by Mark Helprin
He looked at Nicolò, who was lying on his side, his right ear pressed against the stone rim of the fountain, shirt sleeve rolled up, arm fully extended into the water, straining to grasp a submerged coin with the tip of his fingers.
"Do you think it's worth it?" Alessandro asked.
Wanting to answer by holding up a glistening 100-lire piece, Nicolò didn't reply.
After he retrieved the coin he straightened himself with relief and took a box of matches from his pocket, one of which he lit with his left hand, which was dry. "What's this?" he asked Alessandro, who saw in flickering match light that the boy's arm had been whitened by its submersion in the cold water.
"Let me see."
Nicolò struck another match.
"It's Greek," Alessandro told him.
"How much is it worth?" Nicolò asked with the particular tension common to people who find a foreign coin that they suspect may be many times more valuable than they fear it really is.
"About a lira, or less," he was informed.
"A lira? One?"
Alessandro nodded affirmatively before the match went out.
"How can that be?"
"What did you expect? Do you think people throw away gold? The only time it's profitable to pull money from a fountain is if it's crowded with coins. I used to do it myself."
"But you were rich."
"So? I was a kid. We used to get money for ice cream by dipping in the fountains."
"Didn't your father give you money?"
"Not for ice cream."
"Why not?"
"He knew I got my ice cream money from the fountains."
"He was smart."
"That was the least of it," Alessandro said. "How old are you, Nicolò? You look about eighteen."
"Seventeen."
"Nicolò, in nineteen hundred and eight, more than half a century ago, I was a student just starting in the university. One day I passed a fountain that was choked with silver. I knew it wasn't quite right for me to take off my jacket, roll up my sleeve, and struggle to get the money from the bottom. Though I wasn't sure why, it seemed to have something to do with dignity. Then a policeman arrived and intimated, in the forceful way in which they often intimate, that I should return the coins to the water. He told me that it wasn't proper for me to be doing what I was doing, that I should leave it for the children.
"It had nothing to do with dignity. One shouldn't ever do anything to protect one's dignity. You either have it or you don't. It was a matter, it seems, of fairness. And by recognizing that it was a matter of fairness, I advanced the idea of dignity instead of trying to make it advance me. You see what I mean?"
"But it's Greek, Signore," Nicolò protested.
"Wouldn't that be exciting for a little boy?" the old man asked.
Nicolò bent back his arm, about to throw the coin into the middle of the fountain.
"Ah!" Alessandro said, bringing him up short. "How's he going to get it? Do you want him to drown?"
"Let him swim," Nicolò said.
"No," he was answered. "It's for a little child."
Nicolò dropped the coin and rolled up his sleeve. He didn't like the idea of throwing away even one lira. "This whole stupid town is closed up," he said. "Imagine, not a single light, not one..."
"I saw a light when we came in, at the crossroads."
"But not in the town itself. I can't believe it. It's only ten o'clock. Right now on the Via Veneto things are just beginning to heat up," he stated, as if he went there every night.
"Do you frequent the Via Veneto?" Alessandro asked.
"Sometimes."
"What do you do there?"
"I look for women," Nicolò answered, blushing so deeply that, even in the dark, Alessandro muttered, "Pomodoro."
"It's a good place to look for women," Alessandro said. "Lots of them go there, but do you find them?"
"Not really..." was the answer, in a sort of hoarse whisper.
"Have you ever slept with a woman?"
"Not yet," Nicolò confessed, ashamed.
"Don't worry," Alessandro told him. "You will. You probably don't even know that women want to sleep with you as much as you want to sleep with them."
"They do?"
"Its true, but I know you won't believe me. I wouldn't have believed me. Anyway, it's something that you should never come to accept fully. If you do, it's tragic, because it means you've become a peacock. You don't even begin to get an inkling of it until you're much older than you are now.
"You should be confident. You're young, you're serious, and you have a good job. I would think that women would be strongly attracted to someone who makes propellers."
