Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  “See it, and it is yours,” he had said in Italian to the little boy, carrying him from one window to the next, and guiding his eye over the hills, bay, and ocean. “Look there,” the father had said, pointing at distant hills the color of mustard and gold, “they are like the pelt of the spotted beast. Look how they roll. Look at the muscle under their lively backs.”

  Outside, the fog and clouds were invading armies which swept in ragged determined lines and flying wings of devoted cavalry to surround the city and outflank the bay. They rushed past and almost buried everything with their pointed and trembling peaks, but still there was a crown of blue above the mountains, so that the light in the study was pure and deep. Light that was predominantly ultraviolet, purple, and blue washed over Hardesty’s face, and over the salver, which glistened like something unearthly.

  As if he were moving under water, he slowly approached the massive table where the salver had been left by his father as casually as if it had been a dish from the kitchen. The Marrattas believed that the salver was protected. It had survived wars, fires, earthquakes, and thieves, who, like Evan, seemed not to want it. Hardesty wondered how his brother could have refused such a miraculous thing, for in the cloud-buffeted sun it shone in a hundred thousand colors, all subsumed in gold and silver. Seamless rays arose from it in a solid thicket, radiating in blinding beauty from the words engraved around the rim, meeting the others above the center, and plunging downward to illuminate the primary inscription.

  The light on Hardesty’s face went from violet and blue to gold and silver. He felt its warmth, and saw again the inscriptions—four virtues, and one seductive and promising sentence suspended in their midst as if it were the hub of a wheel. Many times, his father had taken him to read them, insisting that they were the most important things he could have, and implying with a sharp dismissive gesture of hand and arm that wealth, fame, and worldly possessions were worthless and demeaning. “Little men,” he once said, “spend their days in pursuit of such things. I know from experience that at the moment of their deaths they see their lives shattered before them like glass. I’ve seen them die. They fall away as if they have been pushed, and the expressions on their faces are those of the most unbelieving surprise. Not so, the man who knows the virtues and lives by them. The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn’t matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we may stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God.”

  When Hardesty’s mother had died, when he had gone to war, when he had come back, and at all other times of grief, danger, or triumph, his father had made sure that he had gone to the salver. He could almost see his father in front of him, turning the golden tray in his hands. Signor Marratta first read the silvered inscriptions in Italian, and then translated. A foreign language enjoys the benefit of the doubt in much the same way that marriages between those who speak different tongues allow a gentleness and tolerance untouched by destructive wit. For example, a Japanese kitchen maid might easily mix with the stiffest of the English beau monde, for they would not be able to use her language as a handle with which to throw her out. The same with the virtues when recited in Italian. They were in no way overbearing, or the stock-in-trade of schoolmasters and ministers, so Hardesty accepted them the way he might never have accepted them in his own language.

  “La onestà, honesty,” was the first, never properly valued, Signor Marratta had said, until one must lose a great deal for its sake alone, “and then, it rises like the sun.” Hardesty’s favorite, even though it was the word about which his mother’s death seemed to revolve, and even though he associated it with tears more than with anything else, was “il coraggio, courage.” Next was one that he hardly understood—“il sacrificio, sacrifice.” Why sacrifice? Was it not a defunct trait of the martyrs? Perhaps because it was so rare, it was as mystifying to him as the last virtue (which almost bumped into “la onestà,” at the bottom of the plate), the most puzzling, the one least attractive to him as a young man, “la pazienza, patience.”

  But none of these qualities, hard to understand as they might have been, and even harder to put into practice, was half as mysterious as the pronouncement inlaid in white gold on the center of the plate. It was from the Senilia of Benintèndi, and Signor Marratta made sure early on that Hardesty knew it and would not forget. Now, after his father’s death, alone in a study that was at times high above the clouds, Hardesty picked up the gleaming salver and translated its inscription out loud: “‘For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.’”

  He repeated this to himself several times, and then put the salver into a pack that held everything he would take with him. A quick look at San Francisco from the tranquillity of the high and isolated study was all he needed to show him that this city—as stunning as it was—was not and would never be the seat of perfect justice, having no relation to it. It was a paradigm of soulless beauty—always cool, forever silent, asleep in blue—but it had nothing to do with justice, for justice was not so easy. Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived.

  As he walked out of his house for the last time, he realized that any guile and sophistication that he had learned was now gone from him forever. What if he were asked where he was going? What could he say? “I’m looking for the perfectly just city”? They would think he was a lunatic.

  “Where are you going, Hardesty?” Evan asked when Hardesty emerged from the house just as Evan was entering.

  “I’m looking for the perfectly just city.”

  “Yes, but where are you going?” Evan wanted Hardesty to guide him in his new responsibilities, and had decided to offer him a very large salary if the lawyers interpreted the will as allowing him to do so.

  “You wouldn’t understand. You always hated the plate. I always loved it.”

  “For Christ’s sake, what was it, anyway, some sort of a treasure hunt?”

  “In a way.”

