Septimania Read online

  The Colosseum was an end in itself for Malory, a chance to celebrate Tibor’s first Christmas, his first success in the West. The forward guard of Bomb Squad and Nurses greeted Malory at the entrance closest to the Arch of Constantine. They registered Antonella with a care that recognizes fragility. They handed Malory two tickets—he was certain the Driver would find his own way in.

  In the two months since he had invited Malory to play Dante, Tibor had stayed true to his word. He hadn’t called Malory to a single rehearsal, hadn’t given him a single line to learn in either Italian or English. At one point Dora, with her Louise Brooks fringe and omnivorous mouth, had tried to describe Tibor’s directorial method; in Bucharest, she had been Tibor’s assistant for the first six months of his marriage thanks to a friendship with Cristina forged during hot teenage summers on the Black Sea, with official boyfriends and contraband cigarettes.

  “What the audience sees is one thing,” she told Malory one evening in the back seat of Brendushka’s Dacia. “What Tibor sees is another. He has a dozen actors and actresses and assorted hangers-on of varying talents playing Dante during the course of the whole production. After all,” she said, “from the top of the Colosseum or the back of St. Peter’s, who can see a face, especially if it’s wearing one of those pointy Dante caps with ear flaps. What really matters”—and Malory wasn’t certain whether it was the hand on his forearm or the weight of Dora’s mascara that drew him into the sobriety behind her eyes—“what really matters is what Tibor sees as he is imagining his Comedy.”

  “But the five or ten Dantes,” Malory said. “Aren’t they confused? Isn’t a single Dante, one actor, one face, one personality better?” And he told Dora and a few others in the front seat about Isaac Newton, about Newton’s discovery written in the margin of a Chapbook, about the search for the One True Rule that guides the universe.

  “You really believe in this Newton?” Dora asked him, resting a narrow chin on his shoulder.

  “Well …” Malory began.

  “What he believes”—Tibor stuck his beard through a rear window into the middle of Malory’s lecture—“is in the number one. Not just one Dante, but one rule, one girl, one god.”

  “Why not?” Radu said. “One is a good number. At least it’s a start.”

  “So …” Tibor said. “My poor friends. You have learned nothing from your childhoods on the dark side of the moon.”

  “He means Rumania,” Dora whispered up at Malory, her chin still uncomfortably present. “Ceauşescu, our beloved president, thought he was the only One.”

  “But I’m not talking about politics,” Malory whispered back.

  “Then why talk about girls?” Tibor roared. “One girl! One girl! This sacred search for One! Why not two girls, why not twenty-two?”

  “Or seven?” It was Sasha, innocent and inquiring, standing outside in the grass. How had he picked the number seven?

  “I like One.” Dora breathed garlic into a cloud around Malory, who knew that she meant something else.

  As Tibor predicted, Mastroianni, Cardinale, the pop stars Mina and Adriano Celentano, the blue suits of the Camera dei Deputati led by Giulio Andreotti, whose sins would have landed him a choice seat in any number of circles, all the politicians and movie stars, club owners, and tourists came out for the four hours of the Inferno, a chance to visit Hell on Christmas Eve and still catch mass at midnight. Heretics, Adulterers—the Proud, the Gluttonous—seven circles, one for every sin, wound down the inner shell of the Colosseum. All was flame and music and spectacle. Although there was at least one Dante and one Virgil, one tiny Beatrice—Dante’s unreachable teenage love—somewhere in the arena, Malory gave up early on trying to point out to Antonella the difference between the actors and the audience. A trio of popes, both Abraham and Mohamed, suicides, sodomites, and false leaders. Francesca da Rimini and her brother-in-law Paolo flitted by like a pair of starlings—up, down, eternally attached by some unheard signal. They stopped for a moment on the terrace below Malory and Antonella and looked up at them:

  Love, which in gentle hearts is quickly born,

  Seized him for my fair body …

  Francesca sighed, before flitting away.

  “What did she say?” Malory turned to Antonella.

  “She’s talking about her brother-in-law Paolo,” Antonella said.

  “They were very naughty.” Francesca flew back:

  One day, for pleasure,

  We read of Lancelot, by love constrained:

  Alone, suspecting nothing, at our leisure.

