Septimania

by Jonathan Levi

  The problem was not the National Theatre. The problem was not Reshma and her international friends—for whom I acted as agent and intermediary with staff, and secured a pretty tidy compensation package. I suspect that at least one Antigone was keeping the Director company on St. Martin’s Lane. The problem was Tibor. He was drinking—at least that one bottle of Absolut a night. And even though every morning when I picked him up, he was showered, shaved, and stable enough to walk the twenty minutes to the Studio, it was clear that he was stumbling in rehearsal. I became both lightning rod and the handkerchief for the individual and collective anxieties. As I waited in the lobby for Tibor on the morning of the sixth day of the second week, I rehearsed again the speech of concern I had been writing all night.

  Tibor didn’t come down. I rang up to his room. No answer. I convinced the front desk to come up with me to the room and knock, and when there was still no answer, persuaded security to let me in.

  Tibor was there. Sitting on the edge of his bed, fully dressed. Not one but three empty bottles—empty liter bottles of Absolut—stood on the console next to the TV. BBC News was playing, without the sound thankfully, and equally thankfully with no sign of either Cristina or Anna Ford on the screen. But Tibor was absent—clearly alive in body, dressed, and ready for rehearsal, but absent in mind.

  I asked security to call for a doctor.

  “No,” Tibor whispered, from a great distance—more distant than a Tom Waits rasp. I thanked the hotel staff and assured them I’d be all right. They left and closed the door. I sat next to Tibor on the bed and took his right hand. It was huge and heavy.

  “Something’s missing,” Tibor said. “The box is empty.”

  “What box?” I asked him, thinking about the vacant bassinet in Fatebenefratelli.

  “Seven isn’t working,” Tibor said. “I was so certain!”

  “Perhaps,” I suggested, “we should go to rehearsal?”

  He said nothing.

  “Perhaps you should slow down on your drinking.”

  Tibor turned his face to me and gave me a look of such infernal hatred. “You are your mother’s daughter,” he said, with an accent on every bitter word. “You stand on my shoulders and press me down with your heels.” I couldn’t make much sense of what he was saying. But his hand was still in mine, my father’s hand.

  “What do you need?” I asked him, and stroked that hand with my other.

  “The Pip,” he said.

  “The Pip?”

  “Once upon a time, little girl, my friend Malory told me that I was out of tune. Maybe he was wrong then. He is right now.”

  That was the second time I’d heard your name.

  “Malory will know. Malory will give me the Pip to put me back in tune. Then Cristina, maybe she will hear me.”

  I put Tibor to bed and stepped out into the hallway. I called Cristina in New York. I called the National. Both had contingency plans in place. So when on the third day, Tibor was still unable and unwilling to go to rehearsal, the National quietly let it be known he was being replaced. Cristina arrived that morning on a private jet loaned by someone grateful. Heels on his shoulders or no, Tibor let us guide him down to a cab and the airport. I rode with them to the airport, holding Tibor’s big right hand. But when he saw the plane, he balked.

  “The Pip,” Tibor said, looking at the stairs up to the cabin door. “Do you have the Pip?”

  And so I stayed—the only way we could get him onto the plane—with the promise that I would find Malory, with the promise that I would find you and bring you and the Pip to him.

  I took the next flight to Rome. I had no idea where to look for you. But I went to see Sister Francesca Splendida—I hadn’t been back in ten years. And as I entered the Basilica of Santa Sabina, I looked up at the light, translucent through the foggy marble, and knew that you were close by. I know how to find people.

  Monday, September 10, is Tibor’s birthday. He will turn fifty, and you must be there. He is stuck, like Dante, in the middle of the road of life, the right road lost. He has been tested by loss and has surrendered to gloom. He needs a Virgil to guide him out of the dark woods. You must come. I know you are the little Englishman with the pale English wife. I know you lost that wife and also lost a baby at Fatebenefratelli. And maybe all that loss makes it difficult for you to go to Tibor. But you must come. And you must—Tibor was very insistent—you must bring the Pip. Do you know what he means? The Pip?

  MALORY HADN’T TOUCHED HIS SCONE. NOR HIS TEA. HE HAD ONE thought—it is not possible.

