by Mark Helprin
His axes moved so wildly he could hardly see. Though his sunglasses were covered with blood and ice, he couldn't spare the time or energy to rip them from his face. When he looked up he discovered that the comets of snow, the dazzling spray, and the singing of the wind in the sun were right above him. Just over the top, he knew, the wind was flowing up a white ramp many kilometers in length, and the gossamer rivers of snow that it pushed before it leapt here into the blue. Ahead was an easy descent that would put him behind the Italian line by dusk. Were he to find the strength for the final two meters, the war would be over. He would look out and beyond, and there, in miraculously clear air, would be the dark blue mass of the Po Valley, a thin line beyond the snow-capped Dolomites. There, in terrain less severe, the rivers ran and the trees swayed in warm winds. Two meters below the rim, he was overcome by a surge of affection for the golden autumn in Rome. There lay his future and his past, all that had been lost, and all that he might piece together. He looked calmly at the driven snow against the cold blue sky, and with the last his heart could offer, he climbed directly into it.
IX. LA TEMPESTA
THE ADRIATIC is shallow and confined. Its storms are fierce in the air and fierce in the light, but on the sea itself the waves break before they come to resemble the movable mountains of the ocean, and the surface flashes with curling whitecaps until it looks like a sheepskin in the moonlight. The action of the Atlantic when it is angry is a wild assault on earth and sky: of the Adriatic, a disciplined self-lashing, a convulsion as quick and bright as the sticks of butter-colored lightning that dance over the sea like stilts.
Almost all of it lies between long mountain ranges, where storms collect after they have forced the passes like flash floods bursting over weirs. There they rise, purple, gray, and black, into an angry wall that the setting sun paints in tranquil gold.
As one of these low gray walls became visible to the east, almost like a distant fog-bank, hardly anyone noticed and those who did gave it no thought. Children built castles and pools in the sand; old people read day-old newspapers from Rome or Milan; and young girls barely in adolescence walked rigidly along the beach, delighting that men of various ages paid heed to their swan-like limbs and soft golden hair.
Only Alessandro Giuliani, immobile in a cloth beach chair, tracked the oncoming storm. Though he tried, he was unable to read a day-old copy of Corriere della Sera, and though the sun was bright and hot in the African or Sicilian style, gentle gusts of cool September wind riffled the pages of the newspaper. When the clouds were so high and near that the older people began to stir because, unlike their grandchildren, they would not be able to dash quickly through the dunes to the hotel, Alessandro folded the Corriere della Sera and put it under his thigh to protect it from the large drops of rain that had begun to arrive in the vanguard of the storm.
The wind tangled the ribbons on the children's gondolier's hats, old people labored across the dunes, and mothers and fathers called their sons and daughters. Then lightning struck the sea far away in a silent explosion of light, and the beach became a scene of panic. Babies were lifted into the air as if the lightning were slithering along the sand. Umbrellas were collapsed. Towels whipped free in the wind.
The beach porters were skinny boys with huge wet eyes. In uniforms that made them look like organ-grinders' monkeys, they desperately and breathlessly gathered beach chairs and umbrellas and ran across the dunes. One of these boys, who had huge black eyebrows that threatened to bridge his macaque-like nose, approached Alessandro.
"You have to go in," he said. "I have to take your chair."
Alessandro kept his face to the storm.
"Signore?"
Deliberately playing with time that was running out quickly and dangerously, Alessandro turned slowly to the young macaque and widened his eyes as if to say, What?
The macaque flashed two rows of incredibly white teeth. "Signore!" he shouted, and pointed, with a thumb extended from a clenched fist, at the storm behind him.
"Yes?"
"You have to go inside because of the lightning!"
As Alessandro's eyes filled with the distant webs of enraged light, the corners of his mouth showed a barely perceptible smile. At this, the frightened macaque exploded forward like a racehorse leaving the gate, and crossed the dunes just ahead of a heavy rain. He took shelter under the verandah of the hotel, where guests who were in robes and carrying baskets stood behind walls of glass to watch the storm, and as he and his friends stacked chairs and umbrellas under the light of an electric bulb, he told them about Alessandro, who was going to be turned into a cinder and blown into the clouds.
