IX. LA TEMPESTA

THE ADRIATIC is shallow and confined. Its storms are fierce in the air and fierce in the light, but on the sea itself the waves break before they come to resemble the movable mountains of the ocean, and the surface flashes with curling whitecaps until it looks like a sheepskin in the moonlight. The action of the Atlantic when it is angry is a wild assault on earth and sky: of the Adriatic, a disciplined self-lashing, a convulsion as quick and bright as the sticks of butter-colored lightning that dance over the sea like stilts.

Almost all of it lies between long mountain ranges, where storms collect after they have forced the passes like flash floods bursting over weirs. There they rise, purple, gray, and black, into an angry wall that the setting sun paints in tranquil gold.

As one of these low gray walls became visible to the east, almost like a distant fog-bank, hardly anyone noticed and those who did gave it no thought. Children built castles and pools in the sand; old people read day-old newspapers from Rome or Milan; and young girls barely in adolescence walked rigidly along the beach, delighting that men of various ages paid heed to their swan-like limbs and soft golden hair.

Only Alessandro Giuliani, immobile in a cloth beach chair, tracked the oncoming storm. Though he tried, he was unable to read a day-old copy of Corriere della Sera, and though the sun was bright and hot in the African or Sicilian style, gentle gusts of cool September wind riffled the pages of the newspaper. When the clouds were so high and near that the older people began to stir because, unlike their grandchildren, they would not be able to dash quickly through the dunes to the hotel, Alessandro folded the Corriere della Sera and put it under his thigh to protect it from the large drops of rain that had begun to arrive in the vanguard of the storm.

The wind tangled the ribbons on the children's gondolier's hats, old people labored across the dunes, and mothers and fathers called their sons and daughters. Then lightning struck the sea far away in a silent explosion of light, and the beach became a scene of panic. Babies were lifted into the air as if the lightning were slithering along the sand. Umbrellas were collapsed. Towels whipped free in the wind.

The beach porters were skinny boys with huge wet eyes. In uniforms that made them look like organ-grinders' monkeys, they desperately and breathlessly gathered beach chairs and umbrellas and ran across the dunes. One of these boys, who had huge black eyebrows that threatened to bridge his macaque-like nose, approached Alessandro.

"You have to go in," he said. "I have to take your chair."

Alessandro kept his face to the storm.

"Signore?"

Deliberately playing with time that was running out quickly and dangerously, Alessandro turned slowly to the young macaque and widened his eyes as if to say, What?

The macaque flashed two rows of incredibly white teeth. "Signore!" he shouted, and pointed, with a thumb extended from a clenched fist, at the storm behind him.

"Yes?"

"You have to go inside because of the lightning!"

As Alessandro's eyes filled with the distant webs of enraged light, the corners of his mouth showed a barely perceptible smile. At this, the frightened macaque exploded forward like a racehorse leaving the gate, and crossed the dunes just ahead of a heavy rain. He took shelter under the verandah of the hotel, where guests who were in robes and carrying baskets stood behind walls of glass to watch the storm, and as he and his friends stacked chairs and umbrellas under the light of an electric bulb, he told them about Alessandro, who was going to be turned into a cinder and blown into the clouds.

On the verandah itself, everyone could see Alessandro sitting still in the rain, his head visible just above the beach chair, his hair blowing wildly in the wind.

Lightning the color of white gold danced awkwardly on the broken surface of the sea and flashed against the dark skeins of cloud from which it had come, cascading over itself in shallow angles and bent limbs. Thundercracks colliding in midair flattened the water into spoon-like silver depressions and rattled the glass windows of the hotel.

"He'll be killed," said a woman on the part of the porch farthest away from the windows. "What's he doing?"

"He's doing what we're doing," an old man answered, "but more so. He seems to have lost the habit of safety."

"Or maybe he never had it!" the woman exclaimed with joyful intolerance as she turned to go inside.

No, the old man thought. It's something that, eventually, you learn to do without.

Lightning struck so close to Alessandro that it pushed him against the beach chair and bent its wooden legs like bows. Blinded, he waited for the next bolt to release him from the reeling darkness, for the logic of the lightning and its approach over the sea was like the logic of a swelling crescendo in music. He was sure it would rush him with perfect accuracy, sure of the greater and greater light and geometrically increasing shock, sure that the walking barrage would end with him, and content that it would.

But it didn't. It lacked volition after all, and did not descend with a kind and quick stroke that would take him where the heart could not be broken. It left him on a beach that the rain had made the color of municipal concrete, staring at the ten minutes of robins-egg blue hanging in the air over Istria. A cold and tranquil rain came after the lightning, and lasted until dark. Only then did Alessandro rise and turn to the hotel, which sat on the dunes and glowed with artificial light like a ship gliding across the horizon on a warm summer night.

 

AS OFTEN happens after September storms, the weather became cool and clear. On the beach, children wore sweaters. Ships moving placidly up and down the distant aisles of the sea were as sharply etched as diagrams, not that the sea itself was calm, for it still had a fresh, agitated, windy quality, and it rocked and churned in waves as imperfect as slabs of raw glass.

Into this sea Alessandro plunged for his daily exercise. He was the only one to swim out to deep water, for which he was held half in awe and half in contempt. It didn't matter to him, for as soon as he cleared the shallows and found himself suspended at a giddy height over the sea floor, darting ahead and slipping through the swells that hid him from those who watched onshore, he was happy. The farther from the beach he swam, the more serene he felt, and in the midst of waves that had never touched shore or lapped against a ship, he would flip over onto his back and float, his gaze fixed on enormous white clouds. Several kilometers out, he floated, turned, and sounded, swimming straight down, eyes open. When he was as deep as he could get, he would relax completely, splay his limbs, and let the currents under the surface tumble him in dark emerald light for as long as he could go without breath. Then, raking the brine, he would swim desperately for the surface and break through a silver roof into clear air and stinging spray.

He liked to swim back at an angle, reaching shore far enough away from where he started so that by the time he returned to his chair he was dry and in full possession of himself. Reaccustomed to gravity and light, his vision cleared, he would open the newspaper, lean back, give up, fold the paper, and sink into dream-laden sleep.

"I'm speaking quietly so that if you're asleep you won't wake up and I'll go away, but if you're not asleep then perhaps you'll tell me whether or not you're sleeping," someone said to

Alessandro, who kept his eyes closed, pretending not to have heard.

"You know, I have a telephone in my office now. When I call someone or they call me, the conversation starts with 'Did I wake you?' even at two in the afternoon. And even if you use the apparatus at four o'clock in the morning and ask them, they'll say, no, you didn't wake them. Why are people ashamed of sleep?

"I think the telephone should stop at midnight, like the buses, but I suppose its value also encompasses emergencies. I must admit, though, that I don't like it. I don't like what it does to people. If I call a client, his secretary will say something like 'Signor Ubaldi is in conference.' 'So?' I say, and she says, 'Let me take your name.' I always reply, 'Ah! We can honeymoon in the Sudan!' But they never get it. That's what the telephone does to people."

Alessandro opened his eyes and saw, standing before him on the windy beach, a middle-aged man in a thick white robe. He was balding, stocky, embarrassed, and sunburnt to the color of molasses, with a patina of volcanic red that said he had a lot of blood in him and that it circulated with great vigor. He also spoke with great vigor, with the ease of movement and solidarity of engagement without which a Turkish wrestler would not be able to practice his craft or tolerate his life. And yet, underlying all this, as the color of his blood lay under his dark sunburn, was both delicacy and reticence.

"My wife asks if you would like to have a cold drink and a canapè with us. My son watches you swim. I told him of the danger, and he thinks you are a hero."

"That's very kind of you," Alessandro replied. Before he could add that he was neither hungry nor thirsty, and wanted just to rest, the wrestler said, "Magnifico!" and turned on his heels.

The son was a miniature of the father, with more hair on his head and less on his body; the wife a lovely woman of extreme and endearing tininess. Alessandro immediately and alarmingly wanted to draw her to him and kiss her beautiful diminutive face. She came up only to his sternum, and her hands were so small and delicate that she reminded him of the sweet and innocent mice in children's books. At once he saw that the wrestler was perfect for her, a devoted and tender protector. And at once he saw that the little boy was special, that with such a husky father and delicate mother, he, continually translating between divergent qualities, was poised to become wise, even if, at only nine, he looked like a Turkish wrestler. Alessandro liked them. They were so imperfect and so admirable that he could not help liking them, and he was not sorry that he had been drawn their way.

"Momigliano, Arturo," the wrestler said, introducing himself in the formal manner, last name first.

"Giuliani, Alessandro," Alessandro returned, bowing slightly.

"My wife, Attilia, and my son, Raffaello."

Alessandro thought of Rafi, another Raffaello with a Jewish name. "A friend of mine was named Raffaello—Raffaello Foa," Alessandro told the boy.

The wrestler was slightly startled. "Everyone knows the Foas," he said. "Who is his father?"

Alessandro told him.

"I don't recognize him. What does he do?"

