Septimania

by Jonathan Levi

  And then?

  And then, of course, Ottavia came back. Without her man. I stood up. We went back out into the snow.

  Without Malory?

  Don’t you understand, Cristina? Newton found the equation to describe the attraction between two moving bodies at a distance. But three bodies in motion—that was too much for his mathematics. For anyone’s mathematics.

  What does that have to do with Malory?

  I met Malory the day that I was awarded my PhD. It wasn’t much, my thesis, just a simple equation: i = u, an identity, a relationship of two bodies. Ottavia and her young physicist pointed their equipment at the Pip, believing, in this digital century, that we can be quantified, boiled down into numbers that are the sum totals of all the little packets of information of the things we Google or Like or the keys we touch when we send the private messages of our unconscious wishes as we shop on Amazon or flirt on our cell phones. But that’s not why i = u is so powerful. That’s not why we aren’t with Malory.

  What happened?

  A third element entered the equation.

  Ottavia, Malory, and me. It’s a Three-Body Problem. There is so much to tell Malory, so much I want to tell him, waking up after all these years. But Malory has to open his eyes, listen to the music. Malory has to follow the unimaginable.

  3/6

  HYSICISTS, MATHEMATICIANS, AND A HANDFUL OF ARTISTS MAY have the luxury to dream about alternate universes of dead cats and live cats and ten-dimensional cats of many colors. But Antonella returned to Cambridge in the middle of January 1979 with a job that was balancing on the precarious edge of her visa. She had dreamed about Malory, she had boiled kettles and asked impertinent questions to porters and junior faculty. She had traveled on her infrequent holiday and scanty budget to Rome for Malory. But she had blinked. She had blinked when Tibor confused her one Christmas morning. And although that blink spawned many tears, eventually her eyes opened back onto the damp on the skirting of her bedsit and a series of days measured out more in chocolate biscuits than in mathematical units.

  For her own preservation, she succumbed to one of the up-and-comers in the Faculty—a willowy, insinuating statistician who wore his confidence in orange and honey patterns of tweed and persisted in following Antonella with a patience not dissimilar from her own with Malory. Antonella gave in. The two children she bore him gave in. And by the time the willowy cad succumbed to a shoddy death, hushed up during a conference on fractals in Málaga, the boy had escaped to study trees in Zambia and the girl to parts unknown—which Antonella believed to be the cottage of a gardener on an estate just outside of Newmarket. She was alone in the flat she had dreamed into being on Cranmer Road, with souvenirs of a family and the Times of London on her doorstep.

  The flat on Cranmer Road was the garden level of one side of a freestanding two-story building, with a semi-circle gravel drive in front guarded by two stone lions and a gardener’s shed in the back that her late husband had imagined stocking with wines and their associated machinery if he ever won the Fields Medal. As English as the garden flat was, Antonella over the years filled the vacuum of her family’s negligence with strings of garlic and pepperoncino, fruit bowls from Deruta, and five-liter drums of olive oil. And she continued to be useful. Organizing guest socials for the Maths Faculty, teaching romantic Italian conversation to ambitious Girton girls intent on trading their sensible cardigans for a Palermo fling with the Alain Delons or Vittorio Gassmen they were certain were pining for a pale British hand.

  Old Rix, the Head Porter of Trinity, adopted her, both after Malory’s initial disappearance from Cambridge and especially upon her return from Rome. When Sybil Rix returned from her own failed marriage to her father’s home, she and Antonella took it in turns to prop up the old man as age fought with his sense of duty and decorum. There was nothing surprising about Antonella’s presence at Rix’s funeral, and indeed something natural about her rescue of Malory, frozen on the bench of the organ in Trinity Chapel.

