by Mark Helprin
ON ALL documents, notices, and orders, the vast concrete and stone fortress on a cliff above the sea south of Anzio was called Military Prison Four, or M.P. 4, but never did anyone who had been inside ever call it anything but Stella Maris. It seemed to float above the sea like the plain of stars that on a clear night rides above the waters and the wind. In conversation mysterious and deep, in the crackling, hissing, seemingly inconsequential sounds of the foam, waves, and wind, the stars were talking to the enraptured sea, and, as with many of its greatest secrets, nature entrusted knowledge of this to whoever would not be believed or who could not speak. Staggering volumes of wondrous information were exchanged between the waves and the stars, in traffic so thick, fast, and full as to be beyond understanding, in sounds that rose up in fumes and clouds, in musical dialogues, and in uncountable voices speaking to uncountable lights. The condemned soldiers of Stella Maris, with neither reputation to uphold, nor gain to desire, nor hope to sustain, knew the soul of the sea at night. It was their compensation and their reward.
Alessandro was taken to Stella Maris, a short distance from Rome, in half a dozen conveyances. The army needed four days and the stamps and signatures on half a hundred pieces of paper to get him from his house to a tiny cell overlooking the sea.
He walked the last few miles, in a line of men shackled and chained by the left ankle. The guards counted them now and then as if they did not trust either their own eyes or the constancy of steel. The prisoners had been put in uniform, because the discipline that it reawakened in them made them easier to handle.
They descended to the beach at Anzio and walked toward Stella Maris, which they could see quite clearly in the distance. It was one of those mornings in November when the sun is out so full that it seems like spring or summer, and the only way to know the fall is by the depth and darkness of the shade. The sea was agitated and blue. Breakers pounded the beach, and the wind that had driven them propelled the spray far beyond the crests, so that the soldiers who wore glasses had to peer through encrustations of salt on their lenses. Even without the spray they would have had difficulty, for, despite the wind, the hot sun and its reflection from the sand made them sweat. They walked in the sound of the pounding surf, their olive-colored shirts stained dark, their chains shining.
Though Alessandro was pleased by the waves and the wind that drove them on, every step he took away from Rome was agony. He was next to the sea, walking in the sun, and his father and Luciana were without him in a room on the top floor of the hospital. No doubt the sky was a brilliant blue and the geraniums in the window boxes as red as blood, but the cool sobriety of the streets and squares, the shade trees, and the stones was less than what he had now as he marched to Stella Maris.
Had things been minutely different sometime earlier, the Giulianis might now be together on the beach. They might have arrived with food in a basket, and Alessandro and his father might have gone in the water, proud to be less sensitive to the cold than Signora and Luciana, who would pretend to be disgusted by the fact that the two men were so indelicate as to be able to float in the Tyrrhenian in November.
Alessandro hoped that with Luciana by his father's side the old man would rally, but he feared that, even if they withheld the news until summer, when his father was told that Alessandro had been executed, the shock would kill him. And that would be almost the end of them all. But perhaps he would live beyond his time. Perhaps, if Rafi survived, Luciana would bear a child, and the attorney Giuliani would have a grandchild with golden hair. Perhaps they would name that child Alessandro, or Alessandra.
ALESSANDRO WAS thrown into a narrow cell with a small window that looked over the courtyard where the executions took place. Beyond the courtyard, over a high wall, was the sea. In the window were a pair of iron bars, but no glass. Pervading the air was a smell like that of a much-used kitchen. It had the smooth quality of vanilla cream, of something that was white, and semi-sweet. The ceils other occupant, permanently chilled by the maritime winds that whistled through the damp prison block, was wrapped in two blankets, like an Indian.
This Indian had wire-rimmed glasses and the face of an intellectual. He looked pained, he sighed, and he threw off one of the blankets. "It's yours," he said.
"I don't want it," Alessandro replied, still hot from his walk in the sun.
