A Soldier of the Great War (7 page)

"Have you ever seen a spirit?" Nicolò asked.

"By the million," came the answer, surprising even Alessandro, who was now not entirely in control of himself. "By the million, in troops of the glowing dead, walking upward on a beam of light.

"Now you listen!" he said to the boy, leaning forward and slamming his palm with his fist. "If you were to go to every museum in the world to look at the paintings in which such a beam of light connects heaven and earth, do you know what you would find? You would find that in whatever time, in whatever country, painter to painter, the angle of light is more or less the same. An accident?"

"I'd have to see. I'd have to measure. I don't know."

"Measure?"

"With a protractor."

"You can measure such things solely with your eyes, and besides, when the last judgment comes, even Marxists won't have protractors."

"I will. I always carry one in my pocket. Look," Nicolò said, pulling out a little red plastic box in which were neatly placed a six-scaled rule, a protractor, a small contour rule, calipers, and precision calipers, nesting there as if they had been prepared for Alessandro Giuliani to see. "You don't know. When you work with machines and you shape things you always have to measure and remeasure to get it right. The machine doesn't tolerate mistakes or excuses. It has nothing to do with what you want or what you hope. You have to get things right or it won't work." As he made this declaration he was so innocent and so exact that he forced the old man into silence. "What?" Nicolò asked, to get Alessandro to talk.

"Your argument is beautiful and surprising, Nicolò," Alessandro said. "In short, you are correct. You must measure and remeasure, to get things right. And because I have not measured all those beams of light, I am ashamed."

"Signore, what happened to you there?"

At this, perhaps because he was exhausted and strained by the walk, the old man bowed his head onto his loosely clenched left fist.

Nicolò leaned forward in a complicated, unfathomable gesture
that showed he would become a wise and compassionate man. He did not apologize for having led Alessandro on, for Alessandro had led himself, but, still, Nicolò was moved, and he felt affection for the old man who, though lame, was teaching him how to walk.

 

T
HEY PICKED
up the pace outside of Acereto. Perhaps because they had eaten and rested, Alessandro found strength. "God compensates perfectly," he said to his companion. "You cannot fall and expect not to rise. Call it the wheel, the lesson of Antaeus, what you will, but strength floods in after a fall.

"And then again," he said cheerily, "it may be just that the moon is about to rise, or it may be the chocolate, or a second wind. Tell me if you want to walk more slowly."

"I think I can keep up with you," Nicolò answered sarcastically.

For the next hour or two, keeping up with Alessandro would be a task that would set the boy to breathing hard and make him think that something might be wrong with his heart, because he found it difficult to stay even with an old man who carried a cane and whose every step was a cross between an uncontrolled pivot and a barely arrested fall.

They were walking up. The road from Acereto to Lanciata was steep in places, ascending to the ridge line of the low mountains that from the rooftops of Rome looked like the Alps, and then twisting dizzily into sheltered valleys where herds of sheep glowed in the moonlight like patches of snow.

They passed drop-offs where the milk-white shoulder of the road became a luminous ramp into an attractive void of weightlessness and rapture. In making the turns, Alessandro came perilously close to the abyss, and at times the edge of the cake would crumble away noiselessly after his foot had left it. He seemed not to notice or care, but to be protected by their almost supernatural momentum, which Nicolò interpreted as a friendly race to see who
could rise faster to the topmost ridge, where the moon would hang voluminously over a noiseless world.

Nicolò stayed away from the edge, and Alessandro was amused. "Of the many excellent things about mountaineering," he said as much to the night, the cliffs, and the air as to the boy taking quick steps beside him, "one of the finest is to become unafraid of heights. When I was a boy, and would climb with my father and the mountain guides he knew or hired, I abhorred the vacuum of an abyss, and my fists were white from clutching the rock. Meanwhile, the guides would sit with legs dangling over an infinite precipice; they would stand on tiny pinnacles, smoking their pipes, coiling ropes, and sorting the climbing hardware; and they would run up and down goat trails sometimes no less vertical and no more contoured than Trajan's Column.

