A Soldier of the Great War (60 page)

"They'll shoot us, won't they?" Fabio asked.

"Yes," Alessandro answered from above.

"Against those trees."

Alessandro nodded.

"Oh well," Fabio said.

Guariglia closed his eyes.

"Alessandro," Fabio began with great earnestness. "Do you think they'll have beautiful women in heaven?"

Guariglia cringed.

"Millions of them, but how do you know you're going there?"

Fabio looked intensely pleased. "My mother told me," he answered. "She said, no matter what, I was going to heaven. She promised."

Alessandro shrugged his shoulders.

"How's the food in this prison?" Fabio asked. "Is it decent?"

"Sometimes we get an egg," Ludovico said, coming to the bars.

"What?"

"Sometimes we get an egg."

"Who's that?" Fabio inquired.

"His name is Ludovico Indian. He doesn't have a last name, because he's a communist."

"Adami, Fabio," Fabio volunteered, almost coquettishly, "and this is Guariglia." Guariglia stared at the ground. "He's a real veteran, but he's not so happy now."

An officer entered the yard and ordered the prisoners to form ranks. They were used to such exercises, and in no time at all they formed orderly rows that, though they had neither weapons nor equipment, made them look formidable.

The officer was yet another student-type, with wire glasses, and he addressed the prisoners. "This is M.P. Four, which you'll call Stella Maris. You can't escape, and anyone who tries will be shot on the spot. You get three eggs and two oranges a week, a haircut and a bath every two weeks. Don't complain about the food, it's as good as in any other prison, or better. We maintain military discipline up to the last, even as you come out here to be shot.

"Everybody asks why, so I'll tell you. It's the only thing you've got. You go through all the motions of life knowing that you're going to die, don't you? You go through them anyway. You shave, you play
bocce,
you polish the doorknobs, you make a big deal
about growing a mustache. Everybody wastes time. The same goes for Stella Maris. You're still in the army, and you'll maintain military discipline until you die. It'll give you satisfaction. On the other hand, if you don't do it, you'll feel like a jellyfish and you'll suffer too much, and at the very end you'll crap in your pants. You're all going to die, soon. So am I. I'm under sentence, too. On the first of January, I'm the first to go. Follow my example. Watch what I do. Stand straight until the bullets enter your chest. It's the only way. Dismissed! Line up at the gate."

"Who the hell is that?" Alessandro asked Ludovico.

"Didn't you get that speech?"

"No, and I didn't get a bath, either. Is he for real?"

"He killed a colonel, because the colonel was shooting his own men. They sentenced him for the first of January. Usually you go the next morning, but they wanted to give him plenty of time to think about it."

"He's beating them."

"So rar."

"What about the bath?"

"Tonight. And a haircut."

"I don't want a haircut."

"Tough. I think they sell the hair, for mattresses."

"That's disgusting."

"No it isn't. Maybe a baby will sleep on the mattress. I like the idea."

 

T
HE BARBERS
arrived in the afternoon. They were little rotund men, almost all of them bald, who balanced on ammunition boxes and sheared the hair off the heads of the soldiers, who stood for their haircuts after waiting in long lines.

The prisoners were removed from their cells in groups of fifty, in a complicated pattern based on cell blocks and floors. They were
assembled in a huge hall where the barbers stood on their ammunition boxes, electric clippers in hand, the cables twisted into a braid that disappeared through a hole knocked into one of the walls.

In groups of five the prisoners were then passed into a terrazzo-floored shower room where miserable common soldiers threw buckets of soapy water at them and sprayed them with cattle-washing hoses borrowed from a slaughterhouse. After they were rinsed they were pushed into a shallow pool of hot water, where they were allowed to stay for a few minutes. When they emerged they filed through long halls and were dried by the wind. At the end of the halls they picked up their damp newly washed uniforms. They called all this the washing machine.

Alessandro and Ludovico were at the ends of two of the lines, and another soldier, Fabio, and Guariglia were at the ends of the others. Everything was rushed, and though they weren't permitted to talk, they did.