  Lancelot, the faithful right-hand of King Arthur, had been as much a hero to the nine-year-old Malory as the giant Hercules, although at that age he couldn’t possibly have understood quite how naughty Lancelot was with Guinevere, the wife of his best friend.

  Sometimes at what we read our glances joined,

  Looking from the book each to the other’s eyes,

  Looking from the book. Malory remembered the book they must have read—his namesake’s, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur—and the illustration of Lancelot kneeling before a queen with long, red, pre-Raphaelite locks.

  And then the color in our faces drained …

  That day we read of Lancelot no more.

  Francesca and Paolo flew away in a cloud of immigrant extras, and with them went the attention of the crowd. But Malory felt Antonella’s hand in his. A single hand, he thought, will not cast me down into the circle of Hell reserved for adulterers who read books. Anyway, he resolved, it is a hand of guidance not of naughtiness. He let that hand remain in his for the rest of the journey, even as Dante and Virgil climbed to the top of the ruin and upward to the stars.

  They filed out in silence, along with the other thousands, too stunned by their private visions to begin to appreciate Tibor’s art. And yet very few—only the Bomb Squad, the Nurses, Cristina, a few experimental theater directors from Latvia, and a pair of acting students from Texas on Fulbrights—joined Malory and Antonella on the long hike to the Piazza del Popolo and the late-night limbo of the Purgatorio. By the final cantos, when Malory and Antonella followed Virgil up from the purgatory of the Piazza to the Eden of the Villa Borghese to watch the sun rise over Rome and breakfast on apples, there were fewer still.

  Malory and Antonella walked arm in arm almost alone in the pre-dawn, back down the winding path to the Piazza. He had invited her to this spectacle without warning her what it might be—since he, in fact, had only the vaguest notion. But she had followed, she had listened, she had understood perhaps even better than he. Was he guiding her, or was she indeed the Angel of the Annunciation, her red curls leading him to his one Madonna, his only Beatrice?

  An audience had already gathered in the Piazza San Pietro as they arrived. Canto by canto it increased in size. By the time the Paradiso swelled into its grand finale, Malory guessed there might have been as many in the crowd as on the day that the Polish pope first waved to his Italian fans. In the final canto, the velvet ropes of St. Peter’s opened and the thousands of lost souls in the piazza surged inside. The grand organ of St. Peter’s—a Tamburini from Crema, Malory knew—began to play a tune he recognized dimly and then recognized completely. It was a melody he had played in Whistler Abbey, a melody that had awakened Tibor on the morning they had first met. MALORY = LOUIZA was the tune. Had he sung it to Tibor? Had Tibor really listened to Malory? Did anyone else know?

  And then he saw the cast—the Beatrice, the Dante, Virgil, Thomas Aquinas, Paolo, and Francesca, all two hundred actors and musicians and extras—he saw the audience turn as one and begin to sing:

  Tanti Auguri a te,

  Tanti Auguri a te,

  Happy Birthday to Dante …

  To Dante?

  They were looking at him. He was not Dante, but they were clearly singing to him, to Malory. It was his birthday, the way it had been Isaac Newton’s 309 years earlier. No one had sung to him since his tenth birthday, his last Christmas with his mother. And now, here in St. P
eter’s as he stood with Antonella on the circle of porphyry, the Pole walked up the steps to the altar below Bernini’s baldacchino preparing to celebrate Christmas Mass and waved down the nave to Malory—

  Happy Birthday to You!

  Malory waved back, with hesitation and pride to his friend at the altar. And as the cheering continued, he turned to the congregation behind him and waved to them. Beyond those thousands in the nave, Michelangelo’s sculpted mother sat holding her son in her lap. He wished his own mother, he even wished Old Mrs. Emery could have been here for the cheering. And there was another mother, another child … Antonella took his elbow and turned him away from the dream, straddling his biceps with her very immediate breasts.

