by Mark Helprin
Living-quarters often were cantilevered out from precipices, or hung on heavy chains that had been carried up by teams of mountaineers. Every meter of board, teaspoon of sugar, and drop of kerosene was brought by railroad, truck, mule, and man. Fortifications were hewn into the dolomite by hand, in the cold, in air that caused newly arrived troops to gasp for breath. Though the air may have been thin, the wind was such that outposts were sometimes, literally, blown away. Its effects on marksmanship were ruinous, but that hardly mattered, for the distances were so great that most gunfire was merely to let the enemy know that a height or ridge had been reached or occupied: the war was not so much between the two armies as between each army and the terrain, and the test lay not so much in combating one's opponent as in reaching him.
The eastern face of the Cima Bianca was broken into a mass of cirques and towers, the kind of perspective-and-distance-charged landscape that changed as one moved across it. Cliff faces, rock chimneys, small glaciers, and snowbound plateaux seemed deceptively close or deceptively wide apart, depending upon one's vantage point. Even careful attention to the map did not stop the ground from continual mutation. As soon as you thought you understood the relation of one feature to another, you moved to a new post, and everything looked different. The maps were not entirely accurate, and judgments made by alignment of the map image with actual sightings were apt to be just as wrong as if made by eye alone.
In peacetime the protean characteristics of the mountainscape meant nothing more than that parties of sportsmen lost their way and were forced to extend their food supply to cover a few extra days of walking. Sometimes it meant mountaineers taking the wrong route and losing a member of their party to rockfall or the cold, but these tragedies were few and far between.
In war it was different. Supreme efforts were made to capture one summit or another, and when the battle was over, the soldiers who had pushed forward discovered that they had actually retreated, or that they and their comrades had suffered and died only to lay claim to useless ground far from any strategical point. The battle was slowed by the lethargy that arose from realization that all movements were as if in a dream, for the small groups of men fighting in the cirques and towers were subject not merely to the wishes of Rome or Vienna but to illusions of time, space, and the alpine air.
When Alessandro went to brigade headquarters to receive his posting, he was kept waiting outside a bunker where the major who would decide his fate was deciding the fate of the people who had arrived before him. He sat on a bench, next to his pack, for five or six hours during which the sun shone brilliantly and reflected from the stone wall behind him. He hadn't been as warm since Sicily.
A staff sergeant emerged every half hour to tell Alessandro that he had to wait another half hour. Finally, after ten of these announcements, none of which Alessandro believed, the sergeant was embarrassed enough to want to be friendly. "Would you like to see something?" he asked Alessandro, and started to walk around the corner of the bunker. Alessandro shouldered his pack.
"No, leave that there," the sergeant told him. "It's just up here."
They climbed a ladder to a sandbagged firing position manned by a dullard sentry whom the sun had dyed the color of smoked bacon. Even when the two visitors arrived, he hardly moved.
A mortar stood next to two heavy iron posts within the ring of sandbags. Mounted on one post was an anti-aircraft machine gun, and on the other a pair of binoculars as long as Alessandro was tall. The sergeant removed metal caps from the eyepieces and objectives, and swung the binoculars into position. Then he stepped back and invited Alessandro to take a look. The instrument was aimed at a ridge about three or four kilometers away.
When Alessandro brought his eyes close to the bright glass, he saw as if by magic a group of men on a breastworks. Some were eating, some talking, others scanning the plain below with binoculars and a telescope mounted on a tripod. They wore fur cloaks and snow-white dominoes as if they were a race of monks, and as they walked along the line of their fortifications the wind made their robes dance. With rifles slung across their backs, and their faces hidden in the shadows of pointy hoods, they did not look like an army of the living.
"That's the enemy," the sergeant said as he followed Alessandro's right eye tracking the figures in the distance.
"Why are they so bundled up?" Alessandro asked.
"It's colder up there."
"Are these Germans?"
"Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarians, who knows, but now you can see them up close."
"I beg your pardon?" Alessandro asked.
"The enemy," the sergeant repeated.
"You think they're close?"
"You can see the fingers on their hands."
"Have you ever touched one?" Alessandro inquired.
"Touched one? Of course not. You can't get that close."
"I have. Their blood has squirted all over me like a warm shower. I've been tangled up in them. I know how they smell, and I've seen their dental work."
"Are you a dentist?" the dumbfounded sergeant asked.
"No," Alessandro answered. "Are you?"
THE MAJOR was an aristocrat. Alessandro thought he might be the son of a Methuselan connoisseur who lived in a villa threatened by floods. Within the villa were paintings, and books in Latin and Greek that the major had read and absorbed, distancing himself from most of human society even before he had entered it. And now here he was, rich, urbane, and tremendous, in a green Alpini hat with a red feather, doing paperwork in a bunker at two thousand meters.
Like many a veteran of repeated combats, Alessandro was unable to avoid provocation.
"How many dozens of obscure Latin and Greek tomes did you read as the marsh ebbed to and fro, the insects buzzed around the marble mausoleums, and the moths ate your father's tweed hunting jackets?" he asked, after failing to salute.