They never knew the other soldier's name, and they never saw him again. He was two days from his execution, and very eloquent in his desperation. He was probably a physicist.

"Shit!" he said, which seemed eloquent enough. "Damn! I can't die. I can't die. I have to survive. It'll take forty years to develop my theory. Jesus, I can't die."

"What theory?" Fabio asked.

"Gravity," he said, "I figured out gravity. I know what gravity is, and magnetism, and they're going to shoot me before I can develop the theory. They don't listen. I try to tell them, but they don't listen.

"There's no such thing as gravitational pull. It's a push from an all-pervasive force, but the force moves in straight lines, so it casts a shadow because it can't go around mass. It goes through and it gets absorbed. On the other side, another object is accelerated toward it because of a lack of pressure between the two—because the
gravitational rays that would balance it have been weakened or cut off by the intervening mass.

"The perfect radiative body is the perfect absorber of gravitational force, and so everything is pushed to it and doesn't escape, because nothing goes through it to moderate the effect of the pushing on the other side.

"Variations in gravity are simply a function of intervening mass. Mass is a function of molecular resistance to gravity, and what counts is not what everyone takes to be the traditional determinant of mass but, rather, the expanse and force of the atomic and molecular bonds.

"Magnetism is the exclusion of gravitational force from an area between two bodies, so they're pushed together, as if in a vacuum. And electrical energy is the release of the potential from the violation of this condition, convertible at will to the recreation of it.

"It's not particles or waves that fly about the universe but an ether of sorts, and what we perceive experimentally to be movement is the opening and closing of gates. Light is the condition when the gates are open. That's why it doesn't interfere with itself, why the speed of light is uniform no matter what the relative speed of its starting point, why two beams fired head-on do not cancel one another out.

"Christ, I can put it all together. I've thought of a hundred tests for verification. I see light, magnetism, electricity, and gravity in equation, and the theory handily explains inertia. I have a lifetime of experimentation, but I can bring it all together."

He turned to the barber. "You've got to tell them. Please! You've got to tell them. For God's sake, tell them that I can reconcile Newtonian mechanics with the theory of relativity. Tell them to get a physicist here. In an hour I can pass it on to him. Get an officer. Tell an officer."

The barber hadn't the slightest idea what the physicist was talking about. "If
you
thought of it," he said, "someone else must have
thought of it already. Don't worry." He pressed the switch on the clippers, and electricity ran through the cord, to power the magnets that spun the shaft that turned the gears that moved the blades that shaved the physicist in preparation for his execution. A blue spark was playing inside the motor, crackling and making ozone.

The barbers cut close to the scalp and drew blood. They had just started, they were already ankle deep in hair, and the sound of the clippers was like the sound of a mechanized bee hive. "It's getting dark, and they're tired," Alessandro told Guariglia. "After all, they've already had a day's work in Rome."

"I hope my children never find out that before they shot me they shaved my head."

"If your children found out, they'd love you even more."

"I miss them. They won't remember me."

"Yes they will."

"No," Guariglia said. "The memory will fade. They're too young."

Alessandro, Ludovico, Fabio, and Guariglia stepped into position by the barbers' ammunition boxes. As the barbers ran the electric shears along their skulls, their hair fell to the floor, matting and entangling with the hair of the soldiers who had preceded them. Then they moved forward, each of them bleeding from small cuts, and removed their clothes.

"How do they get us back our uniforms?" Fabio asked.

"Ever the fashion plate," Alessandro said.

Ludovico told them that a soldier looked at them, judged their size, and reached without looking into one of three bins. "He throws the stuff at you. He doesn't look at it, and he doesn't look at you, since by the time he's going to toss it he's already sizing up the next guy."

"Shut up," said a guard standing off to the side.

"That's tailoring..." Fabio stated.

"Shut up," the guard repeated without passion.

"...fit for the King of Spain."

