A Soldier of the Great War (101 page)

"Yes!" Alessandro said, in a clipped fashion with a lot of aspiration. "You know something, Nicolò?"

"What?" the boy asked, smiling like a lamb.

"You're thinking, and, two days ago, you weren't."

Nicolò allowed for the possibility. Had it not been the black of night, Alessandro would have seen his face light up.

"Thinking, asking questions, figuring things out, you see, is like a ball. When it starts to roll downhill—even if it starts very slowly—it never stops. Do you understand?"

"No."

"Yes you do."

"Not exactly."

"Of course you do. You're just so pleased with yourself that you want me to describe it so you can enjoy it. I won't. The pleasure should be without expert advice, like your first orgasm."

"What's an orgasm?"

Alessandro sighed.

"Come on," Nicolò said. "I'm not like you. I don't have a lot of money. I can't even afford a bicycle, much less an orgasm."

"My God," Alessandro said, his eyes darting upward.

"An orgasm is a car, isn't it?"

"You mean, like a...
Hispano-Suiza?
"

"Is that what it is?"

"No," Alessandro said, his voice falling, "it's a type of Japanese lantern."

"We don't need any orgasms, we have light bulbs," Nicolò said.

"But soon you will be willing to trade all your light bulbs for one orgasm."

"That's what you think," Nicolò said indignantly. "Light bulbs are expensive. I wouldn't trade a single one for an orgasm."

"That's what you think."

"You're sure of a lot of things, aren't you. According to you, I'm going to be the president of F.A.I." He waited for Alessandro to deny it. "I'll live in a big house and have a lot of leather books...."

"Leather-bound. "

"Leather-bound. I'll sail my yacht to Switzerland for the summer."

"From where?"

"From Capri."

After a pause, Alessandro said, "I was going to mock you, but the Rhone extends to Geneva, and bursts from Lac Leman full blown. Who knows?"

"Why not just sail directly on the ocean?" Nicolò asked.

"You can't. Switzerland doesn't have a seacoast, but, as I was saying, the Lake of Neuchàtel empties into Lac Leman. Perhaps you could go farther. It's the kind of thing one proposes to a geographical magazine, and they never accept."

"Rich guys."

"Yes. Rich guys propose to geographical magazines. Poor guys don't know where to begin, and they don't have yachts. The difference between classes of men is that the vast majority remember youth as their glory, and the tiniest fraction, in escaping a life of drudgery and increasing difficulty, finds something even better."

"Maybe God will make me rich someday."

"Possibly."

"God didn't make me rich to start. I don't believe in Him anyway. My sister does."

"If you don't believe in Him, how can He make you rich?"

"So what if He doesn't."

"I don't think He will. You may make yourself rich. He doesn't care.

"He doesn't?"

"No. Of that I am sure."

"Why?"

"Money is one of the few things that He Himself didn't invent. He invented birds, stars, volcanoes, the soul, beams of light—but not money."

"You believe in God, don't you."

"Yes."

"How can you? What did He ever do for you?"

"That's not the point, what He did or didn't do for me. In fact, He did a great deal, but for some He's done a lot less than nothing. Besides, one doesn't believe in God or disbelieve in Him. It isn't an argument.

"Though I used to argue it," the old man said, "even with myself, when I was younger. His existence is not a question of argument but of apprehension. Either you apprehend God, or you do not."

"Do you?"

"Yes, very strongly, but, at times, not. The older I get, and the more I see how life is arranged and with what certainty and predictability we move from stage to stage, the more I believe in God, the more I feel His presence, the more I am stunned by the power of His works. And yet, the older I become and the more I see of suffering and death, the less approachable is God, and the more it appears that He does not exist. Being very clever, He has beaten life into a great question that breaks the living and is answered only in death. I am so much less sure than when I was young. Sometimes I believe, and sometimes not."

"What accounts for the difference?"

"My strength, the clarity of my vision, the brokenness of my heart—only these.

