A Soldier of the Great War (64 page)

The hammer was ungainly, badly balanced, and heavier than a rifle. It pulled Alessandro off his stride and was hard to carry, and he wondered how he could possibly have the strength to swing it through a sixteen-hour day. And yet for the others it seemed as light as air.

Squads of men veered off to ledges and tables on different levels, but Alessandro, being near the end of the line, went as high as it was possible to go, to a platform of clean rock a hundred meters above the quarry floor. He and a dozen other men were taken to a forest of iron stakes, which served many purposes. They made fissure lines for the eventual separation of the slabs, provided bases and pivots for cables, cranes, and hooks, and, in a fanciful sense, they killed the virginal marble just as harpoons kill a whale before it, too, is cut into slabs.

"Take this one," a sergeant instructed Alessandro, guiding him to a stake that was waist high. "Work on it until you lose so much blood that you faint."

"I beg your pardon?" Alessandro asked.

"Fainting is a pleasure, and, don't worry, we carry you down."

"I don't understand."

"Your hands. The skin will come off your hands."

"Why not use gloves?" Alessandro asked.

"You're better off facing it directly," the sergeant said. "If you use gloves it takes longer, you're more exhausted because you're not yet fit, and you tend to succumb to infections more readily. And a glove will stick to the tissue underneath the skin."

Alessandro found the sergeant's account hard to believe, thinking himself strong enough to drive this and other stakes without much injury to his hands. "It all depends on control of the hammer," he told the sergeant.

"Exactly. The more the shaft moves, the faster you come apart. Grip the shaft hard," he said as he left.

Alessandro looked at the iron stake. The head was partially flattened and exfoliated, but its disintegration had been checked as if the stress of the hammering had hardened it.

He swung the hammer, and when he connected with the stake he heard a lovely metallic ring that joined the fast-moving chorus on the cliff face. The first strokes were pleasant, as were the following dozen or two, even though ten minutes of labor pushed the stake in only a few millimeters.

Because he knew he couldn't rest he started a slow and deliberate stroke that he hoped would protect him. After half an hour the skin of his palms and fingers was pink and blistered. Had he or anyone else been doing this in the garden, he would have gone inside for lemonade.

He stopped. The blisters were not painful, but they covered the inside of his hands. As he was looking at the stake and hoping for the best, the sergeant returned with another sergeant in tow. Now Alessandro became acutely aware of the pistols at their sides.

"Why stop now?" the new sergeant asked.

"Blisters," Alessandro said, knowing their answer and that they would give it with utter dispassion.

"Not a reason for stopping, a blister or two."

"My hands are like water skins."

"The bar has hardly moved."

"All right," Alessandro said. "If it has to be," and he knew it did.

The blisters didn't break until he had struck the stake twenty times or more, and when they did break, the fluid kept the pain from him for another twenty blows.

"Keep on," the sergeant ordered.

When his hands had dried and the handle was hot, each bell-like ring rolled up the loose skin that had been hanging from his palms and tore it so that eventually it all fell to the ground. In fifteen minutes his hands were the color of a rose, and in half an hour they had started to bleed, to exude viscous white fluids, and to crack apart.

The air itself hurt his harrowed fingers and palms. To grip something solid was out of the question, to hold a heavy object, quite insane, to swing a sledgehammer, unimaginable—and yet he did, for he knew that when he had bled enough he would faint and they would carry him down.

He surprised them with how long he kept going, and they had to step back because the blood flew in distorted parabolas that made thickening lines upon the rock floor. At times it appeared to be raining in a dense windblown cloud whose underside had turned red as it passed over a raging fire. The sergeants waited for Alessandro to fall. He didn't fall. Instead, he struck as hard as he could, for he had come to believe that he was holding a piece of the sun in his hands, and that he would use it to cleave the rock as Guariglia had severed his own leg. His muscles tightened and then relaxed, his arms flew out before him as flexibly as elastic bands, and the head of the hammer struck the top of the stake with costly precision. The stake was driven down until it disappeared flush into the floor.

