The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

by Giorgio Bassani

  ‘I haven’t the least doubt about that, though my saying so won’t cheer you up. Have you chosen the subject for your thesis yet?’

  ‘I’ve chosen, so far no more than chosen, to do it on Emily Dickinson – you know, the nineteenth-century American poet, that archetypally awful woman … but what can you do? I’ll have to be tied to the Professor’s apron strings, waste a whole fortnight in Venice, the Pearl of the Lagoon – but a short while there’s enough for me … All these years I’ve stayed there as little as possible. Besides, to be honest, studying’s never been my forte.’

  ‘Liar. Liar and snob.’

  ‘No. I swear it’s true. And this autumn, trying hard to be as good as gold, I feel even less cut out for it. D’you know what I’d rather do, dear boy, instead of burying myself in the library?’

  ‘Why not tell me.’

  ‘Play tennis, go out dancing and flirting, you can imagine.’

  ‘All of them healthy recreations, including tennis and dancing, which if you cared to you could just as easily pursue in Venice.’

  ‘Sure I could – with that pair of governesses Uncle Giulio and Uncle Federico always snapping at my heels!’

  ‘Well, you can’t claim anyone’s going to stop you playing tennis. As for me, whenever I can, I take the train and make off to Bologna …’

  ‘Go on, tell the truth, you make off to make out, round at your true love’s.’

  ‘No. Not at all. I have to graduate myself next year, I’m still not sure whether in Art History or Italian – but now I think it’ll be Italian – and whenever I feel like it I permit myself an hour of tennis. I hire an excellent paying court in Via del Castello or at the Littoriale, and no one can stop me. Why don’t you do the same at Venice?’

  ‘The question is that to play tennis or go dancing you need a partner,4 but at Venice I don’t have anyone remotely suitable. And I tell you, Venice may well be beautiful, I wouldn’t deny it, but I don’t feel at ease there. I feel provisional, displaced … a bit as though I’m abroad.’

  ‘Do you stay at your uncles’?’

  ‘Yeah. Just to sleep and eat there.’

  ‘I see. All the same, two years ago, when the Littoriali were held at Ca’ Foscari, I’m grateful you didn’t come along. I mean it. It was the ghastliest day of my life.’

  ‘How come? After all … I should tell you that at one moment, finding out you were performing, I did think of rushing off to be a bit of a claque for … the local flag. But listen, changing the subject: d’you remember that time on the Mura degli Angeli, out here, the year you were made to retake your maths exams in October? You must have sobbed your eyes out, poor little fellow: you had such eyes! I wanted to console you. It even crossed my mind to get you to climb over the wall and come into the garden. And what reason did you have for not coming in? I know you didn’t, but I can’t remember why.’

  ‘Because someone disturbed us at the crucial moment.’

  ‘Oh yes, Perotti, the gardener, that dog of a Perotti.’

  ‘Gardener? Coachman, I seem to recall.’

  ‘Gardener, coachman, chauffeur, doorman, everything.’

  ‘Is he still alive?’

  ‘Are you kidding?!’

  ‘And the dog, the actual dog, the one that barked?’

  ‘Who? Jor?’

  ‘Yes, the Great Dane.’

  ‘Yes he’s also alive and vegetating.’

  She had repeated her brother’s invitation (‘I don’t know if Alberto has called you, but why not come round for a bit of a knock-up at our house?’), but without insisting, and without the slightest mention, in contrast to him, of the Marchese Barbicinti’s letter. She mentioned nothing but the real pleasure of seeing each other again after such a long time, and of enjoying together, in the teeth of so many things that might prevent it, whatever good times were still possible while the season lasted.

  2

  I wasn’t the only one to be invited.

  When, that Saturday afternoon, I emerged at the end of Corso Ercole I (I’d avoided the Giovecca and the town centre, and come round by way of the near-ish Piazza della Certosa), I immediately noted in the shade in front of the Finzi-Continis’ gateway a small group of tennis players. There were five of them, four boys and a girl, who’d also come by bike. My lips drew back in a grimace of disappointment. Who were these people? Apart from one whom I didn’t even know by sight, older, around twenty-five, with a pipe between his teeth, long white linen trousers and a brown corduroy jacket, the others, all of them in coloured pullovers and shorts, had the look of regular players at the Eleonora d’Este. They had just arrived and were waiting to be let in. But since the gate had still not been opened, every now and then they would leave off their loud chatter and laughter and, as a sign of light-hearted protest, rhythmically ring their bicycle bells.

