I. ROME, AUGUST

ON THE ninth of August, 1964, Rome lay asleep in afternoon light as the sun swirled in a blinding pinwheel above its roofs, its low hills, and its gilded domes. The city was quiet and all was still except the crowns of a few slightly swaying pines, one lost and tentative cloud, and an old man who rushed through the Villa Borghese, alone. Limping along paths of crushed stone and tapping his cane as he took each step, he raced across intricacies of sunlight and shadow spread before him on the dark garden floor like golden lace.

Alessandro Giuliani was tall and unbent, and his buoyant white hair fell and floated about his head like the white water in the curl of a wave. Perhaps because he had been without his family, solitary for so long, the deer in deer preserves and even in the wild sometimes allowed him to stroke their cloud-spotted flanks and touch their faces. And on the hot terra cotta floors of roof gardens and in other, less likely places, though it may have been accidental, doves had flown into his hands. Most of the time they held in place and stared at him with their round gray eyes until they sailed away with a feminine flutter of wings that he found beautiful not only for its delicacy and grace, but because the sound echoed through what then became an exquisite silence.

As he hurried along the Villa Borghese he felt his blood rushing and his eyes sharpening with sweat. In advance of his approach through long tunnels of dark greenery the birds caught fire in song but were perfectly quiet as he passed directly underneath, so that he propelled and drew their hypnotic chatter before and after him like an ocean wave pushing through an estuary. With his white hair and thick white mustache, Alessandro Giuliani might have seemed English were it not for his cream-colored suit of distinctly Roman cut and a thin bamboo cane entirely inappropriate for an Englishman. Still trotting, breathless, and tapping, he emerged from the Villa Borghese onto a long wide road that went up a hill and was flanked on either side by a row of tranquil buildings with tile roofs from which the light reflected as if it were a waterfall cascading onto broken rock.

Had he looked up he might have seen angels of light dancing above the throbbing bright squares—in whirlwinds, will-o'-the-wisps, and golden eddies—but he didn't look up, for he was intent on getting to the end of the long road, to a place where he had to catch a streetcar that, by evening, would take him far into the countryside. He would have said, anyway, that it was better to get to the end of the road than to see angels, for he had seen angels many times before. Their faces shone from paintings; their voices rode the long and lovely notes of arias; they descended to capture the bodies and souls of young children; they sang and perched in the trees; they were in the surf and the streams; they inspired dancing; and they were the right and holy combination of words in poetry. As he climbed the hill he thought not of angels and their conveyances, but of a motorized trolley. It was the last to leave Rome on Sunday, and he did not want to miss it.

 

THE ROAD traveled relatively straight to the top of the hill, but descended the opposite side in switchbacks that, unlike their mountain counterparts, cupped fountains in the turns. Stairs cut through its shuttling, and Alessandro Giuliani took them fast and painfully. He tapped his cane at each step, partly in commemoration, partly in retaliation, and partly to make it a metronome, for he had discovered long before that to defeat pain he had to separate it from time, its most useful ally. As he went down, the walking became easier, and a short distance from the crossroads where he would board the streetcar he found himself on ten flights of gradual stairs and landings in a thick green defile. Through a confessional grille of tangled trees in a long dark gallery penetrated at intervals by the blinding sun, he saw the pale circle of light that marked his destination.

Drawing closer, he knew from the open blue awning that—unlike everything else in Rome that day—the cafe that seemed to exist solely for people who awaited the rarest streetcar in Italy had not shut its doors. He had neglected to buy presents for his granddaughter and her family, and now he knew that he would be able to take something to them. Though his great-granddaughter would not be pleased by gifts of food, she would be asleep when he arrived, and in the morning he would walk with her to the village to get a toy. Meanwhile, he would buy some prosciutto, chocolate, and dried fruit, hoping that these would be appreciated as much as his more elaborate presents. Once, he brought an expensive English shotgun to his granddaughters husband, and at other times he arrived with the kinds of things that were to be expected from a man who had many years previously outrun any possible use for his money.

The tables and chairs on the terrace of the cafe were crowded with people and bundles. The overhead wires neither vibrated nor sizzled, which meant that Alessandro Giuliani could walk slowly, buy provisions, and have something to drink. On this line the cables always began to sing ten minutes before the tram arrived, because of the way it gripped them as it rounded the hill.

Walking through the thicket of chairs, he glanced at people who would ride with him on the way to Monte Prato, though most would leave the streetcar in advance of the last stop, and some even before it lowered its whip-like antennae, switched to diesel, and ran far beyond the grid of electrical wires from which it took its sustenance on the streets of the city. It had rubber tires and a pantograph, and, because it was a cross between a trolley and a bus, the drivers called it a mule.

A construction worker who had made for himself a hat of folded newspaper thrust his right hand into a bucket to encourage a listless squid that Alessandro knew would have to die within the hour from lack of oxygen. The headline running along the rim of the hat said, inexplicably, "Greeks Make Bridges of Gold for the Rest of 1964." Perhaps it was related to the Cyprus Crisis, but, then again, Alessandro thought, it might have had something to do with sports, a subject of which he was entirely ignorant. Two Danes, a boy and a girl in blue-and-white student hats, were at one corner of the terrace, seated next to German army rucksacks almost as big as they were. Their shorts were as tight as surgeons' gloves, and they were so severely and brazenly entangled in one another that it was impossible to tell his smooth and hairless limbs from hers.

Several poor women of Rome, perhaps sweepers or cafeteria workers, sat together over glasses of iced tea and were overcome now and then with the hysterical giggling born of fatigue and hard work. Sometimes they were free for a few days to go back into the country, where they had once been sylph-like little girls completely different from the obedient cardigan-covered barrels they had become. As Alessandro went past they lowered their voices, for although he was courtly and deferential, his age, bearing, and unusual self-possession awakened their memories of another time. They looked down at their hands, remembering the discipline not of the factory, but of childhood.

At another table were five strong men in the prime of life. They were truck drivers, and they wore sun glasses, striped shirts, and faded army clothing. Their arms and wrists were as thick as armor; they had huge families; they worked impossibly hard; and they thought they were worldly because they had driven over the high Alpine passes and spent time with blonde women in German bordellos. Without thinking, Alessandro formed them into a squad of soldiers in a war that had long been over and would soon be forgotten, but then, catching himself, he disbanded them.

"It hasn't arrived yet, has it?" he asked the proprietor of the cafe.

"No, not yet," the proprietor answered, leaning over the copper bar to glance at the wires, for he could read their vibrations as if they were a schedule. "It's nowhere near; it won't come for at least ten minutes.

"You're late, you know," he continued. "When I didn't see you coming, I thought you had finally given in and bought a car."

"I hate cars," Alessandro said, without the slightest energy. "Would never buy one. They're ugly and they're small. I'd rather ride in something airy and open, or walk, because to be in a car gives me a headache. Their motion frequently makes me want to vomit, although I don't. And they're so cheaply made I don't even like to look at them." He made a gesture in imitation of spitting. He was too refined to have done this in normal circumstances, but here he was speaking the language of the man behind the counter, who, like Alessandro, was a veteran of the Alpine War.

"These automobiles," Alessandro said, as if he were conceding the existence of a new word, "are everywhere, like pigeon shit. I haven't seen a naked piazza in ten years. They put them all over the place, so that you can't even move. Someday I'll come home and find automobiles in my kitchen, in all the closets, and in the bathtub.

"Rome was not meant to move, but to be beautiful. The wind was supposed to be the fastest thing here, and the trees, bending and swaying, to slow it down. Now it's like Milan. Now the slimmest swiftest cats are killed because they aren't agile enough to cross streets where once—and I remember it—a cow could nap all afternoon. It wasn't like this, so frantic and tense, everybody walking, talking, eating, and fucking all the time. Nobody sits still anymore, except me."

He looked up at a row of medals displayed in a glass case above a battalion of liquor bottles. Alessandro had medals, too. He kept them in a brown Morocco-leather folder in the credenza in his study. He hadn't opened the folder in many years. He knew exactly what they looked like, for what they had been awarded, and the order in which he had earned them, but he did not wish to see them. Each one, tarnished or bright, would push him back to a time that he found both too painful and too beautiful to remember, and he had never wanted to be one of the many old men who, like absinthe drinkers, are lost in dreams. Had he owned a cafe he probably would have put his medals in a case above the bar, because it would have been good for business, but for as long as he could, until the last, he would keep certain memories locked away.

"Let me offer you something," said the proprietor, "compliments of the house."

"Thank you," Alessandro answered. "I'll take a glass of red wine." He had always associated the expression compliments of the house,' with some giant establishment twenty or fifty times the size of the one he was in—perhaps an enormous casino, or a resort on an island bulging with Germans in tiny bathing suits.

As the proprietor's hand grasped the bottle, he asked, "Anything to eat? Bread? Cheese?"

"Yes, but I'll pay for them," Alessandro told him.

This was answered by a quick gesture that said, remarkably, 'I offered, at least, but I'm glad you want to pay, because although things are not impossible, lately they've been kind of slow.' Then, as his customer was eating, the proprietor edged closer and spoke in a camouflaged voice.

"Do you see those two?" he asked in reference to the lascivious Danes. "Look at them. All they can do is eat and fuck."

"I wish I could."

The proprietor looked puzzled. He saw that Alessandro was taking alternating and vigorous bites of bread and cheese. "What are you doing now?"

Alessandro swallowed, and looked the proprietor in the eye. "I can tell you what I'm not doing," he said.

"Yes, but that's all they can do."

"How do you know?"

"Because if I carried on the way they do, I wouldn't be able to do anything else, would I?"

"If you carried on the way they do, I wouldn't be able to do anything else, would I?"

"If you carried on the way they do," Alessandro said, with complete assurance, "you'd be dead. You know what they do? I'll tell you what they do. They eat dinner and then they go back to their hotel, and for twelve hours they strain like gymnasts to pressure-weld themselves together, to fill every socket. By day, they sleep on buses and beaches. At night they're Paolo and Francesca."

"It's disgusting."

"No it isn't. You're jealous of their bliss because in our day such things were hardly possible."

"Yes, but at their age I drove mules, real mules!"

Alessandro awaited the connection.

"I pushed mule trains over the passes in the middle of winter. The animals were so heavily laden and the ice so hard and smooth that we would lose them. They would vanish from us and fall great distances, always silently, but we went on. The snow was blinding and the ice-clad walls of rock towered over us, streaming mist for a thousand meters."

"What has that to do with them?" Alessandro asked, glancing at the Danes.

"They don't know such things, and I resent it. I envy them, yes, but I'm proud."

"If you were one of the mule drivers," Alessandro said, "I may have seen you. I may have spoken to you, half a century ago."

They let the subject drop, but certainly they had been in the same places: the front line in the north had stretched for only several hundred kilometers. Doubtless they would have been able to reconstruct in conversation a little of what it had been like, but they knew that to do so in a few idle words while waiting for a trolley would not be right.

"Someday we'll talk," the proprietor said, "but..." He hesitated. "I don't know. These things are like the things of the Church."

"I understand. I never speak of them either. I want to buy some food before the trolley comes. Can you get it for me?"

The proprietor shuffled back and forth between the cases and counters, and as the wires began to sing and the people outside touched their luggage to make sure that it hadn't walked away on its own or been taken by short or invisible thieves, Alessandro Giuliani was presented with half a dozen neat packages, which he slipped into his small leather briefcase.

The wires were singing like afternoon locusts. Every now and then one of them would be drawn down so tightly that it would begin to shriek like the worst soprano in the hottest town in Italy.

"How much?" Alessandro asked. He was anxious because he knew he would have difficulty mounting the high step of the streetcar, and would have to fumble for money while supporting himself with his cane and balancing the briefcase and wallet as the car lurched from side to side.

The proprietor didn't answer. The streetcar was grinding around the bend. It sounded like a traveling machine shop. "How much?" Alessandro asked once again. The people outside had arisen and were waiting by the side of the tracks.

The proprietor held up his right hand as if to stop traffic.

"What? Again?" Alessandro asked.

The proprietor shook his head back and forth.

"We're no longer soldiers," Alessandro said quietly. "That was a lifetime ago. Everything has changed."

"Yes," said the proprietor, "but once, a lifetime ago, we were, and sometimes it all comes back, and moves my heart."

 

THE FARE to Monte Prato had risen from 1900 lire to 2200, which meant that Alessandro could hot merely give over two 1,000-lire notes, pocket the change, and walk away in balance, as he had planned. Instead, he found himself holding on to many things at once while the airy streetcar swayed violently and the sun flashed through the trees. Trying to withdraw a 500-lire note from his wallet was difficult, but it would have been worse had not the young Dane separated himself for a moment from his sunburnt and beautiful lover to hold Alessandro's briefcase and take his arm as a son might have done for a father.

Alessandro thanked the boy, pleased that lack of decorum did not necessarily imply lack of courtesy.

The best seat was next to the man with the newspaper hat and the squid. "Good day," Alessandro said, addressing both man and squid. Sensing mischief, the construction worker looked away sullenly.

A few minutes later he peered into the bucket and poked the squid with his finger. Then he lifted his eyes and stared at Alessandro as if Alessandro were to blame. "Dead," he said, accusingly.

Alessandro shrugged his shoulders. "Not enough oxygen in the water."

"How do you mean?"

"He needed oxygenated water to breathe."

"That's crazy. Fish don't breathe. They live under water."

"But they do, they do. There's oxygen in the water, and they extract it with their gills."

"So why didn't this one?"

"He did, until there was no more left, and then he passed away."

The construction worker preferred to believe otherwise. "The bastards at Civitavecchia sold me a bad squid."

"As you wish."

The construction worker thought for a moment. "Would he have lived if I had blown into the water with a straw?"

"Probably not, since you would have been blowing in more carbon dioxide than oxygen. How far are you going?"

"Monte Prato."

"Impossible," Alessandro said, briefly shutting his eyes for emphasis. "It's far too warm. The bucket should have been half full of ice."

"How do you know these things? I think you're wrong."

"I know them because they're obvious."

"Do you have a fish market?"

"No."

The construction worker was tremendously suspicious. "If you don't have a fish market, what do you do?"

"I'm a professor."

"Of fish?"

"Of chicken," Alessandro answered.

"Then you don't know enough to talk."

"Ah," said Alessandro, holding up his finger. "A squid is not a fish."

"It isn't?"

"No."

"What is it?"

"It's a type of chicken, a water chicken."

The construction worker looked abject. Feeling sorry for him, Alessandro said, "I'm not a professor of chicken, and as far as I know, there is no such thing, but the part about the oxygen is true. I regret that your squid died. He had already come all the way from Civitavecchia, and before that he had been pulled from the sea, which was his home, and he suffered many hours in the hold of a fishing boat as it worked its way back to land in the August heat. The journey was too much."

The construction worker nodded. "But of what are you a professor?"

"Aesthetics."

"What are aesthetics?"

"The study of beauty."

"Beauty? What for?"

"Beauty. Why not."

"Why do you have to study it?"

"You don't. It's everywhere, in great profusion, and always will be. Were I to cease studying it, it would not go away, if that's what you mean."

"Then why do you?"

"It entrances me, it always has, so it's what I do—despite occasional ridicule."

"I'm not ridiculing you."

"I know you're not, but others say that mine is an effeminate or a useless calling. Well, for some it is. Not for me."

"Don't get me wrong; I don't think you look effeminate."

The construction worker drew back to study him. "You're a tough old bastard, I think. You remind me of my father."

"Thank you," Alessandro replied, slightly alarmed.

Now the way to Monte Prato was clear. He had only to fall into the pleasant hypnosis of travel; to watch the long ranks of trees as they passed; to view the mountains when they first rose over the fields; to observe the great round moon and its attendant bright stars shining through the streetcar's glassy walls; to match the whirring of the engines with the mad chorus of the cicadas; to be comfortable, and old, and content with small things. He assumed that the remaining hours would pass without incident, that he would rest, and that he would be alone—free of memories too great for the heart to hold.

 

BEFORE IT came to the edge of the city, where it would pick up speed, the trolley wound through many small streets not as congenial as the one on the side of the hill where Alessandro Giuliani had embarked. It crossed and recrossed the river Aniene, and rattled down desolate boulevards scored by the patterned shadows of iron fences and trees. At every church, the sweeper ladies crossed themselves, and now and then the squad of truck drivers noticed a new German truck, or a piece of construction machinery, and turned their heads to look at it while one of them told how much it cost or how many horsepower it had.

At each stop the driver looked up into his mirror to scan both the interior of the car and the street, to see if anyone would insult and delay him by wanting to get on or off. Though no one had a short ticket, people sometimes changed their minds about how far they wanted to go, and he had to be alert: but Rome hardly stirred, offering not a soul to slow his progress. The streetcar made excellent time, and when it reached the edge of the city it was running ahead of schedule, This delighted the driver. If he beat his fares to a stop he could hurl himself forward and arrive even earlier at the next stop, where he would be less likely to encounter someone else. In this way he was able to convert his viscous long-distance local into the most ethereal express. He hated deceleration and he hated to make change, but he did like to drive, and each stop that he could pass at speed was for him the partial satisfaction of his long-standing dream of riding in the steeplechase as a jockey or even as a horse.

