Oh the sheets of roe
Are filled with rubber
Anchovy prints
Are everywhere
IBOR’S PAW GUIDED MALORY AROUND A FRAGRANT CORNER OF the prison of Regina Coeli in the direction of the music. Tibor had insisted—and now that Malory had found him, there was no real question he would follow—that Malory come home with him for dinner and plan the search for Louiza. They walked at a measured pace—as if Tibor were calculating strategy or counting syllables in a canto—from Trajan’s Column through the Ghetto and out the back end of the Teatro Marcello, to the Synagogue and across the Isola Tiborina. Part of the route was familiar from Malory’s dash with Tibor and Louiza two weeks earlier. But part was different and new. Even without the weight of Louiza in his arms, Tibor’s determination lightened Malory. He let Tibor guide him, be his Virgil, across the Ponte Cestio and into Trastevere, the dome of St. Peter’s making the occasional flirtatious appearance according to the curve of the river. He followed Tibor down a set of steps fragrant with rotting leaves and urine into the medieval circle of Rome, past the prison of Regina Coeli up to a high gate that shivered with the sound of drums, an electric guitar, and a Rumanian-accented song he thought he recognized.
Cuttlefish ink
Cappuccino double
With a fork and knife
On the Spanish Stairs.
“Dylan?” Malory asked. It was the soundtrack of garden parties and May Balls along the Cam, but in a less self-conscious key—F-sharp major, perhaps—one whose strings were less taut, whose harmonics were less forced than the madrigals and pantos and practiced frivolity of Cambridge. Tibor pushed open the gate. Seven or so first-and second-tier members of the Bomb Squad, tie-dyed and batiked and bandanaed and bejeweled, and a variety of Danube mädchens, befrocked like Florence Nightingale auditioning for The Night Porter, were gathered around Sasha who, guitar draped like a Kalashnikov across his chest and perched on the bonnet of a shipwrecked car, was in full chorus:
Gotta get a bag from my hotel room,
Where I got me some dates from a pretty little girl in Greece,
She promise, she beat and whip me,
When I pain my fututi pizda!
“So …Welcome to the Dacia.”
Radu handed them glass jars filled with a bubbling, celebratory punch of indistinct origin. Nurses thrust ramekins beneath their chins, full of mozzarella and olive and some impossibly hot Carpathian pepper. More of them, dozens of them, Nurses and Bomb Squad, danced through the gate and in and out of the shadows of Christmas lights hanging like Babylonian grapes from the iron struts of the Dacia. Smudge pots of citronella lit the dying moments of quixotic mosquitoes who had slouched over to the Dacia from the neighboring Botanical Gardens. The Dacia, as Malory discovered over the succeeding weeks of punch and grill, had once been a nursery of fig and pear and apricot and apple trees for princes and cardinals who lived at the fecund base of the Gianicolo, two healthy spits away from the Vatican. The Nurses and the Bomb Squad took over the ruins of a house and garden from impatient families who used it as a rest room around the corner from the prison of Regina Coeli. They fixed the holes in the roof, put locks on the doors, ran the whole thing through with industrial brooms and whitewash, and baptized the compound as the Dacia, not because of any romantic memories of the summer dachas of Pasternak or Akhmatova or the Bucharest nomenklatura, but because Brendushka’s diminutive Dacia 1300 finally dropped its gearshaft in the middle of the garden after her flight from Bucharest. It was late October 1978 to Malory, the physics dropout from Cambridge. But to refugees from the other side of the Iron Gate it was still the Summer of Love.
That first night, Malory did little more than sip at his jar of punch as Radu and Sasha—once he’d relinquished his guitar to Dora or Brendushka or one of the other many Nurses Malory eventually came to know—and a handful of other members of the Bomb Squad peppered him with questions. Not just searching for the obvious physical details about Louiza, but for behavioral quirks—the way she walked, the way she talked, the way she thought. Malory gladly told and retold the stories of his two encounters with Louiza to an audience far more demonstrative than Settimio. He told them about Louiza’s mathematics, he told them about Whistler Abbey. They were intrigued by the story of negativity and soberly awed by the image of Louiza tracing i = u onto Malory’s naked chest in the late afternoon light of St. George’s.
“Do not forget the Pip.” Tibor pulled at a cigarette and wiped the smoke from his beard. And so Malory told them of the Pip, from Louiza’s discovery in the shutters of the steeple of St. George’s through its fall from the organ loft of Santa Maria and Tibor’s miraculous discovery of the tiny apple seed in the morning shadows of the pavement below the altar. Malory tried not to embellish or editorialize. But Radu in particular encouraged him not to worry himself too much with the effect his own attraction to Louiza had on his description of the girl.
“We need to find the girl you are searching for,” he said. “Not just some little blonde named Louiza.”
When he was finished, Malory excused himself and walked out the gate. The Driver found him around a discreet corner and drove him on the Vespa back home to the Villa Septimania. Malory returned the next night and the next for an update from this new family of dispossessed. The Nurses and Bomb Squad would wander in at odd moments from their occasional jobs. Some evenings Tibor was already at the Dacia when Malory arrived, some evenings he showed up later or not at all. But Malory always found a Nurse chopping vegetables she had seduced off a fruttivendolo in the markets of Campo dei Fiori or San Cosimato, and Radu or Sasha or Vlad scaling and grilling a fish that one or another extra from Tibor’s production had donated to the cause. Malory listened to tales of discovery as they chopped and scaled and he experimentally sipped on a glass of whatever was placed in his hand. He listened to stories of escape from the East—Radu and Sasha wrapped in horse blankets in a corner of a refrigerated truck, Dora and Anda less insulated in the boot of an English tourist’s Morris Minor. Tibor and Cristina had flown out of Bucharest in style, of course, thanks to Cristina’s discovery of an uncle in Ramat Gan, who wangled her an Israeli visa with a flight connection in Rome.