  Evan began to get interested. He knew Hardesty was smart, and now he suspected that the plate was the key to El Dorado. “Have you got it?”

  “Right here.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “There it is,” Hardesty said, taking it out of his pack. He knew exactly what Evan was thinking.

  “What does it say? Can you translate?”

  “It says, ‘Wash me, I’m dirty.’”

  “Tell me what it says, Hardesty.”

  “I told you what it says, Evan.”

  “What are you going to do?” Evan asked, in desperation at being left.

  “I may be going to Italy, but I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not sure? How will you get there?”

  “I think I’ll walk,” Hardesty said, laughing.

  “Walk? You’re going to walk to Italy? Is that what the tray says?”

  “Yes.”

  “How? There’s water, there’s a lot of water. . . .”

  “Goodbye, Evan.” Hardesty began walking.

  “I don’t understand you, Hardesty,” Evan screamed. “I never did. What does the tray say?”

  “It says, ‘For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone,’” Hardesty shouted back. But Evan had already gone in to claim the house.

  A BRIDGEWORKER in medieval-looking gray coveralls stiff and dirty with orange paint did not understand why Hardesty, his passenger, trembled with emotion as they drove across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland. But it was clear to Hardesty, as they tunneled through a cool bank of mist and watched ships etching white tracks across the deep water below them, that he was going from one world to another.

  So great was the difference between San Franci
sco and its foghorns on islands in cold waters, and dusty Oakland, that they should have been separated not by seven miles and a bridge, but by seven thousand miles of sea. The shock of traveling between San Francisco and its numbing ultraviolets and Oakland and its dizzying sun enabled Hardesty quickly to revert to his army self. As the tollbooths disappeared behind him, he found that he was prepared to climb barbed-wire fences, hop freights, sleep on the ground, and cover fifty miles a day on foot. Leaving his emotions where he had shed them into the bay, he prepared to cross America and the Atlantic, with no money, a vague idea, and a golden plate. The heat on the Oakland side seemed to have started up within him sleek engines that had been silent since the war.

  He didn’t take long to find a good position behind some reeds on the bank of a railroad line running east. He lay there in the sun, his head on his pack, chewing a sprig of grass, until he heard the sound of traveling thunder. Squinting through the vegetation, he saw a lone engine coming down the track. Where the diesel exhaust rose above its black-and-yellow striped cabin (it looked like a huge motorized bee), the air wiggled like a bunch of springs, and six men in denim hung out from both sides in the fashion of circus acrobats on a horse. Everything went by with a roar, and Hardesty put his head back on the knapsack, content to wait. After falling in and out of sleep, he heard the unmistakable rumble of a multi-engined freight. Without even looking, he got himself ready: he didn’t need to look, for when the eight engines came along the rails, pulling two hundred cars, the earth shook and the reeds sang.

  Oil-covered water in a nearby ditch began to ripple and quiver. The first engine was as black as a gun, and had a yellow light glaring from the top as if it were the truth itself. Having just started out of the Oakland yards, it was beginning to pick up speed, straining to get going, and Hardesty could hear the sharp concussions of the couplers as they snapped into place to pull the hundreds of cars all the way down the line. Quite possibly there’s nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That’s when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots. The reeds and grasses on the hot mounds and in the ditches turned green with envy and begged to go along (which is why they waved when the train went by). The train itself promised a hundred thousand hot and lovely places filled with the noise of wind in the trees, easy summer in deep valleys, brown rivers, sparkling bays, and so much prairie that alongside it infinity would look like a tick.

  When Hardesty saw that a clean new gondola car was coming, he slung his pack and began to run alongside the train. The occasional stones that had rolled from the railbed onto the black loam path paralleling it dug into his feet through his shoes. Every now and then he would glance to his right to see if the gondola car was approaching. The second ladder moved into place. He put his right hand on it and felt it pulling him along. By the time his left hand had grasped hold, his legs were windmilling at a prodigious rate. Then he moved his right hand up a rung, jumped, and he was riding ahead, free. All in all, it was many times better a sensation than finding a hundred-dollar bill.

  Vaulting the low bulkhead, he fell onto planks of brand-new pine that smelled like a sunny forest in the Sierra. The bulkheads were high enough to keep out most of the wind (but not all of it) and hide him from view. He might not be able to see railroad detectives standing by the side of the track, but then again, they would not be able to see him. And he would be able to see the fields, the valleys, and the mountain ranges. He could stand up without fear of being decapitated by bridges and tunnels, pace back and forth, run around in circles, whoop, dance, and leave his pack in a corner knowing that, no matter how much the train lurched, the pack would not roll off into a field, never to be seen again. He wasn’t hungry, it was lovely weather, and he had the whole country before him. Not surprisingly, he began to sing, and because no one in the world could hear him, and he sang without inhibition, he sang well.

  The next morning, somewhere in the mountains near Truckee, while the train was moving slowly between hills of rock studded with straight pines, Hardesty paced the length of the gondola car, still happy, though, after a night on the boards, no longer elated. As the train labored up the grade, he realized how difficult his future was going to be.

