by Mark Helprin
He never received letters. His financial business, such as it was, was handled by his fathers old firm. He was going to transfer some of it to Arturo if things worked out, but for now he used the law firm's address for everything of that nature, and he received no other type of mail, because he no longer knew anyone.
He had written to Ariane, and his first letter to her had begun with the thought that her death had made his letters to her soliloquies. Of course, he did not mail the letters, and had he mailed them he would not have been able to address them, and had he hallucinated an address, they would not have reached it, and had they reached it, they would not have been answered.
He stooped to pick up the envelope, and returned to the lamp. The letter was from Venice, on the stationery of the Hotel Magenta. He went quickly through a salutation and four or five lines of awkward formalities in an unpracticed hand. Then he read very carefully.
I have not written until now because my sister's daughter Gisella was confirmed in December and I had to make something for her, I work in wood. I made an ocean liner with little electric lights that shine through the port holes, she keeps it in her room and looks at it before she goes to sleep.
Maria told me you asked her about some people. Others said the same. They described them to me. I am a waiter and I was not working when you were here. Last spring a mother and a child, a boy of about two, ate in the restaurant several times. I probably would not have remembered except that I love children especially, and this baby was very beautiful, as was his mother, and he had a boat, a sailboat made from wood, so I noticed because ever since I was in the navy in Libya, or off Libya, I don't know, I have been making boats out of wood.
It was the kind of racing schooner that children try to sail in fountains but they're not rigged right for real sailing. Make sure there's a long pole around so you can retrieve it! Well I thought you would want to know. They were here. Even though they weren't guests of the hotel I gave the mother a bag for carrying the boat—a picnic sack that we have in the kitchen, the boat fit just right. I had wanted to get it back but when I saw how perfect it fit I said keep it and she did. She is a Romana. She told me that her husband was killed in the war but that she could not get assistance and lives with her cousin or a sister or some such.
The boy sails his boat in the Villa Borghese. I held him and kissed him. The mother was moved, and it reminded me of my own son when he was small. I think they came twice, they never came back, if I see them I will tell them about you. We have put a check next to your name in the register in case we forget.
Sincerely yours,
Roberto Genzano
Throughout the winter of 1920–21, Alessandro went to the fountain in the Villa Borghese, where in summer children tried to sail boats in no breeze and watched as they were becalmed out of reach. But for the coin-sized leaves that chased around it in gusts of winter wind, the fountain was empty. In the spring, a man like Alessandro, someone who had been outside for much of the winter and knew the feeling of cold, wind, rain, and darkness, would spend an hour or two cleaning out the basin. He would polish the grayling spigots, clear the drains, and turn the valve that would open the pipes to a sparkling flow of water. The water would spill out and splash upon the floor, slicking it down, and then rise to a depth of a few centimeters. While no one watched, the stream would flow steadily until the basin was full, a perfectly round lake of fresh water that was never still, where dogs could drink, old men could dip their handkerchiefs before tying them around their heads, and children could sail their boats.
Sometimes at dusk Alessandro returned to the fountain and for half an hour or more turned what was gray into blue. In the silence and the chill, he fired up the sun, leafed the trees, and populated the park with children and their mothers.
On the walk from the Gianicolo to the Villa Borghese his dreams became more and more exquisite. Each time he crossed the city he grew happy thinking about what might await him. He never believed that it was not a delusion, that it had not arisen from his love, his loneliness, and every canvas he had ever seen of the Virgin and Child. Perhaps it had arisen from the Giorgione itself, and he had begun to live the painting.
Throughout the winter, as he worked, he imagined a world so perfect and just that sometimes he forgot it was not real. "Have you taken up religion?" one of the gardeners asked as they dug the foundation for a cold-frame.
"No. Why do you ask?" Alessandro replied.
"The way you talk to yourself, and the way you smile at cats and birds. Only priests and crazy people smile at cats. You talk to someone."
Alessandro kept on digging. "And what if I had?"
"What?"
"What if I had taken up religion?"
"Nothing. Nothings wrong with that," the gardener said, leaning forward and brushing the dirt off his hands. "But what religion?"
"What religion do you think?"
"Buddhism?"
"Buddhism! Why Buddhism?"
"Don't they worship cats?"
Alessandro laughed. "Not cats, frogs."
"Frogs, you worship frogs?"
"The frog god," Alessandro said, still digging, "lives in foundation drains. If you see him, if you just catch sight of his foot, he makes you vomit uncontrollably for sixty-eight hours."
"Why?"
"He likes to be alone."
"Why does he like to be alone?"
"He needs time," Alessandro said, straightening up and addressing the gardener directly.
"You're fooling," the other gardener said. "There's no frog."
"Before you disbelieve me," Alessandro said, "ask yourself how I knew where all the pipes were buried."
"How did you know?"
In March he quit.
