A Soldier of the Great War (55 page)

 

T
HE NEXT
day was sunny, clear, and unusually quiet. Rome sometimes became as dramatically silent as if everyone had left it. You could hear the wind rushing through leaves and reeds just as it did at the seaside, and the sky was a deep, dizzying, oceanic blue. Children were in shady classrooms, clerks wrote their figures in cool shadow, and the tops of the trees glistened in the sun like sequins.

Alessandro and Luciana sat near the window in their father's hospital room, listening to him breathe in his sleep. The sun came in sharply, bathing the blood-red geraniums in a window-box in
unworldly fluorescence and drawing a sharp black triangle of shadow on the butter-colored sill. Now and then cool air lifted the curtains inward and dropped them again, as if they were riding on the waves.

In waiting for their father to awaken, they could not talk, but sometimes their eyes met. When nurses looked in they saw two exemplary young people, healthy and strong, dressed like patricians. Their father himself was handsome and imposing, he spoke well, he was engaging, he was obviously a man of great resources. On this cool October day, the Giulianis appeared to be in control.

The nursing-sisters came quickly when the attorney Giuliani called. Nothing was forgotten, every service requested was provided, and De Roos or the other doctors who made their rounds—specialists in infection, the heart, and Röntgenology—had long technical conversations with Alessandro, thus keeping him far better informed than most of the other supplicants who were drawn daily to the hospital.

Alessandro thought that if he paid and demanded close attention he might catch a fault in treatment or stimulate the doctors and nurses to do so, and that if he kept up the privileged bearing that, oddly enough, had begun as a fugitives method of evading capture, he could provide for his father a small margin that in desperate circumstances might be critical in preserving his life. He had seen it a thousand times in the River Guard: impeccable, careful, meticulous soldiers seemed to survive longer, or at least to be more conspicuous as they survived, though, of course, even they were sometimes instantly disemboweled by a shell that came from the blue.

He kicked Lucianas white stocking. When she looked at him, he held up his finger as if to say, listen. Without the patience her brother had learned in two years' watch for infiltrating enemy soldiers, she went back to her dreaming.

He kicked her again, and pointed down the hill.

She leaned forward. She could just barely hear a noise somewhere in the streets that fell to the Tiber.

"That's a horse pulling a caisson."

"How do you know?"

"I've spent two years with the sound."

For the next five minutes Alessandro listened to the clip clop of an army-shod horse and the distinctive squeaking of a caisson. As they came up the hill in the sunshine, he heard them through the red and green of the sunlit geraniums, and he felt the wind that carried the sound.

Guided by a soldier who seemed to be sleepwalking, the horse drew up to the hospital. The soldier looked at the sign on the hospital's wrought-iron gate, and then, with the deep depression of a private who has drawn garrison duty and been doomed to spend the most adventuresome period of his life as an office boy, opened the top of the caisson and took out a large package.

Luciana was by now leaning over the sill, and her hair caught the sun like a flair. "Perhaps Orfeo isn't as mad as we think," she said.

"No," Alessandro corrected. "Orfeo can give the medicine to dying soldiers only because he has taken it from dying soldiers."

"That isn't mad. It's neutral."

"It's by no means neutral, Luciana, it's violent and it's mad."

The attorney Giuliani awoke, breathing as if he were resting after a foot-race. His eyes went first to the blank walls, then to the sunlight, and then to his children. Though awake, he seemed in some ways like a man who is asleep. His breathing was labored and loud, his eyes were glassy, and he hardly moved.

"Did you hear the thunderstorm, Papa?" Luciana asked.

The attorney Giuliani turned to his daughter, waiting for her to explain. His expression showed that he had no memory of a thunderstorm. "I missed it," he said weakly.

"It was tremendous!" she announced with such enthusiasm and buoyancy that Alessandro smiled. "Ten bolts of lightning hit so
near the house, and in such rapid succession, that I thought I was going to fall down. I had the same feeling of being out of control that you get in a boat that is too small on a sea that is too windy!"

"It's a blind," her father said.

"What's a blind?" Alessandro asked.

"Memory of things like days at the sea, or thunderstorms."

