Septimania

Joined forces? No. There was a sympathy that joined us, that joined us together.

  A sympathy?

  When I was little, Sister Francesca Splendida at Santa Sabina took us into the Giardino degli Aranci at night and showed us the stars above St. Peter’s. She taught us that there was a sympathy between heavenly bodies, a mutual attraction, the same way there is between human souls. Isaac Newton called it attraction at a distance, since it didn’t require that the two objects touch or even be in the same city. The boys guiding rocket ships from Houston, the boys with their fingers on buttons or joysticks guiding bombs or drones know a great deal about power operated at a distance. But Sister Francesca and Sir Isaac were talking about something else. They were talking about the way that an orange or an apple pulls the Earth at the same time as the Earth pulls the fruit. It’s the same sympathy that drew Louiza to me that morning at the Farmers’ Market on River Road, that led me to scribble an invitation to Tibor’s party and drop it into a bag of apples for her. Malory was the name she mentioned then, and perhaps Malory was the link. But there was a force that drew us towards one another and all the adventures that followed.

  The adventures, yes. That’s what I want to hear about. Where did you go?

  Do you want a list? We went to Minsk, to Benghazi, to Baghdad. We went to Beirut where I danced on rooftops to R.E.M. and Fairouz, to underground temples in Malta where it was David Bowie and Croatian cello duos playing Guns N’ Roses. But most of all, we went where the answers took us. The answers to the problems that came to Louiza in the middle of the night, the ones that she solved with her right index finger on her left thigh or drawing equations in the air.

  What were the answers?

  What were the questions?

  Did it matter?

  I knew where to go. That’s my talent. I know how to find people. That’s what I do. That’s how I found him.

  Him?

  It was easy. But it wasn’t from any lesson I’d learned at the feet of Tibor or the Bomb Squad, or any genetic talent deep in my DNA. I simply followed Dodo, the leader of the Unimaginables. I left Louiza sleeping in a stone hut outside Tora Bora and followed Dodo, as completely camouflaged as my raven-haired supergirl. Over rocks, through the wind, picking my way around Improvised Explosive Devices made of sheep bladders and shrapnel, down, down. Dodo, hard-edged against a sky more purple than black, luminescent for my eyes only. I followed Dodo and walked into his cave with a cadre of mujahedin.

  But the Americans say they found Osama in Abbottabad, and not in the caves of Tora Bora.

  Years later. Many years later. They never asked me.

  Would you have told them?

  After Baghdad and Kabul, Helmand and Tora Bora? After the mass slaughter, the gang rapes, the multiple manias of Sunnis and Shi’ites, Kurds and Pashtuns, Alawites and Maronites, Israelites and Philistines, Episcopalians and Mormons? I had seen the apple tree. I had talked to the gardener. I had spoken with the apple. If talking to the Americans would have prevented that, why not? But they didn’t ask, and I didn’t see any point in volunteering the unbelievable. I followed Louiza, and she followed Dodo and the answers to her equations to Serbia to Karadžić and Mladić, and then to the Sudan for Omar al Bashir, and Burma for Than Shwe, North Korea for Kim Jong-Il, and Venezuela for Ingrid Betancourt.

  And nobody followed you?

  If they did, they didn’t do anything about it.

  Didn’t you wonder why?

  Of course. I read the papers, I scanned the Internet from the cubicles and cafes around the globe. One night, it was in a roadside shack near the Salt Cathedral outside Bogotá, I finally heard a plausible explanation. I left Louiza inside our hostel and went looking for something to eat. An Australian surfer bought me a steak at a roadside shack out in the country, a pair of cows grazing in the parking lot. He was full of insight and stupidity, and I was grateful for the silence when he excused himself to go to the bathroom. But as soon as he had gone, the silence gave way to another voice. Maybe I was drunk on the altitude and the slab of meat I’d swallowed and a couple of mojitos served in a gourd the size of a goat skull. It was Tibor.

  You spoke with Tibor?

  Tibor found me. “It’s all hide-and-go-seek, Ottavia,” he said, the smell of Absolut wafting in from just outside my vision. Tibor was dead, of course, thankfully with his head intact and spine straight enough to sit on the stool beside me.

