by Mark Helprin
A BIRD had begun to sing in a smooth slow warble that came before the first hint of dawn and yet long after the night songs had ceased. Alessandro would have been content merely to listen, but Nicolò was impatient, and pressed for more. "What about Fabio?" he asked.
"What about him? I watched him die. They put his body on a wooden cart and sent it, the perfectly formed face and entrancing blue eyes, the flesh that women loved to touch with their fingers and their mouths, to hold, to run their limbs against it so they could feel perfect and loved and like something light that was made of silk, something that could float on the wind, and they knew it, I am sure, tumbling into the grave.
"The grave-diggers had many men to bury, and they didn't lay them out gently. They tossed them in, hunched up, with limbs tangled and hands an unnatural distance from the body, to be caught and pressed in the earth as if in amber."
"Did you try to see his family?"
"No. No. I hadn't the strength to seek out any but Guariglia's family. I had my own life, my own troubles. Fabio undoubtedly had someone, but God's gift to him was himself. He spent everything up front, and, given what happened, perhaps he was right. When he was gone, he was gone. We loved him because he was, in his vain way, so wonderfully stupid. When I think of him, I always smile, which I am sure is what he would have wanted."
"What about Orfeo?"
"Do you want me to tie up every loose end in my life for you?"
"I just want to know. You told me about these people. You said it never ends: I want to know what happened."
Alessandro was still. Then he raised his hand, as if to say, Wait. He had long been sitting up on the ledge, having risen from a position of rest, and when he hesitated Nicolò thought that he was going to lie back and rest again, but, instead, he spoke.
"Look," Alessandro said, "lets not fool around. I'm going to die today, this morning. The walk was too great a strain on my heart. While I try to rest, it struggles on in exhaustion, and I can't control it. It thunders inside me, and seems arrhythmic. Within my chest are hollow spaces like bubbles of air. I can neither calm it down nor stop the pain."
"I'll run to the village to get an ambulance," Nicolò said, his body tensing as he began to stand. Alessandro could see that Nicolò was eager to run.
"I don't want an ambulance. I want you to sit down and shut up."
"But Signore, an ambulance could take you to a hospital. They could help you."
"I don't want to die in a hospital."
"You wouldn't! You'd live!"
Alessandro closed one eye. "I don't want to be alive in a hospital, either."
"You'd rather die outside? On the ground?"
"I've always loved being outside, on the ground. The ground has been my salvation. Sitting here under the stars makes me feel as if I have a place, as if I'm doing right, as if this is where I was intended to be. So you just shut up, please, and let me continue."
Nicolò sank back, half in dejection.
"I'm going to die today, I think, so I can tell you. I never told anyone: neither my wife nor my son. I never told a priest. I had planned to confess it, but every time I thought of it I smiled, so I didn't think I'd get very far in the confessional. They don't like it when you laugh at your sins, and I always do, goddamn me, though it's what has kept me alive. Maybe I shouldn't tell you. Who said I'll die today?"
"You did."
"Who knows? What if I don't?"
"I won't tell anybody."
"And if you did?"
"So what?"
"My idea of a graceful retirement does not encompass six or seven years of hearings and depositions."
"You told me everything else," Nicolò said, sounding injured.
"I haven't scratched the surface."
"There's a statute of limitations."
"How do you know about that?"
"Where I come from is different from where you come from."
"Swear not to tell."
"I swear."
"People say things, and then they lapse, but, between your oath and my health, I think I can tell you. I murdered him."
"Orfeo?"
"Orfeo."
"I don't believe you."
"But you want to hear the story anyway."
"Yes."
"EVEN NOW, at seventy-four years of age, I can't get the war out of my blood. It was too strong a thing—never had anything been like it. I dream of the war more than I dream of the present or of my youth. It is the essential condition to which I always return and refer. Should I slip, it is where I will fall; should I weaken, it is where I will rest.
