A Soldier of the Great War (50 page)

When he opened his eyes he saw the tremendous lighted globe of the moon.

"Guariglia," he said, turning over to call to his friend. "Guariglia."

Guariglia awakened.

"What time is it?"

Guariglia looked at his watch. "Eleven-thirty. You woke me up to ask what time it is?"

"Who's guarding now?"

"Fabio and Imperatore."

"Let's relieve them early."

Guariglia looked at Alessandro, and then glanced over the deck to the water and beyond. "Why?" he asked, but he already knew. Rome lay directly across the Apennines.

 

G
UARIGLIA TRADED
never knowing what might become of him for the one sweet certainty that would mean his death. Like Alessandro, he decided to go home even if it meant walking across the mountains, even if it were the last thing he would ever do.

Although Alessandros chances of remaining alive were probably neither better nor worse in the line than in trying to keep ahead of the military police, he was pulled to Rome by what he loved. He thought of the trains rushing out of Tiburtina, their whistles shrieking; of pigeons the color of gray pearls whirling around the high domes, mixing with the pale blue sky; of the Tiber urgently overflowing its banks in heavy rain; of the silent streets and stairs that had learned their unexpected sympathy for mortal man by watching him for generation after generation; and of the thunderstorms that washed the city clean and left it sparkling and steaming in the sun. He wanted to return to his family.

Instead of putting on their boots, he and Guariglia quietly joined the laces, and hung them over their shoulders.

Every infantry unit had heavy wire cutters. With a little extra pressure, these could be made to snap manacles and leg irons. One did not have to be a mechanic to know it. The wire cutters were kept in a wooden crate with the signaling equipment and the battle flags, but when Alessandro and Guariglia reached the crate, they saw that the open latch was swaying with the mild roll of the ship, and the wire cutters had been removed.

They descended to the main deck, moving in a strange and stilted gait because they were not used to walking with their boots off. Someone was standing at the rail where the prisoners had been chained to the deck. They thought it was Fabio, but as they got closer they realized that it was the bandsman. He was staring at the mountains and the shore, his manacles and leg irons cut away from him.

The spot on deck where Gianfranco had been transformed into a not entirely pure beatitude was empty, as were all the others.

"I can't swim," the bandsman stated, as if he were discussing his rejection from a military unit.

"Where are they?" Alessandro asked, though he knew.

The bandsman gestured toward the mountains.

"Where's Fabio?"

"Who's Fabio?"

"The one who was guarding you."

"The waiter?"

"Yes."

"He cut the chains," the bandsman said. "He went over the side with the others."

"All the prisoners?" Guariglia asked.

"Everybody," the bandsman replied.

"What do you mean,
everybody?
"

"Everyone."

"The prisoners."

"Everyone. If you don't believe me, go look. Don't you know what happened? Someone killed your colonel."

"Gianfranco?"

"Fabio cut the chains, the waiter."

"He killed the colonel?"

"I don't know."

They rushed up the companionway, and then recoiled. The colonel was sprawled across the deck, his throat cut. The line of the cut was thick and maroon-colored, and the deck was sticky with blood. They ran to the next deck, where blankets were spread as if invisible men were lying on them.

They returned to the bandsman. "I can't swim," he said, "and they're going to have to shoot somebody. That's why I left in the first place," he added, laughing. "Everyone was being shot, and I didn't want to be. But I've changed my mind. I can't avoid it, can I? I might as well finish it."

"Use a life preserver."

"There aren't any. It doesn't matter, anyway. They'd catch me. I know they'd catch me. You caught me, didn't you?"

As the boat continued ahead, they looked at the bandsman. The cold light accentuated his bird-like features, and they thought
that if the world were just, he would be surprised and rewarded, and that merely by moving his arms gently back and forth he would fly like a bird over the mountains and into the moonlight.

"You can swim," Alessandro said to Guariglia yet again. Somehow, solely because of the way that Guariglia looked, Alessandro never believed that he could swim.

Guariglia looked back in disgust. "How do you think I got to that island and back?"

