A Soldier of the Great War (63 page)

"Who'll tell them?" Guariglia asked.

"Someone will tell them," Alessandro answered. "They'll know. Guariglia, my sister came last night. I told her about your children, and I asked her to help them as long as they needed it. She can pass through the world almost as if by magic—they won't throw her in railway cars and put her in irons, or stand her up against a stake and shoot her. She'll be able to take care of your children. It will be as if they are protected by a saint. You see?"

Guariglia's response was to weep, and in so doing he shattered the River Guard's flawless control.

"What they need the most is you," Alessandro said, "but they'll be provided for, and they'll have your love."

Guariglia nodded. "Not only do I love them," he said, "but they really love me. I could be ten times as ugly as I am, and they would love me just as much. When they look at me, they see something beautiful, and, dear God, they are so beautiful themselves."

A third officer entered the
cortile,
and the soldiers of the River Guard were directed toward the stakes.

They felt hollow, empty, and as if they were falling. Alessandro had the sensation that his lower legs were caught in fire and darkness, and that he was walking through thick mud, but with each breath he felt the strength to counter his affliction. As if he were a soldier in the last seconds before battle, his fear joined with a tremendous longing for the clash, and he imagined that the force of the bullets would unleash the furious angels of speed, velocity, and light.

"I don't like it that no one will remember us," Fabio said as they turned left toward the stakes.

"They'll remember
me
," the Puppet Soldier declared. "They'll remember that I was the best shot in the whole fucking army."

When they reached the posts, they stopped talking, and stood straight. Not a single one of them knelt down. Not a single one asked for a blindfold.

The priests were humming like bees on a summer day. As they withdrew, they said to each man, "Christ be with you." They had pronounced this many times already and they would pronounce it many times more, and yet they were moved.

Taking up position, the firing squad did not unsling their rifles until ordered to do so. They stood at attention while the three officers conferred over their papers. One of the officers lit a match, and they peered down at the documents they were checking. "It's true," said the last officer to enter.

They walked across the
cortile,
approached each man, and said his name. When they got to Alessandro, they said his name twice, and then they made it part of a question. "Are you Alessandro Giuliani?"

"Yes."

"Rome has commuted your sentence."

Without hesitation Alessandro said, "The man next to me has children. I've seen them. They're babies, beautiful babies. He shouldn't die. They won't understand, and they need a father. Please, give him my name, and I'll take his. No one will know."

The senior officer, a major, thought for a moment, and replied. "You can do that kind of thing in the north," he said. "At the front anyone can do anything he wants, but not in Stella Maris. Stella Maris is too close to Rome. We're as powerless as you." He ordered one of the guards to remove Alessandro.

Alessandro refused to go. With his hands and feet bound, he shuffled and dodged, trying to stand his ground.

"Knock him down," the officer commanded, as if he had seen such a thing before.

The soldier raised his rifle and hit Alessandro on the back of the head. Alessandro fell forward into the dirt. They picked him up and dumped him on the ground behind the firing squad.

The priests went forward once again. Alessandro could neither move nor talk, but he could see everything. He wanted to shout to the River Guard that he would remember as long as he lived, and he tried, but the blow had rendered him speechless: He heard the priests in recitation—
Ave maris stella, dei mater alma, atque semper Virgo, felix coeli porta
—and he watched them withdraw.

"Unsling your weapons," one of the officers ordered. "Express rounds. Take aim."

Alessandro was overcome by the sound of the rifles loading, but then all was tranquil, and in the silence before the fusillade he heard Guariglia say, "God keep my children."

A
THOUSAND
soldiers labored on the cliffs of a chalk-white bowl in the Apennines, cutting marble plinths to mark graves. At the beginning of the war a few hundred military prisoners had been sent to work under a cadre of quarry workers, but time and the course of successive battles had greatly augmented their number. When working in daylight proved insufficient to honor the dead, the quarry detail had been divided into groups and shifts as complex and disorganized as the rock faces they mined, and their industry continued into the night at a fast and even pace, under and above the glare of torches, floodlights, and strings of clear electric bulbs. The engines never were quiet. As one shut down, others took over, supplying current, traction, drive for the cutting blades, cables, and pumps, and steam to polish the plinths until they were whiter than the bones they would memorialize. When the mechanics took one generator out of service and switched over to another, the lights would surge under double power and then fall back to something that was merely steady and bright.

