A Soldier of the Great War (94 page)

On the valley floor he stopped to eat by a river that had swollen and receded so as to leave a dry snowless bank as warm as spring. He passed people on the road and greeted them with the Tyrolean "
Scut!
" and a gesture of his hand, which made them think that alpinists had returned to their region. Only once did he see a patrol of mounted dragoons. Fifty of them suddenly passed him on a bend in the road. They came from nowhere and thundered past him as he smiled in embarrassment. Perhaps it was below the dignity of fifty mounted dragoons to question a man, in climbing knickers, walking on a mountain road in the middle of the afternoon, or perhaps they simply did not care, but as they passed they increased their speed. Alessandro learned yet again that the joy of escape is better than the joy of merely being free.

At the foot of the Stubaital he was more than halfway to Italy. He decided to climb even if he would have to climb in the dark, but the moon that night was so bright that it hardly mattered, and by the next morning he found himself in the northern highlands of the Pan di Zucchero, one mountain from the Italian lines. In a swirling fog that lay thick on the ground under a sky so cold and
blue that it compressed the mists and punished them in whirlwinds of senseless velocity, Alessandro, dripping wet and freezing cold, finished the rest of his provisions, discarded his pack, and prepared to make the final push.

He knew the Pan di Zucchero on the other side, where a long ramp would take him down past the Italian lines, on gradually descending snowfields that, though they might blind him with reflected sun, would never see him falter or fall.

 

T
HE SUN
burned off the fog, which rose, broke, and disappeared like smoke. It lit the eastern face of the Pan with the kind of early morning light that had urged Alessandro on for two days running. By now he was exhausted, and some of his fingers were beginning to show the black of frostbite. His face was burned and blistering, and a rough beard three days in the making was coated with rime.

Had the weather been worse, and it could have been a hundred times worse, he would have died, but the sun was warm and the sky was the color that encourages mountain walkers to venture into places from which they sometimes do not return.

Climbing huge couloirs was by now second nature. After an exercise or two on a vertiginous face it seems only natural to struggle along tiny finger cracks a thousand meters above anything, or to make one's way up an inhospitable ice wall. Each step is an art, and as time goes on, the steps are surer and almost automatic. Anxiety vanishes in favor of affection for the height and pride in sure footing, which is how the mountain goat thinks all his life.

Halfway up a massive wall that led to the ridge over which he had to pass before he could descend, Alessandro began to feel weak and dizzy. He wanted to rest, but, of course, he could not rest. He dared not even slow down.

Breathing in short gasps that made him more comfortable and served as a metronome by which to time the placements of the
axes, he turned now and then to spit. After an hour he thought he saw red algae on the snow. As he got closer to the ridge line, he stopped thinking about it, until a patch of perfectly clean snow was filled with red spots just after he spat in its direction.

Fifty meters over his head the ridge line was exploding in airborne crescents of snow, whipped by a storm of rising ice crystals and bathed in light from a hidden source: the sun, invisible on the other side of the ridge. Snow rocketed up in rivers that bent into the wind and spread into tides of mist and sparkling haze. At the ridge line, everything moved, everything was bright, and everything was alive.

But Alessandro was still. For a moment, now and then, he slept, and then pulled himself awake. The sleep was more than merely comfortable. It was black, and warm, and all-encompassing.

Then he awoke, by force of will, and pushed ahead another twenty meters. He knew that were he unable to go on he would have peace. Once again, he slept, and as the sleep grew soft, warm, and forgiving, he began to fall, but now he awoke as if a bolt of lightning had flashed within him, and his fatigue turned to anger and action.

