by Mark Helprin
He began to fall, but as he did he caught the bent tree with his fingertips, and soon thereafter he, too, was sitting on the ledge.
IN TEN days the pupil had begun to outdistance the teacher and was leading the most difficult and precipitous pitches, the ones that had to be climbed artificially because they offered not a single hold. These were the walls upon which climbers developed their immense strength, driving fifty bolts into the rock in an afternoon.
Five hundred meters in the air, with nothing beneath him, Rafi felt entirely at ease and would peg his way up an impossible hairline crack, never seeming to tire.
They rappelled off many a spire, almost flying, spending a whole day's hard climb in one joyous hour. They climbed ice and snow and reached the top of peaks where the light was doubled by reflection. They accomplished several extraordinary glissades, skiing without skis for kilometers and kilometers down couloirs of untouched powder.
Though they ate prodigiously, they lost weight as the altitude and exercise whittled them down. They were asleep before dark and up before the light. Just as the sun was beginning to set and they had come in from a climb, they would wash, devour a few packets of biscuits, cheese, and dried meat, and surrender to oblivion. They slept without dreams, and jumped up every morning, when the moon was sinking into Switzerland, full of energy, stronger than they had ever been, able to run up the steep meadows in the half light and push themselves eagerly into the vertical world where, by midday, hawks glided in dizzying circles below them.
As Rafi grew more competent, his passion for climbing and Alessandro's diverged. He was interested in passing beyond his limits, in doing what neither he nor anyone else had done, and because the limit was, by definition, danger itself, he was always courting risk.
He enjoyed standing at the very edge of a cliff, sometimes with only his heels on the rock, like a mountain guide impressing clients, or staring into an abyss so profound that, had he fallen, Alessandro would not, without a telescope, have been able to have seen where he had come to rest, and would not, without a microscope, have been able to have found him where he had fallen. They dropped boulders from these heights, and many seconds later, if they were looking in the right place, they would see a soundless puff of smoke.
Rafi said that the iron he pounded into the rock, and the ropes that were lithe and beautiful as they flew from a rappel point, were far better than indexes and citations, and Alessandro understood, for he knew that the beauty of climbing is that at times the failure of things to go exactly right subjects even ordinary men to saintly tests that elevate them far beyond what they have expected, and that a climber's return to camp can sometimes be like the footless gliding of the angels who cross the pits of hell.
Rafi was suited perfectly to the mountains, for when he was tested and worn down to practically nothing, his soul was unencumbered, and it rose, drawing him closer to where he wanted to be. He cared little for safety, and noticed less and less the small things that were for Alessandro the most important reasons for climbing. Alessandro loved the smell of the plants that grew on the vertical rock. As they were crushed by a boot or the horizontal motion of the rope they gave off a sweet and resinous perfume that took to ones clothes, and when Alessandro made a fire, the fragrant smoke worked its way into everything he possessed and was with him pleasantly all day. The morning sun glinting off huge lacquered agglomerations of rock far above, where clouds and mist scudded and sparkled, was a divine explosion that rushed through the eyes to capture the heart. And best of all was the thunder.
On their last climb they had set out at three in the morning for the base of a vertical spire a thousand meters high and so creased and battered that there seemed to be a hundred thousand ways to scale it, but as often is the case, the higher they went the more difficult things became, and the last spire was no exception.
Far below the summit the ledges stopped, the cracks narrowed to nothing, and overhangs appeared more frequently while the ways around them became less and less apparent.
At four in the afternoon, exhausted from a full day of artificial climbing, they were a long way from the top. With only a few hours until dark, they decided to rappel down. To descend would take longer than usual, because their belays had been pitons driven into the rock, not trees or boulders. They would have to rappel from the pins they had just driven, so they would have to reset them with care.
Time was running out and the weather was worsening. Had they any doubt about the merits of retreat, it vanished with the gathering clouds. They made their decision as they both stood in étriers clipped into a heavy piton. They were tied onto it by their waists, and they rested by leaning out over seven hundred meters of empty air.
They were very careful in setting up the rappel. To unclip the wrong carabiner would mean falling silently to one's death. Their lives depended upon the ropes, the carabiners, and the heavy piton that Rafi had driven into the cliff. He had taken five minutes to hammer it in, and as he worked his sweat had vanished in the brightening wind.
Laden with iron that he had collected on the way up, as second, Alessandro was about to descend to set the next piton, when the wind pushed a huge volume of black cloud over the top of the spire and shrieked through the empty spaces as the sky was about to break.
The dark clouds came tumbling at the two climbers, slowly unfurling and rolling over, pushing ahead of them a mass of agitated and conflicting winds so violent that they pressed back Rail's beard and made him look like a goat. In one gust of wind they were hit with rain, snow, and hail, one rapidly following the other, and then dried by cold air blasting through their clothes until everything they wore ballooned out from them as if to tear away.
They struggled into oilskins as the first lightning bolt snaked down the precipice and raised their hair on end. Everything went white and they were thrown against the rock like fishing floats. Instant thunder rattled their skulls and reverberated out toward other mountain ranges for a minute or more. Even as it ceased, their ears were ringing and they could not see.
