HE MORNING OF MY TENTH BIRTHDAY—OR AT LEAST ON THE morning of the tenth anniversary of my arrival at the baby hatch of Santa Sabina—Sister Francesca Splendida asked me if I wanted to be an angel.”HE MORNING OF MY TENTH BIRTHDAY—OR AT LEAST ON THE morning of the tenth anniversary of my arrival at the baby hatch of Santa Sabina—Sister Francesca Splendida asked me if I wanted to be an angel.”
A girl. A girl stood beside the Bernini statue, speaking to Malory.
He had awakened to a brilliant late-summer morning. He had walked, as he had for more than twenty years of mornings, down the corridor, through the foyer, and into the dining room for his scones and tea, and had discovered Settimio and the girl beside the apple tossers.
“I found her in the Sanctum Sanctorum,” Settimio said, “half an hour ago, asleep on the desk. When she opened her eyes, she asked for you.”
The girl was even smaller than him, hair cropped in a golden helmet, almost as young as Louiza, or as young as Louiza had been twenty-three years before. Jeans, leather jacket over a white T-shirt, blue trainers—she must have been like many other girls on the streets of Rome. But Malory had met very few girls in recent years. In fact, none.
“Tibor said, ‘Malory will understand.’” The girl spoke English. But the words buckled Malory’s knees. He sat. The girl sat across from him. Settimio brought a cup and a plate. The girl continued her story.
A FAMOUS THEATER DIRECTOR WAS COMING TO ROME FROM AMERICA to stage a tenth birthday of his own—a revival of the Divine Comedy that had catapulted him to fame. He needed young things—a dozen young things—to play angels. For us damaged girls from Santa Sabina, Santa Chiara, Santa Cecilia, and elsewhere, it was a chance to run around the Circo Massimo dressed in something other than our daily uniform. And run around most of us did. I, alone among the dozen, followed directions. It was what I had been trained to do for as long as I could remember. And because I was so good at following directions and knowing where and when to go, at the end of the week Tibor and Cristina took me for a gelato in Testaccio.
They asked me questions—about my family, which I didn’t know, about my schoolwork. They were impressed by my Italian and my Latin, my history and my geography. Most of all they were impressed by my mathematical ability, which had already outstripped what the Dominican Sisters were able to teach in Santa Sabina.
When the Dante was over and the rest of the girls went back to the convent, Sister Francesca Splendida took me aside and told me I was being sent to a school in Switzerland. It wasn’t until I turned thirteen in a girls’ grammar outside Lucerne that I saw Tibor and Cristina again and realized—even if they didn’t say so explicitly—that they had been paying for my education and my escape from Santa Sabina. I thought Cristina was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, a real princess—I believed it when I heard Tibor order “thé au citron for La Principessa”—so I allowed each of them to take one of my hands and lead me down to the Lake of Lucerne, buy me a stuffed zebra, feed me a cream bun as if I were Paddington Bear and deposit me back at the school before supper. Later, at the English school above Nice, Tibor and Cristina came to visit every year on Family Day when no other family came for me. And even at the A-Level crammer outside Inverness, where my only friend was a flannel-covered hot-water bottle, I answered Cristina’s questions about my knowledge and Tibor’s about my dreams without asking why and kept a secret scrapbook with reviews and photos of all of Tibor’s productions in the bottom of a steamer trunk. “Cope-able,” was what one headmistress called me; I can’t remember if she was Swiss, French, or Scots—the word existed in none of the languages. “Ottavia is able to cope,” she wrote, “with anything.”
It wasn’t until I was on the cusp of graduating from Trinity that Rix the Porter rang up to say that a Miss Cristina was calling for me at the lodge. I was a week away from receiving my degree so hadn’t expected a visit. And it was immediately clear that there was something improvised about Cristina’s appearance. She was in a taxi. She needed to talk with me. She had been crying.
I suggested the Orchard, just a few miles outside of town, where I used to go when I was in search of a quiet place to contemplate Fourier Series and Eigenvectors. The next week it would be full of proud parents and cream teas and jam-sotted bees. But Cristina and I had no trouble finding a trestle table in a quiet corner of apple trees with the church rising up on the other side of the road.
“Ottavia,” Cristina began, dark glasses still firmly in place over the gray eyes that had first seduced me into a schoolgirl crush twelve years before. “You are old enough now that I think it is time to tell you a few things.”
