A Soldier of the Great War (65 page)

From this he derived great satisfaction, even joy, as he labored in the quarry under a rapidly changing winter sky. Once he had determined to do it he felt all his strength returning, for he had discovered how to break up the white ice that covered the blue lake of Europe.

The guards marveled at the way the new man had adapted. He had his breath, his heart was not pounding, and he returned time
after time in an even sweat to request another load, which he took up to the heights as if he were a pack animal or a mountaineer with calves as thick and dense as the barrels of small cannon.

 

T
HEY STARTED
him driving some of the rods he carried, five minutes at a time, then ten, fifteen, and so on, until, three weeks after his panda pads had been removed, his hands were so heavily callused he could calmly hold a hot coal. Eight or ten hours a day walking up steep trails, under seventy kilograms of steel, and six or eight hours swinging a heavy hammer, changed him physically into something he had never been. In the first few days, his softer flesh simply disappeared. With no reserves of fat, he began to eat four loaves of bread at a sitting, as he had predicted he would not.

The heart and lungs of this soldier in his late twenties were shocked and strained almost to collapse, but they soon rebounded. He thought of himself as an engine. To fuel the incredibly dense and powerful musculature, he need a great bellows and a first-class pump, and he had them. He moved up and down the cliffs and swung the hammer like the ancients of whom he had read, like a Phrygian who worked the mines, a prisoner of Knossos, or a Palaconian slave boy.

After Alessandro had rushed through his meal, he washed in a piped torrent of icy water and ran for the tent, where he spent ten seconds removing his boots, ten loosening his buttons, and five straightening the blankets and making a pillow of his spare clothes. As soon as his head was down he was unconscious, surrounded by a dizzying blackness that rocked him in smooth stressful arcs that compromised with gravity like a pendulum or a swing, and then, for eight hours, he was free.

Even as he slept he knew somehow that this was his good time, that he had best sink into it as deeply as he could, and at reveille, whether at night or in the day, he had great difficulty rising and felt
as if he weighed a thousand kilograms, or as if he were coming back from the dead.

Hard labor, deep sleep, simple food, cold water, the lack of possessions, and the presence of the morning stars upon arising gave the quarry soldiers so much strength and energy that they might as well have been the rulers of Europe lost in manic conquests. For hours after dawn they raced up and down the paths and struck at the rods like athletes and knights. By nightfall they would be exhausted, and then the lamps would flash on, and volumes of white light spilling through the dust and spray would energize them again, until only much later would they be ready to drop, anticipating with pleasure sleep that was studded with brilliant dreams.

As much as Alessandro's life was sharply divided into feverish activity and absolute rest, so were his thoughts. He killed Orfeo a hundred times a day, and each time was as elaborate as a bullfight. He would see himself walking up the aisle and drawing the bayonet from its oiled sheath. He went through innumerable mental versions of the speech he would deliver before the lunge, the actual twist of the bayonet, and what he would say when he turned to the newly liberated, frozen clerks.

As he struck the stakes he murdered Orfeo, and when the head of the stakes reached the level of Alessandro's solar plexus, at the level of Orfeo's head, they became Orfeo's head.

At night Orfeo made no appearance whatsoever. Alessandro's dreams were as free of obsession as his waking hours were controlled by it. At night, he melded images until they sang. Their intensity reflected the state into which he had fallen and the world into which he dearly hoped he someday would rise.

In the 19th River Guard it had been said that if a soldier were lucky enough to survive the war he would spend the rest of his life trying to figure it out. Whatever time they had left was taken from them by gas, a bullet, a shell, typhoid, or, if not those, a series of
unanswerable questions that would go with them to the grave. Indirectly, Alessandro began to pose these questions in his dreams.

