Septimania

by Jonathan Levi

  “Go home with Settimio, my poor boy. Come back and see me tomorrow at four in the afternoon. Tonight you will have to sleep with questions.” Suor Miriam reached up with her hands. Understanding the motion, Malory bent forward and let Suor Miriam bless his forehead with her lips, let her kiss take with it the last grains of his energy. The Driver was waiting below with both Vespas. Malory descended into the seat behind him, felt the October night warm on his face as they drove off the island, Fatebenefratelli at their backs, and rose up a winding alley that smelled of night and pine. A gate opened, and the Driver entered, it seemed to Malory, directly into the side of a hill. They dismounted. There were more stairs. A door opened, a light. There was a kitchen, bread-warm. Settimio removed his coat, Malory his corduroy jacket. There was a bed, there were pajamas, a glass of water. Malory lay down in a country beyond exhaustion but with enough strength for a final question.

  “Settimio,” Malory said, pulling himself up against the pillows to a seated position, his legs following like serpents from a foreign zoo.

  “Sì, mio Principe?”

  “Where am I?”

  “You are home.”

  “Home?”

  “Many years ago,” Settimio sat in the shadows beyond the lamplight and began to speak, “a Jewish butcher named Yehoshua lived in the town of Narbonne along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.” He spoke with a gentle bass, like the pedals of the great organ of that same Narbonne where Malory had first learned to play, singing him back to the last time he had been told a story at bedtime. Settimio’s voice encircled him as securely as the mattress below and the duvet above, floating around Malory’s ears at a gothic distance between waking and dream. Later, when Malory opened his eyes in the dark and the silence, he was not only unsure whether he was awake or asleep but even where he was and in which century. For more than a moment, he imagined he was back in the Dominican cell of Galileo Galilei where, only twenty-four hours before, the hempen bed cords had begun to engrave a fresh Roman dissertation into his skull. In the darkness of the morning, Malory reached with his right hand into the air beside his bed and located a cord and a switch.

  “Louiza?” he called out.

  There was light.

  There was more.

  Above him a ceiling of a blue richer than the sky of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, as pure and saturated with color as any he had seen through any of the dozens of Newtonian prisms he’d examined over the years. It was a color unknown to the British sky, but an inseparable part of the wood outside Narbonne, where he had lain for hours on his back on a mattress of bluebells, paralyzed by nature.

  Malory pushed himself up on his elbows. Around the walls, Malory’s own image gazed back at him. In a dozen or so portraits set into the hazelnut panels of the room, Malory’s own face—young and old, as a man, as a woman, in costumes as ornate and archaic as any he had seen in the halls and chapels of Cambridge—looked back at him, refracted in mirrors of time and manner. In curling wigs or in flat caps, with beards or rouged cheeks, every portrait had an ear or a chin or a cheek that Malory felt was essentially his own. The perplexed look in all of their eyes as they looked at him lying in the bed, made him realize that his own appearance of general bewilderment had more to do with genes and less with his history of abandonment. The painting directly across from him—the most recent an Edwardian-looking gentleman, perhaps his great-grandfather, the last prince of Septimania before himself—couldn’t hide his own confusion behind a starched collar and whiskers. Had all those faces in all the portraits in the bedroom wondered at one time the same thing he was wondering—what am I doing here?

  In answer, there was a knock on the door.

  “Mio Principe?” A knock again. “I saw your light. Do you require something?”

  “Ah—” Malory said. Which meant nothing, but was interpreted as an invitation.

  Settimio was dressed in dark trousers, a long white shirt, clipped at the cuff by medallions that caught the light from Malory’s bedside lamp and shone a touch of comprehension into his awakening brain. Above the shirt and trousers, Settimio wore a smock, long and leathery like the apron of a butcher. It must be morning, Malory thought, or perhaps later.

  “Did you sleep well, Principe?”

  “Were you reading to me all night, Settimio?” Was there really a story about a Jewish butcher?

  “Reading?”

  “Telling me a story?”

  “Until you fell asleep.”

  “Which was?”

