A Soldier of the Great War (21 page)

The thunder persisted. Alessandro had no idea that thunder, muffled in wild snow, sounded exactly like artillery. He held his position because it was all he could do, and the monarchists backed down.

 

Y
OUNG SINGERS
of little experience and old ones of poor voice often found themselves in Bologna in a theater that was supported by huge trusses and timbers arrayed against its bulging outer walls. The architectural decorations on the façade of this doomed opera house had been so worn down by wind and water that the devils were toothless, the gargoyles faceless, and the cornices round, but Italy had always been full of buildings that seemed just about to fall down, and this one, in its timber girdle, waited until Alessandro had left the city.

Three times a week, Rossini and Verdi marshaled sufficient force and beauty to shut the students up and bring them to the kind of rapt attention that the singers of La Scala thought the natural state of mankind. When one singer questioned another about a run in this theater, the query was, "For how long did you clear the air?" meaning for how many minutes in his aria was he able to rid the sky of the paper airplanes that crossed and collided over the orchestra in a traffic unlike any that had ever been seen on earth. They were sometimes ten and twenty layers deep, they would meander in circles, or zigzag, a hundred or more sailing about unimpeded.

Everyone kept his eye on his own craft or on a favorite. As the planes darted through the huge empty space, the singers looked out not only upon the missiles themselves but upon a thousand boys whose heads, as if in a completely anarchic tennis match,
moved back and forth in many different directions—and not only back and forth, but slowly and gradually down. Singing there was like performing in a hospital for nervous diseases.

On occasion, one or more students who knew the lyrics and were gifted with powerful voices stood in their seats and competed with whatever wretch was unlucky enough to be onstage. Whether it was done as a compliment or in derision was immaterial. The result was the same. Worse, perhaps, was the unfolding of several hundred newspapers, signaling an insulting neutrality. Bombardment by eggs and vegetables, shouted insults, and the occasional shoe that landed next to a terrified soprano, were, of course, unambiguous.

But should a young singer with the heart and courage to face these things and keep on singing, sing well, a thousand boys as unruly as animals and as jumpy as unbroken horses or caffeinated bulls on a festival day, would suddenly become still. The house electrified, beyond the footlights a thousand faces would show expressions of sadness, longing, and desire, and some would sparkle back at the lights, in tracks that ran down the cheeks from bright eyes that caught the light. And when the aria ended, after a few seconds of silence the students would erupt into a roar of appreciation that put the audiences of major opera houses to shame.

After a lively overture with an orchestral signature attributable mainly to the fact that theatrical impresarios have known for ages that adolescents can be quieted by hunting horns, the curtain rose, crushing several paper gliders in its folds. An extraordinary painted backdrop glowed in the light. Giotto's blues and Caravaggio's shadows had been united to portray a tranquil forest in neither night nor day but, rather, in a condition of the spirit. In combination with the overture, the weak and dream-like blue, the clouds of dark green that marked the tops of the trees, and the motile and confusing shadows, several forms of art kept the students as quiet as the dead.

But not long after a group of obese 'hunters' had stepped from the trees and begun to sing, Alessandro noticed that the white objects had begun to glide down from the highest balconies. In the orchestra, with contempt for the fire laws, two students had set up a brazier and were grilling small cubes of meat. Alessandro leaned against what had once been the velvet-covered rail of the middle balcony, and smiled. He was thinking of the girl in the Villa Medici. Although she was too young, she was French, he didn't know her name, she had been surrounded by protective companions, and their encounter had been like a dream, she was more familiar to him than someone he had known all his life. When their eyes met he had felt immense gravity, as if fifty years had been compressed into ten seconds. He wasn't infatuated with her, but instead he loved her so quietly that he thought he would soon forget her, although when he considered the prospect of forgetting her his love for her grew, and this made him remember that heavy blizzards start as gentle and persistent snow.