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” Tibor quoted to whomever would listen. “We got off the plane in the middle of the flight, and that particular yellow line suits us just fine.”
Much of the truth of Tibor’s story was veiled in cigarette smoke, but no one dared contradict Tibor when he was in voice. The paw that Tibor had first placed on Malory’s shoulder, that Transylvanian crag of a hand, was nothing compared to the force that hogtied the Bomb Squad, the Nurses, and any others he corralled into the garden of the Dacia with his stories. Malory was as happy as the rest of them to recline on the paternal speechifying of Tibor.
Cristina, as Principessa, held her own court and followed a different protocol. Cristina never had to queue for auditions. She arrived in Rome to three well-paying jobs—cleaning a Canadian journalist’s office in Piazza Barberini, wiping the noses and bottoms of four-year-olds in an asilo on the Via Sistina, and preparing lunch for a lonely fiddle maker in an attico off Piazza Navona twice a week. Cristina never followed Tibor on his evening tours of the garden. Cristina perched gray-eyed on a sprung sofa off the kitchen, smoking a filtered cigarette of exotic origin. Some evenings, she would look over to Malory, and Malory would join her. He didn’t smoke. But he shared their loss in a silence that he hoped gave her as much comfort as it gave him. And sometime during the evening—before dinner, during, or most often once the dishes had been piled up in the Dacia bathtub—Cristina would stand up from the sprung sofa. The Bomb Squad, or occasionally a non-Rumanian guest, would strike a guitar or a zither or a drum, and Cristina and the Nurses would throw on costume boas or army greatcoats or strip down to their Weimar nighties and perform a post-Brechtian, pre-Madonna cabaret with a determined chaos that, for at least a little while, helped all of them forget the daily indignities of exile.
Malory expected it would be a matter of days until the Bomb Squad found Louiza and their child. But as the rains of November rose higher up the embankment of the Tevere, overflowing the Isola Tiberina and threatening the trees along the upriver prow and the more untraveled cargo holds of the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, as the rains of December drove Tibor’s Divine Comedy rehearsals under sheets of plastic and corrugated scrap, the Bomb Squad returned every evening to the Dacia without a single wisp of fair hair or dyslexic, mathematical clue.
“Sometimes,” Radu said to Malory one evening, wiping the rain off his glasses with the sleeve of Malory’s jacket, “you get closer to your treasure by figuring out where it definitely is not.” Malory put his own palm on Radu’s shoulder. Perhaps he had lost, perhaps they all had lost at least as much as Malory and had even less of a chance of recovery. “Some bombs are hidden very deep.”
“Accidental discovery, mio Principe.” Settimio listened every morning at breakfast, as he served Malory his Earl Grey and scones in front of the statues of Newton and the Woman and the Apple, as Malory recounted the previous evening’s Tales from the Dacia. “The history of man, and I suspect nature in general, is one of accidental discovery, finding something precious while looking for something else.”
“But don’t you understand? I don’t want anything else.”
Settimio knew that the cure for petulance was to be found in the Sanctum Sanctorum. And during the days—while Malory waited for the evening summons to the Dacia and hope of news from the Bomb Squad—Settimio profited from Malory’s other passions and cushioned him with manuscripts around the seven-sided desk.
One of those mornings, the day before Christmas, Settimio appeared at the padded door of the Sanctum Sanctorum.
“Mio Principe.”
Malory had been examining the manuscript of Newton’s Principia—although he found himself taking frequent breaks to read back over Haroun al Rashid’s encounters with the daughter of Charlemagne. He placed a slip of paper into the book, slightly embarrassed that Settimio might have found him out, and looked up.
“You may recall Fra Mario. From the Dominicans. Santa Maria …”
“Of course!” Malory said, climbing up from the stables of the Jewish butcher back to memories of an organ left untuned and a girl left unfound.
“Fra Mario rang,” Settimio said, “on the telephone, a moment ago. A young lady, he said.”
Malory jumped up—less petulant now—and headed towards Settimio and the padding. He had known, at least he had hoped that, even if his own gravity was insufficient, the bulk of Santa Maria sopra Minerva might pull Louiza back to its pews and end his two months of anxiety and search. This was better than any voyage of transformation.
“Not that young lady, purtroppo,” Settimio said. “A young Italian lady. Quite insistent. Fra Mario said that she must see you at once.”
“Italian?” Malory asked. “I don’t know any young Italian ladies.”
But when fifteen minutes later the Driver parked the Vespa in the Via del Beato Angelico and escorted Malory through the rear entrance of Santa Maria, past Michelangelo’s Salvatore, past the tomb of the anorexic Santa Caterina and past the pew below the organ where he had last found Louiza, the copper curls bobbing above the gate of the Carafa Chapel reminded Malory that yes, indeed, he did know one Italian lady.
“Malory,” Antonella whispered—but with the same enthusiasm she used to serve him biscuits and tea in the Maths Faculty. Malory hugged Antonella back—not caring that the Lippi Madonna was looking down at him with contempt—happy, grateful at this very fleshy reminder of a life before his landing on the planet of Septimania. “Look at you!” Antonella said finally, releasing him only to hold him at the length of a nose and a little more. “What a change.”
