A Soldier of the Great War (6 page)

"D'Annunzio who?"

"D'Annunzio—
who
?" Alessandro repeated.

"It sounds familiar."

"I can't explain the whole world to you. I should have known that. How can I expect you to understand the theory when you don't know the story. It was a mistake to start out from such a high point. Let me begin as simply as possible.

"There was a great, devastating war. It was fought in Europe from nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen. Italy stayed out until the spring of nineteen fifteen. Then, mainly because we had designs on the Südtirol, the Alto Adige, we went to war against Austria-Hungary, and almost a million men died."

"That was the war you were in?"

"That was the war I was in."

"Tell me what it was like."

"No," Alessandro said. "Among other things, I simply do not have the strength."

They passed through the few outlying streets of Acereto. Even at ten o'clock, the town was asleep, the windows shuttered. In the center of the village was a piazza, and in the center of the piazza, a fountain. They sat down at its edge.

 

N
OT A
single light burned, and the moon had not risen, but the piazza and the buildings surrounding it were of a pale color that amplified the starlight enough to outline shapes and give away anything that moved across fields of varying contrast. Water rose from the fountain's spire in a thick steady stream that waved back and forth, collapsing gently upon itself as it fell into the cold pool below. Sometimes spray from colliding masses of falling water would sweep lightly across Alessandro Giuliani and Nicolò Sambucca.

Alessandro's hands were folded on top of his cane. In daylight he might have been taken for a landowner, the mayor, or a doctor resting by the fountain after having attended a very sick patient. He felt pain in his right leg, in the thigh and just above the knee.
It was one of the wounds that grew worse over time, but he welcomed the pain. Pain was inevitable, and he knew that in his struggle with it he would eventually be the master. When he had returned from the war, in winter, to the sullen and demoralized city of Rome, he had often missed the fighting that he had longed so deeply to leave. So with the pain.

Perhaps because of the age of his traveling companion, Alessandro himself felt as if he were young, in a different time, and he dreaded the prospect of once again thinking through his youth. Some of his colleagues and a few of his students claimed to have been moved so by a book that they had read it again and again. Who were they? Of what were they made? Were they dissembling? Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever. It would become part of you and never leave, and you would love the characters as if they were your own. Who would want to plow over ground that has been perfectly plowed? Would it not be, like living one's life over again, infinitely painful and dissonant? In his work he had to read over, and he often found it to be an operation of despoliation and agony.

He looked at Nicolò, who was lying on his side, his right ear pressed against the stone rim of the fountain, shirt sleeve rolled up, arm fully extended into the water, straining to grasp a submerged coin with the tip of his fingers.

"Do you think it's worth it?" Alessandro asked.

Wanting to answer by holding up a glistening 100-lire piece, Nicolò didn't reply.

After he retrieved the coin he straightened himself with relief and took a box of matches from his pocket, one of which he lit with his left hand, which was dry. "What's this?" he asked Alessandro, who saw in flickering match light that the boy's arm had been whitened by its submersion in the cold water.

"Let me see."

Nicolò struck another match.

"It's Greek," Alessandro told him.

"How much is it worth?" Nicolò asked with the particular tension common to people who find a foreign coin that they suspect may be many times more valuable than they fear it really is.

"About a lira, or less," he was informed.

"A lira? One?"

Alessandro nodded affirmatively before the match went out.

"How can that be?"

"What did you expect? Do you think people throw away gold? The only time it's profitable to pull money from a fountain is if it's crowded with coins. I used to do it myself."

"But you were rich."

"So? I was a kid. We used to get money for ice cream by dipping in the fountains."

"Didn't your father give you money?"

"Not for ice cream."

"Why not?"

"He knew I got my ice cream money from the fountains."

"He was smart."

"That was the least of it," Alessandro said. "How old are you, Nicolò? You look about eighteen."

"Seventeen."

