by Mark Helprin
Though Alessandro found it nearly impossible to believe that habit, custom, and civilization could be so strong as to compel the ten men below to walk to their deaths, he knew that when civilization, habit, and custom do not exist, executions proceed apace, even if with less formality and less warning.
The priests wore black cassocks dripping with beads that some of the prisoners tried to clutch. They circulated among the men who were going to die, and comforted them as best they could. By the time they withdrew from the line of fire most of the men were staring at the clouds and sky, over which the dawn light was vaulting and could not be turned back.
Half the firing squad knelt down. An officer drew his sword and lifted it. Orders were shouted, but Alessandro was in a fog and could not hear them. The soldiers raised their rifles in unison. As they worked the bolts to place rounds in the chambers the sound echoed from wall to wall. Alessandro had always liked that noise. It had signified protection and preparedness. Even when it had drifted up en masse to the Bell Tower as a thousand Austrian soldiers made ready to attack, it had been comforting and it had dispelled his fear, but now it was the sound of despair.
The soldiers aimed. They were standing far enough away so that it was unlikely that they would place the bullets directly in the hearts of the men facing them, as they were supposed to do—as if they could know exactly where the hearts of these men lay.
"Now it comes!" Ludovico cried out.
The officer lowered his sword.
AFTER ALESSANDRO had witnessed a number of dawn executions he had more detail than he wanted. When the prisoners were led into the courtyard, the sun was touching only the top of the west wall. By the time they had marched along the north wall to the stakes, it had lit the tops of the stakes themselves. And when the priests had left those who were about to die to their last moments, the sun was tracking toward the firing squad and taking up the cream-colored dust in its powerful beam. It looked as if the firing squad were shooting at the advancing light, to keep from their eyes what the prisoners, who were blinking and squinting, had just seen. When the bodies were unshackled and loaded on the carts, the shirts of the men who did this work were quickly blackened with blood.
On cloudy days, when the prisoners had no glare in their eyes, the lack of confusion and the even temper of the light seemed to make them suffer even more. Alessandro was repeatedly enraged at the grave-diggers, who loaded the bodies on the carts with little care. From their lack of respect came the movement, far too free, of loose and relaxed limbs, heads that rolled back, and mouths that fell open. He hated it when a mans arm hung down from the charrette, and the fingers, slightly curled, tripped in the dust.
In the afternoons of clear days when the sea was so blue and open that it was too painful to look at, Alessandro stared straight into the glare. He wondered why he hadn't taken any of the many chances he had had to put a little boat on the sea and leave the land behind. Better to die in the waves than between walls. To be pounded to death in the cold surf was preferable to being shot by a row of illiterate marksmen who had not yet picked their teeth clean of the previous night's scungili.
Stella Maris had been built to hold four hundred men. It now held eight hundred, and soon it would bulge with twelve hundred souls. The mere ten executions a day were due not to a dearth of candidates but to the necessity of trying them, and to the difficulty of transporting paperwork and documentation to and from Rome. Firing squads in the north were more efficient; it was said that some used machine guns, and the paperwork was nonexistent, but in Rome the populace could not be affronted. They had been spared proximity to the executions, very few of which were carried out in the city itself, the seat of government, where agitation was unwanted. A guard had told Alessandro and Ludovico that if Stella Maris had been close to the bureaucracy the toll would have been sixty a day. That they were alive was due to slow couriers and the fact that officials did not like to be trapped at the seaside in autumn.
Nonetheless, the loss of ten men a day, after two weeks, meant that, for Stella Maris to keep its business-like air, new prisoners had to arrive. Empty cells, like empty rooms in a resort or empty shelves in a store, spoke of failure. When the Italian armies regrouped in November and held their ground, the prisoners had hoped that the army, relieved of fatal pressure, would show mercy, but at the same time they despaired as they realized that their executioners would not be overthrown. The passage from hope to despair was, as always, more painful than the despair and more powerful than hope itself, but the whipsawing ceased as the days passed and they saw that the Italian victory meant nothing to Stella Maris, that the executions had actually accelerated.
A hundred new men, breathing hard from their walk across the sand, were left in the execution yard for an hour as small groups proceeded to the cells. Though Ludovico did not in principle allow himself pleasure from the misfortunes of others, he could not suppress his amusement at the expressions of the newcomers as they filed in and saw the posts and the pockmarked wall. "You ought to look at their faces, Alessandro," Ludovico said. "I don't know why it's funny, but it is. Their innocence is so offended that you'd think they're all here by mistake. Look at them."
Alessandro studied the new prisoners. Their expressions were familiar and their uniforms black with sweat. It was the army, where everyone looks the same, but in the southwest corner was a soldier who was using a cane and leaning on a friend. Alessandro pressed against the bars. Then someone called to them. They had been given nicknames on the walk by the sea, or perhaps in the holding pens on the road from Rome. The one who limped and the one who helped him were called Bruto and Bello.
As soon as Alessandro heard the names he remembered Guariglia's children, and the beneficial effects of Stella Maris and the sea, which had begun to spare him from pain and prepare him for death, immediately vanished.