"He's a butcher, in Venice."

"I know only the Foas of Rome and Florence. They're all accountants and rabbis. And the one who was your friend, Raffaello, what does he do now?"

"He was killed in the war."

"I'm sorry. I hope he did not suffer."

"He suffered greatly."

"Do you know for sure? Word of mouth is unreliable, and you can't always assume the worst."

"I can still feel his weight," Alessandro said, "and his blood."

Attilia looked at Alessandro in a way that made him feel another surge of affection, amplified because it was clear that she held herself in low regard, perhaps because she was so small. Alessandro let his infatuation for her become respect for her husband, although he could only guess that Arturo merited it.

"Well, listen," Arturo said. "He must have been related to the Foas that I know. I'll ask when I see them. I know them because I'm an accountant, too—an unsuccessful accountant."

"Unsuccessful?"

"Yes. That's why we're here," Arturo said, "at this not exactly glorious hotel, in the off-season, instead of on Capri in August. Of course, I don't mean to imply that everyone here is unsuccessful, but I am."

"I think you're probably right. I myself am as poor as a swallow, at the moment," Alessandro said—not like someone dreaming that someday he would be wealthy, but with certainty. "And I work in a lowly, boring occupation. I'm a gardener's helper. Not even a gardener, but the helper."

"For someone so well spoken, and such a courageous swimmer ... I never would have guessed, but what I do is worse," Arturo asserted.

"Why is a strong and enthusiastic man like you an unsuccessful accountant? Are you stupid?"

"Unfortunately, no."

"Then why don't you have factories and fleets of ships? You have the air of a disgruntled magnate. Though you seem disgruntled, you seem like a magnate nonetheless."

"I was born to stand outside myself," said Arturo.

Alessandro settled into a chair, and Raffaello brought him a glass of lemonade, holding it as if, were he to spill it, the world would explode. Attilia passed Alessandro a plate of cheese, celery, and breadsticks. For a moment, Alessandro forgot that he had lost everything and everyone.

"It has always seemed to me," Arturo said, "that, except in art, except for someone like Beethoven or Chateaubriand"—Alessandro's eyes widened—"men of great ambition and great success go through life in a frictionless way, as if they were always riding the waves but never in them. I have found that failure is a brake on time."

"That's just an excuse, Arturo," Attilia said, but in a kindly, loving way suggesting that she was not sure, and didn't care if it were. Arturo, meanwhile, was lost in his impending declarations.

"I cannot be a successful accountant for a number of reasons. First, I am absolutely honest. I take great pleasure in sacrificing my own interests so as to be entirely honorable. Isn't that terrible?"

"Yes," said Alessandro, Attilia, and Raffaello, quietly and simultaneously.

"And then," Arturo continued, his words coming pacifically from the turtle-like jaw under his centurions face and sparkling black eyes, "most accountants like games, and to them their work is a game. I have always detested games. I never saw them as anything but a waste of time. For me, accountancy is a chore. I suffer when I work, which allows me beautiful visions."

"What kind of visions?" Alessandro asked.

"Religious and poetic."

"You mean, when you add your columns, you have ecstasies?"

Arturo bent his head. "I cannot abide numbers. They drive me insane in the same way that forced labor made mystics of galley slaves."

"It did?"

"Haven't you read Digenis Akritas Calypsis?"

"Do you mean Digenis Akritas, the first Byzantine novel?"

"No, Digenis Akritas Calypsis," Arturo said. "The first Byzantine novel was Melissa, wasn't it?"

"I should have known," Alessandro told him.

"Digenis Akritas followed soon after. Or perhaps I've reversed the order."

"No matter."

"The other reason I'm unsuccessful as an accountant is that I love rounded, even numbers. I do my accounting as a matter of aesthetics.

"For example, were you my client and you had, let's say, seventy-three thousand four hundred lire in war bonds, sixty-nine thousand two hundred and thirty-two lire in a savings account, and you collected rents of ten thousand three hundred and fifty lire each month, I would juggle things around so that you might have a hundred-thousand in war bonds, fifty thousand in your savings account, ten thousand in your checking account, and you collected ten thousand a month in rent, but your tenant paid for the gas.

"I'd arrange for your interest to be transferred into a separate collection account, and in the event of an odd balance I'd cash it out and buy you something perfectly symmetrical—like a glass ball.

"I present my clients with the records of their finances in beautiful leather notebooks, in groups of balanced sets, with figures and typefaces in a maximally congruent grid. The client's financial system comprises vessels of constant volume that, when they overflow, overflow into other vessels of constant volume. Uneven excesses go immediately into everyday expenses. I even arrange for crisp new banknotes to be delivered to my clients in beautifully proportioned maroon-and-gold envelopes, in amounts of a thousand, two thousand, four, five, and ten thousand lire.

"I negotiate contracts, sales prices, and fees to be payable in large, round, whole numbers. That's because ragged trails of non-zeros remind me of an infestation of insects, or not having taken a bath for a long time," Arturo said, his eyes gleaming with the azure of the sky, his fists clenched as he held forth. "I arrange for the services to be billed in even increments, and if I make a mistake, even at the bottom of a page of calculations, I don't cross it out, I don't erase it, I throw the page away and start over. To me, a poorly formed letter or number is a mistake."

"And yet," Alessandro said, "your dress and grooming are not pristine."

"I don't care what I look like, I care about what's outside me, which is why I'm unsuccessful. I go to too much trouble in a world where success flows to those who rapaciously avoid trouble, but I can't help it. It bothers me to be slovenly and asymmetrical. Perhaps," he said, blushing, but not so much as Attilia, "that is why I was so taken with my wife, and remain so, for she is a glory of graceful proportion.

"But it is also why we come in the off-season, second class, and why we live in an apartment with no view, in the Via Catalana."

"On the second floor," Raffaello interjected.

"On the second floor."

"It's big," Attilia told her husband.

"Yes," he replied, "but it has no terrace, no view, and its too close to the street."

"It's near the synagogue."

"Far from my office."

"You love to walk"

"Not when it's raining."

"Most of the time, it doesn't rain."

"Most of the time, I don't walk."

"You mean it rains when you walk?"

"You must confine your judgment of the frequency of the rain to the appropriate times in question. Otherwise you are statistically cavalier."

"I don't understand, Arturo. All I know is that we are well provided for and Raffaello stands on a pillar of granite—you."

Arturo looked at the sand, and then, uneasy with the compliment, turned to Alessandro with an expression that seemed to say, what about you? Now its your turn to tell us something about yourself, to balance my confession.

"I'm a gardener's helper. That's simple enough. After I tell them, no one ever asks exactly what I do, or why."

"I ask," Arturo said. "I ask. I am most interested."

Before he began, Alessandro leaned back in his chair and looked at the sky as if to take refreshment from the light. "When I came back from the war I had lost everything, but I was grateful nonetheless to be alive. Despite what I had seen, despite the destruction of all I had once taken for granted, despite the wounds I had sustained and my memory of men, far better than me, who were obliterated, I was overwhelmed with gratitude, inexorable, intoxicating gratitude.

"After being demobilized, I took a train from Verona to Rome. I knew that, for the first time, when I arrived in Rome neither my mother, my father, nor anyone else would be waiting for me. It was winter. It would be cold and gray. The train was filled with former soldiers just like me.

"It was a military train, an express that did not stop in stations, and it seemed to go faster and faster, rocking gently to and fro, gaining momentum, sprinting across the fields and through the brakes where startled birds rose like air-driven smoke.

"I looked out the window, and though occasionally I could see myself reflected in the glass I saw the countryside racing by, ancient towns and buildings in all their patience, and the wind pressing down the reeds in its never-ending argument with the land.

"Perhaps it was because certain thoughts and memories could not leave me that the landscape erupted in a vision the likes of which I have not had since. It was gray and dead, littered with rotting straw and stubble, and half buried in patches of snow. The trees were black, soaked through the bark, and stripped of their leaves, and the clouds and sky looked like the waves of smoke that curl over a burning city.

"This was what lay before me, and what I believed to be there, and what I wanted to see. It was not what I saw."

"What did you see?" Attilia asked.

"God help me, but I saw early summer. An explosion of light green floated airily in the trees. Fuses and buds rent the ground and split the branches, and where I didn't see green I saw yellow and blue. The colors were deep, the forms exquisite. The rich summer that I imagined, or remembered, had broken from time and defeated winter.

"Before the war, if I had seen something as startling and beautiful as what I saw on the train that day ... but no more. Never again. For the first time, I had looked upon victory from the place of defeat, and because the victory was not my own, and I was apart from it, I felt it all the more. It was God's victory, the victory of the continuation of the world. It would bring me nothing, swell my fortunes not a bit. It was bitter, and I would always be outside, but never have I felt a deeper pleasure, never have I been more satisfied, for even if hardly anything was left of me, the world was full. And I was not the only one. A thousand men were on the train for seven hours, and in that time I do not believe a single word was spoken.

"Were you in the army?" Alessandro asked Arturo.

