A Soldier of the Great War (98 page)

 

W
HO WAS
this that arrived half an hour before closing and slowly took the stairs, ignoring all the paintings? Every guard in every museum in the world gets a nervous stomach when such people enter his precincts, for these unshaven glassy-eyed men are the ones who pull knives from their jackets and destroy works close to the soul of man. They are the ones who use ball-peen hammers to knock the noses off marble Madonnas. They attack paintings because in every great painting they see the somber flash of God, they see themselves as the truth would have it, and they see all that enrages them for the lack of it.

A museum guard who resembled, at best, a type of French railway guard of very slight stature, slicked-down black hair, poor health, and too much to drink, followed

Alessandro across the highly polished floor with a gait so apprehensive and full of fear that he sounded like a prancing dog with untrimmed nails.

Alessandro wheeled around and glowered at him. "Are you positioning yourself to bite my behind!" he shouted.

The guards mouth tightened, and he screwed up all his courage. "This is a museum," he said.

"I know it's a museum," Alessandro replied.

"That's all I want to say."

Alessandro turned away and walked through the wide portals from room to room, until he was in the presence of Giorgione's painting.

"That is
La Tempesta
," the guard said, having stuck right by him.

"I see," Alessandro said.

"It's very beautiful, and no one knows what it means."

"What do you think it means?" Alessandro asked.

"I think it's going to rain and that guy is wondering why she's going to take a bath."

"Probably that's it."

"They say no one will ever know."

"It was to have been the story of my life," Alessandro said with the kind of affection that one devotes to defeat that has come so close to victory as to be able to kiss it. "I was a soldier, the world was battered in a storm, and she was under a canopy of light, untouched, the baby in her arms."

"Were you in the fighting? Then it could be you," the guard said, suddenly of the opinion that Alessandro was not a slasher but, instead, one of the many unhappy soldiers who filled the streets of the cities, their hearts and minds lost in memories of the war. "You find a woman, you get married,
binga, binga, binga, binga,
you got a baby."

"It's not that simple."

"Why?"

"Just believe me."

"All right, I believe you."

Alessandro could feel the high wind coming and hear the rattle of the leaves in the trees as they shuddered and swayed. As the rain approached, the light seemed both tranquil and doomed. The soldier was serene because he had been through many a storm, and the woman was serene because she had at her breast the reason for all history and the agent of its indefatigable energy. Between them floated a bolt of lightning that joined and consecrated them.

"Sometimes," the guard said, "people come in here and stare at this painting for a long time, and they cry."

After a silence in which something seemed to have been building very rapidly, Alessandro asked, "Who? Soldiers?"

"Well, no, not soldiers."

Without changing the position of his feet, Alessandro made a quarter turn toward the guard. "Who?"

"All kinds of people."

"Yes?"

"What do you want me to do, name them?" the guard asked.

"Tell me about them."

"Why?"

"I'm one of them, am I not? I want to know."

"It's almost time to close."

"Will you be here tomorrow?"

"I'll be here, but I won't be able to tell you anything then that I can't tell you now."

"So tell me now."

"Oh! What do you want me to do? Describe them?"

"Yes. Describe them."

"All right. There was a gentleman, about ten years older than you..."

"Go on to the next one."

"I didn't say anything!"

"I'm not interested in him. Go on."

The guard looked at Alessandro with an expression that said he was returning to his initial assessment of Alessandro's mental condition. "There was another guy," he began.

"I'm not interested in him either."

"This is crazy," the guard said.

"Keep on."

"I suppose you're not interested in the old lady..."

"No."

"...who lost her husband."

"No."

"Or the woman ... who came in ... with a baby." Alessandro did not interrupt. In the habit of being interrupted, the guard
echoed his last words. "With a baby." After a long silence, he said, "And stood in front of the painting, and cried."

Assaulted by electricity rising along his spine and traveling out upon the path of his limbs, Alessandro quietly asked, "When was this?"

