A Soldier of the Great War (77 page)

Had he fallen he would have bounced against the cliff in several places one or two hundred meters down and been hurled onto the snow ramp, perhaps close enough to the base of the cliff so as not to slide down it. From his exposed perspective, however, not that it mattered, it looked as if he would land in the upper course of the Talvera, which made a disheveled green-and-white line through the gray rock of the lower valley. The air seemed so thin as to allow a man who fell to hear no whistling and feel no wind.

The minute Alessandro put his hands on the stone sill over which the ropes passed, the observer began to question him. "You're new," he said. "I don't know you. "What happened?"

Still standing in the loops, Alessandro answered, "Right. May I come in?"

"Were they overrun? I haven't spoken to them since my batteries ran out five days ago."

"Do you mind?" Alessandro asked, straining his stomach muscles as he climbed in.

"Let me help."

The observer was so awkward and enthusiastic that he pulled in Alessandro head over heels, and they both were caught in a tangle of ropes, hooks, and empty knapsacks. Looking around at the cell carved into the rock, Alessandro immediately asked if he had to sleep in the blankets the observer had used for the past month.

"They have fresh blankets for you, and some surprises, too. It's not bad if you don't mind being alone. We've got seven books now,
and they've undoubtedly brought up another. If the war lasts for five more years they'll have sixty-eight books up here, and it'll be the world's highest library."

"What about Potala?" Alessandro asked.

"Who's he?"

"The great monastery in Tibet."

"Fuck him."

Alessandro and the observer worked feverishly to haul up the supplies. As they pulled at the ropes the observer spoke at high speed, explaining the tasks and tricks that Alessandro would have to master. When everything was received, the observer took him around and demonstrated how to open ports, change batteries, and record coordinates. Through a powerful telescope chained to a plate in the ceiling so it would not be inadvertently dropped from the window, he showed Alessandro the latest Austrian dispositions, upon which he had become expert. He explained the dangers and defenses of the observation post, the system of rationing, and the miracle of the telephone that sat upon the table in the center of the floor, its wire traveling straight up to a wooden beam in the ceiling, as if it were in a business office in Rome rather than in a cell in the rock just below the summit of a peak several thousand meters high.

Hundreds of spools of telephone wire had been brought up, carefully spliced and reinforced, and then lowered on the other side of the summit. The line dropped straight down a vertical cliff onto a glacier, and detoured across the snowfields, for if it had been laid on the glacier it would have been ripped apart in the shifting of crevasses. For several kilometers it was buried in the snow, until it emerged at headquarters. In daylight, reports were made every two hours. At night Alessandro would be awakened now and then to listen for bolts driven into the rock below him.

After the observer rappelled down, Alessandro was all alone in a miraculous cabin that had taken three hundred alpinists and ar
tisans four months to requisition from the rock, and on account of which fifteen men lay buried on the glacier and two had died in falls.

 

T
HEY HAD
hollowed out a chamber seven meters deep, two meters high, and four meters wide. It went lengthwise into the mountain, level and true, and its granite walls were perfectly smooth and dry. Two chimneys passed through the rock for ten meters and were vented under rainproof baffles. The chimney shafts were narrow, but smoke from the lamps and the cookstove were sucked into them in quick swirls that, in the alternate rush and hesitation of their spirals, reminded Alessandro of circus acrobats in candle-lit tents. Alessandro had known since his childhood that the circus was bittersweet, and after he had lit the lamps he watched the smoke twist into the chimneys as he floated in and out of circuses—impoverished Gypsy circuses in coastal Sicilian towns, at odds with the blue surf and the citrus groves; Baltic circuses that were colorful and warm despite the dirty gray clouds that lashed the tents with rain; and Roman circuses, the perfect median, with tents of saffron-colored canvas, and sparkling lights, in balance in every way, just like Rome itself.

One wall was empty, which made the room seem bigger. Upon this wall was a grid in which each occupant had three boxes, running from side to side, for the inscription of his name, the dates of his sojourn, and a comment: "Bottai, Rudolpho: I was the first. Send me a postcard to tell me what you think." "Giammatti, Andrea: Don't talk to yourself, and do not smile inappropriately." "Labrera, Anselmo: Any woman would have been welcome, even if she had had a wart on her nose." "Ceceni, Michele: I warned of the Austrian attack of the 5th." "Agnello, Giuseppe: Killed several enemy trying to take this post. Wounded in shoulder." "Costanza, Benito: Why not talk to yourself? I talk to myself all the time."