"I wanted to make sure."

"Alessandro," Guariglia asked dryly, "do you think I'm too ugly to know how to swim?"

"That has nothing to do with it."

"As much as it pains me," Guariglia said, "we'd better go separately. The hills are going to be thick with deserters. Wait a few minutes so you'll be carried north a ways."

"We could stay, Guariglia."

"No. They shoot everybody. It's like pulling ticks. They'd question us for an hour and put us up against a wall. Fuck them, fuck all of them. I'm going to my children." He climbed over the rail. "Maybe we'll make it."

Guariglia jumped away from the ship. He hit the water with hardly a sound and disappeared in the waves. When he surfaced he had already turned toward shore and was swimming strongly. The way he moved reminded Alessandro of the way an animal swims in a flooded river that has taken his home.

The bandsman walked to the stern, talking to himself like a patient in a hospital for the terminally ill.

Alessandro stood with his hands on the rail. He had no good way to gauge the time. If he had counted, he would have counted too fast. If he had tried to mark the progress of the moon from peak to peak, he would have been mesmerized for too long. So he simply waited for the boat to come even with a stretch of beach that looked wide and clear.

The sea was no longer like a washboard, for the moon had stroked it into rambling waves that said what the sea was supposed to say in moonlight, and these gave the cattle boat a lovely motion as it slid down their shallow troughs. Alessandro climbed up and sat on the rail.

He looked out. The sea was marbled with foam and drawn into molten hills and valleys that were cool and smooth and flooded with the moon. Soon the moon would be behind the mountains and he would be crossing the rings of fire. He stepped outward into space and felt the lovely light caress him with affection. He hadn't known that anything as cold and clear as moonlight could be so full of promise, and as he fell it seemed to him that his hands clawed a trail of white sparks through the air, but these were the stars.

T
HE SEA
was warm, and the surf was unusually high for the Adriatic at that time of year. The wind coming off the hills, dry, full of smoke, and seemingly driven by the moon, knocked the crests from the waves as if they were as light as snow. In this kind of beautiful water a swimmer might want to drown, and the heart of the temptation was not so much the quality of sensation but the way the water moved, endlessly rocking, endlessly meeting the wind and falling back, endlessly engaged in a conversation wiser than any act of will.

Loosely churning half asleep in the white sound of the waves, Alessandro stopped swimming, but the very moment that his thoughts turned to the possibility of release he was picked up by a whip-like stroke and slapped against the sand as if he were a piece of meat thrown onto a marble slab in a fancy butcher shop.

With the wind knocked out of him, he stood to fight the undertow. Keeping his balance, he emerged on an empty beach, in a warm wind that had dried his clothing by the time he put on his boots and that promised to dry the boots themselves before he crossed the first ring of fire.

The walking was easy. The grain had been harvested and the fields were flat and unplowed, with golden stalks littering the ground in a soft mat that glowed in the moonlight. The olive trees had been pruned, and he moved through them as if on a garden path.

After half an hour he came to the first line of fire. From the cattle boat these lines had looked like luminous golden cables braided across the fields. It had seemed that they could easily have been straddled, though it was possible even from the sea to make out the thick curtain of smoke that rose from sullen flame.

Alessandro was surprised to discover that the fires were taller than a man, and burned in a solid unbroken front for as far as he could see. In the distance, figures in shadow appeared to be tending the slowly moving wall of flame. They held torches, because they were present not to control the fire but merely to spur it on.

The line, though not drawn by a straight-edge, was remarkably even, because the wind was remarkably even. It was so hot and so bright that Alessandro could hardly get close to it.

He wondered if, just the way that one can pass one's finger quickly through a candle flame, he might pass through the fire unscathed. At first he made tentative approaches, with his hands in front of his eyes, but it was too hot to bear, and as the wind pushed the fire at him he had to retreat.

When he looked to see what the farmers were doing he saw that every now and then one of the torches would speed toward the flame and disappear into it, and sometimes the wall would spit out a drop of fire, a torch borne by a man.