On the verandah itself, everyone could see Alessandro sitting still in the rain, his head visible just above the beach chair, his hair blowing wildly in the wind.
Lightning the color of white gold danced awkwardly on the broken surface of the sea and flashed against the dark skeins of cloud from which it had come, cascading over itself in shallow angles and bent limbs. Thundercracks colliding in midair flattened the water into spoon-like silver depressions and rattled the glass windows of the hotel.
"He'll be killed," said a woman on the part of the porch farthest away from the windows. "What's he doing?"
"He's doing what we're doing," an old man answered, "but more so. He seems to have lost the habit of safety."
"Or maybe he never had it!" the woman exclaimed with joyful intolerance as she turned to go inside.
No, the old man thought. It's something that, eventually, you learn to do without.
Lightning struck so close to Alessandro that it pushed him against the beach chair and bent its wooden legs like bows. Blinded, he waited for the next bolt to release him from the reeling darkness, for the logic of the lightning and its approach over the sea was like the logic of a swelling crescendo in music. He was sure it would rush him with perfect accuracy, sure of the greater and greater light and geometrically increasing shock, sure that the walking barrage would end with him, and content that it would.
But it didn't. It lacked volition after all, and did not descend with a kind and quick stroke that would take him where the heart could not be broken. It left him on a beach that the rain had made the color of municipal concrete, staring at the ten minutes of robins-egg blue hanging in the air over Istria. A cold and tranquil rain came after the lightning, and lasted until dark. Only then did Alessandro rise and turn to the hotel, which sat on the dunes and glowed with artificial light like a ship gliding across the horizon on a warm summer night.
AS OFTEN happens after September storms, the weather became cool and clear. On the beach, children wore sweaters. Ships moving placidly up and down the distant aisles of the sea were as sharply etched as diagrams, not that the sea itself was calm, for it still had a fresh, agitated, windy quality, and it rocked and churned in waves as imperfect as slabs of raw glass.
Into this sea Alessandro plunged for his daily exercise. He was the only one to swim out to deep water, for which he was held half in awe and half in contempt. It didn't matter to him, for as soon as he cleared the shallows and found himself suspended at a giddy height over the sea floor, darting ahead and slipping through the swells that hid him from those who watched onshore, he was happy. The farther from the beach he swam, the more serene he felt, and in the midst of waves that had never touched shore or lapped against a ship, he would flip over onto his back and float, his gaze fixed on enormous white clouds. Several kilometers out, he floated, turned, and sounded, swimming straight down, eyes open. When he was as deep as he could get, he would relax completely, splay his limbs, and let the currents under the surface tumble him in dark emerald light for as long as he could go without breath. Then, raking the brine, he would swim desperately for the surface and break through a silver roof into clear air and stinging spray.
He liked to swim back at an angle, reaching shore far enough away from where he started so that by the time he returned to his chair he was dry and in full possession of himself. Rea
ccustomed to gravity and light, his vision cleared, he would open the newspaper, lean back, give up, fold the paper, and sink into dream-laden sleep.
"I'm speaking quietly so that if you're asleep you won't wake up and I'll go away, but if you're not asleep then perhaps you'll tell me whether or not you're sleeping," someone said to
Alessandro, who kept his eyes closed, pretending not to have heard.
"You know, I have a telephone in my office now. When I call someone or they call me, the conversation starts with 'Did I wake you?' even at two in the afternoon. And even if you use the apparatus at four o'clock in the morning and ask them, they'll say, no, you didn't wake them. Why are people ashamed of sleep?
"I think the telephone should stop at midnight, like the buses, but I suppose its value also encompasses emergencies. I must admit, though, that I don't like it. I don't like what it does to people. If I call a client, his secretary will say something like 'Signor Ubaldi is in conference.' 'So?' I say, and she says, 'Let me take your name.' I always reply, 'Ah! We can honeymoon in the Sudan!' But they never get it. That's what the telephone does to people."