  I was tempted to slope off. Too late. They’d already stopped ringing their bells and begun to stare at me with interest. One of them whom, as I approached, I recognized with a glance to be Bruno Lattes, was even greeting me by waving his racket at the end of his long and extremely skinny arm. He wanted to be recognized, though we had never been great friends – he was two years younger than me, and we hadn’t seen much of each other even at Bologna, in the Literature Department – and at the same time to usher me forwards.

  By this stage I’d come to a halt, face to face with Bruno, my left hand leaning on the smooth oak of the gate.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said and grinned. ‘What brings this gathering here today? Has the open tournament ended by any chance? Or have you all been knocked out?’

  My tone and words had been carefully chosen. In the meantime I was observing them one by one. I looked at Adriana Trentini, her lovely, very blond hair, her long tapering legs – magnificent legs, admittedly, but their skin was too white and speckled with strange red patches that always surfaced when she was hot. I looked at the taciturn young man in the linen trousers and brown jacket (certainly not from Ferrara, I told myself). I looked at the other two boys, much younger than him and even than Adriana, the two of them still at school perhaps or at the Technical College, and so, having ‘moved up’ during the last year when, bit by bit, I’d removed myself from every circle of the city, they were pretty well unknown to me. And I looked at last at Bruno, there in front of me, ever taller and drier, and because of his ever swarthier skin like a vibrant, nervous, young black. And that day, too, he was prey to such nervous agitation he was able to transmit the force of it through the light contact of the two front tyres of our bikes.

  Between the two of us passed the inevitable quick glance of Jewish complicity which, partly in anxiety and partly in distaste, I had already foreseen. Still looking at him, I then added:

  ‘I trust that before venturing out to play on foreign soil you have asked Signor Barbicinti’s permission.’

  The unknown young man, the one not from Ferrara, astonished at my sarcastic tone or because he felt uneasy, moved a little to the side of me. Instead of holding me back, this only spurred me on.

  ‘Please, put my mind at rest’, I insisted, ‘that this is an absence with proper leave and not a great escape.’

  ‘What are you saying!’ Adriana interrupted with her usual recklessness – quite innocent, but no less irritating for that. ‘Don’t you know what happened last Wednesday, during the mixed doubles’ finals? Don’t tell me you weren’t there, and why not give your eternal Vittorio Alfieri1 pose a rest. While we were playing, I saw you among the spectators. I saw you clearly.’

  ‘I wasn’t there at all,’ I replied drily. ‘I haven’t hung around the place for at least a year.’

  ‘And why not?’

  ‘Because I was sure one day or another I’d be chucked out anyway. And in fact I wasn’t wrong. Here’s the little document of expulsion.’

  I took the envelope out of my jacket pocket.

  ‘I assume you’ll have received one too,’ I added, turning to Bruno.

  It was only then tha
t Adriana seemed to remember. She twisted her lips. But the chance of breaking important news to me, which I was evidently uninformed about, quickly banished any other thought of hers.

  ‘He needs to be told,’ she said.

  She sighed, lifting her eyes towards the sky.

