Septimania Page 17

  That first night, Malory did little more than sip at his jar of punch as Radu and Sasha—once he’d relinquished his guitar to Dora or Brendushka or one of the other many Nurses Malory eventually came to know—and a handful of other members of the Bomb Squad peppered him with questions. Not just searching for the obvious physical details about Louiza, but for behavioral quirks—the way she walked, the way she talked, the way she thought. Malory gladly told and retold the stories of his two encounters with Louiza to an audience far more demonstrative than Settimio. He told them about Louiza’s mathematics, he told them about Whistler Abbey. They were intrigued by the story of negativity and soberly awed by the image of Louiza tracing i = u onto Malory’s naked chest in the late afternoon light of St. George’s.

  “Do not forget the Pip.” Tibor pulled at a cigarette and wiped the smoke from his beard. And so Malory told them of the Pip, from Louiza’s discovery in the shutters of the steeple of St. George’s through its fall from the organ loft of Santa Maria and Tibor’s miraculous discovery of the tiny apple seed in the morning shadows of the pavement below the altar. Malory tried not to embellish or editorialize. But Radu in particular encouraged him not to worry himself too much with the effect his own attraction to Louiza had on his description of the girl.

  “We need to find the girl you are searching for,” he said. “Not just some little blonde named Louiza.”

  When he was finished, Malory excused himself and walked out the gate. The Driver found him around a discreet corner and drove him on the Vespa back home to the Villa Septimania. Malory returned the next night and the next for an update from this new family of dispossessed. The Nurses and Bomb Squad would wander in at odd moments from their occasional jobs. Some evenings Tibor was already at the Dacia when Malory arrived, some evenings he showed up later or not at all. But Malory always found a Nurse chopping vegetables she had seduced off a fruttivendolo in the markets of Campo dei Fiori or San Cosimato, and Radu or Sasha or Vlad scaling and grilling a fish that one or another extra from Tibor’s production had donated to the cause. Malory listened to tales of discovery as they chopped and scaled and he experimentally sipped on a glass of whatever was placed in his hand. He listened to stories of escape from the East—Radu and Sasha wrapped in horse blankets in a corner of a refrigerated truck, Dora and Anda less insulated in the boot of an English tourist’s Morris Minor. Tibor and Cristina had flown out of Bucharest in style, of course, thanks to Cristina’s discovery of an uncle in Ramat Gan, who wangled her an Israeli visa with a flight connection in Rome.

  “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” Tibor quoted to whomever would listen. “We got off the plane in the middle of the flight, and that particular yellow line suits us just fine.”

  Much of the truth of Tibor’s story was veiled in cigarette smoke, but no one dared contradict Tibor when he was in voice. The paw that Tibor had first placed on Malory’s shoulder, that Transylvanian crag of a hand, was nothing compared to the force that hogtied the Bomb Squad, the Nurses, and any others he corralled into the garden of the Dacia with his stories. Malory was as happy as the rest of them to recline on the paternal speechifying of Tibor.

  Cristina, as Principessa, held her own court and followed a different protocol. Cristina never had to queue for auditions. She arrived in Rome to three well-paying jobs—cleaning a Canadian journalist’s office in Piazza Barberini, wiping the noses and bottoms of four-year-olds in an asilo on the Via Sistina, and preparing lunch for a lonely fiddle maker in an attico off Piazza Navona twice a week. Cristina never followed Tibor on his evening tours of the garden. Cristina perched gray-eyed on a sprung sofa off the kitchen, smoking a filtered cigarette of exotic origin. Some evenings, she would look over to Malory, and Malory would join her. He didn’t smoke. But he shared their loss in a silence that he hoped gave her as much comfort as it gave him. And sometime during the evening—before dinner, during, or most often once the dishes had been piled up in the Dacia bathtub—Cristina would stand up from the sprung sofa. The Bomb Squad, or occasionally a non-Rumanian guest, would strike a guitar or a zither or a drum, and Cristina and the Nurses would throw on costume boas or army greatcoats or strip down to their Weimar nighties and perform a post-Brechtian, pre-Madonna cabaret with a determined chaos that, for at least a little while, helped all of them forget the daily indignities of exile.

