A Soldier of the Great War (100 page)

He rented an apartment that was far more respectable than the one he abandoned. It was small, but it overlooked a garden, and Alessandro put real furniture in it. He had begun to build a new library. That Luciana had sold his books was a blow akin to yet another death. Now, at least, the new books sometimes made him feel that not everything had changed.

He wore a white suit when the weather gave him the slightest excuse, not the bright white of Mexico or India, but a much warmer color, almost cream, that made his face glow. His face had changed. His eyes were deeper, and he had a slowness of expression. One could see that his thoughts were drifting like fast clouds.

He was happy that even after the many years that had passed since he had first quit civilian life he could still be frivolous enough to harbor an affectation—a cane that rounded out the suit and tapped like a horse against the cobbles.

When he went to the Villa Borghese at the end of April he looked like a man who was much older. He took a bench in the sun, near the fountain, and he watched, his cane resting beside him, a book or newspaper on his lap, his hair blowing in the wind like untended grass.

April was too cold. Though he sat for hours listening to the graceful unburdening of the fountain—and of this he never tired—no one came. That is, no one came to sail a boat. Every night, Alessandro would go home, and in the space between his
arrival and the time when he had to leave for work he would sit in dejection, his head bent. He breathed as slowly as someone who has sustained a wound, and then the image of Ariane filled him with happiness and warmth, as if he were holding her, and the next day he would have the strength to go again to the Villa Borghese.

Sometimes he slept in the sun for an hour or two, for he never had enough sleep, and he feared that they had come and gone while he had been sleeping. The first two weeks in May were unusually cold, and then it was hot.

People came out in large numbers. Alessandro carefully watched the boats becalmed in the fountain and the children who stood at the edge. In the third week of May, he abandoned the newspaper and concentrated upon the children. He found tremendous satisfaction in observing their faces. When he saw a father cradling a child in his arms, the father admiring the child, the child floating, Alessandro felt neither envy nor distance.

The end of the month was complicated by rain, and for several days Alessandro failed to awaken in time to go to the Villa Borghese except late in the afternoon. He thought that June would be better, and that if he were to have asked a statistician to determine when children were most likely to sail their boats in fountains, or, if not that, when their mothers were most apt to take them walking in the park, the answer would be always June. Among other things, June is the month when children first recognize summer and when their mothers are positive of its arrival. It is the month of vacations and the influx of tourists, and when the sun attains its full glory but not its greatest heat.

Perhaps the woman, whether or not she was Ariane, had been ill. Perhaps the child had been ill. Perhaps they had moved, or were visiting, or had lost interest in the park, or had been there just when he was not. And perhaps he had seen them many times, the mother and child who had been in Venice, and they were strangers.

***

A
T THE
end of June, Alessandro abandoned his customary bench and moved to the south side of the fountain. Many more people used the south path because the trees were thicker on the north and their shadows were like a barrier. On the south side the sun did not strike Alessandro properly. It seemed to aim for his right eye and the right side of his neck. If for hours these relatively unexposed parts of him were in direct light, he would get a sunburn.

He could not, however, bring himself to move. He told himself that it wouldn't matter, and he didn't move. Riveted to the bench, he remembered the stories he had heard of the soldiers of the line who had seen angels—whole battalions of them. The angels flew above the no-man's-lands between the trenches, and, as they flew, the souls of the bodies that lay upon the artillery-turned soil decomposing into paste rose to join them. Only the battered formations reported angels, and only in the course of difficult battles. No dissenters challenged their accounts. Nothing is as beautiful as an angel, the soldiers said. They moved in massive numbers ten or twenty meters above the ground. They looked ahead undisturbed, giving off light in pulses that made the landscape glow, beautiful insubstantial beings who had themselves seen God. The souls, too, were visible as they ascended, and the luminous host could be seen from a great distance away as it moved in the vast and terrible spaces along the line. Many of the soldiers assumed that the world would end the night they saw the angels, and, for some, it did.

