by Mark Helprin
Alessandro looked at him, and smiled.
It was nearly dark, and as they walked down the road they could hardly see one another's faces. Having lapsed into silence once again, they listened to the click of Alessandro's cane and watched the brightening planets arise as vanguards for the more timid stars that would eventually blaze up from behind and smile upon the whole world.
They saw sparks from fires in the distance as field hands working on the harvest cooked their dinners. And the many shooting stars that fell in August, Alessandro stated, made up for the lack of rain.
Several kilometers from Acereto, when they still could not see its lights, Alessandro said, "We'll eat by the fountain in Acereto. Maybe if someplace is open we'll have hot tea, but I doubt it."
They walked on. "To understand the First War," he said, "you have to know a little of history. Do you?"
"No."
"Why did I ask? You're a tabula rasa."
"I'm a what?"
"There's no point."
They continued in silence for ten minutes or so. Again, Alessandro turned to Nicolò, as he had done after Nicolò's declaration about propellers. "Or maybe there is," he said. "Maybe I can summarize it succinctly."
"I don't care," Nicolò said. "I just hope we can get some tea or coffee in Acereto. Can I have a piece of chocolate now, to hold me until we eat?"
"First," Alessandro said, paying no attention to Nicolò, "first, you must understand that history arises as the interpretation and misinterpretation of passion. What do I mean by that? It's complicated, but perhaps you ought to listen."
"I'M NOT a historian. My colleagues would probably be greatly offended that a humanist crossed the windbreak into their field, and would bark like dogs until I crossed back."
"That's just like F.A.I.," Nicolò said. "There was an engineer named Guido Castiglione. He was the head of testing, so he tried to test things at all stages of production, in each department. That would have been the best way to do it, to catch mistakes where they started. But all the department heads—like Cortese in airframes, and my boss in propellers, Garaviglia—they plotted to shoot him down. You can't take someone's bread, that's what my father says. Anyway, now Guido Castiglione doesn't work at F.A.I. anymore. And it's the same way with the helpers. If one is supposed to sweep and he sees anyone else with a broom, say the last rites.
"We're like that, too," the old man said, "only the last rites are words and glances and things that people say about you when you aren't there.
"Historians have their method, just like anyone else, and they're jealous of it, but the Iliad shames any history of Greece, and Dante stands supreme above the world's collected medievalists. Of course, the medievalists don't know it, but everyone else does. As a way to arrive at the truth, exactitude and methodology are, in the end, far inferior to vision and apotheosis. I don't claim to have a patent on either, and history is not my profession, but I do have some ideas about the times that I have seen. Forgive me if I'm not as learned or subtle as I might be."
"What?" Nicolò asked.
"A preface to warn you that I'll be speaking outside my area of expertise."
"You're crazy. Stop apologizing," Nicolò said. "You didn't do anything wrong. Just tell me the story. I can see you ordering coffee and bread. You walk up to the guy and you say, 'Forgive me. I'm not a baker, and I've never been to Brazil. What's more, I don't work in a restaurant, but, though I didn't bring my microscope, please, can you give me a cappuccino and a roll?'"
Alessandro nodded. "You're right," he said. "The reason for my hesitation is not my academic manner. I never had much of an academic manner. It's because, once, these things hit me like a huge wave, an avalanche, and for a long time it was as if I were in a long and emotional dream where I could neither speak nor move, and the world was passing me by.
"But that's over. I'll tell you the elementary history of the war. I won't stray from the objective. There isn't a need for anything about me."
"Okay," Nicolò said. "Here I am. Anytime you're ready."
"Though Italy is flanked on three sides by the sea, and in the north by a mountain barrier," Alessandro began, "and though its early history is an illustration of the success of uniform administration and centralism, this country has exemplified division, contention, and atomization. Mind you, for art, for the development of the soul, nothing is better than a landscape of separate and impregnable towers. The variety, the sense of possibility, and the watchfulness that such an environment creates have given to us many honors unparalleled in the world. Politically, however, it's a different story."
Nicolò was following carefully, struggling to understand. No one had ever spoken to him like this.
