said, pulling out a little red plastic box in which were neatly placed a six-scaled rule, a protractor, a small contour rule, calipers, and precision calipers, nesting there as if they had been prepared for Alessandro Giuliani to see. "You don't know. When you work with machines and you shape things you always have to measure and remeasure to get it right. The machine doesn't tolerate mistakes or excuses. It has nothing to do with what you want or what you hope. You have to get things right or it won't work." As he made this declaration he was so innocent and so exact that he forced the old man into silence. "What?" Nicolò asked, to get Alessandro to talk.
"Your argument is beautiful and surprising, Nicolò," Alessandro said. "In short, you are correct. You must measure and remeasure, to get things right. And because I have not measured all those beams of light, I am ashamed."
"Signore, what happened to you there?"
At this, perhaps because he was exhausted and strained by the walk, the old man bowed his head onto his loosely clenched left fist.
Nicolò leaned forward in a complicated, unfathomable gesture
that showed he would become a wise and compassionate man. He did not apologize for having led Alessandro on, for Alessandro had led himself, but, still, Nicolò was moved, and he felt affection for the old man who, though lame, was teaching him how to walk.
Â
T HEY PICKED up the pace outside of Acereto. Perhaps because they had eaten and rested, Alessandro found strength. "God compensates perfectly," he said to his companion. "You cannot fall and expect not to rise. Call it the wheel, the lesson of Antaeus, what you will, but strength floods in after a fall.
"And then again," he said cheerily, "it may be just that the moon is about to rise, or it may be the chocolate, or a second wind. Tell me if you want to walk more slowly."
"I think I can keep up with you," Nicolò answered sarcastically.
For the next hour or two, keeping up with Alessandro would be a task that would set the boy to breathing hard and make him think that something might be wrong with his heart, because he found it difficult to stay even with an old man who carried a cane and whose every step was a cross between an uncontrolled pivot and a barely arrested fall.
They were walking up. The road from Acereto to Lanciata was steep in places, ascending to the ridge line of the low mountains that from the rooftops of Rome looked like the Alps, and then twisting dizzily into sheltered valleys where herds of sheep glowed in the moonlight like patches of snow.
They passed drop-offs where the milk-white shoulder of the road became a luminous ramp into an attractive void of weightlessness and rapture. In making the turns, Alessandro came perilously close to the abyss, and at times the edge of the cake would crumble away noiselessly after his foot had left it. He seemed not to notice or care, but to be protected by their almost supernatural momentum, which Nicolò interpreted as a friendly race to see who
could rise faster to the topmost ridge, where the moon would hang voluminously over a noiseless world.
Nicolò stayed away from the edge, and Alessandro was amused. "Of the many excellent things about mountaineering," he said as much to the night, the cliffs, and the air as to the boy taking quick steps beside him, "one of the finest is to become unafraid of heights. When I was a boy, and would climb with my father and the mountain guides he knew or hired, I abhorred the vacuum of an abyss, and my fists were white from clutching the rock. Meanwhile, the guides would sit with legs dangling over an infinite precipice; they would stand on tiny pinnacles, smoking their pipes, coiling ropes, and sorting the climbing hardware; and they would run up and down goat trails sometimes no less vertical and no more contoured than Trajan's Column.
"After a few days in the mountains my father hardly paid attention to the drop underneath the overhanging
"Your argument is beautiful and surprising, Nicolò," Alessandro said. "In short, you are correct. You must measure and remeasure, to get things right. And because I have not measured all those beams of light, I am ashamed."
"Signore, what happened to you there?"
At this, perhaps because he was exhausted and strained by the walk, the old man bowed his head onto his loosely clenched left fist.
Nicolò leaned forward in a complicated, unfathomable gesture
that showed he would become a wise and compassionate man. He did not apologize for having led Alessandro on, for Alessandro had led himself, but, still, Nicolò was moved, and he felt affection for the old man who, though lame, was teaching him how to walk.
Â
T HEY PICKED up the pace outside of Acereto. Perhaps because they had eaten and rested, Alessandro found strength. "God compensates perfectly," he said to his companion. "You cannot fall and expect not to rise. Call it the wheel, the lesson of Antaeus, what you will, but strength floods in after a fall.
"And then again," he said cheerily, "it may be just that the moon is about to rise, or it may be the chocolate, or a second wind. Tell me if you want to walk more slowly."
"I think I can keep up with you," Nicolò answered sarcastically.
For the next hour or two, keeping up with Alessandro would be a task that would set the boy to breathing hard and make him think that something might be wrong with his heart, because he found it difficult to stay even with an old man who carried a cane and whose every step was a cross between an uncontrolled pivot and a barely arrested fall.
They were walking up. The road from Acereto to Lanciata was steep in places, ascending to the ridge line of the low mountains that from the rooftops of Rome looked like the Alps, and then twisting dizzily into sheltered valleys where herds of sheep glowed in the moonlight like patches of snow.
They passed drop-offs where the milk-white shoulder of the road became a luminous ramp into an attractive void of weightlessness and rapture. In making the turns, Alessandro came perilously close to the abyss, and at times the edge of the cake would crumble away noiselessly after his foot had left it. He seemed not to notice or care, but to be protected by their almost supernatural momentum, which Nicolò interpreted as a friendly race to see who
could rise faster to the topmost ridge, where the moon would hang voluminously over a noiseless world.
Nicolò stayed away from the edge, and Alessandro was amused. "Of the many excellent things about mountaineering," he said as much to the night, the cliffs, and the air as to the boy taking quick steps beside him, "one of the finest is to become unafraid of heights. When I was a boy, and would climb with my father and the mountain guides he knew or hired, I abhorred the vacuum of an abyss, and my fists were white from clutching the rock. Meanwhile, the guides would sit with legs dangling over an infinite precipice; they would stand on tiny pinnacles, smoking their pipes, coiling ropes, and sorting the climbing hardware; and they would run up and down goat trails sometimes no less vertical and no more contoured than Trajan's Column.
"After a few days in the mountains my father hardly paid attention to the drop underneath the overhanging
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