My scrapbook of clippings memorializing Tibor’s successes also included photo features on Cristina. From the moment she strolled out of the maternity ward of Fatebenefratelli on that astonishing October evening in 1978, Cristina had found herself surrounded by a magnetic field that didn’t so much open doors for her as blow them off their hinges. A job scrubbing floors for a Reuters functionary at the Vatican led to an invitation to be a sound editor in New York and a pair of green cards for her and Tibor. Within a year she was reporting traffic on the radio. Within two, isobars and satellite radar on the Today Show. As tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square and heads rolled over six of the seven continents, no palace leader or rainforest revolutionary was safe from the charms of Cristina. Here was one page from Time, Cristina at the siege of Sarajevo, here in a firefight in Hebron. There were stories from Darfur, New Orleans, Nagorno-Karabakh, Praia da Luz, Casale, Gori, Wasilla, Garoowe where, for ten days that she would be happy to forget, she was the property of the Somali warlord Jama Abduk Boosaaso. Not to mention the dinners and interviews with Clinton, Blair, Havel, Prince Bandar, and Bishop Tutu. Cristina didn’t stop long enough to count, but her producers told her that she had filed more stories and won more Peabodys than Christiane Amanpour by a factor of three, not to mention a Pulitzer. And even now that she was approaching the age when correspondents with creaking knees and spreading posteriors were shunted behind studio desks in New York or London or Atlanta, Cristina not only remained in the field, but consistently placed in the Top Ten Sexiest Woman on TV. And not in the Grandma Class. Top Ten. Punto.
“Why did I come today to talk to you?” Cristina asked. She hadn’t touched her tea, nor removed her glasses. Leaning back, her helmet of gray hair lying just past her ears against the canvas of the lawn chair, black linen blouse without sleeves, black linen trousers without calves, and toenails that needed no paint shining out from within her espadrilles, she seemed like a runway astronaut about to eject into the ether. “Because I may be your mother. And a mother’s duty is to warn her daughter.”
Even though mathematics was my strongest suit, I had, of course, created plenty of fantasies featuring Cristina and Tibor as my parents, although we couldn’t have looked less alike. Where Cristina and Tibor were tall, I barely broke five feet and struggled to get my weight up to a hundred pounds. There had been a time in my first year at Cambridge when I brought cutouts of Cristina’s head from People and Time to Cropper’s across from the Trinity gate and asked the hairdresser to perform the impossible with my thin, disembodied hair. I tried to smoke, since I never saw either of them without a cigarette, but found it easier to imitate Cristina’s preference for thé au citron. I had no desire to become a director like Tibor or an investigative journalist like Cristina. But they had clearly spent a lifetime coping with one thing or another. And maybe, just maybe, they were the biological origin of what the headmistress had called my copeability.
But the word maybe and its verbal cousin may awakened the part of my mathematical brain that dealt in probabilities. I may be your mother, Cristina had said. I could understand the uncertainty of Tibor’s paternity, but with mothers … isn’t there a higher level of probability, reaching almost to absolute certainty?
“There was confusion,” Cristina went on. “Tibor and I were very poor in those days and we had just arrived in Rome.” That much I knew from the articles in Il Messaggero and Oggi that celebrated Tibor’s 1988 return to the Eternal City and the dinners and drinks in expensive restaurants by the Pantheon or the Palazzo Farnese that featured Tibor’s face next to Laura Morante or Valeria Golino. “I was pregnant. I gave birth in Fatebenefratelli. But then …”
“I know,” I said, wanting to save Cristina the pain of saying it but also keen to try out my pet theories, “but you didn’t have enough money, the Italians were going to send you back, you had to give me up. Santa Sabina …”
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t that.” Cristina looked up to the church across the road, the steeple cradled in the cleavage of the afternoon sun. “The room in the maternity ward of Fatebenefratelli was very beautiful—white light, the river just past the windows on both sides. I was there for a whole day—very quiet, very tranquil, floating on a white bed between contractions, twenty-four hours at least, totally alone. More than alone—well,” she stopped and realized that she was speaking to me. “While Tibor …”
I waited. Behind me, I heard the rattle of a bicycle chain on the towpath by the river, a shuffling breeze through the apple trees. I tried to imagine Cristina, my mother, with the proto-me inside her, the two of us riding the raft of Fatebenefratelli down the Tevere, waving up to the girls of Santa Sabina looking down on us from the Giardino degli Aranci.
