A Soldier of the Great War (16 page)

"I need you today. Umberto is sick and hasn't been in for three days, we have a tremendous backlog, and Orfeo told me yesterday that, if I didn't get a substitute, he wouldn't work. You know what Orfeo is like. Shave and dress. We're late."

"Can't you hire a scribe?" Alessandro asked indignantly.

"Scribes are not fireflies," his father said. "They're cautious and
slow. I've never been able to hire one for less than three months, or find one in less than two."

"There's something wrong with my hand," Alessandro stated. "After just a little bit of writing, it freezes up hot. I think I must have a paralysis, or the beginnings of a terrible disease...."

"Probably the gold has worn off the point of your pen. Bring it. Orfeo will take a look: he's an expert."

"But today I wanted to ride to Bracciano to swim in the lake."

"Today you must replace Umberto."

"I prefer not to."

"You have no choice."

"Still, I prefer not to."

His father left the room.

'"You have no choice! You have no choice,'" Alessandro repeated. Though at first he put his pants on backwards, in five minutes he had shaved and bathed, and he appeared downstairs dressed like a lawyer, in suit, tie, and vest.

"Breakfast!" he cried as his father pulled him out the door.

"In the office," the attorney Giuliani said.

They descended the Gianicolo on winding paths, streets, and stairs. Soon they were at the edge of Trastevere, where they went down a series of steep and crumbling steps that had been the death of old men and that on slick January mornings had even dispatched into the next world so cautious and agile a creature as a cat.

Going down the hill made Alessandro and his father walk fast, and, listening to the cadence of their steps against the cobbles, they cut through the level parts of Trastevere almost at a run. Taking a bridge across the Tiber, they joined a stream of other men intently on their way to work as if the morning light on all the marble palaces, advancing through the gardens, and filling the perfectly proportioned squares, were nothing.

'"When you walk through the city in the morning, what do you think about?" Alessandro asked his father.

"Many things."

"Do you think of the city itself?"

"No. I used to, but I've had a profession for a number of years, and it has mastered me. A profession is like a great snake that wraps itself around you. Once you are enwrapped, you are in a slow fight for the rest of your life, and the lightness of youth leaves you. You don't have time, for example, to think about the city even as you are walking through it."

"Unless you make it your profession."

"Then you're an architect, and you're always thinking of how to get clients."

"But what if you were to choose the profession of looking at things to see their beauty, to see what they meant, to find in the world as much of the truth as you could find?"

"For that you need to be independently wealthy."

"What about a professorship?"

"Of what?"

"Aesthetics."

"Aesthetics?" the father asked. "That's ridiculous. You'll live like a slave for twenty-five years. Better to go into the Church."

"I would rather die than live without women," Alessandro said.

"What about the army?" Alessandro's father inquired. "In my view, universities are like the army. The only difference is that the officers don't wear their ranks on their uniforms: they write them after their names and announce them in the degree to which their speech is pompous, mellifluous, and monotonous."

"The army?" Alessandro asked. "The army kills people!"

The attorney Giuliani looked at his son with a pointed expression. "Have there been reforms of which I have not heard? Don't you know that the only people the army kills are the people who eat its food? Our army, of late, is composed of saints and martyrs. They march into battle and don't come back, and the enemy holds his ground. To fault them for killing people is truly a slander."

"Lias brother is in the army. He seems capable."

"Lia..." his father said.

"Lia Bellati?"

"I see. How old is she?"

"My age, more or less."

"How old is her brother?"

"Thirty."

"What rank has he?"

"Captain."

"Impressive," the attorney Giuliani said. "He carries a sword, and has a magnificent uniform." He stopped in the middle of a street, and, as carriages passed on either side of them, looked his son straight in the eye. "Respect him for what he is, but picture the uniform covered with blood, and the man inside it blue with death, lying abandoned on a field. For what? Usually, for nothing. Whatever you do, don't join the army. Is that clear?"

"I have no intention of joining the army! You're the one who said the army is better than a university."

"It is."

"What shall I do, then, become a lawyer?"

"Wouldn't you like to be a successful attorney?"