In her absence, and in the absence of anyone like her, he was drawn to many things that, in being beautiful, were her allies—the blue of the stage-set in the floodlights, the grace of a cat as it turned its small lion-like face to question a human movement, a fire that blazed from within the dark of a blacksmith's shop or a baker's and caught his eye as he passed, a single tone arising from a cathedral choir to shock a jaded congregation with its unworldly beauty, the mountaintops as snow was lashed from them by blue winds, the perfect and uncontrived smile of a child. Upon such observations, because they came so thick and full, he had begun to build an arsenal of uncoordinated aesthetic principles. Though the system that was forming was not well in order, he trusted that as things progressed he would watch the images run together.

At the end of their song the hunters went offstage in disappointment, and then came several scenes that had not been com
posed for an audience that rocked back and forth in its seats like stir-crazed leopards in a zoo.

Alessandro leaned forward, eyes fixed upon the illuminated painting. As the air passed over the candles in the footlights and their flames struggled against it, differing light was thrown upon the rich forest.

"I've been tapping your shoulder for at least a minute," Rafi said to Alessandro.

Alessandro turned to squint into the darkness.

"You look rather dumb when you listen to music."

"You're well now?" Alessandro asked.

"Yes. I even played tennis. Can we talk here?" Rafi asked, as if it were a regular theater.

"We could fight a duel and no one would notice," Alessandro answered, "but let's go outside."

When they were sitting on a long flight of white marble steps from which they could see far out over the countryside surrounding Bologna, Alessandro asked, "Why didn't you fight?"

In the last year of his legal studies, Rafi could do anything he pleased with either a question or an answer. "I did fight," he said. "I fought as hard as I could, and I carry the wounds from it."

"
They
don't."

"That isn't my concern."

"A strange way of fighting."

"It binds me to what I seek."

"I suppose it does," Alessandro told him, "and if I hadn't been there with a pistol that I stole by smashing a store window, you would have been bound so close to what you seek that to see anything you would have had to look out."

"True," Rafi said, infuriatingly.

"Why haven't you learned to strike back?"

"As you may know," Rafi said, "the streets of Venice are made of water. Fights there tend to be very short, because after a few
moments one of the combatants usually ends up in the canal. When I was young I was thrown off bridges and embankments a number of times."

"Look," said Alessandro, who had never been in a real fight in his life, "I can show you how to acquit yourself properly in physical combat." He considered the object of conversion. "You're tremendous, but you're probably not very strong. Size itself is unimportant: you have to exercise. Why are you smiling?"

"I'm rather strong, you see."

"Oh, I doubt it," the smaller of the two said pompously.

"For six months of the year I study law, but in the other six I work for my father."

"Slicing cutlets doesn't make a Hercules."

"My father doesn't have a butcher shop with a glass window and a display case. He's a wholesaler. His warehouse is the size of the Arsenal and he has a hundred and fifty employees. Most are cutters. Since cutting demands great skill and I was supposed to be a lawyer, there never was any reason for me to learn how to cut, so I carry and hang meat."

"How much?"

"Quarters."

"What do they weigh?"

"A hundred kilograms or more. You wear a blue coat with a hood. Before you carry, you flip the hood so your hair doesn't get bloody. You take the quarter off the hook, mount it on your back, and walk. If it's in the hold of an oceangoing ship you may walk for ten minutes before you get to the warehouse. Then you flip the carcass over your shoulder, hold it steady, and hang it. The meat can also come stacked. In that case you have to pick it up from the ground and hoist it onto your shoulders."

"So why didn't you pick up the monarchists and throw them down the stairs?"

"I've never done that sort of thing."

"Let me show you."

"All right," Rafi said, "show me."

"On the weekend," Alessandro answered, "if the weather is good."

They shook hands.

 

B
ECAUSE HE
hadn't had the slightest notion of how to do it, Alessandro spent the next few days figuring out how to toughen up Rafi Foa, and on Sunday morning the two of them stood by the railroad tracks as a train approached from out of the winter sun. Not wanting to be seen by the engineers, they hid in the brush.

"What are we going to do?" Rafi asked.