The major's mouth opened as if he were sucking in cool air to compensate for having scalded his tongue. "What?" he asked, forgetting military etiquette, as had the private who had walked into his office like a general in command of the sector.
Knowing that the major had heard, Alessandro sat down, stared at him, and expanded his thesis.
"You shot skeet with an English shotgun, didn't you. You learned to drink akvavit, and read Apuleius. Your father worried all the time that the foundations of the villa were rotting and that he didn't have the strength to rake up the fallen leaves, which he believed might be poisonous if their essence found admission to the water supply."
"My father?"
"White baffi and bulging eyes. He wore dressing gowns and wrote with a pen made of ebony and gold. Don't you remember? On the marsh?"
"My father was an engineer," the major said defensively, his voice rising. "We lived in an apartment on the Via Cola di Rienzo. What is this about moths eating his tweed hunting jackets? He had no tweed hunting jackets."
"How am I supposed to know about your father's wardrobe?" Alessandro asked indignantly. "Who was I, his tailor?"
"You said he had tweed hunting jackets."
"I made the best guess available, given the information I had."
"What information?"
"Your face."
"Who are you?" the major asked, amazed. "You didn't even salute. You're sitting in my chair."
"The part of me that lies between the top of my legs and my waist, in the back, that is cleft in two, and rounded, is tired," Alessandro answered.
"Do you realize," the major asked, leaning forward slightly over his desk, "that men have been shot for lesser insubordination?"
"No, I didn't realize, but in Stella Maris I watched them die like flies. Every once in a while," Alessandro went on, clearing his throat, "they try to shoot me, too, but they miss, or I'm pulled out of line. What? It doesn't matter. I have discovered only of late, I have understood only after becoming embittered, that I have immunity, not so much an aura, but comical immunity."
"Comical immunity?"
"Yes. It's
a joke. I have laissez-passer and I watch as everyone else is blown to bits. It's that bastard, that little dwarf, Orfeo. He did it."
"I beg your pardon?"
"You think Giolitti and the Kaiser made the war? Franz-Josef?"
"No?"
"A dwarf runs everything, from the first shot to the last, the dwarf Orfeo Quatta. If only I had known. Do you know how many unjust, gratuitous, frivolous execution orders that little son of a bitch signed? He's thrown whole brigades into the fire. I didn't believe him when I sat next to him copying the Portuguese contract, but he must have been telling the truth.
"He told me that one of my father's scribes, a Torinese named Sanduvo, had discovered a way to make chickens lay seven eggs a day. It had something to do with playing a certain kind of harpsichord rondo while the chickens were massaged with indelible ink. Orfeo planned to steal the method and start a chicken farm, but he was afraid that Sanduvo would kill him if he found out, so Orfeo planned to kill Sanduvo first. Of course, Sanduvo was joking, I think, but that didn't stop Orfeo."
"He killed him?"
"Sanduvo was found in the Tiber, having struck his head and drowned."
"What does this have to do with..."
"I should have killed Orfeo even then. It never occurred to me. When he leaned out the window to throw coins at the imaginary African opera singers, I could have pushed him. The world would have been preserved, and everyone I love would be alive today. I would have gone from party to party in Rome, slept, like Fabio, with fourteen hundred foreign women, and rowed on the Tiber. I would have read books and gotten old, and enjoyed eating and drinking. In the fall I would have walked down the Via Cola di Rienzo, in your father's tweed hunting jackets with the moth holes."
As the major hardy knew what to think, he pulled a cigarette from his dull aluminum military cigarette case, offered one to Alessandro to no avail, lit his trench-lighter, and pensively stared at the ceiling of the bunker. Alessandro added, "The bottom of his closet, even though it was a cedar closet, was littered with moth droppings."
"Are you making fun of my father?" the major asked.
"I loved your father," Alessandro answered. "He was much like my own father. How could I make fun of him? I only make fun of myself."
"Why?"
"Why? Because, when I love someone, that person disappears."
To the ceiling of the bunker, the major said, "Even the fresh troops they send me now have battle fatigue."
"I don't have battle fatigue," Alessandro snapped. "I was bred and trained for battle. I've been in the line for more than two years. I'm not tired. I'm not afraid. I'm not irrational. To the contrary. I object to the deaths that result not only from battle, but otherwise. If a cleaning woman dies in her bed in Trastevere, a soldier is liquidated by an artillery shell, or an African chieftain succumbs to an infected ostrich-bite, it's all the same, isn't it? "Why bother to make distinctions? I doubt very much that God does. To the tourist in the Pinacoteca di Brera the paintings are the same whether he came by train, horseback, or automobile. I'm not fatigued. I merely resent all this dying."
"That's too bad. What are you going to do about it? You can't bring back the dead."
"I know. I've tried."
"Pardon me? You've tried?"
"Oh, I see," Alessandro said. "I suppose you think that's irrational. It is irrational. You can do little with reason except in the material world. Why should I limit myself to reason?"
"Because no one will understand you if you don't."
"To the contrary. Anyway, reason is just as irrational, and those who are rational just as unreasonable as anyone else."
