A Soldier of the Great War (95 page)

"My wife asks if you would like to have a cold drink and a canapè with us. My son watches you swim. I told him of the danger, and he thinks you are a hero."

"That's very kind of you," Alessandro replied. Before he could add that he was neither hungry nor thirsty, and wanted just to rest, the wrestler said, "
Magnifico!
" and turned on his heels.

The son was a miniature of the father, with more hair on his head and less on his body; the wife a lovely woman of extreme and endearing tininess. Alessandro immediately and alarmingly wanted to draw her to him and kiss her beautiful diminutive face. She came up only to his sternum, and her hands were so small and delicate that she reminded him of the sweet and innocent mice in children's books. At once he saw that the wrestler was perfect for her, a devoted and tender protector. And at once he saw that the little boy was special, that with such a husky father and delicate mother, he, continually translating between divergent qualities, was poised to become wise, even if, at only nine, he looked like a Turkish wrestler. Alessandro liked them. They were so imperfect and so admirable that he could not help liking them, and he was not sorry that he had been drawn their way.

"Momigliano, Arturo," the wrestler said, introducing himself in the formal manner, last name first.

"Giuliani, Alessandro," Alessandro returned, bowing slightly.

"My wife, Attilia, and my son, Raffaello."

Alessandro thought of Rafi, another Raffaello with a Jewish name. "A friend of mine was named Raffaello—Raffaello Foa," Alessandro told the boy.

The wrestler was slightly startled. "Everyone knows the Foas," he said. "Who is his father?"

Alessandro told him.

"I don't recognize him. What does he do?"

"He's a butcher, in Venice."

"I know only the Foas of Rome and Florence. They're all accountants and rabbis. And the one who was your friend, Raffaello, what does he do now?"

"He was killed in the war."

"I'm sorry. I hope he did not suffer."

"He suffered greatly."

"Do you know for sure? Word of mouth is unreliable, and you can't always assume the worst."

"I can still feel his weight," Alessandro said, "and his blood."

Attilia looked at Alessandro in a way that made him feel another surge of affection, amplified because it was clear that she held herself in low regard, perhaps because she was so small. Alessandro let his infatuation for her become respect for her husband, although he could only guess that Arturo merited it.

"Well, listen," Arturo said. "He must have been related to the Foas that I know. I'll ask when I see them. I know them because I'm an accountant, too—an unsuccessful accountant."

"Unsuccessful?"

"Yes. That's why we're here," Arturo said, "at this not exactly glorious hotel, in the off-season, instead of on Capri in August. Of course, I don't mean to imply that everyone here is unsuccessful, but I am."

"I think you're probably right. I myself am as poor as a swallow, at the moment," Alessandro said—not like someone dreaming that someday he would be wealthy, but with certainty. "And I work in a lowly, boring occupation. I'm a gardener's helper. Not even a gardener, but the helper."

"For someone so well spoken, and such a courageous swimmer ... I never would have guessed, but what I do is worse," Arturo asserted.

"Why is a strong and enthusiastic man like you an unsuccessful accountant? Are you stupid?"

"Unfortunately, no."

"Then why don't you have factories and fleets of ships? You have the air of a disgruntled magnate. Though you seem disgruntled, you seem like a magnate nonetheless."

"I was born to stand outside myself," said Arturo.

Alessandro settled into a chair, and Raffaello brought him a glass of lemonade, holding it as if, were he to spill it, the world would explode. Attilia passed Alessandro a plate of cheese, celery, and breadsticks. For a moment, Alessandro forgot that he had lost everything and everyone.

"It has always seemed to me," Arturo said, "that, except in art, except for someone like Beethoven or Chateaubriand"—Alessandro's eyes widened—"men of great ambition and great success go through life in a frictionless way, as if they were always riding the waves but never in them. I have found that failure is a brake on time."

"That's just an excuse, Arturo," Attilia said, but in a kindly, loving way suggesting that she was not sure, and didn't care if it were. Arturo, meanwhile, was lost in his impending declarations.

