by Mark Helprin
Alessandro saw that the man he had shot had stopped moving. The other had not even jerked. They lay immobile in pools of blood. His face tightened as he slung his bloody rifle. Pressing his right hand against the wound, he stumbled back to the Bell Tower.
Light-headed, he pushed into the map room and stood before the others. The ones who were sitting, stood up. They looked at his bloodied hand covering the wound, and at his devastated eyes.
Even the infantrymen did not make light of it. One guided Alessandro to a cot. Another took the rifle and went to clean the bayonet. This was their métier. It wasn't something with which you were born, you learned it, and it wasn't even that difficult to learn. They used bandage shears to cut open Alessandro's shirt quickly, the way it would be done if he had been going to die, but then they stepped back. "Nothing," an infantryman said.
"It cut a little channel in the top of your shoulder, that's all," Guariglia stated before he dropped an alcohol-soaked rag on what looked like a sabre cut. The alcohol made Alessandro scream at the top of his lungs.
"Here they come!" one of the infantrymen shouted, as a chilling sound rolled through the Bell Tower—the cry of twenty thousand men beginning a charge.
ALONG THE entire length of the line thousands of Austrians and Germans appeared to rise out of the ground, slowly at first as they went over the top, and then faster as they ran toward the river, shielded by ragged banks of smoke. By the thousands and the ten thousands, they shouted. The Italians mounted the firesteps, looked over the tops of their trenches, and fired. Trench mortars on both sides were continually stoked. They could, at random, level a line of attackers as they began to wade the river, or kill the defenders exposed above their dugouts, and they did. The heavy artillery ceased except for a ten-minute barrage against the Bell Tower, which was hit by hundreds of shells.
The cat Serafina, who had suffered before from artillery fire, was crouched in terror in the deepest corner of the communications bunker. Alessandro lay on a cot, bandaged and throbbing.
At first no one could move, but the concussions of the shells became so great that everything shook, and people were knocked around the room like dice in a cup.
Then, as if pushing through waves in stormy surf, shouting things that no one could really hear but that were obscenities of anger and determination, the infantrymen and the River Guard struggled to the firing ports. They were knocked down. They were pinned under parts of the ceiling as it fell, choked with dust, thrown against each other, but some made it to the outer wall. There, they screamed and they cursed, and they took their weapons.
Hardly able to see or hear, blinded by the smoke and choking on the powder, they fired toward the river, sweeping to and fro with the machine guns, their teeth clenched as if they were using swords and pikes. A man at the center was blown inward and made unrecognizable when a shell exploded just outside his gun port. Another man rushed to his position, but could not find a weapon.
As Alessandro got up to replace a man who fell, one of the other bunkers exploded. After a terrible cry, everyone who was left alive began to run, because the firing ports had been closed and the Austrians, who had lost several thousand men in the river, were now at the shattered wire. Alessandro was last out.
Biondo lay dead in the cortile. The Guitarist was climbing over the rubble to get away. The machine-gunner was dead and his machine gun at the entrance to the trench smashed apart. Guariglia had been right. The trench was filled in.
As Alessandro struggled through the craters and began to run toward the Italian line, he saw only about a dozen others from the Bell Tower. The cat ran so fast that she disappeared almost immediately, leaping right over the Italian trench that was everyone else's goal, running like a rocket toward the fields of the Veneto.
The heavy artillery had stopped but the trench mortars kept up their barrage. Some of the men fell. No one went back to see if they were alive, for a thousand Austrians had come through the wire and were close behind.
Alessandro reached the trench and vaulted in. The Italians over whose heads he had jumped were working their rifles madly and had hardly even noticed.
The sound of their firing was tremendous, as if the whole world had been taken up in an explosive wind. Alessandro closed his eyes, and when he opened them he saw the Guitarist crouched down right in front of him. He was smiling, so Alessandro automatically smiled back. At least they had come through. Then he looked more closely. The Guitarist was frozen in place, and his eyes were dead.
