A Soldier of the Great War (102 page)

"I asked myself, why do I love, and what is the power of beauty, and I understood that each and every instance of beauty is a promise and example, in miniature, of life that can end in balance, with symmetry, purpose, and hope—even if without explanation. Beauty has no explanation, but its right perfection elicits love. I wondered if my life would be the same, if at the end the elements would come together just enough to give rise to a simple melody as powerful as the one in Paolo's metal top, a song that, even if it did not explain the desperate and painful past, would make it worthy of love.

"Of course, I still don't know. God help me to have a moment of his saddest beauty in which I do.

"Perhaps I am wandering. Perhaps that was my intent. No matter. I can wander, because my notion of what it is to come to rest is clear and unencumbered, and I may yet find it.

"The top, you see, that my little boy, at the age of three, twirled round and round, played a beautiful song—a song that, from time to time, I still hear. What is the song? The song is love."

 

A
FTER THEY
had been still for a while, watching the trees sway in wind that crept across the blackened hills as slowly as if it were blind, Nicolò sat up and pointed.

"What's that!" he asked in the manner of a sailor who sees a sea-monster.

"What's what?" Alessandro answered, in the manner of an old soldier who will never forget the electricity of an imminent attack.

"Up there."

Alessandro turned his head. "The Perseids," he said.

"The what?"

"The Perseids, a meteor shower that comes in August. This must be the first day. I didn't see them last night, and last night we were on a high, open ridge where the stars were visible down to where they're dimmed by the mists above the sea."

"Give me your glasses," Nicolò said.

When he had put them on, he stared at the sky, looking both contemplative and sharp. Alessandro saw in the way the boy held his head, in the smoothness of his face, and the freshness of his movements, not the image of himself at that age, because it was so long ago that he had almost forgotten, but the image of his son.

"Where do they come from?" Nicolò asked. "Look! Thousands of them. Like burning magnesium."

"They drift around in the Solar System," Alessandro told him, "and at this time each year they and the earth collide. They come
from the direction of Perseus, and when they strike our air, it lights and burns them. The flashes you see are their last and their brightest. You can look at them all night, imagining that each tiny flash is a man going down, and you won't see the casualties of even a few divisions."

"They're beautiful," Nicolò said. "They must be so hot, and yet all we can see is a streak of cool light."

"One of the categories of beauty," Alessandro said not so much to Nicolò as to an unseen audience of his peers, "that Aristotle and Croce inexplicably neglect, is the beauty of that which is lost. How intensely, and with such great loyalty, do we take to heart a life that has no chance of revision."

"Where do they fall?" Nicolò asked.

"Most of them simply burn in the air," Alessandro replied, thinking of angels cast furiously through pale and endless light. "Of those that do reach the earth's surface, two-thirds, I suppose, nip into the sea, and the other third sinks into forests or skids across savannahs and steppes."

"Do they ever fall in Italy?"

"I'm sure some have fallen in Italy. Probably you can see them in science museums."

"On cities?"

"I don't know. Why? Are you worried? Do you think you should wear a helmet?"

"No, I'd just like to see one after it landed. It really wouldn't know what was going on, would it? Out there in space for a billion years, going at a million kilometers an hour, with no air, no sound, and nothing but the planets moving by. And then, boom! It comes to rest on the floor of a butcher shop in Trastevere, with a bunch of old ladies and a cat backed up against the wall and screaming because it exploded the meat case!

"I'd feel really sad that after a billion years whistling around space it ended up on a tray of pork chops, but I'd like to touch it
to see what it felt like after all that time in the fresh air.
La Madonna!
I hope it wouldn't bite me!"

"Wait in the butcher shop," Alessandro told him.

"I don't know. I'd rather hang around at work. I miss making propellers."

"But you're not allowed even to touch them."

"I miss thinking about making them. Someday I'll make them. Why do those meteoroids radiate out like that?"

