A Soldier of the Great War (11 page)

"Let go of me," he thought more than said, for he had no air left in his lungs. When the huge bandsman responded to Alessandro's pathetic gurgle by tightening his fists until Alessandro thought his neck was about to snap, the boy bared his teeth and jerked the open flask toward the face of the strangler.

A stunted rainbow of boiling tea and broken glass shot directly into the target. The trumpeter screamed, dropped his hands, and fell against the wooden floor, knocking himself unconscious. Forgetting where he was, Alessandro leapt to the side and tumbled into empty space, but, as the hut master had said, he was securely tied in, and he found himself dangling from the harness, a short distance from the gondola.

"Mama!" he cried, almost in tears, but then he felt stupid, because, obviously, no one was there except him, and he himself had to do whatever had to be done.

Though he was scared even to look up, much less down, he raised his hands and caught the side of the gondola. With a stream of curse words known principally to the fourth class of the Accademia San Pietro in Rome, he pulled himself back.

The trumpeter lay on the sheepskin in perfect quiet. Perhaps he was dead, but, dead or not, Alessandro had to massage his heart. He started pushing against the chest. In between strokes, he tossed the flask overboard, and then deftly did the same for each shard of glass.

The trumpeter was still alive. He stirred. The wind had ceased and now, as they floated through the tops of the pines, Alessandro could hear the cable engine puffing not far below.

On the way back, Alessandro reclined on the sheepskin. Warm, secure, and disgusted, he marveled that the trumpeter had been able to jump up and run from the cable car station. Still, Alessandro would be a hero when he got back. He wouldn't be able to avoid it. They would carry him in and cheer for half an hour while he finished his dinner. After dismissing them he would ascend not to his room but to the room of the blonde girl in the velvet dress. She would take him into her bed, where they would spend the entire night alone in the dark, pressed together, motionless. This would mix their hearts forever, and thereafter they would be married. The problem was where to live—in Rome or in Vienna. Perhaps Paris, as a compromise. He decided that her name was Patrizia.

He did hear cheering as he came over the lip, now clear of clouds, but it was not the sustained hysteria that he had expected. No matter, the big part would come in the dining hall, with an orchestra, lights, flags, and warm fires.

The attorney Giuliani passed the rifle to a soldier and watched the hut master undo the harness. Dinner had ended, Alessandro was told, but they would cook for him anything he wanted, and serve it in the kitchen. He wanted only dessert.

Though he was as
thin as a switch, he imagined that if he were to eat that night, he would be too fat to lie with Patrizia.

The dining hall in the Schlernhaus was dark. Everyone had gone upstairs except some soldiers and mountain guides who sat around a grate of glowing coals in the guides' room, talking about war. The sound of a zither came softly from the upper floors—for the princess.

No one cheered. The guides stared at him because he walked so pompously, and the kitchen cadet who had to stay late to serve the food was anxious to go to bed, because he had to rise at four A.M.

"Tell me about it," the attorney Giuliani asked, "what it was like. Why was the tea spilled? The note they sent back with you said that Herr Willgis ran all the way to his house. That amazes me....

"All right," his father said, "I can understand why you might not want to talk. I'm going to bed now. If you like, we can go home tomorrow."

Alessandro nodded.

The cadet put a piece of Sacher torte on the table, took off his blue apron, and stumbled dizzily out the kitchen door toward the cadet barracks, saying, "Just put the dishes in the sink, so the rats don't jump on the table." Alone in the kitchen, his courage beginning to ebb, Alessandro thought to seek out Patrizia before he was too afraid to do so. He was tempted just to go to bed, but the image of the beautiful, shy, blonde girl made him rise. He trembled so much as he put the dishes in the sink that the fork clattered against the plate and the cup against the saucer like palsied old men. Then, with the weighted heartbreaking tread of someone on his way to be hanged, he walked toward the stairs. He wanted to hold her, to kiss her, to breathe—in her breath, and he bumped against the stairs in the dark and started to ascend to the upper floors and their dizzying, intimate warrens.