  He had often jumped freights to go into the Sierra in rainless summers, but he had always had a home to which he could return. With that no longer true, he was beginning to get some idea of what it had been like for his father to desert a unit of Italian mountain troops that had been cutting itself down to nothing in the Dolomites, and make his way (as a fugitive) to the sea and finally to America.

  “For the first months,” Signor Marratta had said, “it wasn’t so bad. We spent most of the time building fortifications high on cliffs, and we could see the enemy only through our telescopes. But when our redoubts and theirs were finished, generals on both sides were compelled to order us to advance and fight. To me, this seemed ridiculous. We had been quite happy, up there in the mountains, until we began to get killed. I went to our maggiore, and said, ‘Why not a stalemate, a balance? Just because they’re killing each other on the plain doesn’t mean that we have to do it up here.’ He thought it was a splendid idea, but who was he? Rome wanted territorial gains. Our half-hearted sharpshooters began to shoot, our artillerymen stuffed the barrels of their fieldpieces and started their bombardments, and those of us unfortunate enough to have been alpinists had to trundle through the defiles and make dangerous ascents—so that we might suddenly appear two hundred feet above our unsuspecting adversaries, and shoot down at them. I left half a dozen good friends hanging lifeless on their mountaineering ropes a thousand feet high on sheer walls, because the enemy shot back. They used their cannon, in the most deadly and unpredictable flat trajectories, to burst apart the cliffs we were ascending. After a year of that, all I wanted was to live. Had I persisted in that struggle between armed chapters of the Italian and Austrian alpine clubs, you probably would not be here. Besides, you can now join either club and get reciprocal membership in the other.”

  But Signor Marratta had also had regrets about deserting. Both loyalty and responsibility often did justify the act of dying in place, and it was hard to rid himself of the feeling that he had made “the great refusal.” Hardesty thought that perhaps he himself had shirked his responsibilities when he chose the salver. But, as usual, his father had structured the question so that either choice would have brought him doubt. The doubt, his father might have said in characteristic Marratta fashion, would propel him to seek a far more thorough, adventurous, and valuable resolution than he would seek without it. “All great discoveries,” the elder Marratta had once said, “are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.”

  At that very moment, Hardesty was thrown with irresistible force to the floor of the gondola car. In the fraction of a second before he lost consciousness, he regretted that the boards seemed to be rising toward his face; he wondered what was on his back; and he feared that the car ahead had tumbled over and was in the midst of crushing him. Then he blacked out.

  When he awakened, he was lying with his face to the sky. Blood had clotted over his cheeks, he felt sore, and he discovered on the side of his head a gash as long as a caterpillar and at least as distinct. Then he noticed a creature squatting against the wall. Only by blinking, and clearing the blood from his eyes, could he see that it was a man who could not have been more than five feet tall, but who looked about two feet high because of the powerful muscle-bound way in which he was squatting. He was wearing a costume that, at first, Hardesty could not take in. Piece by piece, it was decipherable, but as a whole it was breathtaking and unbelievable. His shoes were big dollops of greasy black leather that looked like pomaded cannonballs—these Hardesty recognized as the most expensive mountaineering boots with many years of wear and a bear or two worth of grease. To fall in a river with shoes like that meant certain death. And if they were to catch fir
e they would burn for a month, even under water. He wore zigzagged edelweiss-design, purple-and-blue knee socks, cobalt blue knickers, rainbow suspenders, a violet shirt, and a pirate-style bandanna that was the same purple and blue as the knee socks but had a hypnotic pattern of red washed through it. His face was almost fully covered by a beard and perfectly round, rose-colored sunglasses. Two fingers were missing from his right hand, three from the left, he carried a bright blue day pack, and he wore a sling of mountain-climbing equipment that was the necklace of necklaces. It was dripping with silver carabiners, baubled with shiny climbing nuts, clanging with pitons, and festooned with two-dozen webbing runners of half a hundred fluorescent interwoven colors. Slung over his shoulder was an orange-and-black climbing rope, and he was chewing a piece of beef jerky as big as a notebook.

  “Sorry about that,” he said between chaws on the beef. “I jumped the train from a bridge and I didn’t see you. Thanks.”

  “Thanks for what?” asked Hardesty.

  “Cushioning my fall.”

  “What are you?”

  “What am I? What do you mean by that?”

  “What the hell are you? Am I dreaming you? You look like Rumpelstiltskin.”

  “Never heard of him. Does he climb in the Sierra?”

  “No, he doesn’t climb in the Sierra.”

  “I’m a climber. A professional. I’m on my way to the Wind Rivers, where I’m going to do the first solo of East Temple Spire. If I’m beartrap enough, I’ll do it at night. Boy, that was some landing. I’m glad that my rack and nuts are safe.”

  “Yes,” said Hardesty, “I, too, am glad that your rack and nuts are safe.”

  “That’s a bad gash you’ve got. You oughta put some Nandiboon on that.”