A Soldier of the Great War (104 page)

"I was desperate to protect my son. And I myself was still a little mad. I regretted that I hadn't killed Orfeo in the toilet stall. He was the one who assigned Rafi to the Cima Bianca. He was the one who assigned me. He assigned us all. The evil was not in the steel, but in the paper, and that little son of a bitch knew it and gave in completely."

"So what did you do?"

"I killed him."

"You killed him?"

"To protect my son, and other sons, and other babies. To protect all the babies in Italy."

"But it didn't."

"I was unable to see into the future."

"How did you do it?"

"Although I had killed men in trenches and redoubts and among the trees, I had never killed in cold blood. The difference is stupendous. It is nearly impossible for a sane person to drive a bayonet through the chest of another human being if he is defenseless and still. In bayonet training throughout the world, the soldier who wields the bayoneted rifle is ordered to scream as he drives the blade through. Civilians assume that the cry is meant to terrify an opponent, but it isn't. It's meant to allow you to bridge your natural reluctance to push a long blade into a living human being, and to cover the horrible sound of steel cutting into flesh and bone. As dreadful as is the task, should your enemy be coming at you, you accomplish it so readily and remorselessly that, how can I describe it? It seems no more difficult or disturbing than, say, lighting a match.

"I knew I could never kill Orfeo in cold blood. I would have to provoke him, but I could not imagine how."

"You could call him names."

"He
was
names. It would only have flattered him."

"You could push him, poke him. That would make him angry."

"It would have made him go limp."

"You could challenge him to a duel."

"He was a half-blind, fat, old midget with palsies and ticks. He would have laughed."

"Then how did you do it?"

"You won't believe me."

"Yes I will," Nicolò protested.

"No you won't, but it's true.

"First, I had to find him. I went to the enormous room in the Ministry of War where Orfeo had been seated on a platform above the other scribes. It was empty save for regimental flags hanging from the walls, and the platform was gone.

"A fat little guy in an office down a hall saw me and kept calling out, 'You! You!' and waving for me to come to him. 'I saw you in there looking amazed,' he said. 'You must have been here when the war was run from that room.' I nodded. 'Now it's a marching hall for new recruits who have to wait to go to training camp. Who the hell would join the army now that the war's over?'

"'The smart ones,' I said.

"'It's a little like
coitus interruptus,
isn't it?'

"'Some people can't help it if they're young,' I told him."

"What's
coitus interruptus'?
" Nicolò asked.

"
Coitus
is having sex," Alessandro said, "and
interruptus
is when, suddenly, you're not."

Nicolò laughed out loud. "Why would anyone want to
interruptus?
"

"Why do you think?"

"I don't know. It sounds really stupid to me. Why stop if you've
started? Why start if you're going to stop? I thought that in sex it was a gradual stop, like a duck landing in a pond."

"Yes, but can you think of a reason why you would stop at a certain point?"

"No."

"Think hard."

"A holiday?"

Alessandro scowled.

"I don't know! What do you want from me? I'd die to have sex. All right. Some people stop in the middle. Boom! That's their problem. I don't even want to talk to them. Get them out of here. It's as stupid as joining the army after the war."

"What about babies?"

"What about them?"

"Having them."

"Having them
what?
" Nicolò asked in exasperation.

"Having them be born."

"What about them?"

"Maybe that's a good reason to stop immediately."

"So you'll have a baby?"

"No, idiot! So you won't!"

"I don't understand."

Alessandro sat up straight. "How is it you think babies are born?"

"Something the mother and father do before sex, some sort of cloth or herb or hard-boiled egg that the father puts in the mother or something, with a rubber bulb and a glass dish."

"No," Alessandro said. "That's not quite it."

"No?"

"No. You just have to have sex—if you're married, fifty times; if you're not married, once."

"You're kidding!"

"I'm not kidding."

"I thought it was something additional."

"Nothing additional."

"That's good to know," Nicolò said, "because, you know, I might have—you know."

