A Soldier of the Great War (103 page)

"The problem with war, as I have seen it, is not so much that it makes misery and grief—all of which would tend to come anyway, in time. The sin is in the abruptness, in the abridgement of those stages that otherwise might be joined so brilliantly to make a life.

"Infants are left without fathers or mothers. Fathers and mothers die with the unbearable knowledge that their children are alone in the world. The love of a man and a woman is neither consummated nor allowed to flare and fade. Generations end, families cease to exist. The line, the story, stops for some, and that, I think, is the worst of it. When your children die before you no recovery exists except perhaps in the inexplicable grace of God, in events that no one has reported, in a place from which no one has ever returned.

"And in war, as I have known it, the children die and their parents are left to grieve."

"Not Guariglia's children."

"No. He perished, but they were saved."

"What happened to them?"

"When I got back, the harness shop was still there, but with another harness-maker—he had two legs—and his family. They had bought the stock and trade from Guariglia's widow.

"I asked where she had taken the children, and the harness-
maker told me, 'To get work in the north.' What city? Milano? Torino? Genova? He didn't know. What kind of work? That he knew. Any kind of work, she had told him, whatever it might be."

"Just like my father and mother, the same thing," Nicolò said. "We got off in Rome because there was a guy on the train platform who gave my father a job in a restaurant. My mother left the train with the babies, and my father passed me and the suitcases to them and the restaurant guy. My father had to jump from the train while it was moving. We got some money back on the tickets, and my father worked in the kitchen of this guy's restaurant. Everything was by chance, nothing by plan. Did you find them? How could you have found them?"

"I put microscopic advertisements in the back of newspapers. In those days, the newspapers were full of such things. I couldn't afford more than a line or two:
Signora Guariglia, Rome Harness Shop, Contact Alessandro Giuliani,
and my address. I ran them twice in the first year, twice in the second, then once a year, now and then, far less than the appeals I had published for Ariane, who never saw them."

"But did Guariglia's wife?"

"Oh yes,
she
did. She was in Milano, where she saw the very first one. She clipped it and put it in her sewing box."

"Why?"

"Why? You want me to explain to you what goes on in the mind of a Roman harness-maker's widow? I asked her, years later, when finally she got in touch with me. Suddenly, she sent me a Christmas card. She said she didn't know why, it wasn't that she was busy, or afraid that I was a bill collector, but she thought something like that belonged in her sewing box, where she could think about it. She had let it age, you see.

"She came to see me, with all her children, in nineteen twenty-five. She was married to a foundry worker, and they had enough money, so I started a savings account for the children. I put it in a
Milan bank, and every year I added to it. I would take the children to the bank and make the deposit in the office for trust accounts—a more and more sizable deposit as time went on—and then we'd go to a restaurant where, for an hour and a half, I would tell them about their father.

"The foundry worker was not very comfortable with this, but the swelling trust account, in a blue-and-gold portfolio, eased his nerves. The mother loved Guariglia but she wasn't able to tell the children very much about him. She had always been in a subservient position; he had had to work all the time; and she was the kind of woman who kept yellowed newspaper clippings in a sewing box.

"But I told them. Every year it was the same. I told them about how brave he was in the line, in the Bell Tower. I told them about the other world we saw together in Sicily; and how their father did well in a combat that might have occurred in the Middle Ages. I told them about the cattle boat, and of how he cut off his own leg in an effort to stay alive—for them.

"It took some time, as you can imagine. By the end of the meal—it was more than an hour and a half—the restaurant would be empty except for me and the children, and the waiters leaned against the banquettes, linen towels still over their arms, napping, but facing the street in case a customer would interrupt them....By the end of the meal, I had told them about Stella Maris. I always cried when I told them how their father had said, in a clear voice,
God protect my children,
and they would cry, too. Even when they were older, I would embrace them—in the middle of the goddamned restaurant—but it was all right, because by that time no one else was there and the waiters were too sleepy to notice.

