A Soldier of the Great War (28 page)

"What is it?" Alessandro asked, rising from his chair. He wanted to know immediately. "Did someone die? Who died?"

Signora Giuliani closed her eyes and dipped her head.

"Who?" he asked, now weakly.

"Elio Bellati."

Luciana was weeping, and Alessandro couldn't understand why. She was shaking as if she had seen it with her own eyes.

As her mother went to comfort her, her father stood up, removed his glasses, and faced his son. "Alessandro, they tore the body to pieces...."

Alessandro dropped into his chair. "How do you know?"

"It was reported. He wasn't the only one. There were many."

"What about Lia? Have you seen her since?"

"I think you'd better get used to doing without her, Alessandro."

"Why?"

"Because that's the way things work."

Later, Alessandro walked through the garden, which was covered with wet and rotting leaves. Though only a few lights were burning in the Bellatis' house, he opened the iron gate. A servant whom he had never seen came to the door, an old man who appeared as if he specialized in temporary work in houses of mourning. His manner was a buffer for every emotion and every request. If asked to bring the paper, he would have said, "Just a moment. I'll go to see if perhaps one has arrived."

Alessandro announced himself. The servant went away, and returned. "Perhaps you can leave your card."

"I don't have a card," Alessandro told him. "I live across the garden."

The servant gently shook his head. "They won't see you," he said.

I
N
O
CTOBER
of 1914 Alessandro went on horseback from Bologna to Rome. He was young, the weather was beautiful, and Europe was at war. Though Italy had remained neutral, Alessandro was sure that the newly unified country would find the test of combat irresistible, and that he would be forced to take his place in the front lines. During the mad days of August, the attorney Giuliani had expressed the sudden desire that his only son should go to America, but Alessandro rebuffed all efforts to remove him from danger, protesting that only a few months remained before the confirmation of his doctorate, and that he had to be present for the final examinations.

"You can come back," his father had said.

"Why leave if I'll come back?" Alessandro had asked, and then had quoted Horace. "'New skies the exile finds, but the heart is still the same.'"

His thoughts had been not merely of practicalities and not merely of Latin poetry but of the girl in the Villa Medici. Had he known her name, or that he had been close to her on the street half a dozen times without realizing it, or that from his window he could see her house far away across the Tiber, his life might have been different. More than once he had seen her lamp light amidst the ten thousand lamps of evening, so distant that it flickered like a star.

Now he had been riding since early morning, when it was cold and the moon had refused to abdicate, hanging delicately over a
pine-covered hill, as bashful as a doe, and as still. At the highest point of a ridge that seemed to run diagonally across all of Tuscany, he dismounted, quieted Enrico, and looped the reins around a pine bough sticky with resin. A few steps took him out of the shade and into the clear, close to a cliff that dropped away until the land rose up again in a line of mountains far to the north.

He tilted his head slightly and looked at the light over the horizon. To the north the air was tortured and quick, undulating like the air above a fire and bending the light into untrustworthy contortions. Somewhere along the line of sight, under the canopy of pale blue, was France and the war. Rooted in the stillness, Alessandro was like a farmer watching a blaze consume the forest at the edge of his fields.

The world was going to be torn to pieces. In the driving apart of so many families, every family would be driven apart; in the death of so many husbands and sons, every husband and son would die; in the anarchy and gravity of suffering, God's laws would emerge in all their color, hardness, and injustice. Were Alessandro to survive he would have to start anew, but he wondered if, left with nothing familiar and no sign of anyone he loved, he would be able even to think of starting over.

Alessandro took in the grace of the surrounding landscape like a blind man whose vision is suddenly restored not in a small room in a clinic but on a high and windy promontory overlooking half the world. Before him were rounded green hills, floating clouds, a river, pines, and a distant line of mountains. Though the only noise in the forest was the chatter of birds, he was able to hear music that he took from memory and fused with the sound of wind in the trees. From the fullness of the clouds, the arc of a swallow, and the sparkling of the sun upon a shattered river, came sonatas, symphonies, and songs.

