A Soldier of the Great War (30 page)

The stores and restaurants that lined the concourse were full of people who bought something and ran with it, or lifted glasses and cups while closing their eyes. Porters with jaded and resentful expressions pulled creaking wagons that were mainly empty, and one cut a straight path along the side of the concourse, drawing after him an enormous cart of wood and steel, upon which rested a single wicker-covered jug of wine.

Alessandro bought half a dozen rolls and two bottles of fruit juice before crossing the vital stream of traffic on the concourse. After his ticket was punched and he passed through the barrier he began to walk next to a long line of lacquered railway cars. He was early. The few people boarding the train went down the platform and then suddenly disappeared as if they had been flies snatched by feeding fish. Almost everyone walked on the right side, near the train, but by an empty track on the left an old man in a white suit took a few steps forward and then stopped to rest on a cane. He looked up, first at the light pouring into the train shed from outside, then at the soot-blackened roof, and then at the train itself. After staring at the pavement for a moment, he started off again.

The old man had great difficulty with a small suitcase that he carried in his left hand. Alessandro offered to carry it for him.

"You'll have to spend ten minutes waiting for me," the old man said, "when you can probably just skip down there and jump up the steps."

"I don't mind walking slowly," Alessandro replied, taking the suitcase.

"Do you know why you walk slowly when you're old?"

"No."

"Because with age you receive the gift of friction. The less time you have, the more you suffer, the more you feel, the more you observe, and the more slowly time moves even as it races ahead."

"I don't understand."

"You will."

"The less time, the more friction, difficulty, and viscosity. Time expands. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"At the end, when no time is left, it will pass so slowly that it will not pass at all."

"Correct."

"Then, at death, time stops?"

"What did you think death is?" the old man asked, taking a few more steps. "In death, time
unifies.
Old men on their deathbeds call for their fathers not because they are afraid, but because they have seen time bend back upon itself."

"How do you know this?" Alessandro asked politely.

"I don't know for sure. When I was your age I was skeptical and quick. I made fast work of the myths of heaven and hell and of the vastly deficient idea of nothingness. As I've grown older I've seen that the world is made of perfect balances and exact compensations. The heavier the burden and the closer you get to the end, the more viscous time becomes, and you see, in slow motion, intimations of eternity."

"Such as?"

"Beams of light, birds springing up."

"Birds springing up?"

The old man stopped. "It sounds crazy," he said, "but when you see birds rising, as if they're startled, their graceful flight becomes motionless. Their startled song, too, which should be so quick and crisp, freezes into one long note before the hunter fires. I've seen it many times now. They fly in arcs. The arc stops still, forever.

"If there are pigeons in this shed," he said, looking up, "and if a train blows its whistle and they scatter, you'll see, if you concentrate at the moment of the whistle blast."

The old man looked back at Alessandro. "You think I'm crazy," he said.

"I don't."

"You do. Come on, help me up the steps."

They crossed the platform and Alessandro gave him a boost into the train.

"What's for lunch?" the old man asked.

"In the dining car?"

"Yes."

"I don't know."

"Why not?"

"I don't work for the railroad."

"Since when?"

"I never did."

"Oh," the old man said, not so much embarrassed as confused.

"But I can find out, if you'd like."

"No no. It's not necessary. I get confused sometimes." He began to laugh at himself. "And I sometimes forget where I am. But that's all right, young man, because, sometimes, to forget where you are makes you feel very light and free."

 

I
N MID-MORNING
, as the train panted in the light-filled station in Bologna, Alessandro bought a bottle of mineral water that he
placed on the table near the window. He leaned out as he departed, flying by the tiled roofs of the city that had for so long been his home, and as the train accelerated and began to run north, the yellows and golds of fields just harvested, or just about to be, disappeared into the blue. A lariat-line of smoke was pulled after the train, and then, in the silence just before the afternoon crickets resumed their song, it rose effortlessly into the open sky.

