Malory sat on the concrete bench with his belongings beside him, as lost as the old men he used to see camped out beneath the bridges by the Tevere with their possessions spread out on a muddy piece of tarpaulin, knowing less—if that were possible—than when he’d first come to Rome. He sat, and the day turned into evening and the evening turned into night. Malory sat all night in the Giardino degli Aranci. Beneath him and his concrete bench and the contents of his Kit Bag, there was only dust. And beneath that, the center of an Earth that was same size as the point at the center of the Sun, ninety-three million miles away. In all the years since he had been crowned on the circle of porphyry in St. Peter’s, the Earth had traveled thirty billion miles around the Sun. And yet the Sun’s two-hundred-fifty million-year journey around the center of the Milky Way during that time barely registered on any calendars, Julian, Roman, Arabic, Biblical, or otherwise, even less the motion of the Milky Way around the center of the universe, and the universe around whatever collection of other universes unimaginable to a species that had been around for only a few hundred thousand years. What would it mean to discover Newton’s One True Rule that guided everything? Would it explain all that? It was all that Malory could do to imagine scattering Antonella’s ashes here in the Giardino degli Aranci, behind the Basilica of Santa Sabina where she had spent her girlhood, where Ottavia had spent her early years. Scatter Antonella, turn her into an orange tree the way Ottavia had been the product of a pip. Dust to dust, ashes to oranges.
As the rays of the sun rose and touched the round dome of St. Peter’s, the square dome of the Great Synagogue across from the prow of the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, Malory took the box, took what remained of Antonella from out of his Kit Bag, and placed it on his lap. He was alone in the Giardino degli Aranci except for a few early morning ancients—he was now one of them—walking alone or with caretakers. One old man—could he possibly have the faded memory of a red beard?—in a wheelchair, a plaid flannel across his lap, watched his movements carefully from the shade of a Roman pine across the gravel path. But who would notice, who would mind the sentimental sprinkling at this early hour?
Malory set his thumb against the lid of the blue marbled box to pry it loose. He thought of the box on the seven-sided desk of the Sanctum Sanctorum that Settimio had shown him on his first morning in the villa. He thought of the villa itself, perhaps only an immeasurable meter or two beneath his feet. This box, this marbled box, he would open. But search as he did, turn the box and turn again, Malory couldn’t find an opening. Had there been a list of instructions from the Huntingdon Road Crematorium that he had carelessly discarded? He searched again in his Kit Bag but came up empty-handed. He tried again with his thumbs, but the top wouldn’t budge. He set the box down next to him on the bench, defeated even in this one simple task. Yet as he did, the light reflected off the metal of his Universal Organ Tuner. Picking it up, he wedged its bent and mottled tip under the forward edge of the top, and in one easy motion pried off the lid and opened the box.
There she was, his Antonella. He thought of her biscuits. He thought of the first kiss in a Rome of another era. He thought of Tibor and the weight of his hand on Malory’s shoulder. He thought of gray-eyed, gray-haired Cristina and the Nurses and the Bomb Squad, of Settimio and the Driver and the poor Pole whose funeral he had missed while he was in mourning in England. He thought of Rix. And he thought of that last kiss at the door of Cranmer Road, tasting of coffee and comfort, and a memory of copper curls.
Malory reached his hand into the ashes, as warm in the morning light as Antonella’s hand in the chilly ward of Addenbrooke’s. But as he did, his fingers touched something hard. They had told him at the Crematorium that sometimes pieces of bone remained, resistant until the end against the flames. But what Malory pulled out from within the ashes was something more solid, something heavier. It was a pen. A simple ballpoint pen. Silver, if coated with a dull layer of ash. Had a careless attendant dropped it into the box? Had Antonella managed to leave it for Malory as she had left the letters from the Queen of Septimania? He clicked the butt-end. It had a point. Malory set down the blue marbled box of ashes for a moment and picked up the Book of Organs and turned to an empty page. “15 August,” he wrote. The pen wrote.