"When you cool down, you'll want it, especially at night. Two are hardly enough. Now we'll both freeze."
"What's your name," Alessandro asked after he had introduced himself.
"Ludovico."
"Ludovico what?"
"Just Ludovico."
"Why?" Alessandro asked.
Disgusted, Ludovico replied, "Because I'm a communist."
"Communists don't have last names?"
"When they're in secret organizations they don't. If the army puts together a few more pieces of the puzzle, they'll capture my comrades and shoot them."
"You didn't desert?"
"I did."
"Are you going to be shot for desertion or for being a communist?"
"It's the same thing, but it's too complicated to explain when I'm cold."
"It doesn't matter anyway; I'm not interested."
"I suppose that's because you have faith in the judicial system that will try us."
"Yes. I have faith that we will be found guilty and that we will be shot."
"Your faith will be rewarded."
"Why? It hasn't been for the last few years."
"I think I don't want to talk to you," Ludovico said. "You're neither scientific nor rational." He went to the window, like a sulking child.
Alessandro bumped him out of the way to get a look. The courtyard was about twenty-five meters square, and on the opposite side was a row of ten poles, each slightly shorter than a man. They were splintered and crumbling, as if thousands of linemen had been climbing them for weeks, and the wall behind them was as pockmarked as a squash court. Beyond this was the blue sea. The waves made refractive lines that seemed to hold more than the light, and the whitecaps speckling its windy surface bloomed like flowers. "That's where they shoot people," Alessandro said.
"Fifty a day," Ludovico confirmed. "Under communism, it would never be."
"Of course not."
Its true.
Alessandro shook his head. "Ludovico Indian," he said gently, but firmly, "since its beginning the world has seen empires, theocracies, slave states, anarchy, feudalism, capitalism, revolutionary states, and everything else you can think of, and no matter what the variation, the bloodstained stakes, guillotines, and killing grounds remain."
"Scientific socialism will make it otherwise."
"Scientific socialism will make the killing scientific and socialistic," Alessandro replied.
"True, it may be necessary, initially, to liquidate opponents of the revolution," Ludovico admitted.
"Yes, I know. The stakes do come in handy. It's why no one ever takes them down."
"You commit a great evil," Ludovico declared, "by abandoning belief in the perfectibility of man in favor of dreams of the heavenly city and of a God that cannot be proved."
"The heavenly city in which I believe, Ludovico, cannot be demonstrated. It is a matter of faith and revelation, not reason. You, however, claim that your heavenly city is demonstrable, and, of course, it isn't."
"In our lifetime."
"You are as short of proof as am I. The difference is that, for you to prove what you attempt to bring about, you'll have to harrow the world. At least my dreams don't rest upon compelling all of humanity to pose for them."
"What the hell are you," Ludovico asked, "a Jesuit?"
"No."
"How do you know about political systems?"
Alessandro sat down on the plank that served as his bed. "I had a wonderful horse," he said.
"That's how you know about political systems?"
"Yes."
"From a horse?"
"Yes. His name was Enrico. When the war broke out they took
him for the cavalry. If I know him, he's still alive somewhere, though he's not as young as he used to be. I trained him well. We used to race against trains, and win, and I had a trick that I taught him. That's how I know about political systems.
"We often rode in the Villa Doria Pamphili. Sometimes it's open to the public, sometimes not, but you can't tell that to a horse. Horses are like communists: they don't like the idea of private property, and Enrico would want to run in the Villa Doria even when it was locked.
"On the north side, near the gate, is an iron fence as high as a man, with posts topped by spear points. The entire length of Enrico's belly would have to clear that fence; and his legs, and his awkward equine genitals.
"We did it. We actually did it. Not just once, but all the time."
"Why does that bear upon political systems?"
Alessandro leaned forward. "Because, Ludovico Indian, problems of the intellect, including political questions, are much the same—puzzles and mazes in which you can meander for the rest of your life, that turn you hither and thither until you sometimes get so dizzy and confused that you don't know what's going on.
