by Mark Helprin
"What is the tragedy? The tragedy is this, but what would you know?" he asked, "you bunch of ignorant little snot-noses. Before your fathers were born my hand guided the streams of blessed sap across white oceans of vellum that—had my masters only had the vision and the courage—could have changed the world as if my hand had held a hundred kings.
"As rivers of white passed through my pen, I put down the opposite image of the gracious sap in forms that paralyzed my heart. We had the proper seals, or I could have gotten them. The orders I have written, all together, have had the power to lift whole mountain ranges. My will sang the proper song, but the sap was black, like blood.
"I began to study the effects of opposites, so that in understanding them I could call down the gracious one and change the path of his cloak across the vellum. After many years I had meticulously regurgitated the ten degrees of holy blessed sap, and mixed it in every conceivable formulation. I was on the verge of discovering how to transpose the degrees and flip the sap back to strike the vellum and char it black, which would have turned the gracious sap from black to white and back to black.
"My orders would for a time have glowed white, and luminously reformed the world. But this boy's father," he thundered, without, to Alessandro's eternal gratitude, indicating anyone in particular, "bolted during the last few seconds and robbed from me my mastery of the sap. He destroyed the entire system that I had so carefully built to lure the sap to the chopping point.
"Do you know what he did? I'll tell you what he did," Orfeo said, abandoning the podium to glare at the front rows until no one dared breathe.
"He brought in machines for writing, the so-called 'typewriter,' which is noisier than a flush toilet, as ugly a thing as you can imagine, and writes in individual letters that are all the same, exactly the same, dead. Machines have no grace. It cannot make a flourish, vary the thickness of a line, or tantalize the reader with a lapse into an indecipherable but lovely style. A good penman can make rivers that race to the sea, rivers as wild and dizzy as a flume in the Alps, as choppy as the Isarco, as wide and smooth as the Tiber at Ostia, or as deep as the Po where it rolls into the Adriatic.
"But the so-called 'typewriter'? It has attacked the holy blessed sap that binds all things. It is mine own executioner. Mechanized and quick, as dead as steel, like those guns that shoot a hundred bullets at a time, it has killed my life, it has broken the beautiful lines, it has bullied and beaten time. The old world is dead, and now, you know, they'll put motors in them, and you'll have to sit on a rubber throne or wear a rubber suit so they won't electrocute you.
"And they'll attach your hands to the keys, and you'll just sit there, in the electric light that hurts your eyes, on your rubber chair, with nothing left of this life. Can't you see? Nothing whatsoever."
He was finished. He walked in silence up the center aisle. Heads turned as he passed, but no one rose to follow. When he had left the Teatro Barbarossa, a huge collective sigh escaped from a thousand souls, but not a single person spoke as the audience filed out into the cold night air. Several graduates of the University of Trondheim disappeared down the narrow streets, anxiously wondering what the morrow would bring.
When Alessandro reached home he found neither Orfeo nor the round suitcase. He ran to the station, where the last train to Rome was just about to leave. Rushing up and down the platform to look for Orfeo, he didn't see him at first, because Orfeo was in the water cabinet, afraid to flush the toilet before the train left the station. Finally, Orfeo gave up and went back to his compartment, where Alessandro saw him putting his strange suitcase up onto one of the luggage racks.
Alessandro stood outside, recovering his breath. Orfeo opened the door so they could talk.
"What are you going to do now?" Alessandro asked.
"Go back to Rome and die," said the old scribe.
"I'll talk to my father. I'll make him get rid of the machines, or at least keep you on for as long as you like. You'll be able to do the contracts in the old way, as if nothing had changed."
"No use," Orfeo said. "I was fooling myself. Those machines are ubiquitous. Everyone uses them now. They began to use them ten years ago, but I just wouldn't admit it. When the pamphlets ar rived in our office, telling about what these machines could do, I threw them away." He shook his head. "It's all over."
"I'll write to my father," Alessandro said, walking with the train, which had begun to move and was picking up speed.
Orfeo shook his head once more. "Thank you," he said. "It's over."
