A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

  Alessandro's image of the waves and the wind on the sea made him narrow his eyes and sent cool sparkling bolts of electricity coursing through him. Enrico followed suit and shuddered even as he ran, starting ahead as if he had been stung.

  As he was thinking about his marvelous advantage and comfortable long lead, Alessandro was knocked forward by a huge blast from behind. He turned in the saddle, and he saw a great light suspended high in the air. He was so shocked that it took him a second or two to realize that it was the headlamp of a locomotive running on the track next to the road. Gradually the locomotive pulled up even. The blur of its rods and wheels, the steam that issued from steel, the distance chased down and beaten by fire, the ten thousand sounds, and the complex and contradictory movements that combined to push it forward along the two silky rails that lay before it, were like a dream.

  Two men in the cab and one on the coal car were smiling at him and waving their arms. They knew neither that he was chasing Lia Bellati nor fleeing the carabinieri. They were lighthearted in the fine weather. They were proud of their engine. They wanted to race.

  Why not? Alessandro looked through heat that bent the light, and raised his right hand, his thumb pointed up. The black locomotive churned the air and clattered over the silver rails. The fireman began to shovel coal into the firebox, and the engineers stopped smiling. As their speed increased, the concoction of hysterical pistons and spokes moved into a frenzy that drew Alessandro to it as if it were the magnetic black water under a bridge: he had to fight not to lean in its direction.

  Now and then he passed astonished people on the road. Had two carts blocked the way he would have jumped them. He didn't think he could beat the train, and had the race lasted longer he would not have, but they approached the forest, and the horse, who could smell it, stretched forward as if carried on the thundering engine's invisible bow waves.

  When the race was over they rose into the green. The forest took them as Alessandro had thought it would, lightly and gently. They ran through it, disappearing into its shadows, and gradually they slowed. Enrico was dancing as smoothly through the brush as a swallow that maneuvers through a tangle of trees.

  HAD LIA taken the Laurentina, Alessandro thought, she probably would have broken off toward the sea on a particular road that followed the course of a clear stream. This was the most direct route, and the prettiest, and, after swimming in the sea, one had merely to push from the waves into the stream's pulsating plume, traveling up the transparent shallows to emerge free of salt and chill, for even in early spring the currents could be as warm as bath water.

  That she intended to swim alone, and had ridden alone to such a deserted place, puzzled him. Though the countryside around Rome was neither Sicily nor Calabria, it was not safe for an unaccompanied woman, it never had been, and it never would be. He turned almost blue with the thought that she might have—indeed, must have—met a lover on the road, in which case his triple race would have been for nothing, and his shame would drive him to emigrate to Argentina. He began to think about Argentina, and it was not unpleasant, but before he left he would stand by the stream that flowed into the sea and watch as Lia and her lover emerged from the dunes. What an exquisite look he would give them. His expression would be that of a spurned horseman on foot in a Budapest cafe, who, about to shoot himself in the head, would glance at the woman he loved, and smile. All was forgiven, if only because everything was so magnificently bittersweet. Even at twenty, Alessandro knew that he had been dazzled by the greatness of Pushkin, and that, despite the pronouncements of opera, Italians were far more practical in these matters than were the Central Europeans who wore epaulets and bearskin helmets and killed themselves in cafes or jumped out of windows with playing cards in their hands. Nonetheless, many Italians, including Garibaldi, had gone to Argentina and come away better, far-seeing men with white mustaches, wrinkled faces, and eyes that had grown wise in the Andes, so to speak.

  While Enrico lapped the warm river water and Alessandro was planning the layout of a hacienda on the Pampas, Lia rode over the crest of the dunes. She was struck by the fact that Enrico had stretched out his long neck and carefully spread his forelegs so he could drink, and that Alessandro, after having done the impossible, was lost in thought. He might have been strutting back and forth on his horse, amazed that he had beaten her overwhelming head start, but he seemed almost to be unhappy, and she liked that more even than she knew.

  As her cavalry mount, his head held high for balance, quietly slid down the cool sand, Alessandro turned in surprise.

  "You must have flown," she said. "I pushed my horse all the way.

  "We cut through the forest." He looked down at Enrico. "He thinks it's his duty to jump fences and walls, to go through the bushes and the trees like a rabbit, and to cover great distances without tiring—and I never told him it wasn't."

  "They used to ride like that in Argentina," she said.

  "Argentina?" Alessandro asked, in amazement.

  "My father was overseeing the construction of a rail line from Bahía Blanca to Buenos Aires."

  "I thought your father was a banker."

  "Who do you think provides the money to construct railroads?"

  "How long were you there?"

  "A few years. The beaches there are more beautiful," she said, looking out at the sea. Her hair was kept in motion rhythmically by the breeze that came off the waves. "There weren't any people for tens of kilometers. I used to swim in the sea with nothing, not even a ring."

  She reddened across her face and neck, and, although he could not see it, her chest and shoulders. The heat began to travel even down her back, but the wind ballooned her clothing and cooled her.

  "Was it dangerous?" Alessandro asked. They had begun to walk their horses, south of the stream, toward Anzio.