"I love those things," Alessandro said. "You can't imagine how much I love them."

"Alessandro, in memory, things, objects, and sensations merely stand in for the people you love." He had to rest and breathe before he continued. After a while, he said, "If I long for a thunderstorm in Rome sixty years ago, or seventy, for the heavy rain and the disheveled lightning, for the wet trees that were completely free and completely abandoned, it's not because of the rain, or the quiet, or the ticking of the clock in the hallway—all of which I remember—but because of my mother and my father, who held me at the window as we watched the storm."

"Papa," Alessandro said, with assured optimism, "the medicine came this morning, in an ammunition caisson. Orfeo sent it. The hospital didn't have any, but now they can stabilize your heart. Now you'll be able to fight the fever with all your strength, and in a week or ten days we'll bring you home."

"Sandro, what do my eyes look like?"

"They're all right," Alessandro said, though his father's eyes were cloudy and gray.

"You know what happens?"

"When?"

"You betray your parents."

"Papa, you're talking nonsense."

The attorney Giuliani shook his head as if to signify that he agreed, but then he returned to what he had been saying. "When your parents die, Alessandro, you feel that you have betrayed them."

"Why?" Luciana asked.

"Because you come to love your children more. I lost my mother and father to images in photographs and handwriting on letters, and as I abandoned them for you, the saddest thing was that they made no protest.

"Even now that I'm going back to them, I regret above all that I must leave you."

"You're not going back to anybody," Alessandro told him. "We'll solve those problems later."

"Alessandro," his father said, almost cheerfully. "You don't understand. This kind of problem is very special:
it has no solution
"

 

L
ATER IN
the morning, De Roos came in holding a hypodermic needle as if it were a dueling pistol. Drops of liquid emerged from the hollow end of the needle and slowly slid down the shaft. The attorney Giuliani was impassive.

"We have it," De Roos announced. "A hundred thousand units. It'll hold us for months, a very great thing. What this does, Signore," he said, vigorously wiping the attorney Giuliani's frail arm with alcohol-soaked gauze, "is to make your heart as even and temperate as the heart of a young horse. Not as strong," he added, plunging the needle in, "but as even and as steady. And if your heart doesn't lag, doesn't race, and doesn't skip beats, you'll see, all will follow onto an even keel." He gripped the attorney Giuliani's hand, squeezed it, and quickly let go. "You have a good chance now, Signore. You have a good chance."

"I hope so," the attorney Giuliani said quietly as De Roos left.

"I'd be very grateful," he told his children, "if I could put this off, but, Alessandro, promise me that when the time comes you'll be with me."

"I'll be there," Alessandro said, "if I'm still alive."

"The house," the attorney Giuliani started to say, as if now he might inquire about the condition of the house that he had been
convinced he would never see again, but he was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a group of orderlies and nurses clumsily wheeling-in a bed in which lay an unconscious soldier.

They took no notice of the Giulianis, and moved their patient about as if no one else were in the room. Luciana felt her heart go into check. Alessandro asked if they had the right room.

"This is the room," an orderly said, "and we're going to bring another one."

The attorney Giuliani fell back against his pillows. The dying soldier, whose eyes were closed and whose lips were white, had told him far more about his chances than had the doctor.

"We need the privacy!" Alessandro said to Luciana. "He's grown used to this room. The balance is delicate." As he left, Luciana went to her father to be comforted as well as to comfort.

In the hallways outside, orderlies were running a railroad, and every bed in the hospital seemed to be in transit. Patients from the enormous halls on the first floors were being moved to the small chambers upstairs. On the stairs themselves, the procession of orderlies and nuns transporting men on stretchers looked like something from a religious tableau, for they moved in and out of mitred beams of light alive with flashing dust.

Flattening himself against the railings to let the stretcher-bearers rise, Alessandro made his way downstairs. When he found De Roos, he asked, "What is it?"

"We've been ordered to triple our capacity all at once."

"All at once?"

"By tomorrow afternoon."

"Why?"

"The Germans and the Austrians," De Roos said, "have broken the front on the Isonzo."

"Where?" Alessandro asked.

"Everywhere."

"Everywhere? That's impossible."