  “Happy Birthday, my Malory.” With two gentle hands, she curled the stray hairs of Malory’s fringe behind his ears and pulled his lips to hers. And as the fluffy zabaione of Antonella’s lower lip touched Malory’s upper, an elixir tasting of Marsala and the yolk of forbidden eggs and forgetfulness pumped a warmth into Malory. Antonella’s lips came briefly away from his and drew with them an anesthetic that had coated his senses for nine long months, releasing a new drug that pulsed through his lips and tongue, across his cheeks, along his jaw to the nerves that sparked his brain, and down his throat to the untapped pipes of his most delicate organs. It unplugged, transposed the key of everything that Malory believed—beyond the skepticism of Tibor or the ministrations of Settimio—beyond everything Malory had worshipped since that first afternoon in the organ loft of St. George’s, Whistler Abbey.

  Here he was in Rome with another woman, not Louiza. Here was Antonella, tasting of pillow and zabaione, and—as she wrapped her fingers into the few bits of gray matter that remained beneath his hair and urged his own hands lower towards the abundant bits of Italian girl that only the nearest celebrants in St. Peter’s could see—not only did she seem to want Malory, not only had she worked and traveled hundreds of miles to see Malory, but she had done so while knowing of Malory’s single-minded pursuit of Louiza. There was a part of Malory—just how much he was only beginning to sense—that, after a single fragrant kiss, was tempted by Antonella. Not the unseen, veiled Madonna but the very present Angel. Antonella reached up and took Malory’s face between her hands and kissed him again, without translation, without tea and biscuits, without Anna Ford or the Carafa Chapel.

  “Fututi pizda matii!” The paw landed on Malory’s shoulder.

  “Tibor!” Malory shouted, detaching, recalibrating. “This is Antonella. A colleague of mine. From Cambridge.” But it was not only Tibor. Cristina, Radu, Brendushka, Dora, Sasha, and the entire pack of Bomb Squad and Nurses were jumping and flitting around them in a show of Rumanian enthusiasm.

  “Eccezionale, Tibor! Complimenti!” Without releasing Malory, Antonella reached up and kissed Tibor on both bearded cheeks.

  “Grazie mille, bella …” Tibor bowed. “But tonight the complimenti are for the birthday boy.”

  “How did you know?” Malory began.

  “We are the Bomb Squad,” Sasha said. “Do I need to remind you?”

  “And the party is just beginning. Brendushka,” Tibor called, “take Malory’s colleague to the Dacia. I want to steal our hero for a few minutes.”

  “Malory!” Antonella held onto his hand.

  “Do not worry,” Tibor laughed. “The Dacia is my kingdom, and you are under my protection and the care of my Nurses.”

  Malory kissed Antonella one last time and then let Tibor lead him out of St. Peter’s, below the balcony where only two months before the Polish cardinal had been reborn as pope to the world of Catholic believers. They threaded through the remnants of Christmas morning out the arches of St. Peter’s into the quiet of Santo Spirito.

  “Thank you, Tibor,” Malory said at last. “Your Divine Comedy was spectacular. And that last …” Malory reddened, knowing that he was about to gush. “That was amazing!”

  “Happy Birthday, Dante,” Tibor said. “Enjoy your day in Paradiso.” As they walked, without haste, without aim, down the Via della Lungara, Malory felt he was entering a new world—a world that was certainly new to Malory at least. In that world, Tibor had gathered the forces of the displaced and homeless of Rome to celebrate Malory’s journey down to the depths of Hell and back up to Paradise. There was no room in this new world for discretion.

  “It’s time, Tibor,” Malory said, “that I told you where I went that evening, when those men took me away from the hospital.”

  Malory told Tibor about the Vespa ride to the Sistine Chapel. He told him about the Turn that chose the new Pope, about his own investiture on the porphyry circle of St. Peter’s as Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Jews. He told him about Isaac Newton and how the whole story boiled down to One—one rule, one god, one woman. He told Tibor about Settimio and the Driver and Septimania, the invisible country that gave him unlimited powers. He told him about the Sanctum Sanctorum. He told him about the Pip.

  Tibor listened as they walked, silent, unsmoking.

  “So,” he said. “Septimania. In this country of Septimania, you believe that if you find the answer to Newton, if you bring all of the world’s religions under your belt, then you will also buy Peace in Our Time and find your girl? The One Girl?”