With the pen in his hand, an understanding came to Malory, borne by the light of the sun. It wasn’t that he had read the letters too late—the letter from his grandmother, the letter from Settimio, the letters that Antonella left on his pillow that signified that he was too late to kiss her goodbye. It wasn’t that he realized too late that Mrs. Emery was his grandmother, that Louiza loved him, that Ottavia was his daughter, that Tibor, Settimio, Rix, Cristina, and Antonella would die. He realized that what he had failed to do was what all had been urging him for more than fifty years. He realized that Louiza with her i = u, Newton with his One True Rule did not merely describe what existed but gave birth to a new creation. Newton, for all his inability to acknowledge the love of the Queen of Septimania, had created something extraordinary beyond a mere line of heirs. Newton had spent years, after all, experimenting with alchemy, calculating the End of Time using the Bible as his slide rule—activities and obsessions that would have got him laughed out of the least academic of pubs. Such a small portion of Newton’s life had been spent with the science that history remembered. But perhaps it was all tied together in this marginal note, this one rule. Newton was looking, as Malory was looking—as perhaps the rocks, the planets, the stars, the oranges on the branches of the trees of the Giardino degli Aranci were looking—they were all looking for sympathy. For sympathy. For love. And that creation, that equation, that identity of Louiza’s, the i = u that described the attraction of two bodies at a distance—what was that if not love? The same love that broke Newton when he learned of the death of his Queen—that fractured, marble look that paralyzed Malory on the bench of the organ loft of Trinity College.
“The applications are extraordinary,” Louiza had warned him, “and quite possibly dangerous.” Malory knew nothing. He had spent forty-three years searching without looking.
The first rays of light of the new mid-August day began to ripple the tips of the Roman pines. Malory saw that all the colors of light that he had so carefully separated into files, that he had collected onto shelves through the prism of all he had learned were as useless as when Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain. With that first light, Malory let go of all that he had gathered beneath him for seventy years and picked up a second prism. Malory saw the answer approaching nearer and incalculably nearer, understood what Newton knew, what Newton had learned, not by standing on the shoulders of giants, but by falling into the arms of his Queen. The One True Rule that guides the universe. Armed with that prism—not the scepter of Charlemagne or the orb of the treasure of Al-Shammardal, but the pen he had drawn from the ashes, a simple biro—Malory intercepted all those infinite rays and concentrated them into a single beam. Forse oggi, forty-three years after the Master of Trinity yanked away the lever from beneath Malory’s fellowship, Malory began to write.
He began at the beginning with that first day: the shaft of light, Louiza’s golden head around the side of the Orchard, Louiza’s pale chin lifted in the balmy air of mid-March forty-three years past. He wrote through the morning and into the afternoon. He wrote as the clouds above the Tevere draped a modest loincloth over the savior of an evening sun. He wrote as the shadows deepened, shaped and reshaped, tuned and retuned into ever-modulating harmonies, as swarms of starlings chased their own invisibles, beaks open in reckless hunger. Malory wrote. He wrote in the Book of Organs. Sometimes he picked up the Chapbook and wrote in the margins, in the spaces between the lines of the Queen of Septimania’s journal, in and around and astride the shoulders of Newton’s triumphant footnote. As he wrote, the fig leaves fell away, and he began to understand how little he had understood the signs of simple love that Louiza, Ottavia, Antonella, and even Tibor and Old Mrs. Emery and Settimio, had shown him, given him, tried to tea
ch him all these years.
Although he couldn’t see it, the bitter oranges in the trees of the garden began to fall and the air was rich with their bruising, and the sound of the little girls released by the nuns for their afternoon freedom like starlings themselves, chasing the living cats that hid in the ruins of the garden walls. And as he wrote, two women entered the garden from the gate behind Santa Sabina, lifting their pale chins in the late-summer light, walking slowly—out of choice, not out of need, although one of the women, the taller one, was clearly as old as Malory and the smaller, while not in her youth, looked as if she could fly to the top of Trajan’s Column at any moment.
