A Soldier of the Great War (40 page)

Alessandro approached her. She put down the umbrella.

"Excuse me," he said quietly. "You're speaking German."

"Yes, I'm speaking German," she said in unaccented Italian.

"Why?" he asked. "You're Italian, aren't you?"

"I am, but they aren't," she answered, glancing at the old ladies, who were waiting patiently.

"Germans?"

She said yes.

"We're at war with them," he said. "Not far from here, we're killing each other. We're killing their sons and grandsons, and their sons and grandsons are killing us."

"They're women," the guide said. "They came to see the sights of Venice."

Alessandro was stunned.

"They hurt no one, these old women. No one notices them. They're free to come and go."

"Give me your address," Alessandro demanded.

"Why?"

"I want to visit you sometime."

"You're crazy."

"Don't you want me to visit you?"

She assessed him. Then she said, "Yes, I do, but I live in Paris, and we're leaving for Verona this afternoon."

"Someday," he said, "I'll visit you in Paris. I'll make love to you. It happens."

"It does," she said, smiling.

"What does he say? What does he say?" one of the old ladies asked in German.

The guide turned to her and said in correct, excellent, enthusiastic German, "He says he'll visit me in Paris."

The ladies nodded their approval.

Alessandro turned deep red. "After the war," he said.

"Or during the war, if you can. I live in Passage Jean Nicot. Ask for me there, but come before I'm married and come before I'm old."

She leaned forward, took his hand, and kissed him.

The old ladies said "Ahhhhh!" and then the guide lifted her red umbrella, turned her charges toward the Doge's Palace, and led them away, describing what lay ahead.

 

F
OR THE
visitor without the map of Venice by heart the city is a maze that defeats human intention, and, like life itself, blocks and shunts those who live it into backwaters, alleys, and quiet places that never were part of any plan. This it does by watery divisions both great and small, and streets that turn so subtly that they seem not to be changing direction even when they are in the process of describing a full circle, which is how Alessandro, trying to reach the Ghetto, found himself in the Accademia.

He had come here often as a student, but now he knew no one, no one knew him, and he felt out of place. The nearly empty
galleries were more eloquent in contrasting war and peace than had been his two years in the mountains, where his dream-like state had gone uninterrupted for want of a fragment of his previous life.

He was almost entirely alone in the rich fields of the Accademia, where he removed his hat and walked slowly about, taking in not only the paintings themselves but the building as well. He had lived for too long in the cornerless, ceilingless, overly narrow and horridly low world of trenches and bunkers. Here were height, volume, stirring proportions, and magical details.

At the end of one gallery, in a shaft of sunlight, a man stood before Giorgione's
La Tempesta.
Even in the presence of so great a painting he had a self-important air, and Alessandro could see that he was lost in thought and wanted to be left alone.

Undoubtedly, Alessandro thought, he's on a fellowship, writing an article, trying to advance his career. How did he escape the war? He was not much older than Alessandro himself. As Alessandro approached, his boots striking the floorboards like hammers on a wooden box, the scholar showed an expression of irritated and delicate superiority.

"Move," Alessandro commanded. "You're blocking my view."

The scholar could not speak for his disgust, but he smiled patronizingly. "Sorry."

"It's darker than when I saw it last," Alessandro said.

"The weather?"

"The painting. I haven't seen it for three or four years."

"A painting that has been stable for centuries," the scholar answered, "doesn't darken suddenly in a few years. You merely think it's darker."

"Wrong," said Alessandro.

"Wrong?"

"The painting is darker now. I can see it."

"Then your eye must be extraordinarily sensitive and precise," the scholar said in sarcastic deference.

"It served me when I needed it."

"In shooting?"

"In shooting, assessment, and appraisal."

"Of what?"

"Paintings. Paintings mainly. You know why? Because they're so easily apprehensible. They're present all at once, unlike music, or language, with which you can lie to the common man merely because he may not remember what has just been and cannot know what is coming. Painting is tranquil and appeals directly to heart and soul."