At a place that was neither Rome nor the countryside, where fields of corn and wheat alternated with lumber yards and factory compounds, and where a distant highway was visible, sparkling like a stream as its traffic beat against the sunlight, they made an insincere lurch at an empty stop, and started off again as usual. Alessandro had begun to dream, but was pulled from his reverie by the insistent and conscientious action of the corner of his eye. Off to the right was a slightly sloping dirt road littered with potholes. A little way down this road, someone was running desperately, leaping the potholes and waving his arms.

A long moment passed during which Alessandro begged to remain at rest but was again overruled by the corner of his eye. He turned his head for a full view. Whoever it was, he wanted to get on the streetcar, and was screaming for it to stop. Although he could not be heard, what he said was apparent in the movement of his arms as they jolted slightly at each shout.

"There's someone," Alessandro said weakly. Then he cleared his throat. "There's a person!" he shouted. Because no one else had seen the runner no one knew what Alessandro meant. They were not surprised that an old man, even one as dignified as he, would blurt out something incoherent on a hot afternoon. Except for one sweeper woman, who smiled idiotically, their reaction was to hold still and not look at him. The car was on a straightaway, accelerating to the southeast.

Alessandro jumped to his feet. "Driver!" he screamed. "There's a person who wants to catch the streetcar!"

"Where?" the driver shouted, without taking his eyes from the road.

"Back there."

The driver turned his head. No one was visible. "You're mistaken," he said. They were far away now from the corner of the dirt road. "Besides," the driver continued, "I can't pick anyone up between stops."

Alessandro sat down. He looked back, and saw no one. It was not fair for the driver to race through the stops, especially because this was the last car of the day.

Alessandro began to compose a letter of protest. It was short, but he rephrased it repeatedly. During this time the streetcar traveled a kilometer or two and was forced to slow down behind a huge truck that was hauling an arcane piece of electrical equipment almost as big as a house.

"Hey, look," the construction worker said to Alessandro.

Alessandro turned to see where the construction worker was pointing. Far behind them on the road, the slight figure from the dirt track was chasing them, after having run for two or three kilometers without flagging. No longer was he begging, and he had stopped waving his arms, as if he had decided that since the streetcar would give him nothing he would save his strength so he could get what he wanted himself.

"I'll tell the driver," Alessandro said to the construction worker. He rose and made his way to the front. "Signore," he implored the driver, "look in back of us. Someone is chasing."

The driver glanced up into his mirror. He saw the runner. "It's too late," he said. "The next stop is fifteen kilometers away. He'll never make it."

"Why don't you let him on?" Alessandro demanded, his voice rising.

"I told you. We don't pick up passengers between stops. Please sit down."

"You sped right by the last stop, early. That's why he's running."

"Please sit down."

"No," Alessandro said. "I want to get off."

"You get off in Monte Prato."

"I want to get off here instead."

"I can't do that."

"Why not?"

"Here? There's nothing here! We don't let people off here."

"These are my fields. All these fields are mine. I want to check the wheat."

The streetcar rolled to a stop and the doors were thrown open. "Okay, then," the driver said, glancing at the mirror, "check the wheat."

"Just a minute," Alessandro answered. "I have to get my briefcase." He began to walk back to his seat, very slowly.

The driver was angry. "Come on!" he screamed. "You're holding us up."

"Just a moment, just a moment," Alessandro said, and, upon reaching his seat, he added, "I dropped something."

The driver closed the door and started up again, but the persistent runner was gaining. Alessandro looked back, and saw a boy of eighteen or nineteen sprinting behind the bus. He was wearing heavy leather work shoes, and he looked as if he were about to die from overexertion. His hair was plastered by sweat onto the sides of his forehead. He breathed hard through an open mouth. He was the color of a ripe pepper.

"He's here!" Alessandro shouted.

The driver looked stonily ahead, but the boy put on a final burst of speed and ran up to the door, where he hopped onto the step and held on. He was heaving, dripping sweat, and his head was bowed.

Alessandro, briefcase under his arm, tapped his way to the front of the streetcar and hit the roof with his cane. "Signore," he said in a surprisingly deep and powerful voice, "I believe you have a passenger." At this very moment the boy, who looked like someone from a wild valley in Sicily, began to beat furiously on the glass. The way he hung on the door and pounded with his fists reminded Alessandro of his own tenacity in other times, and he was filled with affection and pride, as if the boy had been his son.

The driver pressed hard on the brakes. Alessandro flew headlong into the windshield but was cushioned by his briefcase and his arms, and was able to stay in balance. The boy swung around and slammed against the streetcar in the fashion of a flexible whip, but he hung on.

When the door was opened, both Alessandro and the boy thought that they had won, but when the driver got up, they saw that he was a giant. Alessandro bent his head to look at him. "I didn't realize how..." he started to say. Then he looked at the driver's seat and saw that it had been lowered all the way to the floor.

As the driver descended, the boy backed away from the door. "If you touch this vehicle again...!" the driver said before he became voiceless with rage.

Alessandro walked down the steps and hopped to the ground. "If you don't let him ride, I won't ride either. I'm an old man. It might cost you your job."

"Crap on my job," the driver said, leaping back into the car. "I always wanted to be a jockey." He closed the door, and the streetcar started up suddenly and began to pull away.

Alessandro was shocked to see the construction worker in the newspaper hat pressed up against the window behind which he himself, only a few minutes before, had been resting. The construction worker lifted his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. Then he changed his mind and rushed to the front, but whatever he did or said there, the car did not stop, and the faces of the truck drivers, the sweeper women, and the Danes looked back at the old man and the boy, like expressionless moons.

"Seventy kilometers to Monte Prato," Alessandro said under his breath as the streetcar disappeared down the long straight road.

"In a few hours the other car will pass on its way back to Rome," the boy declared, still breathing hard from his run. "Maybe less than that."

"I just came from Rome," the old man said. "What good would it do me to go back? I'm going to Monte Prato. And you?"

"To Sant' Angelo, ten kilometers before Monte Prato."

"I'm aware of that."

"To my sister. She lives in the convent there."

"She's a nun?"

"No. She washes for them. They're very clean, but they can't do it all themselves."

Alessandro looked back and saw that, in leaving most of the city behind, the road had become beautiful. To right and left were fields now golden in the declining sun, and the tall trees on either side sparkled and swayed as the wind rushed through them. "I'll tell you what," he proposed. "I'll go with you as far as Sant' Angelo, and then continue on my own to Monte Prato."

"I don't know if they'll give the two of us a ride," the boy replied. "There isn't any traffic anyway. There hardly ever is, on this road, and not today, not on a saint's day."

"Do you think I would stand on the road and beg for a ride?" Alessandro asked indignantly.

"I'll do it for you."

"No you won't. I've had legs for seventy-four years, and I know how to use them. In addition," he said, rapping his cane on the surface of the road, "I have this. It helps. It's as long as a rhinoceros's penis, and twice as stiff."

"But you can't walk seventy kilometers. Even I can't," the boy said.

"What's your name?"

"Nicolò."

"Nicolò, I once walked several hundred kilometers over glaciers and snowfields, with no rest, and if I had been discovered I would have been shot."

"That was in the war?"

"Of course it was in the war. I'm going to Monte Prato," Alessandro declared, cinching up his belt, straightening his jacket, and patting down his mustache. "If you like, I'll accompany you as far as Sant' Angelo."

"By the time I get there, if I walk," Nicolò said, "I'll have to turn around and go back."

"Would you let a little thing like that stop you?" Alessandro asked.

Contemplating the old lion in front of him, Nicolò said nothing.

"Well, would you?" Alessandro demanded, his face so tense and peculiar that Nicolò was frightened.

"No, of course not," the boy said. "Why would I?"

 

"THE FIRST thing you have to do," Alessandro told him, "is take inventory and make a plan."

"What inventory, what plan?" Nicolò asked dismissively. "We have nothing and we're going to Sant' Angelo."

The old man was silent. They walked about a hundred steps.

"What do you mean, inventory?" Nicolò wanted to know. When he received no answer, he looked straight ahead and decided that if the old man chose not to talk, he wouldn't talk either. That lasted, as Alessandro knew it would, for no more than ten steps.

"I thought inventory was what they did in a store."

"It is what they do in a store."

"Where's the store?" Nicolò asked.

"Merchants take inventory," Alessandro stated, "so that, knowing what they have, they can plan ahead. We can do the same. We can think in our brains of what we have, and what obstacles are in front of us to be overcome."

"What for?"

"Anticipation is the heart of wisdom. If you are going to cross a desert, you anticipate that you will be thirsty, and you take water."

"But this is the road to Monte Prato, and there are towns along the way. We don't need water."

"Did you ever walk seventy kilometers?"

"No."

"It may be difficult for you. It will be very difficult for me. I'm somewhat older than you, and, as you can see, I'm half lame. If I'm to succeed, it will be by a narrow margin, and, therefore, I must court precision. It's always been that way for me. What do you have with you?"

"I don't have anything."

"You have no food?"

"Food?" The boy jumped in the air and whirled around, turning a full circle to show that he wasn't concealing anything. "I don't carry around food. Do you?" he asked.

The old man went to one side of the road and sat on a rock. "Yes," he answered, opening his briefcase. "Bread, and a half kilo each of prosciutto, dried fruit, and semi-sweet chocolate. We'll need a lot of water. It's hot."

"In the towns," Nicolò volunteered.

"Only a few towns line the route, but between them are springs. As soon as it gets hilly, you'll see, we'll have plenty of water."

"We don't need food. When we get to a village, we can eat there."

"The next village is fifteen kilometers away," the old man said, "and I walk slowly. When we arrive the stars will be halfway across the sky and every window will be shut tight. Though we won't be able to eat in the towns, this food will see us through. You'd be surprised at how much you burn up on a march."

"Where will we sleep?" Nicolò asked.

"Sleep?" Alessandro repeated, with one bushy white eyebrow riding so far above the other that it looked for a moment as if he had been in an automobile accident and had not quite recovered.

"Aren't we going to sleep at night?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"On a march of seventy kilometers you don't need to sleep."

"Yes, you don't need to sleep," the boy said, "but why not sleep? Who says you shouldn't?"

"If you slept you wouldn't be properly intent. You'd be swept away by dreams, and miss the waking dreams. And you would insult the road."

"I don't understand."

"Look," Alessandro said, grabbing Nicolò's wrist. "If I decide that I'm going to Monte Prato, seventy kilometers or not, I go to Monte Prato. You don't do things by halves. If you love a woman, you love her entirely. You give everything. You don't spend your time in cafes; you don't make love to other women; you don't take her for granted. Do you understand?"

Nicolò shook his head back and forth to express that he did not. He expected that the old man might be more than he could handle and was perhaps an escapee from an asylum, or, worse, someone who had contrived to avoid asylums altogether.

"God gives gifts to all creatures," Alessandro continued, "no matter what their station or condition. He may give innocence to a lunatic, or heaven to a thief. Contrary to most theologians, I have always believed that even worms and weasels have souls, and that even they are capable of salvation.

"But one thing God does not give, something that must be earned, something that a lazy man can never know. Call it understanding, grace, the elevation of the spirit—call it what you will. It comes only of work, sacrifice, and suffering.

"You must give everything you have. You must love unto exhaustion, work unto exhaustion, and walk unto exhaustion.

"If I want to go to Monte Prato, I go to Monte Prato. I don't hang around like an ass with half a dozen trunks who has gone to take the waters at Montecatini. People like that continually expose their souls to mortal danger in imagining that they are free of it, when, indeed, the only mortal danger for the spirit is to remain too long without it. The world is made of fire."

Alessandro's homily was a success, and Nicolò was beginning to get fiery himself. Swept up remarkably fast in a storm of passion and dreams, within a minute or two he had decided his fate and declared that he would go to Sant' Angelo, to Monte Prato, twice the distance, three times the distance, without rest, driving himself until he came close to death. His face, with its dark, lateral, wolflike eyes, a crooked mouth, and a sharp and substantial nose, was tight with resolution.

Alessandro released his grip and held up one finger. "Of course," he said, "you must always rest." A cloud swept across the boy's face as he was knocked from his reverie. "There are times for sleep, for inactivity, dreaming, indiscipline, even lethargy. You'll know when you deserve these times. They come after you've been broken. I'm speaking of a helpless, tranquil state before the great excitement of dawn."

"Dawn..." Nicolò repeated, confused.

"Yes," said Alessandro, "dawn. Tell me, what kind of feet do you have."

"My feet?"

"Yes, your feet, the ones that are attached to your legs."

"I have human feet, Signore."

"Of course, but two kinds of feet exist. Every army knows this but won't admit it for fear of losing recruits.

"You may be tall, handsome, intelligent, graceful, and gifted, but if you have feet of despair you might just as well be a dwarf who shines shoes on the Via del Corso. Feet of despair are too tender, and can't fight back. Under prolonged assault they come apart. They bleed to death. They become infected and swollen in half an hour. I have seen men remove from their boots, after less than a day's march, feet that are nothing more than bloody sponges, soft shapeless things that look like skinned animals.

"On the other hand, if I may, are the feet of invincibility. In extreme cases such as those of South American mountain peasants it may appear that a man is wearing an old torn-up muddy pair of boots, when actually he is barefooted. Feet of invincibility are ugly, but they don't suffer, and they last forever—building defenses where they are attacked, turning color, reproportioning and repositioning themselves until they look like bulldogs. They do everything but bleed and feel pain.

"During your first days in the army you realize that despite all other differences mankind is divided into two classes. Well, what kind of feet do you have?"

"I don't know, Signore."

"Take off your shoes."

Nicolò sat on the ground and unlaced his shoes. When they and his socks were strewn on the stones beside him, he rolled onto his back and put his legs up into the air so that Alessandro could inspect his feet.

The old man first looked at the soles. Then he felt under the heel. He glanced at the toes. "Your feet are repugnant, objectionable, and invincible. Put your shoes back on."

"And what about your feet, Signore? Are they invincible?"

"Need you ask?"

Nicolò had not needed to ask, for he had observed that Alessandro had scars even on his palms.

Then Alessandro took inventory of his briefcase. The first objects did not please Nicolò entirely, for they were a set of webbing straps that attached to the case so that it could be carried like a knapsack. "Take it," Alessandro said matter-of-factly, "until Sant' Angelo. You're young." Next to emerge was a pocket knife, very sharp and very old, with a flint in the handle. "The flint pulls out, you see," Alessandro said, "and if you strike it against the top of the blade, you get a spark. When we rest, we may need a fire to keep us warm."

"In August?"

"The higher you go, the colder it gets, even in August."

After the packets of food came a map. Having the appropriate map at hand, Alessandro explained, was an obsession that he had had for a long time. He liked to know where he was in the world and what was around him. A map, he stated, was for him what a Bible was for a priest, a book for an intellectual, and so forth.

They discovered on their map, among mountains, rivers, empty plains, and settlements too small to have their names shown, four beacon-like towns strung along the road. Alessandro knew that at night these towns would sparkle and shine. Just their few lights in the slate-blue darkness would have, in their simplicity and purity, more of what made up light itself than the accumulated phosphorescence of whole ranks of great cities.

He indicated on the map that, here, if they were hungry or had not already eaten, they would halt for dinner. Here they would be able to see Rome far behind them, lower, and seething with lights. Here they would see no villages, Rome would be obscured, and they would have only stars—because the moon would rise that night, Alessandro said, late, but when the moon did rise it would be perfectly full. Here they would go off the road and traverse a set of rounded peaks that overlooked Sant' Angelo and, farther beyond, Monte Prato.

Alessandro said that they would walk through the night, the next day, the whole of another night, and the early part of the next morning. The weather would be good and the full moon would be their lantern.

Already Sant' Angelo and Monte Prato had become far more than just mountain villages on the line of the motorized trolley. They seemed far away, beautiful, and high. Before reaching them, Alessandro Giuliani and Nicolò would have much walking to do, and would have to pass through the towns of Acereto, Lanciata, and perhaps five or six others with beautiful names, equidistant over civilizing fields and groves of trees waving against the perfectly blue sky. At the start of their long walk, the road was deserted, and, perhaps because the world was silent, they were too.

 

ALESSANDRO GIULIANI believed that if all things went smoothly and well on a journey, the momentum and equanimity of walking or riding would overshadow whatever the traveler had left behind and whatever he was traveling to reach. Making good time on the road was in itself reason for elation.

Once, in a lecture, he had stated this in passing, only to be abruptly challenged by a student who had wanted to know if the respected professor thought that elation could come to a condemned man on his way to the gallows.

"I don't know," Alessandro had answered. "Usually, the way to the gallows is not long enough to be called a journey, but let us say, for example, that a condemned man must be transported from one extreme of a country to another, where he will be executed, and that his journey will take days or weeks."

"Is that realistic?" the student asked.

"Yes," Alessandro replied. "Yes, it is realistic. In such a case," he continued, "the man may know the greatest elation and the most savage despair—as if, in anticipation of eternity in heaven or in hell, he were previewing both."

"I don't understand. Elation in a man condemned to die?"