  He had other thoughts—it will not happen.

  Yet he also had a question, for himself.

  How can I tell this girl, this Ottavia who somehow found her way past the doors, the gates, the walls, the alarms, the buzzers, not to mention Settimio and his invisible minions, how can I give this girl who found me the simple answer No, when I have forgotten how to speak?

  In the beginning, Settimio brought me invitations for meetings with popes and rabbis, imams and lamas, politicians and supplicants. In the beginning, Settimio brought messages that came four, sometimes ten times a day, frantic messages from Antonella, from all the residents of the Dacia that through Fra Mario eventually found their way to Settimio. I ignored all news, especially news of Tibor. I had seen what I had seen—the position of Tibor’s body, the position of Antonella’s body beneath his, the velocity of Cristina’s walking away, the futility of my own observation. On the morning of December 26, 1978, I made the calculations that anyone with basic Newtonian common sense would have made. All added up to betrayal.

  “Go,” Tibor told me at Fatebenefratelli and promised to look after Louiza.

  “Go,” Tibor told me at the Dacia and promised to look after Antonella.

  I went. I trusted those promises. Trust—the One True Rule of friendship.

  Not for Tibor.

  The betrayal is too great.

  I will not go again.

  Twenty-three years ago, I climbed into my oil lamp and pulled down the lid. In twenty-three years, I have set foot outside the grounds of the Villa Septimania precisely once, spoken to no one except Settimio, and most of what I have said to Settimio required no speech. For twenty-three years I have stared at the statue of Newton, the Princess of Septimania, and the marble apple. The force of gravity that Bernini harnessed in his sculpture, the force that attracted the two lovers and their apple into a perfect balance no longer calls to me. I’d had the gall to imagine the woman as Louiza and the man as myself and to dream that such a perfect balance guided our lives. But I had been late, been off-balance. I forsook the quest for Louiza and our lost child in a misbegotten lunge for happiness and Antonella. I rejected gravity, rejected attraction, rejected all of them, including Newton.

  What did I have left? Septimania.

  From the depths of my lamp, I sent away for books and papers, entire libraries on Newton and science. I corresponded with super-experts in super-gravity, super-symmetry, super-colliders, cosmology, string theory, and quantum hoo-hah to such an extent that Settimio had to redesign the Sanctum Sanctorum and wire it with serious self-updating computer machinery to handle the quantity and quality of information that I collected from Feynman in California, Hawking back in Cambridge, Greene, Klebanov, Polyakov, and even Freeman Dyson whose black holes and theory of perpetual free-fall felt most sympathetic to my own state.

  I built tunnels and bookshelves, dug deep and deeper, seven times seven, beneath the orange trees and Roman pines, into the hill of the Aventino. I filled the tunnels with books, with manuscripts. As Settimio brought in computers, I devised a way with him to digitize what we have and acquire what we have not with a system that receives without giving any clue of its existence. The amount of knowledge I have beneath me, beneath the Villa Septimania, would not only bury Minerva the Goddess, but Maria the Mother, and two, if not all three, of the Catholic Gods without giving a clue to the outside world.

  Discretion.

  Settimio passed o
n the key to quiet acquisition of knowledge, as I searched for what Newton knew, as I tried to put the world in tune. Discreetly. Leaving no trace.

  I buried myself in everything and anything that might lead me back to Newton’s One True Rule so I might begin again. I sat and thought, the way Newton sat and thought back in our frozen rooms next to the gate of Trinity College. But I couldn’t will myself back to the balance of knowledge and ignorance that Newton had.

  I am not Newton. I am a descendant. And even if I am not the giant that Newton was, I am standing at least several shoulder heights above the giant, and see far too far to limit my vision. My knowledge is made up of toothpaste that cannot be unsqueezed.

  My memory cannot be unsqueezed.

  I have sat in this dining room every day staring at this statue, contemplating the one mystery I cannot explain. I have read of Arthur and Excalibur, the Sword in the Stone, and all the tales in the Arabian Nights.

  I am Malory—King of the Christians, King of the Jews, and, if the Princess of Septimania’s Chapbook is to be believed, I am the Son of Newton, King of Science, King of the World, and yet I have nothing and have nothing to say. I argued that the answer was One. Tibor argued that the answer was Seven, at the very least. The answer was none of the above, neither negative nor imaginary.