  The current Organ Scholar had stepped in and played the service as Antonella, with the aid of a junior porter, escorted Malory down the steps from the loft and to a folding chair in the antechapel. Malory let her lead him, let her bring him a glass of water. After the service, Antonella sat with Sybil and Sybil sat with Malory, touched by the depth of feeling she assumed had overwhelmed Malory at the shock of her father’s death. Yet as they walked under the Wren Library and across the Trinity Bridge, the first autumn acers in the Clare Gardens beginning to turn, there was no sign that Malory knew who Antonella was. And when they’d pulled Malory’s suitcase up Burrell’s Lane past the familiar bulk of the University Library and the unfamiliar wall of Robinson College, when they’d turned into the house at the end of Cranmer Road and Antonella had sat Malory down at her kitchen table, not even a cup of tea broke through the cuirass and buckler and greaves and helmet of resignation that Malory had donned in that single moment of commune with Newton in the organ loft of the Trinity Chapel.

  Sybil rang at nine that evening to see how Antonella was getting on. Malory was unchanged. He sat where Antonella led him. He ate the carbonara she placed in front of him. He followed her to her son’s bedroom—or at least the bedroom she had reserved for her son if he ever decided to come home to a Cambridge that was free of the sarcasms of his father if not the memories of childhood. He sat contentedly, or at least without complaint, at the edge of her son’s bed as she opened up Malory’s suitcase and laid out his toiletries and took away the dirty laundry of his journey. She would put him up for the night, she told Sybil. In the morning, she was certain he would be fine.

  But the morning was the same. Antonella opened the bedroom door at 8 a.m. and found Malory lying on his back with the covers pulled up to his chin, eyes open and fixed on the infinite space between his nose and the ceiling. She spoke to him, asked how he had slept, what he wanted for breakfast. Without an answer, she left the door half open and went into the kitchen. She put a flame under the macchinetta, scrambled some eggs, toasted some bread, set out butter and jam—she hadn’t been prepared for a guest, after all. When she went to find Malory, she found him dressed—clearly he had lain down the night before without removing a single piece of clothing. She led him to the bathroom. He knew enough to stand, to sit, to unzip and relieve himself. She put soap in his hand, toothpaste on a fresh toothbrush she kept because she had more hope than company, and made certain that whatever part of Malory’s brain was still functioning knew how to brush teeth. The eggs and the toast were cold, but that didn’t bother Malory. He ate, he drank tea. He sat.

  Antonella cleared the dishes, washed them in the sink, set them in the rack. She was just drying her hands on a Florentine dishtowel—there had, in the past, been family trips, presents, affection once bottled if long uncorked—when he spoke.

  “Biscuit?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Might you have a biscuit?” Malory asked. His voice sounded strange to Antonella, touched with an Italian precision; she would not have recognized it over the telephone. “A chocolate biscuit?” With each bite, with each dip of Antonella’s hand into the tin for another biscuit, and another, the old Malory returned, the Malory she had remembered loving in a time when she was very young and very foolish. And as the bites turned into days and the days into weeks, Malory, against the odds of Tibor, against the marble stare of Newton, turned fifty. And fifty-one. And two.

  Still, for Malory the world of Cambridge was encapsulated in a crazed and greasy globe of Perspex. There was a film over all his senses, and trying to rub it away only moved the streaks from one quadrant to another. He began to tune organs at two churches, then a dozen. He ate two, sometimes three meals a day with Antonella and watched the Nine O’Clock News with her on an ever-renewing range of television sets. He spoke, he heard, he saw. But he made little attempt to pop his ears or adjust the aperture of his telescope. And on the few occasions he did—when he found himself by the front gate of Trinity College, or on the to
wpath by the river—a sharp tweak of the lens only brought his pain into focus with the force of a light from a distant galaxy and warned him away from even thinking about Louiza, for her own safety.

  From time to time, Malory believed that people were watching him. Occasionally he thought he recognized one or two of the Americans from The Gables. But no one was stopping him from doing anything, perhaps because he was doing nothing. No one came for Malory—on a Vespa, in a police car, or with the stealth and ingenuity that followed the marriage of technology and suspicion in the new century. Whether Malory’s interest in the world died before the world’s interest in Malory, or whether both died from the removal of whatever had nurtured their ambitions, it was impossible to say. But to all appearances, Malory returned to the same unremarkable counting of time that had preceded the afternoon when Louiza found him in the organ loft of St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey, with little left of his ambition to tune the world.