"They were so young when he died that they might have forgotten him, but I think his picture and the story I told every year had their effect—because, as it turns out, they loved him above all others.

"One of the girls said to me, At first I loved him like a saint, but then, when I got to know him better as I got older and I could
imagine him better, it wasn't like a saint. Saints make you heave with emotion, and then you forget them. I began to miss my father all the time. I would look up and realize that I had been thinking of him, that I wanted him to be there. You never really want a saint to be there, do you?'

"His children grew up the way he would have wanted them to. And when they had children of their own, I released the trust, and I saw them no more. Now it is their father I think of, from time to time. Perhaps had he not been so physically ugly I would not have loved him so much, and perhaps even his children would not have loved him as they did. He was a good man. He was a man who really broke your heart."

 

A
BIRD
had begun to sing in a smooth slow warble that came before the first hint of dawn and yet long after the night songs had ceased. Alessandro would have been content merely to listen, but Nicolò was impatient, and pressed for more. "What about Fabio?" he asked.

"What about him? I watched him die. They put his body on a wooden cart and sent it, the perfectly formed face and entrancing blue eyes, the flesh that women loved to touch with their fingers and their mouths, to hold, to run their limbs against it so they could feel perfect and loved and like something light that was made of silk, something that could float on the wind, and they knew it, I am sure, tumbling into the grave.

"The grave-diggers had many men to bury, and they didn't lay them out gently. They tossed them in, hunched up, with limbs tangled and hands an unnatural distance from the body, to be caught and pressed in the earth as if in amber."

"Did you try to see his family?"

"No. No. I hadn't the strength to seek out any but Guariglia's family. I had my own life, my own troubles. Fabio undoubtedly had someone, but God's gift to him was himself. He spent everything
up front, and, given what happened, perhaps he was right. When he was gone, he was gone. We loved him because he was, in his vain way, so wonderfully stupid. When I think of him, I always smile, which I am sure is what he would have wanted."

"What about Orfeo?"

"Do you want me to tie up every loose end in my life for you?"

"I just want to know. You told me about these people. You said it never ends: I want to know what happened."

Alessandro was still. Then he raised his hand, as if to say,
Wait.
He had long been sitting up on the ledge, having risen from a position of rest, and when he hesitated Nicolò thought that he was going to lie back and rest again, but, instead, he spoke.

"Look," Alessandro said, "lets not fool around. I'm going to die today, this morning. The walk was too great a strain on my heart. While I try to rest, it struggles on in exhaustion, and I can't control it. It thunders inside me, and seems arrhythmic. Within my chest are hollow spaces like bubbles of air. I can neither calm it down nor stop the pain."

"I'll run to the village to get an ambulance," Nicolò said, his body tensing as he began to stand. Alessandro could see that Nicolò was eager to run.

"I don't want an ambulance. I want you to sit down and shut up."

"But Signore, an ambulance could take you to a hospital. They could help you."

"I don't want to die in a hospital."

"You wouldn't! You'd live!"

Alessandro closed one eye. "I don't want to be alive in a hospital, either."

"You'd rather die outside? On the ground?"

"I've always loved being outside, on the ground. The ground has been my salvation. Sitting here under the stars makes me feel as if I have a place, as if I'm doing right, as if this is where I was intended to be. So you just shut up, please, and let me continue."

Nicolò sank back, half in dejection.

"I'm going to die today, I think, so I can tell you. I never told anyone: neither my wife nor my son. I never told a priest. I had planned to confess it, but every time I thought of it I smiled, so I didn't think I'd get very far in the confessional. They don't like it when you laugh at your sins, and I always do, goddamn me, though it's what has kept me alive. Maybe I shouldn't tell you. Who said I'll die today?"

"You did."

"Who knows? What if I don't?"

"I won't tell anybody."

"And if you did?"

"So what?"

"My idea of a graceful retirement does not encompass six or seven years of hearings and depositions."

