A Soldier of the Great War (54 page)

"You see, Alessandro, what it all comes to?" he asked, glassy-eyed.

"Papa," Alessandro said. "Forgive me."

"For what?" his father asked, as his head rested on Alessandro's shoulder and Alessandro grasped him forcefully. For being young when I'm old?"

"Yes."

"I won't forgive you for that." His father took a breath as the
thermometer was withdrawn, fell back, and looked at his son. "It's my salvation."

"You have a fever," De Roos said loudly into the attorney Giuliani's right ear, "because you have a cardiac infection. The very weakness of your heart allows the infection to rage, further weakening it, and so on. If we can stabilize the heart, we can reverse the decline."

"Good," the father said, as if he had not understood, as if the doctor were a fool who didn't know what was ahead.

"How do you feel?" Alessandro asked, adopting the same authoritative tone.

His father looked at him half with suspicion and half with amusement. He shrugged his shoulders. "Not all that good," he said, weakly.

"Do you have pain?" De Roos asked.

"No."

"Are you afraid?"

"No."

"Good. Rest, Signore. If all goes well, you'll walk out of here."

"If all goes well," the attorney Giuliani echoed, in the same voice that he would have used to draw attention to a spurious clause in a contract.

De Roos took Alessandro aside and they spoke in the considered manner of young men who are given the task of controlling events that they do not yet comprehend and that they do not yet know are uncontrollable. The attorney Giuliani understood this, and had seen it a dozen times before. He didn't blame them for their efforts. To the contrary, he was seduced by the hope that seemed to come to them so easily. He knew that to guide themselves when they couldn't see, to be firm in the face of the unknowable, and to do what was right when they didn't know what it was, they—even the doctor—had to posture. When he saw that Alessandro was trying to do the impossible, he realized that Alessandro was moved by love.
He understood that Alessandro knew, and yet did not know, that they would soon part forever. Above all, the posturing alerted him. He recognized the tone into which Alessandro had been forced, for, once, a long time before, he had been forced into it himself.

 

A
LESSANDRO DID
not visit Orfeo at home, because a poor man with burning ambition can hate his house as much as he hates the many other things that weigh upon him. Instead, he went to the palatial Ministry of War, where Orfeo sat on a raised platform overlooking hundreds of scribes, typists, and sealing-wax clerks who were busy manufacturing the documents that fueled the war.

Orfeo was hunched over an enormous desk, scratching with a plume at an unrolled sheet of vellum weighted casually at its four corners with heavy royal seals. His feet did not even begin to reach the floor, he was dressed like a dandy, and anyone who looked at him could see that he wasn't merely copying the proclamation, but composing it as well, for the features of his unusual face seemed to be dancing in the rapture of creation, and he hummed a song to match the rhythm of his prose.

A minute later, in his private office, where one wall was of heavy vault doors and the other of glass, he kept glancing through the panes at his underscribes, and he spoke to Alessandro in a mad whisper.

"Of course scribes have always cleared up their masters' punctuation, adding a comma here, a hyphen there. And spelling, well, that goes without saying. If you're supposed to copy the word
tintinnabulation,
and it's spelled
tintinnablution,
or if
heinous
is spelled
anus,
as sometimes occurs, what are you supposed to do, leave it?"

Now his voice began to rise, and Alessandro realized that at the end of the interview he would be raving.

"And then come adverbs, wrongly used prepositions, et cetera.
We correct them. We have to. And we hold our masters in no little contempt when they are cripples with the pen.

"Ah, but then where is the great mortal leap! I'll tell you. It's when the exalted one infuses into the body of a scribe sufficient quantities of the sap that flows in the boiling passages of the bony valleys of the moon...." Orfeo suddenly jumped as if a pin had been thrust into him. "And Mars!" he said, apoplectically.

"What?"

"Yes, the mortal leap is a gift of holy gracious sap from the exalted one."

"I don't understand, Orfeo."

"It means I write what I choose!"

"You do?"