"Ariane left me a letter. Apart from the signs on the street, that I read as I rode home, hers were the first words I saw after she died. It was as if she were speaking to me, and she said, 'As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.'"

"With all due respect, Signore, you'll have to convince me," Nicolò challenged, thinking, awakening, ready for ten hours of disputation.

"No I won't, not me," Alessandro said. "I've stayed up enough nights over long-dead dinner tables, ironing my blood sugar until
it was flat. I don't have to convince you. The world will present to you the evidence, and the choice will be yours. It will rest entirely on how clearly you can see out from the tangle of your physical body and your prideful intellect."

"I have an intellect?"

"I didn't say that."

"What's an intellect?"

Alessandro shifted position and snorted to get more delicious night air. "It's a thing you have in your brain. It remembers other things and lets you shuffle them around so you can figure them out.

"Oh."

"You've got one, but you've got to exercise it so it'll get bigger."

"The people who've got these intellects, they're smart, aren't they?"

"Not as smart as they think."

"They're not?"

"No. They don't know it, but the intellect is the attribute easiest to develop, and if it grows out of proportion to the rest of them they think they're smart—but they're not any smarter than a telephone book. A fact of humanity throughout history is the desirability, the necessity, of balance among the intellect, the spirit, and the flesh."

"Flesh, what flesh?"

"Mortification of the flesh."

Nicolò drew back almost imperceptibly.

"What do you think we just did?" Alessandro asked. "This walk, for days and nights in the open air, without sleep, under sun, moon, and stars, is mortification of the flesh. Like thundering music, it agitates the spirit until it rises. In Islam the Sufis and Dervishes use drugs to accomplish this. We're Christians, we don't. We launch our souls from the cannons of art and discipline, and on any one night, hovering over the chimney tops of Europe,
halfway to the stars, there are armies of brightly spinning spirits that have risen like fireworks, tethered to the souls of those men and women who, by reflection, mortification, and devotion, effortlessly outdazzle kings."

"Yeah, but you don't ... you don't take walks like this every day," Nicolò said, "and if everyone did, the whole world would be crazy, wouldn't it? Everybody walking around the mountains in the middle of the night, Christ!"

"Tell me," the old man said, slyly. "You don't think there are other ways?"

"Like what?"

"Then you do."

"I didn't say that."

"Yes you did."

"All right, what are they?"

"What time do you get up in the morning?" Alessandro asked.

"Me?"

"Who else is here?"

"Seven-thirty. Why?"

"So you can get to work?"

Nicolò nodded.

"And on days when you don't work?"

"Nine, ten, whatever."

"You get up at seven-thirty because you have to."

"Yes."

"I'm retired. I don't have to get up at any time. If I want, I can sleep all morning. What time do you think I get up?"

"How should I know?"

"Guess.

"I told you, I don't know."

"That's what guessing is for, when you don't know. I knew you didn't know—how could you know? That's why I asked you to guess."

"Nine-thirty?"

"No. Five."

"Five?"

"I'm at my desk by five-thirty."

"You must be crazy."

"You're a great runner," Alessandro said. "I saw you run after the bus for kilometers and kilometers. How many times a week do you exercise to exhaustion?"

"When we have a soccer game. You? You can't exercise to exhaustion. You'd die."

"Four times. I row. I row until I have visions. I drink lemonade. I hear music. I hear music, Nicolò, even though no one is playing it. Do you?"

"No. Sometimes I don't hear it even when someone éplaying it."

"Do you sleep in a bed?"

"Of course I sleep in a bed. Who doesn't sleep in a bed?"

Alessandro smiled.

"You don't sleep in a bed? Where do you sleep?"

"The floor."

"The floor, you sleep on the floor? Why?"

The old man looked at the boy and said, with the air of someone who is telling a great secret, "Because the floor is hard and cold."

"I don't believe this," Nicolò said to an imaginary third party.

"What time do you think your sister's nuns get up in the morning?"

Nicolò shrugged his shoulders.

"Ask her."

"Christ," Nicolò said. "I don't want to be a nun."