Malory wrote. And what he wrote was Newton’s solution—the answer, what Newton had found, what Haroun had found, what he, Malory, was slowly, slowly discovering. All difference is merely a disguise for the One True Rule that guides everything. And even as the light began to fade, Malory continued to write with a strength and a determination that came not from an anxiety of being late, but from an understanding that, with the approach of the two women, this was the time. That he could not have made this discovery until now. Even if all the ink of the Queen and all the ink of Newton and the new ink that Malory joined with theirs, full of his Mother and his unseen Father and the unknown Old Mrs. Emery; even if all this history and science and philosophy and dreams and truth and imagination and what is unimaginable, even if all this melted into one indistinguishable paste. Maybe, just maybe, with this new pen that mixture could be unsqueezed back into a tube, a tube that contained all the dishes, all the desires, all the djinns as handily as the Magic Bag of Judar, the one tube, the single tube that mattered—or at least mattered to those who mattered to Malory.
When Malory had finished writing, when he’d followed the alpha bet in the negative path of Louiza from the bricked-up arches of the omega back to the alpha of the apple of that first Pip, Malory laid down his pen and took up the box with Antonella’s ashes. In the fading light of the Roman evening, the two women approached the bench. Malory looked down into the box. What he saw was alive and it was dead, it was life and death, lives and deaths, Antonella and Louiza, Ottavia and Cristina, Tibor and Mrs. Emery, his Mother and Father, and as many as the fireflies that a Tuscan peasant saw in the imagination of a Florentine poet on a summer’s evening so many more years ago.
Malory looked up. The women sat on the bench beside him, Louiza on his left, Ottavia on his right, Antonella in the blue marbled box before him.
“Hello, Malory,” Louiza said.
“Hello, Father,” Ottavia said, “may we come up?”
And Malory felt that he had grown. In the fading light, he looked down at the uplifted faces of Louiza and Ottavia. Had he risen from the bench, or floated up like Bernini’s apple, balanced by the force of the two women—the scientist on one side and the Queen on the other? In the deepening dark, it was impossible to say whether the old man with the faded red beard and the tartan flannel across his lap might roll in his wheelchair towards Malory and break the ascension. But for a moment, all laws, all rules were suspended. Sometime very soon, perhaps, others would stand on his shoulders. Ottavia, her daughter, others would straddle a Vespa and ride into their own Septimanias, away from their Louizas, towards their Louizas. But for now, he was on the topmost layer with no need of religion or science. Malory, his world, his universe, were in tune.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EPTIMANIA TOOK ROOT AT THE BEAUTIFUL ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION villa above Bellagio, Italy, where I spent a month of tranquility and creation with ten other fellows in late 2007. Down the hill, the Foundation was simultaneously hosting a conference on developing low-cost drugs to battle African diseases. One evening, our two groups came together for cocktails, and I spoke with a young doctor—a genuine hero from a small village in Mozambique—who had traveled out of Africa, out of his country for the first time in his life. He told me why he was in Bellagio; I told him why I was there. But even after I had told him twice, he couldn’t believe that I was being housed and fed and supported in order to write a story.
It is extraordinary. And I have received extraordinary support from many sources. My editor Allyson Rudolph championed my book to Overlook Press and its celebrated owner Peter Mayer. My agent Ayesha Pande guided me with elegance and acumen through a marathon of rewrites in unerring belief and affection for Septimania. The poet Robert Pinsky not only introduced me to The Inferno of Dante, but also generously gave me permission to incorporate freely his extraordinary translation.
But it is the unquestioning belief of my family—of my children, Rebecca, Gabriel, and Mimi, of my wife, Stephanie, and my parents, Judith and Isaac, who have followed the changing fortunes of Malory and Louiza with patience and the advice of their wider lives—that has sustained me the most and has taught me the true meaning of copeability.
JONATHAN LEVI is an American writer and producer, and author of A Guide for the Perplexed. His short stories and articles have also appeared in many magazines including Granta, GQ, Terra Nova, The Nation, Condé Nast Traveler, and The New York Times. Born in New York, he currently lives in Rome, Italy.
Printed in the United States Copyright © 2016 The Overlook Press
JACKET DESIGN BY ADLY ELEWA
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © JEANETTE MONTGOMERY BARRON
OVERLOOK DUCKWORTH
NEW YORK • LONDON
WWW.OVERLOOKPRESS.COM
WWW.DUCKNET.CO.UK
Septimania Page 34