Arturo bowed slightly and blinked. When he bobbed up he said, "I was an armorer in Trento."

"Then you know how lucky you are to have come home to your son."

Arturo crooked his right arm around Raffaello's neck and pulled the boy to him. "Of course I know," he said. "He was a baby when I left, and I thought he might have to grow up without me."

"Papa! Papa!" Raffaello squealed in embarrassment as Arturo kissed him.

"Why didn't you give yourself to the Church?" Arturo asked Alessandro. "With such feelings you might have entered the Church in just the way that men are supposed to devote them selves to God, not as young boys who learn by rote that which a man cannot learn until he is broken."

"I didn't have the temperament. I knew as well that I couldn't go back to what I had done before the war, at least not for a while, at least not as an acolyte."

"What did you do?"

"I was a minor academic. I wrote essays on music and painting because I wanted to listen to music and look at paintings, and because I had to make a living. It was torture. I was too young to approach a work of art with anything but vigor and joy. Now I am able to write contemplative essays. The war is responsible for that, although war itself has no aesthetic. Lives that would be brought together to make a graceful end are abruptly truncated. Characters do not reappear where, by the dictates of a peaceful aesthetic, they should, for they have been killed. The balance between men and women is destroyed. Time loses its fullness. Tranquillity doesn't exist. The lack of an aesthetic empowers the extremes, and they depict war inaccurately, either glorifying it or glorifying its horror, whereas it is somewhere between pure horror and pure glory, with touches of both.

"I can now write contemplative essays, but I don't, because I don't want to."

"You're a gardener's helper."

"Yes. Many practical matters absorbed my attention upon my return to Rome. It's complicated, but it comes down to thè fact that I have no money. Except for a few pleasures that they foolishly deny themselves, I live like a monk.

"I work in half a dozen gardens on the Gianicolo, including that of the house in which I grew up. My father sold the garden to the people who lived across from us. My sister thought I was dead, and while I was a prisoner in Austria she sold the house and left for America.

"Things can be redeemed. The people who bought the house then bought back the garden. Now house and garden are united once again, and three children are growing up in it as their own.

"Once, it was mine, and I was happy there. I see my father, my mother, and my sister again and again as I work. The old gardeners have disappeared, and no one knows that at one time it was my house. I have to be careful not to be too proprietary, but sometimes I tell the new owners, with a certainty they cannot understand, where something will be even if it is buried, or what used to be in a particular place, even if it is gone.

"I'm lucky to have something that I love. Though the garden is no longer mine, it's beautiful nonetheless, and I remember. To see the shoots emerge from the earth; to see the pine boughs, which I keep in clean trim, wave against the blue sky; and to see the children of the house as they grow with the tender illusion that this is theirs, is a cause of great satisfaction."

"Will it be forever?" Arturo asked.

"No. For me, even that place will not always be green, but now it's just what I need. I'm content."

"You'll get married and have children," Attilia said. "You'll see. Everything will change. Time will bring you grace, even more than the garden."

 

NOT TOO long after their meeting on the beach, Alessandro and the Family Momigliano found themselves at table together in the hotel dining room. It was one of those days in fall when summer returns in every respect except one, the strength of the light. Such a day has the quality of a very old man who possesses every faculty and undiminished vigor, and is doomed merely by the passage of time. Though it was hot, the light was dying.

But declining light is the crowning glory of the seaside and a dream-like reward for the exertions of summer. In summer, the waves toil, but when the air is hot and the light is autumnal, the waves are masters of silent elision: they do not break so much as whisper.

Alessandro dipped a spoon into a bowl of chicken broth and gnocchi almost as golden as the light outdoors. "It's good, this soup," he said. "They don't oversalt it. The reason people oversalt chicken soup is so that they can pretend to be eating something that is virtually nothing, but the truth of virtually nothing is worth infinitely more than a lie that makes almost nothing into a lot of something."

"What about bread and butter?" Arturo asked. "Do you put butter on bread?"

"Not since nineteen fifteen."

"In the army? We had butter most of the time."

"We had lard, so I learned to eat bread plain."

On the verandah was a cast-iron table supporting a phonograph. The base of the phonograph was made of rose-colored mahogany, the hardware shiny nickel plate, and the horn a flowerlike shape of ivory, ebony, and amber. During lunch a boy of sixteen or seventeen too overstimulated to eat with his family went onto the verandah and played the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony over and over again.

The sound had a frail quality that matched the dying light. Alessandro was thinking about the similarity, and about the ability of frailty to become strength, when he heard a huge clatter and then the phonograph needle sliding across the cylinder like a sabre cutting through tendons.

Alessandro left the table, with Arturo following him in urgent little steps. On the verandah, the boy who had been playing the phonograph, eyes full of tears, was glowering at six local toughs who were on the verandah, the rail, and the ground, all in the pose of leaving, and ready to bolt, clutching sticks and frozen still for the purpose of taunting whoever might show up. When only Alessandro and Arturo appeared, the latter holding a napkin, the six hoodlums moved back a little into the hotel.

As soon as Alessandro saw this, he realized that a complex ritual would follow in which, by voice, wit, movement, and control of fear, either he and Arturo, or the six boys would be vanquished, but he wanted no part of the game.

"Who did this?" he asked. At the sound of his voice they tapped the sticks.

"We don't listen to German music in Italy." They were nearly indistinguishable, and their faces said that they were sorry they had missed the war, and they were going to take it out on as many people as they could torment.

"We don't, do we? And why not?" Alessandro asked. Arturo laughed.

"Because Austrians kill Italians!" one of them stated with deliberate outrage.

"And what would you know about that?" Alessandro asked. "Besides, Italians listen to Italian music, and Italians kill Italians, as you will now see."

"Correct," Arturo shouted. Then Arturo and Alessandro lunged for the six boys, who fanned into a half circle and closed in with sticks and fists, some kicking, and, for the first ten seconds, no one breathing.

Alessandro took a blow on his upraised arm, his ear, and his head. The boy who landed it expected Alessandro to retreat, but Alessandro grasped his shoulders and used his own head as an anvil into which he pulled the boy's face.

Three were upon Arturo, kicking him in the ribs and beating him about the head with sticks, but his arms were upraised, and he broke free, chasing one of the assailants, with the others still upon him, until he caught him and began to rip flesh with his teeth. The boy screamed with such terror that they all broke off and spilled over the railing, at which point Alessandro and Arturo immediately vaulted after them. When they caught them, they punched their necks and kicked them in the back. Then, rather than killing them, which they might have, they allowed them to escape.

Alessandro felt rivulets of warm blood running down his neck. His clothes were torn and bloody, and he limped. Arturo was in much the same condition.

As they stood on the sand, with the sound of the waves and the smell of the sea all around them, Arturo turned to Alessandro. "You see," he said, breathing hard and happily. "You're alive. You have fight in you. You'll have fight in you till you die."

"But I don't want to." Alessandro replied.

"Why not?"

"Real power is with those who are forever still, and I want to join them."

"Good God. Why?"

"Because I love them."

"You mean like Hamlet jumping into the grave?"

"Yes."

"You can't do that!" Arturo screamed. "This is the twentieth century. And, besides, he jumped out."

"He climbed out."

"All right, he climbed out. Better that your soul should be on fire. It is on fire, and when you give it air it will flare like the sun. Even I ... My soul is on fire.... I, an accountant!"

 

THAT NIGHT a storm came in from the sea and made the air a three-dimensional battlefield of angry lightning bolts, and thunder that carried on the wind and rattled the hotel as if it were shaking it by the shoulders.

From a rush chair on his balcony Alessandro watched the sea pitch and heave like a cat fighting on its back. Each time the lightning flashed it revealed a massive struggle in the dark, with the surface of the sea as littered and disorganized as a plain where two armies have fought for days.

In the noise of the wind, words came incoherently, and he heard music that sounded as if it were coming from the phonograph on the verandah. In the last movement of the Third Brandenburg, sawing in incomparable glory, came a kind of thump thump thump that Alessandro could not place, and that swelled until it thundered over the forward race of the music like guns echoing in the mountains.

When he was young, he thought, he could bring himself into God's presence by grasping the sharp nettle of beauty, but now he didn't dare.

The whole sky ignited in a painful flash. Another soon followed, and he knew that it would be minutes before he would be able to make out the dim outlines of the sea and beach. Though he was sitting up, he felt as if he were flat on his back, or upside down, twirling in space. Though the pounding sound, much like the beat of a kettle drum, was timed to the insistent tempo of the strings, it overrode them. Whenever it weakened, it took strength again and grew more and more intense, until the whole world seemed to be shaking.

Alessandro strained to identify it. His face contorted in an effort to hear better not its volume but the characteristics of sound within the volume. It was as if he saw clearly an army as it approached, but wanted to know what elements it comprised.

Then, all at once, for no reason that he could name, he realized that the sound that seemed to ride far above the thunder, keeping pace, never faltering, was the beating of a heart, and it said to him, despite all he knew and despite all he had come to believe, that he had not yet lost Ariane.

