The Gladiator

"Try," A

She said that, but she didn't mean it. No matter what she said, she thought she was bright and sophisticated. She didn't really believe her alternate was backward, either. They had electricity and clean water and atomic energy. What more did they need?

Then she saw the way Eduardo looked at her. To him, she really was a primitive girl from a backward place. She could tell. It embarrassed her and made her angry at the same time.

"Fasartas," he said. "Well, I'll do my best." And he talked for a while, and she got the idea that a fasarta made life more worth living, but she couldn't have said exactly how. He saw he wasn't getting through. "For me, a fasarta is like water to a fish. For you, it's more like water to a hedgehog, isn't it?"

"I'm not prickly!" she said, sounding… prickly.

"Sure," Eduardo said, sounding all the more smooth and soothing next to her. She'd never heard disagreeing by agreeing done better.

And so she got mad at Eduardo. She got mad at the place he came from-the home timeline, he called it-for having things her Italy didn't… freedom, for instance. She was already mad at Maria Tenace for being Maria. She was mad at the Young Socialists' League for paying attention to Maria, even if (no, especially because) Maria turned out to be right. A stopped clock is right twice a day, her father sometimes said. She'd thrown that in Maria's face once. And she was mad at Italy- her Italy, the Italy she'd always taken for granted and loved at the same time-for being less perfect, less a workers' paradise, than she'd thought it was.

And she was mad because she couldn't do anything about anything she was mad at. She had to keep her mouth shut, or somebody would knock on the door in the middle of the night. Then she would learn some things about the workers' paradise that everybody already knew, but no one wanted to discover at first hand. She felt as if she wanted to explode. She knew she couldn't, of course. Maybe that made her maddest of all.

Seven

In the Mazzillis' apartment, Gianfranco's father looked up from the report on the latest Communist Party Congress and said, "That cousin the Crosettis have staying with them seems like a nice young fellow."

"I think so, too." Gianfranco was glad to get away from his literature project, even if it meant talking with his father. The assignment was, Write a canto in the style of Dante's Inferno. Which feudal lords, capitalists, and Fascists would you assign to which circles of hell? Why?

How was he supposed to do anything like that? To begin with, he was no poet. Then, Dante's language was almost nine hundred years old now. It lay at the core of modern Italian, but nobody had a style like Dante's any more. Would anybody be crazy enough to ask a modern English-speaker to try to write like Chaucer, or even Shakespeare? Gianfranco hoped not, anyhow.

"Yes, that Silvio seems very friendly," his father went on. "You talk with him like you've known him a long time."

Oops, Gianfranco thought. He had known Eduardo for a while, of course. But it wasn't supposed to show. "He has interesting things to say," Gianfranco answered.

"Good. And it's nice that he plays that game you were teaching A

This was the first time he'd said anything about The Gladiator, even in passing. Gianfranco had wondered if he even knew the gaming shop got closed down. There were times when Gianfranco wondered just how co

"It's only a game, Father," he said, as if no other possibility had ever crossed his mind.

"Nothing is only anything." His father sounded very sure of that. Gianfranco wondered what it meant, or if it meant anything. He started to ask. Then he noticed his father was deep in the Party Congress report again.

That meant he had to get back to imitating Dante himself. Rails across Europe had taught him something about dealing with big, complicated projects. If you could break them down into smaller, simpler pieces and tackle those pieces one at a time, you had a better chance than if you tried to tackle everything at once.

So… If he were traveling through the circles of hell, whom would he see? He needed to figure that out first. Then he could decide why they were there. And after that… Well, after that he could try to sound like Dante. He didn't think he would have much luck, but he didn't think anyone else in the class would, either.

Feudal lords, capitalists, and Fascists. The assignment made it plain he needed at least one of each. The Fascist would be Hitler. He'd already decided that. And he'd put Hitler as close to Satan as he could, because Hitler attacked Stalin and the Soviet Union. Probably more than half the class would pick Hitler, but Gianfranco couldn't help that. Mussolini was the other choice, and he didn't do as much.

"Capitalist," Gianfranco muttered, not loud enough for his father to hear him. When you thought of a capitalist, you thought of…

When Gianfranco thought of a capitalist, he thought of Henry Ford. And Ford would definitely do. He made millions of dollars and exploited his workers doing it. Gianfranco had to check a map of Dante's hell to decide which circle to put him in.

The fifth, he decided: the circle of hoarders and spendthrifts. Didn't that say what capitalists were all about?

Now he needed a feudal lord, and one Dante hadn't used. He smiled when Francesco Sforza came to mind. Sforza had ruled here in Milan. The big castle near the heart of town was his creation. Since he'd taken the city by force in 1450, he probably belonged in the sixth circle of hell, that of the wrathful. And Dante had never heard of Francesco Sforza, because the poet was long dead when the soldier of fortune came to power.

/ have my people, Gianfranco thought. Now all I've got to do is sound like Dante. That would have been fu

Still, he had to try. He could steal some lines from Dante and change names. He could adapt some others. But he still had to write some of his own. He had to think about that old-fashioned Italian, and about the rhythm, and about the right number of syllables in every line, and about what he was trying to say. Ft was harder than patting his head and rubbing his stomach at the same time.

Finally, though, he wasn't too unhappy with what he had. "Do you want to listen to my verses, Father?" he asked.

His father looked at the report on the Party Congress. Gian-franco thought he would say no, but he nodded. "Well, why not?" he answered. "They've got to be more interesting than this thing. Doctors could bore patients to sleep with this, and save the cost of ether."

That didn't mean he was eager to listen to Gianfranco, but he'd said he would. Listening was all that really mattered. Gianfranco did his best imitation of Dante. He'd just started Hitler, whom he'd saved for last, when his father broke out laughing. Gianfranco broke off, insulted. "It's not that bad," he said.

"Scusi. Semi," his father said, laughing still. "I wasn't laughing at the poetry."