"Nicolò, in nineteen hundred and eight, more than half a century ago, I was a student just starting in the university. One day I passed a fountain that was choked with silver. I knew it wasn't quite right for me to take off my jacket, roll up my sleeve, and struggle to get the money from the bottom. Though I wasn't sure why, it seemed to have something to do with dignity. Then a policeman arrived and intimated, in the forceful way in which they often intimate, that I should return the coins to the water. He told me that it wasn't proper for me to be doing what I was doing, that I should leave it for the children.

"It had nothing to do with dignity. One shouldn't ever do anything to protect one's dignity. You either have it or you don't. It was a matter, it seems, of fairness. And by recognizing that it was a matter of fairness, I advanced the idea of dignity instead of trying to make it advance me. You see what I mean?"

"But it's Greek, Signore," Nicolò protested.

"Wouldn't that be exciting for a little boy?" the old man asked.

Nicolò bent back his arm, about to throw the coin into the middle of the fountain.

"Ah!" Alessandro said, bringing him up short. "How's he going to get it? Do you want him to drown?"

"Let him swim," Nicolò said.

"No," he was answered. "It's for a little child."

Nicolò dropped the coin and rolled up his sleeve. He didn't like the idea of throwing away even one lira. "This whole stupid town is closed up," he said. "Imagine, not a single light, not one..."

"I saw a light when we came in, at the crossroads."

"But not in the town itself. I can't believe it. It's only ten o'clock. Right now on the Via Veneto things are just beginning to heat up," he stated, as if he went there every night.

"Do you frequent the Via Veneto?" Alessandro asked.

"Sometimes."

"What do you do there?"

"I look for women," Nicolò answered, blushing so deeply that, even in the dark, Alessandro muttered, "
Pomodoro.
"

"It's a good place to look for women," Alessandro said. "Lots of them go there, but do you find them?"

"Not really..." was the answer, in a sort of hoarse whisper.

"Have you ever slept with a woman?"

"Not yet," Nicolò confessed, ashamed.

"Don't worry," Alessandro told him. "You will. You probably don't even know that women want to sleep with you as much as you want to sleep with them."

"They do?"

"Its true, but I know you won't believe me.
I
wouldn't have believed me. Anyway, it's something that you should never come to accept fully. If you do, it's tragic, because it means you've become a peacock. You don't even begin to get an inkling of it until you're much older than you are now.

"You should be confident. You're young, you're serious, and you have a good job. I would think that women would be strongly attracted to someone who makes propellers."

"You think so?"

"Yes. It's honorable, unusual, interesting, with the possibility of advancement. Admittedly, it's not like being a doctor or a lawyer, but who's to say that you won't work hard, become an engineer, and maybe, someday, become the head of F.A.I."

"Of F.A.I.?" Nicolò asked skeptically, in the way that people of suppressed dreams often preclude their own possibilities. "Me? Never. A hundred and twenty thousand people work for F.A.I."

Alessandro did not indulge Nicolò's lack of belief in himself. "Look, stupid," he said, turning Nicolò from red to white. "It'll be hard enough for you to rise. Fate, circumstances, and other men will at times be almost overwhelmingly against you. You'll be able to beat them only if you don't join them, only if you don't condemn yourself from the start. If you have no faith in yourself, who will? I won't. I wouldn't waste my time, and neither will anyone else. Do you understand? You can be the head of F.A.I. You're still young enough to be the Pope."

"The Pope? They'd never have a pope as young as me."

Alessandro sighed hopelessly. "You're still young enough to
become
the Pope."

"Would I have to be a priest first?"

"I think that is the minimal qualification, yes."

"I don't want to be the Pope."

"I'm not suggesting that you become the Pope, you little idiot! I'm only saying that you're still young enough to try."

"Why would I want to?"

"You wouldn't, necessarily, but your youth is a magical instrument with which you can accomplish anything."

"Every two seconds you say I'm an idiot. Why?"

"Because every two seconds you are. You're wasting what you have."