Alessandro impulsively wrote his name, the dates of his assignment, and his comment, for he did not want to spend a month trying to distill the wisdom of the ages into one line. The message read, "Though now I am the safest man in Italy, I cannot wait to fly." Let them try to figure that out, he thought, though probably most would assume that he was slated to become a pilot. And perhaps not—not after they had spent a month staring out at the clouds, watching the birds disappear beyond the war to places over the sea or islands within it, where the animals had never heard the crack of a gun.

Another wall was entirely taken up by heavy cedar shelves, which gave off a fragrance that filled the chamber. Upon them, in military order, were the supplies and equipment that had been carried up at such great cost. Most of it had been there already, and Alessandro neatly stacked and lined up what he had brought, so he could ration his inventories as time passed: thirty packets apiece of bread, pasta, jam, sugar, tea, powdered soup, dried fruit, chocolate, and cured beef; a small sack of potatoes and onions; two cans of salmon; a diminutive
panettone;
two one-liter bottles of red wine; a crock of butter; a bunch of carrots; a kilo and a half of cheese; two bars of soap; a box of tooth salts; iodine swabs; bandages; aspirin; tincture of opium; six newly washed woolen blankets; a down pillow; eight rolls of toilet paper; ten grenades; twenty signal or illumination flares; a Mauser 98; five hundred rounds of ammunition in ten boxes of fifty rounds; a bayonet; a first-aid kit; an alpine hammer; two dozen pitons; 150 meters of rope; a box of hooks and nails; pliers; a screwdriver; eight extra dry-cells for the telephone; a wash-basin; two huge bottles into which water from a small cistern passed through a hose connected to a stopcock in the wall; and eight liters of kerosene, for cooking and illumination, along with extra wicks for the lamps, and several boxes of wooden matches.

In the center of the floor was a huge oak table that had been put together in the chamber after the components were taken up
by rope. Arrayed upon it were the telephone and a row of four cells to power it; the telescope, with its chain rising to the plate in the ceiling; a pelorus, for establishing bearings; an optical range-finder; a daily log; a codebook; a box of pencils and a penknife for whittling them sharp; a pair of binoculars—even the king did not have better binoculars; and a kerosene lamp with a brightly polished reflector. Between bookends of solid granite were the Bible;
Scaramouche,
by Rafaello Sabbatini; the 1909 edition of Baedeker's
Die Schweiz,
with the subtitle
Oberitalien, Savoyen und Tirol; Orlando Furioso;
the original French edition of
La Chartreuse de Parme;
a Boy Scout manual that had been split in two; a small volume of Dante entitled
Vita Nuova—Rime;
and an extraordinary short English pornographic novella (that Alessandro read even before he unpacked) in which a barely disguised Prince of Wales traveled to Paris to spend time in a warm pool with half a dozen of the world's most beautiful and licentious women, exploring with every part of his anatomy every part of theirs as they did the same for him and among themselves. The end degenerated into such a tangle of beautiful limbs, turgid breasts, and open mouths against the fat barrel of the Prince of Wales and his various appendages, that it made Alessandro think of a belaying pin in a vat of
calamari.

The outside wall had the large opening through which he had entered, and two narrow rectangular windows on either side. All three were covered by steel shutters hinged at the top. A little window opened in the center of the plate that fit over the entrance, and the plate itself was so heavy that it had to be raised and lowered by cranking a winch. A steel trap-door led to the roof without benefit of a ladder: one had to reach up and pull oneself through. The roof itself, nothing more than a narrow ledge carved into the cliff, gave access to the absolutely vertical cliff face above, which went another hundred meters or so to a summit that was nothing more than a needle the size of a hitching post. This roof platform was the latrine, in which one had to hang out, while grasping two bolts, over a drop of nearly a thousand meters.

Alessandro lit the lamps. A thin line of orange light marked the west, and the lights in the Austrian and Italian trenches sparkled in the darkness into which they had been cast an hour previously.

