A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  "I won't," Alessandro answered, backing out of the room.

  "Be sure to act sensibly."

  "Have I ever not acted sensibly?"

  The attorney Giuliani had the expression of a man who has just lit a fuse.

  "Papa," Alessandro said, his eyes closing. "She swims nude in the sea. She carries a pistol. And she wears perfume that makes me dizzy. Sometimes I go to the garden gate and smell the handle, because, when she touches it, the perfume stays."

  The attorney Giuliani was frozen still. "Be disciplined," he urged.

  "Were you?"

  "Not enough. That's how I know."

  ALESSANDRO WAS received by Orfeo, the chief mouse of the granary, the commander of the scratching chickens, who brought him to a desk near his own. Both shared a magnificent view of Rome. "It's sunny today," Orfeo said. "How nice to be indoors in the shade."

  Alessandro peered at the deeply seductive blue, closed his eyes, and saw a huge white wave sparkling in the sun. Flying within its airy circular crest were he and Lia Bellati, without a stitch of clothing, without gravity, tumbling, all limbs, glistening, wet, careening in the foam.

  "Think of all those devils out there in the heat," Orfeo went on, "with heavy loads on their backs, sweating like mules." Orfeo was an old man who had begun work as a scribe not long after the nineteenth century had passed its midpoint, and who still had not a single speck of gray. Perhaps he dyed his always gleaming hair with coal tar or some other intensely black substance. His height and his posture had been the cause of many thousands of fleeting internal debates as people who passed him on the street tried to decide whether or not he was a dwarf and whether or not he was a hunchback. In fact, though he was short and stooped, he was neither a hunchback nor a dwarf, but could look the part of both, depending upon his state of agitation and the energy of his resentment. He had the face of a far taller man who had been compacted in an olive press. It was all there, but very little space existed between it. "Much better to be a gentleman, out of the glare!" he said, hoping to please the son of the padrone.

  Alessandro smiled in pain for being in the shade, but Orfeo took his expression to be that of anger and embarrassment. Orfeo should not have implied that he and the attorney Giuliani's son were gentlemen of the same standing. Had the boy been a year younger, perhaps, yes, but Alessandro had crossed an imperceptible line, and had no doubt long since stopped eating with the servants, no matter how much he may have loved them. Orfeo, however, did not think that this was a threatening predicament. It had, rather, a thousand exits, and he chose one almost at random, speaking in rapid fire.

  "All kinds of gentlemen exist. There are gentlemen such as your father, and you, who are of exalted status. Perhaps not the most exalted status: God and the angels, and His holy blessed Son, bless him, are certainly the most exalted, but as there is the sun and Saturn, so are there the moons that circle in rich profundity. And then there are the other ranks, far below the exalted ones, which are to the moons of the planets as the mountains of the moon are to the moon itself. They ride upon his back, though they are upright and uncongealed, and perhaps if you and your gracious father are moons that sail and dip in the rainbow lines of Saturn's rings, I am but a true, but a proud tree, on the mountain of the moon, standing upright in the cool light of the blessed protector, whose cloak of silk like a luminous mantle is draped across the stars, and from the dog that rides in the godly sea of space, this exaltedness runs in train, trying to lap its blessed luminous sap."

  One of the other scribes, a young man with a mustache, caught Alessandro's eye. The index finger of his left hand was pointed to his head, and as he wrote with his right hand the left twirled in a circle.

  Orfeo had begun to describe in spectacular detail the "gracious luminous sap that falls like the blood of the Cross from the tree in the valley of the bone-white mountains that circle the moon," when Alessandro produced from his vest pocket the beautiful fountain pen with which he wrote anything and everything—his essays on aesthetics, his departmental examinations, letters declaring love to married women in Bologna who dared not answer, summaries of account, instructions for feeding his horse, epistles (also never answered) to the prime minister of Italy. It was the most precious of all the instruments he possessed, including his penis, though, admittedly, the pen was irreplaceable.

  "My father said to ask you about this," he told Orfeo. "I find that when I write for ten minutes or more I lose control of my hand, which pains me, and shakes. It's also very hot. And yet nothing is wrong with the rest of me, I think."

