A Soldier of the Great War (96 page)

"I can now write contemplative essays, but I don't, because I don't want to."

"You're a gardener's helper."

"Yes. Many practical matters absorbed my attention upon my return to Rome. It's complicated, but it comes down to thè fact that I have no money. Except for a few pleasures that they foolishly deny themselves, I live like a monk.

"I work in half a dozen gardens on the Gianicolo, including that of the house in which I grew up. My father sold the garden to the people who lived across from us. My sister thought I was dead, and while I was a prisoner in Austria she sold the house and left for America.

"Things can be redeemed. The people who bought the house
then bought back the garden. Now house and garden are united once again, and three children are growing up in it as their own.

"Once, it was mine, and I was happy there. I see my father, my mother, and my sister again and again as I work. The old gardeners have disappeared, and no one knows that at one time it was my house. I have to be careful not to be too proprietary, but sometimes I tell the new owners, with a certainty they cannot understand, where something will be even if it is buried, or what used to be in a particular place, even if it is gone.

"I'm lucky to have something that I love. Though the garden is no longer mine, it's beautiful nonetheless, and I remember. To see the shoots emerge from the earth; to see the pine boughs, which I keep in clean trim, wave against the blue sky; and to see the children of the house as they grow with the tender illusion that this is theirs, is a cause of great satisfaction."

"Will it be forever?" Arturo asked.

"No. For me, even that place will not always be green, but now it's just what I need. I'm content."

"You'll get married and have children," Attilia said. "You'll see. Everything will change. Time will bring you grace, even more than the garden."

 

N
OT TOO
long after their meeting on the beach, Alessandro and the Family Momigliano found themselves at table together in the hotel dining room. It was one of those days in fall when summer returns in every respect except one, the strength of the light. Such a day has the quality of a very old man who possesses every faculty and undiminished vigor, and is doomed merely by the passage of time. Though it was hot, the light was dying.

But declining light is the crowning glory of the seaside and a dream-like reward for the exertions of summer. In summer, the waves toil, but when the air is hot and the light is autumnal, the waves are masters of silent elision: they do not break so much as whisper.

Alessandro dipped a spoon into a bowl of chicken broth and gnocchi almost as golden as the light outdoors. "It's good, this soup," he said. "They don't oversalt it. The reason people oversalt chicken soup is so that they can pretend to be eating something that is virtually nothing, but the truth of virtually nothing is worth infinitely more than a lie that makes almost nothing into a lot of something."

"What about bread and butter?" Arturo asked. "Do you put butter on bread?"

"Not since nineteen fifteen."

"In the army? We had butter most of the time."

"We had lard, so I learned to eat bread plain."

On the verandah was a cast-iron table supporting a phonograph. The base of the phonograph was made of rose-colored mahogany, the hardware shiny nickel plate, and the horn a flowerlike shape of ivory, ebony, and amber. During lunch a boy of sixteen or seventeen too overstimulated to eat with his family went onto the verandah and played the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony over and over again.

The sound had a frail quality that matched the dying light. Alessandro was thinking about the similarity, and about the ability of frailty to become strength, when he heard a huge clatter and then the phonograph needle sliding across the cylinder like a sabre cutting through tendons.

Alessandro left the table, with Arturo following him in urgent little steps. On the verandah, the boy who had been playing the phonograph, eyes full of tears, was glowering at six local toughs who were on the verandah, the rail, and the ground, all in the pose of leaving, and ready to bolt, clutching sticks and frozen still for the purpose of taunting whoever might show up. When only Alessandro and Arturo appeared, the latter holding a napkin, the six hoodlums moved back a little into the hotel.

As soon as Alessandro saw this, he realized that a complex ritual would follow in which, by voice, wit, movement, and control
of fear, either he and Arturo, or the six boys would be vanquished, but he wanted no part of the game.

"Who did this?" he asked. At the sound of his voice they tapped the sticks.

"We don't listen to German music in Italy." They were nearly indistinguishable, and their faces said that they were sorry they had missed the war, and they were going to take it out on as many people as they could torment.