"Elation, mad elation, visions, euphoria." A long silence had followed, during which the lecture audience had been as motionless as if it had been under the gun, and the professor had been unable to resume the lecture, on account of memories that made him forget momentarily where he was and what he was doing.

Even a trip across the city provided minor joys and desperations that, although of a lesser order than those experienced on a journey of days or weeks, stood in relation to one another nonetheless in much the same way as those of a voyage around the world. The scale might change, but the patterns were the same. Alessandro guessed that Nicolò would expect the walk to be of one complexion. Why should it not be? Despite enough variation in the experience of a child by the age of fourteen to show him twenty times over that life is stupefying and complex, a single great force drove him forward and gave him both the momentum he would need for the rest of his life and the immediate resilience for surviving the blows he attracted with his adolescent stupidities and excesses. Nicolò would have chased the streetcar not only to Acereto, but, if he hadn't caught it there, to Lanciata and perhaps all the way to Sant' Angelo. He expected the world to be complected uniformly.

Nicolò would be bitterly disappointed by the slow and difficult, but Alessandro had learned to love these as much as or perhaps more than he loved the fast and easy. To him, they seemed not so far apart. It was almost as if, facing off invariably at odds, they conducted a secret liaison, with their hands enwrapped under the table.

Nicolò could not yet know this, and he would be troubled when the road grew dark and steep. For that reason, Alessandro was disappointed that they had set out with such glory all around them, everywhere—in the trees that swayed lightly, like ocean waves; in the rich colors of late afternoon as the retreating sun made the east a shadowless perfection of evenly throbbing light; in the slightly dusty haze that came with the approach of evening, dry and cool; in the wheat as the wind traveled through it as slowly as a boat in the thick of polar seas; and in all the memories summoned by these beauties to resonate and sing, until, in their ecstatic multiplication, they closed themselves off to mortal view by virtue of the light that is too bright to see.

Nicolò had no notion that everything was not well. He thought that the fine weather, the flat road, and the sun at their backs were all to be expected. He was surprised by Alessandro's silence, for he had assumed from the very beginning, because the old man had left the streetcar for Nicolò's sake, that the walk would be paved with his words. Did he not, in his first sentences, launch the explosive shell about his escape over the ice fields? Even if the old were inconsistent and cranky, they did sometimes tell good stories, and this fellow, with his shock of straight white hair, his finely tailored suit, the slim bamboo cane, and a noble bearing that Nicolò had seen only ... well, had never seen ... would undoubtedly have a lot to say.

He wanted Alessandro to talk endlessly in stories and regale him with things from an age before he was born. He would listen eagerly not because he had any hint of what the old man would elucidate, but, to the contrary, because he hadn't the vaguest idea of what had made the man who limped steadily alongside him on the road to Sant' Angelo and Monte Prato.

Nicolò also didn't understand that Alessandro knew exactly what a young man would expect, and (before Nicolò had given any indication whatsoever of such expectations) was offended by what were, in fact, the boy's assumptions.

After all, Alessandro Giuliani was paid more than decently to speak and to write. Why should this boy expect that, in walking, he would overflow with speech? And why should the boy assume that the old man, having seen what he had seen, having contended throughout his life with great and ineffable forces, having survived into old age, and having known, intimately and deeply, both natural and feminine beauty, would want to say anything at all? For kilometers and kilometers, they walked the straight road in absolute silence.

 

NICOLÒ FOUND it difficult to believe that Alessandro was not moving faster, for, perhaps because of the blurred-spokes effect caused by the movement of his legs and his active cane, and the unusual up-and-down motion of his limping gait, he looked as if he were going very fast. It seemed as if, had he been able to channel all the energy with which he moved and checked himself, he would have been swifter than a gazelle. But he was slow.

Nicolò, who moved smoothly and effortlessly, ached to run or climb. "What's that?" he asked, though not as a question, pointing to a mound of earth sitting in the middle of a field. Soon he was racing toward it, the briefcase bouncing against his back as he jumped irrigation ditches and ran among the furrows. Then he re turned by way of a little dam over which water was pouring in a curve that looked like a leaping fish.

"What are these side trips?" Alessandro inquired.

Nicolò shrugged.

"You know, I once had a dog," the old man continued, "a big black English dog named Francesco. Every time I took him for a walk, he covered three times the distance I did."

"Why do you tell me this?" Nicolò asked.

"I don't know," Alessandro said, waving his arms in the air as if to indicate confusion. "It just came to me."

"Do you still have him?"

"No, that was a long time ago. He died when I was in Milan, but I think of him on occasion, and in teaching I often use him as an example."

"You're a teacher?" Nicolò asked, with noticeable discomfort, for he had never been to school, and he thought of teachers as a dangerous species of male nun.

Alessandro didn't answer. The sun was low now. Everything was warm and golden, and they were still ten kilometers from Acereto. Soon it would be dark. The old man did not want to waste energy, because he was beginning to warm up, to feel an oncoming sensation of strength and equanimity. If he didn't upset it, the equanimity would carry him forward in a trance.

They continued on in silence until Nicolò began to dance through his steps.

"You have so much energy you can't contain yourself, can you."

"I don't know."

"Marvelous. I, if I had your strength, could unite Europe in a week and a half."

"You were young," Nicolò challenged. "Did you unite Europe?"

"I was too busy thinking about girls and climbing mountains."

"What mountains?"

"The Alps."

"With ropes and things?"

"Yes."

"How do you do that? I saw a movie once where the guy fell. Do you throw the rope to catch on a rock, or what?"

"No. Its different, but if I have to explain, I won't have any breath."

"You're a teacher. Teachers should explain."

"Not when they're on long marches."

"What do you teach?"

"Aesthetics."

"Who are they?" Nicolò asked, thinking that they might be initiates in a hilltop religious order.

"You mean what are they. You're the second person to ask me that today," Alessandro said. "Are you sure you want me to answer? If I do, your squid may die."

Nicolò's suspicions about the old man's sanity resurfaced.

"He came all the way from Civitavecchia." Alessandro turned to the boy and looked into his eyes. "Marco ... the water chicken."

"Don't tell me Marco the water chicken," Nicolò commanded. "What are aesthetics?"

"The philosophy and study of beauty."

"What?"

"What?" the old man echoed.

"They teach that?"

"I teach it."

"That's stupid."

"Why is it stupid?"

"For one, what is there to teach?"

"Are you asking or telling?"

"Asking."

"I'm not telling."

"Why not?"

"I've already answered you, in a book. Buy the book and leave me alone. Better yet, read Croce."

"You wrote a book?"

"Yes, many books."

"About what?"

"About aesthetics," Alessandro said, rolling his eyes upward.

"What's your name?"

"Alessandro Giuliani."

"I've never heard of you."

"I still exist. Who are you?"

Nicolò Sambucca."

"What do you do, Mr. Sambucca?"

With some pain, in the way of self-deprecating beginners who are facing long apprenticeships, Nicolò said, "I make propellers."

Alessandro stopped to stare at Nicolò Sambucca. "Propellers," he said. "Naturally! I'm going to walk seventy kilometers with a kid who makes propellers."

"What's wrong with propellers?" Nicolò asked.

"Nothing's wrong with propellers," Alessandro answered. "They're necessary to drive airplanes. Where do you do this, if I may ask? Certainly not at home."

"At F.A.I. I don't really make them, I help. Next year I'll be an apprentice but now I'm a helper. I sweep the chips and the curlings, keep the tools in order, serve lunch, and push around the big frames that they make the propellers on. It takes a long time to make a propeller: it has to be tested. We have wind tunnels. Because of the union, I'm not allowed to touch the propellers yet. I can't even put my finger on one."

"Did you finish school?"

"I didn't start," the boy said. "When I was little, we moved here from Girifalco, in Calabria. When I was a kid, I sold cigarettes."

"What does your father do?"

"He puts up clotheslines, the kind that have the steel towers, you know, near the house."

"Those are very useful."

"I don't really understand you," Nicolò said.

"Good. We met only this afternoon, and we've said very little. I'm glad that I have retained an aura of mystery."

"Yeah, but you're a teacher."

"What's not to be understood?"

"It doesn't match."

"What doesn't match?"

"A lot of things, but teachers don't do that."

"Don't do what?"

"Walk over ice fields, hunted by armed soldiers."

"In the war a lot of people did things they weren't accustomed to doing."

"Did you fight the English?"

"Sometimes, but they were on our side."

"I thought we fought them and the Americans. Hey, we like the Americans, but they were on the other side," Nicolò said.

"That was in the Second World War. I was too old for it. All I did was sit on the ground while I was shelled and bombed. I knew how to do that because I had had a lot of practice in the previous war."

"There was another one?"

"Yes," Alessandro said, "there was another one."

"When? I never heard of it. Who did we fight? Are you sure?"

"Why do you think the Second World War is called the Second?"

"It makes sense. Maybe I'm stupid, but I didn't know about the first one. Was it big? Did it last long? What did you do? How old were you?"

"You have asked me many questions at once."

"Yeah."

"If I answer you, you'll be listening all the way to Sant' Angelo. I don't have the breath to walk that distance and explain these things. The hills are far too steep for me to give a treatise. There are numerous books about the First World War. I can give you a list, if you want."

"Is there a book about you in the war?"

"Of course not. Who would write a book about me in the war? Why would anyone want to, and who could ever know?" Alessandro looked askance at Nicolò. "Let me put it this way," he said. "I don't know myself well enough to write my autobiography, and if anyone else ever tried, I would say: Forget about me, tell the story of Paolo, Guariglia, and Ariane."

"Who were they?"

"Never mind."

"You talk to me, Signore, like this was the propeller shop. This isn't the propeller shop."

Alessandro looked at him, and smiled.

It was nearly dark, and as they walked down the road they could hardly see one another's faces. Having lapsed into silence once again, they listened to the click of Alessandro's cane and watched the brightening planets arise as vanguards for the more timid stars that would eventually blaze up from behind and smile upon the whole world.

They saw sparks from fires in the distance as field hands working on the harvest cooked their dinners. And the many shooting stars that fell in August, Alessandro stated, made up for the lack of rain.

Several kilometers from Acereto, when they still could not see its lights, Alessandro said, "We'll eat by the fountain in Acereto. Maybe if someplace is open we'll have hot tea, but I doubt it."

They walked on. "To understand the First War," he said, "you have to know a little of history. Do you?"

"No."

"Why did I ask? You're a tabula rasa."

"I'm a what?"

"There's no point."

They continued in silence for ten minutes or so. Again, Alessandro turned to Nicolò, as he had done after Nicolò's declaration about propellers. "Or maybe there is," he said. "Maybe I can summarize it succinctly."

"I don't care," Nicolò said. "I just hope we can get some tea or coffee in Acereto. Can I have a piece of chocolate now, to hold me until we eat?"

"First," Alessandro said, paying no attention to Nicolò, "first, you must understand that history arises as the interpretation and misinterpretation of passion. What do I mean by that? It's complicated, but perhaps you ought to listen."

 

"I'M NOT a historian. My colleagues would probably be greatly offended that a humanist crossed the windbreak into their field, and would bark like dogs until I crossed back."

"That's just like F.A.I.," Nicolò said. "There was an engineer named Guido Castiglione. He was the head of testing, so he tried to test things at all stages of production, in each department. That would have been the best way to do it, to catch mistakes where they started. But all the department heads—like Cortese in airframes, and my boss in propellers, Garaviglia—they plotted to shoot him down. You can't take someone's bread, that's what my father says. Anyway, now Guido Castiglione doesn't work at F.A.I. anymore. And it's the same way with the helpers. If one is supposed to sweep and he sees anyone else with a broom, say the last rites.

"We're like that, too," the old man said, "only the last rites are words and glances and things that people say about you when you aren't there.

"Historians have their method, just like anyone else, and they're jealous of it, but the Iliad shames any history of Greece, and Dante stands supreme above the world's collected medievalists. Of course, the medievalists don't know it, but everyone else does. As a way to arrive at the truth, exactitude and methodology are, in the end, far inferior to vision and apotheosis. I don't claim to have a patent on either, and history is not my profession, but I do have some ideas about the times that I have seen. Forgive me if I'm not as learned or subtle as I might be."

"What?" Nicolò asked.

"A preface to warn you that I'll be speaking outside my area of expertise."

"You're crazy. Stop apologizing," Nicolò said. "You didn't do anything wrong. Just tell me the story. I can see you ordering coffee and bread. You walk up to the guy and you say, 'Forgive me. I'm not a baker, and I've never been to Brazil. What's more, I don't work in a restaurant, but, though I didn't bring my microscope, please, can you give me a cappuccino and a roll?'"

Alessandro nodded. "You're right," he said. "The reason for my hesitation is not my academic manner. I never had much of an academic manner. It's because, once, these things hit me like a huge wave, an avalanche, and for a long time it was as if I were in a long and emotional dream where I could neither speak nor move, and the world was passing me by.

"But that's over. I'll tell you the elementary history of the war. I won't stray from the objective. There isn't a need for anything about me."

"Okay," Nicolò said. "Here I am. Anytime you're ready."

"Though Italy is flanked on three sides by the sea, and in the north by a mountain barrier," Alessandro began, "and though its early history is an illustration of the success of uniform administration and centralism, this country has exemplified division, contention, and atomization. Mind you, for art, for the development of the soul, nothing is better than a landscape of separate and impregnable towers. The variety, the sense of possibility, and the watchfulness that such an environment creates have given to us many honors unparalleled in the world. Politically, however, it's a different story."

Nicolò was following carefully, struggling to understand. No one had ever spoken to him like this.

"Paradoxically, countries with open and vulnerable borders—France, Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary—and those with populations divided by language, race, and religion, found the strength and means to unify themselves and act as nations far earlier than did we. Perhaps it was because they were pushed into doing so by the very diversity they had to overcome. I don't know the causes, but I do know the results of the difference between them and us.

"We were, and are, politically weak. Whereas their policies toward other nations remained fairly consistent because of their elementary political harmony, we have always been like the family that must receive visitors, and quarrels bitterly until they are at the door. What if the visitors are predatory? How does such a family deal with the threat? If the visitors come with sword in hand, the family forgets its quarrels and fights as one. The nineteenth century, however, was the century of diplomacy. It was a splendid system—or would have been, had it not collapsed in nineteen fourteen—in which no one rushed in with swords. It was subtler than that.

"When they came to the door, they had their eyes on everything in the house, but they were more like jewel thieves than vandals. In an atmosphere of international civility, we were at a terrible disadvantage, because it wasn't threatening enough to distract us from our own struggles."

By this time, no matter how hard he tried to understand, Nicolò's eyes had begun to glaze, but Alessandro had no fear of bending green cane, because he knew it seldom broke.

"Remember this, then—even if you don't agree—for two reasons. First, factional paralysis made Italy weak on the international stage, and, second, it exaggerated inconsistency and volatility in internal matters.

"Are you with me?"

"Yes," Nicolò replied.

"Good. Much of the reason that the nineteenth century after the Congress of Vienna was as peaceful as it was, is that the European powers were absorbed in getting and running colonies. This cushioned many bursts of energy that otherwise might have led to war, and provided a margin of wealth and space that greatly relieved Europe of its tensions. Some little wars captured the public's imagination because of their exotic locations, but they weren't real wars. You know how when you get into a disagreement with your friend and it comes to a fight the first thing you do is start making rules about how the fight will be conducted? No punching in the face, no weapons, outside so you won't break up the furniture? That was the last century. The rules were clear, and Europe had an outside—the rest of the world—in which to carry on a fight without smashing its own crockery.

"Italy was left out of all this. We had our underdeveloped country right in our own south. And when we tried to imitate England, France, Germany, Holland, and even Spain, in seizing regions of the world, it was pathetic. It was comical. So, by the early part of this century Italy was crazy for making up lost ground. From the Nineties on, we had begun to look to Africa with a vengeance. We built naval bases at Augusta, Taranto, and Brindisi, and waited for a chance to redeem our prestige in Europe by seizing coconuts and diamonds. Why not? In ancient times, the whole of North Africa was ours.

"Our colonial failings made us feel as if we were always missing the boat. The next time, we wouldn't make ' il gran rifiuto.' No, the next time, no matter how dangerous it looked, no matter how stupid, we would cast in our lot. The next time, we would avenge Custoza, Lissa, and Aduwa."

"What were those?" Nicolò asked.

Alessandro seemed resentful of humiliations so distant that Nicolò had not even heard of them.

"Those were battles in which we were made to look ridiculous—at Custoza, in the mountains, and at Lissa, on the sea, and at Aduwa, in Eritrea, by a bunch of Africans."

"I wish I had been there," Nicolò said.

"Really?" Alessandro asked. "We might have used you at Caporetto, too."

"Just tell me about the war."

"There's nothing to tell about a war unless you tell how it began."

"That's boring."

"Only for someone who doesn't know anything. When you get older, battles of any sort become far less interesting than what led to them and what they brought about. I know, I know. I have three hooves in the pasture and one already in the grave, but I have a few things more to tell before I get to the smoke and thunder.

"The Triplice, have you ever heard of it?"

