Ernesto

by Umberto Saba

  Signor Wilder, usually so punctual, kept them waiting that morning. When he finally did arrive he called Ernesto into his office. “I’ve hired a new apprentice. Sie werden sehen. You’ll see,” he said, and went on speaking German for most of the conversation. “You’ll see how quickly and how well he gets to know his way around. The first thing is to teach him to be organized.” His words contained a concealed rebuke for Ernesto’s disorganization. It was as if the boss had completely forgotten the underlying feelings he had always shown to his verfluchter Kerl. Perhaps he was having belated suspicions about the excessive use of naphthalene, unexplained ink stains on his five-page letters, pesky screaming kids who’d burst through Ernesto’s door and chase each other out through his door, lamps that exploded one after another, or canary-yellow gloves and such, and had finally found a way to avenge himself on the malefactor without having to fire him, mostly because he was useful for Italian correspondence and because, suspicious as Signor Wilder was by nature or by some malady, he never had any doubts about Ernesto’s honesty. He divided the work between the two boys. Theoretically, at least, the division was planned so that once Ernesto had instructed the new boy, there would be very little for him to do. In effect, he was left with Italian correspondence, bill collecting, and supervision of the laborers, which, because of the man, Ernesto would have happily left to the newcomer.

  “Head clerk, ha!” he thought. “He’s clearly getting rid of me. Except —God only knows why he wants me to quit on my own.”

  The reader knows only too well by now that Ernesto could be pretty thickheaded, but he had good qualities, too. For example, he found it difficult to lie. And what’s worse in terms of the practicalities of life, young as he was, he couldn’t accept anything of value (in this case, the salary Signor Wilder paid him) without feeling he was returning equal value. To do so would simply leave him feeling uncomfortable and distressed. His first impulse, therefore, was to turn around and walk out right then and there, leaving Signor Wilder to look after his new apprentice by himself. But then he thought of his mother, of her tears, and of the scenes she’d make about his quitting his job. It also occurred to him that he might be wrong about Signor Wilder’s intentions. What if he were planning to expand the firm and the new boy would be required for the additional work? In that case hiring the boy wasn’t directed against him. The work the boss was taking away with one hand, he could give back with the other. He might even end up giving him too much work.

  At the end of the nineteenth century commercial enterprises were far riskier undertakings than they are now in 1953. Bankruptcies, followed often by bullets which the ruined man (responsible for it or not) shot into his temple or mouth (rarely into his heart), were so to speak the order of the day. Signor Wilder approached his business affairs (as he did everything else) with great caution. Moreover (although Ernesto couldn’t know it) he was obsessed by the thought of failure. He had even taken the precautionary step of buying a gun in case his worse fears came true. They never did. And Signor Wilder, who was not an old man, though he seemed so to sixteen-year-old Ernesto, would live to serve as a (noncombatant) reserve officer during the First World War, to leave Trieste after it was occupied by Italy (he regarded this a personal insult), to survive the Second World War under circumstances I leave to the imagination, and to die enfeebled, well into his eighties, in a gas chamber along with other Hungarian Jews after being hunted down by his beloved Germany, which considered him a dangerous threat to the Third Reich’s millennium empire. Such was the fate of the man now facing Ernesto and dividing some quiet office jobs between him and the new boy. And not just his fate.

  Signor Wilder didn’t say anything about letting Ernesto go or reducing his salary. He even ended his little speech in Italian (but this seemed just as punishing to the boy, even though he used somewhat affectionate terms). For a moment, he’d even been tempted to tell Ernesto about some expansion plans he’d been considering. But at the last minute, he decided it would be wiser not to say anything to anyone, not even to the little bastard, the verfluchte Kerl.