"You sound like the soccer coach, and we lose to everybody. We always lose to Olivetti. We even lose to the Musicians Union. Fabrica Aeronautica Italiana, maker of war planes, loses to bald-headed guys who play the violin."

"I don't want to walk all the way to Sant' Angelo with a ... with someone who defeats himself before he's begun," Alessandro said. "I'm going to tell you something that you may or may not understand, and I want you to memorize it and say it to yourself now and then, until, someday, you do understand."

"Is it long?"

"No."

"Go ahead."

"Nicolò," Alessandro said.

"Nicolò," Nicolò repeated.

"The spark of life is not gain."

"The spark of life is not gain."

"Nor is it luxury."

"Nor is it luxury."

"The spark of life is movement."

"Movement."

"Color."

"Color."

"Love."

"Love."

"And furthermore..."

"And furthermore..."

"If you really want to enjoy life, you must work quietly and humbly to realize your delusions of grandeur."

"But I don't have them."

"Start to have them."

Nicolò shook his head affirmatively. "I understand, Signore, I understand what you're saying. I do. I think I do."

Alessandro grunted.

Neither of them spoke while Alessandro carefully laid out a meal of prosciutto, fruit, and chocolate, after which he and

Nicolò began to eat, leaning down now and then to dip a cupped hand into the numbingly cold water for a drink.

"You eat like an animal," Alessandro said matter-of-factly. Nicolò stopped for a moment, shocked again, with his mouth and cheeks full of a difficult sheet of prosciutto. He couldn't answer, and he half suspected that the old man had timed his criticism accordingly. Cheeks puffed like a squirrel's, he listened. "You mustn't hum when you eat—not that animals do—for it connotes a certain primitive idiocy. No one is going to snatch the food away from you, so you can cut it or tear it apart before you put it in your mouth. Don't breathe so intently—it sounds as if you're going to expire. And don't make so much noise when you chew.

"Cafes on the Via Veneto are full of people who follow the rules I just stated. Believe me, well dressed women don't look twice at someone who eats like a jackal on the Serengeti. Another thing: don't keep shifting your eyes from side to side as you eat. That's half the battle right there."

"I never heard of the Serengeti," Nicolò said, after swallowing from shame a mass of food that might have stuck in his throat and killed him. "Is it a street or a piazza?"

"It's a place half the size of Italy, filled with lions, zebras, gazelles, and elephants."

"In Africa?"

"Yes."

"I would like to go to Africa," Nicolò said, putting another huge pile of prosciutto into his mouth.

"There are better places to go than Africa," Alessandro stated. "Much better places."

"Where?"

"There," the old man said, pointing north-northeast to the great mountains he knew were rearing up far away in the dark, to the Alto Adige, the Carnic Alps, the Julians, and the Tyrol.

Nicolò turned to look in the direction his guide had indicated, and he saw a lightened mass of buildings that, even in the darkness, conveyed a reassuring and uniquely Italian sense of dilapidation.

"What's so great over there?" Nicolò asked. "There aren't even any lights on."

"I don't mean there," Alessandro said, thinking of snow-capped mountains and the electrifying past. "I mean far beyond; if you flew into the night as if in a dream, and rose, the wind tight against your face, the stars drawing you to them, the landscape beneath you blue-black. I have suddenly vaulted into the mountains," he said, "after never having gone back, ever, for fear of encountering my lost self."

"There aren't any people up there anymore, fighting wars. Once things happen, they pass, and that's it."

"No," Alessandro said. "If they happen once, they stay forever. I never spoke of them, because I have faith that they are everlasting, with or without me. I'm not afraid to die, because I know that what I have seen will not fade, and will someday spring full blown from someone not yet born, who did not know me, or my time, or what I loved. I know for sure."

"How?"

"Because that is the soul, and whether you are a soldier, a scholar, a cook, or an apprentice in a factory, your life and your work will eventually teach you that it exists. The difference between your flesh and the animate power within, which can feel, understand, and love, in that very ascending order, will be clear to you in ten thousand ways, ten thousand times over."