"After a few days in the mountains my father hardly paid attention to the drop underneath the overhanging walls upon which he would stand with his heels on the rock and the rest of his boots projecting out into space.

"I don't remember when I lost my fear, but, perhaps because I'd been afraid for so long, when finally I did it never returned. I haven't been in the mountains since the war, but I don't fear heights. Over the years—along the cliffs of Capri, atop Saint Peter's, climbing onto the roof to straighten a crooked tile—I've found that this part of me, at least, has remained young."

He was in as fine a heat as a youthful runner on a good day. "Do you want me to slow down?" he asked Nicolò.

"No," Nicolò answered, breathlessly, "but perhaps you should, since we are, after all, going up."

"Don't slow on my account," Alessandro warned. "I'll be devastated by morning no matter what I do, so I might as well push hard while I can. Nicolò, the world is full of tart little surprises. Here I am, seventy-four years of age, racing up a mountain, putting you to shame because you are a boy of seventeen and you're
breathing like a nonagenarian. Don't worry. In a few hours you'll probably have to carry me, but, for now, indulge me, sweat a little, follow along in the race."

"What if you keep on like this all the way past Sant' Angelo?" Nicolò asked desperately.

"Then you'll have lots of time to spend with your sister, and they'll bury me in Monte Prato. Better to be buried there than in one of those marble filing cabinets in Rome."

"Aren't you afraid to die?"

"No."

"I am."

"You're not tired."

"I'm not brave, either."

"It has nothing to do with bravery. Bravery is for other things."

"Yes, but you miss people."

"I know that."

"So there's nothing you can do about it, is there."

"You keep them alive."

"You do?"

"Yes."

"Come on!"

"You keep them alive not by skill, not by art, not by memory, but by love. When you understand that, you won't be afraid to die. But that doesn't mean you'll go to your death like a clown. Death, Nicolò, is emotional."

"So is life."

"One hopes."

"Look, Signore, you'd better not die on the road, especially if I'm not there to tell, and you'd better not die especially if I am there, you know what I mean?"

"My granddaughter will know to move me next to my wife. And she and I have a bond strong enough that it hardly matters where we are put, for we have never really parted."

"Oh," Nicolò said, unable to say more, because he was too busy breathing.

"Its true. Anyway, death awakens lawyers. They'll get busy when I go. I've left precise, typewritten instructions. I even say what to do with my suits, my papers, and the little things I have in my desk.

"Almost everything is to be burned. You live on not by virtue of the things you have amassed, or the work you have done, but through your spirit, in ways and by means that you can neither control nor foresee. All my possessions and all my papers will be burned in the pine grove behind my house.

"There I have a metal cage to prevent the flight of cinders large enough to set other things on fire. It's against the municipal code to burn refuse in the center of Rome, but I've taken care of that. I have an envelope addressed to the local inspector and one for his supervisor. I have written a carefully composed ode, in perfect
terza rima,
begging a single indulgence. When I realized that they might not care for my poetry, I thought to enclose twenty-five thousand lire for the inspector, and forty thousand for the supervisor."

"Ten thousand would have done it. Why so much?"

"Because inflation is not unknown in this country, and I may live longer than I expect. Though why I would want to is a mystery. I'm so cautious and conscientious that I feel entirely free to die. If I die on this road, just keep walking. They'll find me. Everything will be taken care of properly."

"You think you're going to die?" Nicolò blurted out between breaths. "I think
I'm
going to die."

"Don't worry," Alessandro said, infuriating him. "I'm still quite fit. I think you probably misinterpreted my gait. Since the war, I've slowed down a bit, and lately I've had to use this," he said, knocking the cane on the road, "but I've rowed on the Tiber, except when it has been bone dry or in flood, for forty years. I row in the
heat and in the rain. I've been rammed by motorboats and attacked by swans. I've seen conquering armies march in on the bridges above me, and then, some years later, march out. I've even been on the river in the snow, and seen it hissing onto the water next to me as my oars swept past, as if I had been not in Rome, but in England. I try not to overdo it, but I'm not feeble like many men my age."