"Paradoxically, countries with open and vulnerable borders—France, Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary—and those with populations divided by language, race, and religion, found the strength and means to unify themselves and act as nations far earlier than did we. Perhaps it was because they were pushed into doing so by the very diversity they had to overcome. I don't know the causes, but I do know the results of the difference between them and us.
"We were, and are, politically weak. Whereas their policies toward other nations remained fairly consistent because of their elementary political harmony, we have always been like the family that must receive visitors, and quarrels bitterly until they are at the door. What if the visitors are predatory? How does such a family deal with the threat? If the visitors come with sword in hand, the family forgets its quarrels and fights as one. The nineteenth century, however, was the century of diplomacy. It was a splendid system—or would have been, had it not collapsed in nineteen fourteen—in which no one rushed in with swords. It was subtler than that.
"When they came to the door, they had their eyes on everything in the house, but they were more like jewel thieves than vandals. In an atmosphere of international civility, we were at a terrible disadvantage, because it wasn't threatening enough to distract us from our own struggles."
By this time, no matter how hard he tried to understand, Nicolò's eyes had begun to glaze, but Alessandro had no fear of bending green cane, because he knew it seldom broke.
"Remember this, then—even if you don't agree—for two reasons. First, factional paralysis made Italy weak on the international stage, and, second, it exaggerated inconsistency and volatility in internal matters.
"Are you with me?"
"Yes," Nicolò replied.
"Good. Much of the reason that the nineteenth century after the Congress of Vienna was as peaceful as it was, is that the European powers were absorbed in getting and running colonies. This cushioned many bursts of energy that otherwise might have led to war, and provided a margin of wealth and space that greatly relieved Europe of its tensions. Some little wars captured the public's imagination because of their exotic locations, but they weren't real wars. You know how when you get into a disagreement with your friend and it comes to a fight the first thing you do is start making rules about how the fight will be conducted? No punching in the face, no weapons, outside so you won't break up the furniture? That was the last century. The rules were clear, and Europe had an outside—the rest of the world—in which to carry on a fight without smashing its own crockery.
"Italy was left out of all this. We had our underdeveloped country right in our own south. And when we tried to imitate England, France, Germany, Holland, and even Spain, in seizing regions of the world, it was pathetic. It was comical. So, by the early part of this century Italy was crazy for making up lost ground. From the Nineties on, we had begun to look to Africa with a vengeance. We built naval bases at Augusta, Taranto, and Brindisi, and waited for a chance to redeem our prestige in Europe by seizing coconuts and diamonds. Why not? In ancient times, the whole of North Africa was ours.
"Our colonial failings made us feel as if we were always missing the boat. The next time, we wouldn't make ' il gran rifiuto.' No, the next time, no matter how dangerous it looked, no matter how stupid, we w
ould cast in our lot. The next time, we would avenge Custoza, Lissa, and Aduwa."
"What were those?" Nicolò asked.
Alessandro seemed resentful of humiliations so distant that Nicolò had not even heard of them.
"Those were battles in which we were made to look ridiculous—at Custoza, in the mountains, and at Lissa, on the sea, and at Aduwa, in Eritrea, by a bunch of Africans."
"I wish I had been there," Nicolò said.
"Really?" Alessandro asked. "We might have used you at Caporetto, too."
"Just tell me about the war."
"There's nothing to tell about a war unless you tell how it began."
"That's boring."
"Only for someone who doesn't know anything. When you get older, battles of any sort become far less interesting than what led to them and what they brought about. I know, I know. I have three hooves in the pasture and one already in the grave, but I have a few things more to tell before I get to the smoke and thunder.
"The Triplice, have you ever heard of it?"
"Of course not."
"It was an alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany, in which we applied to the European balance of power what we had learned at home about a mobile, weak faction acting out of all proportion to its size. We balanced off our allies in the Triplice with France, Britain, and Russia, blowing hot and cold one way and then another, living in the cracks, as it were, the Italian tail wagging the big dogs of Europe. The lesson we might have learned from our own internal politics, from history, and from human nature, was not clear to us. If you play off one side against another, sooner or later you will either be crushed between the two or forced to join one of them. In the end, we lost interest in staying aloof, because we wanted the Alto Adige from the Austrians far more than we wanted Corsica from the French. What could we have done with Corsica? Sardinia is enough of a problem.