"You think so?"
"Yes. It's honorable, unusual, interesting, with the possibility of advancement. Admittedly, it's not like being a doctor or a lawyer, but who's to say that you won't work hard, become an engineer, and maybe, someday, become the head of F.A.I."
"Of F.A.I.?" Nicolò asked skeptically, in the way that people of suppressed dreams often preclude their own possibilities. "Me? Never. A hundred and twenty thousand people work for F.A.I."
Alessandro did not indulge Nicolò's lack of belief in himself. "Look, stupid," he said, turning Nicolò from red to white. "It'll be hard enough for you to rise. Fate, circumstances, and other men will at times be almost overwhelmingly against you. You'll be able to beat them only if you don't join them, only if you don't condemn yourself from the start. If you have no faith in yourself, who will? I won't. I wouldn't waste my time, and neither will anyone else. Do you understand? You can be the head of F.A.I. You're still young enough to be the Pope."
"The Pope? They'd never have a pope as young as me."
Alessandro sighed hopelessly. "You're still young enough to become the Pope."
"Would I have to be a priest first?"
"I think that is the minimal qualification, yes."
"I don't want to be the Pope."
"I'm not suggesting that you become the Pope, you little idiot! I'm only saying that you're still young enough to try."
"Why would I want to?"
"You wouldn't, necessarily, but your youth is a magical instrument with which you can accomplish anything."
"Every two seconds you say I'm an idiot. Why?"
"Because every two seconds you are. You're wasting what you have."
"You sound like the soccer coach, and we lose to everybody. We always lose to Olivetti. We even lose to the Musicians Union. Fabrica Aeronautica Italiana, maker of war planes, loses to bald-headed guys who play the violin."
"I don't want to walk all the way to Sant' Angelo with a ... with someone who defeats himself before he's begun," Alessandro said. "I'm going to tell you something that you may or may not understand, and I want you to memorize it and say it to yourself now and then, until, someday, you do understand."
"Is it long?"
"No."
"Go ahead."
"Nicolò," Alessandro said.
"Nicolò," Nicolò repeated.
"The spark of life is not gain."
"The spark of life is not gain."
"Nor is it luxury."
"Nor is it luxury."
"The spark of life is movement."
"Movement."
"Color."
"Color."
"Love."
"Love."
"And furthermore..."
"And furthermore..."
"If you really want to enjoy life, you must work quietly and humbly to realize your delusions of grandeur."
"But I don't have them."
"Start to have them."
Nicolò shook his head affirmatively. "I understand, Signore, I understand what you're saying. I do. I think I do."
Alessandro grunted.
Neither of them spoke while Alessandro carefully laid out a meal of prosciutto, fruit, and chocolate, after which he and
Nicolò began to eat, leaning down now and then to dip a cupped hand into the numbingly cold wate
r for a drink.
"You eat like an animal," Alessandro said matter-of-factly. Nicolò stopped for a moment, shocked again, with his mouth and cheeks full of a difficult sheet of prosciutto. He couldn't answer, and he half suspected that the old man had timed his criticism accordingly. Cheeks puffed like a squirrel's, he listened. "You mustn't hum when you eat—not that animals do—for it connotes a certain primitive idiocy. No one is going to snatch the food away from you, so you can cut it or tear it apart before you put it in your mouth. Don't breathe so intently—it sounds as if you're going to expire. And don't make so much noise when you chew.
"Cafes on the Via Veneto are full of people who follow the rules I just stated. Believe me, well dressed women don't look twice at someone who eats like a jackal on the Serengeti. Another thing: don't keep shifting your eyes from side to side as you eat. That's half the battle right there."
"I never heard of the Serengeti," Nicolò said, after swallowing from shame a mass of food that might have stuck in his throat and killed him. "Is it a street or a piazza?"
"It's a place half the size of Italy, filled with lions, zebras, gazelles, and elephants."
