A Soldier of the Great War (66 page)

The wind that coursed through the pines made their supple branches paint the deep blue sky behind them, and just beyond the first line of markers three riflemen were firing volleys in the air. The same breeze that moved the branches whipped satin flags on staffs bent forward as if in a charge, and carried the small puffs of smoke that emerged from the rifle barrels up and over the heads of the crowd.

While a detachment of young soldiers did their best to imagine, the two old veterans on Alessandro's right had bowed their heads in defeat. Alessandro himself was still wondering after all that time, trying to make sense of memories that never fell into place.

At the front of the crowd were two girls of nine or ten, one wearing a coat and hat of navy-blue wool, the other a more summer-like frock and a hat with flowers marching around the brim. The tops of their heads came up to the elbows of the riflemen. The one in the woolen coat had placed her hands over her ears, and the one with flowers on her hat jumped with each shot, and both were smiling in amazement at the strength of the sound. They must have been a little afraid, and they must have wondered how the men could fire rifles, held so closely to them, without flinching.

 

O
N THE
last full day of work before release, when the fires under the machines were welcome for their warmth, it snowed. No one had ever seen the quarry in snow.

As the first flakes descended early in the morning everyone stopped to stare. For a moment all was silent except the engines,
and then even they were disengaged as their operators turned toward the sky to feel the tiny snow crystals falling against their faces.

The snow grew heavier throughout the afternoon, until the white marble was covered in white, and chains of airborne ice twisting in whirlwinds danced about the soldiers' legs and swallowed them in freezing clouds.

At night, searchlight beams cutting through the snow made it speed up or slow down as they moved, sometimes until the immense number of particles seemed to be rushing to the ground like crashing airplanes, and sometimes until they appeared to be frozen still, or moving back whence they had come.

Blinded by patterns of light and sound that grew ever more confusing and more intense, the soldiers worked themselves up to a feverish pitch to match the pace of falling snow and racing pistons, and, caught in a thousand rhythms, Alessandro seemed to float. Dozens of slabs rode the aerial trams, flashing in and out of the smoke, light, and snow, crossing and intersecting as hammers and saws rang out against the rock. The music of his own heart and breathing, the dervishes of snow that sometimes blinded and sometimes entertained, the mournful steam whistles, the clatter of engines moving across rickety tracks ... the weave here was as tight as it could be, tight enough to elevate the bodiless spirits that labored in it until they floated like swimmers. It had a life of its own, but that life was suddenly shattered when lightning struck amid the snow, homing for the iron that had been laboriously driven into high points. For half an hour hundreds of speechless soldiers were shelled by thunder and light that illuminated every snowflake and blinded them as it scourged the marble cliffs with brightness. The thunder rattled the heavy engines and the lightning made the fires beneath them seem dark and cool.

In the intervals of the bombardment the soldiers were blind, but when the lightning struck they saw every great detail as it was forced upon them with merciless clarity, for whatever it was in the
world that cast spells also sent storms of sound and light to break them.

 

T
HE TRAIN
north was stopped in Rome for forty minutes, the doors of its windowless boxcars thrown open, and the men allowed to pour out. Believing that they were on their way back to the Isonzo, most of them dashed for the prostitutes and restaurants conveniently located in and around the railroad station.

"For those of you who wish to visit libraries and museums," a sarcastic young officer had said, "keep in mind that if you are not in the train when it leaves, you will probably be condemned to death."

Few went beyond the confines of the station itself. Those who did dared not venture more than a block or two, where they spent half an hour bouncing up and down on a woman in a bed, or eating a meal, of exaggerated richness, that they might later involuntarily display to their comrades cooped-up in the same swaying boxcar.

But Alessandro ran through Rome as fast as a horse. He hardly ever touched a sidewalk, preferring the street. His papers and his pass were in his left hand, and a bayonet was tucked inside his tunic.

The streets were crowded early in the evening, so Alessandro allowed himself fifteen minutes to get to the Ministry of War. Assuming that he could evade capture, he would need fifteen minutes to get back. Including the difficult and perhaps impossible feat of gaining entry to the ministry and finding Orfeo—if indeed he were there—Alessandro would have ten minutes in which to do the deed.

