by Mark Helprin
As he took the steps one by one, Alessandro prayed with all the gravity and passion that were in him for that which he had once merely taken for granted.
WHEN LUCIANA returned home at a quarter to eleven she opened the front door, stepped inside, and threw the bolt. Then she walked in the dark until she came to the wall by the stairs, where she searched for the light switch. As soon as the light went on, she stood for a moment to listen, and looked about apprehensively, lifting her eyes to the top of the stairs.
Though the house was cold and empty, Alessandro had been sitting in the living room for five hours. He was warm in his sheepskin clothing, and he had remained in the darkness, hardly moving, staring at the faint shadows on the ceiling. He had called out and gone into every room. It was as he had remembered it, but no one was in, and he had no way of knowing where they had gone.
The fires were out and the ashes cold. No fresh food was in the kitchen. Several cartons of mail were on his bed, including a packet of letters that he had sent from the Bell Tower. Resting on this was a letter from an adjutant's office in Verona. Famiglia Giuliani: Alessandro Giuliani, $ Batt. Fant. Arresto, 19th River Guard, is detached for special service and out of communication until later notice. Please have patience for the allotted time.
Alessandro imagined that everyone was out for dinner and would arrive later in a carriage. His father would take a long time to get out, and then they would come up the walk. Even if the lights of the house did not burst on simultaneously, the fires ignite, and the rooms suddenly smell like fresh flowers, it did not matter, if only they returned.
Perhaps his mother had been desperately ill but had not died after all. He would never believe any report until or unless it came directly from his father or Luciana.
When he entered his parents' room he felt as if he were a child again, driven there by a thunderstorm or the sound of a squirrel scampering across the roof, and he remembered when he lay between his father and mother, taunting ghosts and lightning.
Faint illumination came from the windows facing the city. The bed was curiously stiff and unused, with summer linen, but the paintings had not moved a millimeter and the furniture was positioned exactly where he had last seen it. He held his breath when he opened the clothes cupboards. They were full of familiar bathrobes, suits, dresses, and slippers. His mother's perfume was still strong on her clothes, and his father's jackets had their customary aroma of pipe tobacco.
He approached his father's long desk, which was in order except for one thing, the picture of Alessandro's mother as a young woman. The photograph of a smiling girl at age seventeen, in 1885, was centered on the blotter. In starlight alone, he could not recognize her face, but he could make out the pattern of the background against the subject. Its shape was familiar, like a country on a map. Still, a photograph propped up in the middle of a desk was not the kind of confirmation that would make him lose hope.
As he left the room for the upstairs hall, he stopped short. His head sank, and he turned around. When he reached back for the light switch he had difficulty finding it. Then he found it and the room became so bright that for a second he was not able to look up. His eyes went everywhere but to the desk. He swept them over all the familiar things—over the paintings, across the windows, to the bed, the books—but he had seen from the corner of his eyes exactly what he feared to see, and then he had no reason not to look anymore. The photograph of the smiling young girl was in a new frame. The frame was black.
As Luciana's eyes adjusted to the brightness her brother called to her but she didn't hear. "Luciana," he said, in a subdued voice, so as not to startle her.
She threw her arms in front of her chest. Tightening her fist, she stepped back.
"Rafi?" she asked.
"I'm sorry," Alessandro said, stepping into the light.
SATURDAY MORNINGS on the Gianicolo were as quiet as if time had stopped. Carriages might not pass for an hour or more, and you might not hear boots on the pavement for a day. If it were wet you would be aware not only of the raindrops but of the slower counterpoint of water falling from eaves and the undersides of iron rails after it had clung in rows of heavy teardrops that had marched to the point where they had to let go. And when it was sunny and dry you could smell the pine needles as the sun struck the soft ground underneath symmetrical rows of trees.
Alessandro lay for as long as he could in his own bed. After he opened his eyes and saw the marvelous eastern light on the ceiling and walls of his room, he suffered the kind illusion that nothing had changed. On this cool October day in Rome he thought of riding to the sea, of wandering on horseback through fields and past bonfires of olive branches that had been cut during the harvest, but as the light grew stronger, he remembered.
It was insanely luxurious to have a room in which to sleep in private, to have space and silence, and to be covered in a warm navy-blue silk robe. The paintings and statuary in the hallway, the cool gray light that came from the glass roof above the stairwell, and the very mass of the house, were intensely enjoyable. He ran his hands over the long and ancient cherry-wood desk that was placed against one wall of his room. Among the many things he had not seen in two years was wood with a finish. He thought it strange that, with his father gravely ill in a nearby hospital, his mother dead (Luciana had been astonished that after a year Alessandro had had to ask if it were true), and almost certain death facing him, he could take pleasure from the feel of a smooth desktop or the sound of brass hardware. But why not? When Gianfranco di Rienzi thought he was going to be shot in Venice the next day he concentrated upon the moon, the stars, and the bonfires until he seemed almost to float in the light. No matter that it was madness. Madness was appropriate at the end.
Alessandro knocked on Luciana's door.
"Come in," she said.
