by Mark Helprin
And then he answered the question he had put to himself. Throughout his life he had suffered periods of despair only to be lifted from them and to rise at the speed of falling. It had happened in footraces, when he had sometimes been slapped awake like a newborn and had burst into the lead effortlessly and without warning. It had happened in climbing, when he was suddenly transformed from a frightened novice into someone who could dance up the cliffs. And it had happened in his doctoral examinations, when the young Alessandro, trembling and afraid, had become the examiner of his examiners.
"Do you want to rest?" Nicolò asked just before dawn, as they began to walk southward through the cultivated valley twenty or thirty kilometers in length. "It's almost morning. We've been making good time, but now you're going very slowly. I think that if we rest again we can better our pace. I know you can walk fast; you almost left me behind going up the mountain. As you said, it was the going down in the morning that was difficult."
"My heart feels bad," Alessandro said. "It's hard for me to breathe. I'm afraid that if I stop I'll get so stiff and tired I won't be able to get going again. Walk slowly, if you can bear with me until I recover. This time of night is always the most difficult. If I can get through it into the daylight..."
A delicate white mist had risen from the irrigation ditches. It covered the fields and tried unsuccessfully to arch over the embankments on either side of the road. The sky had grown light enough to obscure the stars and planets. As night became morning, it seemed that all the birds of central Italy began to sing and dance in a mounting ecstasy that soon covered the countryside with sound. The trees were as busy as hives, with hopping or swooping birds and dislodged leaves that spiraled down through the still air.
With the swelling light came swelling sound, a swelling breeze, and the rattling and rustling of leaves. Finally beaten down, melted, and conquered by wind, heat, and light, the mist was swept from the fields. Rich colors bloomed in midair from what had been tentative vanishing grays. When the wind roared over the road and lifted the dust, Alessandro knew that something was happening. He shuddered as he saw the inanimate and lifeless world moving, and the dead things, dancing.
The sun rose on the left and turned the glossy leaves of the poplars into a blinding haze of light too bright to behold until the wind coursed through the trees and they began to bend and sway, softening the glare.
Alessandro felt the world take fire. His heart repaired to the past and he barely touched the ground as he walked between trees that now were shimmering in the dawn. No matter that distant thunder is muted and slow, it comes through the air more clearly. After half a century and more, he was going to take one last look. He no longer cared what it might do to him. He just wanted to go back. And he did.
II. RACE TO THE SEA
THE GARDEN of the attorney Giuliani's house was divided into quarters, and long after Alessandro left home he knew their every attribute by heart. The first quarter was given to an orchard the gardeners seemed never able to leave well enough alone; they were always cutting back, grafting, and lifting the soil around the thriving trees. Year after year, forty trees produced fruit for the Giulianis' table and for the wicker baskets that the gardeners carried home on their shoulders or balanced on the handlebars of their bicycles. The second quarter was tilled as a vegetable garden that produced crops appropriate to a small farm, and that even in January provided half a dozen kinds of greens for the cook to harvest every day, and little white daisies that the gardeners chose to overlook in their weeding because they were the only flowers of winter. In the third quarter a flower garden bloomed in so many colors that it seemed to be coolly on fire, and in the fourth a grape arbor produced much of the Giulianis' wine.
Dividing the vegetable garden and the orchard, on one side, from the flowers and the arbor on the other was a crushed stone path flanked by hedges high enough so that Alessandro, at twenty, could leap them only with difficulty. Green lawns were laid down like enameled intarsia between the quarters, and rows of pines and date palms at its edge made the garden seem like a clearing in the forest. Though the palms were so tall they could be seen from the Villa Borghese as they crested the Gianicolo near the Villa Aurelia, they were sterile. The fruit that hung from them in massive bunches never ripened, and in autumn it blazed up in wasted yellow untouched by swarms of birds that alighted in their crowns.
Though some of the Giulianis' modest wealth was not of Alessandro's father's making, he had had to squeeze the rest from stones. Many whose wherewithal had been solely a matter of birth looked down upon the industrious lawyer for having worked, some who had become rich entirely from their own labor resented that he had had an inheritance, and those who had done and received neither were bitter that he had either. But the Giulianis hardly cared, and Alessandro, at twenty, hardly knew. They had their house and they had their garden.
The garden stretched in the direction of Ostia and the sea. Though they could not see very far in that direction, their front windows gave them all of Rome from high enough to glance down upon its present as if it were history. An eastern view of the city and the Tiber was so deeply engraved in Alessandro's memory that he was able to summon it at will. Even when he was in the maze of streets below, he knew exactly where he was, and could see everything as if he were looking down from one of the pale clouds that so often and so stubbornly hold their place in the Roman sky.
The aerial perspective extended far beyond Rome, to the Apennines. In summer they were chalk white at the summits and along the ridges, and in the setting sun the huge and roughly shaped half spindle of the Gran Sasso gleamed across space until its light was captured weakly in the glass of a framed picture on the west wall of Alessandro's room. The picture was of the Matterhorn, but the silky image, half lost in the glass and far more engaging, was the uninvited presence of the Gran Sasso impudently asserting that life itself was better even than its best remembrance.