Alessandro opened his eyes and saw, standing before him on the windy beach, a middle-aged man in a thick white robe. He was balding, stocky, embarrassed, and sunburnt to the color of molasses, with a patina of volcanic red that said he had a lot of blood in him and that it circulated with great vigor. He also spoke with great vigor, with the ease of movement and solidarity of engagement without which a Turkish wrestler would not be able to practice his craft or tolerate his life. And yet, underlying all this, as the color of his blood lay under his dark sunburn, was both delicacy and reticence.
"My wife asks if you would like to have a cold drink and a canapè with us. My son watches you swim. I told him of the danger, and he thinks you are a hero."
"That's very kind of you," Alessandro replied. Before he could add that he was neither hungry nor thirsty, and wanted just to rest, the wrestler said, "Magnifico!" and turned on his heels.
The son was a miniature of the father, with more hair on his head and less on his body; the wife a lovely woman of extreme and endearing tininess. Alessandro immediately and alarmingly wanted to draw her to him and kiss her beautiful diminutive face. She came up only to his sternum, and her hands were so small and delicate that she reminded him of the sweet and innocent mice in children's books. At once he saw that the wrestler was perfect for her, a devoted and tender protector. And at once he saw that the little boy was special, that with such a husky father and delicate mother, he, continually translating between divergent qualities, was poised to become wise, even if, at only nine, he looked like a Turkish wrestler. Alessandro liked them. They were so imperfect and so admirable that he could not help liking them, and he was not sorry that he had been drawn their way.
"Momigliano, Arturo," the wrestler said, introducing himself in the formal manner, last name first.
"Giuliani, Alessandro," Alessandro returned, bowing slightly.
"My wife, Attilia, and my son, Raffaello."
Alessandro thought of Rafi, another Raffaello with a Jewish name. "A friend of mine was named Raffaello—Raffaello Foa," Alessandro told the boy.
The wrestler was slightly startled. "Everyone knows the Foas," he said. "Who is his father?"
Alessandro told him.
"I don't recognize him. What does he do?"
"He's a butcher, in Venice."
"I know only the Foas of Rome and Florence. They're all accountants and rabbis. And the one who was your friend, Raffaello, what does he do now?"
"He was killed in the war."
"I'm sorry. I hope he did not suffer."
"He suffered greatly."
"Do you know for sure? Word of mouth is unreliable, and you can't always assume the worst."
"I can still feel his weight," Alessandro said, "and his blood."
Attilia looked at Alessandro in a way that made him feel another surge of affection, amplified because it was clear that she held herself in low regard, perhaps because she was so small. Alessandro let his infatuation for her become respect for her husband, although he could only guess that Arturo merited it.
"Well, listen," Arturo said. "He must have been related to the Foas that I know. I'll ask when I see them. I know them because I'm an accountant, too—an unsuccessful accountant."
"Unsuccessful?"
"Yes. That's why we're here," Arturo said, "at this not exactly glorious hotel, in the off-season, instead of on Capri in August. Of course, I don't mean to imply that everyone here is unsuccessful, but I am."
"I think you're probably right. I myself am as poor as a swallow, at the moment," Alessandro said—not like someone dreaming that someday he would be wealthy, but with certainty. "And I work in a lowly, boring occupation. I'm a gardener's helper. Not even a gardener, but the helper."
"For someone so well spoken, and such a courageous swimmer ... I never would have guessed, but what I do is worse," Arturo asserted.
"Why is a strong and enthusiastic man like you an unsuccessful accountant? Are you stupid?"
"Unfortunately, no."
"Then why don't you have factories and fleets of ships? You have the air of a disgruntled magnate. Though you seem disgruntled, you seem like a magnate nonetheless."
"I was born to stand outside myself," said Arturo.