“Well, yes,” Malory said, “a haircut, a few new clothes …”
“No, no,” Antonella said. “Your eyes, Malory. They are—they have become so vulnerable. You have seen a few ghosts since the last time you drank tea with your Antonella.”
“You’re in Rome for Christmas? To see family?” Malory asked, trying to ignore the warmth of both her sympathy and the scent of lavender that came off her hair. I should invite her out for tea or coffee, he thought, without knowing where or how. The Villa Septimania was out of the question, and Malory hadn’t ever drunk tea or coffee outside the villa.
“To see you, my Malory. Only you.”
“Me?”
“To bring you news.”
“About Louiza?” Malory couldn’t help himself, although he wished he’d been slightly more discreet and kept up the pretense of interest in Antonella herself for just a few more minutes. Antonella looked at Malory and at Malory’s curiosity. His need to know, far beyond any normal curiosity, kept him looking into her eyes. The mid-afternoon light shone blue around Antonella’s red curls. Above that halo, Lippi’s Annunciation ballooned in illustration—closer than when Malory had looked above Louiza’s head back in October and seen her face in the pale oval of the Madonna. Now it was the curls of the Angel, come to give good news to the Madonna, that Malory saw reflected in the hairdo of the Italian girl before him.
“Be careful,” Antonella said.
“Careful of what?” Had this been the good news the Angel gave Mary?
“When you left Cambridge,” Antonella said, “there were many Americans who stopped by the Faculty.”
“Looking for Louiza?”
Antonella kept her gaze fixed on Malory.
“I know this is the last thing you want to hear from your Antonella, my Malory. Forget Louiza. Please, for your own safety.”
“What does Louiza have to do with my safety?”
“Please, Malory …”
“Antonella, who were these Americans?”
“Americans, Malory. Like the Americans my mother told me about after the War. All smiling and asking innocent questions about imaginary numbers and dividing by zero.”
“Dividing by zero?” Malory found himself squeezing Antonella’s hand in his excitement. Hadn’t Louiza told him about her childhood ambition to divide by zero? And here were the Americans snooping around the Maths Faculty talking about dividing by zero.
“Malory,” Antonella said, “these are not ordinary mathematicians. One of them—he looked like a soldier—he came and sat on the edge of my desk. He said he liked my hair, you know, that kind of soldier. He asked me about dividing by zero, and I told him I don’t even divide chocolate biscuits. And then, as he was reaching inside my biscuit tin, I thought of my Malory, and I said, ‘If you want to know about dividing by zero, why don’t you ask Louiza?’”
“And?” Malory knew he was squeezing too tightly but didn’t want to break the spell of the name.
“The soldier jumped up from my desk as if my biscuit was poison!”
Malory wasn’t certain why he was excited by this news—it certainly supported Antonella’s contention that this was dangerous business. But it was the first time since October that the world had deigned to recognize the reality of Louiza.
“I don’t know if they are CIA,” Antonella whispered, “or FBI or military or top secret some other letters. But if you want to know what your Antonella thinks, I think Louiza is working in another Maths Faculty that doesn’t have anything to do with my Sidgwick Site. Some place that is very interesting to the Americans. Some place secret. And dangerous. I know.”
Dangerous. If Louiza were, in fact, involved with American intelligence, then there must be a way—Settimio would certainly have the appropriate phone numbers tucked somewhere in the Villa—for Malory to contact them, find her. He had selected the latest pope, been asked to serve dinner to Princess Grace. That must be good for something, for information. “Was there one American?” Malory asked. “Tall? Red beard?”
“Information is dangerous, Malory.”
Malory couldn’t imagine what Antonella meant. Cholera was dangerous. The Red Brigades were dangerous. Miscalculating the arrival of a Dublin-bound ferry was dangerous. But information had neither bacteria nor trigger.
“But your Antonella has other information that will make her Malory very excited!” Antonella unleashed her hands and plunged them into the unshapen cloth bag on the pew beside her. Malory expected biscuits. Instead, Antonella drew out a Heffers bag holding a heavy binder, the size of a doctoral dissertation. “Ecco!” she said. “You see, Malory. All you have to do is ask your Antonella, and …” Malory couldn’t for the life of him remember what he had asked his—had asked Antonella, except, of course, to help him in any and all ways to find Louiza. Then he opened the binder and remembered.
Before leaving Cambridge, he had shown the Chapbook to Antonella and had asked her to translate the first lines. One garden. One tree. That much he remembered. She had offered to make a photo copy and more, a full translation—since all but the final lines were in Italian and Malory’s grasp of the language didn’t extend beyond buon giorno and forse oggi.
“My goodness,” he said, trying to focus a new enthusiasm on Antonella’s dedication.
“Oh, Malory,” Antonella said, seeing straight into the heart of Malory’s embarrassment. “You have no idea what is inside here. All the travels, all the meetings of your Isaac Newton. I used a marker to highlight all the names of people and places.” Antonella turned to Malory until he was almost in her lap, under the gaze of Lippi’s Madonna, the divine impregnation coming at her on the wings of a dove, full of a certain kind of portent. She turned the pages. Names jumped up at Malory in yellow—Rotterdam, Münster, the Abbey of Westphalia, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, Descartes, Nuremberg, Leibniz.
“Leibniz!” Malory shrieked, perhaps less loudly than when the Pip flew off the organ loft of Santa Maria but no less forcefully. “Leibniz in a journal about Newton? Newton hated Leibniz. Leibniz boasted that he had invented the calculus first, before Newton.” And yet, Malory read in the journal of Newton’s Italian chum about how the two of them had stopped off in Nuremberg in August of 1666 to visit some Rosicrucian friends of the chum and had met the young Leibniz, who was working as an apothecary and engaged Newton in a discussion of alchemy.