His axes moved so wildly he could hardly see. Though his sunglasses were covered with blood and ice, he couldn't spare the time or energy to rip them from his face. When he looked up he discovered that the comets of snow, the dazzling spray, and the singing of the wind in the sun were right above him. Just over the top, he knew, the wind was flowing up a white ramp many kilometers in length, and the gossamer rivers of snow that it pushed before it leapt here into the blue. Ahead was an easy descent that would put him behind the Italian line by dusk. Were he to find the strength for the final two meters, the war would be over. He would look out and beyond, and there, in miraculously clear air, would be the dark blue mass of the Po Valley, a thin line beyond the snow-capped Dolomites. There, in terrain less severe, the rivers ran and
the trees swayed in warm winds. Two meters below the rim, he was overcome by a surge of affection for the golden autumn in Rome. There lay his future and his past, all that had been lost, and all that he might piece together. He looked calmly at the driven snow against the cold blue sky, and with the last his heart could offer, he climbed directly into it.

T
HE
A
DRIATIC
is shallow and confined. Its storms are fierce in the air and fierce in the light, but on the sea itself the waves break before they come to resemble the movable mountains of the ocean, and the surface flashes with curling whitecaps until it looks like a sheepskin in the moonlight. The action of the Atlantic when it is angry is a wild assault on earth and sky: of the Adriatic, a disciplined self-lashing, a convulsion as quick and bright as the sticks of butter-colored lightning that dance over the sea like stilts.

Almost all of it lies between long mountain ranges, where storms collect after they have forced the passes like flash floods bursting over weirs. There they rise, purple, gray, and black, into an angry wall that the setting sun paints in tranquil gold.

As one of these low gray walls became visible to the east, almost like a distant fog-bank, hardly anyone noticed and those who did gave it no thought. Children built castles and pools in the sand; old people read day-old newspapers from Rome or Milan; and young girls barely in adolescence walked rigidly along the beach, delighting that men of various ages paid heed to their swan-like limbs and soft golden hair.

Only Alessandro Giuliani, immobile in a cloth beach chair, tracked the oncoming storm. Though he tried, he was unable to read a day-old copy of
Corriere della Sera,
and though the sun was bright and hot in the African or Sicilian style, gentle gusts of cool September wind riffled the pages of the newspaper. When the
clouds were so high and near that the older people began to stir because, unlike their grandchildren, they would not be able to dash quickly through the dunes to the hotel, Alessandro folded the
Corriere della Sera
and put it under his thigh to protect it from the large drops of rain that had begun to arrive in the vanguard of the storm.

The wind tangled the ribbons on the children's gondolier's hats, old people labored across the dunes, and mothers and fathers called their sons and daughters. Then lightning struck the sea far away in a silent explosion of light, and the beach became a scene of panic. Babies were lifted into the air as if the lightning were slithering along the sand. Umbrellas were collapsed. Towels whipped free in the wind.

The beach porters were skinny boys with huge wet eyes. In uniforms that made them look like organ-grinders' monkeys, they desperately and breathlessly gathered beach chairs and umbrellas and ran across the dunes. One of these boys, who had huge black eyebrows that threatened to bridge his macaque-like nose, approached Alessandro.

"You have to go in," he said. "I have to take your chair."

Alessandro kept his face to the storm.

"Signore?"

Deliberately playing with time that was running out quickly and dangerously, Alessandro turned slowly to the young macaque and widened his eyes as if to say,
What?

The macaque flashed two rows of incredibly white teeth. "Signore!" he shouted, and pointed, with a thumb extended from a clenched fist, at the storm behind him.

"Yes?"

"You have to go inside because of the lightning!"

As Alessandro's eyes filled with the distant webs of enraged light, the corners of his mouth showed a barely perceptible smile. At this, the frightened macaque exploded forward like a racehorse
leaving the gate, and crossed the dunes just ahead of a heavy rain. He took shelter under the verandah of the hotel, where guests who were in robes and carrying baskets stood behind walls of glass to watch the storm, and as he and his friends stacked chairs and umbrellas under the light of an electric bulb, he told them about Alessandro, who was going to be turned into a cinder and blown into the clouds.

On the verandah itself, everyone could see Alessandro sitting still in the rain, his head visible just above the beach chair, his hair blowing wildly in the wind.

Lightning the color of white gold danced awkwardly on the broken surface of the sea and flashed against the dark skeins of cloud from which it had come, cascading over itself in shallow angles and bent limbs. Thundercracks colliding in midair flattened the water into spoon-like silver depressions and rattled the glass windows of the hotel.