“Tibor finally arrived on the second day. He was with a strange little English man and his strange little English wife—a girl really—very pale, very blonde, very pregnant. I saw them come in. I saw them lay the girl on the bed. I wanted to speak with Tibor. But then both of us, the English girl and I, went into serious labor, and the doctor shooed everyone else from the room. When I woke up enough to focus, I was in the room again, alone. Or, to be more precise, Tibor was gone. The English girl was gone, the strange little English man was gone, the doctor was gone. The light from outside was sulfur and cold. It was all I could do to pull the blanket up to my chin. I don’t know when the nurse came in, it could have been two minutes or two hours later. She put me in a wheelchair—the pain was, well, pain. She wheeled me down to where Tibor was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette. I was in no shape to understand much except that there was a problem. Everything was in Italian, and my Italian was still new. But what I understood, what Tibor and I understood at the time was like this:
“The English girl and I both gave birth. Both babies were taken away in a single cradle, to be weighed and measured and registered. But when the Sister went to bring the babies back to us, she opened the cradle and it was empty. Not two babies. Not one. Empty.” Cristina paused to light a fresh cigarette. The sound of her lighter shocked me.
“And one of the babies that wasn’t there was me?”
“I screamed for a long time, I think,” Cristina continued. “Or maybe I just think I screamed.” She exhaled, smoke rose into the branches of the apple trees—had she even heard me? “Then I stopped. Tibor smoked. I smoked. It grew dark outside. We went home. Tibor didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. Tibor made up a story for our friends, about the authorities—I don’t know exactly what, we never discussed it. All I had to do was smoke and accept their sympathies. Somehow—and I don’t expect this will make you happy, Ottavia—we both came to believe that this was the best solution, whatever happened to you was better. I would be lying to you if I said we hadn’t thought about giving up the baby every day of the nine months of my pregnancy. We spent enough of our childhood in Rumania fighting against the dictator who was calling on our patriotic souls to climb on top of each other and have children. It felt like we’d be giving in, selling out, if we actually had a child.”
But there had been the anniversary production of the Divine Comedy, I thought, when Sister Francesca Splendida sent me down to meet Tibor with eleven other girls, and something in the way that I did something—my sense of space, of direction, the way I could find things—reminded Tibor of his own early days with the Bomb Squad and his unerring ability to sniff out the mines along the delta of the Danube that the Soviets, the Germans, or maybe the Emperor Trajan had left during one war or another. And Tibor and Cristina were convinced that one of those two babies who had disappeared from Fatebenefratelli ten years earlier was me. Maybe. Tibor had become a successful director in America. Cristina was climbing up the ladder of television journalism. They had enough money to pretend. I could be a toy, a cat they took out once or twice a year, to pet and play with when they weren’t otherwise engaged. It was in nobody’s interest to check DNA, to open the lid of the genetic box too wide—except mine. Maybe.
“Cristina,” I asked, since the word mother had never gained much of a flavor, “why are you telling me this now?”
“Because Tibor—because your father—needs you to help him.” She let the cigarette drop next to a forgotten crabapple. “And I don’t think you should.”
Cristina returned to Cambridge for my graduation a week later. Tibor too. He was playful, in manic high spirits. All my friends thought that I was the luckiest girl in the quad to have such a fantasy close at hand. The hint of a bald spot on Tibor’s crown had widened into permanence. But the rest of his hair was thick and cut and shaped in a way that spoke of financial health as much as art. He had no idea that Cristina had come up the week before, that we had driven out to the Orchard and spoken. But that evening, after half a duck and two bottles of Merlot at Midsummer House, after I’d walked them back to the University Arms, Tibor stopped me under a sulfur lamp on St. Andrew’s Street. The National had signed him to direct a production of Sophocles’ Antigone. He had a concept that he knew could be extra ordinary but required the kind of diplomacy and organization and sense of direction that he believed only I possessed. Might I come work as his assistant? Immediately? This clearly was the help that Cristina warned me about. But Tibor, my father! The National—how and for what reason could I say no?
Even though the National ran with strict union rules regulating hour and place, everyone involved in Tibor’s Antigone had signed a waiver to accommodate Tibor’s particular method. Every day, the entire company met in a large rehearsal room just before noon. Not just actors but designers, carpenters, seamstresses, the occasional executive, and a smattering of ushers and other front-of-house personnel. At the stroke of twelve, Tibor would appear to give a benediction to the company—a sermon that riffed on Sophocles, Dante, Winston Churchill, the changing politics of Eastern Europe, or sometimes just a comment on the hairstyle of one of the actors in the company. Eventually, the road led back to Antigone. And with that, Tibor would declare the workday begun. A couple of trestle tables were laden with food and drink. Most of the company would grab a salad or a Scotch egg and a coffee to fortify themselves for the day’s surprises. Tibor never made a plan in advance. He might begin by gathering a covey of actors into a corner to discuss context and character, or he might spend two hours drilling a speech with the Creon in the middle of the hall while the others looked on. Or he might just huddle with the costume designer, even though everything had been sifted and sorted, for the entire afternoon.