ALESSANDRO CALLED out to Guariglia, but not to Fabio, because he thought he would sound like a bird if he said, "Fabio, Guariglia, Fabio, Guariglia," and that the prisoners would mock him.
The two turned their heads immediately, and walked across the execution yard until they stood directly beneath Alessandro's window. Alessandro and Fabio smiled in embarrassment, while Guariglia, who looked as if he were going to fall apart, tried to keep up a solid front.
"It didn't work," he said, his head tilted up, his hands shielding his eyes from the glare. "The catacombs. I got to them, and I was soon lost in the dark. "When the soldiers who were following me turned back, I thought I was safe, but a few hours later a trolley went overhead and the roof caved in. Luckily, the earth was light and dry. I dug my way through and came out a little hole into another tunnel, where I walked for a few minutes, feeling my way in the dark, and then sat down. I was there for an hour or two, spitting out dirt and trying to breathe, when I saw a lantern coming at me. I bolted in the other direction, right into a squad of military police. I knocked a few down when I collided with them, so they beat me with their rifle butts. I thought I was going to die right there, but they wanted to get into the air and the light, so they stopped."
Fabio said, "Three plainclothesmen came into the cafe and sat down. It was only a few days ago. They asked for me. I should have run out the back, but I thought they were going to leave a big tip, so I served them. Can you believe that? They had expresso and the kind of cookies that we called bracket cakes, the ones with the little chocolate ends." He smiled. "They stayed for half an hour, and then arrested me. I was stupid, huh."
"You weren't smart," Alessandro said.
"They had maps of the catacombs," Guariglia told Alessandro. "They sent surveying parties down there and made maps! Only then did they clear the place out. Why don't they fight the fucking war that well?"
"It doesn't matter now."
"They'll shoot us, won't they?" Fabio asked.
"Yes," Alessandro answered from above.
"Against those trees."
Alessandro nodded.
"Oh well," Fabio said.
> Guariglia closed his eyes.
"Alessandro," Fabio began with great earnestness. "Do you think they'll have beautiful women in heaven?"
Guariglia cringed.
"Millions of them, but how do you know you're going there?"
Fabio looked intensely pleased. "My mother told me," he answered. "She said, no matter what, I was going to heaven. She promised."
Alessandro shrugged his shoulders.
"How's the food in this prison?" Fabio asked. "Is it decent?"
"Sometimes we get an egg," Ludovico said, coming to the bars.
"What?"
"Sometimes we get an egg."
"Who's that?" Fabio inquired.
"His name is Ludovico Indian. He doesn't have a last name, because he's a communist."
"Adami, Fabio," Fabio volunteered, almost coquettishly, "and this is Guariglia." Guariglia stared at the ground. "He's a real veteran, but he's not so happy now."
An officer entered the yard and ordered the prisoners to form ranks. They were used to such exercises, and in no time at all they formed orderly rows that, though they had neither weapons nor equipment, made them look formidable.
The officer was yet another student-type, with wire glasses, and he addressed the prisoners. "This is M.P. Four, which you'll call Stella Maris. You can't escape, and anyone who tries will be shot on the spot. You get three eggs and two oranges a week, a haircut and a bath every two weeks. Don't complain about the food, it's as good as in any other prison, or better. We maintain military discipline up to the last, even as you come out here to be shot.
"Everybody asks why, so I'll tell you. It's the only thing you've got. You go through all the motions of life knowing that you're going to die, don't you? You go through them anyway. You shave, you play bocce, you polish the doorknobs, you make a big deal about growing a mustache. Everybody wastes time. The same goes for Stella Maris. You're still in the army, and you'll maintain military discipline until you die. It'll give you satisfaction. On the other hand, if you don't do it, you'll feel like a jellyfish and you'll suffer too much, and at the very end you'll crap in your pants. You're all going to die, soon. So am I. I'm under sentence, too. On the first of January, I'm the first to go. Follow my example. Watch what I do. Stand straight until the bullets enter your chest. It's the only way. Dismissed! Line up at the gate."
"Who the hell is that?" Alessandro asked Ludovico.
"Didn't you get that speech?"
"No, and I didn't get a bath, either. Is he for real?"
"He killed a colonel, because the colonel was shooting his own men. They sentenced him for the first of January. Usually you go the next morning, but they wanted to give him plenty of time to think about it."
"He's beating them."
"So rar."
"What about the bath?"
"Tonight. And a haircut."
"I don't want a haircut."
"Tough. I think they sell the hair, for mattresses."
"That's disgusting."
"No it isn't. Maybe a baby will sleep on the mattress. I like the idea."
THE BARBERS arrived in the afternoon. They were little rotund men, almost all of them bald, who balanced on ammunition boxes and sheared the hair off the heads of the soldiers, who stood for their haircuts after waiting in long lines.
The prisoners were removed from their cells in groups of fifty, in a complicated pattern based on cell blocks and floors. They were assembled in a huge hall where the barbers stood on their ammunition boxes, electric clippers in hand, the cables twisted into a braid that disappeared through a hole knocked into one of the walls.