"A while ago. Sometime in the spring. It was still raining and rather cold. I wore wool and ate soup for lunch because it was so cold."

"If you remember that," Alessandro stated cautiously, "perhaps you have an extraordinary memory for details."

"Not extraordinary," the guard said proudly, "but, you know, you stand here all day looking at paintings, and, unless you're an idiot, you learn to notice things. You remember."

"What was she like?" Alessandro asked.

"She was very pretty."

"What color was her hair?"

"Blond, but she was an Italian."

"How do you know?"

"Because," the guard said, rightfully proud to have remembered, "she spoke Italian. She also spoke to the baby in French. She was well educated, and those kind of people speak French to their babies."

"The color of her eyes?"

"I don't remember. I never remember the color of people's eyes."

"What was she wearing?"

"That I wouldn't know either, but my wife could tell you. She remembers clothing from forty years ago."

"Your wife saw her?"

"No no, I mean if she had seen her."

"And you saw her only once?"

"Once that I know of. That doesn't mean she wasn't here more than once."

"What else do you know about her?"

"Nothing. The baby was well behaved. It didn't cry."

"What else?"

"Nothing. That's all."

"Think!"

"I can't."

"Close your eyes."

"I shouldn't close my eyes."

"Why not?"

"All right, if you go over there," the guard said, pointing to the center of the floor.

Alessandro walked obediently to the center. "Closing! Closing! Closing!" the guards were calling out as Alessandro's guard closed his eyes. Alessandro prayed faster than he knew what he was praying for.

"I do!" the guard said, with his eyes still closed.

"You do what?"

He opened his eyes. "I do remember something. One more thing. She carried the child on her hip, in a sash. Baby carriages are not very practical in Venice. And when you walk around with a kid, you have to carry stuff for it. So she carried all the things she needed in a canvas bag, the kind they give to tourists who go out to the Lido for a day. They put their lunch, and a book, and their bathing costumes in these bags. You see them in the summer."

"And what does that tell me?"

"They have the name of the hotel on the bag," the guard said, and smiled.

"And you remember."

"Yes I do. You know why? I'll tell you why. It's a small hotel near the Campo San Margherita. I know because I used to live close by and I passed it every day on my way to work. It was the Hotel Magenta. That's what it said on the bag—
Magenta.
I knew there was something."

"Closing! Closing!" the other guards called in high voices that echoed through the galleries.

Alessandro's guard looked at his watch. "Really," he said, "it's time to go home now. Say goodbye to the painting, because it's time to go home."

 

A
LESSANDRO LEANED
against a wrought-iron fence tangled in the soft spirals of young vines. Across the street was the Hotel Magenta, now, in spite of the early fall weather, almost empty. A clerk in a fair imitation of a British admiral's uniform appeared and disappeared from behind the desk with the regularity of a metronome. Alessandro watched him noiselessly bob among the bright lamps and polished brass. The hotel, though small and not well known, was elegant. The only hint of the color magenta was a sash-like magenta line that fell across the upper left-hand corner of a menu posted in a lighted glass case on the fence opposite Alessandro.

He planned to stay in the hotel rather than merely interrogate the staff, who would not remember anything unless they were in exactly the right frame of mind, but he was unsure of what exactly to ask, or why he would be asking. Many women had babies and spoke French. What did it have to do with him? But what if he had been wrong from the start, and the woman he had seen on an upper floor of the clinic had not been Ariane but someone who closely resembled her, or if, in the instant he had looked up at the attacking airplanes, time had elongated, as it does in battle, and, before the building was destroyed, she had simply walked out the back?

The child? The child could be his. Why hadn't she looked for him? The question was easy to answer in light of how many times he had been reported dead.

Like the clerk he watched, he bobbed between one thing and another. Hope would flare and he would shudder with the strong
emotion appropriate to the presence or the imagination of miracles, but then his head would sink, and he would draw in a very different breath than the one that preceded it, weary and full of inexplicable friction, when he believed that he was deluding himself.