At four, lunch was exchanged for tea. At seven, the drinks trolley appeared. More food at seven-thirty, and then the official end of the day at midnight. Everyone—particularly the actors—was expected to be present all the time, all part of the theatrical engine. “An infernal machine,” Tibor called it, quoting Sophocles or Anouilh or some other aesthetic engineer.
And for the first week, the machine ran like a well-oiled Jaguar. The actors were marvelous, particularly the Welsh girl playing Antigone, the young daughter of the dead Oedipus, who defies the laws of her Uncle Creon to bury her brother, who was killed trying to restore morality to the throne. When they weren’t rehearsing with Tibor, they’d go off into corners by themselves and swot the history or run lines. Fruit and bottled water were the staples of their diets that first week—I was the one on the phone every morning at eleven, calling to the buttery for fresh supplies. And so we came to the end of the sixth day and all was good.
Monday was the day of rest. Part of my job was to pick Tibor up at his over-designed hotel on St. Martin’s Lane before rehearsal and deposit him there afterwards. I didn’t expect to see him on Monday—frankly, I needed a day away, and there was some unfinished business with a tutor of mine up at Trinity. But at 7 a.m. my telephone rang.
“Oc-TAY-vya?” The woman on the other end was clearly not someone who knew me. “I’ve got a friend of yours here. In a bad way.
What’d you say your name was, love?”
I took the tube up to Baker Street, to a basement flat just north of the Marylebone Road. Reshma was the girl’s name—she was tall and well filled-out, roughly my age, but in different circumstances. As she fixed me a cup of instant—with a drop from the pint of milk she’d asked me to pick up along the way—she told me about her dilemma, whether to return to Bollywood or try to make it in England. She rattled off the roles she’d played in community theater in Hendon and Ealing and mentioned a couple of TV shows I’d vaguely heard of that had almost offered her a role. The TV was on low by the counter—BBC strangely enough, with Anna Ford reading the morning news. I looked around Reshma’s kitchen and wondered behind which door “my friend” was hiding, or lying, or dying.
“So—” It was the door behind me, as luck would have it.
“Poor darling!” Reshma looked up at Tibor with the eyes of an actress in mid-audition. Tibor waved her off. He was dressed in the same clothes I’d left him in at the hotel the night before. If he had taken them off, it hadn’t been to sleep. It wasn’t particularly warm in Reshma’s kitchen, but Tibor’s shirt bore a stigmata of sweat beneath the arms and breasts. He was holding a water glass in one hand. The other was planted on his knee to support the weight of a back that refused to straighten. “He’s been stuck like that for over an hour,” Reshma said. “That’s why I called you.”
Tibor shook his head and waved the glass towards the TV. Anna Ford was talking about Vice President Cheney, who was preoccupied with his own stress test. But Tibor was more interested in the bottle next to the TV.
“Do you really think?” Reshma asked, not moving from the chair.
“Ottavia!” Tibor shouted in a Tom Waits whisper and shook the glass again in the direction of the bottle. I brought it over to him—a liter of Absolut with perhaps a slurp and a half at the bottom. “Pour,” Tibor said. He drank, he swallowed. And with an effort that seemed to wring several slurps of sweat out of his body, Tibor straightened his back with a crack that momentarily drowned out Anna Ford. “So,” he said, fully erect. “You found me. The same way you first found me and Cristina.”
“Did I find you?” I asked him. “I thought it was the other way around.”
“When La Principessa walked into my rehearsal on her wedding day,” Tibor said, “wardrobed to the max in full bridal regalia and looking for the District Hall, do you think it mattered which one of us found the other? Which one of us was the Sun? Which one the Earth?”
I blushed, struck for the first time by an image of Cristina seated on a bathroom sink, her wedding dress hiked up around her waist and her second-hand heels digging into Tibor’s bomber jacket.