When their vision returned they saw dark clouds rising into the same sort of obliging curves in the pine trees on the ledges. The high front rushed west and made a wonderful, terrifying, obedient dip right above the two climbers as it crested and abandoned the spire, like a snake that takes a wall.
It left an army of thunderbolt throwers to castigate the mountains for slowing it down, but the punishment was beautiful. Eyes opened wide, breathing deeply, shaken by concussions raging about them, Alessandro and Rafi dangled in the air, stupefied. The thunder was so deep, the lightning so bright, and the wind so strong that they wondered why they were surviving. Perhaps they were too small for the explosions that passed over them. Had they been as big as mountains they might have felt pain, but they were immune. Even when the sharp flashes were so close and common that it was as if Rafi and Alessandro were dangling at the mouth of a cannon firing point-blank, they were untouched.
AT THE beginning of winter, Alessandro published an essay arguing against the war with Turkey that had begun in October of 1911. Though he had spoken of the subject many times, in the silence of his room he added the kind of powerful phrasing that would not have occurred to him as he spoke, because its origins were in the collaboration of hand and pen.
The essay saw light in a newspaper in Rome after Alessandro had been forced to rewrite it twenty times, depriving it of at least half its original power. He was deluged with letters, some of which were from monarchists, Garibaldini, and military officers who questioned his patriotism. A few were from simple people who wrote to express their disapproval or their agreement. Most, however, were from workers within an invisible political web entirely of their own making, something not quite real that they hoped to bring suddenly to life. They wanted to use Alessandro for their own purposes, advancing the goal of ending the war with Turkey as merely a first step. In fact, they didn't care about war, Turkey, or much of anything else, for they had hidden agenda that overrode every
thing.
Three-quarters of these people made Orfeo Quatta seem by comparison a paragon of stability. They hated Italy, the military, the government, capitalism, horses, swords, and encyclopedias. They hated encyclopedias because they perceived conspiracies within them, conspiracies that were not only different from their own, but subversive. They disliked capitalism and swords: that was not surprising, but Alessandro could not understand why they hated horses.
Rigorously trained in several philosophical schools, he had realized early in his university career that, however admirable any one of them, none was sufficient to explain life in the world. In fact, even when combined, they were miserably inadequate. He had no patience with Marxism, Julianism, socialism, and the other economic faiths that endeavored not merely to explain everything but to reorder and replace that which had come into being in spite of a thousand philosophies, ten thousand theories, and uncountable millennia of nature, necessity, and chance.
He hated neither Italy, swords, horses, nor encyclopedias, and he didn't see the war in Libya as the logical result of but, rather, as a deviation from the way things were, and yet he received entreaties from strange Italians infatuated with the Turkish Empire. Even some Romans, who lived nearby, moved in a dream world, in crowded tasseled rooms of soft crushed velvet walls and Moorish decoration. Having taught themselves once to look through Islamic eyes, they could not return to the West, and were like young captives, deep in the enemy's country, who must rearrange their souls.
On a cold day in January when millions of swallows had taken possession of the trees along the Tiber and flown in mad black clouds that blocked the sky, Alessandro had watched from his father's office as thousands of people had passed through the winding streets below on their way to the Campidoglio. Holding banners strung between poles, they chanted in and out of unison, demanding the end of the war and protesting the way the war was going. Their strongest ally was the stalemate in the Libyan desert, where cholera and typhoid were leveling the Italian expeditionary force.
The protesters filled the rain-slicked streets as if they were the cobblestones. Apart from what they were saying, the chanting itself brought Alessandro to a high peak of excitement, and he wanted to join them.
"Go ahead," his father said, not looking up from his desk. "It can't hurt. It might even help."
As Alessandro started for the door, his father added, "Let me caution you, however."
"Against the swords of the carabinieri?"
"I know that you're quick enough to stay out of their way, and that you'll march silently and skeptically at the edge of the crowd."
"Then, what?"
"You imagine that you will make a speech."
"No I don't."
"Yes you do. I can see it in you. At the Campidoglio you'll step forward and, suddenly, Cicero. But Alessandro, they won't let you, and even if they did, you would be speaking to a thousand different conceptions. Everyone has a self-made pass for travel through the terror and sadness of the world, and because, in the end, nothing is sufficient, everyone wants to share his own method, hoping for strength in numbers.
"When I was a child, my father told me the story of a troop in Napoleon's army in Russia. They were ten thousand men, and they could not imagine that with their mass they could succumb to something as prosaic as the cold. Ten thousand souls are, after all, a city, and cities don't freeze to death. They were too busy, they were too many, they felt safe in each other's company—but they did freeze to death, because they were lost in the snow.
"Mortality is like the cold. It cannot be altered by human conceit or solidarity, and at the end you will be on your knees, in shock and amazement, and then you'll have only one sword, one shield, one great thing to carry you through."
Alessandro waited to hear what that was, but his father would not say. "If you don't discover it yourself, it will be nothing more than an exhortation from me."
