HERE ARE CERTAIN MOMENTS IN THE YEAR WHEN ROME—A CITY that has seen its share of awakenings and slumbers—is so deserted that a traveler might imagine that the buildings are equally hollow, a set for a warehoused opera, and that a quick dash behind the Baths of Domitian or the Palazzo Massimo would reveal plywood and braces stenciled with the name CINECITTA in capitals. Only a few other travelers stepped down from Malory’s train, testifying to the emptiness. For all he knew, they might have been choristers on the way to an early morning rehearsal of Tosca. The fountain at the center of the Piazza della Repubblica was dry, the roundabout empty, the newspaper kiosks and bookstalls shut tight. The first light of mid-August picked out the sanpietrini in such pockmarked detail that Malory wondered how the stagehands, the grips, the best boys, or whatever the movie people called them—Antonella always insisted on staying in the Cambridge Arts Cinema to laugh at the credits that, even after decades in England remained exotic—could lay them all down in this brief moment when Rome was deserted. Was this a national holiday, a saint’s day, Malory wondered? Was there a crucial football match or rugby or whatever they played in the summer that had kept the entire population off the streets? Had he purchased a special out-of-class fare that had switched him onto a siding that led to a private Rome? Had it been this quiet when Newton first entered Rome and rode with his college friend up the Aventino to the Villa Septimania?
Malory saw Rome with a transparency and the sensation of a twinkling dark matter, as a breathing city that he hadn’t experienced in the forty-three years since he’d first arrived with only his canvas Kit Bag, his toiletries in Tesco’s plastic, and the letter from his grandmother. He walked along the Via Nazionale, past the English church, the Irish Pub. He crossed by the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, where the street sloped down to its medieval level at the Basilica of San Vitale. He knew there was something Roman below the church, and below that something Mithraic, and so down and down, each blind stone trusting the shoulders of the ones beneath it. He walked past the massive flanks of the insurance agencies that backed onto Trajan’s Forum, past the lonely column graffitied with the Emperor’s conquests over Tibor’s ancestors from which he had long ago surveyed a kingdom of hopeful actors. He crossed Piazza Venezia, turning left at the Palazzo Caetani, where Aldo Moro was found crumpled in the trunk of a red Renault 4 to the horror of Anna Ford and Antonella and half the citizens of Italy. And though Malory knew no more about that mystery than he had all those years before, the transparency with which he walked through Rome assured him that he had chosen correctly. Rome. This was where Antonella wanted Malory to bring her.
Antonella was more Roman than Catholic, after all. None of the few members of the Cambridge Maths Faculty who came around to Cranmer Road to give their condolences objected or even noticed when Malory arranged for the Huntingdon Road Crematorium to handle the funeral. Malory couldn’t imagine Antonella imagining a ceremony at Our Lady and English Martyrs, which was such a pale imitation of the churches of her hometown, with none of the Lippis or Caravaggios that made the worm-eaten relics and the waxy air of the altars manageable. He gave no thought to contacting Antonella’s invisible children. Nor did he believe he would stay much longer by himself in the house at the end of Cranmer Road. His decision to bicycle out to St. George’s Church, with what remained of Antonella in the blue marbled biodegradable cardboard box that Huntingdon Road had so solemnly handed over to him, was made in the sincere belief that Antonella had become part of the family, part of Malory’s family, and that it was fitting to scatter her on the ground that held Old Mrs. Emery and in the air that had borne the Pip.
Malory hadn’t visited Whistler Abbey, hadn’t chosen to tune or play its organ since he had returned to Cambridge, hadn’t seen the church since the day of his grandmother’s funeral. Nevertheless, the bicycle path by the river was where both had always been. It was older, much older, as was he, and had resisted the improvements and regulations that generations of planning councils had brought to the Coton and the Histon footpaths. He negotiated its summer dips and baked ridges more nimbly than he had years before. Antonella’s box rode secure inside his Kit Bag, which rested snugly in the basket on his front handlebars. He dismounted in the garden of the Orchard and walked the bicycle across the Cambridge Road, up the ramp to the wooden gate of St. George’s. He had thought of taking Antonella inside, even of carrying her up to the steeple and scattering her ashes through the slats that not only brought air into the bellows but breathed out into the fens beyond. But Malory knew enough physics to know that even if he were fit enough to climb the ladder to the organ loft, there was no going back in time to the afternoon in 1978 when he had been surprised to see a young girl crossing the Cambridge Road from the Orchard, entering the church and climbing the ladder only to see him, Malory.