The scholar touched his glasses. "What did you do before the war?" he asked. After all, if Alessandro, too, had been a scholar he would have been justly offended at his treatment, though not otherwise.

"I was a horse trainer."

"A horse trainer?"

"For the hunt. You know, galloping across the countryside and getting thorns in your ass. I've also written four articles on this painting." He rattled off the titles of the articles and the names of the journals in which they had appeared. "I don't remember the dates, but if you're doing a paper on Giorgione you're bound to run into them."

The scholar had already run across the articles and had remembered them.

"But if you do," Alessandro continued, "ignore them. They're all wrong. I know, intelligent criticism cannot be 'wrong,' but I was wrong to submit to the tyranny by which critics of art live, and to follow the road that they follow, because, to maintain their society and vocation, they parse by intellect alone works that are great solely because of the spirit.

"You're visited with penalties if you transgress," he went on, speaking in a kind of storm, "but I'm no longer afraid of censure by my colleagues or of being without the Academy, for I walked out myself and can never return.

"Do you know why?" he asked, stepping closer to the stranger. "The Academy is a mouse house, and to live within it you must be a house mouse. I didn't want to be a house mouse in a mouse house."

"You've suffered in battle," the scholar said. He was not unsympathetic.

"Not as much as others," Alessandro answered, "but, yes, I have, and it has made me both patient and impatient. Though it has broken and razed everything that once stood within me, I've lost nothing. The ceiling is still there, but now blue, with stars."

"I see," the scholar said, pitying Alessandro's inexactitude.

"That doesn't make sense to you, does it," Alessandro asked. "It does not yet make sense to me. I'll be half a century, if I live, trying to understand why it was that, though I was broken, I was not broken.

"And wrong about the painting. Like everyone else, I backed off. I said, 'We'll never know about
La Tempesta,
it's a mystery.' I retreated to the visual elements, the technique, its strange contra-historical power. I thought it was a dream, because it has the lucidity and freedom of a dream, a dream's unburdening, and a dream-like truth."

The scholar agreed, "
I
think it's a dream, a great dream, with—as you put it—the lucidity, freedom, unburdening, and truth of a dream."

"No," Alessandro said. "Though it could be a dream, it isn't. I know now exactly what it is, and I know the source of its power."

"Dare you tell?" the scholar asked, only half sarcastically, hoping that a stricken soldier might have taken from the fire of his affliction something of value that someone else might use in an essay on Giorgione.

"I know exactly what you're thinking," Alessandro said, "but I'll tell you, and you can do as you wish. For all I care, you can be the chief of the Academy. I'll go back to the front. My blood will wash
into the Adriatic before the ink on the pages of your fucking article is dry. It doesn't matter. You'll join me sooner than you know in a place with no academies and no illusions, where the truth is the only architecture, the only color, the only sound—where that which we sense merely on occasion, and which takes us up and gives us the rare and beautiful glimpses of the things we truly love, flows in deep rivers and tumbles about like clouds in the sky."

He stepped closer to the painting. Just to be near it seemed to give him satisfaction.

"I believe that Giorgione was painting for a patron, and that he started out according to a pattern customary for his time. Look, you still have the remnants of it—the raised platform with a long view of a river and a town. The bridge reiterates the platform. The river disappears leftward. It's a windowed view: the buildings in the town are framed by nearer masses, to block them, for, at the time, perspective was not entirely out of the woods. On the platform, a woman feeding a baby—all Flemish in inspiration, quite standard.

"But what of the soldier, so tremendously out of place, so distant, so jarring, and yet the master figure of the painting? And what of the approaching storm?"

"He's not a soldier," the scholar said. "He's a shepherd."

"Like hell he's a shepherd. Shepherds have never been as clean-cut and well dressed. If he were a shepherd he'd have a crook, not a staff. Shepherds don't stand like that. And look in his eyes. Have you not seen the eyes of a soldier? Have you not seen a shepherd?

"I'll tell you how this strange coalition came about," Alessandro almost whispered. "Giorgione was going to paint a conventional scene. I'd wager my life that other pastoral figures were intended for the foreground, another nude, perhaps, or a satyr, or who knows? To me, the soldier looks as if he were painted-in late.