Not only had he abandoned his customary place, but he was unable to read the paper. He would start a column and follow it to the end, remembering nothing. Was it so much to ask that, several years before, Ariane might have walked out of a building before it collapsed? Would that demand the reordering of the universe? The contradiction of physics? It would not, and yet it would be a miracle, still, unimpeachable even by divisions, whole armies, of skeptics.

And yet it was far too much to ask, if only because he wanted it so much, and he stopped asking. As the afternoon grew hot, he
began to dry up, and he felt the future on its way. Nothing would come of his beliefs or desires.

He folded his newspaper and was about to stand. In the corner of his eye he saw a white flash from the east side of the fountain as the narrow triangle of a racing schooner darted for its motionless station near the center, where only the water would slowly push it to the edge, not the wind and not its sail.

The child who had launched it was a boy of about three, whose hair was pure gold in the sun. His eyes were brown, he wore blue shorts and a white cotton shirt, and he had the face of a child who carries a great burden.

Alessandro looked beyond him at three women sitting on a bench. Two were talking. The third was sewing, and it was she who had her eyes on the little boy with the boat.

Ariane was nowhere to be seen. Alessandro stood up and began to walk in the direction of the Tiber, but after he had gone a few steps he turned to go the other way, because he had decided that he wanted to pass by the construction on the top of the Via Veneto, to see the changes in the land for the sake of which his father had sold the garden.

The last time he had walked by, iron beams had begun to rise from the foundation, and he wanted to see how high they had risen.

As he rounded the fountain he looked again at the child. The boy looked directly at Alessandro, and pointed to his boat. He wanted Alessandro to get it for him with the cane.

"It's too short," Alessandro said, "and the water is too deep."

The child refused to accept that Alessandro could not help him. He pointed again.

Alessandro stepped toward him. He was going to bend forward slightly and explain, but the words caught in his chest, and he stopped abruptly. Just beyond the boy, hidden from Alessandro's sight until he had moved closer, was a worn canvas bag with loops for handles.

The side facing him was blank. He grasped the bag by the loops. At this the woman on the bench stood up and walked toward them. As Alessandro turned the bag, almost as if in slow motion, he saw letters on the other side, in self-referential color—
Magenta.

"What's your name?" Alessandro asked the child.

"Paolo."

"And your last name?"

Before he could answer, the child looked up. The woman had arrived. Though she was not Ariane, she, too, had blue eyes, and Alessandro tried to check his reckless conclusion that she might be the cousin.

"Good afternoon," she said, in a careful but challenging voice.

Alessandro could hardly breathe. "Are you his mother?"

"No," she said, as if she meant,
What of it?

He trembled. "Is his mother's name Ariane?"

"Yes," the woman answered, relaxing. "Do you know her?"

A
LESSANDRO
G
IULIANI
and Nicolò Sambucca had walked for two days and two nights on the way to Monte Prato. The road they took and the shortcuts they made over ridges and through defiles of whitened rock kept them on the crest of the Apennines, on the line of the westernmost ridge. As they walked in daylight or under the stars, they felt as if they were scrambling along the top of a wall so high that the towns of Italy, glittering below them in the warm summer air, were places in a children's book or a fairy tale. Even the sea, a band of navy blue at night or turquoise at noon, was the unmistakable creation of a compassionate illustrator, and fit tightly within the intarsia of fields and sky polished by a weightless fume of silver light.

They were exhausted, and walked with great difficulty, but the open country, the silence, and the altitude enabled them to imagine themselves proceeding without effort, as if they were rising and falling, driven by the wind, across the smooth swells of a ribboned and color-banded sea. After their encounter with the returning farmers they had neither seen nor heard a single soul. The route had been sufficiently remote to render towns and villages silent and motionless but for the blinking of a light or the slow-paced climb of a pillar of coal smoke into an azure infinity that quickly erased it.

