by Mark Helprin
"Sometimes," the guard said, "people come in here and stare at this painting for a long time, and they cry."
After a silence in which something seemed to have been building very rapidly, Alessandro asked, "Who? Soldiers?"
"Well, no, not soldiers."
Without changing the position of his feet, Alessandro made a quarter turn toward the guard. "Who?"
"All kinds of people."
"Yes?"
"What do you want me to do, name them?" the guard asked.
"Tell me about them."
"Why?"
"I'm one of them, am I not? I want to know."
"It's almost time to close."
"Will you be here tomorrow?"
"I'll be here, but I won't be able to tell you anything then that I can't tell you now."
"So tell me now."
"Oh! What do you want me to do? Describe them?"
"Yes. Describe them."
"All right. There was a gentleman, about ten years older than you..."
"Go on to the next one."
"I didn't say anything!"
"I'm not interested in him. Go on."
The guard looked at Alessandro with an expression that said he was returning to his initial assessment of Alessandro's mental condition. "There was another guy," he began.
"I'm not interested in him either."
"This is crazy," the guard said.
"Keep on."
"I suppose you're not interested in the old lady..."
"No."
"...who lost her husband."
"No."
"Or the woman ... who came in ... with a baby." Alessandro did not interrupt. In the habit of being interrupted, the guard echoed his last words. "With a baby." After a long silence, he said, "And stood in front of the painting, and cried."
Assaulted by electricity rising along his spine and traveling out upon the path of his limbs, Alessandro quietly asked, "When was this?"
"A while ago. Sometime in the spring. It was still raining and rather cold. I wore wool and ate soup for lunch because it was so cold."
"If you remember that," Alessandro stated cautiously, "perhaps you have an extraordinary memory for details."
"Not extraordinary," the guard said proudly, "but, you know, you stand here all day looking at paintings, and, unless you're an idiot, you learn to notice things. You remember."
"What was she like?" Alessandro asked.
"She was very pretty."
"What color was her hair?"
"Blond, but she was an Italian."
"How do you know?"
"Because," the guard said, rightfully proud to have remembered, "she spoke Italian. She also spoke to the baby in French. She was well educated, and those kind of people speak French to their babies."
"The color of her eyes?"
"I don't remember. I never remember the color of people's eyes."
"What was she wearing?"
"That I wouldn't know either, but my wife could tell you. She remembers clothing from forty years ago."
"Your wife saw her?"
"No no, I mean if she had seen her."
"And you saw her only once?"
"Once that I know of. That doesn't mean she wasn't here more than once."
"What else do you know about her?"
"Nothing. The baby was well behaved. It didn't cry."
"What else?"
"Nothing. That's all."
"Think!"
"I can't."
"Close your eyes."
"I shouldn't close my eyes."
"Why not?"
"All right, if you go over there," the guard said, pointing to the center of the floor.
Alessandro walked obediently to the center. "Closing! Closing! Closing!" the guards were calling out as Alessandro's guard closed his eyes. Alessandro prayed faster than he knew what he was praying for.
"I do!" the guard said, with his eyes still closed.
"You do what?"
He opened his eyes. "I do remember something. One more thing. She carried the child on her hip, in a sash. Baby carriages are not very practical in Venice. And when you walk around with a kid, you have to carry stuff for it. So she carried all the things she needed in a canvas bag, the kind they give to tourists who go out to the Lido for a day. They put their lunch, and a book, and their bathing costumes in these bags. You see them in the summer."
"And what does that tell me?"
"They have the name of the hotel on the bag," the guard said, and smiled.
"And you remember."
"Yes I do. You know why? I'll tell you why. It's a small hotel near the Campo San Margherita. I know because I used to live close by and I passed it every day on my way to work. It was the Hotel Magenta. That's what it said on the bag—Magenta. I knew there was something."
"Closing! Closing!" the other guards called in high voices that echoed through the galleries.
Alessandro's guard looked at his watch. "Really," he said, "it's time to go home now. Say goodbye to the painting, because it's time to go home."
ALESSANDRO LEANED against a wrought-iron fence tangled in the soft spirals of young vines. Across the street was the Hotel Magenta, now, in spite of the early fall weather, almost empty. A clerk in a fair imitation of a British admiral's uniform appeared and disappeared from behind the desk with the regularity of a metronome. Alessandro watched him noiselessly bob among the bright lamps and polished brass. The hotel, though small and not well known, was elegant. The only hint of the color magenta was a sash-like magenta line that fell across the upper left-hand corner of a menu posted in a lighted glass case on the fence opposite Alessandro.
He planned to stay in the hotel rather than merely interrogate the staff, who would not remember anything unless they were in exactly the right frame of mind, but he was unsure of what exactly to ask, or why he would be asking. Many women had babies and spoke French. What did it have to do with him? But what if he had been wrong from the start, and the woman he had seen on an upper floor of the clinic had not been Ariane but someone who closely resembled her, or if, in the instant he had looked up at the attacking airplanes, time had elongated, as it does in battle, and, before the building was destroyed, she had simply walked out the back?