"Of course not."

"It was an alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany, in which we applied to the European balance of power what we had learned at home about a mobile, weak faction acting out of all proportion to its size. We balanced off our allies in the Triplice with France, Britain, and Russia, blowing hot and cold one way and then another, living in the cracks, as it were, the Italian tail wagging the big dogs of Europe. The lesson we might have learned from our own internal politics, from history, and from human nature, was not clear to us. If you play off one side against another, sooner or later you will either be crushed between the two or forced to join one of them. In the end, we lost interest in staying aloof, because we wanted the Alto Adige from the Austrians far more than we wanted Corsica from the French. What could we have done with Corsica? Sardinia is enough of a problem.

"The elements of instability might have been controllable if we had allowed our culture to buffer the shocks of bad politics. This was not too much to expect. After all, we are not Greenland. For millennia we have substituted culture for politics, and it has been a success.

"But in the years before nineteen fifteen, we were just like everyone else. The absence of a strong ethic suited to our age, the rise of the machine, the decadence of Romanticism as it ended a long and fruitful existence ... who knows? Whatever the factors and in whatever combination, they led to the conviction that what we believed was no longer true, things had come apart, God had deserted us, and nothing in the whole world was left that could be called beautiful. Half a decade of dissonance, and philosophers in a never-ending stream mount the platform to keen that the light of the world has been extinguished forever.

"It passed me by, for when I was young I was sure of the good of the world, its beauty, and its ultimate justice. And even when I was broken the way one sometimes can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shining ever brighter. And nearly every time subsequently that I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter.

"As if history were not the steady alternation of the dark and the light, people become resigned and pessimistic, and when the fields are left open, in rush the lunatics and idiots. Does it remind you of factional politics and the Triplice? It's the same. When greater forces are immobilized, the splinter factions run riot.

"As in other demoralized countries, we too had our madmen of station. A movement of 'Futurists' was led by a mental case named Marinetti. When, at age nineteen, I read his manifesto, even I was appalled. It's almost impossible to appall a boy of nineteen. Have you ever been appalled?"

Nicolò shook his head. "No."

"Parts of it have been with me ever since. I can quote from it: 'We sing the love of danger. Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry.... We are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.... Our praise is for the man at the wheel. There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war.'

"Febrile insomnia? Mortal leaps? It might have been funny but for their influence on the rest of the country. When people write violent absurdities on the walls of a city, the city becomes violent and absurd.

"You're probably not familiar with Folgore's odes to coal and electricity, and you needn't be. It is conceivable that one could write a decent ode to coal or electricity, but these were humorless, monomaniacal, terrifying exercises, matched rather well with the socialist realism on the other side of the political spectrum."

At this, Nicolò drew himself up, blushed, and announced in the manner of a police agent in a melodrama revealing himself to a group of saboteurs, "I am a Communist." Though he was proud, at the same time, he was mortified.

Alessandro took a few steps, wondering exactly why he had been interrupted, and looked at the boy, with the same gently mocking expression with which he had followed Nicolò's declaration about the lost battles where his presence might have helped Italy to prevail. "Good," he said, "is there anything you would like me to say, or may I continue?"

"No, but what you said about ... whatever it was, was not nice. Please keep in mind that I am a Socialist."

"I thought you were a Communist."

"What's the difference?"

"Are you a member of a party?"

"I don't think so."

"A youth organization?"

"The soccer team at the factory."

"Then why do you say you are a Socialist, or a Communist?"

"I don't know, I just am."

"How did you vote?"

"I'm too young."

"How will you vote?"

"I'll stand in line, they'll give me a piece of paper. Then I take it to a little place where I can..."

"I don't mean that. I mean for whom will you vote, for which party."

"How am I supposed to know?"

"Then how do you know what you are?"

"I told you, I just am."

"So what?" the old man demanded indignantly, suddenly angry at having been interrupted.

"Are you a Communist?" Nicolò asked, hoping, for no reason that he could fathom, that Alessandro was not a Communist but, rather, a Christian Democrat.

"No."

"What are you?"

"Who cares? Would it make any difference to you what I am? No. So let me continue. There were others, too. They multiplied like rabbits. Papini, that son of a bitch, wanted every library and museum to be put to the torch. He maintained that the profoundest philosophy was that of a moron, and he could only have been led to that conclusion by self-adulation.

"Combine this with Marinetti's campaign against spaghetti, De Felice's wish that every child be taught to slaughter animals, and the various odes and symphonies to coal, drill presses, daggers, and stick pins, and you have a school. Combine it with D'Annunzio, and you have a movement."

"D'Annunzio who?"

"D'Annunzio—who?" Alessandro repeated.

"It sounds familiar."

"I can't explain the whole world to you. I should have known that. How can I expect you to understand the theory when you don't know the story. It was a mistake to start out from such a high point. Let me begin as simply as possible.

"There was a great, devastating war. It was fought in Europe from nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen. Italy stayed out until the spring of nineteen fifteen. Then, mainly because we had designs on the Südtirol, the Alto Adige, we went to war against Austria-Hungary, and almost a million men died."

"That was the war you were in?"

"That was the war I was in."

"Tell me what it was like."

"No," Alessandro said. "Among other things, I simply do not have the strength."

They passed through the few outlying streets of Acereto. Even at ten o'clock, the town was asleep, the windows shuttered. In the center of the village was a piazza, and in the center of the piazza, a fountain. They sat down at its edge.

 

NOT A single light burned, and the moon had not risen, but the piazza and the buildings surrounding it were of a pale color that amplified the starlight enough to outline shapes and give away anything that moved across fields of varying contrast. Water rose from the fountain's spire in a thick steady stream that waved back and forth, collapsing gently upon itself as it fell into the cold pool below. Sometimes spray from colliding masses of falling water would sweep lightly across Alessandro Giuliani and Nicolò Sambucca.

Alessandro's hands were folded on top of his cane. In daylight he might have been taken for a landowner, the mayor, or a doctor resting by the fountain after having attended a very sick patient. He felt pain in his right leg, in the thigh and just above the knee. It was one of the wounds that grew worse over time, but he welcomed the pain. Pain was inevitable, and he knew that in his struggle with it he would eventually be the master. When he had returned from the war, in winter, to the sullen and demoralized city of Rome, he had often missed the fighting that he had longed so deeply to leave. So with the pain.

Perhaps because of the age of his traveling companion, Alessandro himself felt as if he were young, in a different time, and he dreaded the prospect of once again thinking through his youth. Some of his colleagues and a few of his students claimed to have been moved so by a book that they had read it again and again. Who were they? Of what were they made? Were they dissembling? Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever. It would become part of you and never leave, and you would love the characters as if they were your own. Who would want to plow over ground that has been perfectly plowed? Would it not be, like living one's life over again, infinitely painful and dissonant? In his work he had to read over, and he often found it to be an operation of despoliation and agony.

He looked at Nicolò, who was lying on his side, his right ear pressed against the stone rim of the fountain, shirt sleeve rolled up, arm fully extended into the water, straining to grasp a submerged coin with the tip of his fingers.

"Do you think it's worth it?" Alessandro asked.

Wanting to answer by holding up a glistening 100-lire piece, Nicolò didn't reply.

After he retrieved the coin he straightened himself with relief and took a box of matches from his pocket, one of which he lit with his left hand, which was dry. "What's this?" he asked Alessandro, who saw in flickering match light that the boy's arm had been whitened by its submersion in the cold water.

"Let me see."

Nicolò struck another match.

"It's Greek," Alessandro told him.

"How much is it worth?" Nicolò asked with the particular tension common to people who find a foreign coin that they suspect may be many times more valuable than they fear it really is.

"About a lira, or less," he was informed.

"A lira? One?"

Alessandro nodded affirmatively before the match went out.

"How can that be?"

"What did you expect? Do you think people throw away gold? The only time it's profitable to pull money from a fountain is if it's crowded with coins. I used to do it myself."

"But you were rich."

"So? I was a kid. We used to get money for ice cream by dipping in the fountains."

"Didn't your father give you money?"

"Not for ice cream."

"Why not?"

"He knew I got my ice cream money from the fountains."

"He was smart."

"That was the least of it," Alessandro said. "How old are you, Nicolò? You look about eighteen."

"Seventeen."

"Nicolò, in nineteen hundred and eight, more than half a century ago, I was a student just starting in the university. One day I passed a fountain that was choked with silver. I knew it wasn't quite right for me to take off my jacket, roll up my sleeve, and struggle to get the money from the bottom. Though I wasn't sure why, it seemed to have something to do with dignity. Then a policeman arrived and intimated, in the forceful way in which they often intimate, that I should return the coins to the water. He told me that it wasn't proper for me to be doing what I was doing, that I should leave it for the children.

"It had nothing to do with dignity. One shouldn't ever do anything to protect one's dignity. You either have it or you don't. It was a matter, it seems, of fairness. And by recognizing that it was a matter of fairness, I advanced the idea of dignity instead of trying to make it advance me. You see what I mean?"

"But it's Greek, Signore," Nicolò protested.

"Wouldn't that be exciting for a little boy?" the old man asked.

Nicolò bent back his arm, about to throw the coin into the middle of the fountain.

"Ah!" Alessandro said, bringing him up short. "How's he going to get it? Do you want him to drown?"

"Let him swim," Nicolò said.

"No," he was answered. "It's for a little child."

Nicolò dropped the coin and rolled up his sleeve. He didn't like the idea of throwing away even one lira. "This whole stupid town is closed up," he said. "Imagine, not a single light, not one..."

"I saw a light when we came in, at the crossroads."

"But not in the town itself. I can't believe it. It's only ten o'clock. Right now on the Via Veneto things are just beginning to heat up," he stated, as if he went there every night.

"Do you frequent the Via Veneto?" Alessandro asked.

"Sometimes."

"What do you do there?"

"I look for women," Nicolò answered, blushing so deeply that, even in the dark, Alessandro muttered, "Pomodoro."

"It's a good place to look for women," Alessandro said. "Lots of them go there, but do you find them?"

"Not really..." was the answer, in a sort of hoarse whisper.

"Have you ever slept with a woman?"

"Not yet," Nicolò confessed, ashamed.

"Don't worry," Alessandro told him. "You will. You probably don't even know that women want to sleep with you as much as you want to sleep with them."

"They do?"

"Its true, but I know you won't believe me. I wouldn't have believed me. Anyway, it's something that you should never come to accept fully. If you do, it's tragic, because it means you've become a peacock. You don't even begin to get an inkling of it until you're much older than you are now.

"You should be confident. You're young, you're serious, and you have a good job. I would think that women would be strongly attracted to someone who makes propellers."

"You think so?"

"Yes. It's honorable, unusual, interesting, with the possibility of advancement. Admittedly, it's not like being a doctor or a lawyer, but who's to say that you won't work hard, become an engineer, and maybe, someday, become the head of F.A.I."

"Of F.A.I.?" Nicolò asked skeptically, in the way that people of suppressed dreams often preclude their own possibilities. "Me? Never. A hundred and twenty thousand people work for F.A.I."

Alessandro did not indulge Nicolò's lack of belief in himself. "Look, stupid," he said, turning Nicolò from red to white. "It'll be hard enough for you to rise. Fate, circumstances, and other men will at times be almost overwhelmingly against you. You'll be able to beat them only if you don't join them, only if you don't condemn yourself from the start. If you have no faith in yourself, who will? I won't. I wouldn't waste my time, and neither will anyone else. Do you understand? You can be the head of F.A.I. You're still young enough to be the Pope."

"The Pope? They'd never have a pope as young as me."

Alessandro sighed hopelessly. "You're still young enough to become the Pope."

"Would I have to be a priest first?"

"I think that is the minimal qualification, yes."

"I don't want to be the Pope."

"I'm not suggesting that you become the Pope, you little idiot! I'm only saying that you're still young enough to try."

"Why would I want to?"

"You wouldn't, necessarily, but your youth is a magical instrument with which you can accomplish anything."

"Every two seconds you say I'm an idiot. Why?"

"Because every two seconds you are. You're wasting what you have."

"You sound like the soccer coach, and we lose to everybody. We always lose to Olivetti. We even lose to the Musicians Union. Fabrica Aeronautica Italiana, maker of war planes, loses to bald-headed guys who play the violin."

"I don't want to walk all the way to Sant' Angelo with a ... with someone who defeats himself before he's begun," Alessandro said. "I'm going to tell you something that you may or may not understand, and I want you to memorize it and say it to yourself now and then, until, someday, you do understand."

"Is it long?"

"No."

"Go ahead."

"Nicolò," Alessandro said.

"Nicolò," Nicolò repeated.

"The spark of life is not gain."

"The spark of life is not gain."

"Nor is it luxury."

"Nor is it luxury."

"The spark of life is movement."

"Movement."

"Color."

"Color."

"Love."

"Love."

"And furthermore..."

"And furthermore..."

"If you really want to enjoy life, you must work quietly and humbly to realize your delusions of grandeur."

"But I don't have them."

"Start to have them."

Nicolò shook his head affirmatively. "I understand, Signore, I understand what you're saying. I do. I think I do."

Alessandro grunted.

Neither of them spoke while Alessandro carefully laid out a meal of prosciutto, fruit, and chocolate, after which he and

Nicolò began to eat, leaning down now and then to dip a cupped hand into the numbingly cold water for a drink.

"You eat like an animal," Alessandro said matter-of-factly. Nicolò stopped for a moment, shocked again, with his mouth and cheeks full of a difficult sheet of prosciutto. He couldn't answer, and he half suspected that the old man had timed his criticism accordingly. Cheeks puffed like a squirrel's, he listened. "You mustn't hum when you eat—not that animals do—for it connotes a certain primitive idiocy. No one is going to snatch the food away from you, so you can cut it or tear it apart before you put it in your mouth. Don't breathe so intently—it sounds as if you're going to expire. And don't make so much noise when you chew.

"Cafes on the Via Veneto are full of people who follow the rules I just stated. Believe me, well dressed women don't look twice at someone who eats like a jackal on the Serengeti. Another thing: don't keep shifting your eyes from side to side as you eat. That's half the battle right there."

"I never heard of the Serengeti," Nicolò said, after swallowing from shame a mass of food that might have stuck in his throat and killed him. "Is it a street or a piazza?"

"It's a place half the size of Italy, filled with lions, zebras, gazelles, and elephants."

"In Africa?"

"Yes."

"I would like to go to Africa," Nicolò said, putting another huge pile of prosciutto into his mouth.

"There are better places to go than Africa," Alessandro stated. "Much better places."

"Where?"

"There," the old man said, pointing north-northeast to the great mountains he knew were rearing up far away in the dark, to the Alto Adige, the Carnic Alps, the Julians, and the Tyrol.

Nicolò turned to look in the direction his guide had indicated, and he saw a lightened mass of buildings that, even in the darkness, conveyed a reassuring and uniquely Italian sense of dilapidation.

"What's so great over there?" Nicolò asked. "There aren't even any lights on."

"I don't mean there," Alessandro said, thinking of snow-capped mountains and the electrifying past. "I mean far beyond; if you flew into the night as if in a dream, and rose, the wind tight against your face, the stars drawing you to them, the landscape beneath you blue-black. I have suddenly vaulted into the mountains," he said, "after never having gone back, ever, for fear of encountering my lost self."

"There aren't any people up there anymore, fighting wars. Once things happen, they pass, and that's it."

"No," Alessandro said. "If they happen once, they stay forever. I never spoke of them, because I have faith that they are everlasting, with or without me. I'm not afraid to die, because I know that what I have seen will not fade, and will someday spring full blown from someone not yet born, who did not know me, or my time, or what I loved. I know for sure."

"How?"

"Because that is the soul, and whether you are a soldier, a scholar, a cook, or an apprentice in a factory, your life and your work will eventually teach you that it exists. The difference between your flesh and the animate power within, which can feel, understand, and love, in that very ascending order, will be clear to you in ten thousand ways, ten thousand times over."

"Have you ever seen a spirit?" Nicolò asked.

"By the million," came the answer, surprising even Alessandro, who was now not entirely in control of himself. "By the million, in troops of the glowing dead, walking upward on a beam of light.

"Now you listen!" he said to the boy, leaning forward and slamming his palm with his fist. "If you were to go to every museum in the world to look at the paintings in which such a beam of light connects heaven and earth, do you know what you would find? You would find that in whatever time, in whatever country, painter to painter, the angle of light is more or less the same. An accident?"

"I'd have to see. I'd have to measure. I don't know."

"Measure?"

"With a protractor."

"You can measure such things solely with your eyes, and besides, when the last judgment comes, even Marxists won't have protractors."

"I will. I always carry one in my pocket. Look," Nicolò said, pulling out a little red plastic box in which were neatly placed a six-scaled rule, a protractor, a small contour rule, calipers, and precision calipers, nesting there as if they had been prepared for Alessandro Giuliani to see. "You don't know. When you work with machines and you shape things you always have to measure and remeasure to get it right. The machine doesn't tolerate mistakes or excuses. It has nothing to do with what you want or what you hope. You have to get things right or it won't work." As he made this declaration he was so innocent and so exact that he forced the old man into silence. "What?" Nicolò asked, to get Alessandro to talk.