EVEN THOUGH he no longer worked in the gardens of the Gianicolo, he summoned them in memory and he knew every tree bending in the wind, every shoot, every rustling leaf, the scent of the grass, the color of the sky, the dusk, the dawn, and the rain. Most of all he remembered the hot and glowing fires that he and the others made from branches that had lain in dead heaps, splin tered and wet, black with rain, and yet they had burned, and the heat that came from the heart of the wood fought the winter nights well.
He began to groom himself for Ariane as if he were courting her. He took a job as a night clerk in a telegraph office, translating short paragraphs into and from half a dozen languages. The wires were busy almost all the time, singing across mountain ranges and seas, with messages of the deepest import, birthday telegrams, and orders for wing collars.
He rented an apartment that was far more respectable than the one he abandoned. It was small, but it overlooked a garden, and Alessandro put real furniture in it. He had begun to build a new library. That Luciana had sold his books was a blow akin to yet another death. Now, at least, the new books sometimes made him feel that not everything had changed.
He wore a white suit when the weather gave him the slightest excuse, not the bright white of Mexico or India, but a much warmer color, almost cream, that made his face glow. His face had changed. His eyes were deeper, and he had a slowness of expression. One could see that his thoughts were drifting like fast clouds.
He was happy that even after the many years that had passed since he had first quit civilian life he could still be frivolous enough to harbor an affectation—a cane that rounded out the suit and tapped like a horse against the cobbles.
When he went to the Villa Borghese at the end of April he looked like a man who was much older. He took a bench in the sun, near the fountain, and he watched, his cane resting beside him, a book or newspaper on his lap, his hair blowing in the wind like untended grass.
April was too cold. Though he sat for hours listening to the graceful unburdening of the fountain—and of this he never tired—no one came. That is, no one came to sail a boat. Every night, Alessandro would go home, and in the space between his arrival and the time when he had to leave for work he would sit in dejection, his head bent. He breathed as slowly as
someone who has sustained a wound, and then the image of Ariane filled him with happiness and warmth, as if he were holding her, and the next day he would have the strength to go again to the Villa Borghese.
Sometimes he slept in the sun for an hour or two, for he never had enough sleep, and he feared that they had come and gone while he had been sleeping. The first two weeks in May were unusually cold, and then it was hot.
People came out in large numbers. Alessandro carefully watched the boats becalmed in the fountain and the children who stood at the edge. In the third week of May, he abandoned the newspaper and concentrated upon the children. He found tremendous satisfaction in observing their faces. When he saw a father cradling a child in his arms, the father admiring the child, the child floating, Alessandro felt neither envy nor distance.
The end of the month was complicated by rain, and for several days Alessandro failed to awaken in time to go to the Villa Borghese except late in the afternoon. He thought that June would be better, and that if he were to have asked a statistician to determine when children were most likely to sail their boats in fountains, or, if not that, when their mothers were most apt to take them walking in the park, the answer would be always June. Among other things, June is the month when children first recognize summer and when their mothers are positive of its arrival. It is the month of vacations and the influx of tourists, and when the sun attains its full glory but not its greatest heat.
Perhaps the woman, whether or not she was Ariane, had been ill. Perhaps the child had been ill. Perhaps they had moved, or were visiting, or had lost interest in the park, or had been there just when he was not. And perhaps he had seen them many times, the mother and child who had been in Venice, and they were strangers.
***
AT THE end of June, Alessandro abandoned his customary bench and moved to the south side of the fountain. Many more people used the south path because the trees were thicker on the north and their shadows were like a barrier. On the south side the sun did not strike Alessandro properly. It seemed to aim for his right eye and the right side of his neck. If for hours these relatively unexposed parts of him were in direct light, he would get a sunburn.
He could not, however, bring himself to move. He told himself that it wouldn't matter, and he didn't move. Riveted to the bench, he remembered the stories he had heard of the soldiers of the line who had seen angels—whole battalions of them. The angels flew above the no-man's-lands between the trenches, and, as they flew, the souls of the bodies that lay upon the artillery-turned soil decomposing into paste rose to join them. Only the battered formations reported angels, and only in the course of difficult battles. No dissenters challenged their accounts. Nothing is as beautiful as an angel, the soldiers said. They moved in massive numbers ten or twenty meters above the ground. They looked ahead undisturbed, giving off light in pulses that made the landscape glow, beautiful insubstantial beings who had themselves seen God. The souls, too, were visible as they ascended, and the luminous host could be seen from a great distance away as it moved in the vast and terrible spaces along the line. Many of the soldiers assumed that the world would end the night they saw the angels, and, for some, it did.
Not only had he abandoned his customary place, but he was unable to read the paper. He would start a column and follow it to the end, remembering nothing. Was it so much to ask that, several years before, Ariane might have walked out of a building before it collapsed? Would that demand the reordering of the universe? The contradiction of physics? It would not, and yet it would be a miracle, still, unimpeachable even by divisions, whole armies, of skeptics.
And yet it was far too much to ask, if only because he wanted it so much, and he stopped asking. As the afternoon grew hot, he began to dry up, and he felt the future on its way. Nothing would come of his beliefs or desires.