Alessandro's clothes were soaked with sweat and blood, and his eyelashes were stuck to his eyebrows by drops of blood that had blown against his face like raindrops in a squall. He dropped the hammer and turned to the two sergeants. "Is that the procedure?" he asked, and fainted dead away.

 

T
HREE DAYS
later he awoke on his back in a tent through which both the sunlight and blue sky appeared pale white. Wind-luffed plains of fabric shook the seasoned mahogany-colored poles.

His hands were bandaged in clean gauze that made him feel as if he had been changed into a nursery toy. Beneath the bandages he felt no pain, but only heat. After three days of sleep, he awoke as untroubled as if he had been in a tent on the beach during a seaside holiday.

Perseus came through the tent flaps. "You have only a few minutes," he said.

"No," Alessandro replied. "I have, in one form or another, all of eternity and the rest of time."

"Not before you begin to work you don't."

"How am I supposed to work?" Alessandro asked, holding up his padded hands.

"Your hands will be healed in ten days," Perseus told him, "and then you'll have the hammer all over again, but they let you do it in stages."

"Ten days is not a few minutes, or has Orfeo changed time?"

Perseus was ignorant of Orfeo. "Until you start the hammer again, you'll carry. Then they mix hammering and carrying. Your hands gradually toughen and you end up only hammering."

"What am I going to carry?"

"Steel rods."

"They have cranes," Alessandro protested. "And if they let me do the hammering gradually now, why didn't they to begin with? Did they want to see if I had special skin?"

"No, they wanted to lay you so low that you'd be able to carry rather than hammer."

Shaking his head in disbelief, Alessandro asked, "Why didn't they just assign me to carry?"

"If they had done that, they wouldn't have been able to transfer you to hammering. Now all they have to do is transfer you back. It's easier for them."

"Did you go through the same lunacy?"

"We all did."

"Why didn't you warn me?"

"Had you been anxious, it would have been worse."

"What do they do if you refuse to work?"

"Hit you with a rifle butt."

"And if you still refuse?"

"Shoot you. Do you know how many graves have to be dug?" Perseus asked. "In my estimation we're the most important men in Italy. Cadorna was a fop and a jerk. He'll be forgotten as nothing, and our gravestones will last ten thousand years."

"In the courtyard of my house," Alessandro stated, "are fragments of stone that came from the days of empire. They are devoid of anything but the quality of having lasted. The old laundress washing blouses in a tin tub used to catch my eye a hundred times better. A pine tree bending in the wind, or a bird alighting, would easily overshadow them—and I knew what they meant, because my father had translated them, and he told me. He used to take guests around after dinner, discoursing upon the fragments. I knew it all by heart at a very early age, but the maid walking past them in the corridor, her fat legs like spindle cones, her blue dress wrinkled everywhere except where it had been pressed by the heat of her stupendous ass, was far more gripping."

"Why?"

"Alive," Alessandro said. "I now think of anything alive the way the poor envy the rich."

"That's a long jump from your maid's ass. Obviously, you're educated."

"Like you."

Perseus made a slight bow. "Faculty of Philosophy, Rome, nineteen sixteen—interrupted," he said.

"Bologna, nineteen fifteen," Alessandro answered. "Faculty of Aesthetics. Nipped in the bud."

The smell of hot bread came from underneath the tent walls, and Perseus said that the ovens had just been opened. "You haven't eaten in three days. You'd better strengthen yourself."

"How can I eat," Alessandro answered, pointing his nose to his padded hands.

"Don't be ridiculous, they're perfect for holding a hot loaf of bread. You'll look like a kangaroo, but you'll be able to eat all you
want. Now you can pick up a bowl of boiling soup as if you were a Cossack."

"Wait. Before you go," Alessandro said, when Perseus had already turned to exit. "Rome is still beautiful. The proportions are the same, the colors, the light, the shadows."

Perseus turned. "I know," he said. "I was there recently. It's going to be taken care of by women, isn't it. They'll have to be the guardians now that so many of us are dead, and will die." Alessandro nodded. He found the notion pleasing. "It makes sense," Perseus continued, "that we love them, and they will be entrusted with everything beautiful, and then, children."

