Septimania

by Jonathan Levi

  “Mmm,” Malory said.

  “Don’t worry,” the man said. “I’m not a biter. It’s just to give you a geographical idea of how fucked my part of Rumania is—fucked by the Ottomans, fucked by the Hungarians, the Austrians, the vampires, and, most recently, the Red Star Pioneers of the Soviet Union and its finger puppets, Monsieur and Madame Ceauşescu.” He handed the metal back to Malory. “I come from a place that has been scraped and bended, but is not exactly in tune.”

  Malory had little grasp of Eastern European history. But it occurred to him that the man’s voice itself was out of tune. In the months that had followed his discovery of Louiza and the Pip, Malory’s own internal tuning had become so acutely wired that he felt the need—like Charlie Chaplin with his spanners in Modern Times—to take his own bent piece of metal and tune the horns of cars, the cries of seagulls, the whistle of the wind, to tune the world. And the voice that came to him first from the organ case and now from beside him on the floor of the organ loft of Santa Maria sopra Minerva was out of tune in a way that was unsettling.

  “But you didn’t come here, I mean to Rome, for a tuning.”

  “Not exactly,” the man said, but this time he didn’t laugh. “Back in Rumania, I was a little bit of a big shot. Which means Ceauşescu let me direct Shakespeare and Chekhov three or four times a year, and I had enough friends in the Securitate to keep me tranquilized with Carlsberg and Camels.”

  “But you left.”

  “I left,” the man said, “because I followed La Principessa.”

  “La Principessa?” Malory asked. “Is she living inside the pipe case, too?”

  “Living?” the man looked full at Malory. “You think I am living there?” It seemed to Malory that he was on the verge of laughing, but something more painful arrested the impulse. “I only came up here to get a little sleep. La Principessa,” he continued, “at this moment is in the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, preparing to give birth.”

  “Congratulations,” Malory said, “I mean, I assume …”

  “That the baby is mine? I assume too,” the man said. “It is no consolation.” The man pulled himself standing and turned to face into the vacuum of the church. “I told her,” he said in a whisper mixed with a low bass undertone, “if it is a girl, you must give her away before I fall in love with her. If it is a boy, I will strangle it with my own hands.”

  “La Principessa is your wife?”

  The man pulled Malory to his feet.

  “You tune organs. You also play?”

  “Well …”

  “You will play something for me. Something for La Principessa and the baby.”

  Malory sat once more on the bench, the Rumanian beside him. Once again, he brought the little finger of his left hand down on the B-flat and introduced the theme of i = u, MALORY = LOUIZA, this time without interruption. Lucky Rumanian, Malory thought. In the seven months of absence, the seven months of searching, Malory had named not two, but three of the children he would have with Louiza. If he ever found her.

  But as he played, another note crept into the improvisation, a note that hadn’t been part of the melody in any of the many variations he had played over the past seven months. It was a low F-sharp, two octaves below middle C, a note that had its own force, its own gravity. The note came from a different scale, and added a discordant voice, especially when played with the toe of Malory’s left boot on the far reaches of the pedals. As surely as the Rumanian had taken his place on the bench next to Malory, so had the low F-sharp taken its place in the music. MALORY = LOUIZA was unimaginable without this note.

  Malory finished. His hands sat in his lap, his feet dangled from the bench. Only the whir of the motor for the bellows could be heard in the distance.

  “Tibor,” the man said softly. “My name is Tibor.”

  “Malory,” Malory managed to breathe, even though his lungs were exhausted.

  “Malory,” Tibor said, placing his large palm on Malory’s shoulder. “Malory, you saved me this morning.”

  “Saved you?”

  “Come with me to La Principessa and save my child.”

  Malory had left Cambridge and traveled to Rome against all reason, thrown himself across Europe with only the vague instructions in the letter from his grandmother and the dim light of a single afternoon’s memory of Louiza to guide him. He had spent a restless and ultimately torturous night in the very cell where Galileo had endured the worst of the Inquisition. And yet, at this very moment, with the touch of the man’s hand, with the touch of Tibor’s hand, all the pain in his neck and back, all the uncertainty about Louiza drifted away from his body and out the drafty walls of Santa Maria. Tranquility replaced terror.