  A few days later, Ernesto, returning from the custom’s office at the port, where he’d been on errands for Signor Wilder, was seated next to the man atop flour sacks piled on a cart. His mind was no longer occupied with the new boy, whom, it turned out, he had no trouble controlling. He had even managed to get him to act as a kind of minion. When he had some leftover money and felt overwhelmed by temptation, he would send him out midmorning, or at other odd times, to a nearby baker, a customer of Signor Wilder’s whose confections made up in quantity what they lacked in quality, to buy four of the same pastries that the man once bought him. To his credit, he would then offer half to Stefano, who’d fend him off with thanks and spurious refusals that always irritated Ernesto. He gave up speaking Italian to the boy in favor of dialect, and addressed him as tu, accepting as though perfectly natural that the boy, who was perhaps only a year younger than he, addressed him formally as would a subordinate speaking to a person of superior rank. He would have found it equally comfortable for the boy to use tu to him, but though they got along well, Ernesto didn’t much like him, so he never raised the subject.

  The man was sulking and trying not to look at the boy. Ernesto, on the other hand, was feeling particularly cheerful that morning. He was marveling at the people on their various errands, crowding the streets of Trieste. Every one them, even the women with baskets or handbags on their arms, seemed to be engaged in important activities. Beyond the streets along which the cart was proceeding you could see now a strip of sea, now a hill that in the brilliant summer sun appeared to be closer than it really was. “Trieste is such a beautiful city,” Ernesto thought for the first time in his life. “It’s a good thing I was born here.” (As if he’d had any choice.) But then it occurred to him that he’d never seen any other city, and he remembered how jealous he’d been at school of a well-off schoolmate who took long trips with his parents, even to foreign countries, and who talked about their marvels when he returned. Not having anything to compare it with, Ernesto couldn’t be sure that his admiration for Trieste was justified. Every judgment does indeed imply comparison. So the impossibility of Ernesto’s making such a comparison left him uncertain of what was, indeed, the truth.

  The man was morose because Ernesto hadn’t spoken to him except to give him orders since the day Ernesto had broken the branch chosen with such loving care with the intention, as the man had put it to himself, “to punish him a little” (in reality to vent that bit of sadism on the boy, which seems to go along with that kind of love). Whenever Ernesto went to the square to get a laborer, he still chose him. But that was all. “Punks,” the man would say to himself, “they go with you once or twice, then they’ve had it and dump you, if you don’t dump them first.” But his wound was deeper than that. He knew only too well that being with Ernesto would be a unique experience in his squalid life, and that once it was over, he would never find anything like it again, not with all the other kids in the whole world. Sometimes the bitterness of his love would turn against society. He would tell himself, “Ernesto treats me so bad because he’s high-class and I’m a poor slob.” But he was wrong. Aside from the fact that the boy thought himself poor, too, he wasn’t concerned with social disparity. Perhaps he wouldn’t have done with a gentleman what he had with the day laborer. . . .

  “Trieste is beautiful,” Ernesto repeated to himself, “and Diem” (the schoolmate, who in third year had gotten him to want a vest like his) “can rave all he wants about other cities, but not one of them can be this beautiful.” But while vaunting his city to himself, he realized that he was sitting hunched over, something for which his mother often scolded him. “I’m growing too fast,” he thought regretfully. (He considered being somewhat tall a defect—one of the reasons for his self-avowed “ugliness.”) He sat up straight, unhappily wishing he were half a head shorter. Then his hazel eyes fell upon the man, who as usual had the red kerchief around his head. Seeing
him so sullen (it was easy for Ernesto to understand the reason for the mood, though he had no idea of the societal component), he at first felt a kind of satisfaction, a sort of inner pleasure at having “power” over a person so much older than he, and which, at the same time, gave the lie to his notion that he was too ugly to be loved. Then he felt a pang—almost of guilt—toward the man. Finally he began to laugh.

  “You remind me of Ali Baba,” he said to him.

  The man gave him a dirty look.

  “I’m no baba,” he said (having confused a name with a term that, in his state of mind, sounded offensive). “You gotta know that!”

  Ernesto laughed even louder, almost the way he did the day of the cone. Then he explained that Ali Baba was a character in an Oriental fairy tale—a story like the one about the Three Kings who came from the Orient—and that it had nothing to do with women. “He did the kinda work you do,” he added, “and wore something red on his head, too.”