  The answer is Zero, terrifying and complete.

  I have Zero to say to this girl. Less to say to Tibor.

  On Christmas Day, I will turn fifty myself. And still I have Zero to say.

  And yet, this girl found me.

  Ottavia? Could that possibly be her name?

  Could she possibly be Tibor’s daughter?

  Could she possibly remind me more completely of a day, almost twenty-three years ago, that I have worked so forcefully to forget?

  And yet—if the simple really were the sign of the truth—it is clear, despite Ottavia’s theatrical delivery, that if someone does not rescue him, Tibor will be dead very soon.

  I will not be that someone, even though I have no wish to see Tibor dead.

  And yet I do not want the girl to leave empty-handed.

  The Pip. She asked for the Pip.

  It is here, of course, in its canister. Behind Newton and his Queen.

  POOR MALORY. I DON’T KNOW WHICH OF US WAS MORE THE GHOST. BUT while I explained myself, while I told my story, he shrank further and further into himself, as if he might disappear and leave only a pile of corduroy on the terrazza. But after I finished telling him about Tibor, after I finished telling him why I had come to find him, to bring him to the United States, to bring him up the Hudson to TiborTina, where Cristina was busy preparing a celebration of Tibor’s fiftieth birthday in the hope of a miraculous rejuvenation, I waited. I waited five minutes, fifteen. I polished off two scones and three espressos.

  Finally, Malory spoke, in a voice that convinced me that he really hadn’t spoken to much of anyone in a long time.

  “No,” he said, and then began again. “I’m sorry, but no. I can’t. But I’d like to give you something.”

  “For Tibor?” I asked.

  Malory shuddered. “For yourself,” he said. “You’ve come a long way. I don’t want you to leave empty-handed.”

  I looked around. It was a dining room—seven chairs set around a table. Unused but not undusted. And then I saw them. At first I thought they were alive, the people. And then I saw that they were as small as me, as comfortably small as Malory, and made of stone. A statue of a man—I thought for a moment it was Isaac Newton, although he looked much younger than the statue in Trinity College Chapel—and next to him, a woman.

  “That,” I said to Malory.

  “The whole sculpture?” Malory asked, even paler and smaller than before. “You want that?”

  “Only the apple,” I said. I don’t know why I wasn’t more surprised that the apple was floating in mid-air. Without waiting for an answer from Malory, I walked over to the figures. And whether the man on the left and the woman on the right smiled their approval to me, I can’t be sure. But I reached out and took the apple, as easily as I might pick a McIntosh at the market.

  “Thank you,” I said to Malory. It looked at first like pain, the movement of his mouth, perhaps because he hadn’t performed the action in over twenty years. But by the time Malory walked over to me and reached down to touch the marble apple in my hand, I knew he was smiling.

  2/7

  TTAVIA RETURNED FROM ROME IN TRIUMPH, AND FOR THE NEXT four days, as Tibor’s birthday approached, she was treated the way she imagined a daughter ought. Cristina installed her in the Yellow House down by the creek. With the antiqued brass of the four-poster and the angelic white of the sheets and mosquito netting, Ottavia was starring in Cristina’s idea of an Ibsen dollhouse, in the stately pleasure dome of TiborTina—the upstate kingdom that coupled Cristina’s name and Tibor’s to an approximation of the Roman island of Tiberina, so central to their beginnings in the western world. Ottavia’s yellow dollhouse by the creek sat below the white clapboard house of the Master and the Mistress, the red-sided barn for the Bomb Squad and the Nurses, and the host of guest cottages—the love children of Andrew Wyeth and David Hockney in bright pastels of magenta, chromium, and cobalt. All the color, all the light refracted through poplar and reflected off water and wrapped Ottavia in familial comfort and power.