"In Africa?"
"Yes."
"I would like to go to Africa," Nicolò said, putting another huge pile of prosciutto into his mouth.
"There are better places to go than Africa," Alessandro stated. "Much better places."
"Where?"
"There," the old man said, pointing north-northeast to the great mountains he knew were rearing up far away in the dark, to the Alto Adige, the Carnic Alps, the Julians, and the Tyrol.
Nicolò turned to look in the direction his guide had indicated, and he saw a lightened mass of buildings that, even in the darkness, conveyed a reassuring and uniquely Italian sense of dilapidation.
"What's so great over there?" Nicolò asked. "There aren't even any lights on."
"I don't mean there," Alessandro said, thinking of snow-capped mountains and the electrifying past. "I mean far beyond; if you flew into the night as if in a dream, and rose, the wind tight against your face, the stars drawing you to them, the landscape beneath you blue-black. I have suddenly vaulted into the mountains," he said, "after never having gone back, ever, for fear of encountering my lost self."
"There aren't any people up there anymore, fighting wars. Once things happen, they pass, and that's it."
"No," Alessandro said. "If they happen once, they stay forever. I never spoke of them, because I have faith that they are everlasting, with or without me. I'm not afraid to die, because I know that what I have seen will not fade, and will someday spring full blown from someone not yet born, who did not know me, or my time, or what I loved. I know for sure."
"How?"
"Because that is the soul, and whether you are a soldier, a scholar, a cook, or an apprentice in a factory, your life and your work will eventually teach you that it exists. The difference between your flesh and the animate power within, which can feel, understand, and love, in that very ascending order, will be clear to you in ten thousand ways, ten thousand times over."
"Have you ever seen a spirit?" Nicolò asked.
"By the million," came the answer, surprising even Alessandro, who was now not entirely in control of himself. "By the million, in troops of the glowing dead, walking upward on a beam of light.
"Now you listen!" he said to the boy, leaning forward and slamming his palm with his fist. "If you were to go to every museum in the world to look at the paintings in which such a beam of light connects heaven and earth, do you know what you would find? You would find that in whatever time, in whatever country, painter to painter, the angle of light is more or less the same. An accident?"
"I'd have to see. I'd have to measure. I don't know."
"Measure?"
"With a protractor."
"You can measure such things solely with your eyes, and besides, when the last judgment comes, even Marxists won't have protractors."
"I will. I always carry one in my pocket. Look," Nicolò said, pulling out a little red plastic box in which were neatly placed a six-scaled rule, a protractor, a small contour rule, calipers, and precision calipers, nesting there as if they had been prepared for Alessandro Giuliani to see. "You don't know. When you work with machines and you shape things you always have to measure and remeasure to get it right. The machine doesn't tolerate mistakes or excuses. It has nothing to do with what you want or what you hope. You have to get things right or it won't work." As he made this declaration he was so innocent and so exact that he forced the old man into silence. "What?" Nicolò asked, to get Alessandro to talk.
"Your argument is beautiful and surprising, Nicolò," Alessandro said. "In short, you are correct. You must measure and remeasure, to get things right. And because I have not measured all those beams of light, I am ashamed."
"Signore, what happened to you there?"
At this, perhaps because he was exhausted and strained by the walk, the old man bowed his head onto his loosely clenched left fist.
Nicolò leaned forward in a complicated, unfathomable gesture that showed he would become a wise and compassionate man. He did not apologize for having led Alessandro on, for Alessandro had led himself, but, still, Nicolò was moved, and he felt affection for the old man who, though lame, was teaching him how to walk.
THEY PICKED up the pace outside of Acereto. Perhaps because they had eaten and rested, Alessandro found strength. "God compensates perfectly," he said to his companion. "You cannot fall and expect not to rise. Call it the wheel, the lesson of Antaeus, what you will, but strength floods in after a fall.
