A Soldier of the Great War (99 page)

"Do you have an indication of any woman with a child? Is your register configured to show..."

"Yes," the clerk said, rotating the register on its pivot. "It would say,
and child,
or,
occupied by
so and so,
son,
or
daughter,
for older children."

Alessandro spent half an hour with the register. He even looked for Ariane under his own name, in case she had taken it. He found nothing. Only in two instances had women stayed alone with children. They were English. Perhaps they were war widows, or they were going to join their husbands in the East. In fall and winter the British often went through Venice because the Adriatic was better protected from storms than the Tyrrhenian.

"Are you certain that everyone stopping here would be registered in this book?"

"It's the law," the clerk said.

Alessandro tipped him yet again, and went back to his room. He started to fall asleep, but before he could dream he jumped from the bed and ran from the room. The long airy corridor was carpeted in red and gold. Down this path he sprinted until he got to the stairs. Then he sprinted some more, shuttling through the halls as he tried to catch the maid.

On the third floor he saw a cart from which brooms were upended like gathered daffodils, and he lost his breath as if he had discovered the Chariot of Ur. "I forgot to tip you!" he shouted at an older woman, who clutched at her heart in fear. He peeled banknotes desperately from a stack, and, as if he were bribing an executioner, he refused to stop.

When the woman had received a month of her wages she thanked him so much that he couldn't get in a single word. He put his finger to his lips, and said "Signora!" And when she was quiet, she was interrogated. She may even have feared that he would take the money back, even though she had put it in a pocket and buttoned the flap, but she couldn't tell him what he wanted to know. She was distressed when she told him of the two Englishwomen and their children, for they spoke neither Italian nor French, one woman had a boy of about eight, and, the other, two adolescent girls.

"Anyone else? A baby, a little baby? A mother with blond hair."

"No," said the maid. "I'm so sorry. No."

Alessandro opened the windows wide in his room, and the sea air, filtered by several ranks of buildings and the tops of trees, blew in from the Adriatic. At first the rim of sea over the tree-tops was blue, but as the afternoon wore on, it turned to pearl gray flecked with painful sunlight. The air was cool and clear when Alessandro fell asleep under a thick duvet. Whenever he slept during the day,
he burned as if he had a fever. At dusk, sea and sky were indistinguishably blue-green. He thought he was in a dream, and had to splash water on his face six times before he was confident that he would be awake enough to order dinner.

Perhaps because a ship had docked, or a tour had booked the hotel, the dining room was full to capacity, with at least a hundred people, and it had the noisy, hot, beehive-like quality of an eating establishment running at full throttle. The sounds of metal striking china, china on china, and metal against metal never stopped. Neither did the swinging door to the kitchen cease weaving back and forth for an instant, like a valve in the heart.

Though they tried, the waiters were unable to be as attentive as they would have liked. Alessandro got his soup, his bread, his beefsteak, and his salad, and then, only when he asked, a bottle of mineral water. He ate quietly, observing the women in new-style hats, and, at one table, a family of five, who said nothing as they ate and then rose from their chairs and left in different directions.

He would leave in the morning. He had enough money for a third-class ticket to Rome.

 

I
N
R
OME
the grass grows even in January and crops come in, albeit slowly, in December and February. Unrestrained by cold and rain, a brilliant day can flare into a remnant of the golden autumn. Gardeners prune and cut. They trim hedges, rake leaves, chase away cats, and, if the weather is dry, they make bonfires of branches and stalks. White smoke rises all over the city. Because the grass and trees are not dessicated, as in August, the gardeners never fear to walk away from these fires when it is time to go home, and the fires, or what is left of them, glow in the night like jack-o'-lanterns, hissing at their abandonment.

When the other gardeners did go home, Alessandro knelt and held his hands out to the ash and embers. He would listen to the
wind as it whistled through the Aurelian Wall, the orchards, and the pines that sounded like the surf. When he stayed his extra hour or two in the dark no one saw him, because everyone was inside, where the lights were bright.

Often, he had dinner in the railroad workers' cafeteria, where he was taken for a railroad worker. Even though it was open to all, people who didn't look the part were uncomfortable there. Alessandro didn't like to eat at home, not even breakfast. When you go to bed alone and arise alone, the sound of even a teaspoon in a china cup, very early in the morning, can be as graceless as the sound of a freight train slithering diagonally through a railyard, deliberately slow, scraping every switch.

One night in December he came late, for cold chicken, soup, a hard-boiled egg, and salad. He hadn't read the newspaper and didn't feel qualified to join the continual debates about communism, Leninism, socialism, capitalism, fascism, and syndicalism. The debaters, anyway, were the people he had encountered all his life who thought that art should be detached, and politics the seat of passion and emotion. Though Alessandro was well versed in political theory and could go quickly to the heart of nearly any intellectual question, he told those who tried to talk to him about theory or revolution that he wasn't qualified to discuss it, that he preferred to cut and burn branches. He preferred to see a little cupped flower that had just burst through the ground on a short stem, he told them, than to talk about remaking the world. "I am a simple man," he would say.

But, as he was eating, he had no choice but to listen to some fascists who had come down from Milan. One of them, a real bullet-head, was magnetic, showing both incredible pettiness and a form of distorted grandeur. Many of the railroad workers stopped eating as he spoke, and if a railroad worker stopped eating, it meant that something was happening. Alessandro feared that the fascists would flirt with the Left, that, rather than destroy one an
other, they would combine, but he could not see it happening for at least five or ten years—the country was too exhausted. Surely the bullet-head, who was as ridiculous as he was compelling, would go nowhere.

Alessandro generally arrived home late. His room was so austere that it was good only for sleep, but in the morning the world started anew. He was always out in the air early, before anyone but bakers and newspaper deliverers, because the air and the sky kept him alive, and he knew it.