"Meteor
ites
. They don't. They just look like they do. They're really parallel and straight, like railroad tracks, which also appear to radiate from a central point."

Nicolò returned the glasses. "When I get back to Rome," he said, "I'll get some for myself. I've only been gone for two days, and just to think of going back makes me all excited."

"Rome is like that. It always has been. The city itself is like a family, like girlfriends, lovers, children. I can't tell you exactly why, but it unfolds before you with the grace of water streaming from a fountain. I think that of Rome because for so many years I was either a child, a lover, a father, or a friend, in Rome, and it echoes and echoes, and I'll hear it until I die."

"What happened? When the woman said, 'Yes, do you know her?' Was it Ariane?"

Alessandro hesitated, closed his eyes, and smiled. "Yes. And the child by the fountain was my son. I didn't want to frighten him, so I didn't say anything. I reined in my emotions. I didn't pick him up. I bent down and looked at his face—remarkable. How beautiful. How round. Like a chipmunk! His little legs were as fat as sausages. His fingers were so delicate and diminutive that the fingernails were like the smallest, whitest kernels of corn, the pale sweet ones near the end.

"I said, 'Look, your boat is becalmed, and it's drawn by the currents to the center of the pool. We've got to get a stick.'

"A street sweeper was not far away. I ran to him and gave him
some money, a wad of bills, I think, because I hardly knew what I was doing, and I took a rake from his cart and ran back to the fountain, where I leaned over the water and gently pulled in the sailboat, the sails of which swelled in the breeze.

"I knew I could not explain to the woman, the cousin whom Ariane had never mentioned, either who I was or what had happened. I contented myself in playing with Paolo as she read the newspaper. It was more than forty years ago, but I remember it so well. We sailed the boat rapidly all along the perimeter, because that was where the sails could pick up the wind.

"He kept on getting stones in his shoes, and each time he did, I would take off the shoe and dump out the stone. 'What is your mamas name?' I asked. He said, 'Mama!' And when I asked him his father's name, he just looked at me.

"'Is Ariane home?' I asked the cousin as she was getting ready to leave. 'She should be,' the cousin answered, 'by the time we get back.'

"'May I walk with you?'

"'Of course.' The cousin wondered who I was, but she said nothing, and as we walked through the Villa Borghese, and then through the streets, I began to think that I was suffering a cruel delusion, and that, when I saw the boy's mother, I would not recognize her.

"They lived on the ground floor, and on the doorpost was a highly polished oval plaque with the house number. The cousin rang the bell so Ariane would come out. Were I an undesirable, they could turn me away at the door. Or perhaps the cousin was thinking that Ariane might be in the bath.

"She
was
in the bath, and when she appeared to me, after so long, her hair was undone and she was wrapped in a towel.

"The door opened. It was very strange. All the time that I had been looking for her she had no hint that I might still have been alive. When I was nowhere to be found after the air attack she
thought I had been killed with the hundreds who died on the street that ran through the village, many of whom were mangled beyond recognition.

"The survivors were brought to Trento, and then Verona, and in the confusion I was listed as killed. When I got back to Rome I discovered that the Italian army considered me dead—in Gruensee, in the observation post, and on the Cima Bianca. That I was reported killed three times seemed not to affect their trust in the reports except to strengthen it. Being the army, they must have thought that anyone who was killed three times was most certainly deader than if he had been killed only once.

"I never altered my status. I was worried about having deserted, and in the years immediately following the war, no one—no former soldier, anyway—was sure that we would not be mobilized again, for whatever reason.

"Ariane was indeed the woman I saw just before the house was bombed, but my conception of time was wrong. She had run down two flights of stairs, and was rushing out to meet me, but stretchers were blocking the hallway that led to the front, so she turned to go out the back. She heard the bomb smash through the roof. She said it sounded like a basket being broken up before its thrown away. It pierced the ceilings of the third, second, and first floors. She remembered that this sounded like cards being shuffled.

