Septimania

by Jonathan Levi

  “I didn’t know,” Malory said. “It must have happened when I was in the States.”

  “There was something that Signor Settimio wanted me to give you,” the friar said, even more discreetly, “if you did not return in time.” He handed Malory a package wrapped in brown paper, no heavier than a suit and a change of shirts.

  “Thank you,” Malory said. So it was true. Settimio was dead.

  The friar stood.

  “One more question.”

  The friar stopped.

  “The family, Settimio’s family. Will they, will the son be at the villa tonight?”

  “The villa?” the friar asked. In the dim light of the chapel, Malory had no way of telling whether he honestly lacked knowledge or knew more than Malory or Thomas Aquinas for that matter.

  “Thank you,” Malory said again, “for the package.”

  The friar descended the steps into the nave of the church. Malory was alone with Settimio and Lippi. And the package.

  He separated the tape from the paper. Malory. He saw his name, his father’s name, stenciled along the flap. The Kit Bag. The Kit Bag with his name. He hadn’t seen the Kit Bag in many years. He’d had little use for the Universal Tuner inside. And since he had used Antonella’s English translation of the Newton Chapbook, the Italian original had remained semi-forgotten, tucked away in the central pocket next to Malory’s own Book of Organs. There was only one reason why Settimio would want Malory to have the Kit Bag. Twenty-three years before, Malory had brought the Kit Bag to Rome. It was the sum total of what had belonged to Malory before he arrived, before he was crowned King of Septimania. Settimio had left him a final message. It was time for Malory to go.

  On top of the Kit Bag sat a first-class train ticket from Rome to Cambridge, departing that night—Rome to Milan; Milan to Paris; Paris to London; London to another garden, another life. Malory thought back to the vicar of Whistler Abbey and another funeral. He had been sent to Rome by train twenty-three years before. Now, with the world falling apart and the Villa Septimania dark and shuttered, he was being sent back home without so much as a panino? And why? Because Settimio had died? But Malory was alive. Why would they crown a new king of Septimania to go along with a new majordomo? Did the choice of a new caliph of all Islam depend on the life of the butler? It was all a little too ornate to be the punch line of a rather extensive joke.

  Malory stood and walked over to the coffin. Discretion be damned. He wanted to pound on the lid and get a few answers from Settimio. Or better yet kick the coffin down off the trestle and trample it beneath his feet in response to this heresy! A butler dictating to the King of Septimania. That is not how it works.

  But Malory didn’t. He pulled the strap of the Kit Bag over one shoulder. He wheeled his suitcase out Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The elephant was gray. The train departed from Termini at 8 p.m. And now Malory stood at the Gate of Trinity College, Henry VIII holding his stony sword like the angel at the eastern gate of Eden, and thought about his own expulsion, and wondered would they let him back in?

  “Excuse me?” Malory stood at the counter of the Porters’ lodge. Pigeonholes and bulletin boards had been replaced with computer terminals and stainless steel, but the hat stand next to the desk still sported a pair of bowlers, and the porter on duty still wore a tie. “I was wondering whether I might speak with Mr. Rix? Is he still the Head Porter?”

  “Rix?” The porter looked carefully at Malory. “Did you ask for Mr. Rix?” He couldn’t have been much older than Malory, but his hair had already turned the color of a dishwater that Malory associated with his Trinity hallmate and his baroque cooking habits.

  “Yes,” Malory said. “I am a member of the college, but it’s been quite a few years.”

  “Would you mind waiting a moment,” the porter asked, “Mister …?”

  “Malory,” Malory said.

  “Ah,” the porter’s eyes lit up and he disappeared for a moment into the back room. When he returned, it was in the company of a younger woman, one of those bright-cheeked, sensible women of indeterminate post-marital years that Malory always associated with biology degrees and children who played field hockey.

  “Mr. Malory!” The woman walked around the counter and gave Malory a hug, which surprised him, even if it was an eminently sensible hug. “I was hoping you might come.”

  “I’m sorry,” Malory said. “You are?”

  “Sybil,” the woman said, “the eldest.”