A fight erupted in the crowd below. Anarchists were using the poles of their black banners to flail the crowd, and mounted carabinieri were sidling upon their horses to herd them into a maze of meandering side streets.
"You see," the attorney Giuliani said, "not only is there no comfort in unanimity, but they cannot even achieve it."
"I could unify them."
"That's silly, Alessandro. If they supported you, or even listened, it would be because you flattened yourself and your ideas until everything that once was steep and noble was gone."
"What if I speak my mind, forcibly, and carry them along with me?
"That would make you a demagogue, a windbag. Why do you think great leaders and great orations are coincident with wars, revolutions, and the founding or ending of governments and states? Common interests then are so clear that speeches are effortlessly drawn, but at present neither the facts nor the consequences are sufficiently clear to make oratory legitimate. This is the kind of war that will wind on and make fools of its partisans and opponents both."
The crowd was thinning. "And one thing more," the attorney said, still at work at his desk, scratching out some legal document as he spoke, confident that the crowd's diminishing solidarity had made it less attractive to his son.
"You know how the sheep are driven through Rome in the fall and spring? They go at uniform speed, they have their shepherds and their bell-wethers, and they bleat for change, but all they do is go back and forth from one pasture to another, and everything stays the same.
"You have much more to offer than wool and lamb chops. Don't go into crowds unless you can lead them, and don't try to lead them until they need you."
"What am I supposed to do in the meantime?"
The attorney looked up. "Isn't there enough in the world to occupy you?"
"Yes, certainly, but I mean to bring about a withdrawal from Libya."
"Write another essay."
"I've already said what I had to say."
"If you think you've said everything you have to say," his father told him, "talk to the opposition."
AT FIRST Lia thought she had vanquished Alessandro, as if action were vindication, as if the declaration of war were proof of her argument, or, rather, her brother's argument, that a war was necessary. Alessandro, however, did not concede his points merely because some officials had judged wrongly. In the first round neither he nor Lia had to contend with anything unpleasant. With the fighting not started, nothing was proved and everything in a state of uncertainty. Elio, Lias brother, had written from the north of Italy, where he was stationed with a cavalry detachment, that it seemed the war would be won with a quick bombardment and he would not see Africa.
The more Alessandro argued with Lia the more he was drawn to her. As they debated, he forgot about what he was saying and grew dizzy with many variations of desire—some base, some ordinary, and some ethereal. At times, even when they were not alone, he would grasp Lias hand in making a point, and all their contention would vanish. Sometimes they teased, and sometimes they were serious—harrying one another with history, reason, and statistics, but as the war was not yet bitter, neither were they, and in October, after the declaration and after their arguments had spawned cool fire, they began to kiss.
They had made forty circuits of the garden, looking up to see the swallows and sparrows maneuvering in the cool gray clouds. In the dusk the lights of their houses were comforting and serenely yellow. At the gate, Lia said, "I'm sorry, Alessandro, that we disagree."
Covered by darkness and sheltered by distance and the wall, he pulled her toward him and they touched with no more pressure than would have been appropriate at an embassy dance, but then he lowered his left hand along her velvet cape, to the small of her back, and held tight. She returned the embrace, and for the first time they felt one another from top to toe, hard enough so that they could feel the blood rushing. He kissed her mouth, her perfume rose, her breasts swelled against him, and for half an hour they leaned against the wall. When they parted, they were hot, numb, and pleasantly short of breath. Politics
and war seemed easy to forget.
In November the fields were dry and empty. It was easy, just a short distance from the Aventino, to find a pine grove with a soft floor, or a place where the hay was down. Though the horses would have given warning had a peasant or a hunter happened by, no one even came close to seeing the exceptional scenes they played out in the trees and against sheaves of whitened hay.
But the little war refused to leave them alone. Elio had been moved to Venice, where he and his brigade of cavalry were secretly taken aboard ship at dawn. His family had not known that he had been in Libya, until the tenth of December, after he had been there nearly a month.
Just thirty days there taught him that, rather than his own abilities, it was chance that kept him alive. He sounded as if he were writing from prison knowing that his jailer would read the letter—and yet he was full of hope.
They wondered what he had seen, and they began to find out. The papers revealed constantly revised predictions of victory, calls for volunteers, the existence of a ship of the Knights of Malta that took on hundreds of cholera victims and rushed back to Naples, staying only a day to resupply, the black-bordered death announcements, and the panicked rumors from those in power.
The Italian troops were hugging the coast, barely able to cope with the disease that coursed through their ranks. They had underestimated the enemy's strength, assuming that Libyans would side with Italy against their Turkish overlords, but the Libyans took to the desert, and did not fight like gentlemen. When an Italian detachment was overrun, the soldiers could expect to die as they were slowly dismembered. Winter closed in, and few in Rome knew how difficult it was.
RAFI'S CONVERSATIONS with Luciana had always been cautious and polite. Though sometimes she laughed as he told her of his efforts to find a place in ministries swollen with bureaucrats, her laughter had ended sadly, and in the fraction of a second between these states they would search one another with their eyes. Neither of them knew the other was aware, but, once, when she had come to answer the front door, their eyes had locked in surprise, and from that moment they had known.