  Something very unpleasant had happened – she then began to tell me in a schoolmistressy voice, whilst one of the younger boys turned to press the gate’s sharp little buzzer made of black horn. All right, I didn’t know but, in the open tournament which started halfway through last week and was now over, she and Bruno had reached the finals – no less – a thing of which no one had ever dreamt they might be capable. And then? The final was under way when things took the strangest of turns (honestly, it would make your eyes pop out: Désirée Baggioli and Claudio Montemezzo, two great hopes of the game put in difficulty by a non-classified pair, so much so that they’d lost the first set ten–eight, and were finding the going very tough in the second) when suddenly, by an unprecedented decision of the Marchese Barbicinti, acting on his own behalf, as ever the arbitrating judge of the tournament, and once more, in short, the Big Chief, the game was brought to a sudden halt. It was six o’clock, and admittedly the visibility wasn’t good. But not so bad that they couldn’t have gone on for at least another couple of games. Good Lord, was this the way things should be done? At four games to two in the second set of an important match, he had no right, in the absence of proof to the contrary, to suddenly shout ‘Stop play!’, to rush onto the court with his arms spread wide, proclaiming the match suspended because of ‘the impending darkness’ and postponing the continuance of play and the conclusion of the match to the afternoon of the day after. And besides, the Marchese was hardly acting in good faith. Even if she hadn’t already noticed at the end of the first set that he was in cahoots with that ‘black soul’ Gino Cariani, the GUF2 secretary – they had drawn slightly apart from the crowd alongside the small pavilion for the changing rooms – and that same Cariani, perhaps to be less conspicuous, had been standing with his back completely turned to the court – if this wasn’t enough to tell you, the expression on the Marchese’s face when he bent to open the little entry gate, so pale and shocked she’d never seen anything like it, ‘he looked a right little wimp’, it would have been clear as day to her that the ‘impending darkness’ was nothing but the feeblest excuse, ‘utter bullshit’. Was there really any doubt about it? Nothing further was said of the interrupted match, although Bruno, the morning after, had also received the same registered delivery letter that I’d had; ‘the one I wanted to show her’. And she, Adriana, had been left so disgusted and indignant with the whole thing that she’d sworn never again to set foot in the Eleonora d’Este, at least for a good while. Did they have something against Bruno? If they did, they could easily have stopped him entering the tournament in the first place. They could have been straight with him and said: ‘Because of the way things are, we’re sorry but we can’t let you take part.’ But with the tournament already begun, and nearly finished, and not only that: him a mere hair’s breadth away from winning one of the titles, they should never have behaved the way they did. Four–two. What daylight robbery! The kind of filthy trick you’d expect from complete Zulus, not civilized, well-brought-up people.

  Adriana Trentini talked on, ever more fervently, and now and then Bruno would put in a word and add some details.

  In his view the match was stopped thanks mainly to Cariani, from whom, as anyone who knew him could tell, one could hardly expect anything else. It was only too obvious: a half-pint nobody like him, with his bird-boned look and consumptive’s chest, whose only thought, from the first moment he’d got into the GUF, had been to carve out a career for himself, and so he’d never missed an opportunity, in public or in private, of licking the Federal Secretary’s boots. (Hadn’t I seen him at the Caffè della Borsa on the rare occasions he managed to sit at the small table of the ‘old heavies of the Bombamano’?3 He’d puff himself up, curse, unleash swear words bigger than himself, but as soon as the consul Bolognesi, or Sciagura,4 or some other bigshot of the group contradicted him, you could see him quickly put his tail between his legs and, just to be forgiven and return to favour, he’d be ready to fawn and take on the most servile tasks, like scurrying off to the tobacconist to buy a packet of Giubek for the Federal Secretary, or telephoning the ‘Sciagura household’ to warn his ‘ex-washerwoman wifey’ of the great man’s imminent return …). A ‘worm of that ilk’ would certainly not pass up a chance, you could bet your life on it, to ingratiate himself with the Party once again! The Marchese Barbicinti was what you’d expect – a venerable sort, agreed, but rather lacking in ‘grey matter’, and anything but a hero. If they kept him on to run the Eleonora d’Este they did so because he looked the part, and above all for his name, which to them must have represented some glorious lure for the unwary. So it must have been a great laugh for Cariani to put the wind up the doddery old gent. Perhaps he’ll have said to him ‘And tomorrow? Has it crossed your mind, Marchese, what will happen tomorrow evening when the Federal Secretary’ll be here for the dance party, and will have to give a … Lattes that splendid silver cup and the customary Roman salute? For my part, I can foresee a terrible scandal. And big trouble, endless trouble. If I was in your place, given that it’s starting to get dark, I wouldn’t hesitate to stop the match.’ It wouldn’t have needed any more than that, ‘it’s a dead cert’, to have prompted him to bring the tournament to that grotesque and abrupt end.