He leaned out to pull the door closed, and as he glanced at the boy now running alongside the train, his face showed intense pity. When the door slammed shut and the train pulled from the station into the winter night, Alessandro remembered Orfeo poking him in the chest and saying, "If the world is not held together by the holy blessed sap, then what does hold it together?"
FOR SEVERAL weeks in June of 1911 it was hot enough for the cats in the Giulianis' garden to lie like tigers in the trees. The minute the sun flashed over the Apennines the city began to bake, even at the top of the Gianicolo, where a breeze swept through the dense pines.
Alessandro and Lia were in the garden. The grass had been bleached white, with touches of silver and gold, by a sun that beat down upon it day after day from a cloudless sky, and by a hot dry wind that seemed to come from all directions, but the heat was dry enough and golden enough never to be unpleasant. In the early part of the month, with the memory of the winter rains and the damp, it was as welcome as it would be unwelcome in August.
When Lia was deep in thought her face was darkened just enough to suggest a sharpshooter concentrating on a difficult target. When she laughed she did so not only with her face and voice but with a slight motion of her shoulders and arms, in a subdued and euphoric whiplash that ended always in a slight curving and relaxing of her fingers.
Alessandro desired her intensely. Sometimes he fixed upon one of her physical attributes, something minor of which she might not even have been aware, such as the curves of her neck as it swept into her shoulders, or the microscopic geography of her lips, and brought her into surprised and pleasant stupefaction. She might be talking to him, her head slightly turned, and then she would notice that he was staring at the slope of her upper lip. At first she would attempt to escape, but short of turning away completely evasion was impossible. She would slowly become intoxicated as she felt the upper lip go slightly numb, and then the rest of her, and this was better than a kiss, for it could last as long and longer, and did not waste its power in fulfillment.
That he could, even in complete silence, bring Lia to a state of sexual distraction and turn her almost as scarlet as a poppy in the Villa Doria was a triumph for the academics that the attorney Giuliani loved to disdain, for they had taught Alessandro a thing or two about how to see.
A hawk dropped from the empty sky into the topmost branches of a tall pine. Lia quickly looked up, shading her eyes from the sun, and at that moment Rafi Foa emerged from the Giulianis' house, dressed in a full business suit and carrying a leather briefcase. Having just walked up the hill, he looked like a soldier on maneuvers in the desert, but he would neither loosen his tie nor take off his jacket, because the suit had a logic of its own, and as he had chosen to wear it, he did not want to contradict it.
"This one is complicated," Alessandro said as Rafi approached. "He's made great strides, but he still wears a suit on a day like today."
Rafi sat down on the blond grass and threw the briefcase in front of him. He had finished his studies with great distinction and was making the rounds of palaces and ministries in hope of starting near the top, but because of the way the government operated, and because his heart was not in it, he hadn't found a place. Even the guards and doormen sensed his hesitation, and judges and deputy ministers knew immediately that he was pulled by something far above the law, by something holy and alive.
"I went to see the chief of protocol for the Supreme Court," Rafi said, soaking in s
weat. "He's old enough to be thinking about a successor. He was impressed by my record, and asked about my French. I said it was adequate, and he began to shout in the dialect of the Savoyards—Aostian Italian, we used to call it at school—and he spoke with such insanity and with such a squeaky voice that I couldn't help laughing."
"You shouldn't have laughed," Alessandro said. He was proud of Rafi and wanted him to get as high a position as possible.
"I couldn't help it. He asked a lot of questions that I only half understood, and he didn't hesitate between them. I think his object was to prove that, even though I said I knew French, I didn't.
"What did you do?"
"I told him that."
"You did?" Lia asked.
Rafi nodded. "And I told him ... I said, 'You may think you're speaking French, but you sound like a village idiot.' He got red and he started to make strange noises."
"What happened?"
"What happened? I left his office. Perhaps I'm not cut out for the law."
THE FIRST thing Signora Giuliani had done after Alessandro and Rafi had arrived from Bologna, after a week's ride, was to give Rafi a little room that overlooked the garden. When she showed him the bathroom, she had tiptoed in and put her finger to her lips.