They had had hours of leaden movements and pounding hearts, and hours of flight, but in memory it all seemed the same,
for the line they had made was mainly behind them now, and they hadn't far to go. Nicolò had walked long past the fork in the road where he was to have turned toward Sant' Angelo, and before dawn he and Alessandro had halted on a hill that overlooked Monte Prato.

The road curved left and then back to the village by way of rocky shelves in the hills, but if you were to descend to the floor of the valley, cross the river, and go up again, you would come to the church and the piazza directly, after passing rows of olive trees, and stone walls, and through fields in which sheaves of silver-blond hay stood like dispersed infantrymen.

"Aren't you going to take the road?" Nicolò asked.

"No."

"You'll have to go all the way down and then climb up."

"Isn't that what I've been doing?"

"But you're here. Why risk your heart when you've made the journey? You complained that it was skipping."

"I didn't complain."

"You said it was skipping."

"It was."

"The road is easy," Nicolò said.

Alessandro snapped his head in an almost leonine gesture of impatience. "The sun won't rise for two hours. I'll rest here."

"How do you feel?" Nicolò asked, fearful and solicitous.

Alessandro sat down on a smooth rock that jutted from a wave in the hill, and leaned back until his head rested on soft grass. "I remember from my own youth," he said, addressing the sky as much as the boy beside him, "the reason for such a question. You think that an old fellow like me has lakes of blood pressing against dams of paper, don't you. If I take a step the wrong way, or choke a little on my food, or hear that Octavian prevailed at Actium ... bang! The dam bursts, everything inside ruptures, I'm dead."

"I didn't mean that, Signore."

"You must have. Compared to you, I'm a wishbone. I remember the way I was."

"You're not so delicate, not after what you've been through."

"But I am, Nicolò. I am, and it's a mercy. My body will no longer force me to put up with what I once had to put up with. If something is too much of a shock, too unpleasant, or too painful, God will come as quickly as a nurse on call. The drier and thinner the bone, the more easily it snaps."

"How can that be good?"

"You'd be surprised."

"I never want to die. I'll fight to the end and go with a real struggle."

"I know, I know," Alessandro said kindly. "You can hardly feel time, and yet you are jealous of it more than you will ever be again."

"But you said so many times that when you had nothing left, strength came from nowhere; it flooded into you, and it surprised you."

"It did," Alessandro confirmed. "It still does, but it, like me, grows quieter and quieter."

"Signore!" Nicolò said, in protest of age and mortality.

"You asked me how I felt."

"Yes."

"I feel fine."

"You do?"

"Yes."

"Your heart?"

"Well, my heart doesn't feel so fine, but so what."

"What does it feel like?"

Alessandro turned his head to Nicolò, who was sitting with his right foot and calf tucked under the thigh, the way that girls sat, Alessandro remembered, when they picked berries. "It feels like a man is inside it pushing against the walls with his hands and feet. And my arm feels the same way."

"Is it serious?"

"It isn't comical."

"Do you need a doctor?"

Alessandro laughed. The vigor of his laughter surprised Nicolò

"What's funny?"

"What I need is not to have a doctor. When you die, doctors hang around for weeks, and the poor miserable people you leave behind have to sell all the furniture to pay them, even though ... what did they do? You pay them for their tact when they keep the bare truth from you about the person who's dying.

"The money is unimportant. What hurts is the false hope, in which you are as much at fault as they."

"If someone paid my father to fix his clothesline poles," Nicolò stated, "and both of them fell down, my father would give the money back."

"But?" Alessandro asked.

"But what?"

"But?"

"I didn't say
but.
"

"You should have."

"I should have."

"Keep on."

"But ... but ... but I don't know, but what! But people! People are different."

"Yes. Go on, go on."

"They're not clotheslines. They're complicated. They don't live forever. Even clotheslines could fall, in an earthquake, and it wouldn't be my father's fault, and he'd keep the money."