The few accountants and bookkeepers who found themselves laboring alongside revolutionary factory workers and lethargic peasants might have calculated that even had each man turned out one complete stone every day—which was not the case, for each stone had to be cut from the steep cliffs, lowered, re-cut, beveled, polished, and transported—they would have had to labor for many years to mark the graves of their fellow soldiers.

Given the extent of the operation—men crawling like ants upon scaffolding that hung over nothing; the crews sawing, cutting, and driving wedges; and trains moving back and forth carrying what looked like sugar cubes—it was hard to believe, though it was true, that this kind of stone was being cut all over Italy.

Alessandro arrived in the middle of the night. Two sergeants armed with pistols met him at a small station a few kilometers away. "Are you the only one?" they asked.

"Yes," he said.

"We were under the impression that a platoon was on its way."

"You were betrayed," he said.

Because he despised their familiarity, they marched him double time down a moonlit road that threaded between bare rock cliffs, and allowed him none of the customary rests on the uphill portions. Only when they came to the ridge that gave onto the quarry did they let him pause, and this they did not to be kind but to impress him with the otherworldliness of their work.

From the quarry, scepters of light emerged at sharp angles, like mineral crystals, and the thicket from which they came was a fume of light. Sometimes the beams were cranked into different positions as if they were choosing new targets among the stars. Hundreds of men worked below, in a brilliance that made the vast quarry look like a piece of bright moon that had crashed to earth. They appeared to be mining not stone but white light, and when they took the stone in slabs and caused it to float through empty space, tracked by searchlights, hanging on gossamer cables and unseen chains, it was as if they were handling light in cubic measure, cutting and transporting it in dense self-generating quanta from the heart of magical cliffs.

Huge rectilinear masses of white marble glided at all angles past each other in skew paths of descent, suddenly emerging in full blaze from darkness, and then dimming, only to gain strength again upon reaching the steel frames where they would be cut apart in the glare.

The sound of hammers striking rock and steel never ceased. From above they seemed to be the individual ticks and tocks of thousands of clocks that had been freed from telling time and taught to talk. Patterns and cross-patterns emerged in their excited conversation, music extracted from the gossip of the rocks.

Wheels spun hypnotically, illusions among their spokes oscillating back and forth in gleaming counterpoint. Open fires, forges, and white-hot boiler fires were fed by stokers and incensed by bellows. Rows of machines surrounded by tenders and oilers pulled an astonishing web of cables past innumerable pulleys mounted on every dihedral and face. The movement of the cables suggested that the whole scene was steadily rising. Scores of men dragged about clay-colored rubber hoses from which jets of water were ejected onto the cables that slowly cut into the marble. On a wide section of quarry floor a corps of bevelers and polishers worked in an orderly crowd not unlike that in armories where military clerks milled about their desks. In rows of tents beyond, no one was sleeping, for Alessandro had arrived right before the change of shifts, and every row between the tents was occupied by men pulling on their clothes. Camp stoves steamed with vats of broth and pasta. Alessandro could smell coffee, tea, and freshly baked bread. The shift engaged would eat before they slept. The shift that had been sleeping would eat before they were engaged.

"Everyone here eats a lot," one of the sergeants said. "Here you don't just sit on your ass the way they do on the fronts. You work. Each man is like a goddamned engine, and engines need fuel."

Alessandro didn't know what to say, but he did know he was hungry.

"Don't you have any things?" the talkative sergeant asked. Though he had been repulsed he could not cease being proprietary.

"What things?"

"A mess kit, a blanket. You don't have anything, do you."

"No," Alessandro answered as they started him down the path
that shortcutted the vehicle road into the quarry. "They took everything away from me before they were about to shoot me, and they never gave it back."

"What luck. Why didn't they shoot you?" he was asked cheerfully.

"I don't know."

"Don't worry about it. In your two months here you can make the gravestones for the boys who were going to shoot you. We need hammer men. You look like you were pretty strong before you softened up in Stella Maris, and in a couple of weeks you'll be stronger than you've ever been in your life. You're going to be swinging a ten-kilogram hammer sixteen hours a day, and I don't mean like some ass-head clerk. I mean sixteen hours, and you don't steal from us even a minute."