  You need to know that when Ernesto was thirteen, the same year he was yearning for the vest, he spent the most delightful summer of his life lying facedown on his brass bed, in the only room in the house with a sloping ceiling, reading A Thousand and One Nights. Reading like that, it never even occurred to him to go swimming down at the shore, which he’d always liked doing. It was that happy summer, too, that his nursemaid’s husband had given him Pimpo, the blackbird. And the wonder he felt on discovering the needs and habits of the bird, along with the wonders that A Thousand and One Nights aroused in him, merged into one unforgettable state of bliss. His favorite story was that of a boy (whose name he could no longer remember) who finds the father he had never known while he (the boy) and his slave are walking along the streets of a strange city. Nor did the father, who after an adventurous life was now a confectioner (in Baghdad, or was it Basra?), recognize the boy, who had been a mere baby when he had last seen him. But drawn to him by the call of blood, or perhaps the child’s extraordinary beauty, he invited him into his shop to give him an icy sweet as a gift, telling him that no other shop in the city made a better one. The boy was under strict orders not to eat outside of his home and never to speak to strangers. And the slave flatly refused to allow him to accept the offer. But the vendor’s pleas and those of the boy finally overcame the slave’s fear of the inevitable punishment if the infraction were discovered. The sweet was really so delicious that the boy had a second. Then, in spite of the recriminations of the slave, who having given in once was now at the boy’s mercy, the boy wanted to return there every day. In fact, he didn’t want to walk in any other direction. Finally, of course, it all came to light (one afternoon the boy ate so much of the sweet that he couldn’t eat his dinner and had to tell his mother everything). The slave was whipped bloody, but the boy’s parents, who still loved each other and had found each other again because of the ices, were reunited. Ernesto had been struck by something the boy in the fable said when he must have been about his own age. As the confectioner, ever-more fascinated by the boy’s attractiveness, wanted to go beyond words to caresses, the boy withdrew and spoke sharply, “Just stay there. It’s enough for you to look at me and serve me.” (Ernesto would have given anything in the world to have been that boy, if only for five minutes.) Later that evening, Signora Celestina, anxious and worried to see her son so engrossed in reading, got him to go out of the house by giving him some money to buy a small gelato. He had it at the Caffè del Tergesteo, which in good weather set tables outdoors opposite the Teatro Communale (afterward the Giuseppe Verdi Theater). It was a fairly elegant café frequented by wealthy, generally middle-aged merchants—some on business from distant Turkey, who like the characters in The Thousand and One Nights wore red fezzes. No one paid the least attention to Ernesto (how lucky was that kid in the story!) except the waiter, who disregarding Ernesto’s youth and inelegant clothes brought his small portion of ice cream—chosen after much consideration and many hesitations from the silver-framed list the waiter had offered with a polite bow—as though Ernesto were an adult, a veritable gentleman. (However, it never occurred to the waiter to offer him a second small dish free of charge.) In that café, so suited to his fantasies (with its merchants and red fezzes and the wonderful gelati, which, if Ernesto were alive and fancied now, couldn’t be found anywhere these days), he would imagine he was still reading A Thousand and One Nights, which of course he owned in a dreadfully expurgated edition created by a Frenchman named Galand and then set into Italian by the Salani publishing house, which, as everyone knows, is as popular as it is honest. So that memorable summer the boy not only came to know the particular aspect of the Orient that can be called “the beggars’ dream” as expressed in Princess Scheherazade’s tales (the other aspect—the truer one—was defined by Napoleon, who when defeated by Orientals said, and as usual correctly, “The Orient is a dog”) but he also came to know the elegance of the eighteenth-century French. However, he wasn’t conscious of any of these things, not even of his own exceptional happiness. He recalled it all, and very clearly, many years later. But by then everything in himself and around him had changed so much that the memory, which should have comforted him, instead, because of the contrast with his present—between dream and reality—brought only anguish.

  The man wasn’t much interested in stories (Oriental or not), and Ernesto’s telling him the “open sesame” story about Ali Baba meant nothing to him. He was happy, however, that the boy was speaking to him. No matter what Ernesto said to him, he felt as if they were back in the old days.