"You have to be very quiet," she whispered, "or you'll wake Luciana. She's leaving tomorrow with her classmates for an end-of-the-year trip to Naples. She'll be gone by the time you get up."
"Who's Luciana?"
"My younger sister," Alessandro answered.
"You never mentioned her."
Alessandro shrugged.
Signora Giuliani carefully and silently closed the latch on the door that led to Lucianas room, and began to let the water into a huge bathtub that stood on Egyptian legs. "There's plenty of hot water now," she said.
Alone in the bathroom, Rafi quietly removed his dirty clothes and lowered himself into the voluminous tub. After submerging himself, he broke the surface with a splash, but after that he took pains to be quiet. When he was finished, just before he turned off the light and allowed the bathtub to sing to itself as it emptied in the dark, he noticed a cup on a shelf. Taped around it was a piece of paper with a note in a feminine hand that said, "For an article of clothing." The cup was half full of small coins. The handwriting was neither free enough of the rules of penmanship to have been that of an adult nor sufficiently innocent to have been that of a child.
He slept deeply, and when he awakened the next morning Luciana was halfway to Naples. For several days at dinner he sat in her place. The attorney Giuliani often referred to his daughter as Lu-cianella. Rafi asked nothing about her. She was a schoolgirl, a child, but every night when he came home from his rounds of the palaces and ministries he approached the little cup with the hand-lettered sign, and carefully studied the writing.
THE ASSISTANT to the minister of justice was a better man to meet than the minister himself, the attorney Giuliani had told him, because the assistant did the hiring.
"Don't tell Giuliani," Lias father told Rafi, "but see the minister first. If he likes you he'll walk you into the office of the subordinate to be confirmed and processed—depending."
"Depending on what?"
"On the specific situation at that moment in the Turkish beehive that we call the Ministry of Justice. The minister's subordinates may control his every move. If he's a fool, he'll rely upon them too much and too often, and they'll usurp his power until, should he be lucky, they'll squander it in fighting among themselves."
"What is the situation at the Ministry of Justice?"
"I don't know."
"The attorney is a friend of the assistant."
"Then you've got to decide the approach. If you wish, I can get you an appointment with the minister directly. Just tell me. My wife says that the brother of his mistress is married to a Veneziana. It's up to you."
The night Luciana returned from Naples, Rafi, Alessandro, Lia, and Lias brother had gone to hear an orchestra from Budapest. Rafi was astounded not to be able to hear the music over a dozen furiously whispered debates on the diplomacy of Austria-Hungary, for in Venice the music was drowned out by talk of sex and money.
In the debate that followed, in a restaurant in Trastevere, Rafi was, like most lawyers who consider politics, uninteresting. Alessandro had contrary and volatile opinions and did a good job of justifying them even when they were totally absurd. He continued to read diplomacy and to devour the several newspapers that arrived with the dawn. He combined his burgeoning knowledge with logic, enthusiasm, and rhetoric, and he made a little go a long way.
They had returned at midnight, and Rafi had noticed that Lucianas cup was gone, and the latch in a different position. The next morning he had an appointment with an official who, as the cocks were crowing in the gardens on the hill in back of his ministry, would speak expansively about the demands he made of his staff. Before setting out to meet him, Rafi had pulled on his pants and shoes, and, with his suspenders hanging down, shirtless, gone to shave. When one half of his face had emerged from the drifts and the other was still covered, the door to Lucianas room opened. With his hand still on the razor, and the razor about to glide from the top of his cheek downward, he turned.
Having forgotten that someone was staying in the house, Luciana had come into her bathroom after awakening, and she stood before him, in a short nightgown, absolutely immobile and hardly breathing. He was almost as startled as she, not by her entrance but, rather, by her beguiling appearance. She was taller than her brother, with a shock of golden hair that had yet to be combed that day. Her legs and arms were so long and slender that it was hard to draw conclusions about her age, just as it had been hard to deduce anything from her handwriting save contradictions that, if he had been of a mind to read them, would have told him her age exactly.