“In love and discovery,” Tibor said, looking over my head at Reshma, “there is no Fucker and no Fuckee. Only the Fuck. It’s what we do afterwards,” he said, striking a match, “after the cigarette and the vodka and the snoring are over and the stage lights are off, that’s what matters. Action,” he said, pulling on the Camel, “action is everything.”
“I was just telling Oc-TAY-vya here about my dilemma.” Reshma offered me a cigarette. I declined.
“Give her the address,” Tibor said to me.
“Which address?” The most intelligible person in the room was still Anna Ford, and I never knew what she was saying.
“The Studio, the National …” Tibor waved his own cigarette at me. “My concept,” Tibor said. “Cristina told you I had a concept. She warned you, didn’t she?”
I didn’t know that Tibor knew about my tea with Cristina, about her warning. So I said nothing. But on cue, a familiar Eastern European voice came into the room, care of Reshma’s TV.
“This morning, my guest is the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney.”
“Fututi pizda matii!” Tibor roared. “It’s the Puli-tzarina!” A baby started crying in the next room.
“Oh shit!” Reshma said, as a wet stain began to spread over her T-shirt by her left nipple. “Pardon my Swahili and pardon my hungry monster. Won’t be but a minute.” And with that, she disappeared through another door.
“She follows me everywhere!” Tibor lurched around the room looking for the remote. Cristina continued to talk calmly to the vice president with authority and the charming scalpel of her Rumanian accent. I was happy to have her in the room with us, even if I could understand Tibor’s annoyance. Cristina had a way of looking through the camera and making you believe you were her sole audience. Nevertheless, I reached behind the TV and pulled the plug.
I got Tibor out of the flat and into a mini-cab by Regent’s Park before Reshma finished breakfasting her infant. Back at the hotel, I poured coffee and scrambled eggs into Tibor and tucked him into bed. He began to snore immediately. I cancelled my Cambridge tutor and the rest of my Monday and pieced through the hotel room Tatlers and Vogues. Cristina was mentioned five times in the magazines, Tibor only once and then as “husband of …” I thought about calling Cristina but remembered Tibor’s reaction to her appearance on TV. She follows me everywhere. I remembered her appearance just a few weeks before on the forecourt of Trinity. Was Tibor jealous of Cristina’s success?
Was that why she warned me?
Was he warning me?
I thought about Reshma and her baby. I thought about the night Tibor had spent in her depressing flat. I thought about why I had followed Tibor’s instructions and given her the address of the Studio. I didn’t think about the bottle of Absolut.
Tibor woke around 4 p.m. He sat up in bed. He had no idea where he was. He reached out with his left hand and hit a pillow. He reached out with his right and knocked over the over-designed bedside lamp. I stood above him and handed him his glasses. He tweaked them over his ears and looked up at me.
“So.”
I offered to call up some food. I handed him a glass of water.
“Go away.”
“Can I call you later? See if you’re okay?”
“I’m okay. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Are you sure?”
He looked up at me again and blinked. Twice. Thrice. I don’t know if Cristina ever got that look from him. But I understood her warning.
In the morning, Tibor was downstairs in the lobby of the hotel waiting for me. There were no signs of the previous day’s adventure. If anything, he seemed more energized than he had a week earlier before the first rehearsal. As we walked through Trafalgar Square and across Hungerford Bridge to the South Bank, he talked about how the time had come to begin to unveil the new concept for Antigone. It was a concept he had been considering for over twenty years, since his first days in Rome.
And that’s when he mentioned your name.
“Malory will understand.”
I had no idea who you were, or whether the name Malory referred to a man, a woman, or a Rumanian experimental theater company. I didn’t ask. But then, I didn’t ask a lot of things on that late-morning walk to the Studio, and if I had, a clarification of the name Malory would have been low on the list. I was glad that Tibor was mobile. I wanted to forget our lost Monday. It was Tuesday, the beginning of a new week. We would show our passes at the stage door, take the lift to our well-lighted rehearsal room, listen to our week-two benediction from our glorious leader, and set off on the next episode of our journey towards genius.
“Oc-TAY-vya!”
It wasn’t just the sight of Reshma outside the stage door. It was the sight of Reshma and five other women—Asian, Latin, African, Polynesian, and Eskimo—all yoo-hooing Tibor in ways that told me one thing. Monday hadn’t been the product of Tibor unwinding at the end of a long week by drinking a bottle of Absolut and picking up an Indian prostitute. Tibor had been doing this every night since we began rehearsal. He had been going out in London with a bottle of Absolut and looking for women. A new bottle every night, a new woman every night.