"Who's left?" Alessandro cried out.
He looked down the trench. Microscopico was firing. Some of the infantry from the Bell Tower now manned a machine gun in clouds of smoke. Others were vaguely recognizable along the line. Alessandro picked up a rifle that had been lying on the ground. He laid it across a sandbag, mounted the fire-step, and coldly began to shoot at the advancing ranks of enemy soldiers. Some had reached the Italian trench and were fighting inside it. Alessandro was in a daze. He reloaded.
V. THE MOON AND THE BONFIRES
IN SPRING the remnants of the River Guard were recalled to Mestre and recombined. To the surprise of the naval infantrymen, they were now in the army and their unit had no name. Although they would have preferred the privileges of the navy, they were relieved finally to be recognized for what they were, as they had been army infantrymen almost since the beginning, and it was now 1917. They thought that things would be less confusing, but, then, they didn't know that they were soon to go to sea.
For the entire month of March they were kept within the perimeter of a mine assembly area at Mestre. Venice sparkled across the water, a golden vessel that held all the beautiful and gentle things they had lacked for years, but they could neither go beyond the wire nor let their families know where they were. Nor were they told when their isolation would end or why they had been confined. They drilled in the morning, stripped their weapons several times a day, exercised for hours, and traveled three times a week on a special train to a firing range in the dunes, where they sharpened their aim and ruined their hearing from dawn to dusk with rifles, pistols, and machine guns.
Even in spring, Mestre was gray, at least when compared to the Byzantine water lily over the lagoon. Its church bells rang at noon, and train whistles sounded all day and night as contingents of infantry left for the front or returned. Steam engines exhaled like frightened cattle, and the air was filled with the sounds of metal clanging against metal.
Alessandro lay on a straw pallet in an enormous shed once used to store the detonators of the mines that had been placed in an arc around Venice at the beginning of the war. These had been bobbing in the water for years, sometimes drifting loose and floating casually down the Grand Canal, to the horror of the gondoliers.
"You shouldn't go to him again, Alessandro," Guariglia said. He and Alessandro were the only ones left from the naval contingent in the Bell Tower. Microscopico had been killed early that winter in the push to throw the Austrians from the bridgehead they had established in the fall. "You've gone to him every day for a month, and the answer is always the same."
"I've received no word from my family since January," Alessandro said, as if he couldn't distinguish between Guariglia and the lieutenant of whom he had to beg. "So why can't I have three days to take the train to Rome? Just three days."
"They won't even let us go to Venice," Guariglia said, "and you can see Venice through the cracks in the wall."
They were in a room in which 150 men on gray blankets lay staring at the huge wooden beams that held up a roof of terra cotta tiles. The sun came through fractures and pinholes as if its golden lights were playing across a dark sky. Alessandro had noticed when he first arrived that the color that suffused around the openings where the light entered was a milky orange like that of an orange cream-ice that Roman vendors sold in the parks.
"We're better off here than in the Bell Tower," Guariglia said. "It hurts me that I can't see my children, but I pray to come home to them. I'm not wasting
any requests in the middle, and neither should you."
"I told my parents to write to Rafi's. All I need are a few hours in Venice."
"If you go over the wall, they'll shoot you."
"They only execute in the line."
"That's not so, Alessandro. On the train down I leaned out the window to talk to a sergeant in the station at Treviso. He said that it's true, they condemn whole units, or one in ten men in a unit, or the first five, and he'd never been in the line. It's insane. They want you to know that they might shoot you even if you don't disobey them. It can only lead to a revolution."
Alessandro turned his head without lifting it from the pillow. As Guariglia continued to peer into the beams, he said, "On the day we get sentry duty, when everyone else goes to the firing range..."
"They're at S now. By the time they get to G, we may be gone."
"Where?"
"Who knows?"
"But if we're here..."
