A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin Page A

shocked again, with his mouth and cheeks full of a difficult sheet of prosciutto. He couldn't answer, and he half suspected that the old man had timed his criticism accordingly. Cheeks puffed like a squirrel's, he listened. "You mustn't hum when you eat—not that animals do—for it connotes a certain primitive idiocy. No one is going to snatch the food away from you, so you can cut it or tear it apart before you put it in your mouth. Don't breathe so intently—it sounds as if you're going to expire. And don't make so much noise when you chew.
    "Cafes on the Via Veneto are full of people who follow the rules I just stated. Believe me, well dressed women don't look twice at someone who eats like a jackal on the Serengeti. Another thing: don't keep shifting your eyes from side to side as you eat. That's half the battle right there."
    "I never heard of the Serengeti," Nicolò said, after swallowing from shame a mass of food that might have stuck in his throat and killed him. "Is it a street or a piazza?"
    "It's a place half the size of Italy, filled with lions, zebras, gazelles, and elephants."
    "In Africa?"
    "Yes."
    "I would like to go to Africa," Nicolò said, putting another huge pile of prosciutto into his mouth.
    "There are better places to go than Africa," Alessandro stated. "Much better places."
    "Where?"
    "There," the old man said, pointing north-northeast to the great mountains he knew were rearing up far away in the dark, to the Alto Adige, the Carnic Alps, the Julians, and the Tyrol.
    Nicolò turned to look in the direction his guide had indicated, and he saw a lightened mass of buildings that, even in the darkness, conveyed a reassuring and uniquely Italian sense of dilapidation.
    "What's so great over there?" Nicolò asked. "There aren't even any lights on."
    "I don't mean there," Alessandro said, thinking of snow-capped mountains and the electrifying past. "I mean far beyond; if you flew into the night as if in a dream, and rose, the wind tight against your face, the stars drawing you to them, the landscape beneath you blue-black. I have suddenly vaulted into the mountains," he said, "after never having gone back, ever, for fear of encountering my lost self."
    "There aren't any people up there anymore, fighting wars. Once things happen, they pass, and that's it."
    "No," Alessandro said. "If they happen once, they stay forever. I never spoke of them, because I have faith that they are everlasting, with or without me. I'm not afraid to die, because I know that what I have seen will not fade, and will someday spring full blown from someone not yet born, who did not know me, or my time, or what I loved. I know for sure."
    "How?"
    "Because that is the soul, and whether you are a soldier, a scholar, a cook, or an apprentice in a factory, your life and your work will eventually teach you that it exists. The difference between your flesh and the animate power within, which can feel, understand, and love, in that very ascending order, will be clear to you in ten thousand ways, ten thousand times over."
    "Have you ever seen a spirit?" Nicolò asked.
    "By the million," came the answer, surprising even Alessandro, who was now not entirely in control of himself. "By the million, in troops of the glowing dead, walking upward on a beam of light.
    "Now you listen!" he said to the boy, leaning forward and slamming his palm with his fist. "If you were to go to every museum in the world to look at the paintings in which such a beam of light connects heaven and earth, do you know what you would find? You would find that in whatever time, in whatever country, painter to painter, the angle of light is more or less the same. An accident?"
    "I'd have to see. I'd have to measure. I don't know."
    "Measure?"
    "With a protractor."
    "You can measure such things solely with your eyes, and besides, when the last judgment comes, even Marxists won't have protractors."
    "I will. I always carry one in my pocket. Look," Nicolò