Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

At the age of twenty-three, just two weeks after taking his final exams and before the results were known, Alessandro read a story in an unremarkable student literary journal. In the years to come, had Alessandro been asked to proffer an interpretation, he would have replied that there was nothing of note in the tale; he might have tendered only vague impressions, he might have mentioned that it had a maudlin turn, that it suffered, perhaps, from the overwriting of impatient youth, but as for its details Alessandro would have been able to relate almost nothing. That he would remember the story at all can be put down to a single phrase, a phrase in its opening passage, which, having been laid within him like some spirit, would be born again and again in the months and years to follow, though with his own name substituted for the long-forgotten and finally insignificant original one: In the hour of his death, Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni would cry out for his mother. When he read the tale, one May morning in the library of the university, he could not have foreseen that this phrase, this ordered collection of words, was to command his life in ways he could not have expected, that he would be seized by the fear of yet another substitution, another name, though not for his own. Nor could he know that in the years to follow, the meaning of the phrase, ringing in his ears, would itself be changed by his life.

In 1967, Alessandro’s career as a physician and scientist began apace, full of promise, and it was blessed in its very first years by a chance scientific discovery made possible by his diligence, for Fate, as Louis Pasteur, another notable physician but of an earlier age, remarked, favors the prepared mind. In those days, Alessandro received several minor awards, which marked him out for future reference. Alessandro made the world his home, he traveled widely, and he steeped himself in the culture of each new place, coming even to dream in its native tongue. Alessandro made friends easily, though some might have said not very deeply.

His scientific and medical reputation grew. He kept meticulous notes of all his consultations, regarding each patient, to use a current phrasing, as a human being first but also as the potential hope for others through what might be learned from his or her ailments. He was considered reliable so that more and more he came to be relied upon.

Then Alessandro fell in love. In March of 1972, he attended an academic symposium in the heart of Vienna, not far from the Staatsoper, at which symposium he delivered a creditable paper and impressively fielded an array of questions, but from which he quietly slipped away before the conclusion of the day’s proceedings, being somewhat worse for wear, having arrived in the city only that morning by overnight train from Paris. Alessandro wandered across the Opernring and into the Kunsthistorisches Museum, with only the modest expectation of emptying his mind in preparation for the effort of the symposium dinner.

He idled through its halls, and while he barely took in any of the museum’s considerable collection of masterpieces, he nonetheless gained an advantage from the restorative effect of the ambience. He was searching for a sign showing the way out, when he turned a corner and was brought to a standing stop by what he saw. The painting was by the Italian late-Baroque painter Luca Giordano, and, as Alessandro would observe after emerging from his stunned regard, its subject was precisely as its title attested: The Expulsion of Lucifer from Heaven.

Facing the image of Lucifer, Alessandro was overcome by sadness. As if before Alessi alone in the hall, the archangel Michael, Lucifer’s own brother but instrument of God’s will, thrust Lucifer down, casting him (whose name signifies light itself) from the illumination of heaven into the darkness of exile. Notwithstanding an epic assembly of detail, including, for example, demons and devils scattering and falling, it was the face of Lucifer that arrested Alessandro’s eye, the exile’s upturned head, the arched muscles of the neck straining like a drawn bow, the jugular taut as wire. Above all were those eyes, knives of blue, Lucifer pleading with St. Michael, begging for the mercy of a God whose mercy was spent.

It is tempting to think that in those moments Alessandro remembered the story of Joseph that he learned at the nuns’ feet, Joseph, whose brothers drove him into the desert but who was restored to the fold and whose father rejoiced to see him again. Might Lucifer one day be reconciled with his father in heaven? The Lucifer whom Giordano presented to Alessandro bore no hubris but only the anguish of leaving home and losing love. Was this how evil entered the world? If it was pride that exiled Lucifer from heaven, then surely it is sorrow that fired his hatred.

Stumbling out into the gardens of the museum, Alessandro came upon a secluded café, where, beneath the linden trees, setting down his hat and uncoiling his scarf, he took off his glasses, and, leaning his elbows on the table, buried his face in his hands and wept. If there had been anyone watching at the time — and there was — such witness might have supposed he was merely massaging his eyes, for Alessandro did not let out a sound, nor did he shake, but instead his tears pooled in the interstices between his eyes and palms. It is observed parenthetically that although Alessandro was never prone to cry, it is a fact that within the week he would cry once more.

Duly, which is to say centuries later, he recovered himself, ordered an espresso from the waiter, and put on his glasses. As his coffee was set before him, Alessandro caught the gaze of a woman at the next table. She was, in his instant conviction, unapproachably beautiful, but, having perhaps been shaken free by his crying of some of those social restraints in himself, which he reviled, Alessandro offered to the woman, with such alacrity as to deny the possibility that the utterance was an act of courage, these words issued with measure and poise: The daffodils are early this spring. The woman laughed with pleasure.

Alessi was overcome with longing of a kind he had never felt before. An account of the outward appearance of this woman might be considered appropriate here, a mention of porcelain or roseblush skin, for instance, but a moment’s reflection is enough to remind us that the evocation of the sublime to one man might to another stand merely as the image of plain beauty. Indeed, let us take direction from language: The (Italian) word vago means vague, but an appropriately remote meaning connotes beauty and grace. It is wisdom itself, therefore, to refrain from describing the woman and to let the imagination, which is the true and only expert in this field, do its work. Alessi, who had never considered himself courageous, watched his own body rise from its seat, the cup of coffee, scarf, and hat in his hands, and walk to the woman. For him, it is not too fanciful to suggest, this sequence of acts amounted to a private heroism.

The two lovers spent a week in Vienna, most of it in the room of a hotel (or, to dispense with all vestige of delicacy, in the bed of their hotel room), where the elegance of its appointment was exceeded only by the cultivated discretions of the staff in the face of their guests’ private lives. How is it possible, Alessi asked himself, that another human being’s body can so convincingly seem an extension of one’s own? As she lay there in the mornings, Alessi watched patches of dawn’s searching light find her form. Alessi noted the stark absence of reason in the room, the bond without explanation, the inadequacy of all he knew to account for this, and as he watched her rub her eyes and smile at him, he understood that his life now contained two domains, science and love; that the two domains were divided not by reason, for even science makes claims about love, but were divided because suddenly subjectivity had borne in on him and he would not ever care for the science of love. When he had never before considered if science was necessary, never posed the question, here and now the answer came; here and now he believed that in this it was not.