“My concept,” Tibor said, as he stirred the six new women into the murmuring mix that was his disconcerted company, “is that Antigone will be played not by one woman, but by seven women. Antigone is not just white, not just black or yellow or …” I could have supplied Tibor with the names of the seven colors of the rainbow more easily than figured out the reasoning behind his coalition.
“But why?” It was the Welsh girl, the original Antigone who asked the question. Entirely reasonable. Entirely within character, both as a Welsh girl and as Antigone.
“You should know, Antigone.” Tibor smiled a dangerous smile, the warning of imminent attack. “Your Uncle Creon thinks there is only one right side to any battle, one right answer to any question, one nephew, one hero who can be buried. But you …”—and Tibor laid a comforting palm on her shoulder—“know that sometimes there is more than one answer, more than one hero, more than one heroine.”
“Perhaps …” she began.
“Tell me,” he said, smiling again. “How many boys have you fucked in your life?” Before the Galahads in the company could raise their voices in defense of the poor girl, Tibor held up his hand. “I don’t really want to know. I suspect the number is more than one. But I’m sure you’re looking for the one guy to settle down with, the one man—or maybe woman, I’m easy—to spend the rest of your life with. Aren’t we all?”
The murmur dwindled to the silence of general confusion.
“On the Other Side, where I was born, One was the only number. One party, one president, one way of living, of thinking, of eating, drinking, shitting, and, when it came down to it, one missionary position for making love. I have been fighting a battle against One since I escaped from the Other Side. It is a battle I have tried to describe and explain. And now all of you—and I include our six new, professional colleagues—are here to give life to that battle. To prove once and for all that life is full of answers and origins. There are more Big Bangs, more explanations, more ways to tell where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and why we’re taking the trouble. As many, Dante would say, as the fireflies a peasant sees on a summer’s evening, when he lies on his back on a grassy hill after his work is done. And you, my pilgrims, are going to bring the light of all these fireflies to the world!”
The company was made up of professionals, people who had been in the business, some of them for more than forty years. I was impressed how many of them followed Tibor’s concept for the first day or so. Many of them had worked in the political sixties and seventies with non-professional actors—Kentish farmers and farriers in reenactments of Wat Tyler’s Rebellion or Hackney undertakers reliving the Great Plague of 1666. And they all had grown up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the theater where the Director was the One.
The problem was not the National Theatre. The problem was not Reshma and her international friends—for whom I acted as agent and intermediary with staff, and secured a pretty tidy compensation package. I suspect that at least one Antigone was keeping the Director company on St. Martin’s Lane. The problem was Tibor. He was drinking—at least that one bottle of Absolut a night. And even though every morning when I picked him up, he was showered, shaved, and stable enough to walk the twenty minutes to the Studio, it was clear that he was stumbling in rehearsal. I became both lightning rod and the handkerchief for the individual and collective anxieties. As I waited in the lobby for Tibor on the morning of the sixth day of the second week, I rehearsed again the speech of concern I had been writing all night.
Tibor didn’t come down. I rang up to his room. No answer. I convinced the front desk to come up with me to the room and knock, and when there was still no answer, persuaded security to let me in.
Tibor was there. Sitting on the edge of his bed, fully dressed. Not one but three empty bottles—empty liter bottles of Absolut—stood on the console next to the TV. BBC News was playing, without the sound thankfully, and equally thankfully with no sign of either Cristina or Anna Ford on the screen. But Tibor was absent—clearly alive in body, dressed, and ready for rehearsal, but absent in mind.
I asked security to call for a doctor.
“No,” Tibor whispered, from a great distance—more distant than a Tom Waits rasp. I thanked the hotel staff and assured them I’d be all right. They left and closed the door. I sat next to Tibor on the bed and took his right hand. It was huge and heavy.
“Something’s missing,” Tibor said. “The box is empty.”
“What box?” I asked him, thinking about the vacant bassinet in Fatebenefratelli.
“Seven isn’t working,” Tibor said. “I was so certain!”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “we should go to rehearsal?”
He said nothing.
“Perhaps you should slow down on your drinking.”
Tibor turned his face to me and gave me a look of such infernal hatred. “You are your mother’s daughter,” he said, with an accent on every bitter word. “You stand on my shoulders and press me down with your heels.” I couldn’t make much sense of what he was saying. But his hand was still in mine, my father’s hand.
“What do you need?” I asked him, and stroked that hand with my other.