 

THE NEXT morning, in a thick gray fog, dozens of people pacing unhappily in the halls and public rooms of the hotel made it seem like a mental institution. Gliding nervously over ruby-colored Persian carpets, Alessandro looked the part of an inmate. He hadn't shaved, and had slept only an hour or two, spending enormous energy in dreams.

When Arturo came to get him for lunch he thought Alessandro was ill. "Didn't you sleep last night?" Arturo asked as they raced toward the dining room, almost knocking over old people with canes.

"I slept like an eel. Hurry."

"Why hurry? We'll only have to sit at the table longer before they bring the lunch."

"If we hurry, then maybe they'll hurry."

"What does it matter? Even if the fog does lift, it won't do so until the middle of the afternoon. Where are you off to?"

"I don't know," Alessandro replied. "I think I'm going to leave."

Before Attilia and Raffaello came in from a walk in the fog-shrouded pines, Alessandro played with his silverware, tapping the china and his water glass, balancing and spinning the knife, and twanging it in his ear even though it made no sound.

Arturo tried to engage Alessandro in practical matters. "What did you mean when you said that you were as poor as a swallow, but only temporarily? Do you live on rice and lottery tickets?"

"I don't buy lottery tickets," Alessandro replied vacantly. "Ail my luck kept me alive in the war. Nothing is left for numbers. In ten years, nine now, I'll have an income. It's complicated."

"I'm an accountant."

Alessandro shrugged his shoulders. "My father had a modest estate: bank accounts, some investments, a house on the Gianicolo, and an interest in the building that housed his law offices. He also owned land at the top of the Via Veneto.

"Three times, the army listed me as either missing or killed in action, all after I was supposed to have been executed for desertion. My sister inherited everything, liquidated it all except the land, and moved to America.

"She left what we had in trust with my father's law firm, and, for good or ill, they invested the whole thing, including an immense amount of borrowed money, in the construction of three buildings—a hotel, offices, shops, apartments—on the land. All the income is channeled into repayment of the loans. Depending upon the rents, which will depend upon the development of the city and the economy in general, that should be in eight to ten years.

"At that time I'll be entitled to half the income, as I own half the principal."

Alessandro threw his knife onto the tablecloth. "By that time I'll be forty years old and will have spent the previous fifteen years of my life in combat and working in kitchens, quarries, and gardens."

"But all that time, you've been thinking."

"Thinking, yes, I've been thinking."

"Better to have a font of money in middle age than when you're young. Middle age is the time when you'll need it and appreciate it."

"I'll never appreciate it. I've been trained out of it. I don't want money. I want much more. I want what rarely happens. I want what people are afraid even to imagine."

"Like what?"

"Resurrection, redemption, love."

"Forgive me, Alessandro. I'm not as educated as you, but I am older, and my experience tells me that you may have to be content with less—with the exception of love."

At that moment Attilia and Raffaello entered the dining room, having returned from the beach, their hair sparkling with droplets of water that had been combed from the fog. Sputtering with resentment and discontent, a waiter ladled soup from a large white tureen.

"Signora," Alessandro said to Attilia, addressing her formally, as if to balance his disheveled appearance and gaunt expression, "do you know about dreams? My mother was a master of dreams."

Attilia answered, "For such things your education is appropriate and mine non-existent."

"My education once enabled me to fly like a bird, but what happens to a bird with a broken wing?"

"Then tell me."

"I slept only an hour or two last night, but the dream lasted for weeks and months. I was with my family in a storm. It was sleeting and very cold, and the wind almost pushed us over. We struggled through darkness. We were dying. I was at times the father, and at times the son. When I was the son I worried about my parents and did not want them to die. When I was the father, I was nearly insane with not being able to get my children to safety.

"I also saw the family from without, and at times I was the baby sister, the mother, even the wind. I thought that the child in her mother's arms was dead. Delirious and trembling, we fell by the side of the road, but lying on the ground was no warmer than standing or trying to move forward.

"Then everything went black, with no sound. I don't know how much time passed, but when we awoke it was still snowing, and we were covered with snow. We saw a huge house with lights in all the windows and fires burning within, and we managed to get to our knees. 'Surely they'll help us,' my father said, and sent me to knock on the door.

"It opened when I knocked, but no one was there. Though I called out, there was no answer. Still, we went into the hall.

"The house was beautifully lit, and pale shadows danced on the ceilings. We went to a room where a fire was burning in the fireplace as if it had been made fifteen minutes before. It was so warm that we took off our coats. The kitchen overflowed with every delicacy you could imagine, wrapped as if it had come from the most expensive stores on the Via Condotti. Shawls of soft wool were laid across the couches and chairs, books were stacked on the tables, and children's games were piled in the corner, all brand new.

"'They must have gone out,' my father said, 'perhaps to get their guests. We should wait for them in the hall.' And we did. As the fires burned down, we slept through the night, on the carpet in the hall, and no one came.

"All the time I was waiting for the owners of the marvelous house to return, I saw my parents and my sister only through the corner of my eye. We gradually took possession. We ate, we built up the fires, we read, and, eventually, we slept in the beds.

"At first we were very careful to return everything to its exact position. We sat rather stiffly on the couches so that if the owners came back we could get up and quickly fix the pillows before we apologized and explained, but soon we grew more comfortable, we started to put things down in different places, and we locked the door.

"Living there was wonderful. My father and mother were in love. They joked. My sister and I played happily. And then we looked at each other. We saw that our faces were ashen, entirely drained of all the hot and imperfect colors that show life. And when we realized that we had died, the dream dissolved in the most intense terror I have ever experienced—and I was a soldier of the line, or a prisoner, for almost four years."

"Most dreams are not so straightforward," Attilia said. "What is to interpret? Is it not clear to you? It's so obvious. Don't you know? You still love."

 

WHEN ALESSANDRO left the hotel he felt as if he were deserting the owners at the time of their deepest need. They, however, which is to say the owner's daughter, who was at the desk when Alessandro departed, had no need of his patronage. The summer had been busy and profitable. Usually the place was deserted by this time, and, in fact, they looked forward to the quiet of winter.

But Alessandro burned with guilt. The girl at the desk could not understand why he praised the hotel, which was, at best, threadbare, as if it were one of the Swiss lake palaces. As he described the establishment, insisting that she not refund to him a full week's charges, her eyes widened. She could feel the cool waters of the deep lake parting cold and smooth on either side of the noiseless launch that brought the guests. The sunny glade of firs where it stood was cool enough for the wearing of elaborate and elegant clothing in perfect comfort. And the service of which he spoke could only have been rendered by a corps of ex-cardinals and impoverished noblemen, not by the few oversexed macaques her father caught, day in and day out, peeping through the keyholes.

"I'm so sorry," Alessandro told her.

"That's all right," she answered. "We'll look forward to seeing you next year."

"I had planned to stay another week, but I received an urgent summons." At this, he seemed to sink where he was standing, and the lie pushed the blood into his face with such ferocity that the desk clerk forgot everything else and watched him blaze from crimson to purple.

"Yes," she said. "Perfectly understandable. We'll refund the unused balance. It's our policy."

"No!" he screamed, with an air of madness that pumped even more hot blood into his face. The veins in his forehead stood out so starkly that the desk clerk thought she was witnessing a stroke. And then he left.

She had offered to arrange for a carriage to take him to the station, but he had only a knapsack and had declared that he would walk, and he went ten kilometers in the morning fog that came off the Adriatic. He heard voices in the fog. He could not explain how melancholy he was, not even to himself, and he could not identify the voices, like the chorus at the opera, which now, on account of too many rifle shots and shell bursts, was hard for him to hear, and disappeared as if into the sound of surf, or rain falling heavily on a lake.

Though he could see only a little way ahead, Alessandro thought the road was beautiful. It was a narrow, sandy track between lovely trees that spread their branches as they pleased in the sun and the wind.

Though he knew it was not true, he felt that in Rome someone would be waiting for him. Perhaps it was because the magic of cities is that they provide the illusion of love and family even for those with neither. Lights, the business of the streets, the very buildings close together, the interminable variety and depth, serve to draw lonely people in, and no matter what they know, they still feel in their heart of hearts that someone is waiting to embrace them in perfect love and trust.

Though Ariane was not listed anywhere, either as killed or missing, or even as having served, he had gone from city to city, looking for her, and she had left not a trace. The cities had been desolate, their warmth and comfort an illusion, but whenever his train slowed in the suburbs and began to crawl between the foundries, junk yards, and garages that were the railways escorts into the heart of the town, he took hope, and, as if he were a salesman, his energy flared as he buckled the straps on his luggage and prepared to take to the fast-moving streets.

He finished his walk to the station at ten in the morning. It was a Saturday, represented on the rail schedule by two short columns. The train for Ancona and Rome would depart at 11:32, the train for Bologna and Milan at 1:45 P.M., and the train for Ravenna and Venice at 10:27.