Alessandro settled into a chair, and Raffaello brought him a glass of lemonade, holding it as if, were he to spill it, the world would explode. Attilia passed Alessandro a plate of cheese, celery, and breadsticks. For a moment, Alessandro forgot that he had lost everything and everyone.
"It has always seemed to me," Arturo said, "that, except in art, except for someone like Beethoven or Chateaubriand"—Alessandro's eyes widened—"men of great ambition and great success go through life in a frictionless way, as if they were always riding the waves but never in them. I have found that failure is a brake on time."
"That's just an excuse, Arturo," Attilia said, but in a kindly, loving way suggesting that she was not sure, and didn't care if it were. Arturo, meanwhile, was lost in his impending declarations.
"I cannot be a successful accountant for a number of reasons. First, I am absolutely honest. I take great pleasure in sacrificing my own interests so as to be entirely honorable. Isn't that terrible?"
"Yes," said Alessandro, Attilia, and Raffaello, quietly and simultaneously.
"And then," Arturo continued, his words coming pacifically from the turtle-like jaw under his centurions face and sparkling black eyes, "most accountants like games, and to them their work is a game. I have always detested games. I never saw them as anything but a waste of time. For me, accountancy is a chore. I suffer when I work, which allows me beautiful visions."
"What kind of visions?" Alessandro asked.
"Religious and poetic."
"You mean, when you add your columns, you have ecstasies?"
Arturo bent his head. "I cannot abide numbers. They drive me insane in the same way that forced labor made mystics of galley slaves."
"It did?"
"Haven't you read Digenis Akritas Calypsis?"
"Do you mean Digenis Akritas, the first Byzantine novel?"
"No, Digenis Akritas Calypsis," Arturo said. "The first Byzantine novel was Melissa, wasn't it?"
"I should have known," Alessandro told him.
"Digenis Akritas followed soon after. Or perhaps I've reversed the order."
"No matter."
"The other reason I'm unsuccessful as an accountant is that I love rounded, even numbers. I do my accounting as a matter of aesthetics.
"For example, were you my client and you had, let's say, seventy-three thousand four hundred lire in war bonds, sixty-nine thousand two hundred and thirty-two lire in a savings account, and you collected rents of ten thousand three hundred and fifty lire each month, I would juggle things around so that you might have a hundred-thousand in war bonds, fifty thousand in your savings account, ten thousand in your checking
account, and you collected ten thousand a month in rent, but your tenant paid for the gas.
"I'd arrange for your interest to be transferred into a separate collection account, and in the event of an odd balance I'd cash it out and buy you something perfectly symmetrical—like a glass ball.
"I present my clients with the records of their finances in beautiful leather notebooks, in groups of balanced sets, with figures and typefaces in a maximally congruent grid. The client's financial system comprises vessels of constant volume that, when they overflow, overflow into other vessels of constant volume. Uneven excesses go immediately into everyday expenses. I even arrange for crisp new banknotes to be delivered to my clients in beautifully proportioned maroon-and-gold envelopes, in amounts of a thousand, two thousand, four, five, and ten thousand lire.
"I negotiate contracts, sales prices, and fees to be payable in large, round, whole numbers. That's because ragged trails of non-zeros remind me of an infestation of insects, or not having taken a bath for a long time," Arturo said, his eyes gleaming with the azure of the sky, his fists clenched as he held forth. "I arrange for the services to be billed in even increments, and if I make a mistake, even at the bottom of a page of calculations, I don't cross it out, I don't erase it, I throw the page away and start over. To me, a poorly formed letter or number is a mistake."
"And yet," Alessandro said, "your dress and grooming are not pristine."
"I don't care what I look like, I care about what's outside me, which is why I'm unsuccessful. I go to too much trouble in a world where success flows to those who rapaciously avoid trouble, but I can't help it. It bothers me to be slovenly and asymmetrical. Perhaps," he said, blushing, but not so much as Attilia, "that is why I was so taken with my wife, and remain so, for she is a glory of graceful proportion.