In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  It is my story. It’s the story I want to tell, said Zafar.

  Zafar never finished telling it, but I found it later in his notebooks, where, he’d said, I could read it if I wanted. I don’t know what to make of it.

  I have rather regretted interrupting him. For one thing, it would have been another kind of story to hear it from his own lips, though I’m inclined to think his memory would not have conjured all its detail. But I have assuaged my regret with the thought that if I do not consider the story a piece of the highest sentimentalism, then perhaps it is because in the end it went unsaid, unspoken, as if it were something that remained where it ought to have remained, as if its proper home was the privacy of that recess where decent men tend lost love.

  I think now that he was right: He said that it was his story and it was the story he wanted to tell. It seems obvious to me now that every story belongs to its teller. So I include the passages from the relevant notebook here and let them speak for themselves.

  13

  Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni

  If there is any substitute for love, it’s memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.

  —Joseph Brodsky, “Nadezhda Mandelstam: An Obituary”

  Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God, a spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost depth? Yet it is a faculty of my soul and belongs to my nature. In fact I cannot grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside itself and not within? How can it not contain itself? As this question struck me, I was overcome with wonder and almost stupor. Here are men going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movement of the stars, yet leaving themselves unnoticed.

  —Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X, “Memory,” translated into German by Romano Guardini and from the German into English by Elinor Briefs

  Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.

  —James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

  Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni was born in 1942 in a village four hours by mule from the town of M___, in a part of Italy where the spoken language is neither Italian nor German but shows the influences of both. Alessandro’s birth came nine months and two weeks after a day in June when an ill-disciplined division of Heeresgruppe C of the German Wehrmacht swept through the village, an incursion that caused a degree of embarrassment in those quarters of Italian society which had enthusiastically supported Mussolini’s alliance with Germany.

  Alessandro’s mother died three days after what was by all accounts a terrible labor. It was this mother who might have kindled in little Alessi the fire of the Jewish faith but, as it was, her death cleared the way for the Catholic nuns of Our Lady of Modena, in the village school, whose influence found no resistance in the decreased Iacoboni household. The boy’s father, having barely tolerated his wife’s superstitions and now embittered by the cruelties of war, believed that the God of Abraham, far from deserving of Jacob’s esteem, warranted a good hiding. He would leave Alessi in the care of the good sisters of the Savior, while the villagers attended Sunday mass, and he would make the journey to M___ in order to replenish the stock. Signor Iacoboni was the village grocer.

  Young Alessandro might have fallen by the wayside but for that propitious combination of wit and good luck that furnishes as good an account of how a life came to be, such as it was, as is likely ever to be found. At root, an inquisitive nature directed the boy to make capital of his schooling, despite the torments of children (blame for whose racial animosities must be laid at the doors of their parents). His humiliations do not bear repetition, and Alessandro himself, with no mother to soothe him, consigned each episode to the vaults of memory no sooner than they had occurred, throwing the key away, so to speak. In so doing, he grew to believe himself possessed of unusual mastery over his memory.

  Away from the classroom, Alessandro helped his father in the shop, but his persistent questions drove his father to distraction. Why, Father, do we have snow shovels in the summer and why are they on show outside? So that when the snow comes, no one will say that we’ve hiked the prices in winter. Why do you bring back so much copper sulfate with you every time you go to M___? Don’t we have a lot in the back already? So that when the time comes there will be enough. When the time comes for what, Father? They use it on the vineyards to protect the grapes. Protect them from fungus and disease. What’s fungus? And so it went on, questions of all kinds. Why do so many animals have four legs? Why not three? Old Nico says the moon can move the ocean. Do you agree, Papa?

  His father would inevitably tire, sending Alessi out, which rather suited Alessi, who spent many a happy hour under the hazels, in the vineyards and terraces, under the lime blossom or in the bracken or the reed beds around the watercourses, reading or making up stories, stories of every kind, stories told to a woman he imagined, whom he called My Mama, and when he picked apart plants, to her he described everything he saw. He spied on the peasants and watched old Nico tending his vegetable garden and he learned. In books, too, he found plants, books he came upon at school or books lent to him by the village mayor, a Communist, who, between arranging favors for kinsmen and party faithful, felt moved, it is not hard to imagine, to assist the least of the village (who happened also to own the grocery). Alessi learned how to graft, and there was once an apricot tree that stood for three decades that the child Alessi himself had grafted onto the plum. He saw a picture of a mango in a book, was puzzled to read that mangoes do not grow true to themselves, and looked anew with astonishment at this earth that sprouted such varied fruits.