Malory, of course, knew all about Newton’s interest in alchemy, his years of research and countless experiments looking for the Philosopher’s Stone that would turn ordinary metals into gold and the Elixir of Life, the liquid gateway to immortality. He knew about his calculation of the End of Time based on cranky interpretations of Biblical texts. But Malory, like all other Newton scholars, considered these interests to be the side hobbies at best of a Newton gone ga-ga long after his brain had been pickled by the extraordinary discoveries of 1666.
And yet here, so it seemed, was information—information more precise than the vague notion that Americans were snooping around the Cambridge Maths Faculty trying to divide by zero—that Newton was interested in alchemy from an early age. Perhaps the Newton community had it backwards. Perhaps alchemy, magic, and crackpot religion had been Newton’s reasons for waking up in the morning, and the hard science—the work on gravitation, optics, the calculus (and meeting Leibniz in the winter of 1666!)—were at best sidelines, things that Newton whipped off while he was sitting on the loo. Accidental discoveries, as Settimio would say.
Malory looked up at Antonella. The light around her had changed. Beyond the copper curls and blue halo, Antonella was indeed the Angel of the Annunciation. She had brought him great good news, information that, perhaps like the announcement of the Virgin’s impending birth, was both miraculous and potentially dangerous.
“Antonella,” he said, lifting her up from the pew, “it’s Christmas Eve. Would you like to see something spectacular?”
THE PREMIERE OF TIBOR’S DIVINE COMEDY WAS SET FOR THAT EVENING. After much back and forth with the Minister of Monuments, half a dozen archaeologists, and the carabinieri of eight districts, a 5 p.m. curtain was scheduled for the Inferno in the Colosseum. The Purgatorio would begin its procession at midnight, winding out past the Forum, Trajan’s Column, Mussolini’s balcony in the Piazza Venezia, and up the Corso to the Piazza del Popolo. And then, in the first light of Christmas morning, the finale to Dante’s grand trio, the Paradiso, would unveil itself in St. Peter’s Square.
Malory led Antonella out of Santa Maria as the bell in the spiral of the tower of San Ivo rang four. The elephant with the obelisk balanced on its back looked revived, washed clean of color. Malory also felt the anticipation of renewal, and it drew Antonella’s sculpted fingers into the crook of his arm at the top of the steps. Malory knew that the Driver was watching from a discreet distance. He didn’t mind. He didn’t mind the Driver following them as they walked out to the Corso and past the single pine tree in the center of the Piazza Venezia. He didn’t mind him following them down the Fori Imperiali, already overflowing its banks with Romans heading towards Christmas dinners and tourists searching for pre-Christian meaning in a beer or a Negroni.
The Colosseum was an end in itself for Malory, a chance to celebrate Tibor’s first Christmas, his first success in the West. The forward guard of Bomb Squad and Nurses greeted Malory at the entrance closest to the Arch of Constantine. They registered Antonella with a care that recognizes fragility. They handed Malory two tickets—he was certain the Driver would find his own way in.
In the two months since he had invited Malory to play Dante, Tibor had stayed true to his word. He hadn’t called Malory to a single rehearsal, hadn’t given him a single line to learn in either Italian or English. At one point Dora, with her Louise Brooks fringe and omnivorous mouth, had tried to describe Tibor’s directorial method; in Bucharest, she had been Tibor’s assistant for the first six months of his marriage thanks to a friendship with Cristina forged during hot teenage summers on the Black Sea, with official boyfriends and contraband cigarettes.
“What the audience sees is one thing,” she told Malory one evening in the back seat of Brendushka’s Dacia. “What Tibor sees is another. He has a dozen actors and actresses and assorted hangers-on of varying talents playing Dante during the course of the whole production. After all,” she said, “from the top of the Colosseum or the back of St. Peter’s, who can see a face, especially if it’s wearing one of those pointy Dante caps with ear flaps. What really matters”—and Malory wasn’t certain whether it was the hand on his forearm or the weight of Dora’s mascara that drew him into the sobriety behind her eyes—“what really matters is what Tibor sees as he is imagining his Comedy.”
“But the five or ten Dantes,” Malory said. “Aren’t they confused? Isn’t a single Dante, one actor, one face, one personality better?” And he told Dora and a few others in the front seat about Isaac Newton, about Newton’s discovery written in the margin of a Chapbook, about the search for the One True Rule that guides the universe.
“You really believe in this Newton?” Dora asked him, resting a narrow chin on his shoulder.
“Well …” Malory began.
“What he believes”—Tibor stuck his beard through a rear window into the middle of Malory’s lecture—“is in the number one. Not just one Dante, but one rule, one girl, one god.”
“Why not?” Radu said. “One is a good number. At least it’s a start.”
“So …” Tibor said. “My poor friends. You have learned nothing from your childhoods on the dark side of the moon.”
“He means Rumania,” Dora whispered up at Malory, her chin still uncomfortably present. “Ceauşescu, our beloved president, thought he was the only One.”
“But I’m not talking about politics,” Malory whispered back.
“Then why talk about girls?” Tibor roared. “One girl! One girl! This sacred search for One! Why not two girls, why not twenty-two?”
“Or seven?” It was Sasha, innocent and inquiring, standing outside in the grass. How had he picked the number seven?
“I like One.” Dora breathed garlic into a cloud around Malory, who knew that she meant something else.