It would be safer, less painful, and even cheaper to go back to Rome. If he slowly began to work, and gradually took up the life of a bourgeois, teaching and writing until the money came through, time might make of him a different man.

He knew, however, that time only stripped and revealed, and he had never approached an important question in any way but to ask everything. As he stood in the darkening street, he recognized a pattern in his life. He had learned very quickly, not merely by devoted study but by some natural sympathy, to enter so fully into a painting or a song that he could cross into a world of harrowing beauty and there receive, as he floated on air, the deep, absolute, and instant confirmation of hopes and desires that in normal life are a matter only of speculation and debate.

That was all changed, however, and quickly, during the war. Sometimes after an exploding shell, blood and limbs rained down upon soldiers who were too shocked to move, and who stood as if they had been caught in a sudden downpour, and at such moments Alessandro had been ashamed of the life that had taught him to trust and hope.

The debate between his alternating states of belief would not be resolved until he was unable to report the result, and, like darkness and light, his conviction lingered neither at dusk nor at dawn. Why should it have? The answer lay not in compromise, but in one thing or the other.

"I've been walking in the Brenta," he told the clerk. "I need a good dinner, a room with a bath, and a laundry."

The clerk quoted the price of a room. It was excessive.

"Does it have a balcony?"

"No. The one above it has, and an extra-large bath. It is, however, nearly twice the price."

"Give it to me," Alessandro commanded, rapidly writing his name on the registration card. He tipped the astonished clerk with a week of his own salary.

"Here," Alessandro said when they reached the room, and handed over to the stunned young man yet another weeks salary.

At dinner he was especially lavish, but he did not ask a single question. He hoped that in the morning, when word of his largesse had spread, not a soul in the hotel would be hesitant to provide him the answer to any question he might pose.

He tried not to, but that night, in a room with a balcony, in the Hotel Magenta, in a bed made with thick white sheets that had been carefully pressed and were cold to the touch, he lay thinking of Ariane as if she were alive.

 

A
T BREAKFAST
Alessandro had two waiters, and the chef leaned from the kitchen to behold him. He passed more money around, as if he were not wealthy, but mad. Each time he put a banknote into someone's hand he thought of it not as the pair of shoes, fountain pen, or two years' subscription he would have to do without, but as an inconsequential sum that he was placing on a wager of unprecedented returns, even if he doubted it would go his way. You cannot by force of will undo events, he told himself. You cannot by assaulting the wage structure of a small hotel hope to resurrect the dead. And you do not make miracles by getting on the wrong train.

As he lingered over breakfast he thought back to the many times he had seen the dead jumping off a trolley or walking briskly up a street. He had recognized their faces, their clothing, their gaits, and even after they had objected that he was looking at them as if they had risen from the tomb, he still thought he saw them,
and he felt the same way that shepherdesses feel when, on their rocky fragrant hillsides, they see the Virgin.

His father had appeared, in the uniform of a major, in the trenches beside him, and though he hadn't known his son, it was he. Others, too, came back, at least momentarily, perhaps only because he wanted them to. Shrouds are very light. When they are stretched over a corpse the air in the room can move them just enough for someone devastated by grief to think that the person for whom he grieves is breathing and alive. Call the nurses. Call the doctors. Something astonishing has happened. He's alive. You only thought that he was dead. Even when the shroud is pulled back, the chest seems gently to rise and fall. Some have waited a long time for the person who is breathing to wake, in minutes more dramatic than the fall of empires.

"Can you help me in regard to a woman who stayed here earlier this year?" Alessandro asked the clerk, who had returned to his post.

"Of course. What was her name?"

Alessandro told him. "She had a child with her."

The clerk scanned his register, leafing rapidly through the pages. "No," he said, "no such person from the beginning of the year until now."