One night when he came home he lit the lamp and adjusted the wick until the light was as brassy as the sun in southern India, and his jacket was already half off when he saw that a letter had been slipped under the door. He pulled the jacket back on, and stared at the envelope.

He never received letters. His financial business, such as it was, was handled by his fathers old firm. He was going to transfer some of it to Arturo if things worked out, but for now he used the law firm's address for everything of that nature, and he received no other type of mail, because he no longer knew anyone.

He had written to Ariane, and his first letter to her had begun with the thought that her death had made his letters to her soliloquies. Of course, he did not mail the letters, and had he mailed them he would not have been able to address them, and had he hallucinated an address, they would not have reached it, and had they reached it, they would not have been answered.

He stooped to pick up the envelope, and returned to the lamp. The letter was from Venice, on the stationery of the Hotel Magenta. He went quickly through a salutation and four or five lines of awkward formalities in an unpracticed hand. Then he read very carefully.

 

I have not written until now because my sister's daughter Gisella was confirmed in December and I had to make something for her, I work in wood. I made an ocean liner with little electric lights that shine through the port holes, she keeps it in her room and looks at it before she goes to sleep.

Maria told me you asked her about some people. Others said the same. They described them to me. I am a waiter and I was not working when you were here. Last spring a mother and a child, a boy of about two, ate in the restaurant several times. I probably would not have remembered except that I love children especially, and this baby was very beautiful, as was his mother, and he had a boat, a sailboat made from wood, so I noticed because ever since I was in the navy in Libya, or off Libya, I don't know, I have been making boats out of wood.

It was the kind of racing schooner that children try to sail in fountains but they're not rigged right for real sailing. Make sure there's a long pole around so you can retrieve it! Well I thought you would want to know. They were here. Even though they weren't guests of the hotel I gave the mother a bag for carrying the boat—a picnic sack that we have in the kitchen, the boat fit just right. I had wanted to get it back but when I saw how perfect it fit I said keep it and she did. She is a Romana. She told me that her husband was killed in the war but that she could not get assistance and lives with her cousin or a sister or some such.

The boy sails his boat in the Villa Borghese. I held him and kissed him. The mother was moved, and it reminded me of my own son when he was small. I think they came twice, they never came back, if I see them I will tell them about you. We have put a check next to your name in the register in case we forget.

 

Sincerely yours,
Roberto Genzano

 

Throughout the winter of 1920–21, Alessandro went to the fountain in the Villa Borghese, where in summer children tried to sail
boats in no breeze and watched as they were becalmed out of reach. But for the coin-sized leaves that chased around it in gusts of winter wind, the fountain was empty. In the spring, a man like Alessandro, someone who had been outside for much of the winter and knew the feeling of cold, wind, rain, and darkness, would spend an hour or two cleaning out the basin. He would polish the grayling spigots, clear the drains, and turn the valve that would open the pipes to a sparkling flow of water. The water would spill out and splash upon the floor, slicking it down, and then rise to a depth of a few centimeters. While no one watched, the stream would flow steadily until the basin was full, a perfectly round lake of fresh water that was never still, where dogs could drink, old men could dip their handkerchiefs before tying them around their heads, and children could sail their boats.

Sometimes at dusk Alessandro returned to the fountain and for half an hour or more turned what was gray into blue. In the silence and the chill, he fired up the sun, leafed the trees, and populated the park with children and their mothers.

On the walk from the Gianicolo to the Villa Borghese his dreams became more and more exquisite. Each time he crossed the city he grew happy thinking about what might await him. He never believed that it was not a delusion, that it had not arisen from his love, his loneliness, and every canvas he had ever seen of the Virgin and Child. Perhaps it had arisen from the Giorgione itself, and he had begun to live the painting.

Throughout the winter, as he worked, he imagined a world so perfect and just that sometimes he forgot it was not real. "Have you taken up religion?" one of the gardeners asked as they dug the foundation for a cold-frame.

"No. Why do you ask?" Alessandro replied.

"The way you talk to yourself, and the way you smile at cats and birds. Only priests and crazy people smile at cats. You talk to someone."

Alessandro kept on digging. "And what if I had?"

"What?"

"What if I had taken up religion?"

"Nothing. Nothings wrong with that," the gardener said, leaning forward and brushing the dirt off his hands. "But what religion?"

"What religion do you think?"

"Buddhism?"

"Buddhism! Why Buddhism?"

"Don't they worship cats?"

Alessandro laughed. "Not cats, frogs."

"Frogs, you worship frogs?"

"The frog god," Alessandro said, still digging, "lives in foundation drains. If you see him, if you just catch sight of his foot, he makes you vomit uncontrollably for sixty-eight hours."

"Why?"

"He likes to be alone."

"Why does he like to be alone?"

"He needs time," Alessandro said, straightening up and addressing the gardener directly.

"You're fooling," the other gardener said. "There's no frog."

"Before you disbelieve me," Alessandro said, "ask yourself how I knew where all the pipes were buried."

"How
did you
know?"

In March he quit.

 

E
VEN THOUGH
he no longer worked in the gardens of the Gianicolo, he summoned them in memory and he knew every tree bending in the wind, every shoot, every rustling leaf, the scent of the grass, the color of the sky, the dusk, the dawn, and the rain. Most of all he remembered the hot and glowing fires that he and the others made from branches that had lain in dead heaps, splin
tered and wet, black with rain, and yet they had burned, and the heat that came from the heart of the wood fought the winter nights well.

He began to groom himself for Ariane as if he were courting her. He took a job as a night clerk in a telegraph office, translating short paragraphs into and from half a dozen languages. The wires were busy almost all the time, singing across mountain ranges and seas, with messages of the deepest import, birthday telegrams, and orders for wing collars.