"You can't tell if they'll go out that day."
"If they do, I'll go to Venice and return before they get back. What could go wrong?"
"What could go wrong? Even if you did get back before they did, an officer might come in while you were gone."
"Our officers, all of them, always go along. If anything happens, you need only say that I wasn't here. They'll shoot me, not you."
"You don't have enough patience, Alessandro. You're too used to having things the way you want them."
"Guariglia, if the Guitarist had deserted they'd be chasing him now, but he'd still be alive."
"We're safe now. Why push it?"
"To have a day in Venice before I die."
AFTER MANY S's, not a few T's, some R's and a rich crop of B's, C's, and D's, came two F's, and two other G's, Gastaldino and Garzatti, before Giuliani and Guariglia. Alessandro carefully monitored the calendar and the alphabet as April wore on.
For two weeks they ate mainly salad and minestrone without beans, and during this time they went every day from their makeshift barracks to a parade ground where the mines had been stored, to exercise for six hours—at dawn, in the middle of the morning, noon, in the middle of the afternoon, after dinner, and just before bed. The routine never varied. They marched to the parade ground carrying their rifles. Then, with the rifles held in front of them, they ran around the perimeter for fifteen minutes. Their speed was assured and their mutiny avoided by a stratagem invented by the lieutenant Alessandro had petitioned in vain. A sergeant distributed breadsticks to everyone but the last ten to come in, who, if they made a habit of losing, soon got to be so skinny that they began to win. The troops were hungry, but they had beef or chicken on Sundays, and were allowed cheese for breakfast when they went to the firing range.
There, each soldier was given two hundred rounds of rifle ammunition and a hundred for pistol. Although not a single one of them hadn't fired many more cartridges than this in half an hour under attack in the line, it seemed like a terrible waste just for practice, especially since they had been living with their weapons for years (though most had not had pistols), and could bisect a cigarette at fifty meters. Targets were set up in the dunes, and they practiced until bull's-eyes were routine. Armorers were brought from a nearby arsenal. When a rifle was less than perfect it was re-calibrated or taken to be rebored. If that didn't work, it was exchanged. The River Guard shot slowly and carefully. Every pattern of fire was called out, every target returned for analysis after twenty-four rounds. They had nothing to eat and only a bottle of water from the time they left the mine assembly area until they returned. Toward the end of the month it was hot in the dunes, and they came back painfully sunburned.
The days passed at the shooting range, running, or in the barracks where the orange light glowed the color of the orange cream-ice one could buy in the Villa Borghese, and when the circumstances were right, Alessandro was able to take his chance. They drew sentry duty on a clear windy day late in April when the River Guard went to the firing range. As the formations filed onto the little munitions train that took them out to the dunes, Alessandro looked through the narrow windows near the ceiling and saw whole mountain ranges of cloud slowly slipping by in a sky that was every color from the softest blue to the hardest dirtiest gray. Though such clouds were capable of great thunder and of harboring whole bales of woolly lightning, as these started their slide down the pearly Adriatic they were too high to do anything but glide.
Alessandro walked into the now empty room where Guariglia, rifle at his shoulder, stood by double doors at the opposite end. Beyond him was the courtyard, with two enormous beech trees flanking an iron gate. The trees were newly green, and when the wind blew past the leaves it sounded almost like autumn.
"Just us," Alessandro said. His words carried easily through the empty barracks. Curly-haired Guariglia, who had taken the liberty of smoking a cigar, smiled.
"How will you walk around in Venice, Alessandro?" he asked. "It has half a million military police, and we have no insignia."
"I'll do it the way Orfeo would do it."
"Who's he?"
"He's responsible for all this."
"For the mine assembly area?"
"No."
"For the war?"
"No."
"For what, then?"
"For everything."
"He's like Saturn or Zeus?"
"He's the font of all chaos, and he lives in Rome."
Guariglia took some puffs on the cigar. "I'd like to meet him."