Safe in the greenery, under a canopy of blue, Alessandro watched the birds flit by in momentary ribbons of blurred color,
but over the horizon the action that bent the suffering air shook him awake as if from a dream. Though he could feel the end approaching—the end of the familiar, the rearrangement of the elements of beauty, the death of his family, and his own death—he believed that as night pressed its ever-expanding claim, the things in which he placed his faith would assume their brightest mantles and come most alive. Even the silent things would sing, and fight their undoing by rising up before it to their full and greatest height. After suffering must come redemption. Of this he had no doubt.

 

A
WEEK
on the road had made Enrico lean and half wild. When they crossed the Tiber Alessandro had difficulty holding him back, for the horse knew the road and strengthened with each familiar turn. Knowing that his stable at the Porta San Pancrazio was just at the top of the Gianicolo, where he had been born and where the air was perfectly familiar, Enrico bolted forward and took Alessandro to the top of the second-highest hill in Rome as if he were a bird rising out of control in a storm.

Once, Alessandro had come home after having ridden for weeks on hot dusty roads, and had announced his arrival by firing a pistol in the air as he came up the hill to his house. Now he merely knocked at the door.

When his mother greeted him she did not have her customary energy, and she pulled him into the reception room and closed the door behind them.

"Why are you home?" she whispered.

"What's wrong?" he asked. "Am I not supposed to be home?"

"Your father isn't well. He mustn't be upset. Have you been expelled?"

"How could I be expelled?" Alessandro asked, never failing to be astonished that his mother, who had had no formal education,
did not understand that getting rid of doctoral candidates was a process equivalent to starving a plant rather than obliterating it, and that it never took less than five or ten years. "What's the matter with him?" he asked.

"His heart isn't well," his mother said, clutching her own heart. "He has to rest for a month, and not climb stairs."

"Can he go back to work?"

"Yes."

"How will he climb all the stairs at the office?"

"The doctor said that when he gets better he can do it slowly."

"How serious is this?"

"He'll be all right. He's even resumed overseeing the firm. Every day at five-thirty Orfeo comes to note your father's directions and take letters."

"Orfeo!"

"Yes."

"I thought he wouldn't come back."

"Your father will tell you what happened, but I want to know why you came home early."

"The university is in recess because of the war," Alessandro said, lying.

"We're not in the war," his mother protested.

"Half the students are French and German, as are many of the professors, and a lot of Italians are enlisting in the armies anyway. The war has touched everything, everywhere."

He had neglected to mention that he himself had joined the navy.

His mother's and father's room took up most of the second floor, with half a dozen windows that overlooked Rome, and a fireplace at each end. From the bed one could see the Apennines bathed in evening light, and the city spread out beneath, with palms rising now and then from masses of walls and roofs that looked like lakes of ochre and gold. A large desk was at the north end, opposite a couch surrounded by tables and bookshelves.

The door had been left half open to let in heat. Alessandro entered and stood just inside. His father was sleeping, hands decorously clasped on his middle.

"Papa," Alessandro whispered. The old mans eyes opened.

"Alessandro."

"Why aren't you under the covers?" Alessandro asked when he noticed that his father had been sleeping on a made bed, with a heavy woolen blanket drawn over him.

"I'm only taking a nap. I'm dressed." He wore a shirt, collar, tie, pants, braces, and his suit vest.

"Why are you dressed?"

"I'm not sick, I'm just resting. I hate to stay in bed all day. Orfeo's coming this afternoon so I can dictate letters and instructions, because I'm still working on cases. When he comes I put on my jacket. I don't want him to see me without my jacket."

"For thirty years he's seen you when you take off your jacket."

"Not in my bedroom."

"Is that why all the books are straightened, the papers stacked, the pencils upright in the pencil cups?"

"No. That was from before, in case I died. I was very sick. I collapsed, and they brought me home in an ambulance."

Alessandro stared at his father, unwilling to imagine him so weak.