  Malory expected it would be a matter of days until the Bomb Squad found Louiza and their child. But as the rains of November rose higher up the embankment of the Tevere, overflowing the Isola Tiberina and threatening the trees along the upriver prow and the more untraveled cargo holds of the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, as the rains of December drove Tibor’s Divine Comedy rehearsals under sheets of plastic and corrugated scrap, the Bomb Squad returned every evening to the Dacia without a single wisp of fair hair or dyslexic, mathematical clue.

  “Sometimes,” Radu said to Malory one evening, wiping the rain off his glasses with the sleeve of Malory’s jacket, “you get closer to your treasure by figuring out where it definitely is not.” Malory put his own palm on Radu’s shoulder. Perhaps he had lost, perhaps they all had lost at least as much as Malory and had even less of a chance of recovery. “Some bombs are hidden very deep.”

  “Accidental discovery, mio Principe.” Settimio listened every morning at breakfast, as he served Malory his Earl Grey and scones in front of the statues of Newton and the Woman and the Apple, as Malory recounted the previous evening’s Tales from the Dacia. “The history of man, and I suspect nature in general, is one of accidental discovery, finding something precious while looking for something else.”

  “But don’t you understand? I don’t want anything else.”

  Settimio knew that the cure for petulance was to be found in the Sanctum Sanctorum. And during the days—while Malory waited for the evening summons to the Dacia and hope of news from the Bomb Squad—Settimio profited from Malory’s other passions and cushioned him with manuscripts around the seven-sided desk.

  One of those mornings, the day before Christmas, Settimio appeared at the padded door of the Sanctum Sanctorum.

  “Mio Principe.”

  Malory had been examining the manuscript of Newton’s Principia—although he found himself taking frequent breaks to read back over Haroun al Rashid’s encounters with the daughter of Charlemagne. He placed a slip of paper into the book, slightly embarrassed that Settimio might have found him out, and looked up.

  “You may recall Fra Mario. From the Dominicans. Santa Maria …”

  “Of course!” Malory said, climbing up from the stables of the Jewish butcher back to memories of an organ left untuned and a girl left unfound.

  “Fra Mario rang,” Settimio said, “on the telephone, a moment ago. A young lady, he said.”

  Malory jumped up—less petulant now—and headed towards Settimio and the padding. He had known, at least he had hoped that, even if his own gravity was insufficient, the bulk of Santa Maria sopra Minerva might pull Louiza back to its pews and end his two months of anxiety and search. This was better than any voyage of transformation.

  “Not that young lady, purtroppo,” Settimio said. “A young Italian lady. Quite insistent. Fra Mario said that she must see you at once.”

  “Italian?” Malory asked. “I don’t know any young Italian ladies.”

  But when fifteen minutes later the Driver parked the Vespa in the Via del Beato Angelico and escorted Malory through the rear entrance of Santa Maria, past Michelangelo’s Salvatore, past the tomb of the anorexic Santa Caterina and past the pew below the organ where he had last found Louiza, the copper curls bobbing above the gate of the Carafa Chapel reminded Malory that yes, indeed, he did know one Italian lady.

  “Malory,” Antonella whispered—but with the same enthusiasm she used to serve him biscuits and tea in the Maths Faculty. Malory hugged Antonella back—not caring that the Lippi Madonna was looking down at him with contempt—happy, grateful at this very fleshy reminder of a life before his landing on the plan
et of Septimania. “Look at you!” Antonella said finally, releasing him only to hold him at the length of a nose and a little more. “What a change.”

  “Well, yes,” Malory said, “a haircut, a few new clothes …”

  “No, no,” Antonella said. “Your eyes, Malory. They are—they have become so vulnerable. You have seen a few ghosts since the last time you drank tea with your Antonella.”

  “You’re in Rome for Christmas? To see family?” Malory asked, trying to ignore the warmth of both her sympathy and the scent of lavender that came off her hair. I should invite her out for tea or coffee, he thought, without knowing where or how. The Villa Septimania was out of the question, and Malory hadn’t ever drunk tea or coffee outside the villa.