He wanted to sit in the buffet and read the paper while he had tea and a cornetto, but the newspaper stand and the ticket office were closed. The town, though visible on the hillside, was far away, and a sullen woman who manned the buffet alone was not interested in making tea or explaining why she had no cornetti.

He settled for tomato soup, breadsticks, and no newspaper. "No one travels on Saturday morning?" he asked as he paid for the soup.

"Who's here? It's not summer. Everyone sleeps."

Alessandro took a table in front of open doors that faced the empty track. Fog rolled into the buffet where once the summer tourists had gone to escape the heat. The woman disappeared, and Alessandro was now the only person in the station. With his knapsack on a chair, like a traveling companion, the breadsticks in his left hand like a sheaf of wheat, and his foot tapping the marble floor, he ate the soup and listened to the ticking of the clock.

It was an enormously loud railroad-clock. The ticks and the tocks flooded the station. Alessandro looked at it at 10:26. The ticking thundered as he watched the palsied second hand jerk around the face until the minute hand jumped to 10:27. He rested the spoon in the soup and touched his pack. As the second hand continued in its mantis-like race, Alessandro heard a locomotive.

A train pulled in. It hissed, sighed, and gave off sparks. Men jumped down. Doors opened. Doors shut. Though this was the train to Venice, Alessandro stood up, took the pack, and went onto the platform.

A conductor was there, looking at his watch, his hand up, ready to signal the engineer with a whistle and a downward chop. When he saw Alessandro he said, "Let's go!"

 

BEYOND RAVENNA, in a marsh that stretched to a fully circular horizon, the train rocketed from the fog into a dome of bright blue in which every color was concentrated and luminous, whether of the grasses, the shimmering silver channels between them, or the fat sheepish clouds overhead.

The seats near the windows now had little plaques reserving them for men who had been mutilated in the war. The difference between the mutilated and the merely wounded being that the wounded might recover, Alessandro was not sure where he was allowed to sit. Surely if he were in a window seat and a man without a leg or an arm were to come along he would have to give up the seat, but what if the man without a leg or an arm were satisfied and proud? What if he were a criminal? Would Alessandro have to move then? Would he have to strip to engage in a war of scars, or did scars automatically lose to missing limbs, or metal plates in the back of the head? And how did they compare with glass eyes? Did the reservation apply to the blind? Why would the blind need the window side, except perhaps for the better air and the feeling of the afternoon sun on their faces?

At first Alessandro tried to believe that he had boarded the train to Venice because he had a week of vacation remaining, and suddenly a conveniently empty train was ready to take him to a Venice without tourists, in a season that could be either misty or inimitably golden. This, had he believed it, would have been a lie vainly suppressing a dream.

He was not extending his vacation. He cared little for vacations. In the army, he had had no vacations, and before that, as an essay writer and a student of paintings, he had not needed them. He was going to Venice because, after many years of falling, he thought he had the scent of rising.

"Where's your ticket?" a conductor asked. "I've inquired three times now. Are you deaf?"

Alessandro jumped back in surprise, which startled the conductor and made him do precisely the same thing.

"My ticket?"

"Your ticket. This is a train, and you need a ticket."

"For where?"

"Where do you want to go?"

"Venice. I don't have a ticket. I'll have to buy one."

"How many years were you in?" the conductor asked.

Alessandro thought for a moment. "About four."

When the conductor left, Alessandro stuffed the ticket into his pocket and returned to his position at the window, like a soldier who mounts the fire-step and feels his heart beating faster because he has come to the edge. The sea curved to the northeast, where Venice lay, and the train leaned gently to the right as it accelerated in that promising direction.

 

HE ARRIVED in Venice late enough in the afternoon so that by the time he had wandered from the station to the Ponte dell'Accademia, dusk had softened the sky. The moon had risen, gigantic and full, as if to collide with the domes of Santa Maria della Salute, but it cleared them and it floated in the luminous air as weightless as a song.

Liners lay at anchor in the Canale di San Marco, strung with chains of lights that made them look like whitened cities or illuminated mountains of snow. Languorous traffic on the canal broke the silver carpet that the moon had laid down, and rolled across it in barely audible swells. People had begun to filter through the streets to the squares, where they sat at tables outdoors, in sweaters. The weather was perfect, the air clear, and the city empty.

Alessandro found a pensione near the bridge and left his pack in the middle of a bed that the proprietress told him she used for five soldiers or eight Dutch tourists at a time. It was so big, she said, that she also used it for drunks, because once they were in the middle it was nearly impossible for them to fall out.

He went back into the open air, to a cafe in a garden behind a wrought-iron fence. Though not hungry, he had begun to feel ill, and he forced himself to eat so as to gain strength for what might come.

The meal he ordered was simple: pesce al vino bianco, bread, a salad, and mineral water. When the waiter brought the bread Alessandro felt weak and feverish. By the time he had paid the check, his heart was throbbing in his chest, he panted, sweated, and sharp pains ran through his body, leaving no place untouched.

Walking back to the pensione was so difficult that he despaired when he thought he had taken a wrong turn and would have to retrace his steps. The proprietress was not in. He found his room, locked the door, and crawled onto the huge bed.

He had opened the window, and the moon, now as cold and white as the moon in winter, flooded in so brightly that it hurt his eyes. Everything hurt his eyes. He dared not moan, fearing that if he were heard he would be forced into a clinic, so he breathed in pain but made no sound. Instead, he spoke with his hands, flailing in the air or clenching his fists, and discovered that such a language was perfectly adequate for the purpose, and perhaps even superior. Moving felt better than screaming, even if the proprietress would think, from the rocking of the bed, that he had brought a woman home, and would attempt the next morning to charge him for two.

Whatever was coursing through his body, whether food poisoning, an infection acquired from one of the invalids at the resort, or something else, was fast, relentless, and growing in its power. After a few hours, the moon had worked its way from the room and had begun to spray the buildings across the canal with fusillades of cold light.

The notion of dying alone on a bed that had held eight Dutchmen at a time infuriated and saddened him. All the years at high speed on the backs of dangerous horses, all the years clinging to precipices and ledges above the clouds, and all the bayonets, artillery shells, and machine-gun bullets that had been marvelously rerouted around him, were to be overshadowed by a microbe that felled him in a cheap hotel. The woman would find him in the morning, not a soul would show up for his burial, and he would be interred far from his parents, in a nameless grave in the wet and rotten soil of an island in the lagoon.

He had no fight left. He held his knapsack and bent his head into it as if it were someone he loved. He touched a leather strap on the pack as if it were the warm and delicate hand of Ariane, and he stared at the moonlight whitening the palisade of stone across the canal. Vaguely, softly, in the distance, a woman with a clear and loving voice sang a beautiful aria in the sound of which Alessandro thought he was going to die.

 

WHO WAS this that arrived half an hour before closing and slowly took the stairs, ignoring all the paintings? Every guard in every museum in the world gets a nervous stomach when such people enter his precincts, for these unshaven glassy-eyed men are the ones who pull knives from their jackets and destroy works close to the soul of man. They are the ones who use ball-peen hammers to knock the noses off marble Madonnas. They attack paintings because in every great painting they see the somber flash of God, they see themselves as the truth would have it, and they see all that enrages them for the lack of it.

A museum guard who resembled, at best, a type of French railway guard of very slight stature, slicked-down black hair, poor health, and too much to drink, followed

Alessandro across the highly polished floor with a gait so apprehensive and full of fear that he sounded like a prancing dog with untrimmed nails.

Alessandro wheeled around and glowered at him. "Are you positioning yourself to bite my behind!" he shouted.

The guards mouth tightened, and he screwed up all his courage. "This is a museum," he said.

"I know it's a museum," Alessandro replied.

"That's all I want to say."

Alessandro turned away and walked through the wide portals from room to room, until he was in the presence of Giorgione's painting.

"That is La Tempesta," the guard said, having stuck right by him.

"I see," Alessandro said.

"It's very beautiful, and no one knows what it means."

"What do you think it means?" Alessandro asked.

"I think it's going to rain and that guy is wondering why she's going to take a bath."

"Probably that's it."

"They say no one will ever know."

"It was to have been the story of my life," Alessandro said with the kind of affection that one devotes to defeat that has come so close to victory as to be able to kiss it. "I was a soldier, the world was battered in a storm, and she was under a canopy of light, untouched, the baby in her arms."

"Were you in the fighting? Then it could be you," the guard said, suddenly of the opinion that Alessandro was not a slasher but, instead, one of the many unhappy soldiers who filled the streets of the cities, their hearts and minds lost in memories of the war. "You find a woman, you get married, binga, binga, binga, binga, you got a baby."

"It's not that simple."

"Why?"

"Just believe me."

"All right, I believe you."

Alessandro could feel the high wind coming and hear the rattle of the leaves in the trees as they shuddered and swayed. As the rain approached, the light seemed both tranquil and doomed. The soldier was serene because he had been through many a storm, and the woman was serene because she had at her breast the reason for all history and the agent of its indefatigable energy. Between them floated a bolt of lightning that joined and consecrated them.