The child? The child could be his. Why hadn't she looked for him? The question was easy to answer in light of how many times he had been reported dead.
Like the clerk he watched, he bobbed between one thing and another. Hope would flare and he would shudder with the strong emotion appropriate to the presence or the imagination of miracles, but then his head would sink, and he would draw in a very different breath than the one that preceded it, weary and full of inexplicable friction, when he believed that he was deluding himself.
It would be safer, less painful, and even cheaper to go back to Rome. If he slowly began to work, and gradually took up the life of a bourgeois, teaching and writing until the money came through, time might make of him a different man.
He knew, however, that time only stripped and revealed, and he had never approached an important question in any way but to ask everything. As he stood in the darkening street, he recognized a pattern in his life. He had learned very quickly, not merely by devoted study but by some natural sympathy, to enter so fully into a painting or a song that he could cross into a world of harrowing beauty and there receive, as he floated on air, the deep, absolute, and instant confirmation of hopes and desires that in normal life are a matter only of speculation and debate.
That was all changed, however, and quickly, during the war. Sometimes after an exploding shell, blood and limbs rained down upon soldiers who were too shocked to move, and who stood as if they had been caught in a sudden downpour, and at such moments Alessandro had been ashamed of the life that had taught him to trust and hope.
The debate between his alternating states of belief would not be resolved until he was unable to report the result, and, like darkness and light, his conviction lingered neither at dusk
nor at dawn. Why should it have? The answer lay not in compromise, but in one thing or the other.
"I've been walking in the Brenta," he told the clerk. "I need a good dinner, a room with a bath, and a laundry."
The clerk quoted the price of a room. It was excessive.
"Does it have a balcony?"
"No. The one above it has, and an extra-large bath. It is, however, nearly twice the price."
"Give it to me," Alessandro commanded, rapidly writing his name on the registration card. He tipped the astonished clerk with a week of his own salary.
"Here," Alessandro said when they reached the room, and handed over to the stunned young man yet another weeks salary.
At dinner he was especially lavish, but he did not ask a single question. He hoped that in the morning, when word of his largesse had spread, not a soul in the hotel would be hesitant to provide him the answer to any question he might pose.
He tried not to, but that night, in a room with a balcony, in the Hotel Magenta, in a bed made with thick white sheets that had been carefully pressed and were cold to the touch, he lay thinking of Ariane as if she were alive.
AT BREAKFAST Alessandro had two waiters, and the chef leaned from the kitchen to behold him. He passed more money around, as if he were not wealthy, but mad. Each time he put a banknote into someone's hand he thought of it not as the pair of shoes, fountain pen, or two years' subscription he would have to do without, but as an inconsequential sum that he was placing on a wager of unprecedented returns, even if he doubted it would go his way. You cannot by force of will undo events, he told himself. You cannot by assaulting the wage structure of a small hotel hope to resurrect the dead. And you do not make miracles by getting on the wrong train.
As he lingered over breakfast he thought back to the many times he had seen the dead jumping off a trolley or walking briskly up a street. He had recognized their faces, their clothing, their gaits, and even after they had objected that he was looking at them as if they had risen from the tomb, he still thought he saw them, and he felt the same way that shepherdesses feel when, on their rocky fragrant hillsides, they see the Virgin.
His father had appeared, in the uniform of a major, in the trenches beside him, and though he hadn't known his son, it was he. Others, too, came back, at least momentarily, perhaps only because he wanted them to. Shrouds are very light. When they are stretched over a corpse the air in the room can move them just enough for someone devastated by grief to think that the person for whom he grieves is breathing and alive. Call the nurses. Call the doctors. Something astonishing has happened. He's alive. You only thought that he was dead. Even when the shroud is pulled back, the chest seems gently to rise and fall. Some have waited a long time for the person who is breathing to wake, in minutes more dramatic than the fall of empires.
"Can you help me in regard to a woman who stayed here earlier this year?" Alessandro asked the clerk, who had returned to his post.
"Of course. What was her name?"
Alessandro told him. "She had a child with her."
The clerk scanned his register, leafing rapidly through the pages. "No," he said, "no such person from the beginning of the year until now."
"Do you have an indication of any woman with a child? Is your register configured to show..."
"Yes," the clerk said, rotating the register on its pivot. "It would say, and child, or, occupied by so and so, son, or daughter, for older children."
Alessandro spent half an hour with the register. He even looked for Ariane under his own name, in case she had taken it. He found nothing. Only in two instances had women stayed alone with children. They were English. Perhaps they were war widows, or they were going to join their husbands in the East. In fall and winter the British often went through Venice because the Adriatic was better protected from storms than the Tyrrhenian.
"Are you certain that everyone stopping here would be registered in this book?"
"It's the law," the clerk said.
Alessandro tipped him yet again, and went back to his room. He started to fall asleep, but before he could dream he jumped from the bed and ran from the room. The long airy corridor was carpeted in red and gold. Down this path he sprinted until he got to the stairs. Then he sprinted some more, shuttling through the halls as he tried to catch the maid.
