A Soldier of the Great War (37 page)

For a week before the offensive, Alessandro had the day watch and could sleep at night. The week before that, he had had night duty, and changing over exhausted him to the point where he feared his heart would give out. As time passed, however, he slowly regained his strength and was able to sleep properly and dream. He dreamed of Rome.

After dinner they would wash up, open the gun ports wide to let in the cold night air, throw some apple logs onto the fire, extinguish the lantern, and wrap themselves in their wool blankets. Sleep came easily as the wind whistled through the fortification and the fire crackled. Each man saw in the fire what he saw in his heart. For Alessandro the opening tableau was always the same, a perfect, hot blue day in the Villa Borghese, when the shadows among the trees were so dark that they had red in them. In a grove of hysterical cypress, where the leaves danced in the wind like sequins, the clash of so many beams of light against the dark made a continual phosphorescence. All through the shadows were glimpses of blue so rich that it could almost be breathed.

The water in the fountains of the Villa Borghese was bright and cold. It could take the sun blindingly, like the flash of a sword, collapse upon itself in surf-like white, float in a mist of rainbows, or
rush from darkness to darkness, emerging momentarily over a bed of yellow pebbles as if to be proved clear by the sun.

His father, mother, and sister were on a bench in the shadows, and Alessandro was in a white suit, by the fountain, half blinded by the light, his hand shielding his eyes as he searched the darkness. Luciana dangled her legs from the bench and swung them back and forth, looking to her right for a child with whom to play. Alessandro's mother and father were dressed as he had seen them in nineteenth-century photographs in which, even in the stiff portrayal of their youth, they had seemed as unconcerned with mortality as if the year 1900 were to have been a cap against which the geyser of time would rise only to fall back in decorative plumes.

 

T
HE NEXT
day, Alessandro sat with his back propped against the wall of the
cortile
in the Bell Tower. His rifle, bayonet fixed, was leaning against the same wall. Beyond the rim of the fortification, in the circular lake of sky visible to the soldiers in the
cortile,
dark clouds raced on high winds. Their undersides were black, the rest gray. Though sunshine broke through now and then and the soldiers strained their necks to look, shielding their eyes in a salute, most of the time they were in cool shade.

The urgency of the clouds hurrying down from the north was captivating even to those who did not know why. "It's because they come from the north," Alessandro said to the Guitarist. "They've flown over Vienna, rushed along the Danube, and floated above military camps and the Ministry of War. Now they've come to look at us. They want no part of any of this, and they speed toward the Adriatic. They'll cross the sea and float untouched into Africa like lost balloons. They hear nothing. They float over silent deserts and struggling armies as if the two were indistinguishable. I wish that I could do the same."

"Don't worry," said the Guitarist. "Someday you will."

"Do you really believe that?"

The Guitarist thought. "You mean, if there's something on the other side of the fence?"

"Yes."

"I don't know. All logic says no, but my wife just had a baby boy—I've never seen him. Where did he come from? Space? It isn't logical at all, so who cares about logic."

"It takes a lot of balls to risk the hope, doesn't it."

"It does. I have the feeling that I'm sure to be punished for the presumption, but I've already had the bad luck to have been a musician and a soldier, so maybe I'll get a break.

"Music," the Guitarist continued, with affection, "is the one thing that tells me time and time again that God exists and that He'll take care. Why do you think they have it in churches?"

"I know why they have it in churches," Alessandro replied.

"Music isn't rational," the Guitarist said. "It isn't
true.
What is it? Why do mechanical variations in rhythm and tone speak the language of the heart? How can a simple song be so beautiful? Why does it steel my resolution to believe—even if I can hardly make a living."

"And being a soldier?"

"The only halfway decent thing about this war, Alessandro, is that it teaches you the relation between risk and hope."

"You've learned to dare, and you dare to believe that someday you're going to float like a cloud."