Rushing across the lowlands of the Po and the Adige, Alessandro never took his eyes off the October countryside. Relative to the points toward which his eye was drawn, he was moving at three-quarter time, more or less, and the motion of the train became a kind of music superimposed upon the landscape. Once again, music was arising from the inanimate, the elemental, and the dead, as if to bring them alive. The landscape itself appeared in repetitive volleys of deep color, stopped now and then at a whitened rapids or a dark chasm.

As they rolled over the marshes before Venice, he fell back in his seat, windburnt and exhausted, and noticed that the bottle of water, but for its slight and elegant blue tint, was the smoothest, clearest, and most transparent thing he had ever seen. All that was reflected in it was sharp, subdued, and calm. The fields outside, beyond the reeds; the reeds themselves, waving green and yellow; the water, shockingly blue in north light, were clarified, compressed, and preserved within the lens. And if bottles of mineral water could pacify the light of mountains, fields, and the sea, to what painful mysteries would the lens of beauty be opaque? Even death, Alessandro thought, would yield to beauty—if not in fact then in explanation—for the likeness of every great question could be found in forms as simple as songs, and there, if not explicable, they were at least perfectly apprehensible.

The train slowed to cross the bridge over the lagoon of Venice. Arch after arch, Alessandro's thoughts arose and took their places, as in the building of a cathedral, and by the time he had crossed
half the bridge he had stumbled upon something that would be confirmed only after a lifetime of verification.

He straightened the bottle, adjusted his tie, tucked in his shirt, and waited. On the platform, conductors in dark blue uniforms walked back and forth with a quail-like gait that had never failed to signal the departure of a train. The engine released clouds of steam to rest forever in the vaguely green light, and startled pigeons took flight, forced by glass and steel into maneuvers tighter and more agile than in the open air. Venice seemed buoyant, as in a dream, and gave Alessandro the uncanny feeling that were he to leave the train he might defeat time by reaching out to grasp the opposite part of the loop upon which time was about to billow. But even if that had been literally true, if by breaking his ticket and making an early unplanned exit he could confound time, he would not have done it, for the attractions ahead were too bright to skip, and he had the notion that the harder and better he seized every dazzling particular, the greater would be the light in the end.

 

T
HE PANELED
door of the first-class compartment opened and closed faster than the shutter of a camera, and suddenly a tall woman with a small suitcase in her hand was standing directly in front of him.

"Seven-C?" she asked.

Alessandro shrugged. He never remembered the number of his compartment after he had found it, and was always eager to throw away his ticket as soon as he could. She put down her suitcase, unfolded her ticket, and pulled the door into the compartment so she could read the number on the outside. "Seven-C," she said, closing the door, and then, to Alessandro, while she hoisted her valise up onto the rack, "Perhaps you have the wrong accommodations."

She sat down across from him, looked him in the eye, and said, "I think you are in the wrong compartment." She smiled a forced, deliberately insincere smile that seemed to say, "You
idiot
"

Alessandro shook his head slowly from side to side, and then looked out the window at the sandwich carts racing down the platform. She was a striking, unusual woman. She was as tall as an Englishwoman could get without difficulty in finding a marriage partner, and as slender and lean as if she were tied up in corsets. But the way her black-and-red silk dress fit her indicated that she had no corsetry and that her flesh was as hard as that of a country woman. The way she dressed signified neither wealth nor ease, but an unfamiliarity with both. Her fingernails were carefully painted and glazed, and her hands, though long and powerful, were delicate nonetheless.

"Well?" she asked.

Still trying to assimilate her appearance, he did not answer, but he did return her gaze. Masses of red hair fell about her face, which was almost ablaze with equal masses of freckles. This is not an Italian trait, and he had begun to conclude from her accent that she was Irish.

"Criminy," she said to herself. "Can you talk?"

He continued staring. Now her mouth was partially open as she awaited his answer. The skin on her face was stretched so tightly, and her white teeth were arrayed in such a way, as to give her a permanent look of irony, or even savagery. He had not yet seen her smile soften the Northern gauntness and rage into heart-stopping feminine beauty.

"Not only a man," she said to herself as she shuffled through her tickets, "but a deaf mute."