"All the churches in the world, with their candles flickering in the cool air, and all the masses and all the fugues can't do it justice. My haunting and repetitive dreams receded only after twenty years, and only because my time was over and my son went to take my place at the front.
"What is war, that rolls through history and is more terrible than death, but in whose folds life is vitally compressed more than in the most glorious peace?
"I have never seen anything more riveting than a mountain division, roped in a thousand teams, moving at night, each man with his light, like strings of paper lanterns floating up a glacier half obscured by clouds in a lake of black. It was a whole city of men, moving silently upon the enemy at three in the morning in a place that had hardly felt a footstep since the world began. I remember them rising, their lights swaying, the ice faintly illuminated by the lantern beams from the candles and mirrors on their helmets. The south face of the ice-clad mountain glittered as they walked across it.
"And the cavalry, whether Austrian or our own ... Even the coarsest men were moved by the sight of a thousand riders trotting into line. When the line wheeled on a point and began to charge, hearts stopped in amazement, and the clock of the world was started as if for the first time. Did you ever see a merchant snap an abacus back to zero? As a cavalry charge gains momentum, all registers return to the starting point, and life begins anew.
"I dreamed of these things. I could not rid my mind of them. They had their own life, their own logic. War cannot be explained in the terms of the world we know, but as it moves through all we know, it does so with impunity and surprise.
"In the years immediately following the Armistice, I and millions of others were still caught up in the battles just finished. The war had ended, but not for us, not at least for those foolish enough to struggle in making some sense of it—of whom I was certainly one. I now attribute my vain desire to my education, which had instilled in me the splendid and reckless belief that everything can be explained.
"The way I saw it, then, and to some extent still see it, is that war is a separate world to which some are born, and some are not. Guariglia, for example, was not."
"And what about you?"
"I was born to be a soldier," Alessandro said, "but love pulled me back. It made what could have been an effortless passage sometimes unbearably difficult. I understood my reticence, and I banished it in time to save my life. It came, and it went. Luck brought it to me at the right times, and luck allowed me to cast it aside when it would have killed me.
"Some had no ambivalence whatsoever. Any soldier of the line can spot them immediately, the ones born for war. I certainly could, since they and I had sprung from the same root.
"My son was given to me full blown, whole, as if from nothing, the most beautiful child I had ever seen, my own. At first I despaired that he should live as I had, and then, eventually, I was re-signed to it, as I had to be, for he never came back. He is the reason that I exhaust myself with all these questions, and cannot die in peace. He and the others are the reason I have vainly fought for an opening into another world. I cannot trade that unlikely chance for happiness in this life, because I remember too well those who have fallen. I keep myself on edge—though, all these years, I have done it indirectly, and saved immediate recollection for the very last, both to honor it and to preserve it forever."
"I don't understand."
"You don't have to. Just listen to the story.
"Orfeo—that little Italian ballroom dog, that bent and extraordinary creature, had hardly been born for war, but he had gone over to the camp of those who were. He gave up his sanity so his obsessions could flow within him without resistance and elevate him to a plane of tremendous power, power that, only because he was comical, appeared accidental. It wasn't. I knew him well enough to have seen his madness fuse irrevocably with the spirit of war.
"I was desperate to protect my son. And I myself was still a little mad. I regretted that I hadn't killed Orfeo in the toilet stall. He was the one who assigned Rafi to the Cima Bianca. He was the one who assigned me. He assigned us all. The evil was not in the steel, but in the paper, and that little son of a bitch knew it and gave in completely."
"So what did you do?"
"I killed him."
"You killed him?"
"To protect my son, and other sons, and other babies. To protect all the babies in Italy."
"But it didn't."
"I was unable to see into the future."
"How did you do it?"
