A Soldier of the Great War (15 page)

The
carabinieri
were trained soldiers. They neither said anything nor looked at one another. They merely pulled their caps down tight, inhaled, reconciled themselves to ruining their uniforms, and dug their spurs into their horses' sides. Perhaps Alessandro's decision would have been different had he known that their weapons and pouches were designed and secured for fast pursuit on a horse, and that these men who were so heavily encumbered had been trained to ride and fight in fancy clothes.

He was on a straightaway parallel to a ruined aqueduct. Its arches flew past him as if they were the spaces between cars in a train speeding the other way. The road was clear, flat, and dry, he had at least a kilometer's lead, and, although he didn't look back, he felt that he was enlarging it.

He was riding so fast that everyone he passed turned to look after him, but the horses of the
carabinieri
were somewhat better on a straightaway than Enrico, whose legs were as thick and strong as those of a steeplechase horse.

After five minutes running, Alessandro heard two pistol shots. He looked back. The
carabinieri
were uncomfortably close. Their pistols were held in the air. He could even see the silver badges set in the red bands of the caps.

His throat tightened as they gained, but he chanced that they would tire sooner than Enrico, if only because they outweighed
him and their saddles were heavy and elaborate. The road veered to the right, went through one of the aqueduct's arches, and then veered around to the left again, parallel to a railway. On the left side of the road was a ditch filled with cream-colored water, beyond which was a field sectioned by chest-high barbed wire. The road and the railroad resumed their parallel course on the other side of it. Here was the kind of oxbow that he had planned to cross so that he might catch up to Lia. He reasoned that if he could use such a thing to draw even with a beautiful girl who had a twenty-minute lead, he might also use it to escape the
carabinieri,
so, instead of veering toward the arches, he kept Enrico straight in the curve and closed on the ditch.

Enrico loved to jump. He cleared the stream with a wide margin, and he went too high, merely from exuberance. The
carabinieri
knew their horses could not take the fences. They kept to the road and disappeared through the arches of the aqueduct. Enrico jumped the wire, leaving a great deal of space between it and his lean belly, and Alessandro didn't look back until they had cleared the third and last fence.

When he saw no one behind him, he knew they had taken the road, and after Enrico leapt over a green bank back onto the track, Alessandro saw them two kilometers behind, at the bend. It was so hot that waves of heat rising off the fields made the mounted soldiers look like a single black carriage lifted from the road and traveling on air.

Alessandro heard half a dozen pistol shots. He knew that his fate now depended not upon the principles or training of the
carabinieri
but upon the degree of their frustration, and he realized that because of the
carabinieri
he would have to avoid the Laurentina for a year, and that, to return to Rome in the evening, he would have to swim his horse across the Tiber near Ostia, where it was wide and deep, and approach the city from the north. But these thoughts were premature, for he looked back and saw the riders still in pursuit, still raised above the road and jiggling hypnotically
as if they were a flying machine or an automobile. When would their horses give out? It had to be soon, because of the weight they carried, but it hardly mattered. Soon he would lead them into enormous tracts of forest crossed at random with ravines, gullies, stone walls, and cattle fences, where a horse had to dodge like a boxer, and a rider had to be subtle and quick to avoid hanging limbs and sharp brambles as thick as anacondas.

If Enrico could hold his lead on another few kilometers of straightaway, he would lose them forever in the forest. They would dismount for some listless rifle shots before their quarry vanished into the city-sized green thickets. Then, safe from the
carabinieri,
Alessandro would speed through the foliage, enchanted by the dark leaves and the wind in the pines until he emerged from the forest at the coast, onto an empty white beach with the sound of the waves obliterating his hard breathing and the wind cooling his sweat-drenched horse.

Alessandro's image of the waves and the wind on the sea made him narrow his eyes and sent cool sparkling bolts of electricity coursing through him. Enrico followed suit and shuddered even as he ran, starting ahead as if he had been stung.

