A Soldier of the Great War (42 page)

The beaches were completely deserted, but now and then the River Guard saw a peasant in the fields or an ox cart on the road that paralleled the sea. The perfect rows of olive trees and the net of stone walls looked as if they had been there since the creation. Even fortress-like villages perched on outcroppings of rock seemed empty, until dusk, when their lights went on. At dusk, too, occasional bonfires on the beach told of a military encampment and an army dinner.

"Why couldn't we have done something like that?" Guariglia asked. "I'd like to spend the whole war on the beach, fishing, making fires, never firing a shot."

"That's for the old men of the civil guard," Alessandro answered.

"They must have some real units among them."

"Why?"

"What if the Austrians invaded? Rome is just beyond the mountains."

"How could they invade here?" Alessandro asked. "You know that every single man they've got is up there," he said, pointing toward the Isonzo, "and if they were to move them, we would take Vienna."

Guariglia lit up a cigar. He was upwind of Alessandro, but Alessandro didn't care.

The fields beyond the beaches were low and gold, and they stretched to the mountains. By day, white smoke followed the contours of the land in slowly rising walls drawn like a curtain along the entire length of coast. As the farmers burned their fields for the second crop, in some places the fire was bright enough to be seen in full sunlight, and though a thousand human hands had set and were guiding it, no one could see the men at such a distance, and it seemed out of control. As the sun dropped behind the mountains the smoke grew dark and the flames brighter, until finally the smoke was invisible except when it blocked the stars, and the River Guard could see only the silhouettes of the Apennines, with endless and repetitive chains of smoldering orange flame at their feet. The wind came from ashore and brought them the smell of rich summer grass, and smoke. It brought them back to life.

"I feel like a civilian," Guariglia said, "because it makes me remember. Sometimes I'd get a big order from an estate. I'd work for months and then deliver the stuff myself, and fit the horses in the field, line them up along a fence and harness them one by one. The stable boys would use the opportunity to pull off the ticks and throw them in the fire. I don't think I've ever been happier than when I'm standing in a pasture, quietly harnessing a line of good horses. It's better than working in the shop. They say that God's everywhere, but I think they just say that, because He must prefer the open fields."

"Guariglia," Alessandro said, his eyes fixed on the mountains.

"What?"

"Can you swim?"

Guariglia nodded. "Naturally I can swim."

"Three hundred meters?"

"Three thousand."

"Rome is ninety kilometers beyond those mountains."

"They'd catch us, and they'd shoot us."

"But the mountains are empty, and I know them."

"They wouldn't look for us there, they'd wait until we got home."

"Who said they go looking?"

"Rome will last until after the war."

"We could go to America."

"I thought you wanted to go to Rome?"

"We'd stay in Rome for a year or two."

"Sure."

"Over the side," Alessandro mused, "a swim in the sea, onto the beach in darkness, walking through the fields and across the rings of fire, into the mountains by dawn, and then, in a few days, Rome."

 

A
FTER THEY
had eaten, the captain directed a spotlight into the hold. Then he opened the bridge window and threw down a soccer ball that bounced from bulkhead to bulkhead, and, even before it stopped bouncing, two teams had formed, and the River Guard played a triple-fast game with no out-of-bounds and many soldiers bloodying themselves as they hit the walls. "Why don't you play?" Alessandro asked Guariglia, remembering from games in the
cortile
of the Bell Tower that Guariglia was capable of shaming the younger men.

"I don't fancy splitting my head on a steel beam, thank you. When I was a kid and would get hurt playing soccer my mother would beat me with a whisk broom. I remember her chasing me around the kitchen table. I was bigger than her when I was eight, but she'd still chase me.

"I thought she was crazy, beating me for getting hurt, but then I began not to get hurt just so she wouldn't beat me, and it made sense. It became a habit. In the shop my assistants are always cutting themselves. They drive needles and spikes into their hands and thighs as if they were drunk." He proudly pointed at his own chest.
"Not me. Never. I never shed my own blood." Then he leaned back. "Because of a whisk broom."