  Tibor. Even the man’s voice changed with the sound of his name—Tibor. It came into tune, on that low F-sharp. That low F-sharp reminded Malory of another sound, a note he remembered from fifteen years before, a sleeping giant from the foothills of the Pyrenees, a note that Malory identified with a care and affection he had heard only a few times and long ago. In the organ loft, Malory felt that he had found someone who might take seriously his quest for the lost Louiza. Maybe, even, a friend.

  “Come, Malory,” Tibor said, and turned towards the door to the organ loft. Malory thought he should make an excuse. He had an organ to tune. There was an appointment with a lawyer, Signor Settimio—his grandmother’s letter had been vague. There were reasons why it made sense for Malory to stay in the organ loft of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and continue to do what he was doing before this Tibor appeared. Instead, Malory let himself be pulled by this new acquaintance, this new sensation. He stood up from the organ bench. He opened the flap of his Kit Bag, put the Universal Tuner back in its place, and swung it over his shoulder.

  But Malory had forgotten the 35-millimeter canister. At the moment he stood, either Malory knocked the Pip off the music stand of the organ or the Pip, of its own volition and magnetic charge, flew in search of the Kit Bag but miscalculated. Hitting the floor of the organ loft, the 35-millimeter canister rolled slowly along the tiles towards the opening of the balusters and off into the darkness below.

  “The Pip!” Malory’s shriek, louder than the first note that had awakened Tibor, louder than Tibor’s own awakening roar, echoed in the church, bounced off the stone columns and the painted chapels, off Michelangelo’s statue of Christ the Savior at the altar and the more pedestrian bulk of Cardinal Torquemada in the right nave, and performed a ski dive of an arabesque off Bernini’s funerary marble in the near apse in the tones of a crumhorn. As the highs and the lows settled, Malory leaned over the railing, searching into the black for an answering sound from the canister hitting the paving stones. But the echo that returned was in a softer pitch. It was a voice he remembered from another church, a voice he had never forgotten.

  “Malory?” Something moved below. “Malory?”

  Next to the tomb of the headless and thumbless Santa Caterina, a figure shifted in the dawn shadows and called his name again. Malory ran.

  The corkscrew of the spire of San Ivo unwound, the saucepan lid fell back onto the cauldron of the Pantheon. The colors of the rainbow drew themselves back off the wall of the tower into the white light of the sun to the clang of Malory’s footsteps—one, two, then four at a time—his ear and his heart harnessed to gravity in the singular desire to reach the ground floor of the church before that voice died away. Seven infinite months had passed since he had last heard it. But he had no doubt that, even through the confusion of his meeting with the giant Rumanian, the overturning of the 35-millimeter canister and the vacuum of the church, it was—

  “Louiza!” Breathing hard but not shrieking, Malory ran out of the door of the staircase and into the nave. Although he slowed down the panic of his legs, it took a moment for his blood to catch up with him. Here she is, Louiza, here in Rome, where he’d least expected. Here she is, oggi, risen from the tomb of Santa Caterina below the altar and sitting on the second pew to the right of the aisle, the positio
n Mrs. Emery took every week in a different church in a different time.

  Malory walked as calmly as he could, tugging at Kit Bag and lapel, conscious suddenly that his own unwashed and rumpled appearance might be important. Because something else was different, different about Louiza. Even in the dawn shadows, with his heartbeat searching for escape through his eyeballs, Malory could see how tightly Louiza’s cheeks clasped her face, the red at the edge of her lobeless ears, softened only by a fine pale down. The shadows of pre-Mass dawn draped a shawl of care around Louiza’s neck, as if all nourishment, all strength had leached away in the past months, flown south to sustain a fullness, a roundness of the belly that pressed to bursting through her gray jumper. Louiza was pregnant. Louiza. Pregnant.

  “I thought,” Louiza began.