The shower room smelled of mold and salt, and was lit by one clear bulb that projected the sharp shadows of its filaments onto the walls. The bodies of the five soldiers were pale, but their faces, necks, and forearms were sunburned. With shaven heads and blood dripping down their shoulders they seemed like animals on the way to slaughter. Alessandro could hardly look at Guariglia's stump. It was rounded, covered with fresh scar tissue, and still inflamed.

The hoses stiffened and the men were hit with shockingly cold blasts of sea water. The first volley pushed Guariglia over and made Alessandro sink to his knees. It knocked the breath out of them, opened their cuts, and, though he tried valiantly to get up, it kept Guariglia on the floor.

"Sea water!" someone exclaimed. It was ice cold and it stung. The two soldiers threw buckets of cold soapy water at them, and they struggled as if they were in the surf.

Then they were hit again with the high-pressure brine. "Christ!" Fabio screamed, and, because he had protested, the soldier with the hose aimed the stream of water at his jaw. It hurled him against a wall. When they were done, Fabio was less steady than Guariglia.

They stumbled through a corridor, went down some steps, and were literally pushed into a pool of warm water.

"What is this?"

"It's a swimming pool," Ludovico said.

"It's too shallow."

They were unable to figure out what it was as they sat in it and listened to the wind coming up from the sea.

"It's a bubble bath," Fabio said, his hand pressed to his jaw. Then, for a few minutes, no one said anything.

"Alessandro, you have money, don't you," Guariglia asked.

"I don't. My father is fairly well off."

"That's what all rich sons say," Ludovico mumbled.

"Compared to me, you're rich," Guariglia continued.

Ludovico had assumed the expression of a pointer in a bird sanctuary, because, for him, wealth was an indisputable sign of evil.

"If you get out of here," Guariglia asked, "will you take care of my children? To help them ... It will be difficult for their mother."

"I'm not getting out of here, Guariglia...."

"Will you write a letter?"

Luciana had many troubles. Their father was permanently incapacitated, and would need care. Alessandro didn't know the state of the Giuliani finances other than that the garden had been sold for the sake of acquiring the land near the Villa Borghese. He didn't know if this land was now worth anything at all, or even if they could afford to carry it. If Rafi were wounded or killed, Luciana would need all the money she could get. And yet, Guariglia was a harness-maker, and he had two small children. Their timidity and innocence had been perhaps the most beautiful thing Alessandro had seen since the war began.

"Are we allowed to write letters?" Alessandro asked Ludovico.

"After the trial you have the whole night to write letters. They give you the paper and pen, and they don't censor."

Alessandro turned to Guariglia. "I will," he said. "We're not rich, but we have some money. I'll ask my father to do it for me, I promise."

Guariglia bent his head until his face almost touched the water.

 

W
HEN THEY
left the pool they were just as dizzy and breathless as when they had entered. At the end of the long corridor a soldier threw uniforms at them, and after they dressed they were brought onto a long terrace flanked by battlements. Fabio immediately went to look over the side and reported that anyone who wanted to drop down would not have to go through the trouble of being executed.

Alessandro looked about for chains, ropes, cables, vines, or anything that might be useful in descent. He peered over the side, looking for holds, but the wall was perfectly smooth. They settled into a corner to await the return to cells.

Though it was nearly dark, the sun struck the tops of huge clouds that had skidded in from the sea. They were not the kind of marine clouds that build up like mountains but, rather, like traveling foothills, ragged on the edges, black beneath, and pink and white on top. The sky was the mildest blue anyone had ever seen, and two planets shone just above the horizon.

"Look at the clouds," Alessandro said. "They pass so gently and so quietly, but as if with such resolution. Someone once said they were rafts for souls."

"I would like that," Guariglia said. "I'd prefer to stay nearby and look down, to pass over Rome. It sounds to me a little better than all the stuff about being in the stars, because you wouldn't be able to breathe up there, and it would be either too bright or too dark. In the clouds, on the other hand, ah, that would be nice."

"Yes," Fabio added, innocently. "You would be able to see your children. You could paddle over Rome and check on them now and then."

"I'm going to write a letter to my children and tell them to look for me there," Guariglia said. "Even if it's not true, it's a good way to remember.