"You see how insane the world is, Nicolò? No matter that it is unbearably beautiful. How would I have guessed that during my last hours I would sit on a rock in the starlight, in mountain laurel, explaining sexual hygiene to an apprentice in a propeller factory."

"Well now I know."

"Good."

"But what about Orfeo?"

"What about Orfeo? The fat guy kept talking. 'Remember the hundreds of men who sat at desks in there?' he asked. I said I did. 'Every order and communiqué of the war went through them, and if you promise not to tell, I'll let you in on something that will really amaze you.'

"'What?' I asked, pretending ignorance.

"'Not a single order or communiqué ever left the way it came in. If the dispatch said
Advance twenty kilometers, wheel right until enemy is engaged and hold position on flank as main attack is developed from the south,
it might go out reading,
Advance fifteen kilometers, wheel left, and move position according to necessity as feints are developed from the east.

"'Or a naval order. The coordinates would be reversed, ship types changed. I swear to God, Italian ships were sent to Polynesia, and, somehow, Japanese ships ended up in the Mediterranean. Do you know how many men were shot who weren't supposed to have been shot? How many weren't shot who were supposed to have been? I don't know how the army ate. Every gram of army cinnamon was shipped one day to an anti-aircraft battery in Treviso. That's all they had to eat for the whole war—twenty-two and a half tons of cinnamon, and no one else had even a sprinkle. An infantry battalion on the French border kept on getting boxcars and
boxcars full of pipe tobacco, and there was a cruiser, I swear, that for several years received nothing but anchovy paste.'

"I told the fat guy that what he described sounded to me like a fair description of what life had been like in the army, and I asked him why, if he knew about it then, he didn't try to stop it.

"He said that he had tried, that he had gone to generals and civilian officials and told them, but that they had said, 'So what? We're winning.'

"We did win, Nicolò, but we lost at least seven hundred thousand killed, and many times that number were wounded. Commissions were formed to determine the number of casualties, but because the record keeping had been so chaotic they couldn't agree even to the nearest hundred thousand. No one knows how many died. Maybe a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand fell in between the cracks, disappeared. The loss of a single man should have stopped the world.

"I asked him why it was that the orders were changed, and he replied, 'A dwarf, a little bat-like thing whose name was Orfeo Quatta. He sat on a dais in the middle of the floor. He was the chief scribe. To his clerks he was Caesar Augustus.'

"'Wasn't he removable?'

"The little fat guy smiled. 'In his safe he had the seals, the forms for patents, commissions, proclamations, declarations, and decrees. He set up a government within the government—by moving the decimal points in appropriations and salaries, sending his speechless enemies to tiny towns in Calabria, and rewarding sycophants with sinecures.

"'He had fits of madness and megalomania upon the dais, as the scribes, their heads bent in terror, pretended not to hear.'

"I talked to the little fat guy for a long time. He told me that everyone wanted to kill Orfeo, that it was a common fantasy. 'But no one killed him,' he said, 'just the way you never get to caress the most beautiful woman in the world.'

"'The most beautiful woman in the world always finds a lover, doesn't she?' I asked. Of course, he had to say yes. Then I said, 'Someone there is, always, who does manage to touch her.'

"'Yes.'

"'Then,' I said, 'someone must have killed Orfeo. Or someone will.'

"'No,' he said, 'no one ever did.'

"'How was he removed?'

"'The war ended. It was just like letting the water out of a tub.'

"'Where did he go?'

"The next morning, I went there, too. He lived in a cave dug into the base of the Testaccio."

"What's the Testaccio?" Nicolò asked.

"You know where the pyramid is?"

"Yeah, in Egypt."

"No. I mean the one in Rome."

"There's a pyramid in Rome?"

"Did you ever go to Ostia?"

"Yeah."

"How?"

"On the train."

"You didn't see the pyramid across the street from the train station?"

"That thing?"

Alessandro bobbed his head extra hard, so Nicolò would see his answer even in the dark. "What did you think it was?"

"I thought they were building something and hadn't put on the other side."

