by Mark Helprin
"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 t
hat 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.