"They tell us that a million men are in flight."

Alessandro raced back upstairs, on fire. Perhaps he and Luciana could care for their father at home. Perhaps, in the confusion of a million men in flight, he could rejoin the River Guard, or the army would proclaim an amnesty, reclaim the deserters, and make a final stand against the enemy, who was now in Italy itself.

He felt like a soldier once again. When he met a military messenger on the stairs he urgently asked him where the front had collapsed.

The messenger looked at him with the brotherly look that soldiers have for one another in civilian places, and took note of Alessandro's medals. "At Caporetto," he answered, "but they say the line has folded everywhere. Maybe they can regroup."

As Alessandro climbed the stairs with the nursing-sisters, the orderlies, and the mortally wounded soldiers on stretchers, he was full of schemes. They would take his father home, get him out of the room that was now a ward of the dying, allow him once again some sunlight and tranquillity. He was in his eighth decade, and he deserved privacy and honor. When he was well, Alessandro, with Guariglia and Fabio, would rejoin the 19th River Guard. His father would live, he would be forgiven. The winter would be hard and dangerous, but then spring would come.

He came to his father's room, and his heart went out to Luciana, for three soldiers were there, not a single one conscious, and delicate Luciana, with her elbows on the covers, was trying to shield her father from the presence of death.

Alessandro approached the bed. "Papa, I spoke to De Roos, and I'm going to speak to him again. Perhaps we can take you home, to your own room, with a private nurse."

"Alessandro," his father said. "Don't fear for me."

"I want to take you home."

"You must understand that I'm your father, Alessandro. I'm your father. I came before you, I split the path into this world, and
I'll split the path into the next. It isn't unreasonable, and you mustn't fear, for you will follow in time, and then, it will all come clear."

"I'm going to get De Roos," Alessandro said.

He made his way downstairs again, and brought back the doctor, who thoroughly examined the patient. "You may know something I don't," De Roos said to their father, "but I don't think so. I see no imminent danger. After a few more days, we should start to think about your going home."

The attorney Giuliani lifted his hand slightly, smiled, and fell asleep.

"I'll stay with him," Luciana said to Alessandro. "Go do what you have to do."

As Alessandro set out on what he realized might be his last walk through Rome, the sun was blazing in the cool air and the city was half gold, half blue.

 

T
HE TREES
on the banks of the Tiber had not lost their leaves, and as the wind coursed through them it rattled their brittle foliage and raised fantastic black clouds, for Rome was occupied by millions of birds, perching on every branch, singing as if to warm the wind, hopping about in mad distraction on rails and cornices. The starlings, warblers, finches, and swallows had come from Northern Europe, the Baltic, and Scandinavia, and were about to cross to Africa, to the deserts and the savannahs, the Congo, and the Cape of Good Hope.

Their journey was so deep and impulsive that even at rest they knew only delirium and drive, and their immediate and explosive rising at any sound or motion was not an indication of fear but rather of the love of flight. When someone below merely clapped his hands, when a truck lurched by, or when the wind itself became anxious or fierce, they rose in a buoyant cloud that hovered over
the trees like a ball of hot smoke and then formed into a wing that rallied back and forth until it broke into a hundred thousand anarchic flights and the air was uniformly colored by birds darting on the winds of catastrophe.

The smaller birds rose with a deafening sound. Sometimes their flickering mass was shifted by the wind, like a black balloon, but one by one they returned to their perches, gliding to a landing with the seriousness of new pilots, and then they jumped and chirped in the branches until they took to the air once again.

As the warblers and finches filled the skies, people looked up at the weaving above them and felt their more prosaic burdens lighten. The starlings were a plague, almost like bats, though somewhat smoother as they moved. They were the birds that formed the clouds that held the sunlight and the air, and hovered gently over the swollen Tiber. Though they seemed to float with great ease, Alessandro discovered in watching them that the motion of each one was no less a struggle and no less beautiful for their having been caught up in such a way that their individual paths were hard to trace, for if you followed one, and if you had the patience, if your eyes were quick enough to keep him separate and to stay with him in the dizzying turns, you could see that the way he took the air was a great thing.