  From time to time, Antonella persuaded Malory to climb into her car—an updated cream-colored Cinquecento—to drive for an after noon, to walk in the gardens of Anglesey Abbey, or shop for a skirt in Bishops Stortford or a jumper in Saffron Walden, or eat cakes at the Old Fire Engine House across a damp field from the isolated Norman pile of Ely Cathedral. Occasionally Antonella would invite a pair of undergraduates home for Sunday dinner, and occasionally one would get into conversation with Malory about Newton which would, on rare occasions, lead to more teas and lunches and a semi-official advisory capacity for Malory over the student’s studies, with the benediction of the Maths Faculty. It was Antonella’s way of bringing Malory back into the world.

  The world assumed that Malory and Antonella were married or, even better, living in the presumed excitement of sin at an age when mystery existed only in sixty-minute segments on television. They kept their separate bedrooms, although Antonella was convinced that, if she had climbed into Malory’s bed with the red-haired fullness that had lost nothing to the birth of her two children and gained something with widowhood, Malory would have done whatever she asked of him. But the thought—the one or two times she allowed it—filled her with a horror: not that she would be making Malory do something unpleasant, but that the patience of all those years of waiting for Malory to come to her would be shot as full of holes as that poor Aldo Moro in the boot of the Renault 4.

  It was enough to bring Malory into the world, to return him into the tuning, the tutoring, the Saturday morning organ lessons at Impington Village College for the children of the fens. More than to her bed, she craved to take Malory back to Rome, or rather have Malory take her. They had walked there only once, the night of the Divine Comedy. She wanted to walk through the Christmas fun fair at Piazza Navona and eat roasted chestnuts and lentils at New Year. She wanted to take him down to the open-air cinema along the river in July, to the Celimontana, to Villa Ada with its smell of citronella and cardamom, for jazz and reggae and bad Italian pop stars at the PalaLottomatica. Antonella wanted to feed cacio e pepe to Malory at Felice’s in Testaccio and to watch him eat chocolate cake with panna in the driveway of Augustarello, where the plastic chairs and tables migrated every summer in flight from the oven. Most of all, she wanted to take him up to the Giardino degli Aranci, the Garden of the Oranges, where, as a young convent girl, she had first developed a love of mathematics, counting the fallen fruit and measuring it against the future harvest. Antonella was convinced with the smattering of maths she’d picked up in her years of service at the Faculty, that more than any theoretical notion of forgiveness or forgetting, a positive Roman Holiday was needed to cancel out the negative of that Christmas Roman mistake.

  Even without Rome, Antonella was more than content with each new year to have Malory in her life, in her flat, at her table, even if much of the day he pedaled away from her bay window out the Coton footpath to nowhere in particular. She was hardly a victim of the centrifugal motion of the Earth. But similarly she never pretended that anything she might do would sway its course or align it into more perfect motion.

  On the day that the Times announced Cristina’s death on page five, Antonella made no attempt to hide the news from Malory.

  “The paper mentions Tibor,” Malory said—and Antonella noticed, with mixed emotions that he didn’t look over at her with either censure or memory—“but it doesn’t mention her daughter.”

  “There was a daughter?” Antonella asked. “Back in Rumania or later?”

  “In Rome,” Malory said, eyes still on the photo of Cristina. “They gave her up for adoption, but then found her again later. Nice girl. Read maths at Cambridge, I think. Maybe you ran into her. Must have been twenty years ago.”

  “Militaru?” Antonella didn’t remember any Militarus. Although the Johnsons and Davidsons and Georges and Wilkinsons passed through her mind without leaving a trace, the foreign names—the Selasis and Szegeds and Algaríns and of course the Antonellis—remained with imported postcards and stories of distant relatives who couldn’t understand why their children thought they could feed a family with the study of mathematics.

  “I don’t know what surname she used,” Malory said. “She was brought up by nuns in Rome. Santa Sabina, I think.”

  “Ottavia?” The name came out of Antonella’s mouth uncalled by memory.

  “Yes, Ottavia,” Malory said, looking up. “Did you know her?”