  “I know, Tibor,” I said. “You always told me, success is based on the willingness to open the wrong cave, to look for the cat in the wrong box. But I’ve been successful. I found the cats. Every time!”

  “Maybe,” Tibor whispered, and the smoke from his eternal Camel mixed with his vodka breath, “your American dogs are following you. They just don’t want to kill their pussies.”

  They didn’t want the answers. They didn’t want the answers to the equations. That’s what Tibor was telling me. No one wanted the answers, not even Una and Dodo and the Unimaginables—they were guides, not executioners. When the Americans found Saddam, when they shot the Old Man and dumped his body at sea, it was an accident, a mistake. Everybody was having too much fun with their beheadings and their stables of torture. They were slitting throats and sacrificing cattle to their own gods. But they drew the line at sacrificing the gods themselves, even if they were the other chap’s gods. Where’s the fun in that? Game over.

  But while they weren’t finding the gods I found, the gods I found were killing real people—other men, other women and children. I saw them, too, homing in on our rearguard with their Stingers, blowing off the legs of our Rolands with their landmines and Improvised Explosive Devices. The ritual slaughters. Abrahams beheading their Isaacs, Ishmaels beheading their Abrahams, with no angel or djinni to stop their hands. Charlemagne only lost Roland in the Battle of Roncesvalles. But we were dying—not just Americans but we, we—by the hundreds, by the thousands, headless, limbless bodies with names and histories and families, Tibor after Tibor after Tibor. I tried to connect the dots, to understand the picture that I was helping to draw. But the freckles kept moving. And moving. And moving. And the roar of Charlemagne in pain only grew louder.

  “Get out,” Tibor said from his stool, “before your Australian comes back from the bathroom. Just walk out. Get Louiza and go back into the forest.”

  Did you?

  I stood, as Tibor suggested. I started walking out. But then I looked up at the TV over the door and I saw you.

  You saw me?

  You were talking to Hillary about her campaign, something about following Obama. And that look, seeing you. Another force.

  Another force?

  Yes, Cristina, another force. Different but just as strong as the force that joined me and Louiza. It was a force that reached out of your studio and through the radio waves across half the world to me. It was a force that said keep moving, Ottavia. Keep moving. Move forward.

  …

  Are you still there?

  …

  Cristina?

  I’ve had a long time to think, and not just in the twenty years since Tibor’s fiftieth birthday surprise, but before. The long hours, the plane rides when I should have been preparing questions for a foreign minister or a warlord. The thoughts weren’t complicated—I don’t do complicated, that was Tibor. I’m the one who is prepared. I am the one who is never late. Long before Tibor and I climbed onto the plane out of Bucharest to Rome and he gave me his New Wave lecture on the smallness of the Earth, the absurdity of human ambition, and perspective in general, I realized that being on time, moving forward was the only reason for moving at all. When I was dying for a pee and left my first husband standing on the steps of the National Theatre on our wedding day and came out on the arm of Tibor, that was moving forward. When I persuaded a variety of commissars and less—I don’t need to go into detail—to sign exit visas out of that shit hole for me and Tibor, that was moving forward. And when the nurse came back into my hospital room and told me in the fading light of that Rom
an evening that my baby had disappeared, well … I had a choice. Move forward or die. Tibor tried to move with me, but he used up his energy moving in too many directions at once and never achieved escape velocity. He was too democratic or too much of an anarchist to accept that forward is forward and backward is backward. All roads lead to Rome, he used to say, blah blah blah. Well, news update—they don’t.

  I moved forward. I found you. And I saw that you too were moving. And I let you keep moving, without forcing you to pull us, to pull us forward with you. I warned you about Tibor, about allowing him to deflect your motion. But you were free to ignore me. So … as Tibor used to say. Which means absolutely nothing.

  You can stop.

  I have stopped. I’ve been stopped.

  By what, Cristina?

  You still won’t call me …

  Please.