As Tibor predicted, Mastroianni, Cardinale, the pop stars Mina and Adriano Celentano, the blue suits of the Camera dei Deputati led by Giulio Andreotti, whose sins would have landed him a choice seat in any number of circles, all the politicians and movie stars, club owners, and tourists came out for the four hours of the Inferno, a chance to visit Hell on Christmas Eve and still catch mass at midnight. Heretics, Adulterers—the Proud, the Gluttonous—seven circles, one for every sin, wound down the inner shell of the Colosseum. All was flame and music and spectacle. Although there was at least one Dante and one Virgil, one tiny Beatrice—Dante’s unreachable teenage love—somewhere in the arena, Malory gave up early on trying to point out to Antonella the difference between the actors and the audience. A trio of popes, both Abraham and Mohamed, suicides, sodomites, and false leaders. Francesca da Rimini and her brother-in-law Paolo flitted by like a pair of starlings—up, down, eternally attached by some unheard signal. They stopped for a moment on the terrace below Malory and Antonella and looked up at them:
Love, which in gentle hearts is quickly born,
Seized him for my fair body …
Francesca sighed, before flitting away.
“What did she say?” Malory turned to Antonella.
“She’s talking about her brother-in-law Paolo,” Antonella said.
“They were very naughty.” Francesca flew back:
One day, for pleasure,
We read of Lancelot, by love constrained:
Alone, suspecting nothing, at our leisure.
Lancelot, the faithful right-hand of King Arthur, had been as much a hero to the nine-year-old Malory as the giant Hercules, although at that age he couldn’t possibly have understood quite how naughty Lancelot was with Guinevere, the wife of his best friend.
Sometimes at what we read our glances joined,
Looking from the book each to the other’s eyes,
Looking from the book. Malory remembered the book they must have read—his namesake’s, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur—and the illustration of Lancelot kneeling before a queen with long, red, pre-Raphaelite locks.
And then the color in our faces drained …
That day we read of Lancelot no more.
Francesca and Paolo flew away in a cloud of immigrant extras, and with them went the attention of the crowd. But Malory felt Antonella’s hand in his. A single hand, he thought, will not cast me down into the circle of Hell reserved for adulterers who read books. Anyway, he resolved, it is a hand of guidance not of naughtiness. He let that hand remain in his for the rest of the journey, even as Dante and Virgil climbed to the top of the ruin and upward to the stars.
They filed out in silence, along with the other thousands, too stunned by their private visions to begin to appreciate Tibor’s art. And yet very few—only the Bomb Squad, the Nurses, Cristina, a few experimental theater directors from Latvia, and a pair of acting students from Texas on Fulbrights—joined Malory and Antonella on the long hike to the Piazza del Popolo and the late-night limbo of the Purgatorio. By the final cantos, when Malory and Antonella followed Virgil up from the purgatory of the Piazza to the Eden of the Villa Borghese to watch the sun rise over Rome and breakfast on apples, there were fewer still.
Malory and Antonella walked arm in arm almost alone in the pre-dawn, back down the winding path to the Piazza. He had invited her to this spectacle without warning her what it might be—since he, in fact, had only the vaguest notion. But she had followed, she had listened, she had understood perhaps even better than he. Was he guiding her, or was she indeed the Angel of the Annunciation, her red curls leading him to his one Madonna, his only Beatrice?
An audience had already gathered in the Piazza San Pietro as they arrived. Canto by canto it increased in size. By the time the Paradiso swelled into its grand finale, Malory guessed there might have been as many in the crowd as on the day that the Polish pope first waved to his Italian fans. In the final canto, the velvet ropes of St. Peter’s opened and the thousands of lost souls in the piazza surged inside. The grand organ of St. Peter’s—a Tamburini from Crema, Malory knew—began to play a tune he recognized dimly and then recognized completely. It was a melody he had played in Whistler Abbey, a melody that had awakened Tibor on the morning they had first met. MALORY = LOUIZA was the tune. Had he sung it to Tibor? Had Tibor really listened to Malory? Did anyone else know?
And then he saw the cast—the Beatrice, the Dante, Virgil, Thomas Aquinas, Paolo, and Francesca, all two hundred actors and musicians and extras—he saw the audience turn as one and begin to sing:
Tanti Auguri a te,
Tanti Auguri a te,
Happy Birthday to Dante …
To Dante?
They were looking at him. He was not Dante, but they were clearly singing to him, to Malory. It was his birthday, the way it had been Isaac Newton’s 309 years earlier. No one had sung to him since his tenth birthday, his last Christmas with his mother. And now, here in St. Peter’s as he stood with Antonella on the circle of porphyry, the Pole walked up the steps to the altar below Bernini’s baldacchino preparing to celebrate Christmas Mass and waved down the nave to Malory—
Malory waved back, with hesitation and pride to his friend at the altar. And as the cheering continued, he turned to the congregation behind him and waved to them. Beyond those thousands in the nave, Michelangelo’s sculpted mother sat holding her son in her lap. He wished his own mother, he even wished Old Mrs. Emery could have been here for the cheering. And there was another mother, another child … Antonella took his elbow and turned him away from the dream, straddling his biceps with her very immediate breasts.
“Happy Birthday, my Malory.” With two gentle hands, she curled the stray hairs of Malory’s fringe behind his ears and pulled his lips to hers. And as the fluffy zabaione of Antonella’s lower lip touched Malory’s upper, an elixir tasting of Marsala and the yolk of forbidden eggs and forgetfulness pumped a warmth into Malory. Antonella’s lips came briefly away from his and drew with them an anesthetic that had coated his senses for nine long months, releasing a new drug that pulsed through his lips and tongue, across his cheeks, along his jaw to the nerves that sparked his brain, and down his throat to the untapped pipes of his most delicate organs. It unplugged, transposed the key of everything that Malory believed—beyond the skepticism of Tibor or the ministrations of Settimio—beyond everything Malory had worshipped since that first afternoon in the organ loft of St. George’s, Whistler Abbey.
