A Soldier of the Great War (9 page)

On rows of improvised benches built into hay trucks were scores of exhausted farmers and their wives. One truck pulled a trailer stacked with tools that glimmered in the moonlight. As the convoy passed Alessandro and Nicolò in the shadows, they saw a figure rise to its feet in one truck and lean against the slatted railing. "You get me up on time tomorrow, Bernardo, or you can walk home, you son of a bitch."

From the other truck came the reply. "What can I do? The full moon throws off the clocks!"

"Hey, what's that?" the first man asked, pointing at the ledge where Alessandro Giuliani and Nicolò Sambucca sat in the moonlight. Word was passed from vehicle to vehicle, the convoy halted, and the band stopped playing. The only sound was from the knocking of diesel rocker arms.

"No matter what they say, don't answer," Alessandro told Nicolò under his breath, "and don't move."

"Why? What for?" Nicolò protested.

"To enrich their folklore."

"You're crazy!"

"Shut up."

"Hello!" someone screamed from a truck. "Hello there!"

When no answer came, everyone pressed against the rails on one side, and the trucks tilted.

For a time the farmers were as still as the objects of their curiosity. Then one of them jumped to the ground and scrambled up the rock. He approached Alessandro and Nicolò more gingerly than he would have approached an angry bull. Though for every step forward it seemed that he took two steps back, he magically advanced to within five paces of them. "What do you want?" he asked, as if they had insulted him.

Since neither of them wanted anything, it was easy not to answer.

The farmer stared at them for a while, mumbled something, and ran away.

When he reached the road, he said, "It's an old man, all dressed up, and a boy. They say nothing! They're like stone!" This caused much buzzing.

"Shine a light on them!" someone shouted.

A truck backed up and maneuvered itself so that its headlights shone on the two mysterious figures. They stared into the lights and were absolutely still.

"You see! I told you. I said it, didn't I? Just like I said."

"Hey you," someone yelled. "Who are you? What are you, spirits or something?"

One of the women began to wail. Soon it was a chorus. The truck that had left the line quickly returned, and the farmers drove away, crossing themselves.

"In a thousand years," Alessandro said, "this incident will be remembered. By then, of course, we will have become angels, devils, or a dragon that breathes fire—but we have given this rock a story that will be passed on."

"What good is that?"

"It isn't to our advantage, if that's what you mean. However, it's pleasurable to cast a line into the future, no matter how tenuously. You never know, the line may be unbroken all the way to the last judgment.

"Which is better, you see, than just living and dying, and being buried in a filing cabinet near a chemical factory. Or do you want merely to tread the mill until you drop off? Nicolò, mischief is important. But why should I be telling this to you? At your age, you should have it in your bones, even if you don't know why you should. It's because we don't know everything. Therefore, it sometimes makes sense to break the plan and go where we are not supposed to go.

"Besides, it was none of their business. I didn't feel like being interrogated in the night. This is our journey, not theirs."

The band started up again. "They've recovered," Alessandro said, "but they're going to make me pay."

"Pay? How can they make you pay?"

"Their music." Alessandro seemed weak. He closed his eyes.

"What can I do? Do you want water?" Nicolò asked.

"No," the old man said, waving him away, "I'll be all right. Leave me alone for a while, and then we'll start walking again."

Nicolò moved to another part of the ledge. He heard Alessandro sigh, and then saw him rest his head in his hands. He was the strangest man Nicolò had ever seen. His behavior was at times inexplicable, but though Nicolò didn't understand Alessandro, he knew that whatever was happening to him was proceeding on its own schedule, independently of events on the road even if they lent themselves to its expression.

Alessandro was drawn back in time. As if it were really in front of him, he saw a metal wheel silhouetted against a perfectly clear sky, turning steadily as it pulled-in steel cable and paid it out. He bent his head and covered his eyes as the sun flashed through the spokes. The wheel was the upper terminus of a freight trolley that ran over a vast abyss.