"First we jump the train," Alessandro replied. "We climb onto the roof and run down to the caboose."

"Why?"

"So the men in the caboose will chase us over the roofs of the cars while the train is in motion."

"What if they catch us?"

"They won't: that's the purpose of the exercise."

"On a moving train, where can we possibly go to get away from them?"

"Ten kilometers out, a railroad bridge goes over the river. Imagine how surprised they'll be when we jump!"

"Imagine how surprised
I'll
be when we jump. It's January."

"Just do exactly as I do."

"Have you ever done this before?" Rafi asked apprehensively as the train rumbled forward, the sound of its engine shaking everything around them and penetrating their chests so that their voices vibrated.

"Of course," Alessandro said.

They ran alongside and caught on to a cattle car. "Climb up, as if it were a ladder," Alessandro yelled over the noise of the wheels.
They went straight up the open boards until they found themselves at the beginning of a rounded, slippery roof on which handholds were nonexistent.

"Now what?" Rafi screamed.

"Work your way to the corner," Alessandro said, improvising. They moved to the corner. "Keep your hands on the edges of the roof and go up while you walk on the cross beam."

"How can you put your feet there?" Rafi shouted as they were tossed around above the tracks. "Its not big enough and it's too high."

"It's big enough. You have to bend." Alessandro began to move across the end of the car. His hands were cut on the edges of the filthy metal roof, and it took every muscle in his body to keep from being thrown into the maw between cars. Rafi followed.

The noise was tremendous—thunderous booms when empty cars passed over uneven spots in the rail, steel grinding against steel as wheels strained against the track, the bedlamite rattling of unsprung empty boxcars moving at a rapid clip.

Smoke and cinders swept along the top of the train. Half the time Alessandro and Rafi had to shut their eyes, and the other half they spent in irritating tears. They could hardly breathe. If they had fallen between the cars, the dragging and cutting would have made them unrecognizable.

Alessandro looked at Rafi, whose face showed some strain. "Hoist yourself up," he said.

"I don't have enough of a hold," Rafi said desperately. "It's too high. I'll fall."

Alessandro didn't know if he could do it. His hands were slippery from sweat and blood. "You can do it. Put your hands over the top, like this," he said as he began to pull himself up.

His hands slipped, but when they slid back he clawed forward like a cat and pulled himself onto the roof. Then he grabbed Rafi's wrist and helped him through the same frantic motions until they
both lay face down on the roof, breathing hard, sweating, filthy with soot, and covered with blood from their lacerated hands. The smoke sometimes covered them in nauseating black clouds.

"You do this all the time?" Rafi asked.

"When I can," Alessandro said, spitting out cinders and grease.

"You're crazy!" Rafi screamed.

"I know."

"What about tunnels?"

"Keep a sharp eye out for tunnels," Alessandro said, grateful to have been reminded. "At the first sign of a tunnel you have to hang between the cars. Otherwise, of course, you get scraped off the roof. There probably aren't any tunnels nearby, I would imagine." He stood up on the moving train. The wind, smoke, and sideways jolts of the freight car conspired to throw him off, but they couldn't accomplish the maneuver.

Rafi stood as Alessandro prepared to jump to the car behind them. "What happens if you fall off?" Rafi yelled.

"You don't!" Alessandro shouted before he made a running start and, with no apparent hesitation, sailed into the air. He came down on his right foot, on the roof of the next car, and didn't look back, assuming that Rafi was right behind, for in this operation Alessandro had no way to guide him other than by example.

As he gained speed in running along the tops of the cars it became progressively easier to clear the gaps. He would land with a feeling of joy that he would never forget. After the first five or ten times, he lost his fear and sprinted through the rushing air and smoke. Burning cinders hit the back of his neck. He heard the sound of Rafi's footsteps following.

They went forty cars, flying through the jumps with arms spread like wings to catch the steady and stabilizing air. The longer they were airborne, the happier they felt, and when they reached the caboose they began to pound the roof with their heels.