"Sometimes," the guard said, "people come in here and stare at this painting for a long time, and they cry."

After a silence in which something seemed to have been building very rapidly, Alessandro asked, "Who? Soldiers?"

"Well, no, not soldiers."

Without changing the position of his feet, Alessandro made a quarter turn toward the guard. "Who?"

"All kinds of people."

"Yes?"

"What do you want me to do, name them?" the guard asked.

"Tell me about them."

"Why?"

"I'm one of them, am I not? I want to know."

"It's almost time to close."

"Will you be here tomorrow?"

"I'll be here, but I won't be able to tell you anything then that I can't tell you now."

"So tell me now."

"Oh! What do you want me to do? Describe them?"

"Yes. Describe them."

"All right. There was a gentleman, about ten years older than you..."

"Go on to the next one."

"I didn't say anything!"

"I'm not interested in him. Go on."

The guard looked at Alessandro with an expression that said he was returning to his initial assessment of Alessandro's mental condition. "There was another guy," he began.

"I'm not interested in him either."

"This is crazy," the guard said.

"Keep on."

"I suppose you're not interested in the old lady..."

"No."

"...who lost her husband."

"No."

"Or the woman ... who came in ... with a baby." Alessandro did not interrupt. In the habit of being interrupted, the guard echoed his last words. "With a baby." After a long silence, he said, "And stood in front of the painting, and cried."

Assaulted by electricity rising along his spine and traveling out upon the path of his limbs, Alessandro quietly asked, "When was this?"

"A while ago. Sometime in the spring. It was still raining and rather cold. I wore wool and ate soup for lunch because it was so cold."

"If you remember that," Alessandro stated cautiously, "perhaps you have an extraordinary memory for details."

"Not extraordinary," the guard said proudly, "but, you know, you stand here all day looking at paintings, and, unless you're an idiot, you learn to notice things. You remember."

"What was she like?" Alessandro asked.

"She was very pretty."

"What color was her hair?"

"Blond, but she was an Italian."

"How do you know?"

"Because," the guard said, rightfully proud to have remembered, "she spoke Italian. She also spoke to the baby in French. She was well educated, and those kind of people speak French to their babies."

"The color of her eyes?"

"I don't remember. I never remember the color of people's eyes."

"What was she wearing?"

"That I wouldn't know either, but my wife could tell you. She remembers clothing from forty years ago."

"Your wife saw her?"

"No no, I mean if she had seen her."

"And you saw her only once?"

"Once that I know of. That doesn't mean she wasn't here more than once."

"What else do you know about her?"

"Nothing. The baby was well behaved. It didn't cry."

"What else?"

"Nothing. That's all."

"Think!"

"I can't."

"Close your eyes."

"I shouldn't close my eyes."

"Why not?"

"All right, if you go over there," the guard said, pointing to the center of the floor.

Alessandro walked obediently to the center. "Closing! Closing! Closing!" the guards were calling out as Alessandro's guard closed his eyes. Alessandro prayed faster than he knew what he was praying for.

"I do!" the guard said, with his eyes still closed.

"You do what?"

He opened his eyes. "I do remember something. One more thing. She carried the child on her hip, in a sash. Baby carriages are not very practical in Venice. And when you walk around with a kid, you have to carry stuff for it. So she carried all the things she needed in a canvas bag, the kind they give to tourists who go out to the Lido for a day. They put their lunch, and a book, and their bathing costumes in these bags. You see them in the summer."

"And what does that tell me?"

"They have the name of the hotel on the bag," the guard said, and smiled.

"And you remember."

"Yes I do. You know why? I'll tell you why. It's a small hotel near the Campo San Margherita. I know because I used to live close by and I passed it every day on my way to work. It was the Hotel Magenta. That's what it said on the bag—Magenta. I knew there was something."

"Closing! Closing!" the other guards called in high voices that echoed through the galleries.

Alessandro's guard looked at his watch. "Really," he said, "it's time to go home now. Say goodbye to the painting, because it's time to go home."

 

ALESSANDRO LEANED against a wrought-iron fence tangled in the soft spirals of young vines. Across the street was the Hotel Magenta, now, in spite of the early fall weather, almost empty. A clerk in a fair imitation of a British admiral's uniform appeared and disappeared from behind the desk with the regularity of a metronome. Alessandro watched him noiselessly bob among the bright lamps and polished brass. The hotel, though small and not well known, was elegant. The only hint of the color magenta was a sash-like magenta line that fell across the upper left-hand corner of a menu posted in a lighted glass case on the fence opposite Alessandro.

He planned to stay in the hotel rather than merely interrogate the staff, who would not remember anything unless they were in exactly the right frame of mind, but he was unsure of what exactly to ask, or why he would be asking. Many women had babies and spoke French. What did it have to do with him? But what if he had been wrong from the start, and the woman he had seen on an upper floor of the clinic had not been Ariane but someone who closely resembled her, or if, in the instant he had looked up at the attacking airplanes, time had elongated, as it does in battle, and, before the building was destroyed, she had simply walked out the back?

The child? The child could be his. Why hadn't she looked for him? The question was easy to answer in light of how many times he had been reported dead.

Like the clerk he watched, he bobbed between one thing and another. Hope would flare and he would shudder with the strong emotion appropriate to the presence or the imagination of miracles, but then his head would sink, and he would draw in a very different breath than the one that preceded it, weary and full of inexplicable friction, when he believed that he was deluding himself.

It would be safer, less painful, and even cheaper to go back to Rome. If he slowly began to work, and gradually took up the life of a bourgeois, teaching and writing until the money came through, time might make of him a different man.

He knew, however, that time only stripped and revealed, and he had never approached an important question in any way but to ask everything. As he stood in the darkening street, he recognized a pattern in his life. He had learned very quickly, not merely by devoted study but by some natural sympathy, to enter so fully into a painting or a song that he could cross into a world of harrowing beauty and there receive, as he floated on air, the deep, absolute, and instant confirmation of hopes and desires that in normal life are a matter only of speculation and debate.

That was all changed, however, and quickly, during the war. Sometimes after an exploding shell, blood and limbs rained down upon soldiers who were too shocked to move, and who stood as if they had been caught in a sudden downpour, and at such moments Alessandro had been ashamed of the life that had taught him to trust and hope.

The debate between his alternating states of belief would not be resolved until he was unable to report the result, and, like darkness and light, his conviction lingered neither at dusk nor at dawn. Why should it have? The answer lay not in compromise, but in one thing or the other.

"I've been walking in the Brenta," he told the clerk. "I need a good dinner, a room with a bath, and a laundry."

The clerk quoted the price of a room. It was excessive.

"Does it have a balcony?"

"No. The one above it has, and an extra-large bath. It is, however, nearly twice the price."

"Give it to me," Alessandro commanded, rapidly writing his name on the registration card. He tipped the astonished clerk with a week of his own salary.

"Here," Alessandro said when they reached the room, and handed over to the stunned young man yet another weeks salary.

At dinner he was especially lavish, but he did not ask a single question. He hoped that in the morning, when word of his largesse had spread, not a soul in the hotel would be hesitant to provide him the answer to any question he might pose.

He tried not to, but that night, in a room with a balcony, in the Hotel Magenta, in a bed made with thick white sheets that had been carefully pressed and were cold to the touch, he lay thinking of Ariane as if she were alive.

 

AT BREAKFAST Alessandro had two waiters, and the chef leaned from the kitchen to behold him. He passed more money around, as if he were not wealthy, but mad. Each time he put a banknote into someone's hand he thought of it not as the pair of shoes, fountain pen, or two years' subscription he would have to do without, but as an inconsequential sum that he was placing on a wager of unprecedented returns, even if he doubted it would go his way. You cannot by force of will undo events, he told himself. You cannot by assaulting the wage structure of a small hotel hope to resurrect the dead. And you do not make miracles by getting on the wrong train.

As he lingered over breakfast he thought back to the many times he had seen the dead jumping off a trolley or walking briskly up a street. He had recognized their faces, their clothing, their gaits, and even after they had objected that he was looking at them as if they had risen from the tomb, he still thought he saw them, and he felt the same way that shepherdesses feel when, on their rocky fragrant hillsides, they see the Virgin.

His father had appeared, in the uniform of a major, in the trenches beside him, and though he hadn't known his son, it was he. Others, too, came back, at least momentarily, perhaps only because he wanted them to. Shrouds are very light. When they are stretched over a corpse the air in the room can move them just enough for someone devastated by grief to think that the person for whom he grieves is breathing and alive. Call the nurses. Call the doctors. Something astonishing has happened. He's alive. You only thought that he was dead. Even when the shroud is pulled back, the chest seems gently to rise and fall. Some have waited a long time for the person who is breathing to wake, in minutes more dramatic than the fall of empires.

"Can you help me in regard to a woman who stayed here earlier this year?" Alessandro asked the clerk, who had returned to his post.

"Of course. What was her name?"

Alessandro told him. "She had a child with her."