Here he was in Rome with another woman, not Louiza. Here was Antonella, tasting of pillow and zabaione, and—as she wrapped her fingers into the few bits of gray matter that remained beneath his hair and urged his own hands lower towards the abundant bits of Italian girl that only the nearest celebrants in St. Peter’s could see—not only did she seem to want Malory, not only had she worked and traveled hundreds of miles to see Malory, but she had done so while knowing of Malory’s single-minded pursuit of Louiza. There was a part of Malory—just how much he was only beginning to sense—that, after a single fragrant kiss, was tempted by Antonella. Not the unseen, veiled Madonna but the very present Angel. Antonella reached up and took Malory’s face between her hands and kissed him again, without translation, without tea and biscuits, without Anna Ford or the Carafa Chapel.
“Fututi pizda matii!” The paw landed on Malory’s shoulder.
“Tibor!” Malory shouted, detaching, recalibrating. “This is Antonella. A colleague of mine. From Cambridge.” But it was not only Tibor. Cristina, Radu, Brendushka, Dora, Sasha, and the entire pack of Bomb Squad and Nurses were jumping and flitting around them in a show of Rumanian enthusiasm.
“Eccezionale, Tibor! Complimenti!” Without releasing Malory, Antonella reached up and kissed Tibor on both bearded cheeks.
“Grazie mille, bella …” Tibor bowed. “But tonight the complimenti are for the birthday boy.”
“How did you know?” Malory began.
“We are the Bomb Squad,” Sasha said. “Do I need to remind you?”
“And the party is just beginning. Brendushka,” Tibor called, “take Malory’s colleague to the Dacia. I want to steal our hero for a few minutes.”
“Malory!” Antonella held onto his hand.
“Do not worry,” Tibor laughed. “The Dacia is my kingdom, and you are under my protection and the care of my Nurses.”
Malory kissed Antonella one last time and then let Tibor lead him out of St. Peter’s, below the balcony where only two months before the Polish cardinal had been reborn as pope to the world of Catholic believers. They threaded through the remnants of Christmas morning out the arches of St. Peter’s into the quiet of Santo Spirito.
“Thank you, Tibor,” Malory said at last. “Your Divine Comedy was spectacular. And that last …” Malory reddened, knowing that he was about to gush. “That was amazing!”
“Happy Birthday, Dante,” Tibor said. “Enjoy your day in Paradiso.” As they walked, without haste, without aim, down the Via della Lungara, Malory felt he was entering a new world—a world that was certainly new to Malory at least. In that world, Tibor had gathered the forces of the displaced and homeless of Rome to celebrate Malory’s journey down to the depths of Hell and back up to Paradise. There was no room in this new world for discretion.
“It’s time, Tibor,” Malory said, “that I told you where I went that evening, when those men took me away from the hospital.”
Malory told Tibor about the Vespa ride to the Sistine Chapel. He told him about the Turn that chose the new Pope, about his own investiture on the porphyry circle of St. Peter’s as Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Jews. He told him about Isaac Newton and how the whole story boiled down to One—one rule, one god, one woman. He told Tibor about Settimio and the Driver and Septimania, the invisible country that gave him unlimited powers. He told him about the Sanctum Sanctorum. He told him about the Pip.
Tibor listened as they walked, silent, unsmoking.
“So,” he said. “Septimania. In this country of Septimania, you believe that if you find the answer to Newton, if you bring all of the world’s religions under your belt, then you will also buy Peace in Our Time and find your girl? The One Girl?”
He understood, Malory thought. He wasn’t taking Malory for crazy or delusional.
“What about your colleague?” Tibor asked, a paw steering Malory towards the parapet overlooking the Tevere.
“She arrived this afternoon from Cambridge. With information about Louiza.”
“Malory,” Tibor said, “I am not a scientist or a king, only a poor, unemployed Rumanian from behind the Iron Eight Ball. But I do know that redheaded women do not come all the way to Rome to give organ tuners information about lost girlfriends.”
“You’re wrong,” Malory said.
“Holy Roman Emperor,” Tibor said, placing both paws down on Malory’s shoulders. “Don’t be a Holy Roman Fool.”
Cristina and Dora swept by and pulled Tibor and Malory out of their conference. But Malory fell away into the backwater of the sidewalk beneath the plane trees, where he found Radu leaning against the parapet overlooking the Tevere.
“I’m sorry, Malory,” Radu said.
“Sorry?” Malory asked. “That I am one year older and starting to lose my hair?”
“I imagine Tibor just told you.”
“Tibor told me a lot of things.”
“About Louiza?”
“Louiza?” Now it was Malory’s turn to place a tentative hand on Radu’s shoulder.
“He didn’t tell you?”
“Radu, tell me!” Malory had just said goodbye to his Angel of an Antonella. But the sound of Louiza’s name convinced him that this Divine Comedy, this divine birthday was bringing him a transcendent luck he could never imagine. The Bomb Squad had found Louiza, his prayers—such as they were—had been answered. “Where is she? At the Dacia?”
Radu took off his glasses and wiped them on a pocket of his anorak. “I can’t believe Tibor didn’t tell you,” he mumbled into the pitted asphalt at his feet.
“Tell me what? Where is she? How is she? Is she okay? And the baby?”
“We didn’t find her,” Radu said.