During the day the soldiers of the
Leibregiment
stayed rigidly by the doorposts of the royal compartments, and nothing in the
world, not even a tiny July gnat, could get past them, but, inexplicably, at night they paced back and forth like bears in a shooting gallery, taking long trips down the hall at precisely timed intervals when it was easy for a small boy treading softly on alpaca socks to glide into the forbidden wing and have his choice of twenty doors in two facing rows.

His chances of finding her before he himself was discovered were not good: he could tell nothing from the doors themselves; it was quite dark; and his time was limited because someone would undoubtedly come out into the hall.

Choosing a middle door at random, he was about to put his hand on the latch but was deterred by a raspy voice from within. Someone was talking to himself. "...to Gisella! But Hermann will be exposed for what he is within a week. In a year's time, I'll be the favorite in court, and the monkey will jump on the nut. On the other hand, no one ever got rich by putting octopus ink in a drinking glass, and the emperor likes Von Schafthausen—mistakenly, of course...." Clearly this man was going to stay up all night, and he was not Patrizia.

Alessandro moved to a door at the end of the hall. Slowly, quietly, he lifted the latch and looked within. There, in the flashing, cloud-scudding moonlight, lay a huge beached whale of a woman, with exceedingly spacious gaps in her teeth, enormous fleshy lips, a porcine nose, and ears shaped like powder horns. Who was she? She had been too ugly to come to dinner. Perhaps she was a maid, or an unfortunate royal relative forever hiding on the upper floors of palaces and inns.

After shutting that door, Alessandro despaired of finding Patrizia, but after his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that neatly placed in front of each door was a pair of shoes or boots. Ordinarily, no one was permitted to wear boots in the Schlernhaus, and they were kept on racks under the stairs, but royal shoes and boots were allowed to sleep near their masters and mistresses.

Some were huge, others womanly, and the shoes of the servants had telltale buckles. The door with no shoes in front of it must have been the princess's, since she was probably allowed to wear them even to bed. One pair of slippers was unmistakably petite and had not been left neatly, but thrown down in front of the door as if its owner had had to rush across the cold floor to a warm bed. Alessandro approached these shoes as if they were saintly relics. They were sprawled in front of the last door near the window at the end of the hall, across from the monster, in the moonlight. He was entranced by the casual angle at which she had left them, the way the straps fell, and the way they looked in the white light that machine-gunned across them through rapidly driven clouds, and he wondered if he would be able to love Patrizia herself as much as he could love the poignant and accidental traces of her.

Then a soldier began to stride down the hall. Presented with a choice between love and death, the young Alessandro lifted the latch, pivoted inside, and closed the door silently behind him.

Patrizia lay under a silver satin coverlet illuminated by the light of the moon. She looked different with her braids undone and her golden hair splayed across the pillow. She opened her eyes when he came in, and they followed him as he approached. She herself remained motionless, unafraid.

He put his fingers to his lips. Her hand appeared from under the covers and she did the same. It was a game, but it was more than a game.

"Can you talk Italian?" he whispered.

"Yes," she answered, also in a whisper. "We go to Italy each spring."

"Do you remember me?"

"From Italy?"

"No, from tonight."

"No," she said, lying.

"Oh," he answered, downcast. "I saw you in the dining room."

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Alessandro Garibaldi," he replied.

"Are you related to Garibaldi?" Most of the people she knew were related to other people of whom everyone else had heard.

"I'm his youngest son."

"But didn't he die a long time ago?"

"Yes. Pay it no mind. He was my brother's father, and the uncle of his half wife was my cousin's grandmother's sister. She married my uncle's brother, who was him, and by her he had me. Who is the strange woman in the room across the hall?"

"Did you enter each room?" the girl asked, surprised, and, to Alessandro's delight, jealous.

"It was an accident."

"That's Lorna. She's my cousin. She hides, because she's so ugly. It's very sad, but she's nice, and I love her. She reads to me."

"Look at what the clouds do when they interrupt the moon," Alessandro said. "It makes me dizzy."

"Are you cold?" she asked in a way that would have been unmistakable to anyone but a nine-year-old desperate to do exactly what she wanted him to do.

"No," he answered, shivering not from chill but from the possibility of rejection and the terror of acceptance, both.