"It exploded in the front room, and the impact pushed the interior walls, in one piece, against the outside walls of the building, which then collapsed upon itself. At the instant of detonation Ariane was at the open door, and the air compressing inside blew her ten meters from the house. She landed on the grass, where she lay paralyzed and hardly able to breathe. Everyone else inside had been crushed, burned, obliterated.

"And then, suddenly, in Rome, on a calm day in June, she was standing in front of me, in a towel. I held her.... I wouldn't let go. It must have been an hour. She couldn't speak, because every time
she tried to say something, she wept. The towel slipped and she was naked in my arms. Though the cousin was amazed, Paolo, our son, held tightly to his mother's neck, because of her tears, and paid no heed to the scandalous circumstances.

"She cried. Within her crying, sometimes, she laughed, but not much, and the baby cried and stroked her head, and I, I was overcome, but though I was overcome I thought back upon the painting, and my God, Ariane was naked with a child in her arms, and I had found her, and I could not believe it, but it was true, it was certainly true, and if you ask me how or why it happened I can't tell you, but life and death have a rhythm, an alternating rhythm, and you never know what to expect, as it is in God's hands, and I was waiting for a thunderstorm, for the sky to darken, for lightning, and wind. We were as stunned as the people in the Bible upon whom miracles are showered, and even though the thunderstorm did not come until the next night, each and every lightning flash, and each and every thundercrack, was a triumph."

 

"T
HEN IT
all came out all right," Nicolò said. "It was all resolved."

Alessandro looked at him sharply, as if, despite Nicolò's well meaning remark, he was offended.

"Of course it wasn't resolved," Alessandro said. "You've been listening to me. How can you think that?"

"You said ... you said you found her, like in the painting. It was perfect: the woman, the child, you had survived the war, you had waited, and you found her. You don't think that's coming out all right?"

"If it had all stopped then and there," Alessandro told him, "but it doesn't stop, it never stops. And what about all the others: Fabio, Guariglia, the Guitarist, the two
Milanese,
Rafi? I told you. Look up at the Perseids. You can see them flashing many times a second. They reach the end of their long and silent journeys almost
more quickly than you can note, but if you watch them for hours you will not see the casualties of even one group of divisions.

"Each of the flashes is like the life of a man. We're too weak to feel the full import of such a loss, and so we continue on, or we reduce it to an abstraction, a principle. It would take more than anyone could give to understand the life of one other person—we cannot understand even our own lives—and more energy and compassion than is humanly possible to commemorate even a single life that ends in such a death.

"You cannot know anything but the smallest part of the love, regret, excitement, and melancholy of one of those quick flashes. And two? And three? At two you have entered the realm of abstraction, and are by necessity thinking and talking in abstractions."

"How do you mean, abstractions?"

"I mean, think of a glass of wine that you spend half an hour drinking as it gets dark in the evening, and then think of ten liters of wine, and ten thousand liters. If you can't drink them, they are an abstraction. People throw around abstractions very carelessly because they don't have to live them, and then the abstractions take over their lives."

"So they do live them," Nicolò said.

"No, they don't. They live their lives as dictated by their notions, which is usually something very much different, monstrously different. You don't know what I mean, do you."

"I don't."

"You know the people who are against war, on principle?"

"I'm against war, on principle," Nicolò said indignantly, "although I'd like to fight in one."

"You can't be against it in principle if you can't know it in principle, and you can't know it in principle. You can know only its smallest part, which is enough."

"So why can't I be against it in principle?"

"If you claim to know war in principle you're only pretending, and if you can only pretend to know it you can only pretend to be against it. Many people just like to show that they're thinking the right thoughts. And as the 'right' thoughts change like the wind, so do they."

"So what are you supposed to do?"

"All you have to know is the story of one of the flashes. That's enough. That's more powerful than any principle. And, look, the worst of it only brings to you early and suddenly what would come slowly and late—so don't exaggerate. I've comforted myself with that thought, which is not very comforting, almost all my life.