"We don't, do we? And why not?" Alessandro asked. Arturo laughed.

"Because Austrians kill Italians!" one of them stated with deliberate outrage.

"And what would you know about that?" Alessandro asked. "Besides, Italians listen to Italian music, and Italians kill Italians, as you will now see."

"Correct," Arturo shouted. Then Arturo and Alessandro lunged for the six boys, who fanned into a half circle and closed in with sticks and fists, some kicking, and, for the first ten seconds, no one breathing.

Alessandro took a blow on his upraised arm, his ear, and his head. The boy who landed it expected Alessandro to retreat, but Alessandro grasped his shoulders and used his own head as an anvil into which he pulled the boy's face.

Three were upon Arturo, kicking him in the ribs and beating him about the head with sticks, but his arms were upraised, and he broke free, chasing one of the assailants, with the others still upon him, until he caught him and began to rip flesh with his teeth. The boy screamed with such terror that they all broke off and spilled over the railing, at which point Alessandro and Arturo immediately vaulted after them. When they caught them, they punched their necks and kicked them in the back. Then, rather than killing them, which they might have, they allowed them to escape.

Alessandro felt rivulets of warm blood running down his neck. His clothes were torn and bloody, and he limped. Arturo was in much the same condition.

As they stood on the sand, with the sound of the waves and the smell of the sea all around them, Arturo turned to Alessandro. "You see," he said, breathing hard and happily. "You're alive. You have fight in you. You'll have fight in you till you die."

"But I don't want to." Alessandro replied.

"Why not?"

"Real power is with those who are forever still, and I want to join them."

"Good God. Why?"

"Because I love them."

"You mean like Hamlet jumping into the grave?"

"Yes."

"You can't do that!" Arturo screamed. "This is the twentieth century. And, besides, he jumped out."

"He climbed out."

"All right, he climbed out. Better that your soul should be on fire. It is on fire, and when you give it air it will flare like the sun. Even I ... My soul is on fire.... I, an accountant!"

 

T
HAT NIGHT
a storm came in from the sea and made the air a three-dimensional battlefield of angry lightning bolts, and thunder that carried on the wind and rattled the hotel as if it were shaking it by the shoulders.

From a rush chair on his balcony Alessandro watched the sea pitch and heave like a cat fighting on its back. Each time the lightning flashed it revealed a massive struggle in the dark, with the surface of the sea as littered and disorganized as a plain where two armies have fought for days.

In the noise of the wind, words came incoherently, and he heard music that sounded as if it were coming from the phonograph on
the verandah. In the last movement of the Third Brandenburg, sawing in incomparable glory, came a kind of thump thump thump that Alessandro could not place, and that swelled until it thundered over the forward race of the music like guns echoing in the mountains.

When he was young, he thought, he could bring himself into God's presence by grasping the sharp nettle of beauty, but now he didn't dare.

The whole sky ignited in a painful flash. Another soon followed, and he knew that it would be minutes before he would be able to make out the dim outlines of the sea and beach. Though he was sitting up, he felt as if he were flat on his back, or upside down, twirling in space. Though the pounding sound, much like the beat of a kettle drum, was timed to the insistent tempo of the strings, it overrode them. Whenever it weakened, it took strength again and grew more and more intense, until the whole world seemed to be shaking.

Alessandro strained to identify it. His face contorted in an effort to hear better not its volume but the characteristics of sound within the volume. It was as if he saw clearly an army as it approached, but wanted to know what elements it comprised.

Then, all at once, for no reason that he could name, he realized that the sound that seemed to ride far above the thunder, keeping pace, never faltering, was the beating of a heart, and it said to him, despite all he knew and despite all he had come to believe, that he had not yet lost Ariane.

 

T
HE NEXT
morning, in a thick gray fog, dozens of people pacing unhappily in the halls and public rooms of the hotel made it seem like a mental institution. Gliding nervously over ruby-colored Persian carpets, Alessandro looked the part of an inmate. He hadn't shaved, and had slept only an hour or two, spending enormous energy in dreams.