The clerk scanned his register, leafing rapidly through the pages. "No," he said, "no such person from the beginning of the year until now."

"Do you have an indication of any woman with a child? Is your register configured to show..."

"Yes," the clerk said, rotating the register on its pivot. "It would say, and child, or, occupied by so and so, son, or daughter, for older children."

Alessandro spent half an hour with the register. He even looked for Ariane under his own name, in case she had taken it. He found nothing. Only in two instances had women stayed alone with children. They were English. Perhaps they were war widows, or they were going to join their husbands in the East. In fall and winter the British often went through Venice because the Adriatic was better protected from storms than the Tyrrhenian.

"Are you certain that everyone stopping here would be registered in this book?"

"It's the law," the clerk said.

Alessandro tipped him yet again, and went back to his room. He started to fall asleep, but before he could dream he jumped from the bed and ran from the room. The long airy corridor was carpeted in red and gold. Down this path he sprinted until he got to the stairs. Then he sprinted some more, shuttling through the halls as he tried to catch the maid.

On the third floor he saw a cart from which brooms were upended like gathered daffodils, and he lost his breath as if he had discovered the Chariot of Ur. "I forgot to tip you!" he shouted at an older woman, who clutched at her heart in fear. He peeled banknotes desperately from a stack, and, as if he were bribing an executioner, he refused to stop.

When the woman had received a month of her wages she thanked him so much that he couldn't get in a single word. He put his finger to his lips, and said "Signora!" And when she was quiet, she was interrogated. She may even have feared that he would take the money back, even though she had put it in a pocket and buttoned the flap, but she couldn't tell him what he wanted to know. She was distressed when she told him of the two Englishwomen and their children, for they spoke neither Italian nor French, one woman had a boy of about eight, and, the other, two adolescent girls.

"Anyone else? A baby, a little baby? A mother with blond hair."

"No," said the maid. "I'm so sorry. No."

Alessandro opened the windows wide in his room, and the sea air, filtered by several ranks of buildings and the tops of trees, blew in from the Adriatic. At first the rim of sea over the tree-tops was blue, but as the afternoon wore on, it turned to pearl gray flecked with painful sunlight. The air was cool and clear when Alessandro fell asleep under a thick duvet. Whenever he slept during the day, he burned as if he had a fever. At dusk, sea and sky were indistinguishably blue-green. He thought he was in a dream, and had to splash water on his face six times before he was confident that he would be awake enough to order dinner.

Perhaps because a ship had docked, or a tour had booked the hotel, the dining room was full to capacity, with at least a hundred people, and it had the noisy, hot, beehive-like quality of an eating establishment running at full throttle. The sounds of metal striking china, china on china, and metal against metal never stopped. Neither did the swinging door to the kitchen cease weaving back and forth for an instant, like a valve in the heart.

Though they tried, the waiters were unable to be as attentive as they would have liked. Alessandro got his soup, his bread, his beefsteak, and his salad, and then, only when he asked, a bottle of mineral water. He ate quietly, observing the women in new-style hats, and, at one table, a family of five, who said nothing as they ate and then rose from their chairs and left in different directions.

He would leave in the morning. He had enough money for a third-class ticket to Rome.

 

IN ROME the grass grows even in January and crops come in, albeit slowly, in December and February. Unrestrained by cold and rain, a brilliant day can flare into a remnant of the golden autumn. Gardeners prune and cut. They trim hedges, rake leaves, chase away cats, and, if the weather is dry, they make bonfires of branches and stalks. White smoke rises all over the city. Because the grass and trees are not dessicated, as in August, the gardeners never fear to walk away from these fires when it is time to go home, and the fires, or what is left of them, glow in the night like jack-o'-lanterns, hissing at their abandonment.

When the other gardeners did go home, Alessandro knelt and held his hands out to the ash and embers. He would listen to the wind as it whistled through the Aurelian Wall, the orchards, and the pines that sounded like the surf. When he stayed his extra hour or two in the dark no one saw him, because everyone was inside, where the lights were bright.

Often, he had dinner in the railroad workers' cafeteria, where he was taken for a railroad worker. Even though it was open to all, people who didn't look the part were uncomfortable there. Alessandro didn't like to eat at home, not even breakfast. When you go to bed alone and arise alone, the sound of even a teaspoon in a china cup, very early in the morning, can be as graceless as the sound of a freight train slithering diagonally through a railyard, deliberately slow, scraping every switch.

One night in December he came late, for cold chicken, soup, a hard-boiled egg, and salad. He hadn't read the newspaper and didn't feel qualified to join the continual debates about communism, Leninism, socialism, capitalism, fascism, and syndicalism. The debaters, anyway, were the people he had encountered all his life who thought that art should be detached, and politics the seat of passion and emotion. Though Alessandro was well versed in political theory and could go quickly to the heart of nearly any intellectual question, he told those who tried to talk to him about theory or revolution that he wasn't qualified to discuss it, that he preferred to cut and burn branches. He preferred to see a little cupped flower that had just burst through the ground on a short stem, he told them, than to talk about remaking the world. "I am a simple man," he would say.

But, as he was eating, he had no choice but to listen to some fascists who had come down from Milan. One of them, a real bullet-head, was magnetic, showing both incredible pettiness and a form of distorted grandeur. Many of the railroad workers stopped eating as he spoke, and if a railroad worker stopped eating, it meant that something was happening. Alessandro feared that the fascists would flirt with the Left, that, rather than destroy one an other, they would combine, but he could not see it happening for at least five or ten years—the country was too exhausted. Surely the bullet-head, who was as ridiculous as he was compelling, would go nowhere.

Alessandro generally arrived home late. His room was so austere that it was good only for sleep, but in the morning the world started anew. He was always out in the air early, before anyone but bakers and newspaper deliverers, because the air and the sky kept him alive, and he knew it.

One night when he came home he lit the lamp and adjusted the wick until the light was as brassy as the sun in southern India, and his jacket was already half off when he saw that a letter had been slipped under the door. He pulled the jacket back on, and stared at the envelope.

He never received letters. His financial business, such as it was, was handled by his fathers old firm. He was going to transfer some of it to Arturo if things worked out, but for now he used the law firm's address for everything of that nature, and he received no other type of mail, because he no longer knew anyone.

He had written to Ariane, and his first letter to her had begun with the thought that her death had made his letters to her soliloquies. Of course, he did not mail the letters, and had he mailed them he would not have been able to address them, and had he hallucinated an address, they would not have reached it, and had they reached it, they would not have been answered.

He stooped to pick up the envelope, and returned to the lamp. The letter was from Venice, on the stationery of the Hotel Magenta. He went quickly through a salutation and four or five lines of awkward formalities in an unpracticed hand. Then he read very carefully.

 

I have not written until now because my sister's daughter Gisella was confirmed in December and I had to make something for her, I work in wood. I made an ocean liner with little electric lights that shine through the port holes, she keeps it in her room and looks at it before she goes to sleep.

Maria told me you asked her about some people. Others said the same. They described them to me. I am a waiter and I was not working when you were here. Last spring a mother and a child, a boy of about two, ate in the restaurant several times. I probably would not have remembered except that I love children especially, and this baby was very beautiful, as was his mother, and he had a boat, a sailboat made from wood, so I noticed because ever since I was in the navy in Libya, or off Libya, I don't know, I have been making boats out of wood.

It was the kind of racing schooner that children try to sail in fountains but they're not rigged right for real sailing. Make sure there's a long pole around so you can retrieve it! Well I thought you would want to know. They were here. Even though they weren't guests of the hotel I gave the mother a bag for carrying the boat—a picnic sack that we have in the kitchen, the boat fit just right. I had wanted to get it back but when I saw how perfect it fit I said keep it and she did. She is a Romana. She told me that her husband was killed in the war but that she could not get assistance and lives with her cousin or a sister or some such.

The boy sails his boat in the Villa Borghese. I held him and kissed him. The mother was moved, and it reminded me of my own son when he was small. I think they came twice, they never came back, if I see them I will tell them about you. We have put a check next to your name in the register in case we forget.

 

Sincerely yours,
Roberto Genzano

 

Throughout the winter of 1920–21, Alessandro went to the fountain in the Villa Borghese, where in summer children tried to sail boats in no breeze and watched as they were becalmed out of reach. But for the coin-sized leaves that chased around it in gusts of winter wind, the fountain was empty. In the spring, a man like Alessandro, someone who had been outside for much of the winter and knew the feeling of cold, wind, rain, and darkness, would spend an hour or two cleaning out the basin. He would polish the grayling spigots, clear the drains, and turn the valve that would open the pipes to a sparkling flow of water. The water would spill out and splash upon the floor, slicking it down, and then rise to a depth of a few centimeters. While no one watched, the stream would flow steadily until the basin was full, a perfectly round lake of fresh water that was never still, where dogs could drink, old men could dip their handkerchiefs before tying them around their heads, and children could sail their boats.