  "Let me see, sir." Orfeo took the pen, seized a magnifying glass, and examined the point. "You idiot!" he said. "You don't hold it correctly, sir! The left side is worn down completely, no gold at all left on it. It's like a knife now. A good penman glides over the page. You, my boy, cut. That's no way. This needs a new point. Put it back in your coat. Come. I'll give you a new pen."

  Alessandro followed meekly to a captain's chest that stood near the window. Orfeo pulled out an enormously wide and deep drawer that floated to them as if across bearings of silk, with not the slightest sound. The north light illuminated dozens, scores, and hundreds of pens. "This wealth, this treasure," Orfeo said, "belongs to your father, but is entrusted to me. I'll give you the best one of the lot. Most are ebony. Not this. Look."

  He held up a perfectly smooth, matte-black pen. The heavy point was dazzling even in north light. "Your father let me order it from England. It's ceramic—Wedgwood. You must not drop it. It's perfect—smooth, flawless, cool to the touch, and the point is so massive that it's as flexible as a whip. I'll fill it for you. I'll use treaty ink that costs twice as much for a little bottle than what we pay for a liter of the standard." He filled the pen and wiped its point on a clean linen towel suspended from a hook on the captain's chest.

  "Now we'll copy," he said after they had taken their seats. "Here's the third section of the Portuguese contract. You'll be working on a copy for the records. It isn't a presentation copy, and it doesn't have to be fancy, but it does have to be clear. Work hard. In two hours, the singers will come, and the work will seem easier."

  "What singers?" Alessandro asked.

  "Singers come an hour before noon," the mustachioed scribe answered, still working.

  "They sing until we go home for lunch."

  "Are they good?"

  "They're angels," Orfeo said, looking at the ceiling. "Two women, and a man with a voice that echoes in the piazza."

  "If they're so good," Alessandro asked, "why do they sing in the piazza? And who pays them?"

  "That's simple. They're from Africa, so that's why they sing in the piazza, and that's why no one pays them even though they sing like angels and they should be in La Scala. Of course, they can't be. They've been here for a month. They must have come from Africa because of the rainy season, or because their goats died. I hope they never go back. After each song, the piazza is beaten by a hailstorm of silver. You'll see. From every window, every office."

  Waiting for the singers, they settled down to work. In copying the Portuguese contract, Alessandro found that it was as if the massive gold point on the Wedgwood pen had a mind of its own. When ink was needed, out it flowed. If Alessandro were to hesitate, the ink would hold itself back rather than blot the page. The result was an effortless glide, like skating with the wind at your back, with virgin ice mirroring the easy strides across its surface. Apart from the fact that it was in Portuguese, the Portuguese contract itself was not all that forbidding, being mainly a set of ground rules for currency arbitrage in the purchase of cattle, salt fish, and oil.

  Now and then Orfeo would lean over to check his transient apprentice. "A gentleman's hand. Look at all that flying and skating!"

  "You fly and skate, too," Alessandro said.

  "Yes, but, notice, always in exactly the same way. That is the mark of an old order scribe—consistency. Each letter is always the same. Gentlemen gallop their horses across the fields and leap fences as
they choose. Scribes must follow the streetcar tracks; still, the discipline affords satisfaction. It's like the moon that circles the planets of the outer reach, and the dance of the flatulent animals on the surface of the desiccated brook...."

  "Tell me, if scribes value consistency so much," Alessandro interrupted, to stanch the monologue before Orfeo got on to the luminous sap, "then why not get one of those new machines, typewriters, and every letter will be exactly the same?"

  Orfeo stopped writing. "Let me explain something to you, sir," he said urgently. "We in this office are very advanced. We make use of the miracles that God has chosen to give us—little bird-like machines, fountain pens, bottles with caps that screw on, chairs that adjust up and down. We are at the forefront. If this typewriter of which you speak were a plausible invention, we would not hesitate to use it." He leaned back with a satisfied, amused smile.

  "It isn't a plausible invention?"