"He'll be killed," said a woman on the part of the porch farthest away from the windows. "What's he doing?"

"He's doing what we're doing," an old man answered, "but more so. He seems to have lost the habit of safety."

"Or maybe he never had it!" the woman exclaimed with joyful intolerance as she turned to go inside.

No, the old man thought. It's something that, eventually, you learn to do without.

Lightning struck so close to Alessandro that it pushed him against the beach chair and bent its wooden legs like bows. Blinded, he waited for the next bolt to release him from the reeling darkness, for the logic of the lightning and its approach over the sea was like the logic of a swelling crescendo in music. He was sure it would rush him with perfect accuracy, sure of the greater and greater light and geometrically increasing shock, sure that the walking barrage would end with him, and content that it would.

But it didn't. It lacked volition after all, and did not descend
with a kind and quick stroke that would take him where the heart could not be broken. It left him on a beach that the rain had made the color of municipal concrete, staring at the ten minutes of robins-egg blue hanging in the air over Istria. A cold and tranquil rain came after the lightning, and lasted until dark. Only then did Alessandro rise and turn to the hotel, which sat on the dunes and glowed with artificial light like a ship gliding across the horizon on a warm summer night.

 

A
S OFTEN
happens after September storms, the weather became cool and clear. On the beach, children wore sweaters. Ships moving placidly up and down the distant aisles of the sea were as sharply etched as diagrams, not that the sea itself was calm, for it still had a fresh, agitated, windy quality, and it rocked and churned in waves as imperfect as slabs of raw glass.

Into this sea Alessandro plunged for his daily exercise. He was the only one to swim out to deep water, for which he was held half in awe and half in contempt. It didn't matter to him, for as soon as he cleared the shallows and found himself suspended at a giddy height over the sea floor, darting ahead and slipping through the swells that hid him from those who watched onshore, he was happy. The farther from the beach he swam, the more serene he felt, and in the midst of waves that had never touched shore or lapped against a ship, he would flip over onto his back and float, his gaze fixed on enormous white clouds. Several kilometers out, he floated, turned, and sounded, swimming straight down, eyes open. When he was as deep as he could get, he would relax completely, splay his limbs, and let the currents under the surface tumble him in dark emerald light for as long as he could go without breath. Then, raking the brine, he would swim desperately for the surface and break through a silver roof into clear air and stinging spray.

He liked to swim back at an angle, reaching shore far enough away from where he started so that by the time he returned to his chair he was dry and in full possession of himself. Reaccustomed to gravity and light, his vision cleared, he would open the newspaper, lean back, give up, fold the paper, and sink into dream-laden sleep.

"I'm speaking quietly so that if you're asleep you won't wake up and I'll go away, but if you're not asleep then perhaps you'll tell me whether or not you're sleeping," someone said to

Alessandro, who kept his eyes closed, pretending not to have heard.

"You know, I have a telephone in my office now. When I call someone or they call me, the conversation starts with 'Did I wake you?' even at two in the afternoon. And even if you use the apparatus at four o'clock in the morning and ask them, they'll say, no, you didn't wake them. Why are people ashamed of sleep?

"I think the telephone should stop at midnight, like the buses, but I suppose its value also encompasses emergencies. I must admit, though, that I don't like it. I don't like what it does to people. If I call a client, his secretary will say something like 'Signor Ubaldi is in conference.' 'So?' I say, and she says, 'Let me take your name.' I always reply, 'Ah! We can honeymoon in the Sudan!' But they never get it. That's what the telephone does to people."

Alessandro opened his eyes and saw, standing before him on the windy beach, a middle-aged man in a thick white robe. He was balding, stocky, embarrassed, and sunburnt to the color of molasses, with a patina of volcanic red that said he had a lot of blood in him and that it circulated with great vigor. He also spoke with great vigor, with the ease of movement and solidarity of engagement without which a Turkish wrestler would not be able to practice his craft or tolerate his life. And yet, underlying all this, as the color of his blood lay under his dark sunburn, was both delicacy and reticence.