"Your argument is beautiful and surprising, Nicolò," Alessandro said. "In short, you are correct. You must measure and remeasure, to get things right. And because I have not measured all those beams of light, I am ashamed."

"Signore, what happened to you there?"

At this, perhaps because he was exhausted and strained by the walk, the old man bowed his head onto his loosely clenched left fist.

Nicolò leaned forward in a complicated, unfathomable gesture that showed he would become a wise and compassionate man. He did not apologize for having led Alessandro on, for Alessandro had led himself, but, still, Nicolò was moved, and he felt affection for the old man who, though lame, was teaching him how to walk.

 

THEY PICKED up the pace outside of Acereto. Perhaps because they had eaten and rested, Alessandro found strength. "God compensates perfectly," he said to his companion. "You cannot fall and expect not to rise. Call it the wheel, the lesson of Antaeus, what you will, but strength floods in after a fall.

"And then again," he said cheerily, "it may be just that the moon is about to rise, or it may be the chocolate, or a second wind. Tell me if you want to walk more slowly."

"I think I can keep up with you," Nicolò answered sarcastically.

For the next hour or two, keeping up with Alessandro would be a task that would set the boy to breathing hard and make him think that something might be wrong with his heart, because he found it difficult to stay even with an old man who carried a cane and whose every step was a cross between an uncontrolled pivot and a barely arrested fall.

They were walking up. The road from Acereto to Lanciata was steep in places, ascending to the ridge line of the low mountains that from the rooftops of Rome looked like the Alps, and then twisting dizzily into sheltered valleys where herds of sheep glowed in the moonlight like patches of snow.

They passed drop-offs where the milk-white shoulder of the road became a luminous ramp into an attractive void of weightlessness and rapture. In making the turns, Alessandro came perilously close to the abyss, and at times the edge of the cake would crumble away noiselessly after his foot had left it. He seemed not to notice or care, but to be protected by their almost supernatural momentum, which Nicolò interpreted as a friendly race to see who could rise faster to the topmost ridge, where the moon would hang voluminously over a noiseless world.

Nicolò stayed away from the edge, and Alessandro was amused. "Of the many excellent things about mountaineering," he said as much to the night, the cliffs, and the air as to the boy taking quick steps beside him, "one of the finest is to become unafraid of heights. When I was a boy, and would climb with my father and the mountain guides he knew or hired, I abhorred the vacuum of an abyss, and my fists were white from clutching the rock. Meanwhile, the guides would sit with legs dangling over an infinite precipice; they would stand on tiny pinnacles, smoking their pipes, coiling ropes, and sorting the climbing hardware; and they would run up and down goat trails sometimes no less vertical and no more contoured than Trajan's Column.

"After a few days in the mountains my father hardly paid attention to the drop underneath the overhanging walls upon which he would stand with his heels on the rock and the rest of his boots projecting out into space.

"I don't remember when I lost my fear, but, perhaps because I'd been afraid for so long, when finally I did it never returned. I haven't been in the mountains since the war, but I don't fear heights. Over the years—along the cliffs of Capri, atop Saint Peter's, climbing onto the roof to straighten a crooked tile—I've found that this part of me, at least, has remained young."

He was in as fine a heat as a youthful runner on a good day. "Do you want me to slow down?" he asked Nicolò.

"No," Nicolò answered, breathlessly, "but perhaps you should, since we are, after all, going up."

"Don't slow on my account," Alessandro warned. "I'll be devastated by morning no matter what I do, so I might as well push hard while I can. Nicolò, the world is full of tart little surprises. Here I am, seventy-four years of age, racing up a mountain, putting you to shame because you are a boy of seventeen and you're breathing like a nonagenarian. Don't worry. In a few hours you'll probably have to carry me, but, for now, indulge me, sweat a little, follow along in the race."

"What if you keep on like this all the way past Sant' Angelo?" Nicolò asked desperately.

"Then you'll have lots of time to spend with your sister, and they'll bury me in Monte Prato. Better to be buried there than in one of those marble filing cabinets in Rome."

"Aren't you afraid to die?"

"No."

"I am."

"You're not tired."

"I'm not brave, either."

"It has nothing to do with bravery. Bravery is for other things."

"Yes, but you miss people."

"I know that."

"So there's nothing you can do about it, is there."

"You keep them alive."

"You do?"

"Yes."

"Come on!"

"You keep them alive not by skill, not by art, not by memory, but by love. When you understand that, you won't be afraid to die. But that doesn't mean you'll go to your death like a clown. Death, Nicolò, is emotional."

"So is life."

"One hopes."

"Look, Signore, you'd better not die on the road, especially if I'm not there to tell, and you'd better not die especially if I am there, you know what I mean?"

"My granddaughter will know to move me next to my wife. And she and I have a bond strong enough that it hardly matters where we are put, for we have never really parted."

"Oh," Nicolò said, unable to say more, because he was too busy breathing.

"Its true. Anyway, death awakens lawyers. They'll get busy when I go. I've left precise, typewritten instructions. I even say what to do with my suits, my papers, and the little things I have in my desk.

"Almost everything is to be burned. You live on not by virtue of the things you have amassed, or the work you have done, but through your spirit, in ways and by means that you can neither control nor foresee. All my possessions and all my papers will be burned in the pine grove behind my house.

"There I have a metal cage to prevent the flight of cinders large enough to set other things on fire. It's against the municipal code to burn refuse in the center of Rome, but I've taken care of that. I have an envelope addressed to the local inspector and one for his supervisor. I have written a carefully composed ode, in perfect terza rima, begging a single indulgence. When I realized that they might not care for my poetry, I thought to enclose twenty-five thousand lire for the inspector, and forty thousand for the supervisor."

"Ten thousand would have done it. Why so much?"

"Because inflation is not unknown in this country, and I may live longer than I expect. Though why I would want to is a mystery. I'm so cautious and conscientious that I feel entirely free to die. If I die on this road, just keep walking. They'll find me. Everything will be taken care of properly."

"You think you're going to die?" Nicolò blurted out between breaths. "I think I'm going to die."

"Don't worry," Alessandro said, infuriating him. "I'm still quite fit. I think you probably misinterpreted my gait. Since the war, I've slowed down a bit, and lately I've had to use this," he said, knocking the cane on the road, "but I've rowed on the Tiber, except when it has been bone dry or in flood, for forty years. I row in the heat and in the rain. I've been rammed by motorboats and attacked by swans. I've seen conquering armies march in on the bridges above me, and then, some years later, march out. I've even been on the river in the snow, and seen it hissing onto the water next to me as my oars swept past, as if I had been not in Rome, but in England. I try not to overdo it, but I'm not feeble like many men my age."

"I can see that," Nicolò responded, sweat glistening on his forehead. "You give another impression," he continued. "The way you dress ... it makes you look like a sugar cake."

"What do you mean?" Alessandro asked, looking down at his clothes.

"It's all white. And your hair's white. You look like a priest in summer, or an ice cream man."

"An ice cream man!"

"Well, that's what you look like. You look so delicate I thought you were about ninety or a hundred."

"A hundred?!" Alessandro was not pleased by such flattery. "In twenty-six years, maybe, when you're forty-three, I'll be a hundred. And the suit isn't white. It's a light cream color. You see?"

"Looks white to me."

"It's hard to make distinctions in starlight. Wait till the full moon rises."

"How do you know it's going to be full?"

"Among other things, it was full yesterday except for a tiny splinter. Tonight, it will be perfectly round. That's why I'm walking so fast."

"You walk fast when the moon is full?"

"Just outside Acereto is a high ridge. Over there," he said, pointing ahead and to the right, to a dark hill that rose higher than the others around it. "There, in the evening, when I don't get thrown off the bus, I can see the sun set over the sea—though at this distance the sea is a line as thin and blue as a tentative stroke in a watercolor. And you can see Rome as it lights up, faintly at first, but then like a city that's burning. To the east are half a hundred mountain ridges. In the dusk their undulations make them look more like the sea than the sea itself.

"If we can move fast enough we can be there when the moon rises. First it will be orange and amber, like Rome on the opposite side, glowing like the remnant of a bonfire.

"For a moment the amber moon to the east and the amber city to the west will seem to be mirror images, and from the height of the ridge we'll watch them face one another as if they were two cats on either side of a fence. Then, as the moon comes up in ten thousand colors, we can have a drink and eat some chocolate—it's better than watching a movie."

"Is there water up there?" Nicolò asked. "Even now, I'm thirsty. It's because you walk so fast."

"No, there isn't any water up there. It's too high, but I filled a wine bottle that I found. At the top of the ridge, we can drink the cold water of Acereto. We'll need it because we will have worked so hard."

"Where is it?"

"In the briefcase on your back. Part of the reason you're breathing so hard."

"You found a bottle with a cork?"

"I found a bottle, but it has no cork."

"How do you know the water hasn't spilled?"

"I have observed you carefully," Alessandro said. "Since we left Acereto you have not been upside down for a moment. Don't walk on your hands."

"All right," Nicolò promised. He was known among his friends, and at the factory, for being able to walk on his hands.

"Remarkable thing," Alessandro said, "the moon rising. Especially when it's full. It's so gentle, so round, and so light. Every time I see the full moon rise, I think of my wife. Her face was bright and beautiful, and if it had any imperfection it was that it seemed too perfect, especially when she was young.

"I walk fast because I want to see the moon rise. And I want to see the moon rise because ... I've already told you. Come, it won't wait for us, but it will be there."

They walked on steadily. Nicolò found his breath. He tucked his shirt carefully into his pants and brushed his hair back from his eyes as if he were going to be introduced to someone. And as they walked, he reminded himself now and then that he was not to walk on his hands.

 

"NOT A single cloud," Alessandro said as they sat down on a flat rock at the summit of the ridge toward which they had been walking. "For three hundred and sixty degrees, and all the way to the top of the sky, it's as if clouds had never been invented."

The darkness spread away from them on all sides. Even the whitened road curved into a little bow on the summit and then was hidden as it continued down along the ridge. They had left the road and climbed for a minute or two to reach a ledge at the very top of a hill around which the world had been draped like a swirling fluid that has suddenly frozen.

"There's Rome," Alessandro announced, "the color of an ember, but sparkling like a diamond. The dark ribbon you see is the Tiber cutting through the light, and those white flakes, like mica, are the large piazze.

"If you look west you'll see a tranquil line just beyond the hills. That's the Mediterranean. You can tell it from the sky, for, although they are the same color, in the narrow band of the sea are no stars. The distinction is faint, because the atmosphere dims the stars as they approach the horizon, but if you look hard you'll see."

"I don't see," Nicolò declared. "I don't see stars out there, only above." He strained and squinted, moving his head to and fro.

Happy to have beaten the moon to the top of the hill, and to have a lovely lair from which to capture it as it rose, Alessandro might have ignored Nicolò's inability to see the stars near the horizon, but half a century of explanation and elucidation would not let him. "Look straight up," he commanded.

"Where?"

"There." He pointed toward Rigel, his favorite star. "Count the stars that you can see in a space the size of a coin."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"They stand on top of each other."

"What do you mean, 'they stand on top of each other'?"

"They're too blurry."

"They don't look like pinpoints?"

"No, they look like someone spilled paint."

The old man pulled from one of his jacket pockets a rigid leather case that he snapped open in a well practiced movement of his left hand. "Try looking through these. They may make things sharper."

Nicolò took a pair of gold-framed spectacles from the bed of velvet upon which they had been resting, and put them on. He turned his head back to Rigel, and, for the first time, he saw the stars.

"And those must be all wrong for you," Alessandro said. "Yet, an improvement?"

"Yes! The stars are deep in the sky, and I can see them one by one."

"Have you never had spectacles?"

"Never. I don't need them." He paused. "I do need them."

"Was it because they were too expensive?"

"No. In the clinic I could have gotten them for free. They make things sharper, but girls don't like them."

"Who said?"

"Everybody."

"I've found it to be just the opposite, and as for the opinion that girls are less pretty if they wear glasses, that's only for apes. Many times, the thick spectacles of a young girl have been the barb of the hook she sinks into my heart. Even these days, I'm entranced by the nearsighted ones who sit in the front row and stare at me through concentric rings of sparkling crystal. And when they're slightly cross-eyed, it's that much better."

"You're crazy."

"A marvelous invention, entirely compatible with physical beauty."

"They were invented?"

"Do you think they grow in the wild?"

"Who invented them?"

"A Florentine, Alessandro di Spina. Spectacles even have a patron saint, Saint Jerome, because in Ghirlandaio's portrait of him they hang from the edge of a table as if they were the commonest things in the world. It was Raphael, however, who made them famous, in his painting of Pope Leo the Tenth, the four-eyed son of Lorenzo de Medici, the one who expelled Martin Luther."

"I don't know any of those guys," Nicolò said.

"That's all right. I don't either."

"Except Saint Jerome. I know the saints."

"That's good. Whose day is it today?"

"I don't know."

"I thought you did."

"Not like that I don't. You think the Pope knows?"

"I'd bet on it."

"So what saint?"

"I'm not the Pope, but today is the ninth of August. Saint Romanus, I believe. He was a Byzantine."

Nicolò, who had never heard the word Byzantine, said, "That's too bad."

"Where's the water?" Alessandro asked. "And the chocolate."

"My father says that if you eat too much chocolate, you turn black."

"That's undoubtedly true," Alessandro answered. "After all, chocolate comes from Africa, and Africans are black. But what about Switzerland? A lot of chocolate comes from Switzerland."

"So?"

"Are the Swiss black?"

"They're not?"

"Well what do you think?"

"I don't know," Nicolò offered, obviously confused. Taking the water bottle from Alessandro's briefcase and placing it carefully on the flat slab, he asked, "Is Switziland in Africa?"

"You mean Swaziland?"

"Switziland?" Nicolò insisted.

Alessandro felt his heart pounding against his chest. His breath came slowly. "What did you say?" he asked.

Nicolò struggled to envision the world. "Which is the one that has an ocean, Africa or Peru?"

"Let's start closer to home," Alessandro said. "First, name the countries of Europe."

"What are they?"

"I'm asking you."

"Asking me what?"

"What are the countries of Europe?"

"They're countries," Nicolò said.

"Name them."

"Italy, of course..."

"Excellent."

"France."

"Yes."

"Germany, Spain, Ireland, and Mahogany."

"Mahogany?"

"It's a country, isn't it? It's in Brazil."

"It isn't, but keep going."

"Is Germany a country?"

"Yes, but you've said it already."

"There are more?"

Alessandro nodded.

"Is there one called Great Dane?"

"When you get back to Rome," Alessandro said gravely, "you must look at a map. Haven't you ever seen a map of the world?"

"Yes I have, but I don't know what it says. I can't read."

"You can't read at all?"

"No, not even my own name. I told you, I never went to school."

"You have to learn to read. They'll teach you at the factory."

"They say I have to read before I become an apprentice, and they say they'll teach me. I'm supposed to go to a place in Monte Sacro. It's okay. I can do numbers. I can do numbers very well. Look! The moon."

Alessandro turned to the east. His cane clattered down upon the rock as he caught sight of a tiny orange dome, rising coolly, unlike the molten sunrise, from behind the farthest line of hills.

The arc rapidly turned into a silent half circle, spying upon them with its old and tired face. It had about it the air of being intensely busy, as if its occupation with the task of floating in perfect orbits had made it justly self-absorbed.

"The whole world stops as this stunning dancer rises," Alessandro said, "and its beauty puts to shame all our doubts."

It is like a dancer, Nicolò thought, as the perfectly round moon began to float airily above the silhouetted hills it had begun to illumine. "So smooth," he said.

"Without saying anything, it says so much," Alessandro continued. "In that sense, it's better than the sun, which is always holding forth, and butting at you like a ram."

Because of Alessandro's spectacles, Nicolò was able to see that the moon had mountains and seas. His sudden apprehension of the moon, so close and full, riding over them like a huge airship, endeared it to him forever. For perhaps the first time in his life he was lifted entirely outside himself and separated from his wants. As he contemplated the huge smoldering disc he was easily able to suspend time and the sensation of gravity, and a sort of internal electricity overflowed within him. It came in waves, and grew stronger and stronger as the moon glided from orange and amber to pearl and white. And then, after only a few minutes, the soul that had taken flight returned to a body in which the heart was pounding like the heart of a bird that has just alighted from a long fast flight.

"What happened to me?" he asked, with a convulsive shudder.

"When I was your age," Alessandro said, "I had already learned to compress what you just experienced into bolts of pure lightning."

Nicolò didn't know what to think, so he stared ahead.

"When a great sight comes to sweep you down, fight it. It will take you, for sure, but keep your eyes open, and you can beat it, like molten steel, into beams of light.

"I used to take long walks in the city, and when I was able to immerse myself in a cross-fire of beautiful images I would ignite just as you did. It has many names, and is one of the prime forces of history, and yet it keeps itself hidden, as if it were shy.

"A favorite trick of mine, that I have since abandoned, was to concentrate the overflow upon the horses of the carabinieri to make them rear up on their hind legs and whinny. They're very sensitive to human feelings, and when they know that you are greatly moved they will often react in sympathetic fashion."