  Word of this peculiar boy circulated, and one day, in Alessi’s twelfth year, his father received a visitor from the household of the Contessa Sylvia di Cossano, the lights of whose eponymous hamlet Alessi had seen through the aspens on clear nights as a nest of stars on the black hills. The emissary explained that her ladyship kindly requested to meet the boy so that his future might be considered. The conclusion was foregone. Alessi was installed in a boarding school in M___, where he would see his father on the grocer’s weekly visit. The boy had not yet the maturity to see that his father’s unhesitating acceptance of the contessa’s proposition marked only what the man had long known: The road leading out of the village had been beckoning his child from the boy’s first utterances. In due course, Alessandro earned a scholarship to study medicine in the university in Bologna. Three days after arriving in the grand city, the young man received word that his father had died.

  Although it is true that in the life of Iacoboni, we have few sources upon which to draw, something may be said of it nonetheless, and here the opportunity arises to make a point of more general application. Autobiography, we know, is flawed from the moment the nib of the pen touches the parchment, flawed because it begins and ends with an unfinished work, and flawed because its author himself is the victim of the most cunning deceptions. (It may be argued that the only lives to follow a form with meaning are those of suicides.) But we may go further, for there is a wisdom abroad holding that the records of a life, as drawn on in the course of a biographer’s work, for instance, can illuminate the whole of it, as if the penumbras of light shed by each fragment overlap to cover the entirety, when no reservation is made for the possibility, only too real, that episodes in the course of a life there may be, whose bearing,
in the final analysis, far exceeds the barely traceable mark, if any, which they might leave on even the most extensive record. It may even be the case that the bearing of such episodes escaped the sensibilities of the subject himself. Rescue from stalling altogether before the darkness comes only when we accept that we may enter into the void a counsel of honest speculation, brokered by goodwill and the search for the truth. We can only imagine and, with an attitude of respect, are entitled to do so.

  At the age of twenty-three, just two weeks after taking his final exams and before the results were known, Alessandro read a story in an unremarkable student literary journal. In the years to come, had Alessandro been asked to proffer an interpretation, he would have replied that there was nothing of note in the tale; he might have tendered only vague impressions, he might have mentioned that it had a maudlin turn, that it suffered, perhaps, from the overwriting of impatient youth, but as for its details Alessandro would have been able to relate almost nothing. That he would remember the story at all can be put down to a single phrase, a phrase in its opening passage, which, having been laid within him like some spirit, would be born again and again in the months and years to follow, though with his own name substituted for the long-forgotten and finally insignificant original one: In the hour of his death, Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni would cry out for his mother. When he read the tale, one May morning in the library of the university, he could not have foreseen that this phrase, this ordered collection of words, was to command his life in ways he could not have expected, that he would be seized by the fear of yet another substitution, another name, though not for his own. Nor could he know that in the years to follow, the meaning of the phrase, ringing in his ears, would itself be changed by his life.

  In 1967, Alessandro’s career as a physician and scientist began apace, full of promise, and it was blessed in its very first years by a chance scientific discovery made possible by his diligence, for Fate, as Louis Pasteur, another notable physician but of an earlier age, remarked, favors the prepared mind. In those days, Alessandro received several minor awards, which marked him out for future reference. Alessandro made the world his home, he traveled widely, and he steeped himself in the culture of each new place, coming even to dream in its native tongue. Alessandro made friends easily, though some might have said not very deeply.

  His scientific and medical reputation grew. He kept meticulous notes of all his consultations, regarding each patient, to use a current phrasing, as a human being first but also as the potential hope for others through what might be learned from his or her ailments. He was considered reliable so that more and more he came to be relied upon.

  Then Alessandro fell in love. In March of 1972, he attended an academic symposium in the heart of Vienna, not far from the Staatsoper, at which symposium he delivered a creditable paper and impressively fielded an array of questions, but from which he quietly slipped away before the conclusion of the day’s proceedings, being somewhat worse for wear, having arrived in the city only that morning by overnight train from Paris. Alessandro wandered across the Opernring and into the Kunsthistorisches Museum, with only the modest expectation of emptying his mind in preparation for the effort of the symposium dinner.

  He idled through its halls, and while he barely took in any of the museum’s considerable collection of masterpieces, he nonetheless gained an advantage from the restorative effect of the ambience. He was searching for a sign showing the way out, when he turned a corner and was brought to a standing stop by what he saw. The painting was by the Italian late-Baroque painter Luca Giordano, and, as Alessandro would observe after emerging from his stunned regard, its subject was precisely as its title attested: The Expulsion of Lucifer from Heaven.

  Facing the image of Lucifer, Alessandro was overcome by sadness. As if before Alessi alone in the hall, the archangel Michael, Lucifer’s own brother but instrument of God’s will, thrust Lucifer down, casting him (whose name signifies light itself) from the illumination of heaven into the darkness of exile. Notwithstanding an epic assembly of detail, including, for example, demons and devils scattering and falling, it was the face of Lucifer that arrested Alessandro’s eye, the exile’s upturned head, the arched muscles of the neck straining like a drawn bow, the jugular taut as wire. Above all were those eyes, knives of blue, Lucifer pleading with St. Michael, begging for the mercy of a God whose mercy was spent.