Alessandro started to run. He held his breath, jumped at the flame, and in an instant he was on the other side. He felt no pain. His clothes had not caught fire. He had not even felt the heat in the midst of the flame, but only before and after it.

On the other side, a new field stretched toward the mountains. Though the ground was charred and covered with ash, the way was smooth. He would get through a line and raise dust and ashes for half an hour until he approached another, which he would take as he had taken the one before it. Each time he crossed he was encouraged, and each time he crossed he was closer to the
dark mountain that he was using as a guide. At first the moon had been directly over it, but now was far to the right. Some of the River Guard, Alessandro guessed, not knowing how to move across open country, would use the moon as their compass and make an oddly curved track.

The last fire-line was in a rocky pasture on the side of the mountain itself. Because the ground was not as even or well tended as the fields on the coastal plain, the line was broken and Alessandro could have crossed in the breaks. Instead, he went for the highest wall of flame, which now he could hardly see, for the sun was coming up behind him and hid the fire even as it showed the smoke. He went through it like a spirit, without closing his eyes. Now only the mountains lay between him and Rome.

 

I
N THE
Gran Sasso d'ltalia are summits of almost three thousand meters. Compared to the Alps, they are minor, but not for someone who must go among them with neither food nor blankets. Though Alessandro had to cross more roads and rail lines than he had expected, these were empty but for occasional farmers in the far distance, moving so slowly next to an ox or a donkey that Alessandro could not tell if they were coming or going. Once, a train of empty boxcars rattled down a rusty track, pushed by an engine that seemed half dismantled. Alessandro was tempted to jump aboard, for it was heading west, more or less, but he knew that half the soldiers of the River Guard would seize upon this easy way to get home, and that military police watched freight trains with great interest.

He surveyed a few towns from the hillsides above them but never went in for food. Near one little village perched at the top of a rock in a manner that seemed offensively defensive even to a soldier on the run, the bakers had been baking and the smell of hot fresh bread was almost his undoing, but Alessandro kept walking.

He skirted lakes bordered by rocky outcroppings, and passed over boulder-covered hills and through glades in the forest where possibly no one had ever been. His one salvation was the pure water that ran in ice-cold streams from the lakes, for when he was hungry he knelt down and drank until he felt satisfied. Then he would force himself to drink until he was bloated, after which he could walk for several hours without thinking of food. The land he put behind him, the altitude he gained, and the delight of crossing open country brought the kind of rapture he had known on his rides between Rome and Bologna.

As he crossed the Gran Sasso he was nearly overcome by a steadily mounting desire for women. He was as deeply in need of a woman's embrace as an animal is in need of salt. The equation, so long out of balance, cried for restitution. At times he half floated over the mountains, summoning the memory of almost every woman he had ever known, of all the nudes in paintings subject to his precise and vexing recollection, of the poignant and charged encounters on the streets and in parks, theaters, and lecture halls, where one sees the woman for whom one has to have been born, and then feels the deft and overpowering pain of circumstance as it draws her away, because the train must be caught, dinner is at a certain time, or the store that sells a particular kind of kitchen implement will close in half an hour.

On the morning of his third day without food, Alessandro had crossed the Gran Sasso and was sitting on a bed of pine needles above a small lake. The wind rushed through the trees and he was drunk on stream water and staring out over the lake. In this condition, he expected that some beauty would appear from nowhere and take him in her arms. He was not surprised, therefore, to hear soft footsteps behind him, and a jingling that sounded like bracelets. He breathed deeply and shut his eyes, and then a thousand sheep and half a dozen dogs came flooding through the forest, bumping up against the trees to scratch, and nibbling at inedible pine cones.
They soon surrounded Alessandro so that all he could see was wool.

 

A
FERTILE
meadow of untouched grass lay on both sides of the stream that fed the lake. It was as big as a small town, and no sheep had been near it for a year. Dogs watched the flock from miniature bluffs upon which they perched like models of the Sphinx, and the shepherds camped on the lakeshore as they waited for the sheep to fatten.