  “Ah,” Malory said.

  “Would you mind doing the honors?” She took his arm.

  “I’ll look after this, sir,” the porter said, taking Malory’s suitcase as Sybil led Malory out of the Porters’ lodge and towards the chapel.

  “Honors?” Malory said, but the woman was walking so quickly that he wasn’t able to make out much of anything except that she was hoping Malory might be willing to play the organ. Malory looked up at a statue of a second king, the stony Edward III with his scepter and orb, as he passed beneath the arch into the chapel. Pugna pro patria, read the challenge beneath the king’s feet—fight for your country. Edward had been king of his country for fifty years—Malory had seen his own kingdom locked and barred after a mere twenty-three. What kind of king was he? But even Edward, conqueror of Scotland and France, had seen his England pustulate and crumble beneath the buboes and inky gangrene of a Black Death that recognized neither scepter nor orb. Now it was September 2001. The whole world was falling apart. And though the King of Septimania at one time could crown a pope, what was that against planes from above and guns from below? Perhaps the best Malory could do for his patria was to pull out all the stops and play the Trinity organ, the organ he knew more intimately than he knew Louiza, than he knew his mother, or even poor, dead Settimio, his most constant companion in life.

  Sybil led Malory into the forechapel, past the statues of Tennyson and Bacon, with barely any time for Malory to genuflect to the odd French statue of the old Newton, a man so full of himself in the world that he had been caught in the act of stepping off the pedestal and onto the shoulders of ordinary mathematicians. She stopped at the door to the staircase up to the organ—the Metzler Söhne–refurbished Father Smith organ Malory knew so well—that stood above the arch to the chapel proper, opening its pipes both to the fleshy congregation inside and Newton and his marble companions frozen in the forechapel. Sybil turned to Malory and pressed his hands. Hers were wet—with what Malory couldn’t properly tell.

  “Father always said that he missed the sound of your playing. ‘There was none like Malory,’ he said. He waited twenty years, you know,” she added, “until he couldn’t wait anymore.” And with a final press of the palms, Sybil left Malory to climb alone and she joined the mourners at the coffin at the altar-end of the chapel.

  Now Rix, Malory thought. Dead from waiting for the Toccata and Fugue in D minor—which sat open on the music stand. The hired organist slid aside to make room for Malory. Malory was late again. He was as late as he had been for Settimio, for his grandmother, for his thesis, and above all for Louiza. When had he forgotten how to tell time? When he climbed onto the back of the Driver’s Vespa, or long before, when he invited the pale, fair-haired girl up to the organ loft of St. George’s, Whistler Abbey? Or perhaps even at birth, three months too late to know his father. Fifty years ago, Malory thought. Fifty years ago the other Malory, the elder Malory, had drowned, knocked into the water by his eagerness, by the ferry that was bringing his young bride, the pregnant Sara, to him. In three months I shall turn fifty, Malory thought and remembered Tibor’s last words before he swallowed the Pip—I will not turn fifty. Je refuse.

  Over the top of the music stand, Malory looked into the forechapel. There was Newton, walking off his pedestal towards him. It was the short-haired Newton, the fifty-year-old Newton. A Newton backed by a marble plaque memorializing the War Dead, the Trinity fellows who gave their lives for the England of Edward III, for principles as ingrained into their patriotic hearts as the cosmic
laws of gravity. A Newton who looked, with his half-open mouth and firm step, as if he were ready to lead them like Edward III to victory over the French or the Nazis and maybe even smother Thomas Aquinas under the banner Sapientia Vincit Malitia—Knowledge Conquers Evil.

  But Malory knew better. Malory knew this was the fifty-year-old Newton of 1692. The Newton of that lost year, when he didn’t eat, didn’t talk, didn’t sleep. This was the Newton conquered by a sorrow impervious to the remedies of science, the Newton who wrote to his best friends, John Locke and Samuel Pepys, that if he ever saw them again he would kill them. The Newton of 1692, the last date in the chapbook that Malory’s grandmother, Old Mrs. Emery, had given him; the same Chapbook that was the diary of the Prince, of the Princess of Septimania.