"Wouldn't
you?
" Alessandro shot back, instantly. That his father was successful was irrelevant. Alessandro had meant to hurt him, and he had, but his father forgave him immediately because he knew that Alessandro might never forgive himself.

At the law offices they walked up many sets of stairs squared off about an enormous atrium.

They climbed in silence, but the attorney's heart was light, because his son had brought up, even if obliquely, the very thing about which the attorney had always dreamed.

They turned the handle on an enormous wooden door the color of Enrico. The floor inside was of marble so highly polished that they walked across as carefully as if they had been on ice. The spacious offices of this firm, in which the attorney Giuliani was
the principal partner, looked over Rome as if to govern it, and they were remarkably serene, except for the office of the scribes, where pens scratched across paper in a sound that approximated that of a granary invaded by mice, or a coop of a hundred scratching chickens.

Before Alessandro sat numbly with the scribes he wanted breakfast. A beautiful wooden table stood by the windows in the principal partners office.

They sat down at it, and a waiter in a white jacket appeared. The attorney Giuliani held up a finger: this meant no variation, which, in turn, meant a brioche and a cappuccino. The waiter turned to Alessandro.

"Four hot chocolates, five brioches, and five
cornetti."

"That's all?" Alessandro's father asked, wincing.

"I'm not hungry," Alessandro said.

They heard the waiter on the stairs, descending to a
pasticceria
to get more supplies. Ten minutes later, Alessandro poured a cup of chocolate as thick and hot as lava: the thickness, it seemed, held the heat. It even looked like lava, because it was filled with sluggish bubbles and sharp, scalloped, sponge-like depressions. He began to slice and butter the brioches and
cornetti.
On some he put jam.

"You're not going to butter and jam every one of those, are you?"

"Why not?" Alessandro asked, noticing that as people passed by the open doors of his father's office they paused to look in. The waiter had made him a legend.

"Let me ask you something," the attorney said.

"What?"

"This Lia..."

"Yes?"

"Do you know her?"

"Of course I know her."

"You know her well?"

"Yes and no."

"What do you mean, 'yes and no'?"

"Why are you excited?"

"Do you, have you, does she ... She's supposed to be wild, but perhaps she has a sister. Someone implied that she was amoral."

"He was probably in love with her, and she not with him," Alessandro said confidently. The
cornetti
were gone.

"I warn you sternly..." the father began.

"You warn me sternly? What kind of syntax is that?"

"You don't know where such behavior can lead. It can be disastrous."

"What behavior? I've said nothing."

"I trust this will nip it in the bud."

"Nip
what
in the bud?"

"The production of miniature human beings!" his father screamed.

"I don't plan to produce miniature human beings," Alessandro said.

The attorney Giuliani leaned forward with both hands on the table. "Just don't do anything stupid."

"I won't," Alessandro answered, backing out of the room.

"Be sure to act sensibly."

"Have I ever not acted sensibly?"

The attorney Giuliani had the expression of a man who has just lit a fuse.

"Papa," Alessandro said, his eyes closing. "She swims nude in the sea. She carries a pistol. And she wears perfume that makes me dizzy. Sometimes I go to the garden gate and smell the handle, because, when she touches it, the perfume stays."

The attorney Giuliani was frozen still. "Be disciplined," he urged.

"Were you?"

"Not enough. That's how I know."

 

A
LESSANDRO WAS
received by Orfeo, the chief mouse of the granary, the commander of the scratching chickens, who brought him to a desk near his own. Both shared a magnificent view of
Rome. "It's sunny today," Orfeo said. "How nice to be indoors in the shade."

Alessandro peered at the deeply seductive blue, closed his eyes, and saw a huge white wave sparkling in the sun. Flying within its airy circular crest were he and Lia Bellati, without a stitch of clothing, without gravity, tumbling, all limbs, glistening, wet, careening in the foam.