 

I
N THE
South Tyrol, in July of 1899, surrounded by belled cows and flat farmland, the small settlement of Vols stood alone on a
plateau at the foot of forests and meadows that climbed up a steep mountainside to the point where it became vertical rock. Two kilometers above it, often higher than the clouds, on a fortress plateau where the wind was icy even in summer and trees could not grow, was the Schlernhaus. Most buildings of the several European alpine clubs were called
Hütten,
and rightly so, but not this, for it was tremendous. To haul the stone, timbers, and slate of which it had been built, and to keep it supplied thereafter, mountaineers had pulled up line after line of increasingly heavier rope until at the end of the last one (winched to them by a steam engine they had carried in many pieces on their backs) came a shiny steel cable.

The wheel upon which the cable turned had been revolving smoothly in three-quarter time for more than a decade when the Roman lawyer Giuliani first brought his son to the mountains, and the boy, at age nine, had run across a rocky meadow to the machinery outlined against a sky that rivaled the maritime blues of Venice.

The four-spoked wheel seemed as light as air. As if it had a will of its own, it pulled at times against its torsion brake, or held back, it slowed down or sped up, or sometimes stopped dead and then started again, full of purpose and resolve. Alessandro was amazed to realize that on the delicate lines of the cableway and through the graceful spinning of its wheel the massive Schlernhaus had been built and was maintained.

"Sandro!" his father called, and watched as his son returned to him over the meadow, jumping from rock to rock like a little goat.

It wasn't enough for Alessandro to measure the proportions of a room with his eyes; he had to touch every wall and agitate from boundary to boundary as if he were a torrent settling into a pool, and in their tiny wooden-walled bedroom he bounced back and forth like a cannonball. The beds were so high that he had to use pegs in the wall to climb into them, and he jumped from one to the other, sailing over the narrow chasm between. Though the window was small, it gave out upon a scene of silver-and-white mountains
that challenged the eye to follow them into the distance. Before dinner the first night, Alessandro climbed up on the ledge to open the window. He undid the latch, and the wind came in so violently that at first it tumbled him backward onto the bed. When the attorney Giuliani returned from shaving, a china bowl in his hands, he saw his son, all bundled up in wool, crouching on the sill like a cat. As air howled through every crack in the walls, the young Alessandro stared into the wind as if he had discovered it.

In the daylight hours they visited the peaks, with Alessandro roped to his father like a dog on a leash when they scrambled across rock faces and over glaring snowfields. They ascended the Schlern itself, the Roterd Spitze (which they called the Cima Rossa) and the Mittagskofl. They descended into the Seiser Alpe, gently sloping meadows that had no apparent limits and seemed to be a world unto themselves. They went as far east along the mountain line as the Cresta Nera, where they saw only two other climbers but a dozen shaggy milk-white goats standing on ledges that could only have been miraculously attained. Wandering in the many hours of light, the attorney Giuliani and his son learned to crave the cold wind so that the more they were in it, the richer they felt. Their eyes followed the omnipresent distances, and as the mountains acted upon them and their spirits were calmed and enlarged, they saw the difference between what they once had been and what they had become. After a day's or two days' absence from Rome, they never would have been able to sit in the center of a snowfield, feeding upon the silence and the sun, but after a week they could, and they trudged to snowfields, cliffs, and empty valleys, where they passed the time as quietly as goatherds.

One evening they approached the Schlernhaus in the dark. Its glowing windows, shining through patches of frozen cloud, were like lighthouse beacons. Inside, sullen cadets in blue aprons and rounded blue-and-white army caps worked feverishly in a huge kitchen as humid and warm as a steam bath, and peeked into the
dining room as often as they could to see if they could see a woman.

It was high summer, so only the cookstoves were lit, and not the huge tiled heaters in the main areas. After twelve or fourteen hours on the snowfields and in the wind, many diners shuddered with chill.

Alessandro found it difficult to come from the outside, where it was below freezing, and sit down to drink hot soup in a room little warmer than the rime-covered meadows they had just left. Every day at dusk he was overcome by great sadness, and he longed for his mother, his house, and the summer in Rome. His father, too, was unusually quiet at this time, and often spoke of cutting a few days from the trip, but one evening they returned to the Schlernhaus and didn't think about such things even for a moment.