  I will not turn fifty—Je refuse. Tibor’s words came at him again. He tried to look at the music, to turn to the Bach. But no turn was possible. Newton fixed him with his marble glare. I shan’t turn fifty, Newton said to him. I shan’t turn fifty, Malory answered. I shan’t turn fifty, Malory knew. Je refuse.

  3/4

  Master’s Lodge, Trinity College

  24 December 1692

  y Dear Pepys,

  This evening I abandoned Lady Montague and the children and took myself across Great Court to Newton’s rooms. Christmas Eve, as you well remember, is a muffled holiday at Trinity—the fellows deserting the stairwells for more familial climes. But at noon, the Head Porter informed me that Newton was still in residence, although the man himself had not been sighted in some days. I climbed the stairs and knocked on Newton’s oak to convey not only your but also my best wishes on the eve of the anniversary of the birth of Our Saviour and the eve of Newton’s own fiftieth birthday.

  “Go away!” Newton shouted at me.

  “My dear Newton,” I said, “I hate to see you suffer so.”

  He opened the door with one mad pull. He stood wigless, without a jacket, his boots unlaced, a sheet of foreign paper dangling limply from one hand. “What do you know of how I suffer?” I looked into his rooms. Since he made no effort to block my entrance, I walked in. The disorder was indescribable, the stench even worse.

  “I know,” I continued, opening the window onto Trinity Street, “that you have not touched food these four days and that the porters say you have neither ventured forth from your rooms nor extinguished your candle this week. I dare say you are not sleeping.”

  “You are correct,” Newton said, in a somewhat more placatory manner. “I have not slept for close on eighteen months.”

  I was too astonished to carry on this line of inquiry. Newton continued.

  “For these past twenty-five years,” he said, speaking as much to the letter in his hand as to me, “I have been thinking, at various times, on the attraction at a distance between two bodies, and from thence, the attraction between three.”

  “And for this reason,” I asked, “you neither eat nor sleep?”

  “The force, for example, that the Earth exerts on the Moon and the Moon on the Earth. And then the force that the Sun exerts on the Earth and the Moon and the force those two exert on the Sun.”

  “Or the force,” I tried to lighten the conversation, “you exert upon those like myself who are worried about the effects this study is having on your body.”

  “Yes,” Newton replied, vaguely. I knew he was not fond of metaphor. But I had a sense that I was not far off by bringing the conversation down to Earth. I doubted that the affairs of the cosmos could produce such a calamitous effect in our most gifted fellow.

  “My dear Newton,” I said, gripping his shoulder. “It is fast approaching the dinner hour. Lady Montague and I are entertaining some friends at the Lodge. There will be music, dancing, children. We would be delighted to count you among our guests in, say, an hour’s time? Tonight, after all, is the eve of the birth of Our Saviour.”

  “Yes,” Newton replied, just as vague but with the hint of a smile. “And mine.”

  “What?” I feigned. “You were born on Christmas Day?” Newton nodded. The smile remained, but his eyes wandered over to a portrait above the mantle. It was a sketch in brown charcoal, a sylvan scene, a man and a woman tossing a ball, the ball suspended between them, the motion caught in flight.

  “Septimania,” Newton said.

  “Excuse me?” I replied.

  “Septimania,” he repeated. “It is the reason, Lord Montague, that I must decline your generous invitation. Please tender my best wishes to your gracious wife.”

  “If I cannot persuade you,” I said, “please allow me to send over a tray. You must eat something. And certainly,” I added, “you must celebrate your own birthday with a slice of my wife’s Christmas Pudding.”

  “I have made many calculations in my life, Master Montague,” Newton said. “I have read the Holy Scriptures,” he continued, “and I have calculated that the Battle of Armageddon will bring the Universe to a violent end less than four centuries from now.”

  “By that time,” I began—and I must confess I was at a momentary loss for a riposte—“you and I shall certainly be long gone. Although my wife’s Christmas Pudding may still be edible. Let us gather our rosebuds, as Old Herrick suggested …”

  “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies,” Newton went on, “but not the madness of people.”