“The Pip,” he said.
“The Pip?”
“Once upon a time, little girl, my friend Malory told me that I was out of tune. Maybe he was wrong then. He is right now.”
That was the second time I’d heard your name.
“Malory will know. Malory will give me the Pip to put me back in tune. Then Cristina, maybe she will hear me.”
I put Tibor to bed and stepped out into the hallway. I called Cristina in New York. I called the National. Both had contingency plans in place. So when on the third day, Tibor was still unable and unwilling to go to rehearsal, the National quietly let it be known he was being replaced. Cristina arrived that morning on a private jet loaned by someone grateful. Heels on his shoulders or no, Tibor let us guide him down to a cab and the airport. I rode with them to the airport, holding Tibor’s big right hand. But when he saw the plane, he balked.
“The Pip,” Tibor said, looking at the stairs up to the cabin door. “Do you have the Pip?”
And so I stayed—the only way we could get him onto the plane—with the promise that I would find Malory, with the promise that I would find you and bring you and the Pip to him.
I took the next flight to Rome. I had no idea where to look for you. But I went to see Sister Francesca Splendida—I hadn’t been back in ten years. And as I entered the Basilica of Santa Sabina, I looked up at the light, translucent through the foggy marble, and knew that you were close by. I know how to find people.
Monday, September 10, is Tibor’s birthday. He will turn fifty, and you must be there. He is stuck, like Dante, in the middle of the road of life, the right road lost. He has been tested by loss and has surrendered to gloom. He needs a Virgil to guide him out of the dark woods. You must come. I know you are the little Englishman with the pale English wife. I know you lost that wife and also lost a baby at Fatebenefratelli. And maybe all that loss makes it difficult for you to go to Tibor. But you must come. And you must—Tibor was very insistent—you must bring the Pip. Do you know what he means? The Pip?
MALORY HADN’T TOUCHED HIS SCONE. NOR HIS TEA. HE HAD ONE thought—it is not possible.
He had other thoughts—it will not happen.
Yet he also had a question, for himself.
How can I tell this girl, this Ottavia who somehow found her way past the doors, the gates, the walls, the alarms, the buzzers, not to mention Settimio and his invisible minions, how can I give this girl who found me the simple answer No, when I have forgotten how to speak?
In the beginning, Settimio brought me invitations for meetings with popes and rabbis, imams and lamas, politicians and supplicants. In the beginning, Settimio brought messages that came four, sometimes ten times a day, frantic messages from Antonella, from all the residents of the Dacia that through Fra Mario eventually found their way to Settimio. I ignored all news, especially news of Tibor. I had seen what I had seen—the position of Tibor’s body, the position of Antonella’s body beneath his, the velocity of Cristina’s walking away, the futility of my own observation. On the morning of December 26, 1978, I made the calculations that anyone with basic Newtonian common sense would have made. All added up to betrayal.
“Go,” Tibor told me at Fatebenefratelli and promised to look after Louiza.
“Go,” Tibor told me at the Dacia and promised to look after Antonella.
I went. I trusted those promises. Trust—the One True Rule of friendship.
Not for Tibor.
The betrayal is too great.
I will not go again.
Twenty-three years ago, I climbed into my oil lamp and pulled down the lid. In twenty-three years, I have set foot outside the grounds of the Villa Septimania precisely once, spoken to no one except Settimio, and most of what I have said to Settimio required no speech. For twenty-three years I have stared at the statue of Newton, the Princess of Septimania, and the marble apple. The force of gravity that Bernini harnessed in his sculpture, the force that attracted the two lovers and their apple into a perfect balance no longer calls to me. I’d had the gall to imagine the woman as Louiza and the man as myself and to dream that such a perfect balance guided our lives. But I had been late, been off-balance. I forsook the quest for Louiza and our lost child in a misbegotten lunge for happiness and Antonella. I rejected gravity, rejected attraction, rejected all of them, including Newton.
What did I have left? Septimania.
From the depths of my lamp, I sent away for books and papers, entire libraries on Newton and science. I corresponded with super-experts in super-gravity, super-symmetry, super-colliders, cosmology, string theory, and quantum hoo-hah to such an extent that Settimio had to redesign the Sanctum Sanctorum and wire it with serious self-updating computer machinery to handle the quantity and quality of information that I collected from Feynman in California, Hawking back in Cambridge, Greene, Klebanov, Polyakov, and even Freeman Dyson whose black holes and theory of perpetual free-fall felt most sympathetic to my own state.