"You can come in here with me," she offered, although it was difficult for her to say. "If you want..." She lifted the covers, and he jumped in.

It was warm. It was more than warm. What with the feather bed, her flannel nightgown, the thick down cover, and his woolen clothing and alpaca socks, it was like a Dutch oven.

Alessandro didn't know what to do. When she leaned her head against his chest, gales of wonder and emotion swept over him. He kissed her hair. Never in his life had he smelled anything so sweet or touched anything so soft.

But this moment of utter perfection was as vulnerable to disruption as the mirror-smooth surface of a lake at dawn. Suddenly,
and against his strongest wishes, he was disturbed and unhappy because his father didn't know where he was. Perhaps the attorney Giuliani had gone downstairs to look, and, finding the kitchen empty, had stepped outside to ask the cadets what had happened to Alessandro, only to become lost in the fog and chill. Alessandro winced when he thought of his father wandering blindly over the meadow, close to the high cliffs. Or perhaps he was just lying in his bed, thinking and remembering, in a way that always seemed to Alessandro to be very sad.

Alessandro had no choice but to go back. As wonderful and light as things now were—and he felt as if he had been born to slip into Patrizia's bed—he had to leave her and go back to his father, far less angelic a form, with his goat-like Roman lawyer's beard, his thick hands, and the smell of pipe tobacco that had settled into him forever. As powerful a figure as this man was, still, he was more vulnerable than the slight little girl next to Alessandro. Even Alessandro knew, even at this moment, that the world had worn down the attorney Giuliani in ways that his son simply could not understand. The little ones, the delicate ones of nine or eleven, had all the strength, really.

Alessandro's reflections were immediately banished by the metallic sound of a door latch that had been lifted by someone who did not feel obliged to sneak around in alpaca socks.

He dived under the covers. Whatever the danger, the sudden arrival of a third party was a blessing. When he was deep down in the satin, Patrizia held him tenderly and protectively. That she did so in secret was the most intimate gesture Alessandro had ever experienced. The pressure of her hands, their steadiness while she dealt with the interloper, were what he had dreamed of when he had thought that they would mix their hearts.

Just inside the doorway, Lorna stood almost on tiptoe, her arms folded across her breast and her face upturned to the inrush of moonlight, in the most pathetic, awkward, and repulsive stance that can be imagined. And yet, she was a good soul, tormented
immeasurably and destined to suffer forever in a body that was a fortress against love, an impregnable glacis. She stood in her cousin's room, in tortured ecstasy, poised like one of the three little pigs in prayer, drinking-in the moonlight with her gloomy cow eyes.

"I had the most marvelous dream!" she exclaimed. "
Ich träumte, ich tanzte mit einem Schwan! Er hatte die wunderbarsten flauschigen Polster an dem Füssen, und er war auf einem Mondstrahl in mein Zimmer gekommen
—I dreamed I was dancing with a swan! He had the most marvelous little puffy white feet, and he came into my room on a moonbeam."

"Dear God," Patrizia said softly, for she knew that when Lorna had one of her truly wonderful dreams, her custom was to get into her cousin's bed to tell her of it in great detail. "Lorna, dearest one, do you think that perhaps you could tell me in the morning? Tomorrow we rise early to descend to the Seiser Alpe, and I'm so tired!"

"Certainly not!" Lorna said with maddening insensitivity. "You know that if I wait until morning I'll forget the details, and it's the details you love."

"But Lorna..."

"He was a thin swan, he had a beak that was as orange as the orange in the rainbow, and he loved me. I asked him how he traveled on a moonbeam, and he told me by singing a golden song.... Move over." She half lifted the quilt, and hopped into bed in one quick graceless leap—all of her. The Schlernhaus quivered.

Patrizia, whose name, of course, was not Patrizia, was alarmed. She had lost Alessandro, who was underneath Lorna, completely subsumed. She wondered if he could breathe, or if he were screaming.

"The golden song was like a warbling horn. Once, I heard a bird singing like that, at Grandfather's estate in Klagenfurt.... What is this? Is this your leg?"

As if to answer in the negative, Alessandro, who for the second time in a matter of hours found himself unable to move and without air, bit Lorna fiercely in one of her huge buttocks.