"Although I had killed men in trenches and redoubts and among the trees, I had never killed in cold blood. The difference is stupendous. It is nearly impossible for a sane person to drive a bayonet through the chest of another human being if he is defenseless and still. In bayonet training throughout the world, the soldier who wields the bayoneted rifle is ordered to scream as he drives the blade through. Civilians assume that the cry is meant to terrify an opponent, but it isn't. It's meant to allow you to bridge your natural reluctance to push a long blade into a living human being, and to cover the horrible sound of steel cutting into flesh and bone. As dreadful as is the task, should your enemy be coming at you, you accomplish it so readily and remorselessly that, how can I describe it? It seems no more difficult or disturbing than, say, lighting a match.
"I knew I could never kill Orfeo in cold blood. I would have to provoke him, but I could not imagine how."
"You could call him names."
"He was names. It would only have flattered him."
"You could push him, poke him. That would make him angry."
"It would have made him go limp."
"You could challenge him to a duel."
"He was a half-blind, fat, old midget with palsies and ticks. He would have laughed."
"Then how did you do it?"
"You won't believe me."
"Yes I will," Nicolò protested.
"No you won't, but it's true.
"First, I had to find him. I went to the enormous room in the Ministry of War where Orfeo had been seated on a platform above the other scribes. It was empty save for regimental flags hanging from the walls, and the platform was gone.
"A fat little guy in an office down a hall saw me and kept calling out, 'You! You!' and waving for me to come to him. 'I saw you in there looking amazed,' he said. 'You must have been here when the war was run from that room.' I nodded. 'Now it's a marching hall for new recruits who have to wait to go to training camp. Who the hell would join the army now that the war's over?'
"'The smart ones,' I said.
"'It's a little like coitus interruptus, isn't it?'
"'Some people can't help it if they're young,' I told him."
"What's coitus interruptus'?" Nicolò asked.
"Coitus is having sex," Alessandro said, "and interruptus is when, suddenly, you're not."
Nicolò laughed out loud. "Why would anyone want to interruptus?"
"Why do you think?"
"I don't know. It sounds really stupid to me. Why stop if you've started? Why start if you're going to stop? I thought that in sex it was a gradual stop, like a duck landing in a pond."
"Yes, but can you think of a reason why you would stop at a certain point?"
"No."
"Think hard."
"A holiday?"
Alessandro scowled.
"I don't know! What do you want from me? I'd die to have sex. All right. Some people stop in the middle. Boom! That's their problem. I don't even want to talk to them. Get them out of here. It's as stupid as joining the army after the war."
"What about babies?"
"What about them?"
"Having them."
"Having them what?" Nicolò asked in exasperation.
"Having them be born."
"What about them?"
"Maybe that's a good reason to stop immediately."
"So you'll have a baby?"
"No, idiot! So you won't!"
"I don't understand."
Alessandro sat up straight. "How is it you think babies are born?"
"Something the mother and father do before sex, some sort of cloth or herb or hard-boiled egg that the father puts in the mother or something, with a rubber bulb and a glass dish."
"No," Alessandro said. "That's not quite it."
"No?"
"No. You just have to have sex—if you're married, fifty times; if you're not married, once."
"You're kidding!"
"I'm not kidding."
"I thought it was something additional."
"Nothing additional."
"That's good to know," Nicolò said, "because, you know, I might have—you know."
"You see how insane the world is, Nicolò? No matter that it is unbearably beautiful. How would I have guessed that during my last hours I would sit on a rock in the starlight, in mountain laurel, explaining sexual hygiene to an apprentice in a propeller factory."
"Well now I know."
"Good."
"But what about Orfeo?"
"What about Orfeo? The fat guy kept talking. 'Remember the hundreds of men who sat at desks in there?' he asked. I said I did. 'Every order and communiqué of the war went through them, and if you promise not to tell, I'll let you in on something that will really amaze you.'
"'What?' I asked, pretending ignorance.
"'Not a single order or communiqué ever left the way it came in. If the dispatch said Advance twenty kilometers, wheel right until enemy is engaged and hold position on flank as main attack is developed from the south, it might go out reading, Advance fifteen kilometers, wheel left, and move position according to necessity as feints are developed from the east.