"If it weren't for music," the Guitarist answered, "I would think that love is mortal. If I weren't a soldier, I might not have learned to stand against all odds." He took a deep breath. "Well, that's all very fine, but the truth is I just don't want to be killed before I see my son."

Euridice and Microscopico were kicking a soccer ball back and forth across the
cortile.
Always a little awkward, Euridice met the ball with his toe too low and raised his foot too high in compensation. The ball soared in the air. Everyone in the
cortile
watched it rise against the background of cloud, and hoped it would not go
over the wall. It did, and was five meters out when it started to return as the wind pushed it toward the center of the
cortile.
It landed against the near wall, bounced, flew into the air in a low trajectory, and came to rest on the grassy rim that formed the roof of the Bell Tower.

They watched silently as it settled. Someone said, "That's a good ball." Half the soldiers who had been leaning against the walls stood to get a better view. Alessandro and the Guitarist remained sitting because they could see it from where they were.

"
I
kicked it," Euridice said, moving toward the wall.

"Don't go up there," Guariglia warned him as he was about to grip the handholds in the wall and climb up.

"Why not?" Euridice asked. He was still the new man.

"It's on the edge," Guariglia told him. "They have the edge sighted-in."

"But if I go quickly, stay low, and just grab it and fall back, they won't have time to shoot."

"I wouldn't do it," Biondo said.

"But we don't have another ball," Euridice insisted.

"Let Microscopico get it," the Guitarist called out.

"Fuck you," said Microscopico, who was sick of being a small target. "Why don't you get it?"

"I didn't kick it up there," the Guitarist answered, "and I'm not a midget."

"I told you what to do," Microscopico called out.

Euridice was already up on the grassy part of the roof. Guariglia shouted for him to wait. Alessandro and the Guitarist rose to their feet. "Come back," Guariglia called. "Leave it until nightfall. Not now. It's not worth it."

Flat on his stomach, Euridice crawled along the grass toward the ball. He stopped just short of the rim and looked back. "It's nice up here," he said. "All I have to do is reach out my hand."

Alessandro stepped forward and shouted in anger. "Euridice, don't be an idiot. Come down from there."

For a moment, Euridice didn't move. He twisted, and looked down the length of his body at everyone who was looking up at him. Now he was one of them. "All right," he said, "I'll get it later."

They sighed in relief, but then, for a reason that no one ever knew, perhaps because he felt he was so close, perhaps because everyone was watching, because no one had died since he had arrived, or because he forgot where he was and imagined that he was still in school, Euridice stretched out his hand to get the ball.

In so doing, he raised his head. The soldiers in the
cortile
froze where they stood, hoping that Euridice's impulsiveness would be his guardian, but just before his hand would have swept the ball back down the grassy slope, his head snapped back and he tumbled down the incline. The right arm punched the air, puffing the body with it. He went over the sandbag wall and fell into the
cortile,
on his side.

They knew by now how to recognize death, and they stood silently as a hundred clouds passed overhead, rushing south.

 

Dearest Mama and Papa,
Alessandro wrote.

I have been writing infrequently because, although we don't do much here, it takes up all the time we have. My life is a little like that of a forest ranger, so you'd think I'd have some peace. I stare out into the hills and mountains for twelve hours, and then I'm free. Presumably, with all the time in the world to reflect, I could write brilliant essays and letters that you might read more than once, but I can't. It's too tense here, and everyone is too unhappy. In fact, if I ever get a short leave, I'm going to go to Venice and drink three bottles of wine.

Today I saw something miraculous. I was looking southward through a firing port, with a telescope. It was evening and the light was coming from the northwest. Over the trenches a black cloud appeared, changing direction and moving as rapidly as an airplane, but it was the size of a palace. It writhed dropped, rose, and fell again, catching the light like chain mail or dulled sequins. It was a cloud of starlings or swallows that feed upon the corpses in the no-man's-lands between the lines. Guariglia, who has served farther down, says that they come out every evening and dance over the dead. I don't know what to make of it, as it is at once so beautiful and so grotesque.