"The barriers in these mazes are like iron fences with sharpened spikes, and they condemn intellectuals to wander, but if an intellectual can jump those fences he can see how the puzzle is laid out.
"After the fences I took on Enrico, the problems of political systems do not seem intractable."
"You're crazy," Ludovico announced.
Alessandro held his finger in the air. "Ah!" he said, "but at least I'm able to tell you my last name, and at least, when they take me out to the stake my dreams may be just beginning, whereas yours, by your own definition, must and will come to a dark end."
"You fool yourself. Your illusions will fall away even before the end. They won't do you any good. You'll see."
Alessandro got up and went to the window. An afternoon mist had settled on the sea almost at the horizon, where it made a sparkling band of blue and white light. "Would you have trusted the horse to carry you over the spikes, time and time again, and not be impaled?" he asked.
Ludovico said no.
"Yes,"
Alessandro continued. "It was dangerous, irrational, the fence was far too high. Even when I approached the barrier, I myself did not truly believe that he could take me over."
"So why did you do it?"
"I trusted his strength and his goodness more than I believed my weakness and my doubt. It always worked. It was a good lesson."
"If it fails?"
Alessandro smiled. "It fails." He leaned against the wall. "All right, Mr. Indian, what will we talk about tomorrow?"
"The food. All I can say is that I'm glad you're not religious. When the religious ones are put against the wall they begin to slip, fear takes hold of them, and they beg God. They should just be quiet."
"But I am religious."
"Yes, but not the smarmy kind."
"No, not the smarmy kind."
SUDDENLY, IN the middle of the night, Alessandro said, "The difference between a man and a woman has been driven even deeper into my understanding."
"What do you mean?" Ludovico asked from a painful half sleep.
"If you were a woman, even were you a total stranger, we would have been in one another's arms fifteen minutes after the sun set."
"But I'm not a woman."
"I know that, but your sister would be another story."
Ludovico jumped up in one motion, like a fierce dog roused from sleep by a huge kick. "Leave my sister out of it or you'll die before you get downstairs!" he screamed.
"If your sister were condemned to death, you wouldn't care if she took comfort in my arms, would you?"
"I don't know."
"I would hold her very gently. I would press my face against the side of her face and her neck. I would make her warm. It would be innocent, Ludovico. I'd love her, even though I didn't know her. It wouldn't matter if she was pretty or not. That's not the point.
"The difference between men and women," Alessandro went on, "is something that I've enjoyed a great deal. I would almost say that I wish I had enjoyed it more, except that at least half was the feeling that arose from restraint and modesty—and you have to go lightly with those, as I did. And perhaps I did it just right, even if at the time I thought I wasn't bold enough. I don't know, but here, at the end, I see that the most beautiful thing between a man and a woman is not the consummation of their love, but, simply, their regard for one another."
"That may be so, but you probably can't know it until you're condemned to die."
"You're always condemned to die. It's just a matter of timing."
"There's something about having only a week or two left, though, isn't there," Ludovico asked. "It's too bad they don't shoot women here, because then we could have women in our cells and we'd all be warm, happy, and modest."
"They wouldn't have to shoot them. They could just bring them in."
"Good," Ludovico said, smiling as madly as the Cheshire Cat. "Why don't you tell them about it at your trial?"
"I'm not altruistic, like you."
"That's because you're not a communist."
"How old are you, Ludovico?"
"Twenty-two."
"You're forgiven."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-seven."
"It's not your place to forgive me. I'll die a communist."
"I know."
"What do you do, anyway?"
"Why?"
"I think you're probably a social parasite."
"I was about to become a professor of aesthetics."
"Ahhh! See! You don't make anything, you don't do anything. No wonder."
