A Soldier of the Great War (29 page)

"Please, Orfeo," the attorney Giuliani interrupted. "We agreed that because of my condition we would refrain from speaking of the exalted one and the blessed sap."

"Forgive me," Orfeo asked, waving his hands around his face in a totally unfathomable gesture, and then looking toward the ceiling, transfixed. "The chariots of the exalted one are so near! They sweep across the sky in golden flares. I am hard pressed not to sing, but, I know, the heart. The heart is a wheel that exultation can spin so fast that it can break apart. At our age," he added, "we must be cautious, lest we be overwhelmed with the blessed sap and die before we receive it."

"That's right," the attorney Giuliani said, thinking that Orfeo was now ready to work. "Are you ready to work now?"

"Yes, I'm ready to work now."

"Are you calm?"

"Yes, I'm calm," he answered. "But the glory!" he shouted, his body tensed and trembling, waves of joy and madness vibrating through every muscle. "The glory and the joy of the blessed sap and the exalted one! The light! The light!"

"Orfeo. Orfeo," his former employer entreated. "The heart. The fragile heart!"

"Oh yes," Orfeo said, trying to take control of his trembling body. "Sir," he continued, nearly under his breath, "the realms I sometimes see!"

"Let's talk about the earth," the attorney Giuliani said.

Orfeo nodded.

"Good. Small things, Orfeo, small things, like oil on the waters. Quiet pleasures, good things."

Orfeo closed his eyes.

"A tree in the shade," the attorney went on, attempting to pacify the scribe. "A nice cup of minestrone. A quiet violin. A bird. A rabbit..."

Orfeo, now calm, opened his briefcase and presented the attorney with papers that were to be signed and those with written questions necessary for the guidance of the firm. As the invalid slowly read, Orfeo turned on both heels, penguin-like, to Alessandro.

"I do this from magnificence," he said. "I am no longer employed by your father."

Alessandro looked puzzled.

"I'll tell you," Orfeo continued, stepping closer and lowering his voice so as not to disturb the attorney. He beckoned to Luciana to join in. "I have made the incredible leap"—he made an arc with his left hand, following it with his eyes—"and vaulted above the deathly animal that is going to eat the century.

"You know that there was no more for me to do in your father's office. The so-called typewriter..." He turned and made several gestures, the last of which was to pretend to spit.

"In throwing myself to the wind, I saved myself, though unwittingly. Your father offered me continued employment, but I refused his kind charity. Several weeks passed, and I returned home, ready to clutch the sap.

"Surprise of surprises, a carriage came to my door. Your father had thought about my situation, and, together with Signor Bellati, had found a place for me.

"While my trade was vanishing, and found no demand in the
legal profession, a need was growing elsewhere. I, a scribe of the old order, have been put in charge of a hundred new order scribes and a thousand of those disgusting things that are called 'typewriters.'"

"Where?" Alessandro asked, thinking that perhaps Orfeo was describing a dream.

"The Ministry of War. With the build-up of the armies they need scribes to write proclamations, commissions, and fancy communications. They needed a scribe of the old order to direct the scribes of the new order."

Alessandro's father looked up from his papers. "Soon, he'll move his pen and the earth will shake."

"I'm going into the navy in January," Alessandro told Orfeo.

"The navy! I do everything for the navy. I make admirals, I launch ships, I establish new bases. What would you like? Just say."

"Make me an admiral," Alessandro said, smiling.

"All right," Orfeo said. "I'll bring the papers tomorrow." He was serious.

"Orfeo, you can't do that," Luciana insisted.

"Yes I can. I'll use one of the royal seals, and instruct the minister of war to make him an admiral. I'll write a directive from the minister to the navy, and then I'll write up the commissions, back enter them on all the books, et cetera, et cetera. It will take about three or four hours, but once it's done he'll be an admiral."

"Some things would tend to give him away, Orfeo," Alessandro's father said, "such as his age."

"I'm not responsible for anything other than creating him. Then I walk away. It's happened before."

"What about something less ambitious," Alessandro asked, warming to the idea.

"The less ambitious the faster it can be done. Would you like to command a ship?"

"I don't know how, but I'll tell you what. After I finish the officer's course, I'd like a squadron of small boats in the Adriatic."

"How many boats would you like?"

"Twenty."

