Jonathan Levi - Septimania

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?