As he was thinking about his marvelous advantage and comfortable long lead, Alessandro was knocked forward by a huge blast from behind. He turned in the saddle, and he saw a great light suspended high in the air. He was so shocked that it took him a second or two to realize that it was the headlamp of a locomotive running on the track next to the road. Gradually the locomotive pulled up even. The blur of its rods and wheels, the steam that issued from steel, the distance chased down and beaten by fire, the ten thousand sounds, and the complex and contradictory movements that combined to push it forward along the two silky rails that lay before it, were like a dream.

Two men in the cab and one on the coal car were smiling at him and waving their arms. They knew neither that he was chasing
Lia Bellati nor fleeing the
carabinieri.
They were lighthearted in the fine weather. They were proud of their engine. They wanted to race.

Why not? Alessandro looked through heat that bent the light, and raised his right hand, his thumb pointed up. The black locomotive churned the air and clattered over the silver rails. The fireman began to shovel coal into the firebox, and the engineers stopped smiling. As their speed increased, the concoction of hysterical pistons and spokes moved into a frenzy that drew Alessandro to it as if it were the magnetic black water under a bridge: he had to fight not to lean in its direction.

Now and then he passed astonished people on the road. Had two carts blocked the way he would have jumped them. He didn't think he could beat the train, and had the race lasted longer he would not have, but they approached the forest, and the horse, who could smell it, stretched forward as if carried on the thundering engine's invisible bow waves.

When the race was over they rose into the green. The forest took them as Alessandro had thought it would, lightly and gently. They ran through it, disappearing into its shadows, and gradually they slowed. Enrico was dancing as smoothly through the brush as a swallow that maneuvers through a tangle of trees.

 

H
AD
L
IA
taken the Laurentina, Alessandro thought, she probably would have broken off toward the sea on a particular road that followed the course of a clear stream. This was the most direct route, and the prettiest, and, after swimming in the sea, one had merely to push from the waves into the stream's pulsating plume, traveling up the transparent shallows to emerge free of salt and chill, for even in early spring the currents could be as warm as bath water.

That she intended to swim alone, and had ridden alone to such a deserted place, puzzled him. Though the countryside around
Rome was neither Sicily nor Calabria, it was not safe for an unaccompanied woman, it never had been, and it never would be. He turned almost blue with the thought that she might have—indeed, must have—met a lover on the road, in which case his triple race would have been for nothing, and his shame would drive him to emigrate to Argentina. He began to think about Argentina, and it was not unpleasant, but before he left he would stand by the stream that flowed into the sea and watch as Lia and her lover emerged from the dunes. What an exquisite look he would give them. His expression would be that of a spurned horseman on foot in a Budapest cafe, who, about to shoot himself in the head, would glance at the woman he loved, and smile. All was forgiven, if only because everything was so magnificently bittersweet. Even at twenty, Alessandro knew that he had been dazzled by the greatness of Pushkin, and that, despite the pronouncements of opera, Italians were far more practical in these matters than were the Central Europeans who wore epaulets and bearskin helmets and killed themselves in cafes or jumped out of windows with playing cards in their hands. Nonetheless, many Italians, including Garibaldi, had gone to Argentina and come away better, far-seeing men with white mustaches, wrinkled faces, and eyes that had grown wise in the Andes, so to speak.

While Enrico lapped the warm river water and Alessandro was planning the layout of a hacienda on the Pampas, Lia rode over the crest of the dunes. She was struck by the fact that Enrico had stretched out his long neck and carefully spread his forelegs so he could drink, and that Alessandro, after having done the impossible, was lost in thought. He might have been strutting back and forth on his horse, amazed that he had beaten her overwhelming head start, but he seemed almost to be unhappy, and she liked that more even than she knew.

As her cavalry mount, his head held high for balance, quietly slid down the cool sand, Alessandro turned in surprise.

"You must have flown," she said. "I pushed my horse all the way.

