the trees and they began to bend and sway, softening the glare.

Alessandro felt the world take fire. His heart repaired to the past and he barely touched the ground as he walked between trees that now were shimmering in the dawn. No matter that distant thunder is muted and slow, it comes through the air more clearly. After half a century and more, he was going to take one last look. He no longer cared what it might do to him. He just wanted to go back. And he did.

T
HE GARDEN
of the attorney Giuliani's house was divided into quarters, and long after Alessandro left home he knew their every attribute by heart. The first quarter was given to an orchard the gardeners seemed never able to leave well enough alone; they were always cutting back, grafting, and lifting the soil around the thriving trees. Year after year, forty trees produced fruit for the Giulianis' table and for the wicker baskets that the gardeners carried home on their shoulders or balanced on the handlebars of their bicycles. The second quarter was tilled as a vegetable garden that produced crops appropriate to a small farm, and that even in January provided half a dozen kinds of greens for the cook to harvest every day, and little white daisies that the gardeners chose to overlook in their weeding because they were the only flowers of winter. In the third quarter a flower garden bloomed in so many colors that it seemed to be coolly on fire, and in the fourth a grape arbor produced much of the Giulianis' wine.

Dividing the vegetable garden and the orchard, on one side, from the flowers and the arbor on the other was a crushed stone path flanked by hedges high enough so that Alessandro, at twenty, could leap them only with difficulty. Green lawns were laid down like enameled intarsia between the quarters, and rows of pines and date palms at its edge made the garden seem like a clearing in the forest. Though the palms were so tall they could be seen from the Villa Borghese as they crested the Gianicolo near the Villa Aurelia, they were sterile. The fruit that hung from them in massive
bunches never ripened, and in autumn it blazed up in wasted yellow untouched by swarms of birds that alighted in their crowns.

Though some of the Giulianis' modest wealth was not of Alessandro's father's making, he had had to squeeze the rest from stones. Many whose wherewithal had been solely a matter of birth looked down upon the industrious lawyer for having worked, some who had become rich entirely from their own labor resented that he had had an inheritance, and those who had done and received neither were bitter that he had either. But the Giulianis hardly cared, and Alessandro, at twenty, hardly knew. They had their house and they had their garden.