At first, words flew through Alessandro's head like machine-gun bullets clearing the air over the trenches. His education, still intact, was suddenly fired up. Just the names—all the Greeks, of course, and Descartes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Leibniz, Vico, Eber hard, Herder, Schiller, Kant, Rilke, Keats, Schelling, and a hundred others, loaded all the cannon and made them ready to fire. And he was ready to marshal the principles of intuition, analogy, sympathy, historicism, intellectualism, spiritualism, the relation of physics to aesthetics, various schools of theology.... But in the end, he realized, it was all talk, lovely talk, with no power. In the end, beauty was inexplicable, a matter of grace rather than of the intellect, like a song.
"You're right, Ludovico," he said, and it hurt.
For ten minutes the sea wind pumped wet mist through the window, and they shivered.
"Wait until the morning," Ludovico warned, "when they start the executions. It'll shake you up. You'll lose your bearings. I've seen it many times now."
"I saw men die in the line," Alessandro answered.
"It's not the same."
BREAKFAST ARRIVED before dawn, just as the candles in the long corridors between the rows of cells were burning down. Dazed prisoners under the watch of several guards handed out small cups of milk and unequal sections of bread.
"Don't eat too slowly, and don't eat too fast," Ludovico warned.
Alessandro asked why.
"If you eat too slowly, the shooting will start before you're finished, and your stomach will turn. If you eat too fast, your stomach turns when they start to shoot."
"What's the right speed?"
"Follow me," Ludovico commanded. He ate faster than Alessandro had ever seen anyone eat, and, after he finished, the gates to the courtyard were unlocked and pushed open.
A squad of soldiers with good military bearing marched into the execution yard. Their boots were shining, their uniforms pressed, and they looked straight ahead and turned their rifles in the kind of drill accomplished by elite units that never fight.
"They do nothing else," Ludovico said. "Its the same group. They'll never be able to live with what they've done, but they can't mutiny."
At the window, Alessandro saw that their buttons glinted and sparkled even though little light fell on them. "They know better t
han anyone exactly what would happen to them if they did," he said.
"They should run away."
"Everyone they shoot tried to run away."
Alessandro gripped the bars as the ten men were brought out, accompanied by three priests with open Bibles. A dozen guards stood by. The manacles and chains of the condemned would not be removed until after the execution. Grave-diggers waited on the left, with two-wheeled carts that some of the prisoners eyed painfully.
The priests began to read from the Bibles. Sometimes they would look up into the faces of the men. They were soldiers in uniform, and it was hard to distinguish one from another. Some stood impassively. Some swayed back and forth. One was sobbing, bent over as if he had cramps.
"You smell that?" Ludovico said to Alessandro. "That's shit. They shit in their pants. You will too."
"Like hell I will," Alessandro answered. "I'm not going before God with shit all over me."
"Someone else said that," Ludovico added. "He said it, then he thought about it, and he looked up at me and said, it doesn't matter. God will have me washed clean before I'm brought to Him."
Two officers carrying papers solemnly entered the execution yard. They quietly read each man his sentence, and stepped back. One of them issued a command, and the prisoners were marched along the wall until they were lined up at the stakes. They moved slowly, dragging their feet, shuffling, crying.
Alessandro was mesmerized by the uneven and halting gait of the condemned men. Seventeen or eighteen years ago, their parents had held them up and guided them in their first steps. And now it had come to this. Stumbling, tentative, and afraid, they were walking once again like very young children.
They took their positions in front of the stakes. They didn't need to be tied, because they had nowhere to go and they knew it. One dropped to his knees. The two priests nearest him went to lift him up, but he had lost his courage and two guards moved forward to hook his manacles over a bolt in the post. The posts were not to hold them in place, but to hold them up.
How can they do this? Alessandro asked himself. These men did nothing more than fail to be in a particular place at a particular time. Given another chance, they would fight like Gurkhas, but, then again, if all the soldiers in the line knew that the only penalty for desertion was simply to be returned to the line, the line would evaporate.