"How did you do that?"

"It wasn't hard. I had to be all worked up, but when I was young I was like a perpetual lightning storm. I would concentrate upon the horse as if he were the emblem and paradigm of every horse that ever was or ever will be, and then throw the current across the gap.

"The horse would turn his head to me and draw it back, widening his eyes. Then he'd shudder as if a sudden chill had come over him. At that point I'd open the gates to let the power sweep out all at once, and he'd rear and cry out the way horses do, with a sound that seems able to pierce through all things.

"I'll never forget the surprise of the carabinieri, the fall of their coats, and the banging of their swords as they stood rigidly in the stirrups so as not to be thrown. They were never angry. After the horses had expressed themselves so completely, they and their riders always seemed to regard each other with awe. More often than not, as I passed I would hear the rider saying to his agitated mount, 'What got into you? What has moved you?' You could see them patting the horses' necks to calm them down.

"I don't do it anymore. I'm not sure I could.

"But the moon, what a lovely thing. To see it makes me very happy. My wife's face, especially when she was young, would have been perfect—in the sense that she could have been a star in films—had her eyes not been so full of love. When she smiled," he said, indicating the cool glow that had begun to climb steeply into the sky, "it was as lovely as that."

"This is how you've never left her," Nicolò said.

Alessandro made a curt bow, closing his eyes for an instant. "In this and in many other ways, but they are not enough. My symbols, my parallels, my discoveries, cannot even begin to do her justice and cannot bring her back. The most I can do is to make the memory of her shine. So I touch lightly, ever so lightly, seeking after gentle things, for she was gentle.

"Now look at the apposition," he said, drawing himself up from what might have made him falter, "of the moon on one hand, and the city of Rome on the other.

"Rome still looks like catacombs of fire, and will remain this shattered and amber color throughout the night, although as morning comes the whiter lights will leave the field more and more to the strings of amber streetlights. But the moon, as it moves, has already run through a number of scenes. First it was a farmers fire, almost dead in the field, ruby red. Then it ripened through a thousand shades of orange, amber, and yellow. As it gets lighter it sheds its mass, until somewhere between cream and pearl, halfway to its apogee, it will seem like a burst of smoke that wants to run away on the wind. Then do you know what happens?"

Nicolò moved his head back and forth.

"It gets as white and hard as glacial ice. It dazzles so that you can barely look at it—and all the weight comes back until it seems like one of those huge chandeliers that, at the opera or in palaces of state, in being so high, sharp, and heavy, tend to discourage people from standing underneath them.

"With the city off to one side and the moon directly above, I hope I don't walk crookedly, like a Dutch milkmaid with one bucket at the end of her yoke and the other balanced on her head.

"In the darkness you will see two large bodies of light—one fixed and the other moving in a sure arc. Only in the morning, when the sun comes up, will you see three, and, as the sun rises, the other two will fade away."

"Not true," Nicolò said. "Look. Here's the third. It's making noise."

Alessandro turned, and saw lights winding along an erratic path. The perfect apposition of the moon and the city of Rome was broken by the unexpected arrival of a convoy of cars and trucks. One of the trucks, strung with lights that sparkled across the valley, was carrying a brass band.

"That's why Acereto was deserted," Alessandro speculated. "They must have been helping out in Lanciata. It's higher and colder there. They probably pool resources to take in the crop at Lanciata first. And they bring along a band."

"They're going to pass by," Nicolò declared.

"Of course. This is the road."

"What shall we do?"

"What would you wish to do?"

"Should we just sit here?"

"Unless for some reason you want to stop them," Alessandro answered.

"They won't even see us."

"So what. We'll see them."

"We'll be in the dark. They'll go right by."

"What's wrong with that?"

"I don't know. It'll be as if we don't exist, as if we're dead."

Alessandro nodded.

"I would have run out to greet them."

"You can if you wish."

"I don't want to be a pair of eyes in the darkness."

"Struggle as you may," Alessandro said, "that is what you will someday be. Tell me, a minute ago was Rome any the less, was the moon any the less, because you could not run out to greet them?"

Nicolò was already resigned to watching the lights as they passed in the dark. "No," he said. "They weren't less."

"If anything," Alessandro continued, "the distance is to our advantage. I'm perfectly content to watch the celebrants from here in the dark. Let them go by. We'll lose nothing. To the contrary, and may God forgive us, as they go past and we remain, we'll take from them everything they have."

 

PARTS OF a song floated up to them on the wind, and were interrupted like a telephone conversation on a faulty line, but as the band truck and the convoy it led came closer, the music was welded together and its stammerings vanished. Riding on the truck was a village orchestra with old instruments, not enough time to practice, and a little too much wine. Every musician, however, was a virtuoso who followed an independent line. Though the conductor made dramatic, elegant, sweeping gestures, the meaning of which he had never learned, even had he known what they meant his musicians would not have.

Still, the music was enchanting, if only because of accidental harmonies in its collective dissonance. The clarinet and the glockenspiel, unknowingly, would for a moment or two engage in an apparently random duet that could have put the musicians of La Scala to shame, and then go their separate ludicrous ways. Sound upon sound, reinforcing and combining outside the poorly followed plan, sometimes lit up the amateur orchestra with a kind of glory that transfixed the old man, who knew that this was how brass bands have packed village squares from time immemorial.

On rows of improvised benches built into hay trucks were scores of exhausted farmers and their wives. One truck pulled a trailer stacked with tools that glimmered in the moonlight. As the convoy passed Alessandro and Nicolò in the shadows, they saw a figure rise to its feet in one truck and lean against the slatted railing. "You get me up on time tomorrow, Bernardo, or you can walk home, you son of a bitch."

From the other truck came the reply. "What can I do? The full moon throws off the clocks!"

"Hey, what's that?" the first man asked, pointing at the ledge where Alessandro Giuliani and Nicolò Sambucca sat in the moonlight. Word was passed from vehicle to vehicle, the convoy halted, and the band stopped playing. The only sound was from the knocking of diesel rocker arms.

"No matter what they say, don't answer," Alessandro told Nicolò under his breath, "and don't move."

"Why? What for?" Nicolò protested.

"To enrich their folklore."

"You're crazy!"

"Shut up."

"Hello!" someone screamed from a truck. "Hello there!"

When no answer came, everyone pressed against the rails on one side, and the trucks tilted.

For a time the farmers were as still as the objects of their curiosity. Then one of them jumped to the ground and scrambled up the rock. He approached Alessandro and Nicolò more gingerly than he would have approached an angry bull. Though for every step forward it seemed that he took two steps back, he magically advanced to within five paces of them. "What do you want?" he asked, as if they had insulted him.

Since neither of them wanted anything, it was easy not to answer.

The farmer stared at them for a while, mumbled something, and ran away.

When he reached the road, he said, "It's an old man, all dressed up, and a boy. They say nothing! They're like stone!" This caused much buzzing.

"Shine a light on them!" someone shouted.

A truck backed up and maneuvered itself so that its headlights shone on the two mysterious figures. They stared into the lights and were absolutely still.

"You see! I told you. I said it, didn't I? Just like I said."

"Hey you," someone yelled. "Who are you? What are you, spirits or something?"

One of the women began to wail. Soon it was a chorus. The truck that had left the line quickly returned, and the farmers drove away, crossing themselves.

"In a thousand years," Alessandro said, "this incident will be remembered. By then, of course, we will have become angels, devils, or a dragon that breathes fire—but we have given this rock a story that will be passed on."

"What good is that?"

"It isn't to our advantage, if that's what you mean. However, it's pleasurable to cast a line into the future, no matter how tenuously. You never know, the line may be unbroken all the way to the last judgment.

"Which is better, you see, than just living and dying, and being buried in a filing cabinet near a chemical factory. Or do you want merely to tread the mill until you drop off? Nicolò, mischief is important. But why should I be telling this to you? At your age, you should have it in your bones, even if you don't know why you should. It's because we don't know everything. Therefore, it sometimes makes sense to break the plan and go where we are not supposed to go.

"Besides, it was none of their business. I didn't feel like being interrogated in the night. This is our journey, not theirs."

The band started up again. "They've recovered," Alessandro said, "but they're going to make me pay."

"Pay? How can they make you pay?"

"Their music." Alessandro seemed weak. He closed his eyes.

"What can I do? Do you want water?" Nicolò asked.

"No," the old man said, waving him away, "I'll be all right. Leave me alone for a while, and then we'll start walking again."

Nicolò moved to another part of the ledge. He heard Alessandro sigh, and then saw him rest his head in his hands. He was the strangest man Nicolò had ever seen. His behavior was at times inexplicable, but though Nicolò didn't understand Alessandro, he knew that whatever was happening to him was proceeding on its own schedule, independently of events on the road even if they lent themselves to its expression.

Alessandro was drawn back in time. As if it were really in front of him, he saw a metal wheel silhouetted against a perfectly clear sky, turning steadily as it pulled-in steel cable and paid it out. He bent his head and covered his eyes as the sun flashed through the spokes. The wheel was the upper terminus of a freight trolley that ran over a vast abyss.

 

IN THE South Tyrol, in July of 1899, surrounded by belled cows and flat farmland, the small settlement of Vols stood alone on a plateau at the foot of forests and meadows that climbed up a steep mountainside to the point where it became vertical rock. Two kilometers above it, often higher than the clouds, on a fortress plateau where the wind was icy even in summer and trees could not grow, was the Schlernhaus. Most buildings of the several European alpine clubs were called Hütten, and rightly so, but not this, for it was tremendous. To haul the stone, timbers, and slate of which it had been built, and to keep it supplied thereafter, mountaineers had pulled up line after line of increasingly heavier rope until at the end of the last one (winched to them by a steam engine they had carried in many pieces on their backs) came a shiny steel cable.

The wheel upon which the cable turned had been revolving smoothly in three-quarter time for more than a decade when the Roman lawyer Giuliani first brought his son to the mountains, and the boy, at age nine, had run across a rocky meadow to the machinery outlined against a sky that rivaled the maritime blues of Venice.

The four-spoked wheel seemed as light as air. As if it had a will of its own, it pulled at times against its torsion brake, or held back, it slowed down or sped up, or sometimes stopped dead and then started again, full of purpose and resolve. Alessandro was amazed to realize that on the delicate lines of the cableway and through the graceful spinning of its wheel the massive Schlernhaus had been built and was maintained.

"Sandro!" his father called, and watched as his son returned to him over the meadow, jumping from rock to rock like a little goat.

It wasn't enough for Alessandro to measure the proportions of a room with his eyes; he had to touch every wall and agitate from boundary to boundary as if he were a torrent settling into a pool, and in their tiny wooden-walled bedroom he bounced back and forth like a cannonball. The beds were so high that he had to use pegs in the wall to climb into them, and he jumped from one to the other, sailing over the narrow chasm between. Though the window was small, it gave out upon a scene of silver-and-white mountains that challenged the eye to follow them into the distance. Before dinner the first night, Alessandro climbed up on the ledge to open the window. He undid the latch, and the wind came in so violently that at first it tumbled him backward onto the bed. When the attorney Giuliani returned from shaving, a china bowl in his hands, he saw his son, all bundled up in wool, crouching on the sill like a cat. As air howled through every crack in the walls, the young Alessandro stared into the wind as if he had discovered it.

In the daylight hours they visited the peaks, with Alessandro roped to his father like a dog on a leash when they scrambled across rock faces and over glaring snowfields. They ascended the Schlern itself, the Roterd Spitze (which they called the Cima Rossa) and the Mittagskofl. They descended into the Seiser Alpe, gently sloping meadows that had no apparent limits and seemed to be a world unto themselves. They went as far east along the mountain line as the Cresta Nera, where they saw only two other climbers but a dozen shaggy milk-white goats standing on ledges that could only have been miraculously attained. Wandering in the many hours of light, the attorney Giuliani and his son learned to crave the cold wind so that the more they were in it, the richer they felt. Their eyes followed the omnipresent distances, and as the mountains acted upon them and their spirits were calmed and enlarged, they saw the difference between what they once had been and what they had become. After a day's or two days' absence from Rome, they never would have been able to sit in the center of a snowfield, feeding upon the silence and the sun, but after a week they could, and they trudged to snowfields, cliffs, and empty valleys, where they passed the time as quietly as goatherds.

One evening they approached the Schlernhaus in the dark. Its glowing windows, shining through patches of frozen cloud, were like lighthouse beacons. Inside, sullen cadets in blue aprons and rounded blue-and-white army caps worked feverishly in a huge kitchen as humid and warm as a steam bath, and peeked into the dining room as often as they could to see if they could see a woman.

It was high summer, so only the cookstoves were lit, and not the huge tiled heaters in the main areas. After twelve or fourteen hours on the snowfields and in the wind, many diners shuddered with chill.

Alessandro found it difficult to come from the outside, where it was below freezing, and sit down to drink hot soup in a room little warmer than the rime-covered meadows they had just left. Every day at dusk he was overcome by great sadness, and he longed for his mother, his house, and the summer in Rome. His father, too, was unusually quiet at this time, and often spoke of cutting a few days from the trip, but one evening they returned to the Schlernhaus and didn't think about such things even for a moment.

Two soldiers of the Leibregiment, the Hapsburg royal guard, were stationed at the main door. Like elite soldiers the world over, they looked as if they would be delighted to stay outside all night, and their heavy fur cloaks suggested that perhaps they would. The huge spaces of the Schlernhaus, even the warren-like upper floors, were warm and dry. A fire burned in every stove, flags were draped from the rafters, and one of the floors was roped off. Behind the rope were another two soldiers even larger than the set downstairs.

Alessandro changed, and descended to the uncharacteristically warm dining room. The attorney Giuliani leaned toward a table at which were seated half a dozen Viennese, and inquired in his best German about the sudden heat, the guards, and why the cadets in the kitchen were buttoned up, polished, and overwhelmed by trays of cakes, oven-fired casseroles, and roasting game.

The Austrians consulted among themselves by eye. The attorney Giuliani was Italian, and Italy had designs upon the very mountains where they, the Austrians, had to respond to questions posed by Italians who had had the gall to come there in the first place. Nonetheless, they answered him, coldly and briefly, in two words: "Eine Fürstin." That was enough, in 1899, in the Südtirol, to explain everything.

Alessandro was rapidly learning German, but his teachers had omitted this word. "What is it? What is it?" he chattered, shifting around in his seat, his legs hanging far off the floor, but his father was asking a passing waiter why no bread was on the table.

"No one eats until she comes down," the waiter said, "but in return for waiting, you get to have what they have—venison, pheasant, cakes, things I have never even seen. They brought two chefs, and the cable was busy all day with provisions, one entire gondola just for baking supplies."

"What did he say? What did he say?" Alessandro asked, jumping out of his skin. "What's 'eine Fürstin'?"

As if his language were ugly and prohibited, the attorney Giuliani leaned over and said, "Eine Fürstin è una principessa ... Eine Fürstin is 'a princess.'"

Alessandro froze. The very word principessa had shut him up immediately, and he was now in a daze, eyes glassy, mouth open. He had read about princes and princesses far beyond whatever can be expressed by the term ad nauseam, and here were a castle on top of a mountain, soldiers in fur cloaks, and a real princess herself. Suddenly, in the normally frigid room where they had their soup and cutlets, all the elements of his dreams had combined to hit him in the face like an ermine glove.

Alarmed at the strange, twisted expression on his son's face, the attorney Giuliani took hold of Alessandro's shoulder and shook him.

Then they heard the ringing of a little silver bell, and a real, professional flunkey in a powdered wig swept into the room and screamed, "All rise!"

Everyone did, even the attorney Giuliani, egalitarian and republican, perhaps because he knew that old cats and dying empires viciously insist upon decorum.

Still forgetting to breathe, Alessandro mounted his chair, napkin in hand. From a distance he looked like a tall man with a very-small head. As a group of people clomped down the stairs, Alessandro was so excited that he feared he would fall off the chair. Then, exactly as he had expected, a girl of about eleven entered the room as if she had lived there all her life. She was what adults call a slip of a girl, slim and delicate, with perfect, glowing features, blond hair, and red cheeks. She was dressed in a flowered dirndl that departed from the standard in that it had been made from sable-like black velvet and embroidery thread of real gold.

Alessandro's heart burst, broke, swelled, heaved, froze, stuck, stopped, and surrendered all at the same time. He bowed deeply, sweeping the checkered napkin across the table. Fortunately for him, no one saw this, for they were waiting for the princess to enter the room and she was still on her way. The little girl was the child of someone in the royal entourage.

The princess entered slowly, supporting herself on two ebony canes. Two retainers walked beside her so that she might not fall. She was attired in black, and a heavy veil obscured her face. She was so frail that it was not out of the question to think that the soldiers of the Leibregiment had carried her up the mountain, for it had to have been either that or a ride in the open freight gondola.