ONE MORNING, in April, before going down to breakfast, Alessandro stood near a hall window, buttoning his shirt. He had returned for a short time from his studies in the north, and was happy to be home. The morning sun illuminated the western portion of the garden so brightly that Alessandro was able to see its every detail. In the middle of what once had been solid masonry at the far end was an iron gate through which he could see the windows of a house on the other side of the wall.
Someone had breached the wall and could now see into the Giulianis' private park, into the Giulianis' windows themselves. They might even have seen Alessandro buttoning his shirt.
He ran downstairs to the kitchen, where his father was blindly attending to his breakfast as he read the newspaper. The attorney Giuliani hardly noticed his son. Alessandro's younger sister, Luciana, was standing in a corner, in a white apron. She had been about to leave the room, and her hands were poised on the apron's bow, but her brother's excitement made her refrain from pulling it apart.
"What's that thing in the wall in the garden?" Alessandro demanded in a tone suggesting that he believed his father might simply deny anything was there, and that, in fact, when Alessandro looked again, nothing would be there.
"What thing?" his father asked, unable to look up from a dispatch about the perpetual instability of Morocco.
"The gap in the wall, and the gate."
"What about it?"
"What's it doing there?"
"I don't know," his father answered, wanting to finish the dispatch. He had always been mesmerized by newspapers.
"What do you mean you don't know!" Alessandro asked.
"It's a gate so that the other people can get into the garden." The attorney Giuliani finished reading and took a bite of toast.
"Other people? What other people? Who?"
"The people who live on the far side of the gate. Their name is Bellati."
"Why would they want to come into our garden?" Alessandro asked.
"It isn't our garden. It's their garden."
Alessandro looked like someone
who'd been shot.
"I sold it to them, but we have a twenty-year lease. During that time, everything will remain the same, except that they can use the garden just as we do. They'll pay half for the gardeners, we'll divide the produce equally, they'll let us know when they have a party, we'll let them know, et cetera, et cetera. It's an advantageous arrangement."
"What are we going to do in twenty years?"
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
"They can build a house there, or a public building. A hundred families might be living right on top of us!" the boy screamed.
"Alessandro," the attorney Giuliani said, "the use of the land is controlled by law, and I have it in the agreement as a condition of sale that, even if the law changes, the garden must remain undeveloped for fifty years. That's nineteen hundred and sixty, Alessandro. By that time they will have built giant floating cities in the sea, Europe will be united into one state, and you will be seventy years old. Don't worry about it now."
"But why did you do it?" Alessandro asked in a voice so puzzled and forlorn that his father folded the newspaper and pushed aside his tea and toast.
"It's very simple," the attorney Giuliani said in the tone he used when he was about to reveal something excellent. "Do you know the Via Ludovisi?"
"No."
"Nobody knows it. It's a small street near the Villa Medici."
"What about it?"
"A little triangle of land sits between the Villa Medici, the Borghese, and the Via Ludovisi itself, which is the base. In the triangle are fields, paths, and some buildings. Now I'll tell you what I was thinking. This is what I was thinking."
Alessandro was influenced by his father's enthusiasm as surely as the many magistrates before whom his father appeared in earning his living.
"Rome is a city of ruins. It's very quiet, as befits an ancient city. The economy has problems, as does the system of transport, and the rest. The English tourists come here to look at stones, and they want Rome to be rusticated."
"So?"
"It isn't going to stay that way forever. The days are numbered when flocks of sheep are driven through the Piazza Navona, and, as things change, Rome will become more and more like Paris, London, and Berlin. The city will grow: it has to, it already is growing."
The elder Giuliani shook his finger at his son as if to say, behind this finger is your father. "The question is, how will it grow?"
"And you know."
"I made a good guess. I've been to every major city in Europe, and I've noticed one thing about all of them, something obvious. The fashionable neighborhoods, the districts of wealth, are all near parks—Passy, the Bois de Boulogne, Hyde Park and Mayfair, the Belvedere in Vienna. This is where the land is always most valuable. So it will be, eventually, with the Villa Borghese. Rome will build itself around the Villa Borghese, and the choicest section will be just to the south, leading down the hill to the center of the city. In anticipation of that I have bought one and seven-tenths hectares of land in the triangle that I described—enough land for scores of buildings. Long after I'm dead, your mother, perhaps, but certainly you and Luciana, and all your children, will benefit. It may make you very comfortable someday."
"I don't care about being comfortable," Alessandro protested.
"Neither did I, at your age. I know what you care about now, I'm paying for it. And I was much the same as you, but everything changed, and everything changes, even if you don't yet know it. I sold the garden out from underneath you so that in half a century, in a century, the Giulianis may be free to do what they wish, or perhaps just to survive.
"Its a gamble, and we now have nothing in reserve. I borrowed against the house and I sold the garden to Bellati, who either has the same ideas I have and hasn't been to Paris, or is simply fond enough of nature to put forward a substantial fortune to acquire it."