  “Almost the moment you lay back against the pillow. Yesterday was a long day. One for which your grandmother did little to prepare you.”

  “She knew?” Malory pulled his shoulders a little higher above the pillow.

  “Your grandmother knew many things. I communicated with her in recent years exclusively by telephone. But she was always a deeply curious person.”

  “Hunh,” Malory said, searching the wall for any portrait that might resemble Old Mrs. Emery. “Not curious enough to introduce herself to me. Until the end. Or almost.”

  “Curiosity, mio Principe, is often best served by discretion.”

  “Observation at a distance?”

  Settimio smiled. Again Malory felt the comfort of a perfect mark on an exam, applause at the end of a concert. With the relaxation that accompanies pleasure came the conviction that he needed the toilet. And that today he would find Louiza. Again. With the same delicate hints and gestures he had used the night before, Settimio guided Malory out of the bedroom and up two short steps to a bathroom no smaller than the bedroom Malory had just left. If Malory had bothered to look up, he would have seen his own reflection multiplied—if not as many times then more accurately than in the portraits of the bedroom. But while one hemisphere of his brain was trying to understand where he was, the other was fixed on where he wanted to be. Since the effort so occupied the brain of Malory, the body was left to its own automatic devices. It urinated, it flushed, it bathed, it shampooed and shaved—Settimio not only ran a bath but set out Malory’s toiletries, such as they were, in places where the automaton of his body could not fail to use them. In a robe of velvet and midnight blue, Malory returned to the bedroom.

  “Settimio?”

  “Principe?”

  “What time is it?” A fresh pair of jeans and a chamois shirt, brand new but clearly in his style, lay on his bed. Had Settimio set them out while he was bathing? And made the bed? “We should get back to the hospital. What is the name?”

  “Fatebenefratelli. But you may recall that the nurse you wished to interview expects you in four hours. Might I suggest something to eat?” The jeans, the shirt fit. So did the ankle boots—in a leather and a toe not too ostentatiously Italian. Not even at Cambridge, where the bedders—under the supervision of Rix’s integral wife, Emma—swept and tidied away his bedclothes and tea-droppings, had he been shown such an assiduous respect.

  “Then we have time to ring the Embassy.” Malory stood. The boots were a miracle. “You mentioned the carabinieri last night.”

  “We have two types of scone.” Settimio pinched the shoulders of the chamois and flattened the shirt against Malory’s chest. “And there is marmalade. Your own oranges. Breakfast. You will find it immensely restorative.” Settimio turned and exited the bedroom. Malory looked up at the portraits, each one a perplexed soul. Was there a Settimio hidden on the reverse of each, face pressed against the wall in discretion?

  Malory followed Settimio down a paneled corridor, his boots treading without a sound on a wood of acoustical properties Malory could not plumb. The corridor opened into a low-coffered foyer, a gentle hub leading out into other corridors, a handful of paintings and sculptures punctuating the entrances and exits.

  “Settimio.” Malory stopped. “Who is that?”

  “Borromini, della Robbia, Giotto.”

  But that wasn’t the question Malory was asking. With the same sense of recognition he’d had upon waking to the portraits in the bedroom, Malory saw his moth
er’s cheek in the Michelangelo Santa Marta, his grandmother’s hair in the Canova Venus by the western wall. Settimio walked. Marta smiled down on Malory. Breakfast, she seemed to say. Eat now, we will talk later. Malory followed. Malory sat. Settimio poured his tea. Malory pulled the first scone in two, varnished one surface with a layer of orange marmalade and rind, and took a bite. He chewed. Marta was right—the scone helped. He took another bite. He raised his eyes. He stopped chewing.

  “Settimio, where are we?” It wasn’t the scone, the tea that confounded him. He knew he wasn’t back in Cambridge, although the hovering of Settimio bothered him in the way that had often made him embarrass Rix into sitting down once he’d brought Malory’s morning tea to his rooms, to talk about Trinity’s recent acquisition of machinery for polishing cutlery or cutting grass.