She faced the climbers and hikers, who bowed or curtsied with tremendous satisfaction. She was their mirror. In bowing to her they merely were paying respect to themselves, honoring the world they had made, and confirming that all was right within it. Whether or not this was true, they believed that no better shield of tranquillity existed than an empire on land. For centuries and centuries the Hapsburgs had ruled and protected quiet unvisited valleys, plains thundering with horsemen, and chains of godly and indomitable mountains—all with a fullness and peace that warred with the illogic of their vast untenable domain.

When the princess sat down, everyone did. The little girl, whose hair was braided and piled in the local style, was at the end of the royal table. Her legs dangled, too, but not quite as far off the floor as Alessandro's. She nervously played with her knife, which led the attorney Giuliani to note that when people play with silverware it is usually with the knife.

The waiters charged from the kitchen to serve the princess first, but she waved away practically everything. Though in the end her plate held nine or ten peas, a lettuce leaf, and a piece of meat the size of a minnow, her wine glass was properly filled and she drained it in one swoop. It was immediately taken away and another put in its place. The second had champagne, or beer—it was hard to tell—and this she sipped slowly.

As the waiters carved up sides of venison and served vegetables and roasted potatoes from copper salvers, the village orchestra of Vols trooped into the room and took up position in front of a glowing tile stove as high as the ceiling. Of the eight musicians, six were remarkably corpulent, and they had all walked up the mountain not long before. To make the room itself a perfect temperature, the stove was stoked up and burning like a forge. Standing next to it was absolutely unbearable, especially in a wet goat-hair cloak. The trumpet player lit up like a brand. His face could have served the railroad as a signal light for stop. Still, when the orchestra started to play, he followed. Some people nodded, because they recognized the first selection as the regimental hymn of the Landesschützen, and they wanted everyone to know that they knew. Nothing seemed amiss until, at the end of the second song, "Die lautlose Bergziege" ("The Noiseless Mountain Goat"), the trumpeter was taken ill.

He had great trouble breathing, and, to conceal his agony, he smiled until he seriously distorted his embouchure. Then he keeled over, spinning as he fell, and landed flat on his back against the floor amidst the crashing and clattering of instruments.

The princess exhibited her concern by laying her fork upon her plate. The hut master ran from the kitchen with the officer of the guard. They loosened the trumpeters clothing and carried him out, after which the hut master returned immediately and tapped his baton on one of the overhanging beams. "Is a doctor present?" he asked. "Is a doctor in any of the parties now registered?" No doctors were present. Nonetheless, the hut master, one of the most famous mountaineers in the world, surveyed his clientele with the willful and acquisitive efficiency of a climber seeking a hold. It was as if the doctors were merely hiding, and he had determined to smoke them out. His gaze settled oh Alessandro.

"Me?" Alessandro asked in soundless pantomime, pointing to his chest with his thumb. The hut master continued to stare. Alessandro looked to his father to assure him that he was not a physician or a nurse. The attorney Giuliani squinted at the hut master, trying to fathom his motives. It was clear. The famous guide, who was known to be sane, and who desperately sought a physician, had fixed his eyes on Alessandro.

"He's only nine years old," Alessandro's father said.

The hut master turned on his heels and left. Alessandro breathed in relief. Next, the princess looked his way and smiled. He smiled back as best he could, and she laughed because he had been mistaken for a physician. Then she speared a pea and put it into her mouth, at which point everyone in the vast dining room picked up his fork and started to eat, and the musicians began to play a second, trumpet-free version of "Die lautlose Bergziege."

Soon the music absorbed even the music makers, and seemed to convince them that all would be well with their comrade. The climb from Vols had been difficult, then the waiting outside in the cold, then the hot stove and the gravity of playing for a princess. He was undoubtedly in the kitchen, a cloth on his head, sipping whiskey. As thoughts of their friend's sudden collapse faded, they played with more energy. The fires in the stove and in the fireplaces leapt in time to the music. Alessandro started his attack on a sizzling slab of venison that had been placed before him by a sweating cadet who had also ladled out an enormous amount of roasted potatoes and vegetables. A pitcher of beer was on the table. Neither the attorney nor his son would have any part of it.

Alessandro almost asked his father to cut the meat for him, but decided that this could not be done in the presence of the blonde girl he had thought to be the princess. After several minutes he managed to separate a small piece from the rest and was about to eat it, when the hut master re-entered and strode across the floor.

The princess was interested in both of them, her entourage was interested in what she was interested in, and the hall grew quiet.

Alessandro dropped his cutlery on the plate.

"We need the boy," the hut master said to the attorney Giuliani, in Italian.

"For what?" was the answer.

"I'll tell you outside."

They went into the kitchen. Under a huge copper hood, a whole side of venison was turning above a fire that begged and devoured its drippings. Cauldrons bubbled over with boiling things that surfaced as if to scream, and then were pulled under before they could express themselves. The cadets worked at tables, handling crusts and dessert plates and refilling tureens. In the center of the floor, a stretcher holding the stricken bandsman lay cater-cornered between a pastry table and a bin of onions. One of the soldiers, bent over the sick man, was kneading his chest as if he were preparing dough.

Alessandro knew he was not a doctor. What if they expected him to cure the man? The sole remedy with which he was familiar was hot tea, lemon, and honey, and when he was sick his mother baked chocolate cookies and sat by the bedside, watching him for hours and hours. These were the only medical procedures in his experience.

"I think he had a heart attack," the hut master declared, "but he's still alive, and he may survive if we can get him to a lower altitude and to the doctor in Vols. When I say 'doctor,' I speak loosely, but he will have to do."

"Perhaps," the attorney Giuliani said, "but what do I have to do with all of this?"

"Not you, him," the hut master said, pointing at Alessandro. "He's the only one who can save him."

Alessandro felt horribly inadequate.

"The victim's heart must be massaged, or it will stop. The gondola has no room for two grown men."

"Absolutely not!" Alessandro heard his father say. "Are you out of your mind? You want him to ride on that thing, that, that thing, with a dying man?"

"It's perfectly safe. We'll rope him in. It will be impossible for him to fall off. Even if he did, he wouldn't go anywhere."

"I won't even consider it. The cableway was not made for the transportation of human beings," the attorney Giuliani said, in a sentence perhaps more at home in Italian than in any other language.

"Exactly!" the hut master replied. "It's made to carry loads of stone and slate, plinths of a thousand kilos—ten times their combined weights. The cable is inspected every week. It's five centimeters in diameter. It could hold a fully loaded wagon with ease, a railroad car...."

"The Baths of Caracalla?"

"Yes, one stone at a time. I've ridden it for years. When my daughter was sick, we sent her down on it." He took the elder Giuliani aside and whispered. "Don't tell anyone, but today the princess came up in the gondola. She was quite comfortable."

"If my son is willing, and you'll stake your life on the outcome. When he's on the gondola, I'll hold a rifle on you. If anything happens to him..."

For a moment, the turning of the spit and the boiling of water were the only sounds other than that of the brass band in the dining room. "What rifle?"

"Ask one of the soldiers. I insist. It's the only way to make sure you're telling the truth. I'm not bluffing. I'll kill you if anything happens to him."

"All right."

"And only if he agrees."

"Of course."

The attorney Giuliani took Alessandro aside. "Sandro, if you don't want to do this, you don't have to. The hut master is a great mountaineer. People entrust their lives to him every day. Each time we ride in a train, or stand on a balcony, we are exhibiting the same kind of trust. What do you say?"

"Can we go home tomorrow if I do it?"

"We can do anything you want, even if you don't do it."

"I will. Why shouldn't I?"

"Get a heavy sheepskin," the hut master commanded a cadet, "and fill a vacuum flask with hot tea."

After Alessandro and his father had gone to get warm clothing they and a dozen men went out into the night, with the bandsman on the stretcher. As they made their way through the mist to the cable terminus, the soldier continued to knead the trumpeter's chest, announcing periodically to those in train that the trumpeter was still alive.

The hut master tied Alessandro securely to the steel bracket with which the wooden gondola was hung from the cable. He and the attorney Giuliani checked and rechecked the climbing harness and the knots. "Even if you fall from the gondola," the hut master told Alessandro, "you'll just hang off the side. You're tied in doubly. I've taken people up the Marmolada with far less than what you have here. Nothing to worry about."

Alessandro's father took a rifle from one of the soldiers. Embarrassed by his mistrust of the famous mountaineer, and by what he knew the Germans would consider his overly Italianesque response, he understood that he had to make good on his stated conditions. Though he didn't train the weapon on the hut master, he loaded it, and the hut master heard the unmistakable sounds of a rifle bolt opening, a cartridge rising, the cartridge rammed into the barrel, and the locking of the bolt.

Alessandro buttoned up his loden coat.

"Do you want the hood?" his father asked.

"No, I want to see what's around me."

He was lifted up into the gondola and he positioned himself on the sheepskin that swaddled the trumpeter. They told him what to do, pinned a note on his back, and pulled a wooden lever that rang a bell in the terminal below.

"Don't stop until someone takes over," the hut master instructed. After a few minutes, the cable shuddered, and the gondola moved off into the dark.

"Why is this here?" Alessandro shouted upon noticing the tea flask tucked between the sheepskin and the sideboard of the gondola.

"Against the cold. Drink it on the way back," they screamed over the wind, but he heard nothing after cold,' for he was already flying through a cloud that seemed as dense as cotton.

He pushed against the bandsman's thick chamois shirt just as the soldier had done. Though he could see nothing, he knew he was still riding across the plateau on the summit, and that the gondola would soon carry him backward over the edge.

He could feel the presence of the abyss the way a blind man feels the presence of the sea beyond a beach. Then he passed over, and he felt a weightless chill when he recognized the irresponsive silence of great height. Because the cable was steeply inclined, he had to lean forward to stay upright. Though his restraints might have saved him had he tumbled over the side, they didn't hold him in place: he accomplished that with his knees and by pressing his feet against the walls of the gondola.

In less than a minute they left the envelope of cloud that covered the mountain and were in the free air. The stars were everywhere, even below, swaying in grand nausea. From the dark outline of peaks and valleys, Alessandro saw that he was a thousand meters above the ground, with not even a ledge nearby. No matter where he might reach out, he would find nothing, and all he could hear was the sound of wheels on the cable.

Suddenly the body under him stirred. Still, he kept pushing as he had been told. "Marie!" the bandsman shouted in painful confusion. Alessandro hoped that the subject of his efforts would understand what was happening.

"Marie!" the trumpeter shouted once again, with disturbing power, as Alessandro realized that he was on a horse without a saddle.

"What are you doing?" the trumpeter asked in German of the local dialect, his eyes as wide as those of an enraged eel.

Alessandro didn't understand the dialect, and guessed that the man had asked for the time. "It's night," he said, not knowing the hour exactly. He felt obliged to make conversation. "No moon, no nightingales, but all is well, and the badger is in his hole."

The thin Italian voice, the heavy odor of sheepskin, the cradle-like rocking of the gondola, the hiss of the air, the darkness, and his own pain and distress were too much for the simple bandsman of Vols. He panicked. This was a nightmare, and all his life, whenever he had had a nightmare, he had thrashed. Now his main object was to rid himself of the little gargoyle that sat upon him with its wings folded like a bat, and continually butted his chest. These devilish creatures, they knew, and they were terribly cruel, because the heart was the place that hurt the most.

"Waldteufel!" he screamed. "Forest devil!" He lifted his bulk from the waist up and latched on to Alessandro. Both hands, big fat things like rows of kielbasa, grabbed the boy's fragile neck and locked into rigor mortis, though the bandsman remained very much alive and, apparently, healthy.

As Alessandro felt the blood collecting in his head he remembered what had happened to the mercury thermometer he had put in the kitchen oven. Had he had the reach, he would have pulled the trumpeter's ears, shoved a fist into his mouth, and ripped at his nostrils, but his hands did all this in the air in front of the assailant's face.

"Filthy bat! Hideous creature! Ahhh! Horrible! Horrible!" the trumpeter trumpeted.

Casting about for a weapon, Alessandro found the vacuum flask. He passed it around his back from his left hand to his right. Then he clubbed his tormentor. After a bang and a muffled smashing of glass, nothing changed except that the strangle hold grew tighter.

Knowing that he could not last much longer, Alessandro struggled to unscrew the cap on the vacuum flask. The cadet who prepared it had not taken into account that it was to be opened by a boy of nine. With all the force he could muster, Alessandro turned it. He thought he pulled every muscle in his body, and the cap sailed into the abyss. Steam rose and burned his hands.

"Let go of me," he thought more than said, for he had no air left in his lungs. When the huge bandsman responded to Alessandro's pathetic gurgle by tightening his fists until Alessandro thought his neck was about to snap, the boy bared his teeth and jerked the open flask toward the face of the strangler.

A stunted rainbow of boiling tea and broken glass shot directly into the target. The trumpeter screamed, dropped his hands, and fell against the wooden floor, knocking himself unconscious. Forgetting where he was, Alessandro leapt to the side and tumbled into empty space, but, as the hut master had said, he was securely tied in, and he found himself dangling from the harness, a short distance from the gondola.

"Mama!" he cried, almost in tears, but then he felt stupid, because, obviously, no one was there except him, and he himself had to do whatever had to be done.

Though he was scared even to look up, much less down, he raised his hands and caught the side of the gondola. With a stream of curse words known principally to the fourth class of the Accademia San Pietro in Rome, he pulled himself back.

The trumpeter lay on the sheepskin in perfect quiet. Perhaps he was dead, but, dead or not, Alessandro had to massage his heart. He started pushing against the chest. In between strokes, he tossed the flask overboard, and then deftly did the same for each shard of glass.

The trumpeter was still alive. He stirred. The wind had ceased and now, as they floated through the tops of the pines, Alessandro could hear the cable engine puffing not far below.

On the way back, Alessandro reclined on the sheepskin. Warm, secure, and disgusted, he marveled that the trumpeter had been able to jump up and run from the cable car station. Still, Alessandro would be a hero when he got back. He wouldn't be able to avoid it. They would carry him in and cheer for half an hour while he finished his dinner. After dismissing them he would ascend not to his room but to the room of the blonde girl in the velvet dress. She would take him into her bed, where they would spend the entire night alone in the dark, pressed together, motionless. This would mix their hearts forever, and thereafter they would be married. The problem was where to live—in Rome or in Vienna. Perhaps Paris, as a compromise. He decided that her name was Patrizia.

He did hear cheering as he came over the lip, now clear of clouds, but it was not the sustained hysteria that he had expected. No matter, the big part would come in the dining hall, with an orchestra, lights, flags, and warm fires.

The attorney Giuliani passed the rifle to a soldier and watched the hut master undo the harness. Dinner had ended, Alessandro was told, but they would cook for him anything he wanted, and serve it in the kitchen. He wanted only dessert.

Though he was as thin as a switch, he imagined that if he were to eat that night, he would be too fat to lie with Patrizia.

The dining hall in the Schlernhaus was dark. Everyone had gone upstairs except some soldiers and mountain guides who sat around a grate of glowing coals in the guides' room, talking about war. The sound of a zither came softly from the upper floors—for the princess.

No one cheered. The guides stared at him because he walked so pompously, and the kitchen cadet who had to stay late to serve the food was anxious to go to bed, because he had to rise at four A.M.

"Tell me about it," the attorney Giuliani asked, "what it was like. Why was the tea spilled? The note they sent back with you said that Herr Willgis ran all the way to his house. That amazes me....

"All right," his father said, "I can understand why you might not want to talk. I'm going to bed now. If you like, we can go home tomorrow."

Alessandro nodded.

The cadet put a piece of Sacher torte on the table, took off his blue apron, and stumbled dizzily out the kitchen door toward the cadet barracks, saying, "Just put the dishes in the sink, so the rats don't jump on the table." Alone in the kitchen, his courage beginning to ebb, Alessandro thought to seek out Patrizia before he was too afraid to do so. He was tempted just to go to bed, but the image of the beautiful, shy, blonde girl made him rise. He trembled so much as he put the dishes in the sink that the fork clattered against the plate and the cup against the saucer like palsied old men. Then, with the weighted heartbreaking tread of someone on his way to be hanged, he walked toward the stairs. He wanted to hold her, to kiss her, to breathe—in her breath, and he bumped against the stairs in the dark and started to ascend to the upper floors and their dizzying, intimate warrens.

During the day the soldiers of the Leibregiment stayed rigidly by the doorposts of the royal compartments, and nothing in the world, not even a tiny July gnat, could get past them, but, inexplicably, at night they paced back and forth like bears in a shooting gallery, taking long trips down the hall at precisely timed intervals when it was easy for a small boy treading softly on alpaca socks to glide into the forbidden wing and have his choice of twenty doors in two facing rows.

His chances of finding her before he himself was discovered were not good: he could tell nothing from the doors themselves; it was quite dark; and his time was limited because someone would undoubtedly come out into the hall.

Choosing a middle door at random, he was about to put his hand on the latch but was deterred by a raspy voice from within. Someone was talking to himself. "...to Gisella! But Hermann will be exposed for what he is within a week. In a year's time, I'll be the favorite in court, and the monkey will jump on the nut. On the other hand, no one ever got rich by putting octopus ink in a drinking glass, and the emperor likes Von Schafthausen—mistakenly, of course...." Clearly this man was going to stay up all night, and he was not Patrizia.

