A Soldier of the Great War (19 page)

Alessandro answered, spurred on because so many people were listening to him.

"Captain," he said, respectfully, "Libya is Ottoman territory. We are there as guests, and all the effort we have expended in the last ten years is not equal to half the new construction on the Via del Corso alone. Although you say that the mineral deposits are of great value, you might better have said that they have great skill, for they hide so well under the ground that no one has yet been able to find them.

"As for Libya's agricultural potential—something that is se
verely prejudiced by the fact that nothing grows there—when the day comes that an Italian of the South will leave his dry and rocky soil for sand, then perhaps it will be wise to war against the Sultan. These people are going to America, where they will continue to go whether or not we fight Turkey, in that respect making our fight with Turkey rather pointless.

"And our history is such that were we to follow it in making policy we should declare war not only on our former possessions in Libya, but on Britain, Spain, Germany, France, Austria, and Carthage. Perhaps we can prevent the establishment of a German naval base to the south not by declaring war on Turkey, which seems rather a roundabout way of doing it, but by informing the Germans that it would be
casus belli.
And as for our honor, honor is a complex and important matter best served by doing the right thing."

"Better to go to war with Germany later than with Turkey now?" Lias brother asked.

"Better to go to war with neither."

"Better to
risk
war with Germany, later, than to win a war against Turkey now?" the captain pressed.

"Who said we would win?"

"I assure you, we would win, and I am not able to offer such assurances regarding Germany."

"As far as I can see," Alessandro said, "it would be far more sensible to let the Germans build a naval base in Libya, if that's what they want, and build three naval bases in the boot of Italy to overwhelm it. That way we'd have nothing to worry about, we'd be stronger, and we'd avoid wasting blood and money in a war."

"Maneuver," the captain said, "is far more important than mass or balance. You've neglected maneuver for the sake of equation. In war and in the competition between states, position is everything."

"Ah yes," said an Englishman, in superb German. "Give me a proper platform, and I will move the world!"

Because no one could tell precisely when the English chose to be sarcastic, those who sided with Alessandro assumed that the Englishman was mocking what Lias brother had said, and those who sided with Lias brother believed that he was in agreement.

The baroness took advantage of this and started half a dozen conversations on half a dozen subjects all at once. Leaving the Mediterranean, the two ambassadors began to talk about Russia.

Alessandro sat back in his chair and turned the color of a plum. Overcome with pride and embarrassment, he was too young to know that the question was still open: he thought that he had settled it.

Then he went on to discover that diplomatic dinners have many courses, and that he was mistaken not to have imitated the ambassadors and Lia, who merely tasted each serving. Instead, spurred by triumph, he ate almost everything that was served to him, and after fourteen courses and three desserts he felt so heavy that he was not sure Enrico would be able to bear his weight.

That and the champagne forced him to sit in a chair, like an old man, and watch Lia glide about the floor in waltzes that seemed to last forever. The trick, it seemed, was not to eat so much that you couldn't work it off in dancing immediately thereafter. Lia was waltzing with a soldier. Alessandro would dance with her later. Now he had the privilege of apprehending her beauty from afar, and though he had very little experience to tell him so, he felt that this was better because it was more likely to last into time. She moved like a cloud.

 

L
IA AND
her brother left the Palazzo Venezia at eleven-thirty. As Alessandro stood on the cobbles and watched them get into a carriage, he wondered if he would marry her. She was exquisite, and he feared that he was blinded to everything else, that he was drawn to her by weakness, that his passion for her was incomplete. Know
ing all too well the deeply religious love of the Italian poets for women they had merely seen on the street, he feared that his infatuation for Lia could never be compared to the elemental union that can occur between men and women when God is present and light surrounds them.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

Once, high in the Julian Alps, he and his father had watched a flock of birds scatter in the presence of an eagle. As the eagle moved with uncanny slowness, like a great battleship confidently steaming far offshore, and the birds scattered to bait the eagle away from their young, Alessandro's father said, "Their souls, at this moment, are full, and the eagle is nothing. God is with them for what they lack."

His reverie interrupted by the return of his horse, who was happy to be brought up from unfamiliar stables, he mounted, and Enrico cantered out the gate into the warm spring night.

It was a Wednesday. Rome was quiet. They went on the Via del Corso all the way to the Piazza del Popolo, but instead of turning to cross the Tiber and make their way home they galloped into the Viale del Muro Torto and through the Porta Pinciana to the small triangle of land for which the attorney Giuliani had traded the garden. Looking over the empty lots and undistinguished buildings, Alessandro suddenly realized that if he married Lia he could keep the garden. If the union would put to right the question of a garden on the Gianicolo, then perhaps other balances, too, would be set to right.

As they rode homeward along the Villa Medici in the cool night air, under stars brighter than in any city of Europe, Alessandro heard an orchestra. Even hours earlier, this would have been a shock, an orchestra playing in the open air, and as he drew closer he heard singing. In the garden of the French Academy, a full orchestra accompanied singers in the "
Ma di'...
" from
Norma.
Alessandro tied Enrico to an iron window grate embedded in the wall, and used it as a ladder to get over the top.

Though it was almost midnight, neither the singers nor the musicians showed any signs of exhaustion, and by the time Alessandro dropped into the garden, perfectly camouflaged in his formal clothes, they had finished the aria and started up again. If the Austrians could impale themselves ecstatically upon Strauss, the French were equally capable of a delirium spurred by
Norma,
even if in both cases the singers and musicians were Italian. They left
Norma
and jumped to
Ernani
and then to "
Ecco la barca,
" from
La Gioconda,
and all the while, hundreds of people wandered through the gardens. Perhaps because this was the French Academy, scores of them were attractive women. In respect to this, the embassy in the Palazzo Venezia (apart from Lia) was hopeless. Alessandro wondered why he hadn't come here rather than to the dinner. The music was better, the atmosphere less formal, the fellows of the academy and their guests not too much older than he. As the singers led the orchestra in "
Già nella notte densa...
" Alessandro felt every atom of the cool night air.