"My friends say I can talk snails into orgasm," Alessandro said.

At first she was dumbstruck, but then she said, in flawless Irish-accented Italian, "Well, then, as one snail said to another, I've been taking this train for the past ten years. I believe you have been placed, or have simply walked into, the wrong compartment. Sleeping compartment. You are a man. I am a woman. Sleeping compartment."

He unfolded his ticket and passed it to her. She took it and went over it very carefully. "Seven-C," she said. "Clerical error."

"Yes," he told her, leaning forward. "That's what happens when you buy your railroad tickets in a monastery."

The train had begun to move and half of it was already in the sunlight.

"I didn't buy my tickets in a monastery, thank you very much," she said.

"You're welcome. I did," he answered. "Monks never cheat."

"I'm a travel agent," she said. "I've never heard of this."

"Have you ever been to Rome?"

"Naturally."

"Do you know the Palazzo San Rafaello?"

"No."

"Fifty-five thousand monks live there. They have barber shops, bakeries, watchmakers, stationery stores, everything. And they have a railway agency. Why wouldn't they? They're always on the move."

"That may be so," she said, but then she just stopped talking and looked at him.

"What kind of travel agent are you?" he asked.

"I'm a booking agent for Nederland-Lloyd," was her reply. "I've sent tens of thousands of English and Scandinavian tourists to the Levant. They go there to see the ruins, and they stop off in Greece to look at the light. It hypnotizes them, one and all, and they come back ready to endure another season of darkness."

"Tell me something," he said.

"Yes?"

"Let us say that you were in your office—where is it?"

"On the Piazza San Marco, behind the columns. We're in the shade, and must have electric light even on summer days."

"You've been living in Venice for ten years?"

"Six. I was in Athens first."

"Do you speak Greek?"

"Yes."

"As well as you speak Italian?"

"No. Its harder."

"But there you are, in your office, and a woman comes in to buy a ticket to..."

"Alexandretta."

"She sits down across from you."

"I stand behind a counter."

"She faces you. She has booked a cabin, but you tell her there aren't any left."

"Yes?" The train was now picking up speed, moving across the bridge over which Alessandro had only half an hour before passed in rapt seriousness.

"That she must ride to Alexandretta in steerage."

"We would never do that."

"A hypothesis."

"Go on."

"She protests."

"Of course."

"
I won't ride in steerage. I'm entitled to a cabin.
But you have only a cabin with a man in it. What would you do?"

"I would
not
put them together."

"Even if she looked to you like a woman who was tense, and lovely, and virtuous—a woman who loved, a woman whose life was one of restraint, but for whom a mixed-up trip to Alexandretta would be, perhaps, the kind of thing that makes restraint worth bearing, justifies it? What would you do for one of your sisters in that position?"

Now the train was running across the marsh. The Irishwoman, whose name was Janet McCafrey, did not answer Alessandro directly, but her savage, red, tight, and beautifully crooked face composed itself into an alluring and patient smile.

"The monks are practiced in precisely this kind of distinction," he added.

"What did I do," she asked no one, "to get this man in my compartment?"

"We have two beds," he noted, observing that her dress was tighter around her body than would be required to make her constantly aware of the idea or memory of an embrace. "And in regard to your guilt," he added, "in my profession, as in agriculture, neither guilt nor innocence has a place."

The train was racing across golden fields once again. The bottle of mineral water knocked against the window now and then. It was sunny outside, and cool in their shaded compartment.

"Nor, might I add, in mine. And let me say that I know we have two beds."

"I understand," Alessandro said. He envisioned the long, slow, exciting ritual of their undressing for bed. He would endeavor to close his eyes or stare out the window, and she would disrobe within a foot of him, knowing that the very sound of her clothing would be more powerful than a hundred voluptuous nudes. Somehow, he would manage to get into bed, in the dark, and then he would lean over to speak to her, and she would have let her nightgown fall just, ever-so-slightly, a bit too much. And there they would be, parallel, rushing through the dark, caught in between the sheets, looking at one another's faces, aching to touch.