"I'm not asking you to be a nun," Alessandro told him. "I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm just telling you that the intellect is of no use unless it's disciplined by the mortification of the flesh, so that it may serve the soul. That's all. The intellect thinks. The body dances. And the spirit sings. A song, a simple song. When love and memory are overwhelming, and the soul, though crushed, takes flight, it does so in a simple song."

"How do you know this?"

"I've heard it."

"What does it say?"

"It says, at the very end, in the last distillation of all you know, that you have only one thing left, one thing that might travel, though God only knows how."

"What am I supposed to do with that?" Nicolò asked. "You're always talking about stuff like that. Give me a more concrete example."

"A thing?"

"Yes, a thing."

"It has nothing to do with
things.
"

"I don't care, just give me a thing, one thing."

"All right," Alessandro said, looking over the moonlit village and across the silvered hillsides and newly clipped fields. "Here's a tiny example, one of millions, microscopic, but it may qualify as a thing, I think.

"I have a desk calendar, a leather book that lies open at my right elbow. It's a thing. Now that I'm old, it's always empty, but I buy a new one every year—from habit, and because when I do have an appointment it stands out nobly on the blank pages, like an icebound ship at the North Pole.

"It has a red ribbon for marking one's place, and for almost fifty years that ribbon sat in the crease as straight as a plumb line. Just recently, I went to answer the telephone with my right hand as I was keeping a book open with my left. I wasn't looking, and I swept the ribbon across the page, with half a twist, at a forty-five-degree angle.

"After I had finished with the telephone call, and after I put down the book, I noticed the ribbon. It had a life of its own, be
yond my habits, my intentions, my notions of order, my ideas, and my practices. The little angled ribbon stood out on the page like a banner in the wind, like a pillar of fire."

"So what does that mean."

"Somehow, it tells me that I'm not alone. And even if it doesn't tell me that, I want to believe it, because, over time, it hurts very much to be alone, although you get so that you can hardly tolerate anything else. When you're alone you can long so hard for something like an embrace that you mine it from the air. You find it in meanings that you might not otherwise grasp, for which it is helpful to arise early in the morning, when the mind is clear and the heart is gentle."

"That's not good enough."

"You think not?"

"No."

"Why?"

"It was all intellect."

"Aha!" Alessandro Giuliani said.

"And what did it lack?"

"It lacked, you know ... Give me another."

"Another example?"

"Yes."

"Are you familiar with the
'Madre, non dormi...'
from
II Trovatore?
"

"No."

"When you get home, seek it out. It begins with a nine-bar harmonic progression from D-flat major through A major and back to D-flat."

"And what is that?"

"A bunch of tones."

"And?"

"And, my son had a top. If you pumped it up it would spin and generate precisely the sequence from the
'Madre, non dormi...'
How it dropped and went up again I don't know. Perhaps, as it
slowed, an internal gate fell back and opened a new passage for a higher register. I don't know how it did it, but it did. It was designed with a mysterious and enchanting brilliance.

"The sequence of notes at the beginning of the song is one of the saddest and most beautiful things I have ever known. Listening to its melancholy, lucid progression has the effect of stopping time. It made the faces of the children infinitely touching, infinitely beautiful, and infinitely sad. When I used to listen to it with Paolo, it transported me to the point where we would separate forever, which I thought would be when I died.

"That simple progression had a power far out of proportion to its elements, for it came close to the elemental truth in which hope, remembrance, and love are joined. After a lifetime of thinking a great deal about the question of beauty—it was my job, just as you make propellers—I have found nothing that illuminates or conveys it save another beauty. No better gloss upon a painting than a song, no better gloss upon a song than its lyric. And in the end, perhaps nothing is as beautiful as a song, perhaps because nothing can be as sad.

"I realized both too early and too late—a long time ago, and yet when I was old enough to have this tremor in my hand—that what I had been seeking in a thousand beauties was one, and that I had had it, and might never have it better, sitting on the floor in Paolo's nursery, helping him push his top.