  “I knew,” Malory continued, and then corrected himself, “or at least I think I knew.” Because although he had come to Rome in the trance of the instructions that his grandmother had left with the vicar, Malory knew that something was pushing him off course, as surely as it had pushed him off his bicycle on the towpath by the river. He had felt the same pull, the same gravitational tug that he had felt since arriving in Rome, since that March afternoon with Louiza in the organ loft of St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey. A pull he felt most strongly now, a pull he recognized that dropped him to his knees in adoration. He wanted to touch Louiza’s face, to pull her lips, swollen and chapped as they were, to his.

  “So …”

  Malory had forgotten the Rumanian.

  “Is this what you dropped?” Tibor held up the canister. Malory broke his gaze from Louiza’s belly and stood.

  “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “And this is your Principessa?”

  “Louiza,” Malory said, confused as always with introductions. “This is Tibor. I met him …”

  “So,” Tibor said, “you did not come to Rome just to tune an organ. Not exactly.”

  “What is that?” Louiza said, standing and reaching for the canister in Malory’s hand.

  “The Pip,” Malory answered. “Do you remember?”

  He knelt down beside Louiza in the narrow trough between the pew and the rail in front of it, and opened the lid and held the Pip between his thumb and his middle finger. And as he did, a magnetic force teased the fingers with the Pip closer to Louiza. A magnetic force that made resistance impossible, a magnetic attraction drew Malory’s hand towards Louiza’s belly and drew towards the Pip the unmistakable shape of another hand, a tiny hand from within Louiza’s belly, a hand that rose to press and touch the Pip.

  “Fututi pizda matii!” Tibor’s voice joined Malory’s amazement, but in a timbre more attuned to the phenomenon at the second pew to the right of the aisle in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The Pip was caught in a perfect intersection between Malory and Louiza and that tiny hand. Malory’s gaze floated up beyond Louiza to the dimly lit Madonna of Filippino Lippi’s Annunciation, the fresco he had seen in postcard miniature propped up against Antonella’s biscuit tin. Louiza was—there was no doubt about it—Malory’s pregnant Madonna. And Malory—and Tibor too, for that matter—would have stayed motionless in worshipful wonder of this Madonna if an unholy cry hadn’t, at that moment, erupted from Louiza’s mouth, accompanied by a splash of water on the paving stones of the church.

  “Malory!” she screamed, and fell into his arms, her teeth—fine and white and sharp—digging through the corduroy sleeve of his jacket as Louiza clamped down during the first contraction.

  Malory knew enough to know that Louiza was going into labor. He knew enough to know that there were better delivery rooms in Rome than the nave of Santa Maria. And he knew that it might have been easier for all concerned if Malory had led the way and his new friend, the giant Tibor, had provided the muscle and heft to the gasping weight of Louiza. But Malory also knew that his arms alone should wrap themselves around the back and thighs, should press Louiza’s damp hair beneath his chin and lift her up from the paving stones of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

  And yet the weight—

  “The Pip,” Louiza whispered into his ear as the contraction eased and her jaw released his jacket. “By your foot …” Sure enough, there on an uneven square of marble, illumined by the morning, the Pip glowed with anticipation of the journey. Malory bent to retrieve the shining seed.

  And mirabile dictu, with the Pip in its canister in his Kit Bag, Louiza’s body, sweating and panting in temporary relief, felt no heavier to Malory than a bottle of claret or Isaac Newton’s Principia as he followed Tibor towards the door out of the church and into the piazza.

  “Fatebenefratelli!” shouted Tibor, striding ahead. “We take your Principessa to meet my Principessa.”

  “Principessa?” Louiza mumbled into Malory’s left ear.

  “And maybe,” Tibor roared, “we save a few lives!”

  1/6

  HERE WERE MANY THINGS THAT LOUIZA WANTED TO SAY TO MALORY.