For half the year the Tiber was nothing more than muck and reeds, and seldom was anything but opaque, so the fountains of Rome were for Roman youth something to ponder like a river. Once, having left his house after an adolescent raid upon his fathers patience, Alessandro had bested all his previous records and spent seven hours next to a simple round pool in a little park in what was then a new suburban quarter to the south, and if it is true that nothing is ever forgotten, he had the images and coordinates of a hundred million lazy trajectories marked in cascading water and hesitant droplets revolving at the peak of sunlit wavering arcs. If it is true that nothing is ever forgotten, the pictures he could summon of a stream collapsing upon itself in silky alternation from side to side might have been enough to provide the stuff for him to construct in his unconscious the extraordinary plumes of water that he saw in his dreams, and that, within his dreams, for want of a better word, he called fountains.

He probably dreamed what he dreamed for the sake of the well lighted struggle at the top of their arcs. Here, just after the maximum disintegration of the main stream, when the water had burst into a continual and rapturous explosion, individual droplets took to the air. If a nature could have been attributed to them it might have been one of optimism and hopefulness, for when they were driven apart and they shot off on their own they went into a brave and jovial roll, spinning as if to gain altitude.

Despite their hopeful twirls, the masses of droplets fell back and disappeared, but Alessandro had watched too many fountains for too long not to have remembered that some of the droplets escape. At the very top of the plume, in the greatest violence and turmoil, the water is beaten and pulverized into a fine mist, and the air that is pushed out of the way by the upward jet of water propels the mist in its own arc until it slowly begins to sink in diaphanous
curtains that oscillate in the breeze. Some droplets are combined and some separated. Those that combine head downward at a faster rate. Those that are further separated continue to hang in suspension, bobbing up and down and glistening in the light.

If the wind is right, some are swept into the sky at high speed. They shrink and disintegrate undl they are invisible and can ride the high blue winds that girdle the earth.

Alessandro's dreams took him to the top of the arc, where he watched the explosions of foam, the fight against gravity, and the downward collapse as the waters combined like an army in retreat. Though he could not rise with the mist, he did not deny the fact of its rising, and he watched it with a hopeful eye.

Then the water was transformed from broken foam to an unbroken surface as hard and smooth as ice, and Alessandro was hurled across it with the sun reflecting in the waves below. The engines of a float plane swelled to full power, and the noise was as riveting and dramatic as an endless crash. Alessandro could taste the cold fresh lake water, and the palms of his hands were seared against the hot metal of the engine. The floats that skidded over the surface as they tried to break free were polished rosewood richer than the light in a clearing at sunset. They had the same feel and quality as the rowing shells in which Alessandro had loved to race, but they were heavier and stronger, and they skipped like bobsleds over the speed-hardened surface of the lake.

The engines reached maximum power early on. Their sound never varied, but the plane itself kept accelerating—not because the drive grew more powerful but because of less and less resistance. When it lifted off the chill lake the echo from the mountains virtually disappeared.

"You've failed," said a man who sat between two other men at a table covered in green felt. They were in extraordinarily elaborate robes trimmed with ribbons and decorated with purple bars, red pom-poms, foxes' tails, chains, keys, and ermine. Alessandro wore
a black robe, its only decoration his head emerging from the flat collar.

"Me?" Alessandro asked, acutely aware that they had the foxes' tails.

"You, yes, you," replied one of the two who were assistant professors restricted mainly to words of one syllable, even if they had inestimable quantities of polysyllabic magma beneath their tender crusts, waiting for the chance to erupt into professorhood.

"Why? I've tried to see the truth in things."

"But you haven't been clever enough."

"I was clever when I was a child. I could do all kinds of tricks; I could memorize, analyze, and argue until my opponents were paralyzed, but whenever I did these things I felt shame."

"Shame?" the professors asked, angry and amazed.

Alessandro lost himself for a moment in the great hall where bookshelves rose to a vaulted ceiling five storeys high, and stained glass windows at either end made the scholars feel both that they were submerged in a tropical sea and that they would be prepared were scholasticism subsumed in theocracy. He was sharply retrieved by his inquisitor. "Shame? For what?"