"My mother left that aspect of my upbringing to my father," Alessandro said, "and he didn't know about whisk brooms."

"What'd he use, a riding crop?"

"He only hit me twice in my life, and one of the times didn't really count, as he had no choice."

"Then who hit you?"

"Nobody. Once, I accidentally knocked some spokes off one of the carriage wheels. So I tried to even up the pattern—with a hatchet. In my quest for symmetry I left my father a carriage resting on four empty hoops."

"He really gave it to you...."

"Just that once. He chased me into the garden. As I went up an apple tree he waited until my behind was at good striking height, and he slapped me like a rug."

"Your mother never hit you with a broom?"

"Never."

"Didn't she love you?"

"I don't know," Alessandro answered, staring at the bonfires.

"How could you not know?"

"I never knew her. She was born in Rome in eighteen sixty-eight, and she died in Rome in nineteen sixteen. I never thought of her as being anyone but my mother. She was just my mother, like a wall of the house—always there, always the same, you didn't have to think about her."

"I didn't know that she died," Guariglia said.

"When I went across to Venice I found out that she died in December. The army said I was beyond reach."

"The bastards," Guariglia said, throwing his cigar into the sea.

"I wonder what she looked like when she was young. We have one picture of her, on my father's desk. She must have been about seventeen, but you really can't see her. The picture is brown, she's
as stiff as a board, and her hair is in all kinds of knobby little knots, which was the style then. I wonder what her voice was like. My father knows. He loved her, and he'll carry the memory, but he can carry it only so far."

"Someday the war will be over, Alessandro. Then you'll go home and they won't call you back again. In the next war they'll take some other son of a bitch, and you can sit in a cafe and read in the paper about each offensive."

Alessandro wasn't listening. He was looking at the fires against the mountains. "Guariglia, what happens when you let go, when your strength leaves you and you sink into darkness, when there's nothing that you or anyone else can do, no matter how desperate you are, no matter how you try? Perhaps it's then, when you have neither pride nor power, that you are saved, brought to an unimaginably great reward."

"I don't think so," Guariglia said.

"You don't believe it?"

"No."

"The saints believed it."

"The saints were wrong."

After the soccer game ended and the floodlight was extinguished, the River Guard returned to their makeshift beds, and a full moon came up and hung over the mountains. Half the soldiers slept and half did not. The land was close and lines of fire crept through the darkness up and down the coast. Over the buoyant waves, across the beach, and on the other side of the mountains, was Rome. Perhaps because of the parchment-colored moon, Alessandro was comforted by his passion for the city, as if by the passion of unrequited love.

 

T
HEY GLIDED
into the protected harbor of Brindisi, steaming between shore batteries on windy promontories, and a dazzling white city that rose up on a hill. Brindisi was so hot and bright that
anyone who looked at it too long would go blind, and, apart from Virgil's Column, everything was as square and flat as if it had been hewn from salt. The naval base, which had been built with Africa in mind but now was the jailer of the Hapsburg fleet, was choked with gray. At its edge, however, where the mass of warships thinned, huge flags of brilliant scarlet fluttered above barges laden with explosives.

The River Guard had washed and shaved, and they stood at the rails, peering at the land, their faces red from wind and sun. Only when they had rounded the Gargano and when they pulled into Brindisi Harbor had they smelled the sea rather than the land—the rich wet smell of salt, iodine, and shellfish curing in the sun. Brindisi was where the Adriatic flowed into the Mediterranean, where wind and waves rocked the brine back and forth through the coral.

"Ah! We look good, don't we," said Fabio, a young soldier who was terribly handsome. Everyone liked him, and smiled in his presence. He had a thousand friends and had had a thousand women, and he was happy all the time, but he was afraid to be alone.

"What does that mean?" Guariglia asked. Guariglia was balding and misshapen. The teeth on the right side of his mouth were bigger than those on the left, and his nose looked like the horn of Africa. Fabio had been a waiter in a fancy cafe near Guariglia's harness shop, but they hadn't known one another.

"What does that mean?" Guariglia repeated.

"What?"

"What you just said."

"What did I say?"