When Arturo came to get him for lunch he thought Alessandro was ill. "Didn't you sleep last night?" Arturo asked as they raced toward the dining room, almost knocking over old people with canes.

"I slept like an eel. Hurry."

"Why hurry? We'll only have to sit at the table longer before they bring the lunch."

"If we hurry, then maybe they'll hurry."

"What does it matter? Even if the fog does lift, it won't do so until the middle of the afternoon. Where are you off to?"

"I don't know," Alessandro replied. "I think I'm going to leave."

Before Attilia and Raffaello came in from a walk in the fog-shrouded pines, Alessandro played with his silverware, tapping the china and his water glass, balancing and spinning the knife, and twanging it in his ear even though it made no sound.

Arturo tried to engage Alessandro in practical matters. "What did you mean when you said that you were as poor as a swallow, but only temporarily? Do you live on rice and lottery tickets?"

"I don't buy lottery tickets," Alessandro replied vacantly. "Ail my luck kept me alive in the war. Nothing is left for numbers. In ten years, nine now, I'll have an income. It's complicated."

"I'm an accountant."

Alessandro shrugged his shoulders. "My father had a modest estate: bank accounts, some investments, a house on the Gianicolo, and an interest in the building that housed his law offices. He also owned land at the top of the Via Veneto.

"Three times, the army listed me as either missing or killed in action, all after I was supposed to have been executed for desertion. My sister inherited everything, liquidated it all except the land, and moved to America.

"She left what we had in trust with my father's law firm, and, for good or ill, they invested the whole thing, including an immense amount of borrowed money, in the construction of three
buildings—a hotel, offices, shops, apartments—on the land. All the income is channeled into repayment of the loans. Depending upon the rents, which will depend upon the development of the city and the economy in general, that should be in eight to ten years.

"At that time I'll be entitled to half the income, as I own half the principal."

Alessandro threw his knife onto the tablecloth. "By that time I'll be forty years old and will have spent the previous fifteen years of my life in combat and working in kitchens, quarries, and gardens."

"But all that time, you've been thinking."

"Thinking, yes, I've been thinking."

"Better to have a font of money in middle age than when you're young. Middle age is the time when you'll need it and appreciate it."

"I'll never appreciate it. I've been trained out of it. I don't want money. I want much more. I want what rarely happens. I want what people are afraid even to imagine."

"Like what?"

"Resurrection, redemption, love."

"Forgive me, Alessandro. I'm not as educated as you, but I am older, and my experience tells me that you may have to be content with less—with the exception of love."

At that moment Attilia and Raffaello entered the dining room, having returned from the beach, their hair sparkling with droplets of water that had been combed from the fog. Sputtering with resentment and discontent, a waiter ladled soup from a large white tureen.

"Signora," Alessandro said to Attilia, addressing her formally, as if to balance his disheveled appearance and gaunt expression, "do you know about dreams? My mother was a master of dreams."

Attilia answered, "For such things your education is appropriate and mine non-existent."

"My education once enabled me to fly like a bird, but what happens to a bird with a broken wing?"

"Then tell me."

"I slept only an hour or two last night, but the dream lasted for weeks and months. I was with my family in a storm. It was sleeting and very cold, and the wind almost pushed us over. We struggled through darkness. We were dying. I was at times the father, and at times the son. When I was the son I worried about my parents and did not want them to die. When I was the father, I was nearly insane with not being able to get my children to safety.

"I also saw the family from without, and at times I was the baby sister, the mother, even the wind. I thought that the child in her mother's arms was dead. Delirious and trembling, we fell by the side of the road, but lying on the ground was no warmer than standing or trying to move forward.

"Then everything went black, with no sound. I don't know how much time passed, but when we awoke it was still snowing, and we were covered with snow. We saw a huge house with lights in all the windows and fires burning within, and we managed to get to our knees. 'Surely they'll help us,' my father said, and sent me to knock on the door.