Alessandro moved to a door at the end of the hall. Slowly, quietly, he lifted the latch and looked within. There, in the flashing, cloud-scudding moonlight, lay a huge beached whale of a woman, with exceedingly spacious gaps in her teeth, enormous fleshy lips, a porcine nose, and ears shaped like powder horns. Who was she? She had been too ugly to come to dinner. Perhaps she was a maid, or an unfortunate royal relative forever hiding on the upper floors of palaces and inns.

After shutting that door, Alessandro despaired of finding Patrizia, but after his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that neatly placed in front of each door was a pair of shoes or boots. Ordinarily, no one was permitted to wear boots in the Schlernhaus, and they were kept on racks under the stairs, but royal shoes and boots were allowed to sleep near their masters and mistresses.

Some were huge, others womanly, and the shoes of the servants had telltale buckles. The door with no shoes in front of it must have been the princess's, since she was probably allowed to wear them even to bed. One pair of slippers was unmistakably petite and had not been left neatly, but thrown down in front of the door as if its owner had had to rush across the cold floor to a warm bed. Alessandro approached these shoes as if they were saintly relics. They were sprawled in front of the last door near the window at the end of the hall, across from the monster, in the moonlight. He was entranced by the casual angle at which she had left them, the way the straps fell, and the way they looked in the white light that machine-gunned across them through rapidly driven clouds, and he wondered if he would be able to love Patrizia herself as much as he could love the poignant and accidental traces of her.

Then a soldier began to stride down the hall. Presented with a choice between love and death, the young Alessandro lifted the latch, pivoted inside, and closed the door silently behind him.

Patrizia lay under a silver satin coverlet illuminated by the light of the moon. She looked different with her braids undone and her golden hair splayed across the pillow. She opened her eyes when he came in, and they followed him as he approached. She herself remained motionless, unafraid.

He put his fingers to his lips. Her hand appeared from under the covers and she did the same. It was a game, but it was more than a game.

"Can you talk Italian?" he whispered.

"Yes," she answered, also in a whisper. "We go to Italy each spring."

"Do you remember me?"

"From Italy?"

"No, from tonight."

"No," she said, lying.

"Oh," he answered, downcast. "I saw you in the dining room."

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Alessandro Garibaldi," he replied.

"Are you related to Garibaldi?" Most of the people she knew were related to other people of whom everyone else had heard.

"I'm his youngest son."

"But didn't he die a long time ago?"

"Yes. Pay it no mind. He was my brother's father, and the uncle of his half wife was my cousin's grandmother's sister. She married my uncle's brother, who was him, and by her he had me. Who is the strange woman in the room across the hall?"

"Did you enter each room?" the girl asked, surprised, and, to Alessandro's delight, jealous.

"It was an accident."

"That's Lorna. She's my cousin. She hides, because she's so ugly. It's very sad, but she's nice, and I love her. She reads to me."

"Look at what the clouds do when they interrupt the moon," Alessandro said. "It makes me dizzy."

"Are you cold?" she asked in a way that would have been unmistakable to anyone but a nine-year-old desperate to do exactly what she wanted him to do.

"No," he answered, shivering not from chill but from the possibility of rejection and the terror of acceptance, both.

"You can come in here with me," she offered, although it was difficult for her to say. "If you want..." She lifted the covers, and he jumped in.

It was warm. It was more than warm. What with the feather bed, her flannel nightgown, the thick down cover, and his woolen clothing and alpaca socks, it was like a Dutch oven.

Alessandro didn't know what to do. When she leaned her head against his chest, gales of wonder and emotion swept over him. He kissed her hair. Never in his life had he smelled anything so sweet or touched anything so soft.

But this moment of utter perfection was as vulnerable to disruption as the mirror-smooth surface of a lake at dawn. Suddenly, and against his strongest wishes, he was disturbed and unhappy because his father didn't know where he was. Perhaps the attorney Giuliani had gone downstairs to look, and, finding the kitchen empty, had stepped outside to ask the cadets what had happened to Alessandro, only to become lost in the fog and chill. Alessandro winced when he thought of his father wandering blindly over the meadow, close to the high cliffs. Or perhaps he was just lying in his bed, thinking and remembering, in a way that always seemed to Alessandro to be very sad.

Alessandro had no choice but to go back. As wonderful and light as things now were—and he felt as if he had been born to slip into Patrizia's bed—he had to leave her and go back to his father, far less angelic a form, with his goat-like Roman lawyer's beard, his thick hands, and the smell of pipe tobacco that had settled into him forever. As powerful a figure as this man was, still, he was more vulnerable than the slight little girl next to Alessandro. Even Alessandro knew, even at this moment, that the world had worn down the attorney Giuliani in ways that his son simply could not understand. The little ones, the delicate ones of nine or eleven, had all the strength, really.

Alessandro's reflections were immediately banished by the metallic sound of a door latch that had been lifted by someone who did not feel obliged to sneak around in alpaca socks.

He dived under the covers. Whatever the danger, the sudden arrival of a third party was a blessing. When he was deep down in the satin, Patrizia held him tenderly and protectively. That she did so in secret was the most intimate gesture Alessandro had ever experienced. The pressure of her hands, their steadiness while she dealt with the interloper, were what he had dreamed of when he had thought that they would mix their hearts.

Just inside the doorway, Lorna stood almost on tiptoe, her arms folded across her breast and her face upturned to the inrush of moonlight, in the most pathetic, awkward, and repulsive stance that can be imagined. And yet, she was a good soul, tormented immeasurably and destined to suffer forever in a body that was a fortress against love, an impregnable glacis. She stood in her cousin's room, in tortured ecstasy, poised like one of the three little pigs in prayer, drinking-in the moonlight with her gloomy cow eyes.

"I had the most marvelous dream!" she exclaimed. "Ich träumte, ich tanzte mit einem Schwan! Er hatte die wunderbarsten flauschigen Polster an dem Füssen, und er war auf einem Mondstrahl in mein Zimmer gekommen—I dreamed I was dancing with a swan! He had the most marvelous little puffy white feet, and he came into my room on a moonbeam."

"Dear God," Patrizia said softly, for she knew that when Lorna had one of her truly wonderful dreams, her custom was to get into her cousin's bed to tell her of it in great detail. "Lorna, dearest one, do you think that perhaps you could tell me in the morning? Tomorrow we rise early to descend to the Seiser Alpe, and I'm so tired!"

"Certainly not!" Lorna said with maddening insensitivity. "You know that if I wait until morning I'll forget the details, and it's the details you love."

"But Lorna..."

"He was a thin swan, he had a beak that was as orange as the orange in the rainbow, and he loved me. I asked him how he traveled on a moonbeam, and he told me by singing a golden song.... Move over." She half lifted the quilt, and hopped into bed in one quick graceless leap—all of her. The Schlernhaus quivered.

Patrizia, whose name, of course, was not Patrizia, was alarmed. She had lost Alessandro, who was underneath Lorna, completely subsumed. She wondered if he could breathe, or if he were screaming.

"The golden song was like a warbling horn. Once, I heard a bird singing like that, at Grandfather's estate in Klagenfurt.... What is this? Is this your leg?"

As if to answer in the negative, Alessandro, who for the second time in a matter of hours found himself unable to move and without air, bit Lorna fiercely in one of her huge buttocks.

The cry that escaped from the massive young woman made the rare golden song of her imagined swan as common as a streetcorner ditty. It had the force and power of a great railroad horn. It sounded so terrible that the entire Schlernhaus awoke. Each and every mountaineer, the cadets in their barracks in the fog, the attorney Giuliani, the royal party, and everyone else sat bolt upright in their beds as if they had been struck by lightning. Even little Patrizia began to scream.

"Was ist es!Mach es tot!Mach et tot!—What is it? Kill it! Kill it!" Lorna cried, and resumed her mad howling.

Never before had the lamps of the Schlernhaus been lit simultaneously or so fast. The light that flashed against the fog suggested the work of either a photographer or a cannon. Four soldiers in heavy boots charged through the hallway, bayonets unsheathed. They were so excited that rather than lift the latch they kicked down the door. When it hit the floor it sounded like a bomb. Members of the royal party, born and bred on assassination, gave out a collective moan.

Alessandro sought refuge by wrapping himself up in a ball in the quilt. Patrizia was weeping. Lorna, backed up against the bedposts, was completely silent. Her outstretched finger pointed accusingly at the bundle on the bed.

"What is it? Is it an animal?" asked the officer of the guard, drawing his saber.

"It has horrible fangs? Lorna shouted.

Alessandro peeped from behind a mass of satin. The soldiers were temporarily stunned as he extricated himself from it, stepped off the bed, and started to walk away, intending to return to his room. He was not sure, however, that he was going to be able to do this.

Two sergeants took hold of his ears and dragged him down the hall. He vaguely understood that they had been humiliated, that he had affronted the holiness of order, and that at this moment it was distinctly disadvantageous to be Italian. "Papa!...Papa!...Papa!" he screamed rhythmically, afraid that he was going to be killed. As the whole world collapsed, his tears flowed silently. He was no longer Patrizias lover or Garibaldi's son, but the chief criminal of the Hapsburg Empire, an assassin, an animal with fangs.

"What are you doing!" the attorney Giuliani shouted at the armed soldiers, even though he was in his dressing gown and they seemed to be twice his height. "Let him go!"

Alessandro saw in his father all the light of the world, but the soldiers still held him.

"Are you mad?" the attorney from Rome asked the officer of the guard. "Is this how you treat children?"

"Our children are decent, clean, and well behaved," the officer shouted in a voice so full of hate and rage that the senior Giuliani and his son were silenced. The officer then proceeded to narrate to the assembled onlookers his version of what had happened. Even though he understood little of this, Alessandro trembled.

The princess appeared, scowling in anger, a palsied hand dancing upon her hip. "This child tried to violate my granddaughter," she announced. And then, shaking feebly, she added, "In other times, I would have had him shot."

The attorney Giuliani whitened. He was afraid for Alessandro's life, and he had to take the initiative.

"Sandro," he asked, "is this true?"

Alessandro, who had not understood the accusations, had nonetheless understood their tone, and he knew that his embrace of Patrizia had been the finest and purest thing in the world. "No," he said.

Still, his father raised his hand, and brought it down against Alessandro's face. The sound was heard throughout the hallways as Alessandro collapsed onto the floor.

Then the attorney Giuliani picked up his son. "We're leaving in the morning," he said, and carried the boy back to their room.

Once inside, he lifted Alessandro into bed, and covered him. They were obliged to whisper.

"I'm all right," Alessandro said.

"It wasn't my hand," his father told him. "I was terrified of what they might do. They're not like us."

"I know," Alessandro answered.

"You have to understand," his father begged. "I've never hurt you before, and I'll never hurt you again. The soldiers were armed. Their bayonets had been unsheathed. These people punish their children severely. I didn't want to hit you...."

"I know," Alessandro said, touching his father's face, as his father often touched his. Though he was staring at the attorney Giuliani, he saw the wheel steadily turning in the sunlight, almost with a will of its own.

"Papa? When we go home tomorrow, the wheel will be turning, won't it."

"What wheel?"

"The cable wheel."

"Yes, it turns all the time."

"Even when we don't see it? Even if we're not there?"

"Of course. It has nothing to do with us."

"Even if we're dead?"

"Yes."

"Then, Papa," Alessandro announced, "I'm not afraid to die."

 

"ARE YOU all right?" Nicolò asked. "We've been here for hours. The moon is headed down. Maybe we should go on, unless you want to sleep."

"Help me up and we'll go," the old man said.

As they took to the road, Nicolò asked, "What were you thinking? I could see that you weren't asleep."

"I wasn't asleep. I was thinking of something that happened a long time ago."

"What?"

"The way history, geography, and politics influence love. And the way it, in turn, influences them."

"That doesn't sound like much. I mean, you could make up a hundred stories to show that, couldn't you."

"You could."

"And that's not very imaginative—making things up—is it."

Alessandro closed one eye and lowered his head almost like a bull. "I suppose not," he said, "Mr. Sambucca."

"What was the real story? I ask you what you were thinking, and you tell me history, geography, politics, love. All I wanted to know was what happened to who. Isn't that enough?"

"It's enough when you're seventeen and most of it is ahead of you, but when most of it has passed, you try to make sense of it. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. I was just thinking of my father. I should have comforted him more than I did. Once, he had to hit me in front of some Austrian soldiers, and it made him unhappy out of all proportion; not only at the time, but for the rest of his life. He believed that he had betrayed me, and I could never convince him that it wasn't so."

"Did they make him do it?"

"In a way."

"You should have killed them."

"I did. And not too much later, either."

"How did you do it?"

"How did I do what?"

"Kill them."

"I shot them with a rifle, and, at close range, I used a bayonet."

"Jesus!" Nicolò said, his eyes wide. "How did you do it? I mean, how exactly do you do that?"

"I'm afraid I'm not going to satisfy your curiosity."

"Why not? You weren't the only one ever to be in a war."

"I know, but I survived. That puts me on a lower plane."

"A lower plane?"

"Lower than the one of those who perished. It was their war, not mine. I was able to walk out of it, leave it behind. Though God preserved me, the best stories were theirs, and these were cut short. The real story of a war is no story at all—blackness, sadness, silence. The stories they tell of comradeship and valor are all to make up for what they lacked. When I was in the army I was always surrounded by thousands of men, and yet I was almost always alone. Whenever I made friends, they were killed.

"If I describe what I saw of the war, you'll know it from the point of view of the living, and that is the smallest part of the truth. The truth itself is what was finally apprehended by those who didn't come back."

"Then tell me the smallest part of the truth," Nicolò said, "for how else can I know?"

"There isn't enough time between here and Sant' Angelo for even the smallest part of the truth," was Alessandro Giuliani's reply.

They were walking down into a long valley. The moon was low and full. As it rested on the jagged horizon below them it seemed miraculously close, as if they had risen to it or it had dipped down to earth to take a look. It seemed to be in league with the dawn, glowing pearly and blue at one and the same time.

Though the moon soon disappeared beyond the ridge behind them, most of the world remained in its light, even as they themselves were walking in shadow. Alessandro had begun to shake with fatigue. How stupid, he thought, to have set out on such an expedition. He simply did not have the strength that once he had had, and now Nicolò was setting a fast pace without realizing how difficult it was for the lame old man to keep up. And yet, because the world beyond was illumined in a softening white glow, he kept on, hoping that, even if he did not deserve it, strength would find him as it had so many times before.

If it did, he thought, and by some grace he were to be lifted from his fatigue and pain, he would tell Nicolò what Nicolò had asked to hear. They hadn't far to go until they parted, and in the time they had he would tell a simple tale in which he would skirt the danger of a lost or broken heart, though he knew that recollection could be more powerful and more perilous than experience itself. What vanity had moved him to think he could walk over the mountains again, pushing forward day and night, like a young soldier?

And then he answered the question he had put to himself. Throughout his life he had suffered periods of despair only to be lifted from them and to rise at the speed of falling. It had happened in footraces, when he had sometimes been slapped awake like a newborn and had burst into the lead effortlessly and without warning. It had happened in climbing, when he was suddenly transformed from a frightened novice into someone who could dance up the cliffs. And it had happened in his doctoral examinations, when the young Alessandro, trembling and afraid, had become the examiner of his examiners.

"Do you want to rest?" Nicolò asked just before dawn, as they began to walk southward through the cultivated valley twenty or thirty kilometers in length. "It's almost morning. We've been making good time, but now you're going very slowly. I think that if we rest again we can better our pace. I know you can walk fast; you almost left me behind going up the mountain. As you said, it was the going down in the morning that was difficult."

"My heart feels bad," Alessandro said. "It's hard for me to breathe. I'm afraid that if I stop I'll get so stiff and tired I won't be able to get going again. Walk slowly, if you can bear with me until I recover. This time of night is always the most difficult. If I can get through it into the daylight..."

A delicate white mist had risen from the irrigation ditches. It covered the fields and tried unsuccessfully to arch over the embankments on either side of the road. The sky had grown light enough to obscure the stars and planets. As night became morning, it seemed that all the birds of central Italy began to sing and dance in a mounting ecstasy that soon covered the countryside with sound. The trees were as busy as hives, with hopping or swooping birds and dislodged leaves that spiraled down through the still air.

With the swelling light came swelling sound, a swelling breeze, and the rattling and rustling of leaves. Finally beaten down, melted, and conquered by wind, heat, and light, the mist was swept from the fields. Rich colors bloomed in midair from what had been tentative vanishing grays. When the wind roared over the road and lifted the dust, Alessandro knew that something was happening. He shuddered as he saw the inanimate and lifeless world moving, and the dead things, dancing.

The sun rose on the left and turned the glossy leaves of the poplars into a blinding haze of light too bright to behold until the wind coursed through the trees and they began to bend and sway, softening the glare.

Alessandro felt the world take fire. His heart repaired to the past and he barely touched the ground as he walked between trees that now were shimmering in the dawn. No matter that distant thunder is muted and slow, it comes through the air more clearly. After half a century and more, he was going to take one last look. He no longer cared what it might do to him. He just wanted to go back. And he did.