"We cut through the forest." He looked down at Enrico. "He thinks it's his duty to jump fences and walls, to go through the bushes and the trees like a rabbit, and to cover great distances without tiring—and I never told him it wasn't."

"They used to ride like that in Argentina," she said.

"Argentina?" Alessandro asked, in amazement.

"My father was overseeing the construction of a rail line from Bahía Blanca to Buenos Aires."

"I thought your father was a banker."

"Who do you think provides the money to construct railroads?"

"How long were you there?"

"A few years. The beaches there are more beautiful," she said, looking out at the sea. Her hair was kept in motion rhythmically by the breeze that came off the waves. "There weren't any people for tens of kilometers. I used to swim in the sea with nothing, not even a ring."

She reddened across her face and neck, and, although he could not see it, her chest and shoulders. The heat began to travel even down her back, but the wind ballooned her clothing and cooled her.

"Was it dangerous?" Alessandro asked. They had begun to walk their horses, south of the stream, toward Anzio.

"The waves were high, but the currents were gentle," she answered.

"I mean without clothes."

"I wasn't alone."

Alessandro felt like a rock that is thrown into an unfathomably deep sector of the sea. In imagination of yet another of her lovers, he knew oblivion.

"I had a horse."

"What if someone had come along?"

"Who?"

"Someone of horrendous intentions."

"There wasn't anyone for as far as you could see."

Alessandro nodded. Still, he could not help but feel irritation at the scandalous behavior that, were he to marry her, would reflect badly upon him. Something was wrong if a beautiful and delicate young woman were so careless with herself. "What if someone did come?" he asked. "What if a man had been hiding in the dunes? No one was around to help, except your horse."

"My horse would have been enough."

"Was it trained to bite?" Alessandro asked sarcastically.

"No, it was trained not to flee, and to carry my saddlebags, in which I kept this," she said, reaching into one of a small set of balanced saddle pouches that looked, if not Argentine, at least un-Italian. She drew a heavy revolver and held it expertly in her right hand, with the barrel pointing straight up. "It's British," she said, "a Webley and Scott."

For half an hour they walked their horses down the beach, talking about Argentina, ballistics, and the sea. Though it was not quite warm enough to swim, Alessandro couldn't rid himself of the image of Lia swimming. When he saw them spinning together in the waves, scandal was of no consequence.

Any thoughts Alessandro may have had in this regard were chased from him when he became aware that a storm over the Tyrrhenian had risen as if from nowhere and was speeding directly toward them. They heard faraway rolling thunder that began on the sea and tracked toward Rome in masses of black like the clouds of swallows that nest by the Tiber and sometimes obliterate the November sky.

Soon the solid wall of the storm stretched from the cape at Anzio to the horizon. Small yellow serpentines of lightning weaving amidst the coils of charcoal cloud lit the sea and made it as green as emerald. The storm was sailing on the wind, tossing distant waves into white crests, running for the coast, turning the light above it to gray, purple, and gold.

Lia turned to Alessandro.

"I can beat it to Rome," he said.

"Of course you can't."

"I can."

"That's foolish," she told him.

"No it isn't. I know my chances. I've always known when they're good, and they're good right now." He rested his hand on Enrico's taut neck.

"I'd like to see it. Tell me if you get through."

"Why don't you come with me?"

"I have no intention either of fighting storms or outrunning them, and I have no intention of accompanying anyone who tries. It doesn't work. It never did, and it never will."

 

H
AD
A
LESSANDRO
known that Lia went into the garden early in the morning he would have arisen each day at five and been there to have met her accidentally. It was the end of April and he hadn't seen her for weeks. Nor had he heard from her. Nor had he known how to approach her. Lacking the social graces, he was unable to ask her to the theater or the opera, and he was not likely to meet her at a dinner party, never having been to one. He solved the problem by lying in bed.

Early one morning, before the sun struck the picture of the Matterhorn, his father came into his room and shook him.

"I want to sleep."

"You can't."

"What do you mean, I can't?" Alessandro asked.