"The elements of instability might have been controllable if we had allowed our culture to buffer the shocks of bad politics. This was not too much to expect. After all, we are not Greenland. For millennia we have substituted culture for politics, and it has been a success.
"But in the years before nineteen fifteen, we were just like everyone else. The absence of a strong ethic suited to our age, the rise of the machine, the decadence of Romanticism as it ended a long and fruitful existence ... who knows? Whatever the factors and in whatever combination, they led to the conviction that what we believed was no longer true, things had come apart, God had deserted us, and nothing in the whole world was left that could be called beautiful. Half a decade of dissonance, and philosophers in a never-ending stream mount the platform to keen that the light of the world has been extinguished forever.
"It passed me by, for when I was young I was sure of the good of the world, its beauty, and its ultimate justice. And even when I was broken the way one sometimes can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shining ever brighter. And nearly every time subsequently that I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter.
"As if history were not the steady alternation of the dark and the light, people become resigned and pessimistic, and when the fields are left open, in rush the lunatics and idiots. Does it remind you of factional politics and the Triplice? It's the same. When greater forces are immobilized, the splinter factions run riot.
"As in other demoralized countries, we too had our madmen of station. A movement of 'Futurists' was led by a mental case named Marinetti. When, at age nineteen, I read his manifesto, even I was appalled. It's almost impossible to appall a boy of nineteen. Have you ever been appalled?"
Nicolò shook his head. "No."
"Parts of it have been with me ever since. I can quote from it: 'We sing the love of danger. Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry.... We are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.... Our praise is for the man at the wheel. There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war.'
"Febrile insomnia? Mortal leaps? It might have been funny but for their influence on the rest of the country. When people write violent absurdities on the walls of a city, the city becomes violent and absurd.
"You're probably not familiar with Folgore's odes to coal and electricity, and you needn't be. It is conceivable that one could write a decent ode to coal or electricity, but these were humorless, monomaniacal, terrifying exercises, matched rather well with the socialist realism on the other side of the political spectrum."
At this, Nicolò drew himself up, blushed, and announced in the manner of a police agent in a melodrama revealing himself to a group of saboteurs, "I am a Communist." Though he was proud, at the same time, he was mortified.
Alessandro took a few steps, wondering exactly why he had been interrupted, and looked at the boy, with the same gently mocking expression with which he had followed Nicolò's declaration about the lost battles where his presence might have helped Italy to prevail. "Good," he said, "is there anything you would like me to say, or may I continue?"
"No, but what you said about ... whatever it was, was not nice. Please keep in mind that I am a Socialist."
"I thought you were a Communist."
"What's the difference?"
"Are you a member of a party?"
"I don't think so."
"A youth organization?"
"The soccer team at the factory."
"Then why do you say you are a Socialist, or a Communist?"
"I don't know, I just am."
"How did you vote?"
"I'm too young."
"How will you vote?"
"I'll stand in line, they'll give me a piece of paper. Then I take it to a little place where I can..."
"I don't mean that. I mean for whom will you vote, for which party."
"How am I supposed to know?"
"Then how do you know what you are?"
"I told you, I just am."
"So what?" the old man demanded indignantly, suddenly angry at having been interrupted.
"Are you a Communist?" Nicolò asked, hoping, for no reason that he could fathom, that Alessandro was not a Communist but, rather, a Christian Democrat.
"No."
"What are you?"
"Who cares? Would it make any difference to you what I am? No. So let me continue. There were others, too. They multiplied like rabbits. Papini, that son of a bitch, wanted every library and museum to be put to the torch. He maintained that the profoundest philosophy was that of a moron, and he could only have been led to that conclusion by self-adulation.
"Combine this with Marinetti's campaign against spaghetti, De Felice's wish that every child be taught to slaughter animals, and the various odes and symphonies to coal, drill presses, daggers, and stick pins, and you have a school. Combine it with D'Annunzio, and you have a movement."
"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'cloc
k, 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.
NOT 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.