Had the changing of engines, filling of tanks, and loading of provisions taken another twenty minutes, Alessandro would have run home to see Luciana, but chance had directed him to murder the old scribe.

That evening the wind was coming from the northeast, where battles and winter were in action simultaneously. The city had been ever-so-lightly dusted with snow, and though none had lasted, the chill remained. People wore heavy coats and furs. Many soldiers in all sorts of uniform were walking casually, marching in units, bearing messages, driving carts. No one seemed to notice Alessandro.

As he raced through streets and piazzas and the warrens and alleys that surrounded them like masses of brambles, he smelled chocolate, coffee, and hot milk in expresso bars, and fish frying in olive oil, beef roasting, bread baking. If the doors to a leather shop, a stationer's, or a haberdasher's would happen to open as he flew by, he caught the scent of their wares and remembered the delights of peace. He loved Rome most when the wind was cold and the piazzas were empty. Then, if you listened hard, you could hear the accumulated song of the city, the residue and reflection of whole ages and their destruction. He was going extremely fast, but occasionally he had several seconds' view through ranks of houses, when he saw the Gianicolo, and his own house perched on the hillside like a lifeless projection of rock. He looked for lights and was disoriented because he saw none.

One could not enter the Ministry of War without either a pass or an appointment, and half a dozen efficient sentries monitored the in-going traffic. They checked each pass and detained holders of appointments until receiving telephone clearance. Alessandro approached the enormous building, hoping to find an unwatched opening or a clear space of fence that he could scale. One of the entrances in the back was filled with motorized trucks unloading supplies. Thinking to ride like Ulysses under the belly of a ram, Alessandro walked up a ramp upon which half a dozen provisioners' vehicles were parked. Then he veered toward the loading dock, intending to help in carrying or just to walk past the two lackadaisical sentries. After all, he was in the uniform of the Italian army, and he felt entitled to be there. As he passed a wine truck he
noticed that its front wheels were resting against chocks. He removed the chocks.

The truck was overloaded with five-liter Chianti bottles. It rolled silently down the ramp, hit a stone pillar, and overturned in such a way as to fling out the bottles and smash them against a stone wall in a chain of muffled explosions.

No one was able to resist the overturned truck, and as the sentries ran to it, holding their rifles by the throat and swinging the butts like pendula, Alessandro walked past a phalanx of cooks who had gathered to watch the catastrophe. In a minute he was wandering freely in the corridors, just like any other clerk or orderly.

The hall of scribes was dim and half deserted. Only the grayest, palest natural light came from its high windows, and that was rapidly fading. A few gas chandeliers were lit above the long rows between desks, but most of the scribes had turned off their individual electric lamps and gone home. Those that remained were bent into pools of cheerful yellow light in the center of the desks. The scratchings of the remaining pens, the occasional adjustment of a chair, and the quiet breathing were appropriate to an examination hall, and yet here, where the absolute destiny of hundreds of thousands was decided as if this were heaven itself, was none of the terror and urgency of a university examination hall, in which the stakes were almost meaningless. Here the pen scratches sounded like insects chewing leaves or corn, but in the great written examinations of Bologna they had sounded like flames consuming a house.

Orfeo's lamp was lit but he was not at his desk on the raised platform. "Where is Signor Quatta?" Alessandro inquired of a stray scribe.

"The chief is absent from his desk."

"I know that. Where is he?"

"He's in a different post."

"Where?"

"He's not available."

"Excuse me," Alessandro asked, after a moment of reflection. "Would you be so kind as to direct me to the water cabinets?"

"Of course," answered the stray scribe. "Down the center aisle, just outside the main door, to the left."

A pair of pointy black riding shoes was suspended over the floor, heels resting above the porcelain base of a toilet so as to set them at a ninety-degree angle to one another. Before the view was cut off at the top by the stall door, the headline of a newspaper showed, upside down. Smoke rose in a white twisting column, and every now and then a bitter laugh would echo within the marble walls of the latched chamber. Alessandro rattled the door with martial violence.