  "The waves were high, but the currents were gentle," she answered.

  "I mean without clothes."

  "I wasn't alone."

  Alessandro felt like a rock that is thrown into an unfathomably deep sector of the sea. In imagination of yet another of her lovers, he knew oblivion.

  "I had a horse."

  "What if someone had come along?"

  "Who?"

  "Someone of horrendous intentions."

  "There wasn't anyone for as far as you could see."

  Alessandro nodded. Still, he could not help but feel irritation at the scandalous behavior that, were he to marry her, would reflect badly upon him. Something was wrong if a beautiful and delicate young woman were so careless with herself. "What if someone did come?" he asked. "What if a man had been hiding in the dunes? No one was around to help, except your horse."

  "My horse would have been enough."

  "Was it trained to bite?" Alessandro asked sarcastically.

  "No, it was trained not to flee, and to carry my saddlebags, in which I kept this," she said, reaching into one of a small set of balanced saddle pouches that looked, if not Argentine, at least un-Italian. She drew a heavy revolver and held it expertly in her right hand, with the barrel pointing straight up. "It's British," she said, "a Webley and Scott."

  For half an hour they walked their horses down the beach, talking about Argentina, ballistics, and the sea. Though it was not quite warm enough to swim, Alessandro couldn't rid himself of the image of Lia swimming. When he saw them spinning together in the waves, scandal was of no consequence.

  Any thoughts Alessandro may have had in this regard were chased from him when he became aware that a storm over the Tyrrhenian had risen as if from nowhere and was speeding directly toward them. They heard faraway rolling thunder that began on the sea and tracked toward Rome in masses of black like the clouds of swallows that nest by the Tiber and sometimes obliterate the November sky.

  Soon the solid wall of the storm stretched from the cape at Anzio to the horizon. Small yellow serpentines of lightning weaving amidst the coils of charcoal cloud lit the sea and made it as green as emerald. The storm was sailing on the
wind, tossing distant waves into white crests, running for the coast, turning the light above it to gray, purple, and gold.

  Lia turned to Alessandro.

  "I can beat it to Rome," he said.

  "Of course you can't."

  "I can."

  "That's foolish," she told him.

  "No it isn't. I know my chances. I've always known when they're good, and they're good right now." He rested his hand on Enrico's taut neck.

  "I'd like to see it. Tell me if you get through."

  "Why don't you come with me?"

  "I have no intention either of fighting storms or outrunning them, and I have no intention of accompanying anyone who tries. It doesn't work. It never did, and it never will."

  HAD ALESSANDRO known that Lia went into the garden early in the morning he would have arisen each day at five and been there to have met her accidentally. It was the end of April and he hadn't seen her for weeks. Nor had he heard from her. Nor had he known how to approach her. Lacking the social graces, he was unable to ask her to the theater or the opera, and he was not likely to meet her at a dinner party, never having been to one. He solved the problem by lying in bed.

  Early one morning, before the sun struck the picture of the Matterhorn, his father came into his room and shook him.

  "I want to sleep."

  "You can't."

  "What do you mean, I can't?" Alessandro asked.

  "I need you today. Umberto is sick and hasn't been in for three days, we have a tremendous backlog, and Orfeo told me yesterday that, if I didn't get a substitute, he wouldn't work. You know what Orfeo is like. Shave and dress. We're late."

  "Can't you hire a scribe?" Alessandro asked indignantly.

  "Scribes are not fireflies," his father said. "They're cautious and slow. I've never been able to hire one for less than three months, or find one in less than two."

  "There's something wrong with my hand," Alessandro stated. "After just a little bit of writing, it freezes up hot. I think I must have a paralysis, or the beginnings of a terrible disease...."

  "Probably the gold has worn off the point of your pen. Bring it. Orfeo will take a look: he's an expert."

  "But today I wanted to ride to Bracciano to swim in the lake."

  "Today you must replace Umberto."

  "I prefer not to."

  "You have no choice."

  "Still, I prefer not to."

  His father left the room.

  '"You have no choice! You have no choice,'" Alessandro repeated. Though at first he put his pants on backwards, in five minutes he had shaved and bathed, and he appeared downstairs dressed like a lawyer, in suit, tie, and vest.

  "Breakfast!" he cried as his father pulled him out the door.

  "In the office," the attorney Giuliani said.

  They descended the Gianicolo on winding paths, streets, and stairs. Soon they were at the edge of Trastevere, where they went down a series of steep and crumbling steps that had been the death of old men and that on slick January mornings had even dispatched into the next world so cautious and agile a creature as a cat.

  Going down the hill made Alessandro and his father walk fast, and, listening to the cadence of their steps against the cobbles, they cut through the level parts of Trastevere almost at a run. Taking a bridge across the Tiber, they joined a stream of other men intently on their way to work as if the morning light on all the marble palaces, advancing through the gardens, and filling the perfectly proportioned squares, were nothing.

  '"When you walk through the city in the morning, what do you think about?" Alessandro asked his father.

  "Many things."