"Think of all those devils out there in the heat," Orfeo went on, "with heavy loads on their backs, sweating like mules." Orfeo was an old man who had begun work as a scribe not long after the nineteenth century had passed its midpoint, and who still had not a single speck of gray. Perhaps he dyed his always gleaming hair with coal tar or some other intensely black substance. His height and his posture had been the cause of many thousands of fleeting internal debates as people who passed him on the street tried to decide whether or not he was a dwarf and whether or not he was a hunchback. In fact, though he was short and stooped, he was neither a hunchback nor a dwarf, but could look the part of both, depending upon his state of agitation and the energy of his resentment. He had the face of a far taller man who had been compacted in an olive press. It was all there, but very little space existed between it. "Much better to be a gentleman, out of the glare!" he said, hoping to please the son of the
padrone.

Alessandro smiled in pain for being in the shade, but Orfeo took his expression to be that of anger and embarrassment. Orfeo should not have implied that he and the attorney Giuliani's son were gentlemen of the same standing. Had the boy been a year younger, perhaps, yes, but Alessandro had crossed an imperceptible line, and had no doubt long since stopped eating with the servants, no matter how much he may have loved them. Orfeo, however, did not think that this was a threatening predicament. It had, rather, a thousand exits, and he chose one almost at random, speaking in rapid fire.

"All kinds of gentlemen exist. There are gentlemen such as your father, and you, who are of exalted status. Perhaps not the most
exalted status: God and the angels, and His holy blessed Son, bless him, are certainly the most exalted, but as there is the sun and Saturn, so are there the moons that circle in rich profundity. And then there are the other ranks, far below the exalted ones, which are to the moons of the planets as the mountains of the moon are to the moon itself. They ride upon his back, though they are upright and uncongealed, and perhaps if you and your gracious father are moons that sail and dip in the rainbow lines of Saturn's rings, I am but a true, but a proud tree, on the mountain of the moon, standing upright in the cool light of the blessed protector, whose cloak of silk like a luminous mantle is draped across the stars, and from the dog that rides in the godly sea of space, this exaltedness runs in train, trying to lap its blessed luminous sap."

One of the other scribes, a young man with a mustache, caught Alessandro's eye. The index finger of his left hand was pointed to his head, and as he wrote with his right hand the left twirled in a circle.

Orfeo had begun to describe in spectacular detail the "gracious luminous sap that falls like the blood of the Cross from the tree in the valley of the bone-white mountains that circle the moon," when Alessandro produced from his vest pocket the beautiful fountain pen with which he wrote anything and everything—his essays on aesthetics, his departmental examinations, letters declaring love to married women in Bologna who dared not answer, summaries of account, instructions for feeding his horse, epistles (also never answered) to the prime minister of Italy. It was the most precious of all the instruments he possessed, including his penis, though, admittedly, the pen was irreplaceable.

"My father said to ask you about this," he told Orfeo. "I find that when I write for ten minutes or more I lose control of my hand, which pains me, and shakes. It's also very hot. And yet nothing is wrong with the rest of me, I think."

"Let me see, sir." Orfeo took the pen, seized a magnifying glass, and examined the point. "You idiot!" he said. "You don't hold it
correctly, sir! The left side is worn down completely, no gold at all left on it. It's like a knife now. A good penman glides over the page. You, my boy, cut. That's no way. This needs a new point. Put it back in your coat. Come. I'll give you a new pen."

Alessandro followed meekly to a captain's chest that stood near the window. Orfeo pulled out an enormously wide and deep drawer that floated to them as if across bearings of silk, with not the slightest sound. The north light illuminated dozens, scores, and hundreds of pens. "This wealth, this treasure," Orfeo said, "belongs to your father, but is entrusted to me. I'll give you the best one of the lot. Most are ebony. Not this. Look."

He held up a perfectly smooth, matte-black pen. The heavy point was dazzling even in north light. "Your father let me order it from England. It's ceramic—Wedgwood. You must not drop it. It's perfect—smooth, flawless, cool to the touch, and the point is so massive that it's as flexible as a whip. I'll fill it for you. I'll use treaty ink that costs twice as much for a little bottle than what we pay for a liter of the standard." He filled the pen and wiped its point on a clean linen towel suspended from a hook on the captain's chest.