She was too tall to be a child. Twice as high as Lia Bellati, it seemed, she already had authority, and she would grow no more. On the other hand, she was too slight to be a woman. The delicacy of her limbs testified that they had not existed long enough for much to gravitate to them.
Rafi knew little about women, but he was a good observer. Because she focused her eyes at him in a way that exaggerated her look of surprise and made her seem like someone who has never seen another human being, he knew immediately that she wore glasses. He guessed that she kept them off whenever she could, for reasons of vanity, and although he didn't know exactly why, he liked that.
She and her classmates had done a lot of swimming off Capri, and because of this she was sunburned and her hair wildly blond. The brevity of the nightgown gave Rafi a pleasant shock, but he couldn't take his eyes off her face.
For her part, she seemed as fragile as a reed, frozen in place in the presence of the huge man who was stripped to the waist and bent over her washbasin. The table in which the sink was set came up to the middle of his thighs, and the top of the mirror showed his shoulders and throat. To shave, he had to lean down. Had he been fully dressed, his black hair and sparkling Kirghiz eyes would have stopped her heart, but to see in addition to this the lean frame that years of heavy work had coaxed and changed into something that looked as solid and powerful as a marble statue, was for her an embarrassing pleasure. Only after several minutes had passed, as the steam billowed from the tap, had she said, "Oh, I guess I'd better back up." The memory of this would keep Rafi awake for many hours in the nights thereafter.
At dinner she had been unable to look at him except in quick glances. She was in her schoolgirl's uniform, and she stumbled over her words and left the table as soon as she could. He was a model of composure.
He could have gone back to Venice, but he stayed.
ALESSANDRO HEARD a ringing in his ears as he and Rafi alighted from their train onto a flinty rail bed near the station at Barrenmatt. The air at two thousand meters was so thin and tranquil that it seemed to be only a gloss of the light. Sound carried differently, and was not so urgent. The body's forced economy of movement translated
into a gift of grace, and the August sunshine was less warm than clear. They took their packs from the doorway of the single baggage car, piled them beside the track, and sat down on their rolled-up tent.
At noon, hardly a cloud was in the sky. To the left, on an outcropping, was the village. Of its five buildings, including the station, the largest was the hotel, which had four storeys and an attic. Every window in the town was framed by shutters and by flower boxes in which were unrelieved ranks of geraniums. The only street led up the hill and doubled back toward the station, and the rest of Barrenmatt was rock, track, building, road, or field. The fields were empty now because the cows had migrated to a higher altitude, where they nervously and continually rang their tin or copper bells. Such bells are heard mainly from afar, and the habit is strong, so they sound far away even when they are close.
The train pulled a few meters down the track and stopped so some women with parasols could delicately descend the outboard steps. The space between these women and the two young men and their climbing equipment was the distance between the freight and passenger terminals, but it might as well have been an ocean. The train itself was a mountain train, its engine a muscular little plug of cylinders and rods. It had pulled only two cars, each smaller than a normal railway carriage, each made of aromatic wood that creaked at every bend in the tracks. The windows in the passenger car were actually made of crystal, which was heavy, clear, and thick, with a barely perceptible tinge of purple, and the rock faces that could be seen through it came out sharp and in bright detail. Steam shot lazily to the ground and then disappeared near the feet of a railroad worker tightening bolts as the ladies descended from his beautifully made toy.
Had these things been in Rome they would have been surrounded by other such things, their attributes bled into chaotic illusion. In Rome they would have seemed larger, but at two thousand meters in the open air they were as inconsequential as the cows in the upper pastures, rendered invisible by the distance. Both the train and the little houses were compressed by standing alone in the midst of vast openness. Their colors seemed intense and friendly, their masses solid and dense. Like many man-made objects that originate in the mountains, they seemed to have been perfectly realized within well defined limits. The beauty of the Swiss watch lay in its precision, and its precision had sprung from modesty. It did not have to be an orrery or a tower clock any more than a yodeler has to sing in symphonies, and this friendliness to restriction had left the designers within easy reach of perfection.