Her room was still blue, the furniture coverings still white with blue dots. On the bookcases were rows of schoolbooks, Japanese dolls, and bottles of perfume. "What time is it?" he asked. "I don't have a watch anymore. I never know what time it is."
"It's ten to nine," she said, after leaning to the side of her bed to peer at a delicate woman's watch on her night table.
"How can you tell with a watch that small? You can hardly see the face."
She propped herself up on the pillows. The night before, she had been tired and drawn, with shadows under her eyes and hardly any color in her cheeks. Alessandro had been moved by her appearance, for she was no longer a girl, and she had looked troubled.
She was youthful enough, however, to have recovered her beauty after one nights sleep. Now her cheeks were rosy, her eyes their customary bright blue, and her long blond hair, splayed across the linen, was shining from every shaft.
"You've gained weight," he said.
"I filled out after Mama died, it's true."
Her face, shoulders, and arms seemed entirely different. "You've become very beautiful."
"Oh," she said, as if to say that it didn't matter, because everything was going to waste.
To comfort her, he went into detail. "Your arms aren't skinny anymore," he said. "You have long arms, and they used to make you look like a grasshopper. And your shoulders ... They have just enough roundedness and just, precisely, enough angularity..." His voice fell off short when he realized that her arms and shoulder, but for the slight straps of her nightgown, were bare, and that he had overstepped a line that had never before existed.
She, however, for want of company or want of affection, was frighteningly direct. "And here," she said, pressing her breasts to her in a modest gesture, like that of a new mother who is satisfied with nursing. "Suddenly, I'm full here."
"It's true," Alessandro agreed, sharing in her pride enough to banish his apprehension. "Luciana, I came in here to tell you something. Sooner or later, unless I go to America, they're going to catch me. I haven't decided what to do, but I'm not going anywhere until Papa gets well."
"How will you evade them?"
"I have strateg
ies. For one, I'm going to dress like a banker—"
"You never did before," she interrupted.
"Deserters try not to be noticed. They look down and attempt to pass unseen. My best chance lies in doing exactly the opposite. The walk to the hospital is short and we can go through the passage in the wall so they won't see us going in or out of the house. If they come to the house, I'll hide. Only we know about the recess behind the armoire in the guest room."
Luciana pulled off the covers and left the bed. Although she did so matter-of-factly, and immediately pulled on a robe, he saw virtually every part of her as her nightgown rode up or was pulled taut against her. He was disconcerted, especially because she seemed to be aware of her effect on him. "I'll be ready at ten of ten," he said. "I want to be there when they open the doors. He's all right, isn't he?"
"This week," Luciana said, "the doctors have been saying that he's not going to die."
THEY LEFT the garden through a passage in the Aurelian Wall. After they emerged among the tall twisted pines of the Viale della Mura, a passerby would have thought that they had come from the Porta San Pancrazio, for the wall appeared unbreachable. The police might watch the entrance to the house for a decade and never imagine that Alessandro could come and go on a street in what was almost another part of the city.
The Viale della Mura was empty all the way to the Villa Sciarra, where they passed housewives on their way to market, and the vanguard of the old men who came every day to occupy the domino tables. Alessandro was clean-shaven and dressed in his best suit. His hair had grown to civilian length during the weeks in the mountains, and that morning he had washed it with shampoo, something that in the army simply did not exist. He was sunburned, he walked with a slight limp so that people would think he had been wounded and taken out of action, and he had pinned four medals over his breast pocket. These were not the bread-and- butter kind of decoration that soldiers of the line accumulate for serving in an active unit over time, and he had sent them home from the Bell Tower. Most deserters either would not have such decorations or would not think to wear them around the Villa Sciarra on a Saturday.
"I go every morning," Luciana informed him for the second or third time, "and stay from ten or ten-thirty through lunch. Then I come back at five and stay until ten or eleven.
"Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he sits up and seems as healthy as he ever was. We play chess, I read to him, and often we say nothing. We stare out the window."
"Then why is he there?"
"He can have terrible pain. We were in the midst of dinner a few days ago—it was quite pleasant...."
"They bring two dinners?"
"If you pay. I eat at a little table next to the window. Suddenly Papa jumped forward as if someone had stuck a knife into him. All the dishes and his full wine glass overturned first onto the bed and then the floor. The sisters heard it and ran in to give him an injection. They made me leave. He's slept for most of the time since, but last night he stayed awake long enough for me to read to him."
"It's his heart?"
"Yes, his heart. They say he needs rest in a hospital."
"How long must he remain?"
Luciana threw up her arms just slightly. The barely perceptible breeze rippled her dress like the waters of a small lake. "They don't know."
"What have you been reading to him?"
"The newspapers. He's interested solely in the war news. He's looking for you. He has me read every report of every action and every unit. Sometimes he's very confused, and he thinks he's found you.
"How?"
"I don't know what his reasons are, but when he feels that you're there, hidden among the numbers and the names, he makes me read it over and over again."
As they walked through the Villa Sciarra, which, though private, was open to the public for much of the day, Luciana took her brother's arm.