  “To see you, my Malory. Only you.”

  “Me?”

  “To bring you news.”

  “About Louiza?” Malory couldn’t help himself, although he wished he’d been slightly more discreet and kept up the pretense of interest in Antonella herself for just a few more minutes. Antonella looked at Malory and at Malory’s curiosity. His need to know, far beyond any normal curiosity, kept him looking into her eyes. The mid-afternoon light shone blue around Antonella’s red curls. Above that halo, Lippi’s Annunciation ballooned in illustration—closer than when Malory had looked above Louiza’s head back in October and seen her face in the pale oval of the Madonna. Now it was the curls of the Angel, come to give good news to the Madonna, that Malory saw reflected in the hairdo of the Italian girl before him.

  “Be careful,” Antonella said.

  “Careful of what?” Had this been the good news the Angel gave Mary?

  “When you left Cambridge,” Antonella said, “there were many Americans who stopped by the Faculty.”

  “Looking for Louiza?”

  Antonella kept her gaze fixed on Malory.

  “I know this is the last thing you want to hear from your Antonella, my Malory. Forget Louiza. Please, for your own safety.”

  “What does Louiza have to do with my safety?”

  “Please, Malory …”

  “Antonella, who were these Americans?”

  “Americans, Malory. Like the Americans my mother told me about after the War. All smiling and asking innocent questions about imaginary numbers and dividing by zero.”

  “Dividing by zero?” Malory found himself squeezing Antonella’s hand in his excitement. Hadn’t Louiza told him about her childhood ambition to divide by zero? And here were the Americans snooping around the Maths Faculty talking about dividing by zero.

  “Malory,” Antonella said, “these are not ordinary mathematicians. One of them—he looked like a soldier—he came and sat on the edge of my desk. He said he liked my hair, you know, that kind of soldier. He asked me about dividing by zero, and I told him I don’t even divide chocolate biscuits. And then, as he was reaching inside my biscuit tin, I thought of my Malory, and I said, ‘If you want to know about dividing by zero, why don’t you ask Louiza?’”

  “And?” Malory knew he was squeezing too tightly but didn’t want to break the spell of the name.

  “The soldier jumped up from my desk as if my biscuit was poison!”

  Malory wasn’t certain why he was excited by this news—it certainly supported Antonella’s contention that this was dangerous business. But it was the first time since October that the world had deigned to recognize the reality of Louiza.

  “I don’t know if they are CIA,” Antonella whispered, “or FBI or military or top secret some other letters. But if you want to know what your Antonella thinks, I think Louiza is working in another Maths Faculty that doesn’t have anything to do with my Sidgwick Site. Some place that is very interesting to the Americans. Some place secret. And dangerous. I know.”

  Dangerous. If Louiza were, in fact, involved with American intelligence, then there must be a way—Settimio would certainly have the appropriate phone numbers tucked somewhere in the Villa—for Malory to contact them, find her. He had selected the latest pope, been asked to serve dinner to Princess Grace. That must be good for something, for information. “Was there one American?” Malory asked. “Tall? Red beard?”

  “Information is dangerous, Malory.”

  Malory couldn’t imagine what Antonella meant. Cholera was dangerous. The Red Brigades were dangerous. Miscalculating the arrival of a Dublin-bound ferry was dangerous. But information had neither bacteria nor trigger.

  “But your Antonella has other information that will make her Malory very excited!” Antonella unleashed her hands and plunged them into the unshapen cloth bag on the pew beside her. Malory expected biscuits. Instead, Antonella drew out a Heffers bag holding a heavy binder, the size of a doctoral dissertation. “Ecco!” she said. “You see, Malory. All you have to do is ask your Antonella, and …” Malory couldn’t for the life of him remember what he had asked his—had asked Antonella, except, of course, to help him in any and all ways to find Louiza. Then he opened the binder and remembered.