On the third floor he saw a cart from which brooms were upended like gathered daffodils, and he lost his breath as if he had discovered the Chariot of Ur. "I forgot to tip you!" he shouted at an older woman, who clutched at her heart in fear. He peeled banknotes desperately from a stack, and, as if he were bribing an executioner, he refused to stop.
When the woman had received a month of her wages she thanked him so much that he couldn't get in a single word. He put his finger to his lips, and said "Signora!" And when she was quiet, she was interrogated. She may even have feared that he would take the money back, even though she had put it in a pocket and buttoned the flap, but she couldn't tell him what he wanted to know. She was distressed when she told him of the two Englishwomen and their children, for they spoke neither Italian nor French, one woman had a boy of about eight, and, the other, two adolescent girls.
"Anyone else? A baby, a little baby? A mother with blond hair."
"No," said the maid. "I'm so sorry. No."
Alessandro opened the windows wide in his room, and the sea air, filtered by several ranks of buildings and the tops of trees, blew in from the Adriatic. At first the rim of sea over the tree-tops was blue, but as the afternoon wore on, it turned to pearl gray flecked with painful sunlight. The air was cool and clear when Alessandro fell asleep under a thick duvet. Whenever he slept during the day, he burned as if he had a fever. At dusk, sea and sky were indistinguishably blue-green. He thought he was in a dream, and had to splash water on his face six times before he was confident that he would be awake enough to order dinner.
Perhaps because a ship had docked, or a tour had booked the hotel, the dining room was full to capacity, with at least a hundred people, and it had the noisy, hot, beehive-like quality of an eating establishment running at full throttle. The sounds of metal striking china, china on china, and metal against metal never stopped. Neither did the swinging door to the kitchen cease weaving back and forth for an instant, like a valve in the heart.
Though they tried, the waiters were unable to be as attentive as they would have liked. Alessandro got his soup, his bread, his beefsteak, and his salad, and then, only when he asked, a bottle of mineral water. He ate quietly, observing the women in new-style hats, and, at one table, a family of five, who said nothing as they ate and then rose from their chairs and left in different directions.
He would leave in the morning. He had enough money for a third-class ticket to Rome.
IN ROME the grass grows even in January and crops come in, albeit slowly, in December and February. Unrestrained by cold and rain, a brilliant day can flare into a remnant of the golden autumn. Gardeners prune and cut. They trim hedges, rake leaves, chase away cats, and, if the weather is dry, they make bonfires of branches and stalks. White smoke rises all over the city. Because the grass and trees are not dessicated, as in August, the gardeners never fear to walk away from these fires when it is time to go home, and the fires, or what is left of them, glow in the night like jack-o'-lanterns, hissing at their abandonment.
When the other gardeners did go home, Alessandro knelt and held his hands out to the ash and embers. He would listen to the wind as it whistled through the Aurelian Wall, the orchards, and the pines that sounded like the surf. When he stayed his extra hour or two in the dark no one saw him, because everyone was inside, where the lights were bright.
Often, he had dinner in the railroad workers' cafeteria, where he was taken for a railroad worker. Even though it was open to all, people who didn't look the part were uncomfortable there. Alessandro didn't like to eat at home, not even breakfast. When you go to bed alone and arise alone, the sound of even a teaspoon in a china cup, very early in the
morning, can be as graceless as the sound of a freight train slithering diagonally through a railyard, deliberately slow, scraping every switch.
One night in December he came late, for cold chicken, soup, a hard-boiled egg, and salad. He hadn't read the newspaper and didn't feel qualified to join the continual debates about communism, Leninism, socialism, capitalism, fascism, and syndicalism. The debaters, anyway, were the people he had encountered all his life who thought that art should be detached, and politics the seat of passion and emotion. Though Alessandro was well versed in political theory and could go quickly to the heart of nearly any intellectual question, he told those who tried to talk to him about theory or revolution that he wasn't qualified to discuss it, that he preferred to cut and burn branches. He preferred to see a little cupped flower that had just burst through the ground on a short stem, he told them, than to talk about remaking the world. "I am a simple man," he would say.
But, as he was eating, he had no choice but to listen to some fascists who had come down from Milan. One of them, a real bullet-head, was magnetic, showing both incredible pettiness and a form of distorted grandeur. Many of the railroad workers stopped eating as he spoke, and if a railroad worker stopped eating, it meant that something was happening. Alessandro feared that the fascists would flirt with the Left, that, rather than destroy one an other, they would combine, but he could not see it happening for at least five or ten years—the country was too exhausted. Surely the bullet-head, who was as ridiculous as he was compelling, would go nowhere.
Alessandro generally arrived home late. His room was so austere that it was good only for sleep, but in the morning the world started anew. He was always out in the air early, before anyone but bakers and newspaper deliverers, because the air and the sky kept him alive, and he knew it.
One night when he came home he lit the lamp and adjusted the wick until the light was as brassy as the sun in southern India, and his jacket was already half off when he saw that a letter had been slipped under the door. He pulled the jacket back on, and stared at the envelope.