"What?"
"You're a modern type. You are. You accept the theory of evolution, don't you."
"Yes."
"Of course, it's an underpinning of your thought. And the idea of entropy, are you familiar with it?"
"Yes I am," the major said.
"Do you accept it as well?"
"I don't know."
"Most people do. They think that what's true for acute physical processes is probably applicable to cosmology itself."
"What of it!"
"Only this. You believe in entropy, which postulates that all phenomena tend to sink to lower levels of organization and energy, and in evolution, which postulates that the history of life has been just the opposite. People like you credit both theories. It's de rigueur. Is that reason rational? I say, fuck off. And all my life I've devoted myself to the task of bringing back the dead, only to discover that it's hopeless."
"What did you do, hold seances? Are you a mystic?"
"I learned to concentrate disparate forces and sensations and make them run together, like music, like a song, into something that has a life of its own. That is a song, is it not, something that seems to have its own life, and goes in its own direction, and pulls you along with it.
"I wasn't trained in music, but I've studied musical theory and I know the Aristotelian requirements, and I am enormously moved by music. I can't play an instrument, except the drums, which anyone can play, and I can't compose."
"Oh," the major interjected, slumped in his chair, almost motionless.
"I'm a critic. I write essays about works of art. It's like being a eunuch in the seraglio, but unrequited love is the sweetest, and I have the proper distance. I can compress the qualities of beauty I've been trained to see, store them up, and bring them out at will, rapid-fire, in the combinations I want.
"Images. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of images. My field was the aesthetics of painting. In homage to that, I keep the images compressed in tiny little squares, like the works of Oderisi da Gubbio or Franco Bolognese, like little postage stamps. Each one glows. It's as if you were looking into a firebox through the peephole or peering into one of those Easter eggs with scenes painted within, or watching a brightly illuminated and distant part of a city through a telescope with sparkling optics. Each frame Carries the deep reds, the greens, and the dark blues that Italians never seem to manage as well as the English and the Dutch, though we have almost a lock on every other color. When I run them past my mind's eye, the Bindo Altoviti, La Tempesta, the Uccelli, and all the others that have been provided to me not only by painters but by the sun as it sets or shines on saffron-colored buildings, the sight of perfectly proportioned squares, the gallerie, the cortili, I see something that is alive, like a song, and in the songs that rise in my memory like curling columns of smoke, up from the darkness in opera houses, ascending on the heat of the footlights to swirl in the empty space above, I see the faces of the people I love, the faces of my parents, and Guariglia, and Ariane ... and they almost come alive."
"But they don't."
"No."
"Why?"
"My conceits will never serve to wake the dead. Art has no limit but that. You may come enchantingly close, and you may wither under the power of its lash, but you cannot bring back the dead. It's as if God set loose the powers of art so that man could come so close to His precincts as almost to understand how He works, but in the end He closes the door in your face, and says, leave it to me. It's as if the whole thing were just a lesson. To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too."
"Who is Ariane?" the major asked.
Alessandro seemed not to hear. He turned to the doorway and looked at the square of blue sky it framed. The major opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a holstered pistol wrapped in a leather belt. "You're not an officer," he said to Alessandro, "but as long as you are in my command, you may carry a side arm. It's a Colt."
"Why?" Alessandro asked.
"Because of where I'm going to send you. I hope that there you'll think less about art and more about war, so that you may outlast the war and spend the rest of your life thinking about art.
"After you're accustomed to the altitud
e, after some long marches and descents to the floor of the valley, I'm going to send you to a place where you will be the northernmost Italian soldier in the line, the highest, and the most isolated."
"Why?"
"Because," the major said, "it's what you want. You came in here to ask me for it."
IT WAS remarkable to see the whole world, so wide and so blue, from one place. Straight on, the sky had as much depth and distance as above, and with the clouds below running to the horizon like a white floor, Alessandro believed that he was in the sky rather than under it. For that reason, though not for that reason alone, he felt nearly all the time something akin to the sensation of flying: not vertigo or a feeling of motion, but an aura of lightness, disconnectedness, and quiet. Glacier light arising from blue ice is blinding and cool. When it blends with the light of the sky it commands attention and awe, as if in it the real work of the world is accomplished, and the operations of the richer, warmer light below are of a lesser, fallen order.
Thirty men, including Alessandro, had awakened in the dark at one and assembled on a flat snowfield just beyond their camp. They roped themselves into six parties of five, and checked their equipment. In addition to the rations he would need for the climb, each man carried one day's supply of food, kerosene, and ammunition. Some carried electric lanterns, rope, and extra rings and bolts, in case those on the rock face they would climb needed replacement, and every man had rifle, bayonet, ice axe, slings, alpine hammer, and crampons.
Alessandro had never moved in the mountains so heavily laden. The rifle, especially, was a burden, for with its bayonet, sling, and fifty rounds of ammunition, it weighed five kilograms. Strapped to the soldiers' caps were miner's lamps with thick candles. Because this type of lamp burned with surprising brightness it produced no soot, and its highly polished reflectors stayed clear.