Tibor didn’t come down. I rang up to his room. No answer. I convinced the front desk to come up with me to the room and knock, and when there was still no answer, persuaded security to let me in.
Tibor was there. Sitting on the edge of his bed, fully dressed. Not one but three empty bottles — empty liter bottles of Absolut — stood on the console next to the TV. BBC News was playing, without the sound thankfully, and equally thankfully with no sign of either Cristina or Anna Ford on the screen. But Tibor was absent — clearly alive in body, dressed, and ready for rehearsal, but absent in mind.
I asked security to call for a doctor.
“No,” Tibor whispered, from a great distance — more distant than a Tom Waits rasp. I thanked the hotel staff and assured them I’d be all right. They left and closed the door. I sat next to Tibor on the bed and took his right hand. It was huge and heavy.
“Something’s missing,” Tibor said. “The box is empty.”
“What box?” I asked him, thinking about the vacant bassinet in Fatebenefratelli.
“Seven isn’t working,” Tibor said. “I was so certain!”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “we should go to rehearsal?”
He said nothing.
“Perhaps you should slow down on your drinking.”
Tibor turned his face to me and gave me a look of such infernal hatred. “You are your mother’s daughter,” he said, with an accent on every bitter word. “You stand on my shoulders and press me down with your heels.” I couldn’t make much sense of what he was saying. But his hand was still in mine, my father’s hand.
“What do you need?” I asked him, and stroked that hand with my other.
“The Pip,” he said.
“The Pip?”
“Once upon a time, little girl, my friend Malory told me that I was out of tune. Maybe he was wrong then. He is right now.”
That was the second time I’d heard your name.
“Malory will know. Malory will give me the Pip to put me back in tune. Then Cristina, maybe she will hear me.”
I put Tibor to bed and stepped out into the hallway. I called Cristina in New York. I called the National. Both had contingency plans in place. So when on the third day, Tibor was still unable and unwilling to go to rehearsal, the National quietly let it be known he was being replaced. Cristina arrived that morning on a private jet loaned by someone grateful. Heels on his shoulders or no, Tibor let us guide him down to a cab and the airport. I rode with them to the airport, holding Tibor’s big right hand. But when he saw the plane, he balked.
“The Pip,” Tibor said, looking at the stairs up to the cabin door. “Do you have the Pip?”
And so I stayed — the only way we could get him onto the plane — with the promise that I would find Malory, with the promise that I would find you and bring you and the Pip to him.
I took the next flight to Rome. I had no idea where to look for you. But I went to see Sister Francesca Splendida — I hadn’t been back in ten years. And as I entered the Basilica of Santa Sabina, I looked up at the light, translucent through the foggy marble, and knew that you were close by. I know how to find people.
Monday, September 10, is Tibor’s birthday. He will turn fifty, and you must be there. He is stuck, like Dante, in the middle of the road of life, the right road lost. He has been tested by loss and has surrendered to gloom. He needs a Virgil to guide him out of the dark woods. You must come. I know you are the little Englishman with the pale English wife. I know you lost that wife and also lost a baby at Fatebenefratelli. And maybe all that loss makes it difficult for you to go to Tibor. But you must come. And you must — Tibor was very insistent — you must bring the Pip. Do you know what he means? The Pip?
MALORY HADN’T TOUCHED HIS SCONE. NOR HIS TEA. HE HAD ONE thought — it is not possible.
He had other thoughts — it will not happen.
Yet he also had a question, for himself.
How can I tell this girl, this Ottavia who somehow found her way past the doors, the gates, the walls, the alarms, the buzzers, not to mention Settimio and his invisible minions, how can I give this girl who found me the simple answer No, when I have forgotten how to speak?
In the beginning, Settimio brought me invitations for meetings with popes and rabbis, imams and lamas, politicians and supplicants. In the beginning, Settimio brought messages that came four, sometimes ten times a day, frantic messages from Antonella, from all the residents of the Dacia that through Fra Mario eventually found their way to Settimio. I ignored all news, especially news of Tibor. I had seen what I had seen — the position of Tibor’s body, the position of Antonella’s body beneath his, the velocity of Cristina’s walking away, the futility of my own observation. On the morning of December 26, 1978, I made the calculations that anyone with basic Newtonian common sense would have made. All added up to betrayal.
“Go,” Tibor told me at Fatebenefratelli and promised to look after Louiza.
“Go,” Tibor told me at the Dacia and promised to look after Antonella.
I went. I trusted those promises. Trust — the One True Rule of friendship.
Not for Tibor.
The betrayal is too great.
I will not go again.
Twenty-three years ago, I climbed into my oil lamp and pulled down the lid. In twenty-three years, I have set foot outside the grounds of the Villa Septimania precisely once, spoken to no one except Settimio, and most of what I have said to Settimio required no speech. For twenty-three years I have stared at the statue of Newton, the Princess of Septimania, and the marble apple. The force of gravity that Bernini harnessed in his sculpture, the force that attracted the two lovers and their apple into a perfect balance no longer calls to me. I’d had the gall to imagine the woman as Louiza and the man as myself and to dream that such a perfect balance guided our lives. But I had been late, been off-balance. I forsook the quest for Louiza and our lost child in a misbegotten lunge for happiness and Antonella. I rejected gravity, rejected attraction, rejected all of them, including Newton.
What did I have left? Septimania.
From the depths of my lamp, I sent away for books and papers, entire libraries on Newton and science. I corresponded with super-experts in super-gravity, super-symmetry, super-colliders, cosmology, string theory, and quantum hoo-hah to such an extent that Settimio had to redesign the Sanctum Sanctorum and wire it with serious self-updating computer machinery to handle the quantity and quality of information that I collected from Feynman in California, Hawking back in Cambridge, Greene, Klebanov, Polyakov, and even Freeman Dyson whose black holes and theory of perpetual free-fall felt most sympathetic to my own state.
I built tunnels and bookshelves, dug deep and deeper, seven times seven, beneath the orange trees and Roman pines, into the hill of the Aventino. I filled the tunnels with books, with manuscripts. As Settimio brought in computers, I devised a way with him to digitize what we have and acquire what we have not with a system that receives without giving any clue of its existence. The amount of knowledge I have beneath me, beneath the Villa Septimania, would not only bury Minerva the Goddess, but Maria the Mother, and two, if not all three, of the Catholic Gods without giving a clue to the outside world.
Discretion.
Settimio passed on the key to quiet acquisition of knowledge, as I searched for what Newton knew, as I tried to put the world in tune. Discreetly. Leaving no trace.
I buried myself in everything and anything that might lead me back to Newton’s One True Rule so I might begin again. I sat and thought, the way Newton sat and thought back in our frozen rooms next to the gate of Trinity College. But I couldn’t will myself back to the balance of knowledge and ignorance that Newton had.