"While Giorgione was working on this scene, with the Academy and his patrons in mind, a storm arose. It was a great and unusual storm, as he has depicted it. Lucky for him, because you can't
know history unless you can see it as if it were a stupendous thunderstorm that has just cleared. Light and sound speak clearly then, as if to sweep away illusions and lay down the law. The clouds went straight up in mountainous walls of gray and green, the trees bent in apprehension, the lightning was so thick, supple, and young that before it attacked the town it played in the clouds and lit up the world, just as young horses gallop in a field just to feel the wind.

"As the world darkened before him and the wind rose, Giorgione felt his own death and the death of everyone and everything he loved. He understood dissolution. He saw ruin and night. He saw the future of prosperous and proud cities, of the arches, bridges, and upright walls. These broken columns are his vision of the Academy, of rules, and rivalries, and opinion.

"Only in the lightning and in the foreground is the light active. The woman and the soldier steal the light and color from everything that is in ruin. Unclothed and unprotected, with her baby in her arms, she defies the storm unwittingly. Entirely at risk, she shines out. Don't you understand? She's his only hope. After what he's seen, only she and the child can put the world in balance. And yet the soldier is distant, protected, detached. They always say about the soldier that he's detached. That's true, for he's been in the eye of the storm, his heart has been broken, and he doesn't even know it."

 

T
HE GONDOLIER
who took him to the Ghetto wanted to go in a straight line to avoid the curves of the Grand Canal. He went via narrow and obscure channels, through which he spent much of the time backing out to let oncoming boats pass under bridges so low that he and Alessandro had to run from end to end of the gondola to tilt the bow and stern to allow it to slide underneath. They poled through several flooded buildings in which the gondolier had to light a lantern.

In the last of these, the chamber they negotiated was long and dark, and Alessandro began to yell at the gondolier, accusing him of everything from cretinism to impotence, but the gondolier said, "I know the only straight line in Venice, and nothing you can say will shame or anger me."

Both Signor Foa and his wife were in, having just finished lunch. Alessandro introduced himself. Rafi's father seemed only about half his sons height, but twice as strong. Signora was the tall one, an Austrian Jewess with silver-white hair. Her husband had a heavy gold chain hanging around his bull-like neck, which was hard to call a neck, as it was like the buttress of a bridge.

"What's that?" Alessandro asked, pointing at the chain.

Signor Foa thought Alessandro was pointing at him. "I'm Rafi's father."

"I mean the chain."

"This? This is the chain," he said, pulling the rest of it from under his shirt, "that holds this. Do you know what this is?"

"Of course I know."

"The Shield of David. It says who I am, and the chain makes it easier for them to hang me once they find out."

"With your neck, what would happen if they did?"

"I could probably hang for days," he said.

"It's true," his wife added. "Once, he was caught on a meat conveyor and dragged twenty meters into the air, with a rope around his neck, all the way to the deck of a freighter. It took them half an hour to get him out, and while they were doing it he kept on asking questions about the ship and where it had come from."

"Rafi is slim, like you, Signora," Alessandro said.

"Too bad," said Signor Foa. "He could have been much stronger."

Rafi's mother brought a silver tray of delicate white wafers, which Alessandro would always remember but never again see. "Are these Venetian?" he asked.

"No no," Signora said. "My recipe, from Klagenfurt. We used to call them Turkish something ... Turkish tiles, or bricks, I don't remember exactly."

"They're good," Alessandro added, so as to explain why he had already eaten most of them. "Will you make half a ton for Lucianas wedding?"

"Assuming that Rafi will be there," she said, subjugating the issue of assimilation to the question of survival.

"At least you can give the recipe to my mother," Alessandro said.

Signora Foa's eyes darted and she took in a breath, but Alessandro didn't see, for he was bent toward the silver tray. When he straightened in his chair, with half a dozen Turkish wafers in his hands, he saw that the eyes of the hostess were brimming with tears, and when no one could break the silence, he replaced the wafers on the tray.