“Oh,” Malory said. Okay, he thought. The usual daily regret. A little more disappointment than usual. “But you will keep looking?”
“No,” Radu said, “we won’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“She isn’t here. Not in Rome, not in Italy, not in Europe.”
“You know?”
“We know.”
“Then where?” Malory was shaking Radu again. The sun was fully risen on the waters of the Tevere. The river was moving fast, swollen with the flood.
Radu shrugged. “The Bomb Squad has failed.”
“But,” Malory said.
“It is the first time. I’m sorry.”
Malory’s hand slid from Radu’s shoulder.
“You better come talk to Tibor. At the party.”
Malory stared out at the water.
“Let’s go.” Radu took Malory’s elbow. But Malory had turned into a stone as rigid as the statue of Newton. He felt Radu try. He felt Radu give up and leave. He felt the eddies of the crowd from St. Peter’s part around him as they headed home for Christmas lunch. When he finally began to move again, it was without compass or sense of propulsion, but only with the force of his pain now that the sedative on his lips had worn off. It drew him downriver, past the steps to Regina Coeli and the Dacia. It drew him across the Ponte Cestio to the Isola Tiberina, to the mini Albert Memorial with the Ospedale Israelite on his right and the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli on his left. The tide pulled him portside into the cortile, the cortile he had crossed countless times, where Tibor had smoked and waited for Cristina. It was there that gravity proved stronger than pain and Malory sat down on a bench, all hope abandoned.
There was a sound at his feet. Malory looked. A bag. From Heffers in Cambridge. He picked up the bag, looked inside. A binder. The binder, heavy and black, that he had been carrying all night—Antonella’s translation of the Newton Chapbook. It had become such a part of Malory as he followed Tibor’s production for eighteen hours that he had completely forgotten its existence.
Malory opened the cover where it lay by his feet in the cortile. One tree, one garden, he read again. He read to the bottom of the first page. And then the second. By the tenth page, he had picked up the binder and settled himself onto the bench. Noon passed. Malory read on. Oblivious to noise, oblivious to tranquility, Malory read the account of Newton’s friend. He read of the travels of the pair from Cambridge to Rome, their meetings with Leibniz and a variety of princesses and abbesses.
As he read, it became clear to him that Newton’s friend was not only aware of Septimania, but was himself the King. This was the journal of the King of Septimania, circa 1666, a man who had disguised himself as a student—the way Haroun had disguised himself as his own envoy—in order to travel to Cambridge to study. There he had met Newton, recognized his intellect, and encouraged him to travel abroad during the forced sabbatical of 1666. The Chapbook that his grandmother had given him in St. George’s, Whistler Abbey, Malory realized, was written by one of his own ancestors, someone close enough to his Sir Isaac that Newton had felt comfortable enough to scrawl a discovery—perhaps the most important discovery in the history of science—in a margin. Antonella might be waiting for him at the party in the Dacia, but Malory had to read—it was her translation, after all.
Malory read. He read of Newton’s arrival in Rome, his visit to the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, his introduction to the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. As he read, he turned back and forth, searching within the daily notes for the identity of the woman in the Bernini sculpture with the floating apple. Was it the sister of the King of Septimania, his mother perhaps, a daughter of the Settimio of the time?
And then the truth walked out of the smoke, like a djinni from a Baghdadi lamp.
“Here are the facts,” the King wrote one late night. And Malory read on:
Here are the facts, presented with a desire to bring Reason to a human act, far from cold marble.
We returned from our visit with Bernini and took our supper without conversation. Isaac repaired to his room and I to mine. My custom was to bathe and be in bed by midnight. But this evening, I sent Settimio away and took myself into the Sanctum Sanctorum, where the silence of my books, the books of Septimania, might give my mind the tranquility to listen to the beating of my heart.
And so it was in the deepest hours of the night—the clock had struck three times but I was so entwined with the words on the page that I literally defied Gravity—that I felt Isaac’s hand on my shoulder. I had left the door ajar from the vestibule down the passage to the Sanctum Sanctorum, thinking none would enter but—I ask my older self—was I not nurturing an unconscious hope?
“You have kept a secret,” Isaac said to me, looking around the room in admiration. He was wearing only a nightshirt. His feet were bare.
“There are secrets I must keep,” I said. “It is part of my duty to Septimania.”
“This room,” he began.
“I can tell you a few things about this room,” I said softly. “It contains seven catalogues. Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy. Each contains seven drawers. Each drawer in turn is divided into seven sections. Each catalogue leads to a separate library, entered through one of the seven doors, although many of the volumes are not here within this building—don’t ask me, please, I am not at liberty to tell you where. But make no mistake,” I added quickly. “There is no special meaning to the number seven. None, at least, that I have uncovered.”
“These books”—Isaac motioned to a stack upon a leather desk.
“Have only just arrived,” I said. “It is part of Settimio’s employ to assist me with the catalogue, although he has trusted minions to do the actual labor.”
“Artephius His Secret Book,” Isaac read. “The Epistle of John Pontanus, Nicholas Flamel, his Exposition of the Hieroglyphical Figures which he caused to be painted upon an Arch in St Innocents Churchyard in Paris. Containing both the Theoricke and the Practicke of the Philosophers Stone, Lazarus Zetzner’s Theatrum Chemicum. Are you searching,” Isaac asked me, “in earnest through these books for a recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone?”
“Ah,” I said. “I have been pondering the properties of stone, following this afternoon’s visit to Bernini. His Apollo and Daphne. That moment when the nymph turned to laurel just as the god was about to capture her, her feet taking root, branches sprouting around her girdle, fingers blossoming into leaf.”