"You said, Ah! We look good, don't we.'"

Fabio blinked. "I was just wondering if there were any women in Brindisi."

"How could a city not have women?" Alessandro asked.

"I mean
women
" Fabio answered. "I'll go to a cafe. I know which women come to be taken away, and I've never looked better.
In half an hour I'd be in bed with a woman with tits as big as the Matterhorn."

They regarded him with wonder. "What's wrong with you, Fabio?"

"Me? Nothing's wrong with me. I wear a white jacket and shiny shoes. I'm saving for my own automobile. What's wrong with you, Guariglia? You sit around in a filthy apron, pushing heavy needles through pieces of leather. Sometimes four or five women a day want me to sleep with them. You, you're lucky if a horse breaks wind in your face."

"But Fabio," Guariglia said, "you're a feather."

"I'm a feather?"

"An ostrich plume. A man should not be an ostrich plume."

Fabio straightened his hair and tucked-in his shirt. "You're jealous, Guariglia. You're ten years older than me and I've slept with one thousand, four hundred, and sixteen women. How many women have you slept with?"

"You count?" Alessandro asked.

"I have them in a book. How many, Guariglia?"

"Just one, my wife."

"Then I can't even talk to you," Fabio replied triumphantly.

"She loves me," Guariglia said to the waves.

After the cattle boat tied up next to a slender pier on the sea side of the naval base, not far from the red flags, the River Guard disembarked and marched up a rocky hill to an open shed where hammocks were slung from the beams. As they were eating, Fabio started the rumor that they were going to be allowed a few days in Brindisi. Even he believed it, until they were told that they could exercise by running up and down the hill, but that they would leave in the evening, when the colonel arrived.

Alessandro was summoned to a corner of the shed, where the three officers had settled.

"Alessandro, you'll go to tell the colonel that we've arrived. You
speak well and I'm sure you'll make a fine impression on him," the lieutenant said.

"You'd better," one of the sub-lieutenants added. "It'll be hell for us to be directly under a colonel. I think you should know why we're sending you, and I'm prepared to be frank."

"I'm prepared to be Alessandro, and I know already."

"You do?"

"You want me to be the lightning rod."

"Only because you're intelligent enough to handle it properly."

"And you're not."

"If one of us goes he'll treat us like corporals. If he arrives and finds us in charge, having sent you, he may treat us like majors. After all, he's used to dealing with majors. Tell him that we're here, and that we're ready. He's at the Hotel Monopol. Naturally, we don't know his name, but how many colonels could be staying in one small hotel?"

"Who shall I say we are?"

"Us."

"Yes, but who are we?"

"We don't know, Alessandro, and even if we did, you know we can't say."

"I can't say we're the River Guard?"

"No. I imagine he'll know who we are, even if we don't."

"And if he doesn't?"

"That's why we thought of you,
Dottore.
"

Alessandro rode a donkey-engine to the perimeter of the base. Then he walked into Brindisi, disappearing among the horse butcheries and the cemeteries. Before he went to the Hotel Monopol he bought a kilo of prosciutto in three packages, one for Guariglia and two for himself.

In the Hotel Metropol, which stood across the street from the Hotel Monopol, a desk clerk told Alessandro that the colonel was on the fourth floor, in room 43.

Alessandro labored up long flights of whitewashed stairs, to an open window that gave out on the town and the sea. He stood on a worn Persian carpet that covered the landing, gazing at the brilliant colors. The town had closed for the afternoon, with the exception of the faint sound of motors and engines and an occasional steam whistle in the naval area. To the south were no warships but only empty rooftops, date palms, and sparkling rust-colored headlands projecting into an agitated sea. Alessandro listened to the wind whistling dryly over the sill.

He turned when he heard footsteps, and saw a woman descending from the floor above. Her hair was dyed blond badly enough to look orange, and she was cinched into a Bristol-blue dress that made parts of her appear much smaller than they really were and other parts overflow. She was almost short enough to have been a midget, and her expression was of permanent confusion. When she saw Alessandro she began to sway outlandishly as she came down the steps.