Though the wide paths in the garden of the Villa Medici were lit by wavering torches, the fountain was illuminated by half a dozen electric lights. Somewhere beyond the residence, unseen, an engine turned a generator in unfailing circles to make the current that made the light. During pauses in the music, if one listened carefully, one could hear its steady optimistic sound.

Whereas the waltzes of the Austrian embassy were wonderfully pleasurable, the singing in the garden of the Villa Medici had led
him deep into speculation. He walked slowly amid the guests of the French Academy, seeking anchors for his racing thought—a dark waving branch with waxen leaves, a sight of the stars through a cut in the trees, a girl throwing back her hair to the irresistible rhythm of the song, a concordance of colors compressed in a torchlit line of sight, the stirrings of women in their silken clothing.

Not far from the fountain, out of Alessandro's sight, were three girls who looked like they might have been models for Fragonard, one of the academy's previous residents, in that they seemed not only to reflect light, but, somehow, to hold and perhaps even to generate it.

Younger than the youngest of the fellows, they did not know quite what to do. They talked for show even when too far from anyone to be overheard, because they accurately sensed that, however awkwardly, they were beginning to play a part.

First in line as they paused to watch the reflections in the water was Jeannette, the youngest daughter of one of the residents. Second was Isabelle, the daughter of a second secretary in the French embassy. And last was Ariane, the daughter of an Italian doctor and a Frenchwoman. She could turn from French to Italian as fast as a swallow could change directions, and she had studied Latin, Greek, and English enough to navigate in them largely without mistakes.

She was the youngest, but she stood out among the other girls because of her beauty. When she was a child the physical characteristics that would later make her very beautiful were so striking that she seemed to have been almost homely. Only someone of long experience might have seen breathtaking beauty awkwardly sleeping in what appeared to have been catastrophically misaligned features—the broad expanses of her cheeks and her forehead, the independent energy of her eyes, the painfully beautiful arch of her brows, the smile that, even at a distance, even in memory, filled anyone who had seen it with love and paralyzing pleasure.

Throughout her childhood she had thought that she was ugly, and though all the evidence would later militate against her earliest conclusions, she could never abandon them, and she, more beautiful than any woman Alessandro had ever seen in life, in painting, in photographs, lived with the conviction that she was less than plain, and went about with the discomfort of someone who is embarrassed to be seen. She never quite believed, even later, when she had heard many protestations to the contrary, that when people stared at her it was not because they thought she was hideous, and this made her beautiful almost beyond belief.

Jeannette, Isabelle, and Ariane circled the fountain, walking as slowly as they could without halting at each step, and talking as enthusiastically as if everyone were listening to them as they moved upon a lighted stage. They spoke about Aix-en-Provence. To hear them you would have thought that Aix-en-Provence was not only the capital of France and perhaps even Europe (or at least the Holy Roman Empire), but a French Valhalla.

Young girls in Paris spoke this way about Deauville, Biarritz, or Nice, and young girls elsewhere spoke this way about Paris, but these three, not knowing Paris, had to settle for Aix. They sounded both conspiratorial and blasé, to convince themselves and others that they were on to something. They alternated experimentally between the two states, trying to find the proper voice.

When Jeannette described an afternoon by a waterfall, she did so with erotic luxury. The girls and boys had been captivated with the idea of catching speckled trout that hovered in the waist-deep pools, and had gone in, in their clothing, at first only up to the knee, but then up to the waist, and eventually, slowly, they were diving under the water in pursuit of the fish, and emerging with their hair matted down and fresh cold water running from it, sparkling in the sun. The girls' summer dresses clung to them, showing their breasts and nipples. The boys had taken off their shirts. They lost their sense of time, which, Jeannette said, is what
happens in the water, and soon began to embrace and waltz together in the cold stream, holding on for love and warmth. It would have been even more scandalous, Jeannette declared, had someone not caught a trout now and then, and, in doing so, broken the spell.

"Were you on the bank watching this?" Ariane asked, for Jeannette had been the youngest.

"No," Jeannette answered, as if confessing that her life had been ruined by indiscretion. "I was in the water," she said, lying, "I was in someone's arms."

"Whose?" Isabelle asked, burning with curiosity. Jeannette would not and could not tell.

Perhaps because she was too tall and had a spray of freckles, Isabelle expected to be eventually like her mother, the mistress more of a house than to a man. She had her eye on a farmhouse on a hill, with orchards and vineyards. Someday, she said, she would redo it, and she described rooms and new fabrics as if her heart were breaking in slow motion from the thought of substituting such things for love, although the house would be next to a river, her children would swim there, and perhaps their lives would be ideal.

When Isabelle and Jeannette had twice remembered the bakery, and three times the cafe where they sat with their friends and drank wine, they turned to Ariane to bring in something new, to show why Aix was the superior place that made them fascinating because they had been there.

Though she tried, Ariane couldn't do it. "I love the light in Aix," she said, but, even though she did, her heart was not in it. "And the fields. My father and I walked through the fields every day last summer, almost every day."

One refrained from mentioning parents unless it was to lie about their youthful characteristics that one presumed would soon be handed down, or to drop offhandedly a hint about their wealth, or whom they knew.

"What did you talk about?" Jeannette asked, almost cruelly.