"Would you like your own base? I could give you a small island somewhere, maybe in the water."

"What about one of the Isole Tremiti?"

"I'll see to the details. I have to advance you in rank, but I'll give you the kind of order that will let you take what you need in men and supplies. Tell me the date that you'll graduate from your course, and leave the rest to me. I'll put so much wax and ribbon on it that you'll need a wheelbarrow to carry it."

"No," the attorney Giuliani said. "You will not do this, Orfeo. Both you and he," he said severely, pointing to his son, "could be shot. I forbid it. Drive it from your thoughts."

"As you wish," Orfeo answered.

Though deeply disappointed, Alessandro was also relieved.

"Did you count the steps?" the attorney Giuliani asked Orfeo.

"Yes," Orfeo answered. "Seven flights of stairs, or fourteen if you count the landings as divisions. Twenty steps on each flight. Thus, a hundred and forty steps. I counted them one at a time, both going up and coming down. It was the same number."

"I'm not surprised," the attorney Giuliani said, taking out of his vest a gold pocket watch that showed phases of the moon against a star-dotted indigo sky. "If I take one step every five seconds, which will be easy to do, because the watch is marked to suit, that will be seven hundred seconds, or about twelve minutes."

While his father dictated to Orfeo, and Luciana left to help with dinner, Alessandro sat in the window-seat. As the sun disappeared behind the Gianicolo its light filtered through the palms and pines that stood upon the crest, and part of Rome, though gold and ochre, was tinged with a green color that suggested a city of the East.

Orfeo worked for an hour or so and then capped his pen. The attorney Giuliani instructed him once more not to elevate Alessandro, and Orfeo agreed. As he left, he turned in the darkness in the
hall and looked at Alessandro, who was sitting motionlessly at the window. Alessandro had fallen asleep, but in the shadows where he sat he looked awake, because his head was propped on his hand as if he were lost in thought. Orfeo checked to see that the attorney was absorbed in his papers. Then he looked once again at Alessandro, and, thinking that Alessandro was looking back, he winked.

For the next fifteen minutes a number of servants in the kitchens of houses on various levels of the hillside looked up from their dough and their saucepans as a bat-like figure in a dark cloak fled down the many flights of stone stairs, laughing out loud as he went, and intoning what seemed to be some sort of incantation. No one understood the words, but everyone heard them quite clearly: "Cumbrinal the Oxitan, Oxitan the Loxitan, Loxitan the Oxitan."

 

D
INNER WAS
served on the second floor, where Alessandros father was confined. The food, dishes, and cutlery were carried upstairs to a sitting room with a small fireplace. At this time of year the Giulianis normally would have eaten in the garden, but, now, even had the attorney not suffered maladies of the heart, they would have been driven indoors by an unusually frigid and surprisingly windy October. The cafe tables and chairs had already been stacked or removed, the streets had emptied, and leaves had begun to litter the roads on the Gianicolo. Though November might yet be like summer, October was almost like winter. Anyone walking in the dark little streets near the Piazza Navona would see orange suns blazing inside the shops and restaurants, as fragrant apple wood and oak burned in terra cotta stoves.

"Who wants to go to Germany?" Alessandro asked everyone at once in the middle of the soup course. His mother, his father, Luciana, and Rafi, who had just come in from the cold, continued eating their soup without looking up. "Who wants to go to Germany?" Alessandro asked again, as if he had not been heard.

Finally, Rafi looked up and said, "No one." Then he took more soup.

"Why not?" Alessandro asked, with characteristic tenacity.

"No one wants to go to Germany most of the time, Alessandro," Rafi assured him, "especially Italians. You must know that. And in the winter even more people don't want to go to Germany. Add to that the fact that Germany is at war."

Luciana gurgled with delight.

"I'm not suggesting that we go as tourists," Alessandro said, irritated that his best friend was now the slave of his little sister.

"What do you suggest, then, that we invade?" Rafi asked.

"We may soon do that," Alessandro said, "but that's not what I mean. I'm going to Germany and I thought that maybe you'd like to come with me, but since I seem to be talking to hermits, I'll go myself."

"Alessandro, be careful," his mother urged. He didn't hear her, because she said the same thing whenever he went anywhere or did anything.

"It's a good idea," Rafi said.

"What is?" the attorney Giuliani wanted to know.

"To invade Germany."