"I wanted to get the little things out of the way. I'd like the last thing I see to be the golden light on Rome, or snow on the mountains, or a great thunderstorm—not a pencil cup. Take them out of the room."

"You're recovering."

"I don't care. Get them out of here."

Alessandro gathered the pencil cups. "This one isn't so nice, the red one," he said, holding it up, "but the black one is beautiful: it's like the Wedgwood pen in the office." He moved them to the hall, and returned.

"I know," his father said. "The black ones were a set. I bought them in Paris in seventy-four. Bring it back and put it on the desk."
Alessandro did. "That looks good. I broke the set because ... I don't know why, but it wasn't much good as a set. You don't keep a pen in a pencil cup, or the point dries out."

"What about the others? They're still in the hall."

"They were choking the room. Why are you home?"

Alessandro told the lie about the university being in recess.

"That's a lie," his father said.

"I was told not to upset you."

"Lying upsets me."

"I enlisted in the navy."

"In the what!" his father screamed.

"The navy."

"The navy? Since when did you enlist in the navy?"

"Since last week."

The attorney Giuliani pulled himself up on the pillows and gathered the blanket.

"You stupid! Why?"

"It's a gamble, but it makes sense."

"To give up a professorship to enlist in the navy when Italy may soon be at war!" his father shouted. "That makes sense?"

"Let me finish. First of all, the professorship is purely hypothetical. I start as a lecturer, detested by the department because I don't see things as they do...."

"Why did they take you?"

"So they can drop me later."

"Alessandro, you don't enlist before a war, not unless you want to die. Wasn't Elio Bellati enough?"

"Papa," Alessandro said, holding up his index finger in exclamation, hesitatingly. "I treasure my life. I'm not like the men who fly into the flame of war for no reason other than to perish. I'm not doing that."

"No?"

"Of course not. You're thinking of small wars, like the last. This one is different. You've read of the battles, the need for men, the
way they use them up so quickly. France and Germany have conscription, and Asquith will fall if he should fail to institute it in England. If Italy enters the war, we, too, will have mass conscription. At my age and in my condition I'll go right into the trenches, where the death rate is tremendous.

"The navy is different. In the navy, the targets are the weapons themselves, whereas on land the target is the man who carries the weapon. You see? And if Italy doesn't enter the war, I will have been in the navy during a time of peace. I think, though, that we will go to war. I've taken a chance that everyone I know is afraid to take. They prefer to hope for the best, but if things go badly they'll be in a disastrous position.

"Precisely because I don't want to die in a senseless war, I have, for the first time in my life, calculated. I have retained all my passions, but I've changed. Perhaps for the sake of keeping my passions alive."

"When do they take you?" the attorney Giuliani asked.

"The first of January."

"That's not as soon as it might be," his father said, now resigned.

"I know. I came home to get things in order—just like you."

"Livorno?"

"Venice, officer training, but before I go in I'm going to Munich."

"Why Munich?"

"To see a painting while I still can."

Alessandro and his father turned at the sound of three sharp raps upon the door. Standing before them as stiff and short as a penguin, with a briefcase in one hand and a pencil cup in the other (he had knocked with his head), was the president of the University of Trondheim.

 

L
UCIANA FOLLOWED
Orfeo, slipping into the room so quietly that her brother would not immediately have noticed had it not
been for the striking picture she now presented, in that she was no longer thin, and what had been lost in delicacy had been returned in grace and composure. She wore a yellow dress, and her hair, which was tied with a yellow ribbon, looked as if it itself were the source of the light that played upon it, like strong sunlight shining in a stream.

"Sir," Orfeo said, bowing slightly before the attorney Giuliani and acknowledging Alessandro with his eyes. "As I rose upon the Gianicolo in harmony with the blessed afternoon sap that filters through the universe and lands in the palms, I thought of the one whose cloak,
deliciae humani generis,
sweeps across the vale of the moon. Neither Artemis nor Aphrodite, overwhelmed with the sense of the gracious sap..."