He folded his newspaper and was about to stand. In the corner of his eye he saw a white flash from the east side of the fountain as the narrow triangle of a racing schooner darted for its motionless station near the center, where only the water would slowly push it to the edge, not the wind and not its sail.
The child who had launched it was a boy of about three, whose hair was pure gold in the sun. His eyes were brown, he wore blue shorts and a white cotton shirt, and he had the face of a child who carries a great burden.
Alessandro looked beyond him at three women sitting on a bench. Two were talking. The third was sewing, and it was she who had her eyes on the little boy with the boat.
Ariane was nowhere to be seen. Alessandro stood up and began to walk in the direction of the Tiber, but after he had gone a few steps he turned to go the other way, because he had decided that he wanted to pass by the construction on the top of the Via Veneto, to see the changes in the land for the sake of which his father had sold the garden.
The last time he had walked by, iron beams had begun to rise from the foundation, and he wanted to see how high they had risen.
As he rounded the fountain he looked again at the child. The boy looked directly at Alessandro, and pointed to his boat. He wanted Alessandro to get it for him with the cane.
"It's too short," Alessandro said, "and the water is too deep."
The child refused to accept that Alessandro could not help him. He pointed again.
Alessandro stepped toward him. He was going to bend forward slightly and explain, but the words caught in his chest, and he stopped abruptly. Just beyond the boy, hidden from Alessandro's sight until he had moved closer, was a worn canvas bag with loops for handles.
The side facing him was blank. He grasped the bag by the loops. At this the woman on the bench stood up and walked toward them. As Alessandro turned the bag, almost as if in slow motion, he saw letters on the other side, in self-referential color— Magenta.
"What's your name?" Alessandro asked the child.
"Paolo."
"And your last name?"
Before he could answer, the child looked up. The woman had arrived. Though she was not Ariane, she, too, had blue eyes, and Alessandro tried to check his reckless conclusion that she might be the cousin.
"Good afternoon," she said, in a careful but challenging voice.
Alessandro could hardly breathe. "Are you his mother?"
"No," she said, as if she meant, What of it?
He trembled. "Is his mother's name Ariane?"
"Yes," the woman answered, relaxing. "Do you know her?"
X. LA RONDINE
ALESSANDRO GIULIANI and Nicolò Sambucca had walked for two days and two nights on the way to Monte Prato. The road they took and the shortcuts they made over ridges and through defiles of whitened rock kept them on the crest of the Apennines, on the line of the westernmost ridge. As they walked in daylight or under the stars, they felt as if they were scrambling along the top of a wall so high that the towns of Italy, glittering below them in the warm summer air, were places in a children's book or a fairy tale. Even the sea, a band of navy blue at night or turquoise at noon, was the unmistakable creation of a compassionate illustrator, and fit tightly within the intarsia of fields and sky polished by a weightless fume of silver light.
They were exhausted, and walked with great difficulty, but the open country, the silence, and the altitude enabled them to imagine themselves proceeding without effort, as if they were rising and falling, driven by the wind, across the smooth swells of a ribboned and color-banded sea. After their encounter with the returning farmers they had neither seen nor heard a single soul. The route had been sufficiently remote to render towns and villages silent and motionless but for the blinking of a light or the slow-paced climb of a pillar of coal smoke into an azure infinity that quickly erased it.
They had had hours of leaden movements and pounding hearts, and hours of flight, but in memory it all seemed the same, for the line they had made was mainly behind them now, and they hadn't far to go. Nicolò had walked long past the fork in the road where he was to have turned toward Sant' Angelo, and before dawn he and Aless
andro had halted on a hill that overlooked Monte Prato.
The road curved left and then back to the village by way of rocky shelves in the hills, but if you were to descend to the floor of the valley, cross the river, and go up again, you would come to the church and the piazza directly, after passing rows of olive trees, and stone walls, and through fields in which sheaves of silver-blond hay stood like dispersed infantrymen.
"Aren't you going to take the road?" Nicolò asked.
"No."
"You'll have to go all the way down and then climb up."
"Isn't that what I've been doing?"
"But you're here. Why risk your heart when you've made the journey? You complained that it was skipping."
"I didn't complain."
"You said it was skipping."
"It was."
"The road is easy," Nicolò said.
Alessandro snapped his head in an almost leonine gesture of impatience. "The sun won't rise for two hours. I'll rest here."
"How do you feel?" Nicolò asked, fearful and solicitous.
Alessandro sat down on a smooth rock that jutted from a wave in the hill, and leaned back until his head rested on soft grass. "I remember from my own youth," he said, addressing the sky as much as the boy beside him, "the reason for such a question. You think that an old fellow like me has lakes of blood pressing against dams of paper, don't you. If I take a step the wrong way, or choke a little on my food, or hear that Octavian prevailed at Actium ... bang! The dam bursts, everything inside ruptures, I'm dead."
"I didn't mean that, Signore."
"You must have. Compared to you, I'm a wishbone. I remember the way I was."
"You're not so delicate, not after what you've been through."