Two soldiers of the
Leibregiment,
the Hapsburg royal guard, were stationed at the main door. Like elite soldiers the world over, they looked as if they would be delighted to stay outside all night, and their heavy fur cloaks suggested that perhaps they would. The huge spaces of the Schlernhaus, even the warren-like upper floors, were warm and dry. A fire burned in every stove, flags were draped from the rafters, and one of the floors was roped off. Behind the rope were another two soldiers even larger than the set downstairs.

Alessandro changed, and descended to the uncharacteristically warm dining room. The attorney Giuliani leaned toward a table at which were seated half a dozen Viennese, and inquired in his best German about the sudden heat, the guards, and why the cadets in the kitchen were buttoned up, polished, and overwhelmed by trays of cakes, oven-fired casseroles, and roasting game.

The Austrians consulted among themselves by eye. The attorney Giuliani was Italian, and Italy had designs upon the very mountains where they, the Austrians, had to respond to questions posed by Italians who had had the gall to come there in the first place. Nonetheless, they answered him, coldly and briefly, in two
words: "
Eine Fürstin.
" That was enough, in 1899, in the Südtirol, to explain everything.

Alessandro was rapidly learning German, but his teachers had omitted this word. "What is it? What is it?" he chattered, shifting around in his seat, his legs hanging far off the floor, but his father was asking a passing waiter why no bread was on the table.

"No one eats until she comes down," the waiter said, "but in return for waiting, you get to have what they have—venison, pheasant, cakes, things I have never even seen. They brought two chefs, and the cable was busy all day with provisions, one entire gondola just for baking supplies."

"What did he say? What did he say?" Alessandro asked, jumping out of his skin. "What's
'eine Fürstin'?"

As if his language were ugly and prohibited, the attorney Giuliani leaned over and said, "
Eine Fürstin è una principessa ... Eine Fürstin
is 'a princess.'"

Alessandro froze. The very word
principessa
had shut him up immediately, and he was now in a daze, eyes glassy, mouth open. He had read about princes and princesses far beyond whatever can be expressed by the term
ad nauseam,
and here were a castle on top of a mountain, soldiers in fur cloaks, and a real princess herself. Suddenly, in the normally frigid room where they had their soup and cutlets, all the elements of his dreams had combined to hit him in the face like an ermine glove.

Alarmed at the strange, twisted expression on his son's face, the attorney Giuliani took hold of Alessandro's shoulder and shook him.

Then they heard the ringing of a little silver bell, and a real, professional flunkey in a powdered wig swept into the room and screamed, "All rise!"

Everyone did, even the attorney Giuliani, egalitarian and republican, perhaps because he knew that old cats and dying empires viciously insist upon decorum.

Still forgetting to breathe, Alessandro mounted his chair, napkin in hand. From a distance he looked like a tall man with a very-small head. As a group of people clomped down the stairs, Alessandro was so excited that he feared he would fall off the chair. Then, exactly as he had expected, a girl of about eleven entered the room as if she had lived there all her life. She was what adults call a slip of a girl, slim and delicate, with perfect, glowing features, blond hair, and red cheeks. She was dressed in a flowered dirndl that departed from the standard in that it had been made from sable-like black velvet and embroidery thread of real gold.

Alessandro's heart burst, broke, swelled, heaved, froze, stuck, stopped, and surrendered all at the same time. He bowed deeply, sweeping the checkered napkin across the table. Fortunately for him, no one saw this, for they were waiting for the princess to enter the room and she was still on her way. The little girl was the child of someone in the royal entourage.

The princess entered slowly, supporting herself on two ebony canes. Two retainers walked beside her so that she might not fall. She was attired in black, and a heavy veil obscured her face. She was so frail that it was not out of the question to think that the soldiers of the
Leibregiment
had carried her up the mountain, for it had to have been either that or a ride in the open freight gondola.

She faced the climbers and hikers, who bowed or curtsied with tremendous satisfaction. She was their mirror. In bowing to her they merely were paying respect to themselves, honoring the world they had made, and confirming that all was right within it. Whether or not this was true, they believed that no better shield of tranquillity existed than an empire on land. For centuries and centuries the Hapsburgs had ruled and protected quiet unvisited valleys, plains thundering with horsemen, and chains of godly and indomitable mountains—all with a fullness and peace that warred with the illogic of their vast untenable domain.