"Maybe someday you will. He'd get away with it, and so will I." Alessandro went into the lieutenant's quarters, which were behind a low partition. He took the battalion dispatch bag and threw it over his shoulder.
"So what," said Guariglia. "A battalion courier has to have a pass and insignia just like everyone else."
Alessandro unpinned one of the lieutenant's gold epaulets from a dress tunic that hung on the partition. He attached it to the center of his cap, and the gold braid shone like an electric semaphore.
"You're crazy," Guariglia said.
IN VENICE, Alessandro passed real couriers with dispatch bags and plumes, and neither they nor anyone else looked at him. As he crossed the Grand Canal he greedily began to take in all things not military. His eye seized upon every tendril on every plant, every curve or flute in iron or stone work, the most faded patches of color, women in clothes with sweeping lines, restaurant kitchens going full blast, and children, some of whom he picked up and kissed, for he had not seen a child in more than a year.
He knew Venice. A thousand places came back to him as he walked through the streets. Then he remembered that he was allowed to eat. Although his deepest instincts told him to go to a bakery, he decided to go to the Excelsior.
At eleven the dining room of the Excelsior was deserted but for some English officers having an early lunch. Alessandro went to a table near a large window that overlooked the canal. Crystal and silver on a bright field of slightly rose-colored linen filled his eyes as he put down his leather case and removed his hat.
"You've been at the front," the waiter said.
"Two and a half years."
"You want to eat everything in the world."
Alessandro expressed his agreement.
"Don't. It'll make you sick. Eat well, but eat lightly."
"What should I eat, then?"
"I'll bring it."
"No breadsticks or minestrone."
"Please," the waiter said, his back already turned.
Before the kitchen doors had stopped swinging he came back out with a towel over his arm, carrying three heavy plates and a carafe of wine. One was a bowl of scaldingly hot fish soup, another a dish of tomatoes and arugula, and the third a platter of spaghetti with mussels.
"The portions are small," the waiter said, "but this is only part one."
Alessandro ate, and as he ate he sang and talked to himself. The waiter cleared his table and brought a plate of smoked salmon, a grilled filet mignon, and a portion of funghi porc
ini, along with another carafe of wine and a bottle of sparkling mineral water.
"Things still exist,"
Alessandro said.
"Yes yes yes," the waiter said. "You know they will be expensive?"
"I have the money."
Next came vitello al tonno, a Florentine egg, and some brook trout. When that was dispatched, the waiter brought a pitcher of cioccolato caldo, fruit salad, a dish of rich chocolate ice cream, and a hazelnut cake with whipped Venetian icing.
"I'm satisfied," Alessandro said after this.
"But wait," the waiter said, and he brought a snifter of pear brandy and a plate of the strongest, crispest mints Alessandro had ever tasted.
"Where do you get mints like this?" he asked.
"Since the war they've made them with nitroglycerine," the waiter joked.
"They don't taste like nitroglycerine," Alessandro said.
"You've tasted nitroglycerine?"
"After a lot of firing, the air gets so thick with it that you breathe it in and you can taste it for days."
For this meal Alessandro paid four months' salary, and when he emerged from the hotel he went to a bakery and bought a loaf of freshly baked bread. It was only noon, and he decided to take a walk before he went to see Rafi's parents.
In the Piazza San Marco a beautiful young woman with a solid figure, shoulder-length blond hair, and the bluest eyes was holding aloft a small red umbrella and haranguing a group of overweight old ladies, in German. Her bones seemed heavy. She was perfectly proportioned but she seemed to be weighted with iron, so that any gesture, any movement, was like that of a swordsman swinging something lethal. Her arm, thinner than those that Rubens had portrayed but just as voluptuous and thirty times as strong, looked as if it could smash stone columns, and she gesticulated fiercely. As she described the sights, her breasts leapt vividly against her cotton blouse, and her hair flew back and forth each time she turned her head.