  “The dining room,” Settimio said with simplicity. But when Malory failed to respond, he continued. “You are sitting in one of seven chairs of Tiberian oak. The table is Jerusalem cedar. Gifts, all of them. I would be happy to go into more detail if you wish.”

  “That.” Malory swallowed and pointed with the half-eaten scone. “Them.”

  Across from Malory, on the far side of the table of Jerusalem cedar, a marble statue stood raised on its base. Or rather, two life-sized statues stood on a single base. A man and a woman. Two marble people, in the long hair and long coats of the Enlightenment, were clearly enjoying themselves. The sculptor had caught them in the middle of a game, a ball game. One was tossing the ball to the other—although at the distance of a dining room table and a half-eaten scone, Malory couldn’t tell properly which one was tossing to which. Malory put down the scone, wiped his mouth, and pushed back his oaken chair—with the aid, naturally, of Settimio. He walked around the table to the statues. The figures were slightly smaller than Malory and greeted him on their pedestal at eye level. Malory recognized the male statue immediately.

  “Newton!” he said.

  “Newton,” Settimio answered. There was no mistaking the face, the coat. This was the student Newton, the Newton of the great discoveries, the Newton of the annus mirabilis of 1666, only slightly younger than Malory. “He posed for the sculptor.”

  “The sculptor?”

  “Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” Settimio said. “There are several Berninis in the villa and the garden.”

  “Bernini went to England?” Malory turned to Settimio. “And sculpted Newton? During the Plague?”

  “The ledger for the year shows that Isaac Newton posed for the statue here.”

  “Here? What year?”

  “1666, I believe.”

  “In Rome?”

  “In the garden. I would be happy to show you where.”

  “The garden?” Malory repeated.

  “Perhaps after breakfast, I could take you out.”

  “You mean here? Newton was here? In 1666?” Malory knew the history, the biography, the writings, the readings, the eating habits of Isaac Newton better than anybody, perhaps even better than Newton knew himself. Malory knew that although Newton was acquainted with a number of European scientists, even had a romantic relationship—it was rumored—with a Swiss mathematician, the world met Newton in London. Newton never left England. Newton never traveled to Europe, much less to Rome. The statue must clearly be an act of the imagination.

  But was Bernini’s imagination—the great Gian Lorenzo Bernini, favorite of princes and popes—interested in Newton? And the second figure—a woman. Was there ever a woman who was interested in Newton? Newton had never shown any inclination towards females, except of course his mother, Hannah, and the niece who kept house for him in his later years. Who was this second figure, this woman? She was slightly smaller, her nose more aquiline, her eyes larger, her chin with a delicate cleft above a polished neck.

  Then Malory saw the ball that the two were tossing. Now that he stood and approached the statue, scone in hand, he could see that it was no ball at all, but a polished marble apple. Malory smiled. Of course. Bernini’s imagination had been piqued by story. He had sculpted Newton and the woman and the apple as an allegory for one of his more scientifically minded patrons. The gossip must have crossed the continent, the reports that a falling apple had led the young Isaac to his theories on gravity and the attractions of heavenly bodies at a distance. Perhaps the woman was Bernini’s Renaissance approximation of Minerva herself, the Goddess of Wisdom, tarted up in the robes of Lucrezia Borgia or Catherine de Medici or some more intimate Bernini conquest.

  Then Malory stopped smiling. He had assumed that the ball, the apple, was attached discreetly to another piece of stone or supported by a thin piece of iron or suspended by a filament from the ceiling or the outstretched hands of one or the other of the apple-tossers. But as Malory ran one hand and then another above, below, to the sides and then around the apple, like a Christmas magician at the Cambridge Corn Market, he could find no support, no suspension. The apple was floating in mid-air.

  “Settimio.”

  “Sí,” Settimio offered with his usual gentle guidance. “It is quite remarkable, is it not? Molto particolare.”

  Molto particolare was not what Malory was thinking.

  “I am hardly an expert,” Settimio said. “I understand that you are an aficionado of Signor Newton and the world of physics in general.”

  “This is, well …” Malory hesitated at his own certainty in either observation or judgement. “This is, impossible.” Malory walked around the statue, knelt down below the apple, and peered up.