"I cannot be a successful accountant for a number of reasons. First, I am absolutely honest. I take great pleasure in sacrificing my own interests so as to be entirely honorable. Isn't that terrible?"

"Yes," said Alessandro, Attilia, and Raffaello, quietly and simultaneously.

"And then," Arturo continued, his words coming pacifically from the turtle-like jaw under his centurions face and sparkling black eyes, "most accountants like games, and to them their work is a game. I have always detested games. I never saw them as anything but a waste of time. For me, accountancy is a chore. I suffer when I work, which allows me beautiful visions."

"What kind of visions?" Alessandro asked.

"Religious and poetic."

"You mean, when you add your columns, you have ecstasies?"

Arturo bent his head. "I cannot abide numbers. They drive me insane in the same way that forced labor made mystics of galley slaves."

"It did?"

"Haven't you read
Digenis Akritas Calypsis?
"

"Do you mean
Digenis Akritas,
the first Byzantine novel?"

"No,
Digenis Akritas Calypsis,
" Arturo said. "The first Byzantine novel was
Melissa,
wasn't it?"

"I should have known," Alessandro told him.

"
Digenis Akritas
followed soon after. Or perhaps I've reversed the order."

"No matter."

"The other reason I'm unsuccessful as an accountant is that I love rounded, even numbers. I do my accounting as a matter of aesthetics.

"For example, were you my client and you had, let's say, seventy-three thousand four hundred lire in war bonds, sixty-nine thousand two hundred and thirty-two lire in a savings account, and you collected rents of ten thousand three hundred and fifty lire each month, I would juggle things around so that you might have a hundred-thousand in war bonds, fifty thousand in your savings account, ten thousand in your checking account, and you collected ten thousand a month in rent, but your tenant paid for the gas.

"I'd arrange for your interest to be transferred into a separate collection account, and in the event of an odd balance I'd cash it out and buy you something perfectly symmetrical—like a glass ball.

"I present my clients with the records of their finances in beautiful leather notebooks, in groups of balanced sets, with figures and typefaces in a maximally congruent grid. The client's financial system comprises vessels of constant volume that, when they overflow, overflow into other vessels of constant volume. Uneven excesses go immediately into everyday expenses. I even arrange for crisp new banknotes to be delivered to my clients in beautifully proportioned maroon-and-gold envelopes, in amounts of a thousand, two thousand, four, five, and ten thousand lire.

"I negotiate contracts, sales prices, and fees to be payable in large, round, whole numbers. That's because ragged trails of non-zeros remind me of an infestation of insects, or not having taken a
bath for a long time," Arturo said, his eyes gleaming with the azure of the sky, his fists clenched as he held forth. "I arrange for the services to be billed in even increments, and if I make a mistake, even at the bottom of a page of calculations, I don't cross it out, I don't erase it, I throw the page away and start over. To me, a poorly formed letter or number is a mistake."

"And yet," Alessandro said, "your dress and grooming are not pristine."

"I don't care what I look like, I care about what's outside me, which is why I'm unsuccessful. I go to too much trouble in a world where success flows to those who rapaciously avoid trouble, but I can't help it. It bothers me to be slovenly and asymmetrical. Perhaps," he said, blushing, but not so much as Attilia, "that is why I was so taken with my wife, and remain so, for she is a glory of graceful proportion.

"But it is also why we come in the off-season, second class, and why we live in an apartment with no view, in the Via Catalana."

"On the second floor," Raffaello interjected.

"On the second floor."

"It's big," Attilia told her husband.

"Yes," he replied, "but it has no terrace, no view, and its too close to the street."

"It's near the synagogue."

"Far from my office."

"You love to walk"

"Not when it's raining."

"Most of the time, it doesn't rain."

"Most of the time, I don't walk."

"You mean it rains when you walk?"

"You must confine your judgment of the frequency of the rain to the appropriate times in question. Otherwise you are statistically cavalier."

"I don't understand, Arturo. All I know is that we are well provided for and Raffaello stands on a pillar of granite—you."

Arturo looked at the sand, and then, uneasy with the compliment, turned to Alessandro with an expression that seemed to say, what about you? Now its your turn to tell us something about yourself, to balance my confession.