  But Ottavia …

  Cristina, stop. Please. The only person in the world who ever treated me like a parent was Malory. He read me a goodnight story the first night I met him. About the crowning of King Charlemagne. How the Caliph of Baghdad, Haroun al Rashid, returned in disguise to Rome—although he had never been in Rome out of disguise—dressed in the uniform of his own ambassador. He was in love with the daughter of Charlemagne, but she was married already to the King of Septimania, a Jew.

  Ah, Septimania …

  And there was a child. Both the Jewish father and the Muslim lover were olive-skinned, and in those days there was no DNA testing. So not even Aldana knew who the father was.

  That was the story?

  It’s the story of the history of the kings of Septimania. It begins with doubt. If Septimania can survive with questions of origin, I can survive without a mother.

  Origin? That’s a cold way to speak of a mother.

  Malory was curious about origins. I’m not. I’m moving forward. Like you.

  Malory. He told me my voice was out of tune.

  He told me something else. That your voice sounded one way in his left ear, another in his right—like a Tibetan throat singer or maybe some Balkan peasant woman who could sing two notes at once. I always thought it was the cigarettes, the endless cigarettes refracted into gray, into your voice.

  I like that. Those endless cigarettes have turned me into a Balkan throat singer who no longer has a throat.

  We can live without voices.

  And type messages, like we’re doing now, on a keyboard to a face on a screen for the rest of my life?

  …

  What was it that Tibor said? “I won’t turn fifty. Je refuse.” Well, Ottavia, I was always younger than Tibor, until. It wasn’t fair that I turned fifty before he did, that I grew older than him. But I won’t make sixty-five.

  I know where you are, Cristina. Even without your telling me.

  The hospital hasn’t changed very much. Perhaps the Roman pines outside the windows, the palm trees are a little taller, the sun a little older, the water of the Tevere a different water than the one that flowed past Fatebenefratelli the afternoon you were born.

  The day Malory named the Pope.

  Only one person is missing.

  Would you like me to get her to the keyboard?

  Louiza?

  Hello, Cristina. I never knew your name. But I’ve never forgotten the mole on the crest of your cheekbone or your hair, gray in the afternoon light of the hospital window.

  I wish, Louiza. I wish we could have met again. I wish I was still someone. I wish I was still working. I wish I could interview you, ask you questions. It would be very big, very important. Not just to me.

  You can ask me now.

  What do you have that no one else does?

  I have the Unimaginables.

  Ah yes, the invisible women.

  Not invisible, just unnoticed since unimaginable. They’re here just like you and Ottavia and I are here. Like the neutrinos that pass unfelt and unseen through the Earth, that pass in the billions every day, like the dark matter that makes up the lion’s share of the universe. You just don’t know how to look for the Unimaginables. And when we are singing with them, you don’t know how to listen to us, so we pass unnoticed.

  And you have Ottavia.

  Yes. I have Ottavia.

  And the Pip? Tibor mentioned the Pip. Ottavia said it holds all knowledge like a crystal ball, like a computer searchable in every possible language.

  The Pip. There was a church outside Cambridge. A steeple, a young organ tuner.

  Malory?

  Ottavia told me she visited Malory. She told me that his Villa Septimania was sitting on the world’s biggest computer network, connected according to the principle of Maoist cells or Cathar cabals—no person or part knew the identity of more than six others. It was disconnected from the public Internet, entirely untraceable. The sheer information Malory had acquired would have made Mr. MacPhearson so happy, not to mention poor Vince.

  But whom did it serve, all that information?

  Ask Malory. He’s the one you want to interview.

  But the Pip, Louiza? I need to understand before I die why Tibor did what he did. I can’t help blaming the Pip.

  You think the Pip has that kind of power?

  I saw Tibor. I saw what the Pip did to the top of his head.

  One night, Ottavia and I found ourselves outside Baghdad, perhaps on the very spot where Haroun al Rashid had his palace. Perhaps the Pip was being pulled by the memory of that first apple tree. But even the Pip didn’t have all the information. The ground had been laid waste, many times. Many, many times. Sometime recently it had been a Toyota Dealership—the crumpled remnants of a pole and a sign still remained, along with a few burnt-out Corollas and Land Cruisers.