  It had been a long time since Louiza had spoken to anyone about anything. During her months by the river in Cambridge, she rarely saw the Cottagemates. The problems she picked up and the solutions she returned so occupied the many studies and corridors and niches of her mind that she was well-insulated against what her father called “the universal human need for conversation.” But the pull from the cottage to the church of St. George, the sight of Malory, first on the towpath by the Cam and then graveside with the vicar, the journey to Rome and the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva by train, plane—how and with what she could barely remember—the necessity of the trip as strong as the kick of life inside her, made Louiza realize that for months she had been holding mouthfuls of vowels and consonants for him, for Malory. As if she had been frightened that if she wasted these words in public conversation, she would lose the air in her lungs, the chords in her throat, the lift in her tongue, that special language only she and Malory shared that had first led her to talk about i and u in the dusty afternoon rays of the organ loft.

  There were many things that Louiza wanted to say to Malory.

  Not about the cottage, which was boring and, in any case, she couldn’t understand. Not about the Cottagemates either, or the change in the seasons along the river, or even the change in her own season.

  She wanted to tell him about the problems. Not the solutions, the problems.

  She had begun to feel, particularly in the past few months as her own secret had grown inside her, that she was seeing something, becoming aware, recognizing a pattern in the problems they were bringing her in the mornings, the problems that were left for her on the kitchen table.

  They were all problems about origins: equations about sources, about where things came from. Louiza knew, of course, from a life in the countryside of East Anglia, about chickens and eggs, about the grunts of sows birthing in straw and muck, about lambs born in forgotten ditches and discovered only after the thaw in the recovered memory of lone sheep. She knew that the movement inside her was generated by something more biological than a chance meeting one spring afternoon in the organ loft of a village church. She even knew something about the various theories of the origins of the universe, about the physical forces unleashed by the Big Bang. And her father had an Anglican word to explain all origins.

  What she wanted to tell Malory was more elemental than God.

  “I saw—” she began.

  Malory stopped just outside the door of the church on the piazza of Santa Maria sopra Minerva as Louiza’s contraction dug into the back of his neck and an exposed piece of his left wrist. He wanted to tell Louiza that it would be all right, that she was going to be fine, that he was with her, that he would stay with her, that he would never leave her again. But half his body was resetting its muscles after the run down the nave of the church into the piazza, and the other half was wincing at the pain in his own neck and wrist. What little attention he had left was surprised by the statue of the elephant carrying the obelisk in the center of the piazza. Malory could have
sworn that the night before, when he had knocked on the door of the Dominican monastery, the elephant had been painted an enamel midnight blue, as rich as the ceiling of the nave of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. But now—there was no question, even though he was half-starved of oxygen—the elephant was the crimson of the cardinals whom Fra Mario believed forse oggi would choose a new pope.

  “I thought—” Malory began.

  “Make no mistake, Malory,” Tibor said. “There is a war going on.”

  “War?” Malory asked.

  “Three hundred and something years ago, Fra Domenico Paglia, the Grand Poo-Bah of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, found an Egyptian obelisk buried in his blessed cloister, a scrap from the time of the Romans. So, Fra Domenico decided to erect this puli in front of the piazza and held a competition to design an all-purpose obelisk holder. One of the finalists was Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Mister Baroque, the drinking buddy of four or five popes and a couple of dozen cardinals. The other—surprise, surprise—was Fra Domenico himself. Bernini won, of course. Fra D. was an amateur who only had time for a bust or two when he wasn’t condemning heretics. But that didn’t stop him from showing Bernini who’s boss. He offered Bernini some divinely received structural advice, how the weight of the obelisk would fracture the thirteenth and fourteenth lumbar vertebrae of the elephant. Bernini knew Fra Domenico was weak on the anatomy of pachyderms. But he also knew that the Dominicans were the Hounds of God and would bite hard if he didn’t lend at least one ear to this inquisitorial engineer.

  “So, Bernini put a little stone box beneath the elephant’s gut, to make Fra Domenico happy. And then Bernini led his elephant into the middle of the piazza. Now, a lesser artist might have faced the elephant’s trunk towards the church and another might have faced him away, as if pulling the weight of the cathedral towards Heaven or the Tevere, whichever came first. But Bernini was a genius. He parallel-parked Dumbo with his left flank against the church and his head facing the lobby of the Hotel Minerva. And then he lifted the tail of his beast ever so daintily to the port side, so he could aim his fragrant marble farts through the window of the study of the Dominican friar.”