"It was easy to be clever, but hard to look into the face of God, who is found not so much by cleverness as by stillness."

"Is that why so many foolish people believe in God?"

"If an idiot sees the sun does it mean that the sun doesn't exist?"

"Why did you embark upon an academic career?"

"My father wanted me to join him in the practice of law, but I saw how greatly he suffered the requirement of being clever. It separated him from his soul, and it didn't get him anything other than a living. He said he spent most of his time scratching in the dust. I thought that, in my career, I would be charged with searching for the truth. I apologize for mistaking the requirements."

"You should have gone into the Church."

"No. The Church brings argument and analysis to the door of heaven itself."

"But you could have lived on a stone pillar in the desert, or entered one of those monasteries where they don't talk to each other."

"Italians don't make good hermits."

"You failed your examinations because you could not exercise the cleverness that would demonstrate that you understood."

"Demonstrate to whom?"

"To us."

"I felt no need to demonstrate to you."

"You knew, then, that you would fail?"

"I had hoped to slip by. My passion is not for analysis, but for description."

"Anyone can describe."

"Anyone can analyze. You, sir, work in a big grocery store with lots of things on the shelf. You arrange and rearrange them, but to describe something so as to approach its essence is like singing. I told you this when I wrote about Oderisi da Gubbio and Franco Bolognese. Oderisi's
'Più ridon ...
' was how Dante drew attention to the humility of the miniaturists, who tried in the simplest, densest strokes to convey the essence of what they saw, and were not interested in discursive interpolations, conceits, or dazzling excursions that proved them to their fellows—although they had to do some of this simply to arouse their patrons."

"Oderisi da Gubbio is no excuse for failing to do what you tendered."

"I thought you might mistake for cleverness my love of beauty."

"That might be clever in France, where they confuse wisdom with appreciation, but not in Bologna, where we are at war with the perfect world that God has decreed. Our passion, no less a thing than yours, is to go underneath, to take apart. In that sense, we who scratch in the dust are desperadoes and outlaws, and our lives are tremendously exciting."

"In the end," Alessandro declared, "your workshop full of parts will prove infinitely less than the whole, and you won't even know what it was you have pulled apart, much less how to reassemble it.
You'll have only your efforts, which will evaporate like warm beer, whereas I will have been looking at the world and rendering it just to know it for what it is, and it is something far more solid and sensible than warm beer."

"You are condemned."

"I would rather be lost in the breakers than on some flimsy platform above the sea."

Then came a volley of rifle fire, which, like the sound of artillery or the central point around which Alessandro's dreams revolved, could not be adequately described or remembered. The sharpness and percussion, like the roar of great engines, were always less when recalled.

Alessandro was standing in a sunlit grove on the side of a hill, half a century after the war. An old man with white hair and white mustaches, he had come to witness a memorial to the combat, the dead, and the peace.

He saw himself from the outside, as is possible in dreams. He was in his seventies, his frame was slight, and he had a marvelous shock of white hair. Gravity had shortened him, and only God knew what accident or slow disability had provided him with the opportunity to carry the gold-handled cane that he grasped in a lean and gnarled hand.

Of all the people assembled at the memorial no one had a better claim to being there than he, an old man on an autumn day, standing in a high collar and a stiff morning-coat, as light as a locust, peering down a long row of white headstones. He strained to see himself and felt pressure against his chest as if he were leaning against a breastwork.

Two old men, one a double amputee, sat on his right, in the uniform of the Great War, their heads bowed. Next to them was a younger man who could not have seen the war but was subdued exactly as if he had: he could only have been a politician or an orphaned son. A table on the grass was covered with a mass of white and deliriously fragrant flowers.

With names, dates, and battles set into them in sharp grooves made by hardened steel, the gravestones stretched in long rows for as far as anyone could see, just the way divisions used to move single file down the roads. But these rows were still and orderly, for everyone had arrived.