I built tunnels and bookshelves, dug deep and deeper, seven times seven, beneath the orange trees and Roman pines, into the hill of the Aventino. I filled the tunnels with books, with manuscripts. As Settimio brought in computers, I devised a way with him to digitize what we have and acquire what we have not with a system that receives without giving any clue of its existence. The amount of knowledge I have beneath me, beneath the Villa Septimania, would not only bury Minerva the Goddess, but Maria the Mother, and two, if not all three, of the Catholic Gods without giving a clue to the outside world.
Discretion.
Settimio passed on the key to quiet acquisition of knowledge, as I searched for what Newton knew, as I tried to put the world in tune. Discreetly. Leaving no trace.
I buried myself in everything and anything that might lead me back to Newton’s One True Rule so I might begin again. I sat and thought, the way Newton sat and thought back in our frozen rooms next to the gate of Trinity College. But I couldn’t will myself back to the balance of knowledge and ignorance that Newton had.
I am not Newton. I am a descendant. And even if I am not the giant that Newton was, I am standing at least several shoulder heights above the giant, and see far too far to limit my vision. My knowledge is made up of toothpaste that cannot be unsqueezed.
My memory cannot be unsqueezed.
I have sat in this dining room every day staring at this statue, contemplating the one mystery I cannot explain. I have read of Arthur and Excalibur, the Sword in the Stone, and all the tales in the Arabian Nights.
I am Malory—King of the Christians, King of the Jews, and, if the Princess of Septimania’s Chapbook is to be believed, I am the Son of Newton, King of Science, King of the World, and yet I have nothing and have nothing to say. I argued that the answer was One. Tibor argued that the answer was Seven, at the very least. The answer was none of the above, neither negative nor imaginary.
The answer is Zero, terrifying and complete.
I have Zero to say to this girl. Less to say to Tibor.
On Christmas Day, I will turn fifty myself. And still I have Zero to say.
And yet, this girl found me.
Ottavia? Could that possibly be her name?
Could she possibly be Tibor’s daughter?
Could she possibly remind me more completely of a day, almost twenty-three years ago, that I have worked so forcefully to forget?
And yet—if the simple really were the sign of the truth—it is clear, despite Ottavia’s theatrical delivery, that if someone does not rescue him, Tibor will be dead very soon.
I will not be that someone, even though I have no wish to see Tibor dead.
And yet I do not want the girl to leave empty-handed.
The Pip. She asked for the Pip.
It is here, of course, in its canister. Behind Newton and his Queen.
POOR MALORY. I DON’T KNOW WHICH OF US WAS MORE THE GHOST. BUT while I explained myself, while I told my story, he shrank further and further into himself, as if he might disappear and leave only a pile of corduroy on the terrazza. But after I finished telling him about Tibor, after I finished telling him why I had come to find him, to bring him to the United States, to bring him up the Hudson to TiborTina, where Cristina was busy preparing a celebration of Tibor’s fiftieth birthday in the hope of a miraculous rejuvenation, I waited. I waited five minutes, fifteen. I polished off two scones and three espressos.
Finally, Malory spoke, in a voice that convinced me that he really hadn’t spoken to much of anyone in a long time.
“No,” he said, and then began again. “I’m sorry, but no. I can’t. But I’d like to give you something.”
“For Tibor?” I asked.
Malory shuddered. “For yourself,” he said. “You’ve come a long way. I don’t want you to leave empty-handed.”
I looked around. It was a dining room—seven chairs set around a table. Unused but not undusted. And then I saw them. At first I thought they were alive, the people. And then I saw that they were as small as me, as comfortably small as Malory, and made of stone. A statue of a man—I thought for a moment it was Isaac Newton, although he looked much younger than the statue in Trinity College Chapel—and next to him, a woman.
“That,” I said to Malory.
“The whole sculpture?” Malory asked, even paler and smaller than before. “You want that?”
“Only the apple,” I said. I don’t know why I wasn’t more surprised that the apple was floating in mid-air. Without waiting for an answer from Malory, I walked over to the figures. And whether the man on the left and the woman on the right smiled their approval to me, I can’t be sure. But I reached out and took the apple, as easily as I might pick a McIntosh at the market.
“Thank you,” I said to Malory. It looked at first like pain, the movement of his mouth, perhaps because he hadn’t performed the action in over twenty years. But by the time Malory walked over to me and reached down to touch the marble apple in my hand, I knew he was smiling.