  Information is only … what would you call it? Stuff? Noise? What computers have is the ability to collect stuff, to sort through chatter. But does a computer guide the Moon around the Earth, the Earth around the Sun? Ottavia and I, and I suspect Malory too if he only knew it, are drawn together by something else. Call it a sympathy, the same rule of attraction that guides everything in the universe, from the tiniest pip of a sub-pippic particle to the galaxy of Pippa Major and all the stars that astronomers, with much more knowledge than I have, say are older than the universe itself.

  But you and Ottavia are guided by this sympathy. You’ve caught dozens, perhaps hundreds of criminals, bad men, over the decades.

  We haven’t caught anyone. For a while, I answered problems that Mr. MacPhearson and Vince gave me. Who knows what they did with the answers? Vince died. And MacPhearson, he may have died by now as well. I am not sad, even if that sounds terrible. I imagine my mother, whom I loved dearly, and my father, whom I loved not at all, have died by now as well.

  And Malory?

  What about Malory?

  All those years, all those men. Surely if you could find all those men, couldn’t you have found Malory?

  On one of our journeys, Ottavia met a young physicist. We were somewhere in Switzerland or France outside Geneva, I think. There were mountains, snow, the kind of padded silence I remember from that day you and I spent in hospital in Rome. The young physicist was very excited that Ottavia was paying attention to him—his eagerness reminded me of Malory the first time I met him. He had a key to some super-powerful analytic equipment—scanners and computers. I don’t know anything about these machines that dissect reality. Ottavia had been keen—keen for years—to peer into the depths of her treasures—and not only the Pip, which she carried around in a leather pouch, but a shiny marble apple that was another of the gifts she’d taken from Malory.

  The young physicist asked me if I wanted to join them to take a look, but I told him it wouldn’t be necessary—Ottavia could be my eyes. He smiled in the patronizing fashion that I’ve been used to for so long, not understanding that the sympathy between me and Ottavia is such that I do, indeed, see what she sees—although not, perhaps, in the way that young physicists might imagine. I sat on a leather sofa in a conference room outside the la
b, one of those butterscotch modernistic sofas that make the Swiss feel more Italian and up-to-date. For the first time in a long time, I felt strangely but comfortably alone. The Unimaginables had stayed outside for a little snowboarding. Ottavia was inside the lab with her man and his equipment.

  But as I sat there alone, I felt—I don’t know how else to put it—as if a series of switches were clicking on, a series of lights shining at different angles within me. And whether this is what Ottavia saw at the center of the apple, at the center of the Pip, I don’t know. But as each light clicked on, I saw a pyramid. And then another pyramid and another, attaching themselves to one another in a giant crystal. And then I was inside the crystal, as if inside the Cathedral at Ely, with the Norman arches and arcades and chapels multiplying and stretching away, and producing with each generation of crystals more altars and statues and, one by one, the pipes of a giant organ. Long pipes, short pipes, wooden and metal pipes, bent and fluted. And as the crystal structure grew, I felt myself shrinking smaller and smaller, like Alice in Wonderland, until I was cocooned within the center, surrounded above and below in a crystalline transparency. I was alone, all alone at the heart of something.

  Was it the Pip, was it the apple? I don’t know. There are only two things I knew about this place at the center of the crystal. It was a place where distance didn’t matter. As vast as it seemed, I could reach out with my hand and touch the other side of this infinite cathedral without having to stretch. But more, it was a place where what seemed possible was beyond imagining—was greater than I’d been taught in all the books and articles and parental speeches going back to Vince and MacPhearson and my father. I was at the center of the secret and I was dying to tell someone what I saw. But I was alone—Ottavia was gone with her young man. And then I thought—Malory should see this.

  And then he was there.

  He was sitting next to me, as if he were sitting in that conference room on the butterscotch sofa. He wasn’t exactly the Malory I’d first met in the organ loft, or the one I’d seen in Rome, or the one who was at your party that terrible day. He was an older Malory, a Malory of less hair and worn elbows. But he was also a younger one, a boy in short French trousers and knee socks, who very patiently took my hands and placed them on a crystalline keyboard in front of me. And as I did, Malory stood at full height on a pedal—did you know, Cristina, that organs had pedals? And the music! The music that I heard!