  Barely able to restrain his laughter, Orfeo shook his head. "Of course not! All the establishments that are buying these machines are doomed! They'll never be used in offices, never! I can give you my word. They're too impersonal. You can tell nothing of what is behind the words. And everything will have to be written at first by hand anyway. I've been a scribe for fifty years. I would lay my life down immediately if what I say is not true. These machines will not come into general use. They're entirely impractical. I pity the inventor. I pity the users. I pity the seller."

  "I don't know," Alessandro said. "When they're improved..."

  "How could you possibly improve them!" Orfeo shouted.

  "Let's say you could put a motor in them."

  "A motor?" Orfeo broke into laughter. "What, a steam engine?"

  "No, an electric motor to strike the impressions."

  "Impossible! Every time you touched it ... you'd get killed! And if they found a safe way for you to touch it—a rubber suit perhaps, or ivory plugs so the fingers would be like stilts, or sitting on a rubber throne—then the electricity still wouldn't know what to do. How could electricity know what to do? Human fingers! Human fingers! They were designed to make beautiful curves, not to hit keys."

  "What about a piano?"

  "What about it?"

  "The music of a piano comes out in beautiful curves, and you get it by striking keys."

  "A German, yes, but not us."

  "Italians don't play the piano?"

  "There are degrees of sympathy, and degrees of sympathy," Orfeo said in a kind of panic, his face and body twitching. "What if they swept down here speaking that ugly language that sounds like a monkey choking on an orange. Sometimes I dream that a German is laughing at me because I'm short. He looks at me and points, and his mouth curves like a scroll. 'You're so short!' he says. 'What are you, a meter tall?'

  "But I have it completely under control. I simply pay no attention. I am the master of the situation. I have this dream every night. Those people are tall but they're crazy. That's why they speak like they're undergoing surgery without anaesthetic."

  "I don't think the language is ugly," Alessandro said. "It's as beautiful as ours, almost."

  "Don't cede Venice to those garglers."

  "I didn't say I would."

  Orfeo cocked his arm and made a fist. "Will you fight?"

  "Fight whom?"

  "The Germans, that's whom!"

  "There isn't a war."

  "Does there have to be a war?"

  "Yes! There aren't any Germans here except tourists!"

  "People like you..." Orfeo said, with unconcealable disgust, "are the ruin of Rome. It's been like that for thousands of years."

  "Why? Because I don't kill tourists?"

  "No, because of the elephants."

  "Elephants."

  "They thought they were safe, because the elephants were across the sea, but Hannibal was smarter than them. He fed the elephants grapes and honey until they were as fat as couches, and he coaxed them into the water off Ceuta, saying, Let's just go for a little swim, and the currents carried them to Spain, where they climbed up on the beach." He turned to the mustachioed scribe. "Is this not true?"

  "I don't know, I wasn't there," said the scribe.

  "Ah! Two cowards," Orfeo said, "and, for two cowards, two things. They'd conquered most of Italy already—Milano, Venezia, Firenze, Bologna, Genova. It was a close call, and the people who beat them were the people who had been training and willing to fight all along, like the geese that honked in the night."

  "That's three things," said the other scribe.

  "So what! Who are you to carp at numbers? I can't even read your fives: they look like sixes."

  This quickly became an argument among the scribes. Alessandro returned to the Portuguese contract, thinking about fat elephants climbing from the sea on the southern coast of Spain. The Austrians, of course, had battle cruisers in that sea, and had only to sweep down from the Tyrol, elephantless, but it was a time of peace, and he did not need to think of fighting, and he would not have to die young. This was history's gift to him, he was grateful for it, and he refused to demean it by imagining a war that did not exist. He was free, and he knew it.

  At eleven, the singers came. They weren't Africans. Nor were they angels, but they were very good, and the time until lunch went as smoothly as if all the scribes had been drifting down a river. At one, when the female singer finished her last aria, the doors and windows that faced the piazza were filled with a hundred clerks who made their silver coins into a short and violent hailstorm.

  ALESSANDRO HAD lived all his life in the bosom of his family, and for him a social gathering of any type was an ordeal. He thought that conversations repeatedly nipped in the bud, microscopic chatter, people who stood talking to each other with their eyes scanning the room like hunters looking for birds, and the overwhelming weight of hierarchy, propriety, and manners necessary for an evening without unpleasant incident, were as exhausting and terrifying as a battle. Although he had never been in a battle, he knew nonetheless that he preferred it to a situation in which he was forced to hang himself with collar and tie, dance with ugly women, and get powdered sugar all over his pants.