"What! Occupied!" shouted Orfeo, but Alessandro shook the door so fiercely that the screws began to work out of the marble. "Occupied! Occupied! Occupied!" Orfeo screamed.

Then Alessandro began to kick-in the door.

Orfeo screamed "Wha?" and the pointy shoes hit the ground. When the latch was broken and the door flew open, Orfeo had just finished buckling his belt and was trying to button up his fly.

Alessandro appeared with his bayonet drawn. It glittered with gun oil that oozed down the blood groove.

"Filthy! Filthy!" Orfeo yelled. "It will make an infection."

"Infection will be irrelevant."

"I saved your life."

"You murder others."

"What were they to you? If you had told me, I could have spared them, too. It never even occurred to me."

"You wrote the execution orders?"

"Of course. We have to do everything at a steady pace. If we don't—huh, well—the pile of execution forms in the supplies cabinet looms over the others, and it looks asymmetrical. So, for every transfer, and for every ten requisitions, five discharges, et cetera, et cetera,
toga virilis,
we have to do an execution."

Alessandro stared at Orfeo in disbelief as the time passed dangerously and the water in the toilet pipes hissed like singers in an insane asylum. He remembered how Guariglia had died, and he pushed Orfeo farther back into the stall and closed the door behind them.

"I had to do it! I had to do it! You can't let things get asymmetrical. If you do a job you do it right—
totus porcus, hocus pocus, diplodocus, fan quae sentiat le farceur!
"

"Christ!" Alessandro screamed.

Orfeo had retreated to the toilet, where he stood with one foot in the bowl. "For the love of God, don't kill me in a toilet," he begged.

Breathing hard, Alessandro stepped back, and leaned against the door. "Where would you like to be killed?"

Orfeo cleared his throat. "I would like to be killed ... in the whitest most boneless valley of the moon, where the blessed sap congeals like alabaster and flows in dough-like strata. I would like to be killed within earshot of the soundless sweep of the blessed one's hot golden robe as it decapitates the breathless atmospheres of the lighter planets and takes the air of day from the unchangeable path of the holy blessed sap." He paused. "I would not like to be killed with a bayonet," he said, smiling.

"No?"

"No, he wouldn't like it."

"Who?"

"The great master of the holy gracious sap, the lord whose foot quashes suns, who directs and interprets through my tense hand the jerky flow of the holy blessed sap. The sap of his outermost capillaries plays havoc with the earth, for the way the sap exits in lines and curves is the scythe of fate. As the holy blessed sap falls in chanting forms, life and death follow. Not even a breaking wave could strike harder than the blessed sap as it quietly dries on parchment and vellum wrenched from the innards of piously dancing sheep."

Alessandro lowered the bayonet and leaned back against the door.

"My scribes admire me," Orfeo replied, still standing in the toilet. "They shine my boots, press my coat, and bring my lunch on a silver tray. When I talk to them about the gracious sap, everybody listens. A symmetry has evolved because the sap will not surrender. The blessed one approaches, throwing veils of sap ahead of him like an American mantis.

"I don't murder anyone. I sit with my sap. No longer do I create orders anew. I gave that up long ago. It was not helping the gracious symmetry of the sap."

"Now you write the orders exactly?"

"Exactly, but for one thing. I transpose numbers. One hundred and seventy-eight sappers to Padua becomes eight hundred and seventy-one. The tenth of May becomes the fifth of November, and so on."

"I'm surprised we haven't lost the war."

"To the contrary," Orfeo said, wagging his finger, "the war goes brilliantly, and I don't even care. My effect on the war is like that of a rainstorm on a sailing race. I'm not after anything but sap. It doesn't make any difference. It's like those cages full of monkey balls. It doesn't matter which one is drawn—except for the monkeys—the effect is the same. What do you want of me? Really! I warned you. I warned everyone.

"You were all too tense and too tall. You thought life was graceful and would continue gracefully, and that you would never hear from people like me, but now the harpsichord sings for my kind—not from our effort, but from the mad turning of the ball.