  “You’ve already forgotten what we used to do together and liked so much?” he asked in a voice that contained a touch of bitterness.

  “You told me you can end up in jail for doing that kind of thing,” Ernesto responded with true or pretended seriousness.

  The point seemed not to have any effect on the man this time.

  “God punishes,” Ernesto added, hypocritically for once, for he had instantly lost his faith the first time, following his dirty-minded cousin’s advice and example, he had masturbated. He would more likely have achieved his goal (of freeing himself from the man) if he had told him that he’d been with Tanda, and was trying to save money so that he could go back to her (he wanted to savor, to be more conscious of the pleasure he had felt that first time in his somewhat confused state). The man didn’t hate women, but he had no use for them in bed, and had he known that Ernesto had already slept with one, he might no longer have been an object of the man’s desire.

  “If you wanna,” the man spoke again, “I can say I gotta sew up a torn sack of flour. Then we can meet in the usual place.”

  “You’ve really gone nuts,” Ernesto replied in irritation. “Next, you’re gonna wanna do it with the door open.”

  “There’s no one around but the guy with the cart, and he’s gotta look after the horses,” the man said. “It’ll be good to just feel you a little. I’ll come pretty quick.”

  His words had not only been whispered but were said in a pleading voice, the voice of a beggar seeking alms. Ernesto (who didn’t want to upset the man—he was even a little afraid of him) was moved.

  “Okay, we’ll do it like you say,” he answered solemnly. “But not now—after lunch. And it’s gonna be the last time.”

  As always Ernesto kept his promise. And the man, who for the occasion had removed his kerchief revealing Gypsy-black hair, even managed to kiss him lightly on the cheek. But the boy now knew that there was only one way he could free himself of him—to leave Signor Wilder’s employ, or better still to get himself fired.

  Now, and more than ever since the new boy was seated across the desk from him, Ernesto preferred outdoor work—work that took him to the port and to the city’s suburbs. But though he was healthy, he wasn’t robust, despite Ischirogeno—the new tonic then in fashion, which the old doctor and Signora Celestina had tried to substitute for the unrivaled cod-liver oil. Walking all day, especially now that it was summer, fatigued him. “I’m falling asleep on my feet wh
en I get home,” he had told the man one day, complaining—as the reader may recall—about having to go to school evenings when he’d rather go to bed and sleep. School was actually closed then for vacation. Still, on returning from work Ernesto would feel, as he’d tell his mother, exaggerating more than a little, “I’m dead tired.”

  Signor Wilder allowed him a petty-cash account for purchasing small items as well as for tram fare. Ernesto never misused the money. He was aware of his boss’s stinginess, and for the most part, tired as he’d be, he preferred walking. From the time the tram was no longer drawn by horses, he found using it unpleasant. He would have liked having a carriage, though. Every so often, forgetting that he was a Socialist, he would imagine being in one drawn by two horses with a liveried servant in the box. Beside him (as he made business calls for Signor Wilder) would be his old aunt, the one with the money. They would both be well dressed, his aunt looking like an elderly gentlewoman, himself, like a well-loved son. However, not having a carriage, he had recently begun to use the tram more often (there were still a few horse-drawn cars left—the very last), particularly when he had to go all the way out to Roiano, the suburban town with the fountain, where among Signor Wilder’s various customers there were bakers and confectioners in arrears. Every Friday Ernesto would submit his weekly expenses to Signor Wilder, who, it must be said, reimbursed him without any questions. But just the Friday he had decided to free himself from the man, contrary to his usual manner, Signor Wilder made an inopportune comment about Ernesto’s too frequent (in his opinion) tram “outings.” And he said it in a very nasty way. It was fate speaking a second time, and once again through Signor Wilder, who it seemed had been given “the mission” of first facilitating and then aiding the breakup of his employee’s relationship with the man. Ernesto said nothing at that moment. But as soon as he returned to his small office, he took a sheet of letterhead stationery and writing quickly, though without clearly resigning, penned a nasty letter to Signor Wilder.