"I'm a gardener's helper. That's simple enough. After I tell them, no one ever asks exactly what I do, or why."

"I ask," Arturo said. "I ask. I am most interested."

Before he began, Alessandro leaned back in his chair and looked at the sky as if to take refreshment from the light. "When I came back from the war I had lost everything, but I was grateful nonetheless to be alive. Despite what I had seen, despite the destruction of all I had once taken for granted, despite the wounds I had sustained and my memory of men, far better than me, who were obliterated, I was overwhelmed with gratitude, inexorable, intoxicating gratitude.

"After being demobilized, I took a train from Verona to Rome. I knew that, for the first time, when I arrived in Rome neither my mother, my father, nor anyone else would be waiting for me. It was winter. It would be cold and gray. The train was filled with former soldiers just like me.

"It was a military train, an express that did not stop in stations, and it seemed to go faster and faster, rocking gently to and fro, gaining momentum, sprinting across the fields and through the brakes where startled birds rose like air-driven smoke.

"I looked out the window, and though occasionally I could see myself reflected in the glass I saw the countryside racing by, ancient towns and buildings in all their patience, and the wind pressing down the reeds in its never-ending argument with the land.

"Perhaps it was because certain thoughts and memories could not leave me that the landscape erupted in a vision the likes of which I have not had since. It was gray and dead, littered with rotting straw and stubble, and half buried in patches of snow. The trees were black, soaked through the bark, and stripped of their leaves, and the clouds and sky looked like the waves of smoke that curl over a burning city.

"This was what lay before me, and what I believed to be there, and what I wanted to see. It was not what I saw."

"What did you see?" Attilia asked.

"God help me, but I saw early summer. An explosion of light green floated airily in the trees. Fuses and buds rent the ground and split the branches, and where I didn't see green I saw yellow and blue. The colors were deep, the forms exquisite. The rich summer that I imagined, or remembered, had broken from time and defeated winter.

"Before the war, if I had seen something as startling and beautiful as what I saw on the train that day ... but no more. Never again. For the first time, I had looked upon victory from the place of defeat, and because the victory was not my own, and I was apart from it, I felt it all the more. It was God's victory, the victory of the continuation of the world. It would bring me nothing, swell my fortunes not a bit. It was bitter, and I would always be outside, but never have I felt a deeper pleasure, never have I been more satisfied, for even if hardly anything was left of
me,
the world was full. And I was not the only one. A thousand men were on the train for seven hours, and in that time I do not believe a single word was spoken.

"Were you in the army?" Alessandro asked Arturo.

Arturo bowed slightly and blinked. When he bobbed up he said, "I was an armorer in Trento."

"Then you know how lucky you are to have come home to your son."

Arturo crooked his right arm around Raffaello's neck and pulled the boy to him. "Of course I know," he said. "He was a baby when I left, and I thought he might have to grow up without me."

"Papa! Papa!" Raffaello squealed in embarrassment as Arturo kissed him.

"Why didn't you give yourself to the Church?" Arturo asked Alessandro. "With such feelings you might have entered the Church in just the way that men are supposed to devote them
selves to God, not as young boys who learn by rote that which a man cannot learn until he is broken."

"I didn't have the temperament. I knew as well that I couldn't go back to what I had done before the war, at least not for a while, at least not as an acolyte."

"What did you do?"

"I was a minor academic. I wrote essays on music and painting because I wanted to listen to music and look at paintings, and because I had to make a living. It was torture. I was too young to approach a work of art with anything but vigor and joy. Now I am able to write contemplative essays. The war is responsible for that, although war itself has no aesthetic. Lives that would be brought together to make a graceful end are abruptly truncated. Characters do not reappear where, by the dictates of a peaceful aesthetic, they should, for they have been killed. The balance between men and women is destroyed. Time loses its fullness. Tranquillity doesn't exist. The lack of an aesthetic empowers the extremes, and they depict war inaccurately, either glorifying it or glorifying its horror, whereas it is somewhere between pure horror and pure glory, with touches of both.