He folded the knapsacks and stashed them on a shelf, made the bed (a cot under the wall of inscriptions), and got things ready in case the Austrians were bold enough to attack at night, which he thought even more unlikely than that they would attack in the day. Still, he bolted shut the steel doors, cleaned and loaded the Mauser and stood it in the corner, and hung his Colt pistol and the bayonet on pegs next to the bed. The pegs had been neatly placed in holes bored in the granite, which reminded him of the Prince of Wales, and he dreamed that night of wonderfully perfumed women with rosy flesh and intoxicated, licentious stares. But when he awoke in the middle of the night, the memory of their beautiful bodies reminded him so much of Ariane that he was lost in despair.

 

P
ERHAPS BECAUSE
isolation is the mother of meticulousness, Alessandro kept his aerie sharper and better organized than the bridge of a flagship of the Royal Navy. When the bells churned on the telephone, he was always ready to give his reports, and he read them in precise military language as if he had been doing it all his life. On two occasions in the first ten days he warned Italian outposts of impending air attacks. Because of the high winds, he had been unable to hear the aircraft, though he had seen them with the telescope as they rounded the easternmost peaks of Switzerland. He never would have picked them up individually, but five moving together as one were visible, with the aid of a telescope, even a hundred kilometers away. His warnings were well appreciated, and they suggested to him that if he were able to see Austrian squadrons a hundred kilometers distant in the ice-world, then perhaps someone was able to see him, too. He never relaxed, glancing frequently at the trap-door and listening for bolts driven in the rock below
him. A bolt could be inserted both slowly and silently. The party climbing toward him could do it a little at a time, and then retreat until the next night. It was possible as well that the Austrians would make the arduous climb up the other side, undetected, and
abseil
down to his post in utter silence.

The chamber was cold. When the steel shutters were open, as most of the time they had to be, his water froze. The winds were sometimes so high that his ears popped with the change in pressure, and the normally hypnotic whistling of the wind through fissures in the shutter frames became louder than the horn of an express train. He could neither ignore the sound nor do anything until it stopped, and it was occasionally so loud that objects vibrated across the table and things jumped from the pegs on the walls.

During a thunder-and-lightning storm two days after he arrived, the vibrations from the wind were so great that they dumped the hand grenades onto the floor all at once. Alessandro had experienced this nightmare while sitting on a rope chair, wrapped in blankets and drinking a cup of hot water. Suddenly, with the most brittle and terrible sound he had ever heard, the grenades began to bounce across the stone floor. With no place to flee and not enough time to open the shutter and throw them out, he waited for the explosion that would paper the walls with his flesh and paint them the color of his blood. In that moment, he looked at the cup of hot water, thinking it would be the last thing he would ever see, and he felt so many regrets, that the tin cup looked like the saddest thing in the world. The grenades remained intact. From then on, he kept them in a neat row on the floor.

He soon tired of the sexual adventures of the Prince of Wales. After half a dozen readings, the goings on in the Parisian brothel were no more exciting than the daily routine of a hardware store. After three days, he opened the package marked
Surprise: Do not open for three days.
It was a fresh lemon. Perhaps because it had
been repeatedly thawed and frozen, it had a strange taste, but he used it to flavor half his supply of salmon and two cups of tea.

He hadn't the energy to read the
Vita Nuova
more than a few lines at a time. These took on a magical quality, and he could see them floating in the dark under the rock ceiling, singing and turning in the air like strange fish in the depths of the sea.

During the day he sat for hours in the rope chair, wrapped in blankets and listening to the slow thunder of his heart. When his pulse dropped below forty and his extremities were numb with cold, he would force himself to move. It was painful to rise from the chair and throw off the blankets, but he would do it, and begin to walk slowly around the room. At first he staggered. Then he would run, and bend. When he felt alive again, he did calisthenics for several hours, working up slowly until he was breathing hard, sweating, hot, flushed, and on fire. In these sessions he reclaimed his physical strength. The altitude, the meager rations, and the hardening of his body exercised his spirit. He stopped reading, but the lines kept on coming, circling in the deep, aglow, a phrase or a word at a time. For example, one word, "
bellezza,
" after rotating like a sparkling pinwheel, stopped and drew back like a woman who brazenly asks to be admired. Then it smiled ghoulishly, pulsed in sickening green light, and exploded into silver shards that vanished into the black. Other words had their own repertoires. Sometimes they met before him in the air, in battle or in seduction.