In groups of five the prisoners were then passed into a terrazzo-floored shower room where miserable common soldiers threw buckets of soapy water at them and sprayed them with cattle-washing hoses borrowed from a slaughterhouse. After they were rinsed they were pushed into a shallow pool of hot water, where they were allowed to stay for a few minutes. When they emerged they filed through long halls and were dried by the wind. At the end of the halls they picked up their damp newly washed uniforms. They called all this the washing machine.
Alessandro and Ludovico were at the ends of two of the lines, and another soldier, Fabio, and Guariglia were at the ends of the others. Everything was rushed, and though they weren't permitted to talk, they did.
They never knew the other soldier's name, and they never saw him again. He was two days from his execution, and very eloquent in his desperation. He was probably a physicist.
"Shit!" he said, which seemed eloquent enough. "Damn! I can't die. I can't die. I have to survive. It'll take forty years to develop my theory. Jesus, I can't die."
"What theory?" Fabio asked.
"Gravity," he said, "I figured out gravity. I know what gravity is, and magnetism, and they're going to shoot me before I can develop the theory. They don't listen. I try to tell them, but they don't listen.
"There's no such thing as gravitational pull. It's a push from an all-pervasive force, but the force moves in straight lines, so it casts a shadow because it can't go around mass. It goes through and it gets absorbed. On the other side, another object is accelerated toward it because of a lack of pressure between the two—because the gravitational rays that would balance it have been weakened or cut off by the intervening mass.
"The perfect radiative body is the perfect absorber of gravitational force, and so everything is pushed to it and doesn't escape, because nothing goes through it to moderate the effect of the pushing on the other side.
"Variations in gravity are simply a function of intervening mass. Mass is a function of molecular resistance to gravity, and what counts is not what everyone takes to be the traditional determinant of mass but, rather, the expanse and force of the atomic and molecular bonds.
"Magnetism is the exclusion of gravitational force from an area between two bodies, so they're pushed together, as if in a vacuum. And electrical energy is the release of the potential from the violation of this condition, convertible at will to the recreation of it.
"It's not particles or waves that fly about the universe but an ether of sorts, and what we perceive experimentally to be movement is the opening and closing of gates. Light is the condition when the gates are open. That's why it doesn't interfere with itself, why the speed of light is uniform no matter what the relative speed of its starting point, why two beams fired head-on do not cancel one another out.
"Christ, I can put it all together. I've thought of a hundred tests for verification. I see light, magnetism, electricity, and gravity in equation, and the theory handily explains inertia. I have a lifetime of experimentation, but I can bring it all together."
He turned to the barber. "You've got to tell them. Please! You've got to tell them. For God's sake, tell them that I can reconcile Newtonian mechanics with the theory of relativity. Tell them to get a physicist here. In an hour I can pass it on to him. Get an officer. Tell an officer."
The barber hadn't the slightest idea what the physicist was talking about. "If you thought of it," he said, "someone else must have thought of it already. Don't worry." He pressed the switch on the clippers, and electricity ran through the cord, to power the magnets that spun the shaft that turned the gears that moved the blades that shaved the physicist in preparation for his execution. A blue spark was playing inside the motor, crackling and making ozone.
The barbers cut close to the scalp and drew blood. They had just started, they were already ankle deep in hair, and the sound of the clippers was like the sound of a mechanized bee hive. "It's getting dark, and they're tired," Alessandro told Guariglia. "After all, they've already had a day's work in Rome."
"I hope my children never find out that before they shot me they shaved my head."
"If your children found out, they'd love you even more."
"I miss them. They won't remember me."
"Yes they will."
"No," Guariglia said. "The memory will fade. They're too young."
Alessandro, Ludovi
co, Fabio, and Guariglia stepped into position by the barbers' ammunition boxes. As the barbers ran the electric shears along their skulls, their hair fell to the floor, matting and entangling with the hair of the soldiers who had preceded them. Then they moved forward, each of them bleeding from small cuts, and removed their clothes.
"How do they get us back our uniforms?" Fabio asked.
"Ever the fashion plate," Alessandro said.
Ludovico told them that a soldier looked at them, judged their size, and reached without looking into one of three bins. "He throws the stuff at you. He doesn't look at it, and he doesn't look at you, since by the time he's going to toss it he's already sizing up the next guy."
"Shut up," said a guard standing off to the side.
"That's tailoring..." Fabio stated.
"Shut up," the guard repeated without passion.
"...fit for the King of Spain."
The shower room smelled of mold and salt, and was lit by one clear bulb that projected the sharp shadows of its filaments onto the walls. The bodies of the five soldiers were pale, but their faces, necks, and forearms were sunburned. With shaven heads and blood dripping down their shoulders they seemed like animals on the way to slaughter. Alessandro could hardly look at Guariglia's stump. It was rounded, covered with fresh scar tissue, and still inflamed.
The hoses stiffened and the men were hit with shockingly cold blasts of sea water. The first volley pushed Guariglia over and made Alessandro sink to his knees. It knocked the breath out of them, opened their cuts, and, though he tried valiantly to get up, it kept Guariglia on the floor.
"Sea water!" someone exclaimed. It was ice cold and it stung. The two soldiers threw buckets of cold soapy water at them, and they struggled as if they were in the surf.