"All we have to do,"

Luciana asserted, "is send Orfeo."

"There's no sense in beating a mad horse," her father told her. "He's lived a quiet life, and suffered incomparably."

"Why is he mad, Papa?" Luciana asked.

"I don't know."

"Alessandro," Luciana continued, "why
are
you going to Germany?"

"To see Raphael's portrait of Bindo Altoviti."

"All the way to Germany just to see a painting?" Rafi asked.

"All the way to Antwerp?" Alessandro shot back, "to argue about a dent in a ship?"

"We get paid for it."

"That may be so," Alessandro said, "but remember one thing."

"What?"

"A dent is a dent."

 

T
HOUGH
A
LESSANDRO
had a second-class Wagons-Lits ticket, he was informed at the station that the second-class sleeping car had been withdrawn from service.

"What am I supposed to do?" he asked. "I don't want to sit up all day and all night and arrive in Munich indistinguishable from a laundry bag. I paid for a bed. I have a reservation."

"There's nothing
I
can do, sir," the ticket agent said. "I would like to put you in first class...."

Alessandro lifted his eyes in anticipation.

"But first class is packed."

Alessandro gave up, and then was revived as if by a million volts of electricity.

"The only open space is one which, I am afraid, you would have to share with a passenger of the opposite sex."

"You mean a woman?" Alessandro asked, his pulse banging against his wrists.

"Yes," the ticket agent replied, scanning his lists. "The compartment is for two. It will be open until Venice, and then it is booked for one, and that is a woman. I can't put you in with a woman."

"I'll just have to suffer," Alessandro said, hoping that the female entraining at Venice would not be a bash-faced Albanian widow with three types of skin disease and a vomiting dog.

"I can't assign you to a compartment with a passenger of the opposite sex," the agent protested.

"Why not? Everyone needs to sleep—men, women, everyone."

"I'd get in trouble."

"Not now you wouldn't," Alessandro proclaimed in a voice suitable for his occasional performances on the lecture platform in
the Teatro Barbarossa. "This train terminates in Munich. Munich is in Germany. Germany is at war with France, Britain, and Russia. Hundreds of thousands of men have died, and millions may follow. Do you think that when the train arrives in Munich some authority will know from the empty air inside it that a railway agent in Rome mixed the sexes? Do you think that anyone will care?"

"We're talking about rules," the agent asserted, "and we're talking about Germans."

"But the entire nation is at war!" Alessandro pleaded. Behind him stood a Calabrian family in transit to the north. Two of the three sons held wooden cages stuffed with chickens—strange, clay-colored, sleek, muscular chickens. These were Catanzaro fighting hens. The pressure was building upon the ticket agent.

"I would like to know, sir, if you are truly concerned with your comfort or merely attracted to the idea of enforced and coincidental intimacy?" the ticket agent asked, bursting with indignation, but with the Calabrian family growing more and more anxious, Alessandro had him in a stranglehold. Still, he answered truthfully, because the words
enforced and coincidental intimacy
had caused him to feel a pleasant sensation throughout his entire body.

"To be honest," he said, "the idea of being alone with a woman for sixteen hours in a small cubicle with a bed enchants me...."

"
Ca Caw!
" said the chicken.

"All right," the agent interrupted, "but, remember, I didn't give these to you. I gave them to a woman who came in your place. Track four."

Whenever Alessandro set out on horseback his senses sharpened exhaustingly, but a train journey threw him into a Tibetan trance. Riding on Enrico, he continually made judgments and choices and moved like a dancer as he dodged the brush, but on a train he was in suspended animation, all eyes, as the landscape passed by like a short history of the world. Even as he walked through the great hall of the station, its iron gates similar to the
elaborate grillework of some Spanish churches, he began to experience the elevated state that is the true purpose of railroads.

The station was like a vase of luxuriant flowers. In the golden light of a slightly humid late October morning the colors were astonishingly rich, and beams of sunlight shone as if with keen attention upon dust particles floating under the vaulted roof. A line of tired soldiers about to be slain by the beam of sunlight that animated the dust lay upon their packs and duffels, rifles and bayonets protruding from their midst like stakes in a vineyard. Their uniforms under the light became a golden cross between yellow and red, as bright as tulips, and when the soldiers bent their heads in fatigue and held their hats in their hands, they moved even hurried passersby.