Instead, Malory wheeled his bicycle around the back of the church and propped it against the yew, unchanged in the brief span of yew-years since Malory had last stood in its shade at the grave of Old Mrs. Emery. The grave itself had been well-tended—he could only imagine the arrangements for its manicure, made long ago by Settimio. Surely this was a safe and comforting place to scatter Antonella, perhaps the one place I might return at least occasionally, Malory thought, although he wondered how much returning there might be for him, how much longer he might be able to straddle a bicycle.
He opened the flap of his Kit Bag, the stenciled letters entirely faded, the strap more hole than canvas and restitched several times, most recently by Antonella herself. The blue marbled box was a simple thing of cardboard, large enough for a cat, small enough to fit in a Kit Bag, but entirely inappropriate for a woman as generous as Antonella. Malory hadn’t been shocked by the phone call from Adden brooke’s. He had felt the force of Antonella’s goodbye that morning as he’d cycled away up the Coton footpath, even if he hadn’t understood all its applications. What surprised him, when he was left alone with Antonella’s body after signing the papers set in front of him, was how warm her hand was in his. It was the same warmth, in the same key, as the warmth he had felt when he read the letters she had left on his pillow. It was the warmth of the Queen of Septimania. It was the warmth of the woman who had loved her Isaac enough to disguise herself more completely than Haroun al Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad, himself. It was the warmth perhaps of Aldana, daughter of Charlemagne, who had cloaked her heart in memory and the thousand and one stories she brought to her bed every night. Natural causes. Malory had no idea from what the Queen of Septimania had died. But he imagined it was from the same “Natural Causes” on the certificate Malory signed below the signature of some anonymous Addenbrooke’s doctor. Antonella had been a queen, was a queen, would always be a queen in whatever part of Septimania still survived in Malory’s universe.
“You know the church, I believe?”
Malory turned. A man, in that confident age between thirty-five and forty-five, before the thinning above and the thickening below signal beginnings of endings.
“I used to tune the organ. Years ago. Many.”
“Ah.” The man squinted up at the steeple, but not even in the vague direction of the organ. “Ten days and she’ll be down.”
“She?” Malory looked at the man.
“The church. Parish raised the funds to knock her down to the ground and build me a new one. Splendid, don’t you think?”
“Knock the church down?” It was late enough in the day that Malory doubted most of what passed through his ears. “And you are?”
“The vicar,” the vicar said, squinting up at the vault again.
“And you intend to knock down St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey?”
“Knock, knock, knock,” the vicar smiled. “What the church eats up in heating bills alone.”
“You can’t be serious?”
The vicar turned and focused on Malory for the first time. “You’re not one of those university preservationists, are you?”
Malory wasn’t certain what he was. He never had been. But he thought back to MacPhearson, to all the red-haired, red-bearded questers devoid of doubt.
“It’s a Norman church,” Malory said. “I’ve seen the entry in Holinshed, it’s been around for …”
“Eight bloody hundred years. Don’t quote the vicar, chapter and verse,” the vicar quoted at Malory. “Eight bloody hundred years old. And the electric is eighty, and the plumbing over a hundred, and the drafts have been around since Noah built his bloody ark. ‘It’s a Norman church,’ he says.” The vicar simpered. “Well so are fourteen hundred other Norman churches in East Anglia alone. I believe we might spare this one and build ourselves a church where elderly gentlemen won’t catch their deaths of colds in the bloody springtime!”