"Yes. Yesterday, for example, a battalion of the
bersaglieri
was supposed to have been moved to a new sector on the Isonzo, but I withdrew them to an encampment in the Po Valley, took away their machine guns, and issued them vast amounts of beef."

"Why?"

"Because," Orfeo said, gravely, "when the world ends, the cloak of the exalted one will drag across the Po Valley."

"Christ, Orfeo," Alessandro said.

"That's nothing! You think the king himself has escaped my sap-driven edition? Not a word that comes from him through me is unchanged—subtly, of course, but it's necessary for me to put my stamp on history by jumbling it apart and putting it back together."

"All revolutionaries think that, Orfeo," Alessandro stated, "and they're never as good at putting it back together as they are in jumbling it apart."

"I'm not a revolutionary," Orfeo said. "I'm the conduit, the reservoir, the nozzle of the blessed sap that pounds against the bone-dry valleys of the moon. The sap makes the birds fly. It whistles through their hearts like the spray of a fountain."

"Orfeo."

"When explosives from Factory Thirteen in Pisa are supposed to go to Factory Six in Verona to be stuffed inside artillery shells, I send them to Milan for packing into flares. I run the war the way I see fit, and I've been doing a good job, because I've been blessed by the exalted one, who has directed at my person great quantities of invigorating sap.

"The gracious one has ushered me to this spot because my destiny is to invigorate the armies and liberate the world from common rabbits and scrugs. Though sometimes I want to stop short, to stop everything, and, instead of struggling or fighting, instead of Cumbrinal the Oxitan, and Oxitan the Loxitan, I would look up at the light and ask God to take me up and show me what is great and make it so I don't have to wait anymore. I could fly. My back would not be bent. I would not have a hump. I would be handsome. I would be light. I would be tall." He smiled, and then he placed his finger on the side of his nose. A scribe at one of the many long tables had asked permission to pee, and Orfeo had granted it.

"Orfeo, my father needs this," Alessandro said, unfolding the paper with the name of the drug written on it.

"Who wrote this?" Orfeo asked.

"A doctor."

Orfeo shook his head slowly back and forth. "The world is truly going to the dogs. I'll have a hundred thousand units sent to him tomorrow morning. Why are you always asking for favors?"

"What favors, apart from this?"

"I've been doing you favors all along."

"You have?"

"Who do you think got you in the River Guard; what was it, the Ninth?"

Alessandro was suddenly weakened by rage. He could hardly speak. "You?" he asked.

"Me, the male, the one."

"Why?"

"You were supposed to have been put on the
Euridice,
that's why. I had a bad feeling about it, so I moved you to the River Guard. How many survived the
Euridice
? You see? I was right.

"I'll do you favors, yes, because I owe you a certain amount of respect and gratitude, but gratitude is not immortal. I have to turn from the past to the gracious sap. Quite frankly, Alessandro, I'm running to the end of my tether with doing the Giulianis favors. Now, I'm the important one. I don't quake anymore. I don't have to sit and eat my own sap. I'm the chief scribe. As my powers well through my fingers, I touch the soft open eye of the monster that is eating the century. Cumbrinal the Oxitan. Oxitan the Loxitan. Loxitan the Oxitan. I told you once that I'd ride upon his back Now I'm his master, the master of worlds. You drove me to it; the so-called 'typewriter' drove me to it.

"Politicians and kings suffer the agony of constraint. Not I, I need merely dip my pen in the holy blessed sap and my orders are followed to the letter, with never any consequences for my person, which is totally anonymous. Ah, but I'm more than that, I'm blessed, I'm omnipotent, I'm baked in sap."

Without even looking at Alessandro, Orfeo strode from his office and mounted the platform. Breathing heavily, he fixed his gaze upon an invisible horizon and declared so that the scribes and clerks would hear, "I am lightning! I am a lion!"

 

"O
RFEO IS
completely mad," Alessandro told his sister in a thunderstorm with the rain beating against the windows of his room and the wind rising in gusts that propelled water through crevices that were supposed to have been sealed. "He sits on a platform amidst hundreds of scribes. He's supposed to copy orders and proclamations, but he changes them at will and composes new
ones according to whim—always in the proper style and with the proper seals and codes."