  “And yet, mio Principe,” Settimio suggested, “the stars remain suspended in the heavens. The Moon itself moves in perfect balance around the Earth, which revolves in its turn around the Sun—all without the aid of supporting wires. From what I understand, Newton himself …”

  “Yes, yes …” Malory’s mind was moving with impatience. He knew the astronomy and the physics of the motion of planets. He knew that the Sun drew the Earth towards its center and the Earth drew the Sun towards its own, and that the balance between the two depended on the size of each and the distance between the two, not to mention the speed of the Earth’s journey in orbit around the Sun. And he knew that the Moon and the Earth danced a similar tango and that even the Sun flirted with the Moon as it did with millions of hotter Milky Way companions on a somewhat larger dance floor. And he knew that everything was guided by the laws of attraction at a distance between bodies. And he knew, as Einstein and generations of physicists and historians and schoolchildren and BBC commentators, not to mention Anna Ford, knew, that Newton searched his whole life for a simple rule by which the motions of the heavenly bodies of the planetary system could be completely calculated, if one knew where they all were at one time.

  And Malory also knew that theoretically—a word that was tossed around colloquia and High Tables like custard and claret—theoretically every body had its own gravitational pull. Every body was a magnet. Not just the Moon, but chunky asteroids, Apollo 13, Mount Everest, Moby Dick. Even a man the size of, say, Aldo Moro or Settimio—who was thankfully a few hairs shorter than Malory—had his own power of attraction. But it didn’t take too many experiments, with a shard of toothpick or even tissue, to realize that the gravitational pull of the Earth would yank any apple—McIntosh or marble—with a far greater force than a statue, even one carved by the great Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who could carve fingers clutching thighs out of marble and make you believe they were clasping flesh.

  “May I?” Malory turned to Settimio, pointing at the apple.

  “Everything in this villa is yours, my lord,” Settimio answered simply. “But there may be consequences.”

  And sure enough, as Malory reached out to take the apple, he felt a tug from either side, as if the statue of Newton on the left and the statue of the woman on the right were fighting him—as surely as the Earth—for the piece of fruit. It wasn’t that the apple was so heavy or magnetic or sticky or golden. The figures tottered as Malory pulled, and Settimio stood by with widened eyes
. It felt to Malory that just a little more effort … But no, he just could not move it. Malory let go. Newton and the marble woman and Settimio seemed to take a breath of relief and tottered no more, secure once again in a mutual attraction that had withstood more than three hundred years of dustings and earthquakes and other attempts, since Malory could not imagine he was the first to try to steal the apple.

  Malory leaned back on the table and then slid down into one of the Tiberian chairs that Settimio quickly shifted beneath him. He took a fresh cup of tea from Settimio and chewed on the rest of his scone, all the while fixing his gaze on the marble apple.

  “Settimio,” he said. “I’m ready. Please explain—what is this place you call my home?”

  2/2

  IO PRINCIPE,” SETTIMIO SAID, “YOU ASKED ME THAT QUESTION last night. I told you the story of Yehoshua the butcher who delivered Narbonne to the Franks. Of Charlemagne’s promise to give a kingdom to Yehoshua and his Jews. How Charlemagne sent a request to the Caliph of Baghdad to send him a Jewish prince from the line of David and Solomon to take the throne as the first King of Septimania.”

  “You mean,” Malory asked, “that wasn’t just a bedtime story?”

  “The statue that attracts you so strongly,” Settimio answered, “is it just a statue? This dining room—the chairs of Tiberian oak, the table of Jerusalem cedar—is not only the room where I hope to serve you many meals as my ancestors served a long line of kings before you, but also tells its own story of Septimania, bedtime stories stretching back to King Solomon, King David, and beyond.”

  Malory’s nostrils opened to the barely perceptible but gently hallucinatory honey and clover, balsam and loam.

  “The vestibule”—Settimio led Malory back to the Canova and the Michelangelo, Giotto, della Robbia, and half a dozen other Renaissance Italians—“is a poetic reminder that your ancestor Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, the way you were yesterday evening by the new pope.”