“I too was thinking of Bernini,” said Isaac.
“You spoke this afternoon of the attraction of two bodies at a distance. What the Stoics called Sympathy. I wonder,” I continued, “whether Bernini could sculpt another particular moment. A moment of three bodies. The moment when the attraction of the apple to the scientist, or the desire of the scientist for wisdom, proves greater than the power of the tree over its fruit. Surely,” I added, as Isaac’s eyebrows rose on his forehead, “if the Earth can remain suspended above the Sun, and the Moon can remain suspended above the Earth, and the Comets above all else, an apple and a genius can pull off the trick.”
“You are wondering,” Isaac asked, “if the Sympathy is strong enough, what is stopping a man from sculpting an apple suspended in mid-air?”
“Suspended between the tree and the outstretched hand,” I answered. “Yes.”
“I prithee,” he said. “Let’s talk of Nature and not wax mystical.”
“I live in a world of mystery,” I replied. “Every discovery I make leads irrevocably to another mystery.”
“One does well, therefore,” Isaac said, “to choose one’s mysteries with care.”
“Do we choose our mysteries?”
“Perhaps they choose us.” Isaac sat down next to me on the bench, his nightshirt hiked up to expose one pale, chilblained knee. “I was born on a Christmas morning …”
“You’ve told me the story many times.” It was my turn to interrupt. “Methinks it is you who is waxing mystical.”
“Perhaps these questions of Sympathy are best left to chance.”
And at that moment, I reached down, past the exposed knee and between the legs of my giant and felt Isaac rising against the pull of nature, a force that had more to do with the attraction of two bodies than the force of gravity, an obelisk rising away from knowledge. He groaned, I am forced to say, and his great eyebrows relaxed until his face took on the look of that tiny Christmas-born babe too small to fit in a pint pot.
And it was then that his own hands made an equal and opposite reaction. His hands, the hands of my Isaac, slipped down between my legs and began a search, first up, then down. A search for something that reason told him should be there, but experiment proved was not. And since our experiment was too far advanced to admit retreat, I removed my trousers, showing him that not finding the expected is sometimes the greatest triumph of Science. In recompense, I then undid my blouse, removed the pins from the bandage around my breasts and let loose the abundant secret that only Settimio and now Isaac knew—that I am as much a nymph as Bernini’s Daphne. I am a woman: not the King but fully the Queen of Septimania. And since the rules that guide the attraction of two bodies are absolute, there was no stopping the congress that had been guiding me in blindness since I first set foot for Cambridge and Woolsthorpe.
And, as many as the fireflies a peasant sees on a summer’s evening, so many were the Pips that rushed into me from my apple tree love in unimaginable multiplication.
Malory set the Chapbook down on his lap. He looked out into the cortile, full now with the casualties of Christmas night. But what he saw was the statue in the dining room of the Villa Septimania of Newton and the woman and the apple. The Queen of Septimania. Newton’s friend was not the King but the Queen of Septimania in disguise. If I am descended from this Queen of Septimania, Malory thought, then I am descended from—is it possible?—from the other statue as well. I am the grandson of the man born 309 years to the day before me. I am of the seed of Newton.
Malory thought about Newton and his Queen. He thought about the red-haired Aldana. But he also thought about another red-haired woman. He thought about her faith in him, her devotion, her arm locked in his, her zabaione lips. Perhaps Antonella had been in disguise all this time, in front of his eyes. Perhaps it was time to search no more. Like the Queen of Septimania with her Newton, Malory had to take action if Septimania were to survive.
Malory walked out the front door of Fatebenefratelli without a glance up to the room where he had last seen Louiza. Night was fully advanced, the new day just clearing its throat at the horizon. He crossed the river at the Ponte Cestio and hugged the still-dark parapet of the river. As he descended the steps to Regina Coeli, the yellow walls of the prison were just beginning to catch the morning light. He turned down the Via della Penitenza and saw Cristina, La Principessa, her hair wrapped up in a kerchief, gliding towards the bus stop, on her way to the first of her three jobs—mopping up the butt ends of Christmas 1978. He opened the gate to the Dacia quietly. The courtyard, the broken-down Dacia were both empty. He walked through the front door into the living room. There was a body on each of the sofas, another curled up in front of the fireplace. None of them was Antonella. Malory climbed the stairs to the two bedrooms.
He was the great-grandson to the power of seven of Isaac Newton. He was not only King of the Jews and King of the Christians but a direct descendant of the King of Science.
And yet, as Tibor had warned him, he was also a Holy Roman Fool.
He hadn’t meant to open any box, but the box was there, open to him, open to the world at the end of the corridor. In the sleepless dawn, at first Malory thought that he had found Tibor and Antonella deep in conversation about the glorious new future of their friend Malory—a new future, if he could admit the possibility, of a Roman Empire of Malory and Antonella, Tibor and Cristina.
But the cold light of morning broke the scene into other motion. The curls above were red, the tangled mat of hair and beard below was black. Together they moved with a frantic rhythm in the key of F-sharp that shook Malory and stopped his breath. Tibor had kept his promise. He had guided Malory into the depths of Hell.
Malory turned. He may have been King of Septimania, but he was no King Shahryar. He would not hack Tibor and Antonella in two. He would not vent his wrath on a host of virgins. Malory simply turned, turned downstairs, turned back across the river, up the Clivo, back into the Villa Septimania. And like Haroun al Rashid, like the djinns of a thousand and one other deceived cats and credulous fools, Malory climbed down the spout of his lamp, climbed back into his box, and pulled the top closed.