  He understood, Malory thought. He wasn’t taking Malory for crazy or delusional.

  “What about your colleague?” Tibor asked, a paw steering Malory towards the parapet overlooking the Tevere.

  “She arrived this afternoon from Cambridge. With information about Louiza.”

  “Malory,” Tibor said, “I am not a scientist or a king, only a poor, unemployed Rumanian from behind the Iron Eight Ball. But I do know that redheaded women do not come all the way to Rome to give organ tuners information about lost girlfriends.”

  “You’re wrong,” Malory said.

  “Holy Roman Emperor,” Tibor said, placing both paws down on Malory’s shoulders. “Don’t be a Holy Roman Fool.”

  Cristina and Dora swept by and pulled Tibor and Malory out of their conference. But Malory fell away into the backwater of the sidewalk beneath the plane trees, where he found Radu leaning against the parapet overlooking the Tevere.

  “I’m sorry, Malory,” Radu said.

  “Sorry?” Malory asked. “That I am one year older and starting to lose my hair?”

  “I imagine Tibor just told you.”

  “Tibor told me a lot of things.”

  “About Louiza?”

  “Louiza?” Now it was Malory’s turn to place a tentative hand on Radu’s shoulder.

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “Radu, tell me!” Malory had just said goodbye to his Angel of an Antonella. But the sound of Louiza’s name convinced him that this Divine Comedy, this divine birthday was bringing him a transcendent luck he could never imagine. The Bomb Squad had found Louiza, his prayers—such as they were—had been answered. “Where is she? At the Dacia?”

  Radu took off his glasses and wiped them on a pocket of his anorak. “I can’t believe Tibor didn’t tell you,” he mumbled into the pitted asphalt at his feet.

  “Tell me what? Where is she? How is she? Is she okay? And the baby?”

  “We didn’t find her,” Radu said.

  “Oh,” Malory said. Okay, he thought. The usual daily regret. A little more disappointment than usual. “But you will keep looking?”

  “No,” Radu said, “we won’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She isn’t here. Not in Rome, not in Italy, not in Europe.”

  “You know?”

  “We know.”

  “Then where?” Malory was shaking Radu again. The sun was fully risen on the waters of the Tevere. The river was moving fast, swollen with the flood.

  Radu shrugged. “The Bomb Squad has failed.”

  “But,” Malory said.

  “It is the first time. I’m sorry.”

  Malory’s hand slid from Radu’s shoulder.

  “You better come t
alk to Tibor. At the party.”

  Malory stared out at the water.

  “Let’s go.” Radu took Malory’s elbow. But Malory had turned into a stone as rigid as the statue of Newton. He felt Radu try. He felt Radu give up and leave. He felt the eddies of the crowd from St. Peter’s part around him as they headed home for Christmas lunch. When he finally began to move again, it was without compass or sense of propulsion, but only with the force of his pain now that the sedative on his lips had worn off. It drew him downriver, past the steps to Regina Coeli and the Dacia. It drew him across the Ponte Cestio to the Isola Tiberina, to the mini Albert Memorial with the Ospedale Israelite on his right and the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli on his left. The tide pulled him portside into the cortile, the cortile he had crossed countless times, where Tibor had smoked and waited for Cristina. It was there that gravity proved stronger than pain and Malory sat down on a bench, all hope abandoned.

  There was a sound at his feet. Malory looked. A bag. From Heffers in Cambridge. He picked up the bag, looked inside. A binder. The binder, heavy and black, that he had been carrying all night—Antonella’s translation of the Newton Chapbook. It had become such a part of Malory as he followed Tibor’s production for eighteen hours that he had completely forgotten its existence.

  Malory opened the cover where it lay by his feet in the cortile. One tree, one garden, he read again. He read to the bottom of the first page. And then the second. By the tenth page, he had picked up the binder and settled himself onto the bench. Noon passed. Malory read on. Oblivious to noise, oblivious to tranquility, Malory read the account of Newton’s friend. He read of the travels of the pair from Cambridge to Rome, their meetings with Leibniz and a variety of princesses and abbesses.