"You told me everything else," Nicolò said, sounding injured.

"I haven't scratched the surface."

"There's a statute of limitations."

"How do you know about that?"

"Where I come from is different from where you come from."

"Swear not to tell."

"I swear."

"People say things, and then they lapse, but, between your oath and my health, I think I can tell you. I murdered him."

"Orfeo?"

"Orfeo."

"I don't believe you."

"But you want to hear the story anyway."

"Yes."

 

"E
VEN NOW
, at seventy-four years of age, I can't get the war out of my blood. It was too strong a thing—never had anything been like it. I dream of the war more than I dream of the present or of
my youth. It is the essential condition to which I always return and refer. Should I slip, it is where I will fall; should I weaken, it is where I will rest.

"All the churches in the world, with their candles flickering in the cool air, and all the masses and all the fugues can't do it justice. My haunting and repetitive dreams receded only after twenty years, and only because my time was over and my son went to take my place at the front.

"What is war, that rolls through history and is more terrible than death, but in whose folds life is vitally compressed more than in the most glorious peace?

"I have never seen anything more riveting than a mountain division, roped in a thousand teams, moving at night, each man with his light, like strings of paper lanterns floating up a glacier half obscured by clouds in a lake of black. It was a whole city of men, moving silently upon the enemy at three in the morning in a place that had hardly felt a footstep since the world began. I remember them rising, their lights swaying, the ice faintly illuminated by the lantern beams from the candles and mirrors on their helmets. The south face of the ice-clad mountain glittered as they walked across it.

"And the cavalry, whether Austrian or our own ... Even the coarsest men were moved by the sight of a thousand riders trotting into line. When the line wheeled on a point and began to charge, hearts stopped in amazement, and the clock of the world was started as if for the first time. Did you ever see a merchant snap an abacus back to zero? As a cavalry charge gains momentum, all registers return to the starting point, and life begins anew.

"I dreamed of these things. I could not rid my mind of them. They had their own life, their own logic. War cannot be explained in the terms of the world we know, but as it moves through all we know, it does so with impunity and surprise.

"In the years immediately following the Armistice, I and millions of others were still caught up in the battles just finished. The
war had ended, but not for us, not at least for those foolish enough to struggle in making some sense of it—of whom I was certainly one. I now attribute my vain desire to my education, which had instilled in me the splendid and reckless belief that everything can be explained.

"The way I saw it, then, and to some extent still see it, is that war is a separate world to which some are born, and some are not. Guariglia, for example, was not."

"And what about you?"

"I was born to be a soldier," Alessandro said, "but love pulled me back. It made what could have been an effortless passage sometimes unbearably difficult. I understood my reticence, and I banished it in time to save my life. It came, and it went. Luck brought it to me at the right times, and luck allowed me to cast it aside when it would have killed me.

"Some had no ambivalence whatsoever. Any soldier of the line can spot them immediately, the ones born for war. I certainly could, since they and I had sprung from the same root.

"My son was given to me full blown, whole, as if from nothing, the most beautiful child I had ever seen, my own. At first I despaired that he should live as I had, and then, eventually, I was re-signed to it, as I had to be, for he never came back. He is the reason that I exhaust myself with all these questions, and cannot die in peace. He and the others are the reason I have vainly fought for an opening into another world. I cannot trade that unlikely chance for happiness in this life, because I remember too well those who have fallen. I keep myself on edge—though, all these years, I have done it indirectly, and saved immediate recollection for the very last, both to honor it and to preserve it forever."

"I don't understand."

"You don't have to. Just listen to the story.

"Orfeo—that little Italian ballroom dog, that bent and extraordinary creature, had hardly been born for war, but he had
gone over to the camp of those who were. He gave up his sanity so his obsessions could flow within him without resistance and elevate him to a plane of tremendous power, power that, only because he was comical, appeared accidental. It wasn't. I knew him well enough to have seen his madness fuse irrevocably with the spirit of war.