  “I don’t follow you, dear fellow,” I told him, brought up short by that word.

  “I shan’t turn fifty,” Newton mumbled, folding the letter carefully and placing it into an envelope on top of his papers. He was smiling so benignly, Pepys, and the disorder of his countenance had realigned itself into something so delicate and determined that it wasn’t until I awoke this morning that the words took on a more terrible meaning. I called on the Porters, however, who told me that Mr. Newton had been in and out of college all day, preoccupied, yes, but as was his wont.

  My dear Pepys. Perhaps it is indeed time to take firm action to save this noble mind. Might you ride up to Trinity before the New Year? I believe Newton will follow your counsel. I understand he still has property in Lincolnshire. A small farm might be just the thing. Beets. A few sheep.

  Yours,

  Montague

  3/5

  OW DID YOU LIVE?

  I find people, Cristina. That’s what I do.

  I remember. You found me and Tibor.

  Or did you find me, all those years ago on the Circo Massimo?

  Maybe. You were such an attractive little girl.

  Attraction works in two directions. It’s what brings us food and shelter and, when we need them, a car, a plane.

  How did you decide where to go?

  At first, there was some question. Louiza told me she used to wake up every morning—had spent the past twenty years waking up every morning—with a fresh set of problems laid out next to the orange juice. Orange juice was not my strong suit. And for the first few days, as we wandered from Motel 6 to Waffle House, our days were vague and Louiza withdrew in a way that made me nervous.

  One night I woke up cold, what passed for a blanket on the floor. The draft came from the open door of a TraveLodge near Tuxedo, New York. I heard voices, Louiza’s. When I walked outside to see if she was okay, she was alone, in a thin slip, standing with her left foot flat on a plastic deck chair, while her right index finger drew shapes and numbers in invisible scrawls on her exposed thigh. I looked around. No one else. I led Louiza back to bed. I chained us in. When I woke up, it was daylight. Louiza was showered and dressed. Her eyes, her hair, the skin from her cheekbones to her collar was brighter than I’d ever seen.

  “I was sleepwalking,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “I heard you last night.”

  “Not last night,” she said. “For years.”

  Where did you go, Ottavia? After Tibor shot himself.

  The first month, we walked and talked. Louiza told me about her childhood, imaginary numbers, her mother. She told me about the day she passed her viva at Cambridge, how she met a s
trange little man in the organ loft of a church. She told me about following him to Rome, about finding him in a church and how he carried her to a hospital. And how she never saw him again until that day.

  That day?

  Twenty years ago. I saw them by the pond that day. I saw the way that Malory grew into another human, another body, more powerful, more massive, an altogether larger person in the range of Louiza’s orbit. It took much longer for Louiza to tell me about the dark matter. The years in The Gables, Vince, MacPhearson, her father, negativity.

  Where did you live? After that day.

  We couldn’t stay at TiborTina, of course, and it was getting cold in the woods.

  Where did you go?

  Louiza followed the girls, I followed Louiza.

  The girls?

  At first, I could only hear them, and I’m sure that the music I heard was different from the music that moved Louiza. She called them the Unimaginables. Sometimes there were four, sometimes six, sometimes more. They weren’t real in the sense that you and I are real, but products of the far reaches of our imaginations, if not beyond. Their music came to my ears in a style and a rhythm past what Louiza could imagine. Louiza described them to me, Una and Dodo and Terri and Quatro. But since we shared the language of mathematics, it was on the long nights of walking, following Louiza following the Unimaginables, that Louiza told me about dividing by zero.

  Dividing by zero?

  There’s no point in talking about that now, trying to explain how Louiza had discovered not only ways but benefits of dividing by zero, how to manage the Unimaginables. Old news. After Tibor’s death and Malory’s disappearance, it was no longer enough to divide by zero. We were past that. Oh, occasionally the girls played an oldie or two, or invited another group to sit in on an encore until some producer pulled the plug or a groupie got stomped. But the girls played newer and newer combinations and Louiza and I danced past velvet ropes of mathematics my tutors could never have imagined.

  So you joined forces with Louiza?