A Soldier of the Great War (32 page)

After the waiter left, Janet said, "If this were England, he'd pee in our soup."

"He's German and I'm Italian," Alessandro offered. "He already did."

"Thank God Ireland is neutral."

"On which side?"

"England's."

"Italy may not enter the war after all," Alessandro told her. "We have no real interest in it. Although we make noise, we always make noise, and seldom does anything come of it. If we do declare war, whether against the Central Powers or the Entente, it will be at the end, perhaps next spring. We might send a battle fleet to sea and fire a few shots before the armistice. That's the Italian ethos."

"It's not the English ethos," she said. "And it's certainly not the German ethos."

"Nor the Russian," he added, playing intently with his knife. "The many millions of them are capable of inflicting great damage, not least on themselves."

Outside Innsbruck the train slowed to a walk as it passed through an enormous barbed wire barricade and into a vast military area. Alessandro rose in his chair, surprised that a civilian train
would be allowed in an armed camp. The cars were closely watched by guards in sandbagged enclosures all the way along the route, and electric lights were focused on the undercarriages, sending up a strange white glow that suggested not railway ties and a gravel trackbed but the entry to another world.

The slow pace of the train enabled Alessandro to observe carefully this encampment of the Imperial Army. For as far as he could see west toward the mountains that formed one wall of the valley of the Ruetzbach were lines of tents, rows of wagons and artillery pieces, and fires that stretched down the long alleys like flaming shrubbery.

Dozens of men were gathered around each blaze, at least a hundred fires ran down each row, and the rows did not stop appearing as the train filed past—twenty, thirty, forty, fifty; they kept on coming. Alessandro calculated that the encampment held a hundred thousand men or more.

He felt a chill when he saw this, as if he were looking through a window to the future. And just when the chill was over he turned in his seat to look out the opposite rank of windows. There, too, the casual diners had been stunned by the new world, for there, too, were yet another hundred thousand men in a city of tents and fires.

Most of the soldiers were boys only somewhat younger than he. Their hair was closely cropped, and their big, awkward, adolescent faces were appropriate for sawyers or guides in an Alpine village, or for the discontented sons of grocers in those cities big enough for churches and squares. The ones in the guard posts, who watched the train as it passed through their encampment, had the expression of miners looking out from the dark. It was not just that the floodlights reflected back by the shining undercarriage almost blinded them, but that they had been completely removed from the world they had known. In gray coats and high boots, burdened with rifles and ammunition, they appeared to be silent, fated, and strange.

The fires stretched so far into the distance that they seemed to be lapping at the base of the hills, and the earth seemed to have opened, and released a ghastly white light.

Then an army officer carrying a pistol walked through the dining car. Though he was inspecting the interior, his eyes were turned upward to follow the footsteps of someone who paced him, out of sight, on the roof.

They crossed the perimeter and rolled quietly into Innsbruck, where not a soldier was in sight.

 

M
ORE THAN
a hundred years before, Raphael's portrait of Bindo Altoviti, "when he was young," had traveled by horse cart from Florence to Munich. During rainstorms in the valley of the Adige the dirty gray canvas that protected the cart had leaked in many places, but the wooden case that held the painting was watertight, having been caulked at the seams, and Bindo Altoviti stayed dry. In the Brenner Pass after a quick snowstorm one of the mules slipped on a sheet of ice and nearly pulled everything down the face of a steep cliff. Otherwise, the journey had been unremarkable—except that an important part of the soul of Italy had been moved north to reside in the Alte Pinakothek. That the Germans should consider its few pfennigs' worth of oxides and canvas among their proudest possessions, and that the Italians should feel relatively empty for their absence, said a great deal about the principles that Alessandro Giuliani continually struggled to understand and that Raphael had mastered completely.

Alessandro had wanted to go to Munich not only to study the painting but to look into the eyes of young Bindo Altoviti and see a man who had come through time propelled and pressured by the laws of art. He stood with Janet in a quiet gallery that smelled of freshly applied oils hundreds of years after the fact. How this came to be, they did not know, but the shadows, the great expanse of
dark wooden flooring, and the snow-covered mountains that they could see through the windows seemed to conspire to lift and hold the paintings as if they were balanced atop columns of water or light. Had the paintings merely been tacked to the walls instead of resting atop the breaking surf of sunlight and shadow, they would not have been a tenth as arresting.

Janet stepped off to the left to examine a huge painting of a medieval battle. The horses were as rounded and swollen as balloons and had red martingales and bridles of gold. And the horses, pathetically rotund, frozen, floating in time, bared their teeth in the fight, like dogs, as their enemies and their allies ascended quietly into the place of the imagination where their motion evaporated and left them infinitely wise.

With neither apologies nor care, nor thought, nor credit given to the many contrary proofs, Alessandro believed that the portrait of Bindo Altoviti— "
il ritratto suo quando era giovane,
" his portrait when he was young—was as alive as any of the light that calibrates the time that says of us that we live. His eyes could see, his hand could touch, and he was breathing. The black silk that fell from his shoulder was new, and beyond the emerald wall behind him, Rome breathed in May.

Young Bindo Altoviti, looking out from time, made a perfect coalition with the mountains, the sky, and the tall redheaded woman who had bent over just slightly to examine a raging battle that was long over. Alessandro imagined that Bindo Altoviti was saying, half with longing, half with delight, "These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, remember that it ends in perfect
peace, and you will be as still and content as am I, for whom centuries are not even seconds."

The striking visage of Bindo Altoviti was of a type that had lasted and could be seen on the boys who worked in the cafes on the Via del Corso or drove tourists through the back streets, in carriages that hardly fit between the walls. If Bindo Altoviti could last through time not only to live in his portrait in a German cloister but to sweat in the bakeries of Rome, then perhaps Alessandro had to abandon his own short view of history in favor of the careful process of descent, the awesome repetitions, the inexplicable similarities and reappearances that made a unity of many generations of fathers and sons.