  She rose at dawn on Tibor’s birthday, as she had each of the preceding dawns. The morning was still cool. She crossed the bridge over the creek and strode up a tractor path through the meadow and past the vegetable patch to the pond. She swam for an hour, back and forth across the water, roughly following the minute hand clockwise. By the time she’d dried herself and climbed up the wooden terraces to the back deck of the White House, Cristina was waiting for her with grapefruit juice, café crème, and a basketful of fresh breakfast. Cristina met Ottavia in a fully engaged present, full of mutual marvel and wonder at the butter and marmalade and cut flowers of her Paradiso. Ottavia had grown at least an inch and a half since repatriating Tibor and convincing Malory to leave the Villa Septimania and fly to the United States. If Cristina was the president of TiborTina, Ottavia was anxious to prove herself a worthy secretary of state and see this diplomatic mission through to a world-changing conclusion.

  Once she’d heard that Malory had agreed to come to Tibor’s party, Cristina stepped into high gear. Malory’s plane was due to land at Teterboro at noon. His driver would deposit him at the Blue House at two, giving him time to shower and rest. Drinks would be at five, dinner at six in deference to Malory’s jetlag. Simple. Cristina had initially wanted to invite surviving Nurses, mobile remnants of the Bomb Squad, a producer or two, and a number of local neighbors to celebrate. That was Plan A. But given the unpredictable state of Tibor’s storm front, Cristina had changed plans so many times she was well past the alphabet.

  In the ten days since he had returned from London, Tibor had done little but sit on the deck in a wooden-slatted Adirondack chair, look down at the pine-ringed pond, and smoke himself into a fog. He wasn’t drinking—there wasn’t even a flip-top can of turpentine on the ten acres of TiborTina. Cristina wasn’t certain this silent alternative was more desirable. But although he sat apart in his Adirondack, the white of Tibor’s shirt and trousers and the gray of his hair and cigarette smoke mixed into a shade of solidity that anchored the women and convinced them that, as long as the cigarettes held out, there would be fifty more years in TiborTina of peace and hope.

  Still, Cristina needed fruit and vegetables. More, she needed Tibor to show some signs of life.

  “Darling,” she said to Ottavia. “Why don’t you drive Tibor down to the Farmers’ Market after lunch and pick up a few things for dinner?”

  On that Monday afternoon, there were a dozen or so cars and SUVs at the round barn of the Farmers’ Market. Across River Road, two beat-up Chevy 10s stood in front of the Seven Veils Bar & Grill. An early-model BMW idled in front of Kolodney’s Fish Market.

  “I’ll get the ve
g and fruit,” Ottavia said, pulling the Yukon onto the grass beside the Farmers’ Market. “Do you want to come with me?” she asked, turning off the ignition. “Or do you want to buy the vongole for dinner?” Tibor climbed down from the Yukon and headed across River Road to Kolodney’s. “Do you need money?” Ottavia called after him. Tibor lifted his wallet from his pocket and walked on.

  Kolodney wouldn’t have known what a vongole was in any accent. But Tibor was able to point, pay, and walk out of the fish market with four pounds of netted clams in a plastic bag in under ninety seconds. The lunch crowd—there was a road crew painting yellow lines two miles up 9D—was long gone. But the Seven Veils still smelled of sauerkraut balls, marinating wieners, and bleach.

  Tibor was oblivious to all, even the scent of stale beer that rose from the carpet on the stage. It had been well over a week since he’d had a drink, and that was in another country. Malory was coming. Malory was coming with the Pip. Malory was coming with the Pip. And although Tibor knew the hiding places of at least six bottles of vodka in the beams of TiborTina and even a stump or two around the pond, he was determined to keep his mouth as dry and receptive as possible. The Pip, the Pip that had saved him from plunging to the pavement of that drafty church the morning he’d awakened to the sound of Malory, the Pip would save him now. The Pip would save him. The Pip would cure him.

  A skinny college girl Tibor had auditioned on an earlier visit to the Seven Veils, back when he and Cristina were scouting the back country of the eastern shore of the Hudson for property, was lying on the stage on a beach towel laid above the carpet in the interests of hygiene, crossing and uncrossing her educated legs.

  “Hi, Tibor!” she called from the floor over the music, “Sweetest Taboo.” Sade. If he didn’t know the name of the girl, Tibor knew the singer, named after one of his favorite aristocrats, even if everyone pronounced her name wrong. He nodded. There was no need for more.