Sometimes at dusk Alessandro returned to the fountain and for half an hour or more turned what was gray into blue. In the silence and the chill, he fired up the sun, leafed the trees, and populated the park with children and their mothers.

On the walk from the Gianicolo to the Villa Borghese his dreams became more and more exquisite. Each time he crossed the city he grew happy thinking about what might await him. He never believed that it was not a delusion, that it had not arisen from his love, his loneliness, and every canvas he had ever seen of the Virgin and Child. Perhaps it had arisen from the Giorgione itself, and he had begun to live the painting.

Throughout the winter, as he worked, he imagined a world so perfect and just that sometimes he forgot it was not real. "Have you taken up religion?" one of the gardeners asked as they dug the foundation for a cold-frame.

"No. Why do you ask?" Alessandro replied.

"The way you talk to yourself, and the way you smile at cats and birds. Only priests and crazy people smile at cats. You talk to someone."

Alessandro kept on digging. "And what if I had?"

"What?"

"What if I had taken up religion?"

"Nothing. Nothings wrong with that," the gardener said, leaning forward and brushing the dirt off his hands. "But what religion?"

"What religion do you think?"

"Buddhism?"

"Buddhism! Why Buddhism?"

"Don't they worship cats?"

Alessandro laughed. "Not cats, frogs."

"Frogs, you worship frogs?"

"The frog god," Alessandro said, still digging, "lives in foundation drains. If you see him, if you just catch sight of his foot, he makes you vomit uncontrollably for sixty-eight hours."

"Why?"

"He likes to be alone."

"Why does he like to be alone?"

"He needs time," Alessandro said, straightening up and addressing the gardener directly.

"You're fooling," the other gardener said. "There's no frog."

"Before you disbelieve me," Alessandro said, "ask yourself how I knew where all the pipes were buried."

"How did you know?"

In March he quit.

 

EVEN THOUGH he no longer worked in the gardens of the Gianicolo, he summoned them in memory and he knew every tree bending in the wind, every shoot, every rustling leaf, the scent of the grass, the color of the sky, the dusk, the dawn, and the rain. Most of all he remembered the hot and glowing fires that he and the others made from branches that had lain in dead heaps, splin tered and wet, black with rain, and yet they had burned, and the heat that came from the heart of the wood fought the winter nights well.

He began to groom himself for Ariane as if he were courting her. He took a job as a night clerk in a telegraph office, translating short paragraphs into and from half a dozen languages. The wires were busy almost all the time, singing across mountain ranges and seas, with messages of the deepest import, birthday telegrams, and orders for wing collars.

He rented an apartment that was far more respectable than the one he abandoned. It was small, but it overlooked a garden, and Alessandro put real furniture in it. He had begun to build a new library. That Luciana had sold his books was a blow akin to yet another death. Now, at least, the new books sometimes made him feel that not everything had changed.

He wore a white suit when the weather gave him the slightest excuse, not the bright white of Mexico or India, but a much warmer color, almost cream, that made his face glow. His face had changed. His eyes were deeper, and he had a slowness of expression. One could see that his thoughts were drifting like fast clouds.

He was happy that even after the many years that had passed since he had first quit civilian life he could still be frivolous enough to harbor an affectation—a cane that rounded out the suit and tapped like a horse against the cobbles.

When he went to the Villa Borghese at the end of April he looked like a man who was much older. He took a bench in the sun, near the fountain, and he watched, his cane resting beside him, a book or newspaper on his lap, his hair blowing in the wind like untended grass.

April was too cold. Though he sat for hours listening to the graceful unburdening of the fountain—and of this he never tired—no one came. That is, no one came to sail a boat. Every night, Alessandro would go home, and in the space between his arrival and the time when he had to leave for work he would sit in dejection, his head bent. He breathed as slowly as someone who has sustained a wound, and then the image of Ariane filled him with happiness and warmth, as if he were holding her, and the next day he would have the strength to go again to the Villa Borghese.

Sometimes he slept in the sun for an hour or two, for he never had enough sleep, and he feared that they had come and gone while he had been sleeping. The first two weeks in May were unusually cold, and then it was hot.

People came out in large numbers. Alessandro carefully watched the boats becalmed in the fountain and the children who stood at the edge. In the third week of May, he abandoned the newspaper and concentrated upon the children. He found tremendous satisfaction in observing their faces. When he saw a father cradling a child in his arms, the father admiring the child, the child floating, Alessandro felt neither envy nor distance.

The end of the month was complicated by rain, and for several days Alessandro failed to awaken in time to go to the Villa Borghese except late in the afternoon. He thought that June would be better, and that if he were to have asked a statistician to determine when children were most likely to sail their boats in fountains, or, if not that, when their mothers were most apt to take them walking in the park, the answer would be always June. Among other things, June is the month when children first recognize summer and when their mothers are positive of its arrival. It is the month of vacations and the influx of tourists, and when the sun attains its full glory but not its greatest heat.

Perhaps the woman, whether or not she was Ariane, had been ill. Perhaps the child had been ill. Perhaps they had moved, or were visiting, or had lost interest in the park, or had been there just when he was not. And perhaps he had seen them many times, the mother and child who had been in Venice, and they were strangers.

***

AT THE end of June, Alessandro abandoned his customary bench and moved to the south side of the fountain. Many more people used the south path because the trees were thicker on the north and their shadows were like a barrier. On the south side the sun did not strike Alessandro properly. It seemed to aim for his right eye and the right side of his neck. If for hours these relatively unexposed parts of him were in direct light, he would get a sunburn.

He could not, however, bring himself to move. He told himself that it wouldn't matter, and he didn't move. Riveted to the bench, he remembered the stories he had heard of the soldiers of the line who had seen angels—whole battalions of them. The angels flew above the no-man's-lands between the trenches, and, as they flew, the souls of the bodies that lay upon the artillery-turned soil decomposing into paste rose to join them. Only the battered formations reported angels, and only in the course of difficult battles. No dissenters challenged their accounts. Nothing is as beautiful as an angel, the soldiers said. They moved in massive numbers ten or twenty meters above the ground. They looked ahead undisturbed, giving off light in pulses that made the landscape glow, beautiful insubstantial beings who had themselves seen God. The souls, too, were visible as they ascended, and the luminous host could be seen from a great distance away as it moved in the vast and terrible spaces along the line. Many of the soldiers assumed that the world would end the night they saw the angels, and, for some, it did.

Not only had he abandoned his customary place, but he was unable to read the paper. He would start a column and follow it to the end, remembering nothing. Was it so much to ask that, several years before, Ariane might have walked out of a building before it collapsed? Would that demand the reordering of the universe? The contradiction of physics? It would not, and yet it would be a miracle, still, unimpeachable even by divisions, whole armies, of skeptics.

And yet it was far too much to ask, if only because he wanted it so much, and he stopped asking. As the afternoon grew hot, he began to dry up, and he felt the future on its way. Nothing would come of his beliefs or desires.

He folded his newspaper and was about to stand. In the corner of his eye he saw a white flash from the east side of the fountain as the narrow triangle of a racing schooner darted for its motionless station near the center, where only the water would slowly push it to the edge, not the wind and not its sail.

The child who had launched it was a boy of about three, whose hair was pure gold in the sun. His eyes were brown, he wore blue shorts and a white cotton shirt, and he had the face of a child who carries a great burden.

Alessandro looked beyond him at three women sitting on a bench. Two were talking. The third was sewing, and it was she who had her eyes on the little boy with the boat.

Ariane was nowhere to be seen. Alessandro stood up and began to walk in the direction of the Tiber, but after he had gone a few steps he turned to go the other way, because he had decided that he wanted to pass by the construction on the top of the Via Veneto, to see the changes in the land for the sake of which his father had sold the garden.

The last time he had walked by, iron beams had begun to rise from the foundation, and he wanted to see how high they had risen.

As he rounded the fountain he looked again at the child. The boy looked directly at Alessandro, and pointed to his boat. He wanted Alessandro to get it for him with the cane.

"It's too short," Alessandro said, "and the water is too deep."

The child refused to accept that Alessandro could not help him. He pointed again.

Alessandro stepped toward him. He was going to bend forward slightly and explain, but the words caught in his chest, and he stopped abruptly. Just beyond the boy, hidden from Alessandro's sight until he had moved closer, was a worn canvas bag with loops for handles.

The side facing him was blank. He grasped the bag by the loops. At this the woman on the bench stood up and walked toward them. As Alessandro turned the bag, almost as if in slow motion, he saw letters on the other side, in self-referential color— Magenta.

"What's your name?" Alessandro asked the child.

"Paolo."

"And your last name?"

Before he could answer, the child looked up. The woman had arrived. Though she was not Ariane, she, too, had blue eyes, and Alessandro tried to check his reckless conclusion that she might be the cousin.

"Good afternoon," she said, in a careful but challenging voice.

Alessandro could hardly breathe. "Are you his mother?"

"No," she said, as if she meant, What of it?

He trembled. "Is his mother's name Ariane?"

"Yes," the woman answered, relaxing. "Do you know her?"