Malory put the box back in the Kit Bag, the Kit Bag back in the basket of the bicycle, and pedaled back to Cambridge. He booked a train ticket the same afternoon—he was too fixed in his ways to approach the city otherwise—a train ticket to Rome for a final visit with Antonella. The transparency of his sight allowed him a view into the depths of his regret—late once again—that only now was he bringing Antonella back to the city she ached to visit on Malory’s arm while she was alive. Still, she was there with him, in a box, as safe as any cat, snug within the sturdy canvas of Malory’s ancient Kit Bag.
Malory walked from the Palazzo Caetani through the Ghetto to the Tevere, the same path he had run with another woman in his arms long before.
“Biscuit?” Louiza had asked then.
Biscuit.
Had she thought of that jog, that walk since then? Had she remembered through the pain of delivery and loss and all those years, how Malory had followed Tibor down to the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, carrying her in his arms? Malory looked over the parapet to where the Tevere spilled over the smallest of waterfalls as it passed the prow of the island, and the plastic bottles and cartons and floating debris of decades was caught in the bubbling eddies at the downriver end, floating in an endless balance between water and gravity.
He left the Isola Tiberina, left the square hulk of the synagogue behind him and walked, slower now, past the Temple of Hercules, the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, survivors of that religious fervor to knock, knock, knock to the ground. Crossing the empty slip road off the Lungotevere, Malory found the shaded entrance to the Clivo di Rocca Savella. The sanpietrini looked no more moss-covered, the pines, the bougainvillea no older or less colorful. The Clivo was empty, the medieval brick walls bare of even a midsummer gecko. No cancello, no entrance, not even a fig leaf or a turban to disguise the identity, no omega of a bricked-up arch to suggest that once, long ago, there might have been a hidden door and a villa and a kingdom.
At the top of the Clivo, Malory turned towards the rising bulk of Santa Sabina and in through the iron gate of the entrance to the Giardino degli Aranci. The sun was fully risen, and the odor of the bitter oranges gripped his nostrils. It had been a full day since he had eaten. He set his Kit Bag down upon a concrete bench and picked a piece of fruit from one of the lower branches. The peel came away slowly—he was hot, he was tired, and the skin beneath his nails stung from the juice. He sat on the bench and ate the orange, section by bitter section. The juice ran down his lip and hung suspended from his unshaven chin. He was alone in the garden.
Beneath him lay what remained of Septimania: the bedroom of the portraits of his ancestors; the scarlet cap and cape of the secret cardinal hanging in the wardrobe; the majlis of Haroun, all cedar and cushions; the marble Bernini of Isaac Newton and the Queen of Septimania eternally without the apple; the Sanctum Sanctorum, where Newton and the Queen had made their discoveries, where the Queen had written her lonely letter to the lonely Newton—all of them, Antonella, Malory himself alone in these words; and beneath the words, the kilometers upon miles upon light years of tunnels holding books and wires and information that was declining into antique and ruin with every passing moment. Twenty-three years of his own life passed down there below, eating scones, wandering in the garden, and searching for an answer to a question he may never have understood. Searching for what it meant to be King of Septimania, Holy Roman, Jewish, Muslim, heir to the throne of Science, as if the sum of those titles would add up to One.
What he was, what Malory was, was something else. He was the Hercule of his mother, dreaming of a father and a giant buried beneath the hills of the Pyrenees. He was the organ player of Narbonne, long before he had any notion that the Old Lady up the hill was Mrs. Emery, that Mrs. Emery was his grandmother. He was a seventy-year-old man with a corduroy suit too warm for midsummer Rome and a Kit Bag containing … He opened the flap and set the entire inventory on the bench beside him. A bag of toiletries, including a razor and soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste with perhaps one good squeeze left. The Book of Organs and the Newton Chapbook—the meager remains of his once infinite library. The Universal Organ Tuner, with its memory of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of pipes, but at base only a piece of bent and rusting metal. And finally, the blue marbled box holding what once was a young Italian girl with a biscuit tin, a few kilos of dust.
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 teach 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.