  Before leaving Cambridge, he had shown the Chapbook to Antonella and had asked her to translate the first lines. One garden. One tree. That much he remembered. She had offered to make a photo copy and more, a full translation—since all but the final lines were in Italian and Malory’s grasp of the language didn’t extend beyond buon giorno and forse oggi.

  “My goodness,” he said, trying to focus a new enthusiasm on Antonella’s dedication.

  “Oh, Malory,” Antonella said, seeing straight into the heart of Malory’s embarrassment. “You have no idea what is inside here. All the travels, all the meetings of your Isaac Newton. I used a marker to highlight all the names of people and places.” Antonella turned to Malory until he was almost in her lap, under the gaze of Lippi’s Madonna, the divine impregnation coming at her on the wings of a dove, full of a certain kind of portent. She turned the pages. Names jumped up at Malory in yellow—Rotterdam, Münster, the Abbey of Westphalia, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, Descartes, Nuremberg, Leibniz.

  “Leibniz!” Malory shrieked, perhaps less loudly than when the Pip flew off the organ loft of Santa Maria but no less forcefully. “Leibniz in a journal about Newton? Newton hated Leibniz. Leibniz boasted that he had invented the calculus first, before Newton.” And yet, Malory read in the journal of Newton’s Italian chum about how the two of them had stopped off in Nuremberg in August of 1666 to visit some Rosicrucian friends of the chum and had met the young Leibniz, who was working as an apothecary and engaged Newton in a discussion of alchemy.

  Malory, of course, knew all about Newton’s interest in alchemy, his years of research and countless experiments looking for the Philosopher’s Stone that would turn ordinary metals into gold and the Elixir of Life, the liquid gateway to immortality. He knew about his calculation of the End of Time based on cranky interpretations of Biblical texts. But Malory, like all other Newton scholars, considered these interests to be the side hobbies at best of a Newton gone ga-ga long after his brain had been pickled by the extraordinary discoveries of 1666.

  And yet here, so it seemed, was information—information more precise than the vague notion that Americans were snooping around the Cambridge Maths Faculty trying to divide by zero—that Newton was interested in alchemy from an early age. Perhaps the Newton community had it backwards. Perhaps alchemy, magic, and crackpot religion had been Newton’s reasons for waking up in the morning, and the hard science—the work on gravitation, optics, the calculus (and meeting Leibniz in the winter of 1666!)—were at best sidelines, things that Newton whipped off while he was sitting on the loo. Accidental discoveries, as Settimio would say.

  Malory looked up at Antonella. The light around her had changed. Beyond the copper curls and blue halo, Antonella was indeed the Angel of the Annunciation. She had brought him great good news, information that, perhaps like the announcement of the Virgin’s impending birth, was both miraculous and potentially dangerous.

  “Antonella,” he said, lifting her up from the pew, “it’s Christmas Eve. Woul
d you like to see something spectacular?”

  THE PREMIERE OF TIBOR’S DIVINE COMEDY WAS SET FOR THAT EVENING. After much back and forth with the Minister of Monuments, half a dozen archaeologists, and the carabinieri of eight districts, a 5 p.m. curtain was scheduled for the Inferno in the Colosseum. The Purgatorio would begin its procession at midnight, winding out past the Forum, Trajan’s Column, Mussolini’s balcony in the Piazza Venezia, and up the Corso to the Piazza del Popolo. And then, in the first light of Christmas morning, the finale to Dante’s grand trio, the Paradiso, would unveil itself in St. Peter’s Square.

  Malory led Antonella out of Santa Maria as the bell in the spiral of the tower of San Ivo rang four. The elephant with the obelisk balanced on its back looked revived, washed clean of color. Malory also felt the anticipation of renewal, and it drew Antonella’s sculpted fingers into the crook of his arm at the top of the steps. Malory knew that the Driver was watching from a discreet distance. He didn’t mind. He didn’t mind the Driver following them as they walked out to the Corso and past the single pine tree in the center of the Piazza Venezia. He didn’t mind him following them down the Fori Imperiali, already overflowing its banks with Romans heading towards Christmas dinners and tourists searching for pre-Christian meaning in a beer or a Negroni.