He was overwhelmed by sensations so keen and clear that he was able to view with equanimity even the prospect of his own death, for the intense satisfaction he now found in nearly all things seemed to be the compression of many years.
Upon awakening that morning he had moved his arm across the covers. The sound of the linen, barely audible, was a great thing. The feel of gravity, too, was a surprising pleasure, as was the fact that he could extend his arm and bring it back, and that its strength was intact and served by the complicated apparatus of muscles, joints, ligaments, tendons, and bone compounded within his arm like a block and tackle used to raise a plinth.
They stopped for a moment in an open clearing paved with smooth stones. Children were playing at the edges, little boys kicking a soccer ball, and girls trying to propel hoops over stones, which was extremely hard to do.
Luciana was standing next to him, close enough so that now and then he felt her against his thigh through the cloth of his suit and the silk of her dress, which was a restrained but intense blue, with little snow-white boxes in a tight pattern. Her hair was shining in the indirect morning light, as were her sapphire-blue eyes. Because she was his sister, he assumed that he would take only the same kind of delight in her beauty that he had in all the other exquisite details that now loomed so large. The sound of the fountain directly opposite them across the square might have held him for hours. The water was black, cold, and it came from between perpetually wet black stones. Metal-colored goldfish were suspended within it just above the moss-covered bottom of the pool. It was now about to fall much farther and run to join streams that made their way through the city, almost unnoticed, to the Tiber. Each leaf on the path, in orange or brown, wet or dry, seemed to attract Alessandros eye. He could feel the moisture in the air around plants in the walls that had held more rainwater than those on the flat ground, and now were giving it up in soft and invisible clouds that made almost imperceptibly cool currents on the wind.
"One moment, Luciana," Alessandro said, still holding her arm. "I want to look at the sky."
"Why?" she asked, thinking that, when he said it, he sounded remarkably like their father.
He looked at her to answer, sweeping his eyes across her eyes and then taking in all of the rest of her before he responded with a smile. When he looked up, she, too, bent her neck and narrowed her eyes to adjust to the brighter light from above.
It seemed as if they were staring at an airplane or a balloon, and one of the mothers in the Villa Sciarra shielded her eyes with her hand, almost in a salute, and scanned the sky.
Unlike the brittle blue of the Tyrrhenian that colored it from afar, the sky was pale and soft. Low clouds, slightly dirty, slightly pink, and slightly gold, scudded by on the sea wind with great speed and with hardly a sound.
THE MONUMENTAL hallways of the Hospital of San Martino were filled with soldiers in silent recuperation or soon to die. Every soldier could look up at the light as it tracked across the empty heights of the long galleries in a bright clockwork, streaming through the windows in luminous beams that struck the agitated dust. At the beginning and end of each double row of iron beds was a large table with an enormous arrangement of flowers upon it. Some visitors had already arrived, and they stood near the beds of their sons.
Alessandro and Luciana climbed a broad marble staircase from landing to landing and floor to floor. "Did he have to climb these stairs?" Alessandro asked.
"They carried him on a stretcher," Luciana answered. "They kept it perfectly level as they went up. The man who led bent down as far as he could, and the man who followed lifted his arms in the air as they turned at the landings. Papa seemed embarrassed."
"At one time he could have run these stairs without taking a breath."
"I won't ever be ashamed of being weak," Luciana said with youthful fire.
"Nor will I," her brother answered.
The attorney Giuliani's room was on the top floor in a corner, facing south and east. Four tall windows gave out on the city and the mountains over the treetops in the Villa Sciarra. The door was open, and Alessandro saw his father through a small
hallway. The attorney Giuliani was propped up in an iron bed, a tiny figure in a cloud of glacially white sheets and pillows. A crimson blanket was neatly pulled up under an apron of sheets. Dozens of yellow roses filled two vases just beyond his bed, and he stared at them as they were struck by the morning light.
Alessandro was gripped with a momentary terror when he saw how frail his father had become in the two years they had been apart. Though the old man's hair was the same length, it seemed much longer in contrast to his emaciated face and neck. His legs, too, even under the covers, looked emaciated, like sticks, their mass atrophied.
His father now had a beard, an elegant, correct, Roman beard that was white, or at best silver with some dark gray.
Luciana walked straight into the room, approached the bed, and kissed her father. She knew that Alessandro had stopped at the door, and she did nothing to direct her father's attention to him.
"A beautiful dress," her father said in a subdued voice. "And a beautiful color." His hands moved across the covers in almost au tomatic seeking, the fingers contracting and relaxing, contracting and relaxing, as if they had already embarked on an independent journey.
"Have I seen that dress before?" he asked.
"Of course," Luciana answered defensively, "many times."
"I don't remember it."
"I wore it at the opera."
"What opera?"
"When we went with the judge from Pisa, and his wife, and his ugly son."
"He was a nice boy," the attorney Giuliani said.
"Not to me. He was rude and nasty."
"Because he was hurt."
"Hurt?"
"Yes."
"Who hurt him?" Luciana asked in a flash of temper.
"You did."