BELLATI HELPED to run the Bank of Italy. His son, ten years older than Alessandro, was a captain in the army, and wore a sword. When the King of Italy wanted to talk about money, he invited Bellati to court. Never had the two men spoken to one another of anything other than interest rates, the relative values of currencies, or the merits of a particular venture. The King of Italy didn't want to be heard in conversation about as vulgar a thing as money, so he would walk with Bellati to a quiet place out of earshot but in full view, and there confer with him as others looked on in envy. Bellati made a fortune from what people assumed, and was much in demand as a guest at dinner parties, where he never ever mentioned the king, which made everyone absolutely sure that he and the king were as close as a wheel and an axle.
The Bellatis were as social and gregarious as the Giulianis were not. The attorney Giuliani relied upon his skill in court rather than upon his connections, and he went his own way, preferring to the social life of the capital the risk of climbing mountains. He and his family stayed at home, and their lights burned throughout the evening.
The lights of the house newly visible through the wall usually blazed until eight, and were then extinguished until one or two in the morning, when they came on just long enough to see the inhabitants to the upper floors and into their beds.
A student of aesthetics and philosophy, in training to see the patterns in which one thing was differentiated from another, Alessandro noticed this immediately. And in the ten days or so that he was home he also noticed and was thankful for the fact that these people had never made an appearance. Alessandro began once again to think of the garden as his own, and once again, as he walked in it, his thoughts were able to wander and he could talk to himself in the feverish way of lunatics or university students overburdened by many sure beauties and contradictory truths.
And he did, pacing back and forth one evening at dusk, until his intellect was overpowered by his stomach, and he decided to abandon meditation on the aesthetic in favor of grilled veal chops. He was about to turn around when he noticed that one of the gardeners had left a spade leaning against a hedge. He picked it up, leapt the hedge, and began to walk toward the shed. Though it was now almost entirely dark, the sky was still a bright and decadent color that resembled the warm pink silk that often lined the interiors of ancient carriages.
The Bellatis were preparing to attend a dinner across the Tiber, as they did almost every night. Their son was at that moment with a detachment of soldiers on a warship steaming in the Adriatic, and their daughter had gone to the garden to get the flowers that they would take to their hosts. She had spent too much time in dressing, and now it was dark, but her father had told her of a lantern, in the garden shed, that was new, and that she could handle without fear of carbon black.
As Alessandro approached the shed, shovel in hand, he decided that one of the gardeners might have left it out for a reason, and that the best thing to do would be to lean it against the door.
Inside, in total darkness, Lia Bellati took from the pocket of her velvet cape a box of Finnish matches. She pushed open the tense little drawer, took out a match, and struck it. She looked about. A brand new lantern hung from a beam. Even though she was perfectly proportioned, she was short, and sometimes she jumped to reach things, but only after ascertaining that no one would see. At the age of twenty-two, and yet unmarried, she could not afford to appear ridiculous, and one never knew who was about to come into the kitchen or the library, and who, therefore, might see her body stretch like a cat as she leapt at what she wanted.
The garden shed was high at the peak and the gardeners were a tall race of men, at least compared with Lia Bellati. They had held the lantern by its base and hooked the wire handle around a nail. The match was half burnt-through as Lia looked about for something on which she could stand. A cement mixer was in the corner, far too heavy to move. Ladders for use in pruning the trees were stacked along a wall. The shortest was taller than the highest part of the shed. The match burned out.
Alessandro leaned the shovel against the door. The sound it made frightened the young woman inside, but she concluded
that it must have been the wind, and she struck another match.
Just as he was turning away, Alessandro saw light flare through the cracks between the boards. He had seen the gardeners leave much earlier. Perhaps this was an escaped thief, or a thief who had not escaped. The ladders were of ancient oiled hardwood, their fittings brass. The cement mixer was a prize, maybe, if it could be spirited through the streets. He peered through a space between the boards.
In the middle of the shed an elegantly dressed young girl was holding a burning match in her left hand as she repeatedly leapt into the air. She had been at it long enough to lay her cape across the ladders. It, like her skirt, was a very fine black velvet, and in the lapel was a brooch that sparkled like a diamond because, even if Alessandro thought it was too big to be a diamond, it was a diamond. Her hair, although not quite blond, was sun-bleached enough to catch the light of the match, and it gleamed in places as if it had been bound in gold cords. Again the match went out.
Alessandro continued to peer into the darkness, wondering if he had imagined the dance he had seen, and hoping that it would resume. It did. Another match flared. She stared to heaven, breathing heavily and muttering. Then she leapt high into the air. It startled Alessandro so much that he banged his nose against the shed, but he retained enough presence of mind not to cry out.
Though she was a small woman, she was lithe, and, as she demonstrated with such arresting oddity, athletic. Though from some rare angles the side of her face seemed almost crooked, it was magnificent in the frontal view. As she turned in her jumping, Alessandro found the alternation of contrasts unbearably exciting. In addition, her silken cream-colored blouse was fitted tightly around a body that would have been highly desirable even had it been as still as a marble in the Villa Doria Pamphili; but she was moving strenuously and, as she jumped, Alessandro observed not dispassionately that her breasts were friendlier to gravity than the rest of her on the way up, and more reluctant to descend on the way down. Heredity and perhaps a devotion to gymnastics and swimming had made her figure both very pretty and very full.