 

A
FTER HE
had eaten several loaves of bread and been the object of friendly ridicule because of his kangaroo paws, Alessandro began to work. They put a pack frame on him and loaded it with iron rods until the tendons at the sides of his knees were so sharply defined they cast shadows. It was almost too much. He had to stagger up even the first steps, and was breathing hard just a little way from the ground, and he had to catch his balance at corners lest his exhaustion and momentum combine to push him over the edge of the unprotected trail.

Bolts and cables were affixed to the rock here and there, but for the most part the trail was an unadorned narrow path with rock projections that knocked against his iron rods and pushed him toward the abyss.

Though every step was painful, he soon found the rhythm of it, got to know the stairs, strengthened, and was able to sustain waking dreams.

As his bandaged hands moved in front of his eyes when he used them for balance and counter-balance, he was tempted to self-pity. Sheathed as he was, he seemed touching even to himself.
Once upon a time in the war they took a good panda hear who was completely alone, and wrapped his fat paws in gauze until he could do no harm. Then they made him carry iron rods up steep stairs until he was ready to drop in exhaustion. They were bad and he was good. He knew the right thing to do, always, and they knew how not to do it, always. This is because the little wood doll with squeaky joints had been put in charge, and dangled his legs from a high seat in the Ministry of War, where he wrote out the orders that had turned everything upside down. The evil little wood doll laughed and rocked back and forth in his seat as the panda carried and carried, but someday the panda would take the bandages off his paws, get on the train to Rome, and smash the wood doll into a thousand pieces.

Initially, the idea of killing Orfeo had not been delightful. Alessandro had no passion for killing, and he wondered if he could actually bring himself to do the deed—but it had to be done. Quite clearly, Europe had come apart and millions had died not because of the shifting of great historical forces or the accidents of fate or destiny, the several bullets of Sarajevo, colonial competition, or anything else. It was because Orfeo had slipped from his seat in the office of the attorney Giuliani and been carried upon the flood, like a corked bottle full of shit, until he had lodged upon a platform at the Ministry of War, where his feverish hand and only half-innocent imagination had been directing the machinery of nations in homage to the exalted one and the holy blessed sap.

There he sat, with no neck, with the sexual feelings of a chamber pot, his right foot tapping out the rhythm of his hand as his hand sang out orders and decrees in cursive lines and flourishes that looked like vine tendrils or wrought-iron railing. Perhaps if his feet had reached the floor, or if he had had no moles growing on his face like the cairns tourists leave on trails above mountain lakes, or if he had not slicked down his carbon-black hair with ink and olive oil, Europe would not have come to ruin. It didn't matter, he had to be killed, and Alessandro was the one who had to kill him.

Alessandro now knew how to kill. He knew exactly what to
do—plunge a bayonet at a forty-five-degree angle into Orfeo's chest, entering just at the base of the neck. To accomplish this he would have to put his left hand behind Orfeo's head, as if in affection, to hold the little scribe in place.

He went up the stairs under his nearly impossible burden, cleansed and clear-eyed because he knew that the destiny of Europe depended upon his courage and resolution. Thousands, tens of thousands, millions of graves would be filled if he wavered. Lovely young girls in uncountable darkened houses all over the world would be deprived of the men for whom they had been born, and who had been born for them.

Alessandro was not so foolish as to imagine that the instant he killed the inkish thing the war would stop short amid the clatter of discarded rifles and bayonets. Such a great thing as war, like a potter's wheel, would keep on of its own momentum, but when the tiny jewel upon which the wheel found its central bearing was crushed, the wheel would slowly wind down.

He knew that as soon as Orfeo saw him, aged twenty years and heavily scarred, striding down the long aisles between the rows of clerks, he would jump to the floor and disappear like quicksilver. He might even produce a pistol and fire at Alessandro from behind the lectern, his legs jerking at every shot, but it wouldn't matter, Alessandro would take each bullet as if he were an oak or a melon. He might start to bleed and go blind in one eye, or feel warm blood burst inside him like a sack of water, but he would pick up speed, race past snub-nosed clerks still drafting orders, draw the bayonet, and get the dwarf.