Then they reached the floor, and they were bathed in light and noise.

 

T
HE SOLDIERS
in the quarry grunted, groaned, and hummed when they consumed their bread and soup. Half were shirtless in the cold night wind. Their muscles, seemingly as dense as steel, pressed against their skin like swellings. Veins and arteries with no place to go stood in isolation between hard muscle and elastic skin, like the vines that strangle oaks.

Alessandro had never seen human beings who looked like this. He had always been strong, especially when he climbed, but these men were three or four times stronger than the strongmen in the circus. Next to them, weightlifters were fat-ladies. The only people to whom they bore resemblance were the ancients who served as models for anatomical sketches and statues. Hundreds of men who had been born ordinary men, some of small stature, some surprised waiters and tailors and other unathletic weaklings, had become as strong as galley slaves. Whatever the process that had turned them
to stone, it had also frozen their tongues and given them mythical appetites. A huge dark-haired man next to Alessandro drank hot soup until he sweated in the cold wind, and, as Alessandro watched, he ate four loaves of bread.

"Do you always eat like that?" Alessandro asked.

"Arrrghh!" was the answer he received, followed by a long arm extended as if to cuff him, but the arm was on its way to one of the two loaves that was still on the marble slab beside Alessandro's half-finished soup.

"Go ahead," Alessandro said, but only after the bread-eater had done away with most of it. "Would you like some of this one? I can't eat the whole thing. Here." The bread-eater took it like a trout taking a fly. "For me," Alessandro went on, "it's a great luxury to have so much bread. I was in a line battalion, where we didn't get much to eat. And then, in prison, well, I suppose everyone starves in prison."

The bread-eater's expression seemed to say, talk all you want, but wait until you face what it is that makes me eat five loaves of bread at a sitting. This silent communication was punctuated by one of the hammer men, who broke wind, which elicited the most extraordinary chain reaction from all of them, as if they were a drill team.

Alessandro, who felt that he had nothing to lose, addressed the hammer men. "I don't want to be like you," he said. "I don't want to be a muscle-bound bread-eating jackass who sings in a fart chorus."

"What did you do on the line, kill people?" asked a dark little ape.

"Naturally," Alessandro answered. "What else was I supposed to have done?"

"More work for us," the bread-eater said to his bowl.

"Is this a company of pacifists?" Alessandro asked.

They smiled an astonishing array of toothless, half-toothed, and toothy grins. "Less work," someone said.

"I take it you don't care about the soldiers who are killed, just about the demands they make upon your time?"

"We never see them," the little ape said.

"You should be ashamed," Alessandro told them. "I've seen them. You should be ashamed."

"Tell us that after you've used the hammer."

"I will," Alessandro shot back. "And I won't eat half a dozen loaves of bread at a sitting, either. You become an ape only if you're an ape to start."

"Not all of us are apes," he was told by a soldier who looked, indeed, like the model for the statue of Perseus.

"At least you can talk."

"All of us can talk, but we save our energy."

"I was in the line for two years," Alessandro said, as if to identify and defend himself.

"This is not the line," Perseus said, "but something entirely different. This is a dream."

 

A
S
A
LESSANDRO
marched in a line three or four hundred men long on a steep path that led across the shelves and ledges of a cliff, he felt exceptional peace. Rising on a rock face was cause for an inner jubilation that, perhaps because it could not find an exit past the discipline and caution necessary to stay on, spun like the gleaming armature of an electric motor and stabilized the soul of the climber as surely as if it had been a gyroscope. Alessandro had once remarked on this to Rafi, when they were invisible to the world, hidden in the crags of a cliff in the clouds. Not only had Rafi understood, which surprised Alessandro, for Rafi was not partial to metaphysics, but he had responded immediately, telling Alessandro that the real beauty of forward motion was that, to achieve it, something else had to move either around or up and down—like wheels on a train or a cart, or the pistons and propellers of a flying
machine, or the screw of a ship, or, in the case of a man walking, his bones, his ligaments, and his heart.