We are continually expecting an Austrian 'tick-ass' to come from nowhere, throw a grenade, fire some shots, and bayonet a poor idiot coming out of the latrine. This kind of thing makes you tense twenty-four hours a day. So do the shells. On average, eight to ten a week hit the Bell Tower, and you never know when they're coming. When they do come, they knock you out of bed if you're sleeping, or knock you down if you're standing up, or get you up onto your feet if you're sitting down. These shells, they don't like the status quo. They reverse everything. Dirt comes down from the roof, the walls shake, objects fall to the ground.

We always have to look out for cannon drawn up close to our position. The enemy would like to fire point-blank, in an almost flat trajectory, at our gun ports. The shell would go through the steel plates and that would be the end of the Bell Tower, so the minute we see a cannon we all run to fire at it with rifles and machine guns, we pull the trench mortar into the
cortile
and drop shells into it, and we call up our own artillery. Even if we see some sort of optical device or wood frame, we assume that they're pre-sighting the gun ports so that they can move the cannon up at night, and we respond with the same great diligence. If someone were to put up a cross or try to make a laundry frame, he would draw all our fire and he probably would never know why.

I fire twenty or thirty rounds a day, which may account for my shaky handwriting. I don't hear very well anymore, either. I don't know if I'll ever be able to go to the opera again, because I could hardly hear it even before my right ear drum was ruined by my own rifle.

Another source of tension here is that we have no privacy. Most people have never had their own rooms, as I did, and because they were never alone they learned to live without reflection or contemplation. If I'm in a room with Guariglia, for example, a Romano, a harness-maker, and I sink into thought, he'll feel it, it will make him uncomfortable, and he'll do his best to distract me or engage me in conversation. Physical privacy doesn't exist here. The best you can do is to go to one of the store rooms, where there might be only two other people, who are concentrating on observation and firing out the ports.

Although I don't write often, at least not as much as I used to, I have some things I'd like to clear up with you, or try to clear up, while I can. I feel that I've been living beyond my time, that we may never see each other again. It wasn't that way at first, but something has changed. Anyway, the passes that I get are not long enough to let me come home, and I don't have a way of alerting you so that you could meet me in Venice. Perhaps I'll get home this Christmas—I don't know. We're safe at present, more or less. The last one killed was a boy who, for the sake of retrieving a soccer ball, exposed himself to enemy fire rather than wait until dark. One never knows what will happen, and we're expecting an offensive now at any time.

I mean a local offensive, because it seems unlikely that the Austrians will move along the whole line, but even that is possible. It rained so little this summer that the river is very low. We used to go out at night to swim, and the last time we did we found that at its deepest it was only up to the middle of my chest. That was a few dry weeks ago, and since then the snow has stopped melting in the mountains. Now the river is shallow enough to walk through in a dozen places. In a few days they'll be able to walk across it anywhere. Even if it rains tonight, it's too late, which is why I write.

I promise several things. I'll fight well, I'll try to stay alive, and I'll concentrate on the former rather than on the latter, because the best way to stay alive is to be resolute and to risk. I don't care about our claims on the Alto Adige, so I'm fighting for nothing, but so is everyone and that's not the point. A nightmare has no justification, but you try your best to last through it, even if that means playing by the rules. I suppose a nightmare is having to play by rules that make no sense, for a purpose that is entirely alien, without control of either one's fate or even one's actions. To the extent that I do have control, I'll do what I can. Unfortunately, the war is ruled inordinately by chance, to the point almost where human action seems to have lost its meaning. They're executing soldiers not only for theft and desertion, but, sometimes, for nothing. I believe that after the war, for a long time, perhaps even for the rest of the century, the implications of this will reverberate through almost everything, but I'll save that kind of speculation for when I get home. Weil sit in the garden and talk about all these things, because if I get home I want to buy the garden back. I want to take out the weeds, thicken the grass, prune the trees, and make it what it once was. I have the energy, the will, and, for the first time in my life, the patience.