In the eyes of Bindo Altoviti, Alessandro saw wisdom and amusement, and he knew why the subjects of paintings and photographs seemed to look from the past as if with clairvoyance. Even brutal and impatient men, when frozen in time, assumed expressions of extraordinary compassion, as if they had reflected the essence of their redemption back into the photograph. In a sense they were still living. Bindo Altoviti, unknowingly, had become the young men, unknowing, on the streets of Rome. Had they been aware, they might have come to see his portrait, but it hardly mattered, for what they did would make no difference in the way time cracked and burst above their short lives like a thundering star shell. Except that now Alessandro had seen a benevolent diagram of passion and color in perfect balance, and he knew from Bindo Altoviti's brave and insolent expression that he was going to stay alive forever.

 

A
DISTANT
sound rattled the windows of the Alte Pinakothek. Though faint, it shook Alessandro's chest and reverberated in his lungs.

"What is that?" he asked an old museum guard.

"Nothing to worry about," the guard replied in Italian, even though the question had been posed in German. "It has happened every morning at eleven, without fail, since the war began. It's the testing of the field guns."

"Where is it done?" In the echoing rooms, Alessandro was unable to determine its direction.

"I don't know."

Alessandro and Janet went outside, and were able to tell that the firing was coming from the east. They hired a carriage and told the driver to take them to it.

After an hour of following quiet streets, crossing railroad tracks, and traveling roads that went through forests and fields, they came to an enormous parade ground.

Coils of barbed wire spilled into the dirt track, isolating the military encampment from walkers and picnickers. Cannon, caissons, and motorized trucks in tightly regimented equipment parks covered most of what had been green in the fields, and over and beyond them, on a low hill, were the guns, a hundred of them in a single unbroken line. The order of firing proceeded steadily down the long row almost like the ticking of a clock—except that clocks alternate, first ticking, then tocking, and this great machine expressed itself in a monotone.

"Ka-phoom!" it would say, immediately after one of its segments had convulsed, sprung back, and coughed out a burst of fire and smoke, and then, "Ka-phoom!" when, two seconds later, the next gun let loose.

Methodical as it was, neither the method nor the maddeningly exact timing was what held the carriage driver and his two passengers still, but, rather, the sound itself. Alessandro thought that no matter how many times he would hear it, he would never get used to it. He was wrong.

The signature of each blast was a deep concussion, alone for a tenth of a second and then joined by a sharp metallic rattling like
that of the sheet metal used in the theater to mimic thunder. "Ka-phoom! Ka-phoom! Ka-phoom!" As the metallic effect was slightly out of phase with the initial concussion, beginning an instant later and ending an instant later, so with the soundless waves that followed upon each shot. They were felt through the entire body; mostly in the chest and throat, but also in the extremities, on the forehead, and, depending upon the position of the jaw and the tightness of the cheeks, within the mouth. Natural thunder was neither as deep nor as sharp as this, and though Alessandro had grown up in Rome, a city that is perhaps the best catcher of thunder in all the world, he had never heard it come on so evenly, for even thunder rests.

The horse was skittish. Just a little way over the fields, the snake of a hundred segments kept up its concussive bursts, and each report moved the carriage and made the wheels creak.

"It's beginning to make me shake," Janet announced, trembling not from emotion but from the charged air that shook her lips, her chest, and the muscles in her upper thighs and arms.

The sound of the air blasts rolled down the hillsides and over the fields. With never a pause, tiny figures in gray next to each gun quickly reloaded. Alessandro's infatuation with Janet was overwhelmed by the imperative of the guns, for they were deeper even than thunder. "Ka-phoom! Ka-phoom! Ka-phoom!" This was the sound that, on the Western Front, had begun to drown out the music of the world. It was clear to Alessandro, and easily understandable, that, for some, music would cease to exist. But not for him, not for him. The electricity rose up his spine and he trembled not from shock but because, over the sound of the guns, he was still able to hear sonatas, symphonies, and songs.

S
EPTEMBER,
1916... A dozen soldiers stood just inside the entrance to the tunnel, or squatted, leaning slightly forward, using their rifles for support. They loitered there to get out of the sun and to catch the continuous cool breeze that came from within.
A
lieutenant of infantry emerged from the grove of pale trees that protected the mouth of the shaft, walking briskly, with his left hand resting on his pistol belt and his right grasping a short stick. Following him was a stocky young naval cadet who struggled under the weight of a duffel bag, his rifle knocking against his side.

The men in the tunnel began to rise, but sank back down when the lieutenant motioned with his hand that they should ignore him. Nonetheless, the ones who were smoking removed the cigarettes from their lips and held them at a polite angle in front of their stomachs until the officer had passed.

"Is this a naval installation?" the cadet asked as they stepped into the tunnel, a hundred kilometers from the sea. "It has to be a mistake."

"Put your duffel and the rest here," the lieutenant said, having taken up position next to a wooden cart on tracks that ran through the tunnel.

The cadet had red hair and a chipped tooth in the front of his mouth. He gladly threw down his things. He followed the lieutenant into the shaft, pulling the cart after them. "I was on the sea," he said, as if to protest.

"If a supply train comes through in either direction we'll have to lift this off the tracks. We each take an end and move the cart to the other side. The supply trains move fast, but you can hear them from far away."

They had been walking for about ten minutes, passing beneath a seemingly endless chain of dim bulbs and wood beams, when the lieutenant answered the naval cadet's question. He didn't get right to the point, as if he didn't care, or could no longer concentrate. "Don't worry," he said. "It isn't really dangerous here anymore. At sea, you wouldn't be much safer."