  It is tempting to think that in those moments Alessandro remembered the story of Joseph that he learned at the nuns’ feet, Joseph, whose brothers drove him into the desert but who was restored to the fold and whose father rejoiced to see him again. Might Lucifer one day be reconciled with his father in heaven? The Lucifer whom Giordano presented to Alessandro bore no hubris but only the anguish of leaving home and losing love. Was this how evil entered the world? If it was pride that exiled Lucifer from heaven, then surely it is sorrow that fired his hatred.

  Stumbling out into the gardens of the museum, Alessandro came upon a secluded café, where, beneath the linden trees, setting down his hat and uncoiling his scarf, he took off his glasses, and, leaning his elbows on the table, buried his face in his hands and wept. If there had been anyone watching at the time—and there was—such witness might have supposed he was merely massaging his eyes, for Alessandro did not let out a sound, nor did he shake, but instead his tears pooled in the interstices between his eyes and palms. It is observed parenthetically that although Alessandro was never prone to cry, it is a fact that within the week he would cry once more.

  Duly, which is to say centuries later, he recovered himself, ordered an espresso from the waiter, and put on his glasses. As his coffee was set before him, Alessandro caught the gaze of a woman at the next table. She was, in his instant conviction, unapproachably beautiful, but, having perhaps been shaken free by his crying of some of those social restraints in himself, which he reviled, Alessandro offered to the woman, with such alacrity as to deny the possibility that the utterance was an act of courage, these words issued with measure and poise: The daffodils are early this spring. The woman laughed with pleasure.

  Alessi was overcome with longing of a kind he had never felt before. An account of the outward appearance of this woman might be considered appropriate here, a mention of porcelain or roseblush skin, for instance, but a moment’s reflection is enough to remind us that the evocation of the sublime to one man might to another stand merely as the image of plain beauty. Indeed, let us take direction from language: The (Italian) word vago means vague, but an appropriately remote meaning connotes beauty and grace. It is wisdom itself, therefore, to refrain from describing the woman and to let the imagination, which is the true and only expert in this field, do its work. Alessi, who had never considered himself courageous, watched his own body rise from its seat, the cup of coffee, scarf, and hat in his hands, and walk to the woman. For him, it is not too fanciful to suggest, this sequence of acts amounted to a private heroism.

  The two lovers spent a week in Vienna, most of it in the room of a hotel (or, to dispense with all vestige of delicacy, in the bed of their hotel room), where the elegance of its appointment was exceeded only by the cultivated discretions of the staff in the face of their guests’ private lives. How is it possible, Alessi asked himself, that another human being’s body can so convincingly seem an extension of one’s own? As she lay there in the mornings, Alessi watched patches of dawn’s searching light find her form. Alessi noted the stark absence of reason in the room, the bond without explanation, the inadequacy of all he knew to account for this, and as he watched her rub her eyes and smile at him, he understood that his life now contained two domains, science and love; that the two domains were divided not by reason, for even science makes claims about love, but were divided because suddenly subjectivity had borne in on him and he would not ever care for the science of love. When he had never before considered if science was necessary, never posed the question, here and now the answer came; here and now he believed that in this it was not.

>   Vienna sang in a whirling haze about the two lovers. They visited Stephansdom, and were each charmed, above all else, by the sound of the other’s footsteps on the stone floor. They bought the most expensive tickets at the Staatsoper—the only ones still available—where they had scarcely heard the overture to … well, it does not matter, for they slipped away at the interval and hastened to their room. Alessandro felt an urgent charge running through him, a positive need to be inside her, to make love over and over.

  In the evenings, they stepped out for dinner and to walk under the soft lights of the city, while a cool breeze circled them. They entered a lingerie store, at her girlish urging, her arms extended and her two hands pulling on his. As she lifted various paltry items into the air about her, he felt not only lust drive through him but also what seemed like an equal yet opposite force of tenderness.

  One evening they passed a concert hall. The poster declared that P___ would be performing Mozart. As the strings in the orchestra finished tuning against the piano, Alessi felt her hand grip his. He looked at her, but her eyes were fixed straight ahead. Presently a hush fell over the hall and then, emerging from the canopy of silence, a single oboe broke through, “Gran Partita.” As the oboe made its lofty way through the air, Alessandro’s soul was so moved it went seeking something to cry for. Later, he would not remember having cried. She squeezed his hand again, and this time she was looking at him. She rose from the seat and, despite the reproachful Viennese faces, the two hunched figures squeezed past the knees of their neighbors. At the hotel she made love to him and afterward, holding him in her arms, she kissed his lips as Helen might have kissed Achilles’ heel.