"'Or a naval order. The coordinates would be reversed, ship types changed. I swear to God, Italian ships were sent to Polynesia, and, somehow, Japanese ships ended up in the Mediterranean. Do you know how many men were shot who weren't supposed to have been shot? How many weren't shot who were supposed to have been? I don't know how the army ate. Every gram of army cinnamon was shipped one day to an anti-aircraft battery in Treviso. That's all they had to eat for the whole war—twenty-two and a half tons of cinnamon, and no one else had even a sprinkle. An infantry battalion on the French border kept on getting boxcars and boxcars full of pipe tobacco, and there was a cruiser, I swear, that for several years received nothing but anchovy paste.'
"I told the fat guy that what he described sounded to me like a fair description of what life had been like in the army, and I asked him why, if he knew about it then, he didn't try to stop it.
"He said that he had tried, that he had gone to generals and civilian officials and told them, but that they had said, 'So what? We're winning.'
"We did win, Nicolò, but we lost at least seven hundred thousand killed, and many times that number were wounded. Commissions were formed to determine the number of casualties, but because the record keeping had been so chaotic they couldn't agree even to the nearest hundred thousand. No one knows how many died. Maybe a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand fell in between the cracks, disappeared. The loss of a single man should have stopped the world.
"I asked him why it was that the orders were changed, and he replied, 'A dwarf, a little bat-like thing whose name was Orfeo Quatta. He sat on a dais in the middle of the floor. He was the chief scribe. To his clerks he was Caesar Augustus.'
"'Wasn't he r
emovable?'
"The little fat guy smiled. 'In his safe he had the seals, the forms for patents, commissions, proclamations, declarations, and decrees. He set up a government within the government—by moving the decimal points in appropriations and salaries, sending his speechless enemies to tiny towns in Calabria, and rewarding sycophants with sinecures.
"'He had fits of madness and megalomania upon the dais, as the scribes, their heads bent in terror, pretended not to hear.'
"I talked to the little fat guy for a long time. He told me that everyone wanted to kill Orfeo, that it was a common fantasy. 'But no one killed him,' he said, 'just the way you never get to caress the most beautiful woman in the world.'
"'The most beautiful woman in the world always finds a lover, doesn't she?' I asked. Of course, he had to say yes. Then I said, 'Someone there is, always, who does manage to touch her.'
"'Yes.'
"'Then,' I said, 'someone must have killed Orfeo. Or someone will.'
"'No,' he said, 'no one ever did.'
"'How was he removed?'
"'The war ended. It was just like letting the water out of a tub.'
"'Where did he go?'
"The next morning, I went there, too. He lived in a cave dug into the base of the Testaccio."
"What's the Testaccio?" Nicolò asked.
"You know where the pyramid is?"
"Yeah, in Egypt."
"No. I mean the one in Rome."
"There's a pyramid in Rome?"
"Did you ever go to Ostia?"
"Yeah."
"How?"
"On the train."
"You didn't see the pyramid across the street from the train station?"
"That thing?"
Alessandro bobbed his head extra hard, so Nicolò would see his answer even in the dark. "What did you think it was?"
"I thought they were building something and hadn't put on the other side."
"No. It's a pyramid. Just down the street, beyond the Protestant Cemetery, is a big hill called the Testaccio. It's made of broken amphorae that were used as ballast on ships that docked in the Tiber. They knew they would dam the river if they kept dropping the pieces into it, so they made a mound. The district is also home to the Mattatoio, and to those who are so poor that they cannot even sit on the street in other parts of the city, lest other people be unsettled in their vanity and dreams of rank. You and I and everyone else are a snap of a finger away from the derelicts with sparkling eyes and blackened skin who stumble forward knowing that they'll be gone in a week or two. The only difference now between me and them is that I'm clean and I can talk."