  Before Adriana and Bruno had finished bringing me up to date with these events (and whilst doing so Adriana even managed to introduce me to the burly stranger: Malnate he was called, Giampiero Malnate, a recently qualified chemist working at one of the new synthetic rubber factories in the industrial zone), the big gate finally opened. A man of about sixty appeared on the threshold, big, stocky, with grey hair cut short, from which the half-past-two sun, gushing in a bright stream through the vertical gap behind him, extracted luminous metallic reflections. He had a moustache equally short and grey under a fleshy, violet nose – a bit like Hitler’s, it struck me, both the nose and the little moustache. It was him in person, old Perotti – gardener, coachman, chauffeur, doorman, the whole lot and more, just as Micòl had described him. He had not changed in the least since my time at the Guarini when, enthroned on the box-seat, he waited impassively till the school’s dark and menacing cave mouth, which had swallowed up his little, fearless, smiling ‘charges’, finally decided to restore them, no less serene and self-confident, to the vehicle made of glass, varnish, nickel-plating, padded material, fine planished hardwoods – exactly like a precious casket – whose conservation and conveyance were entirely his responsibility. His little eyes, sharp and grey as his hair, sparkling with a Venetian peasant’s canny hardness, still seemed to be laughing good-naturedly beneath his thick, almost black, eyebrows, exactly as they had been. But at what, this time? Because we had been left there waiting for at least ten minutes? Or at himself, kitted out in a striped jacket and white gloves – all brand new and perhaps donned especially for the occasion?

  And so we entered, and were welcomed on the other side of the gate, which was shut with a sudden massive bang at the hands of the assiduous Perotti, by the heavy barking of Jor, the black-and-white Great Dane. He came down along the driveway, the huge dog, then trotted alongside us with an air that wasn’t in the least intimidating. But nevertheless Bruno and Adriana fell silent.

  ‘He doesn’t bite, does he?’ asked Adriana fearfully.

  ‘Don’t worry yourself, Signorina,’ Perotti replied. ‘With the three or four teeth he still has left, it’s not like he’s fit to bite anything, not even polenta some days …’

  Whilst the decrepit Jor, halted in the middle of the drive in a sculptural pose, fixed us with his frosty, expressionless eyes, one dark the other light-blue, Perotti began to offer excuses. He was sorry to have made us wait – he said. It wasn’t his fault, but the fault of the electric c
urrent, which didn’t always work (but luckily Signorina Micòl had suspected as much and had sent him to check whether by chance we’d arrived), apart from the distance, which regrettably was more than half a kilometre. He couldn’t ride a bicycle, but once Signorina Micòl got something into her head …

  He sighed, rolled his eyes, and once more smiled, who knows why, disclosing from between his thin lips a toothscape as compact and strong as the Great Dane’s was feeble. Meanwhile, with his raised arm, he pointed out the driveway which, after a hundred metres, advanced into a thicket of rattan palms. Even for those who could use a bicycle, he warned, it would take three or four minutes just to arrive at the ‘Palazzo’.

  3

  We were really very lucky with the season. For ten or twelve days the weather remained perfect, held in that state of magical suspension, of glassy, luminous, soft immobility which is the special gift of some of our autumns. In the garden it was hot, just slightly less than if it was summer. Whoever wanted to could go on playing tennis until half past five or later, without fear that the evening damp, so marked towards November, would damage the gut strings of the racket. At that hour, naturally, you could hardly see a thing. And yet the light that continued to shed a golden hue down at the foot of the grassy inclines of the Mura degli Angeli, which were overrun, especially on Sundays, with a quiet, many-coloured crowd (kids chasing a ball, maids knitting away beside prams, soldiers on leave, lovers in search of places where they could kiss), that last light tempted you to keep on playing, regardless of whether you were all but blind. The day was still not over; surely it was worth playing on just a little longer.

  We came back every afternoon, announcing our visits by a phone call at first, then not even that; and always the same group, with the occasional exception of Giampiero Malnate, who had known Alberto since 1933, in Milan, and contrary to what I’d thought that first day, meeting him in front of the Finzi-Continis’ gate, not only had he never before set eyes on the four youngsters who accompanied him, but neither had he anything at all to do with the Eleonora d’Este, or with its vice-president and secretary, the Marchese Ippolito Barbicinti.