  When the invitation arrived, it was sealed with wax and tied with the kind of cord that, in a thicker incarnation, was used in draperies in the dining rooms of expensive hotels. The paper looked like white leather, and the card within was printed in raised black, gold, and red letters, and embossed with the Hapsburg crest. Signora Giuliani had spent the day trying not to open it.

  "What's that?" Alessandro asked.

  "Open it," his mother commanded.

  "Later," Alessandro said, since part of his business was to be contrary.

  "It's probably for your father. If you don't open it, I will. It may be important."

  "I'll open it later, if I may," Alessandro said. "I've been copying all day—a thirty-six-page contract in Portuguese—and I'm tired. It can wait until morning. Undoubtedly, it's trivial."

  He walked to his room, calmly shut the door, and ripped open the envelope as if it contained the last bit of breathable oxygen left on Mars. His Excellency the Baron Zoltán Károly, Minister Plenipotentiary, Extraordinary Legate of the Austrian Emperor, was requesting Alessandro's presence at dinner a week later at the Palazzo Venezia, the embassy of Austria-Hungary.

  Why him?

  Why not? In fact, it was perfect. For years Alessandro had been reading Cicero and English parliamentary debates, with no outlet for his oratory except impatient fellow students who did not appreciate the worth of the great cadences Alessandro now had by heart. Of late he had been reading the newspapers as if with a jeweler's eye, and had yearned for the opportunity to engage what he imagined might be nascent political talent. Of course, not every one of the hundreds of guests at an embassy reception had the opportunity to give a speech, but Alessandro didn't need anything more, really, than fifteen minutes' barking time at a Belgian second secretary, and of this, or something like it, he was confident.

&n
bsp; It took him two days to buy fancy stationery, compose the fruity language in which to say yes, and get Orfeo to write it out with as many as possible of the curlicues and flounces that Alessandro usually tried to avoid. Alessandro put the envelope in a leather bag, jumped on Enrico, and rode to the Palazzo Venezia. At the gate were two grenadiers, private soldiers so elaborately dressed that they put to shame those Brazilian birds in the zoo who died each winter in droves because for them Rome was as cold as the Arctic.

  The soldiers wore, skintight patent leather boots, white pantaloons, green swallow-tailed jackets with gold braid, red ribbons, insignia, piping that ran all over them like rodents frolicking on the carcass of a dead horse, white sword-belts, bearskin helmets, feather plumes, high red collars, sashes, medals, leather pouches, and swords entangled in rustling tassels. It was a wonder that they could move. It was a wonder that they could stand. "Rurier fur den Botschafter," Alessandro said, handing his letter to one of the soldiers.

  "Grazie," the soldier answered.

  As Alessandro rode away he thought of the moment when he would stand in the embassy courtyard, alone in a world he did not understand. He blinked twice that week, once to get fitted in evening clothes, and the second time to polish Enrico's bridle and saddle, and then, barely breathing, he dismounted in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, where a lackey dressed like a monkey took his horse.

  With trembling legs, he walked to the front door. The lights of palaces and embassies are unlike lights anywhere else, and they sparkle as if someone had learned how to capture winter stars. The sound of a full orchestra poured out the doors, and Alessandro could see white flashes as gowns waltzed by, led or pursued by slim black suits with sashes that ran from shoulder to thigh. A hundred people were waltzing in a huge circle in a cavernous white hall that looked like an inside-out wedding cake, as others milled slowly about the edges, so that eventually everyone would get a chance to talk to everyone else.

  Alessandro was the only man with neither sash nor medal. The servants had bright cummerbunds that tied off into sashes, little girls in white gowns and red shoes sported regal-looking ribbons, and the women were dizzying concoctions of cloth, flesh, and jewels. The way they moved in the waltz, like windblown waves, added greatly to their appeal, especially when they were contrasted to the strange, skinny, humpbacked dowagers who wore diamond tiaras, moved with great stiffness, and whose pale flesh was slightly gray with disease.