  "Do you think of the city itself?"

  "No. I used to, but I've had a profession for a number of years, and it has mastered me. A profession is like a great snake that wraps itself around you. Once you are enwrapped, you are in a slow fight for the rest of your life, and the lightness of youth leaves you. You don't have time, for example, to think about the city even as you are walking through it."

  "Unless you make it your profession."

  "Then you're an architect, and you're always thinking of how to get clients."

  "But what if you were to choose the profession of looking at things to see their beauty, to see what they meant, to find in the world as much of the truth as you could find?"

  "For that you need to be independently wealthy."

  "What about a professorship?"

  "Of what?"

  "Aesthetics."

  "Aesthetics?" the father asked. "That's ridiculous. You'll live like a slave for twenty-five years. Better to go into the Church."

  "I would rather die than live without women," Alessandro said.

  "What about the army?" Alessandro's father inquired. "In my view, universities are like the army. The only difference is that the officers don't wear their ranks on their uniforms: they write them after their names and announce them in the degree to which their speech is pompous, mellifluous, and monotonous."

  "The army?" Alessandro asked. "The army kills people!"

  The attorney Giuliani looked at his son with a pointed expression. "Have there been reforms of which I have not heard? Don't you know that the only people the army kills are the people who eat its food? Our army, of late, is composed of saints and martyrs. They march into battle and don't come back, and the enemy holds his ground. To fault them for killing people is truly a slander."

  "Lias brother is in the army. He seems capable."

  "Lia..." his father said.

  "Lia Bellati?"

  "I see. How old is she?"

  "My age, more or less."

  "How old is her brother?"

  "Thirty."

  "What rank has he?"

  "Captain."

  "Impressive," the attorney Giuliani said. "He carries a sword, and has a magnificent uniform." He stopped in the middle of a street, and, as carriages passed on either side of them, looked his son straight in the eye. "Respect him for what he is, but picture the uniform covered with blood, and the man inside it blue with death, lying abandoned on a field. For what? Usually, for nothing. Whatever you do, don't join the army. Is that clear?"

  "I have no intention of joining the army! You're the one who said the army is better than a university."

  "It is."

  "What shall I do, then, become a lawyer?"

  "Wouldn't you like to be a successful attorney?"

  "Wouldn't you?" Alessandro shot back, instantly. That his father was successful was irrelevant. Alessandro had meant to hurt him, and he had, but his father forgave him immediately because he knew that Alessandro might never forgive himself.

  At the law offices they walked up many sets of stairs squared off about an enormous atrium.

  They climbed in silence, but the attorney's heart was light, because his son had brought up, even if obliquely, the very thing about which the attorney had always dreamed.

  They turned the handle on an enormous wooden door the color of Enrico. The floor inside was of marble so highly polished that they walked across as carefully as if they had been on ice. The spacious offices of this firm, in which the attorney Giuliani was the principal partner, looked over Rome as if to govern it, and they were remarkably serene, except for the office of the scribes, where pens scratched across paper in a sound that approximated that of a granary invaded by mice, or a coop of a hundred scratching chickens.

  Before Alessandro sat numbly with the scribes he wanted breakfast. A beautiful wooden table stood by the windows in the principal partners office.

  They sat down at it, and a waiter in a white jacket appeared. The attorney Giuliani held up a finger: this meant no variation, which, in turn, meant a brioche and a cappuccino. The waiter turned to Alessandro.

  "Four hot chocolates, five brioches, and five cornetti."

  "That's all?" Alessandro's father asked, wincing.

  "I'm not hungry," Alessandro said.

  They heard the waiter on the stairs, descending to a pasticc
eria to get more supplies. Ten minutes later, Alessandro poured a cup of chocolate as thick and hot as lava: the thickness, it seemed, held the heat. It even looked like lava, because it was filled with sluggish bubbles and sharp, scalloped, sponge-like depressions. He began to slice and butter the brioches and cornetti. On some he put jam.

  "You're not going to butter and jam every one of those, are you?"

  "Why not?" Alessandro asked, noticing that as people passed by the open doors of his father's office they paused to look in. The waiter had made him a legend.

  "Let me ask you something," the attorney said.

  "What?"

  "This Lia..."

  "Yes?"

  "Do you know her?"

  "Of course I know her."

  "You know her well?"

  "Yes and no."

  "What do you mean, 'yes and no'?"

  "Why are you excited?"

  "Do you, have you, does she ... She's supposed to be wild, but perhaps she has a sister. Someone implied that she was amoral."

  "He was probably in love with her, and she not with him," Alessandro said confidently. The cornetti were gone.

  "I warn you sternly..." the father began.

  "You warn me sternly? What kind of syntax is that?"

  "You don't know where such behavior can lead. It can be disastrous."

  "What behavior? I've said nothing."

  "I trust this will nip it in the bud."

  "Nip what in the bud?"

  "The production of miniature human beings!" his father screamed.

  "I don't plan to produce miniature human beings," Alessandro said.

  The attorney Giuliani leaned forward with both hands on the table. "Just don't do anything stupid."