  “Santa Sabina,” Antonella said. “Of course my Malory remembers nothing about his Antonella. But that is where I went to school, although of course I had a home to return to at the end of every day.” And indeed, Cranmer Road had served as an occasional home for Ottavia during her studies, so thirsty was Antonella for any news of her Rome that didn’t come over the television, even though Ottavia’s news was removed by a generation from her own childhood. Antonella put away the tea and biscuits and served Ottavia espresso and baked her a crostata and listened to her problems with boys and England, even as she wished her own son might take interest in this underfed girl.

  “Ottavia is Cristina’s daughter,” Malory said.

  “That’s impossible,” Antonella said. “Look at Cristina, Malory. Ottavia was a little mouse, not this high-cheekboned, gray-haired movie star! Who told you she was Cristina’s daughter? Tibor?”

  It was that red-haired old man. The one who had asked him all those questions the day after. The one who had been in the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, who might even have been at the Orchard. Malory couldn’t remember his name. But he remembered something he had told Malory, something Malory had stored in a box he had been afraid to open for twenty years.

  “She’s your daughter,” the red-bearded man had told him. “But she’s also Tibor’s.”

  Malory had ignored the first statement for the second. He had assumed the man had corrected himself. How was it possible, after all, that any creature could have two fathers, two origins? Did she have two mothers? Did she grow in two wombs? There was the story he’d heard from Cristina years ago at a party in the Dacia—about how the nurses had produced only one baby after she and Louiza gave birth; how Cristina had given that baby away to keep Tibor from doing something unspeakable. But the credibility of Malory’s paternity was as low as the credibility of what the red-bearded—MacPhearson, wasn’t that his name?—MacPhearson had told him. Two fathers, two mothers? Why not seven to fit into Tibor’s multi-headed cosmology? Impossible. Unimaginable.

  But the moment the breath cooled into words, the moment Malory said that Ottavia was Cristina’s daughter, he knew that the sentence was out of tune. There was Cristina, on page five of the Times, in a quarter-page photo from an era more recent than the death of Tibor, but looking no less glamorous. And although he hadn’t seen Ottavia in all that time, Malory couldn’t conceive of pale, golden-haired, comfortably small Ottavia being the issue of Cristina. Malory knew immediately that Antonella had touched on the truth. Ottavia was not Cristina’s. She was not Tibor’s. She was Malory’s daughter, the daughter of Malory and Louiza. For the past twen
ty years, he had allowed himself to live in a world where he refused to see his daughter—that his daughter was his daughter—refused to believe that she even existed. For twenty years, Malory had bottled, boxed, trapped, hidden, disguised so many memories. To protect Louiza, surely. To keep the red-bearded man and who knew how many others from taking her away. And into that box, Malory had also stuffed the information that red-bearded man had given him.

  Ottavia was his daughter. Ottavia was Louiza’s daughter, the daughter, the child who had pushed her tiny hand from within Louiza’s womb to meet his in the drafty October cold of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Ottavia was the lost girl, the girl who had disappeared along with her mother. He had thrown into the storage bin his memories of that little girl, Ottavia, her miraculous appearance at the villa, the way she sat upright, hugging her knees beneath the duvet as he told her about Septimania and the Caliph Haroun al Rashid and read to her the same goodnight story about Judar the Son of Omar that Haroun’s ambassador had read to the Princess Aldana in the court of Charlemagne. The way Ottavia so naturally linked her arm in his as they walked through the pastures of TiborTina. The way Ottavia so simply and delicately removed Bernini’s apple from the Newton statue. Ottavia was his daughter and she was also the once and future Queen of Septimania.

  These stored memories added up to loss. Boxes full, tunnels full, libraries and mountains full of loss. But instead of the stale taste of outdated regret, Malory felt joy. It was a joy he had known only at those brief moments when he had drawn together with Louiza and Ottavia. But now, here with Antonella, the patient nurse who had cared for him with biscuit tin and copper curls for twenty years, Malory felt a joy with this woman who had removed the glaze from his eyes and given him back his sight, given him a family.