"No. It's a pyramid. Just down the street, beyond the Protestant Cemetery, is a big hill called the Testaccio. It's made of broken amphorae that were used as ballast on ships that docked in the Tiber. They knew they would dam the river if they kept dropping the pieces into it, so they made a mound. The district is also home to
the Mattatoio, and to those who are so poor that they cannot even sit on the street in other parts of the city, lest other people be unsettled in their vanity and dreams of rank. You and I and everyone else are a snap of a finger away from the derelicts with sparkling eyes and blackened skin who stumble forward knowing that they'll be gone in a week or two. The only difference now between me and them is that I'm clean and I can talk."

"You're not so clean anymore, Signore. You're covered with dust, and your eyes are like the eyes of a wolf."

Alessandro smiled. "Like a wolf?"

"Like a wolf."

"All right, I'm not clean, my heart is failing, and I'm lying on the ground, but I can talk. I'm talking, am I not, with some speed?"

"You're windmilling," Nicolò said.

"Good," Alessandro returned. "That can't be unpleasant to you, considering your profession."

"Tell me about Orfeo before you die," Nicolò said, playing a part.

"I won't die until it's hot."

"How do you know?"

"Because I want to, and I will."

"If you hadn't told me about your heart, I would never know."

"I want to."

"Why?"

"I'm ready."

"You're tired of living?"

"I was tired of the world a long time ago, and I'm running half in another realm right now. It isn't unpleasant; it isn't dark. Quite to the contrary, it's a land of light, and soon I'll have to ask you if I'm floating."

"Do you want me to stay with you?"

"No. When it gets light, go back on the road and go visit your sister. Is she pretty?"

"A little bit."

"I wish I could have met her, but she wouldn't have understood. She probably would have been distrustful, or at least shy."

"I don't think so. She used to be a whore."

"What could be more shy than a whore in a convent?"

"She had to do it, but only for six months. A tower buckled when my father was on top fastening the lines. He was unconscious for a month, and he couldn't walk for a long time after that. He never knew. She told him she worked in a cafeteria, and she changed her clothes in the hotel. As soon as he got a job making bricks, she stopped. I shouldn't have told you—she'd kill me—but you told me about Orfeo."

"Let me finish, then, so we'll be even.

"Why did he live in a cave in the Testaccio? I don't know. You would think he would have been smart enough to have ordered a billion lire into a secret bank account in Switzerland, and retire there—like every Italian who does something like that—surrounded by bodyguards, Doberman pinschers, and women with huge breasts.

"But no, he lived in a tiny room hewn from a mountain of potsherds. He used to talk about the whitened bones in the valleys of the moon. Perhaps he thought he was living in a mountain of bones, and that the exalted one was going to go there to pick him up. Well, the exalted one did.

"He had two windows and a door at the front of the cave, and the windows had garish yellow-and-purple curtains: irises and daffodils. I never notice things like shoes and curtains, I see right past them, but these were magnetic. As I stood at the gate of the little garden in the front of his house, I saw him peeping from behind those hideous curtains.

"He didn't know I was watching him, and he thought that I didn't know that he was watching me. His expression was one of deep concentration and concern, like that of an animal, used to running free, that suddenly discovers it is trapped.

"I could see only a quarter of his face at a time, but he moved around enough so that eventually I saw every part. His black hair was slicked down, and he looked nimble and well pressed. He was old, but he was the kind of man who can do a backward somersault until he's ninety. I thought that, with fascism, we were certain to have another war, and, thus, I had an overwhelming desire to get rid of him.

"I waited for several months, and I grew a beard. Ariane was polite, but she preferred me without it. Paolo was amazed and amused. I promised to shave before the autumn. Under an assumed name, I joined a swimming club near the Tiber. It was a horrible club, always crowded and chaotic, especially when the students of a nearby
liceo
were released. A pool designed for seven lane-swimmers would suddenly be burdened with a hundred screaming adolescents. The changing-rooms were so tumultuous that no adult in his right mind would go near them. Good. Part of my plan.