"I can see that," Nicolò responded, sweat glistening on his forehead. "You give another impression," he continued. "The way you dress ... it makes you look like a sugar cake."

"What do you mean?" Alessandro asked, looking down at his clothes.

"It's all white. And your hair's white. You look like a priest in summer, or an ice cream man."

"An ice cream man!"

"Well, that's what you look like. You look so delicate I thought you were about ninety or a hundred."

"A hundred?!" Alessandro was not pleased by such flattery. "In twenty-six years, maybe, when you're forty-three, I'll be a hundred. And the suit isn't white. It's a light cream color. You see?"

"Looks white to me."

"It's hard to make distinctions in starlight. Wait till the full moon rises."

"How do you know it's going to be full?"

"Among other things, it was full yesterday except for a tiny splinter. Tonight, it will be perfectly round. That's why I'm walking so fast."

"You walk fast when the moon is full?"

"Just outside Acereto is a high ridge. Over there," he said, pointing ahead and to the right, to a dark hill that rose higher than the others around it. "There, in the evening, when I don't get thrown off the bus, I can see the sun set over the sea—though at this distance the sea is a line as thin and blue as a tentative stroke
in a watercolor. And you can see Rome as it lights up, faintly at first, but then like a city that's burning. To the east are half a hundred mountain ridges. In the dusk their undulations make them look more like the sea than the sea itself.

"If we can move fast enough we can be there when the moon rises. First it will be orange and amber, like Rome on the opposite side, glowing like the remnant of a bonfire.

"For a moment the amber moon to the east and the amber city to the west will seem to be mirror images, and from the height of the ridge we'll watch them face one another as if they were two cats on either side of a fence. Then, as the moon comes up in ten thousand colors, we can have a drink and eat some chocolate—it's better than watching a movie."

"Is there water up there?" Nicolò asked. "Even now, I'm thirsty. It's because you walk so fast."

"No, there isn't any water up there. It's too high, but I filled a wine bottle that I found. At the top of the ridge, we can drink the cold water of Acereto. We'll need it because we will have worked so hard."

"Where is it?"

"In the briefcase on your back. Part of the reason you're breathing so hard."

"You found a bottle with a cork?"

"I found a bottle, but it has no cork."

"How do you know the water hasn't spilled?"

"I have observed you carefully," Alessandro said. "Since we left Acereto you have not been upside down for a moment. Don't walk on your hands."

"All right," Nicolò promised. He was known among his friends, and at the factory, for being able to walk on his hands.

"Remarkable thing," Alessandro said, "the moon rising. Especially when it's full. It's so gentle, so round, and so light. Every time I see the full moon rise, I think of my wife. Her face was bright and
beautiful, and if it had any imperfection it was that it seemed too perfect, especially when she was young.

"I walk fast because I want to see the moon rise. And I want to see the moon rise because ... I've already told you. Come, it won't wait for us, but it will be there."

They walked on steadily. Nicolò found his breath. He tucked his shirt carefully into his pants and brushed his hair back from his eyes as if he were going to be introduced to someone. And as they walked, he reminded himself now and then that he was not to walk on his hands.

 

"N
OT A
single cloud," Alessandro said as they sat down on a flat rock at the summit of the ridge toward which they had been walking. "For three hundred and sixty degrees, and all the way to the top of the sky, it's as if clouds had never been invented."

The darkness spread away from them on all sides. Even the whitened road curved into a little bow on the summit and then was hidden as it continued down along the ridge. They had left the road and climbed for a minute or two to reach a ledge at the very top of a hill around which the world had been draped like a swirling fluid that has suddenly frozen.

"There's Rome," Alessandro announced, "the color of an ember, but sparkling like a diamond. The dark ribbon you see is the Tiber cutting through the light, and those white flakes, like mica, are the large
piazze.

"If you look west you'll see a tranquil line just beyond the hills. That's the Mediterranean. You can tell it from the sky, for, although they are the same color, in the narrow band of the sea are no stars. The distinction is faint, because the atmosphere dims the stars as they approach the horizon, but if you look hard you'll see."