"Shouldn't someone be told?" Luciana asked innocently.

"Who's going to tell?"

"One of the scribes."

"Them? They're terrified. They raise their hands even to ask permission to go to the water cabinet."

"How can that be?"

"They're young. If he fires them they go straight into the trenches. He has it all figured out. It's not because he's evil, but because of what he believes to be his mission."

"The holy sap?"

Alessandro nodded.

"Alessandro, you must tell someone."

"Me? It was difficult enough for me to walk into the Ministry of War. If I made an accusation about one of its employees the first thing they'd want to know is who I am. I might as well shoot myself now."

"I'll tell them."

"They won't believe you, and it probably wouldn't make any difference. Tomorrow they're going to deliver the medicine to the hospital. Let things rest for the moment."

"They'll find out. He'll give himself away."

"He's been there for two years, and seems quite comfortable."

As a blast of wind blew ribbons of fog through the garden, Luciana turned her head to listen, and the shape of her long neck came clear. Luciana had become, as De Roos had put it, insanely beautiful. In the first week, Alessandro had done a great deal of looking away. To begin with it was easy and habitual, but then he could do it only by redirecting his attention, or by a deliberate relaxation in which he put all thoughts of her out of his mind. He wanted to touch her, to kiss her, and though his desire for her was so wrong that he likened it to setting off a bomb in the middle of
the house, he was unable to banish the image of her delicate hands, her clear blue eyes, her hair the color of white gold.

For the sake of his father, who lay dying in a hospital bed, and for the sake of his mother, who was already gone, he would not succumb to his sisters grace, to her peach-and-rose-colored flesh, and to her frazzled unguarded charm. After he was arrested, they would keep him in a cell, they would bring him one morning to a courtyard to stand him in front of a shattered wall, and he would see his life about to end. He wondered if at that moment he would think of Luciana, and he hoped that he would not.

"We have to sleep," he said, rising, and turning to leave. She seemed almost offended, but as he walked down the dark hallway to his room, her door closed as it always had.

Alessandro sat on his bed, listening to the rain. Without taking his feet from the floor he lay on his side as if he were embracing an invisible presence. He drew his arms closer to him, until they were clasped against his chest and his eyes were filled with tears. And then, in a hopeless whisper, he said, "Papa."

 

H
E WAS
awakened by cracks of thunder that threatened to shatter the windows. The rain was driven so hard that it backed up in the gutters and cascaded from the roof in solid curtains of water that turned silver when the lightning flashed. Rain like this emptied the streets and made the city into a lifeless model of itself. The Tiber would already be in flood and the only people outside would be the sentries who stood before palaces and ministries, and even they had little houses made for chocolate soldiers.

Alessandro went to the long table, where he put his face close to the brass carriage clock that Luciana had always taken the trouble to wind, even when he was not there, even when his mother was dying of influenza. When she wound the clocks she walked all alone from room to room with the keys jangling in her hands. He could hear
the ticking over the rain, though the rain was so hard that it sounded like gravel being spilled across metal sheets, but he couldn't see the hands. He turned to sight them through the corner of his eye, but it was still too dark. The ticking grew in intensity. He had no idea how long he knelt before the clock, staring at it without seeing, listening to the thunder of the machinery within.

Then a bolt of lightning struck the Gianicolo somewhere close by, and the face of the clock was illuminated so brightly that its image was burned into Alessandro's eyes for minutes. The hour hand held its breath and pointed off to the right halfway between two and three, the minute hand had succumbed to gravity and was resting at one notch before the half hour. Now Alessandro was wide awake, and he pulled on an oilcloth jacket and went downstairs with an insatiable craving to go into the night.

It was raining so hard that the water ran down his neck and soaked his shirt. He entered the garden, which was covered in a shallow pool of water exploding in a hundred thousand places as the rain beat down upon it. At one point he bent over and pressed his palm against the white gravel on the path in the center, as if it were the bed of a stream. Gusts of wet wind lashed at him from all directions as the trees and hedges shuddered under the weight of the rain.