"And then again," he said cheerily, "it may be just that the moon is about to rise, or it may be the chocolate, or a second wind. Tell me if you want to walk more slowly."
"I think I can keep up with you," Nicolò answered sarcastically.
For the next hour or two, keeping up with Alessandro would be a task that would set the boy to breathing hard and make him think that something might be wrong with his heart, because he found it difficult to stay even with an old man who carried a cane and whose every step was a cross between an uncontrolled pivot and a barely arrested fall.
They were walking up. The road from Acereto to Lanciata was steep in places, ascending to the ridge line of the low mountains that from the rooftops of Rome looked like the Alps, and then twisting dizzily into sheltered valleys where herds of sheep glowed in the moonlight like patches of snow.
They passed drop-offs where the milk-white shoulder of the road became a luminous ramp into an attractive void of weightlessness and rapture. In making the turns, Alessandro came perilously close to the abyss, and at times the edge of the cake would crumble away noiselessly after his foot had left it. He seemed not to notice or care, but to be protected by their almost supernatural momentum, which Nicolò interpreted as a friendly race to see who could rise faster to the topmost ridge, where the moon would hang voluminously over a noiseless world.
Nicolò stayed away from the edge, and Alessandro was amused. "Of the many excellent things about mountaineering," he said as much to the night, the cliffs, and the air as to the boy taking quick steps beside him, "one of the finest is to become unafraid of heights. When I was a boy, and would climb with my father and the mountain guides he knew or hired, I abhorred the vacuum of an abyss, and my fists were white from clutching the rock. Meanwhile, the guides would sit with legs dangling over an infinite precipice; they would stand on tiny pinnacles, smoking their pipes, coiling ropes, and sorting the climbing hardware; and they would run up and down goat trails sometimes no less vertical and no more contoured than Trajan's Column.
"After a few days in the mountains my father hardly paid attention to the drop underneath the overhanging walls upon which he would stand with his heels on the rock and the rest of his boots projecting out into space.
"I don't remember when I lost my fear, but, perhaps because I'd been afraid for so long, when finally I did it never returned. I haven't been
in the mountains since the war, but I don't fear heights. Over the years—along the cliffs of Capri, atop Saint Peter's, climbing onto the roof to straighten a crooked tile—I've found that this part of me, at least, has remained young."
He was in as fine a heat as a youthful runner on a good day. "Do you want me to slow down?" he asked Nicolò.
"No," Nicolò answered, breathlessly, "but perhaps you should, since we are, after all, going up."
"Don't slow on my account," Alessandro warned. "I'll be devastated by morning no matter what I do, so I might as well push hard while I can. Nicolò, the world is full of tart little surprises. Here I am, seventy-four years of age, racing up a mountain, putting you to shame because you are a boy of seventeen and you're breathing like a nonagenarian. Don't worry. In a few hours you'll probably have to carry me, but, for now, indulge me, sweat a little, follow along in the race."
"What if you keep on like this all the way past Sant' Angelo?" Nicolò asked desperately.
"Then you'll have lots of time to spend with your sister, and they'll bury me in Monte Prato. Better to be buried there than in one of those marble filing cabinets in Rome."
"Aren't you afraid to die?"
"No."
"I am."
"You're not tired."
"I'm not brave, either."
"It has nothing to do with bravery. Bravery is for other things."
"Yes, but you miss people."
"I know that."
"So there's nothing you can do about it, is there."
"You keep them alive."
"You do?"
"Yes."
"Come on!"
"You keep them alive not by skill, not by art, not by memory, but by love. When you understand that, you won't be afraid to die. But that doesn't mean you'll go to your death like a clown. Death, Nicolò, is emotional."
"So is life."
"One hopes."
"Look, Signore, you'd better not die on the road, especially if I'm not there to tell, and you'd better not die especially if I am there, you know what I mean?"
"My granddaughter will know to move me next to my wife. And she and I have a bond strong enough that it hardly matters where we are put, for we have never really parted."