Ernesto

by Umberto Saba

  The Chaconne concluded the first half of the program. There would be a ten-minute intermission before the next half began. Ernesto stood up and, like everyone else, decided to pass the time walking about the hall. However, unlike almost everyone else—most of whom were adult and even older—he would have no acquaintances to greet, no elegant woman before whom to bow or, as was the custom then, whose hand to kiss. It was during this stroll that fate once again waylaid him and, as before, sent him off in the wrong direction.

  Standing next to one of the huge gold-framed mirrors that decorated the walls of the Philharmonic was a boy, essentially still a child, with his arms folded. He was alone, wearing short pants, although he had almost outgrown them, and had long blond hair (another custom of the time, especially among artists and would-be artists) that fell to his shoulders. (We recall a learned man, a celebrity, known locally and beyond, who owed his fame and honors to his long hair, a style he maintained, though thinned and unkempt, well into old age.) The boy was staring ahead and seemed to be thinking about something, which, whatever it was, very clearly had nothing to do with anyone around him, including Ernesto. However, it must have been a pleasant thought because the boy was smiling—as the saying goes—as if he were seeing angels. He was extremely handsome. Instantly Ernesto was sure that he was studying the violin and was a future virtuoso who would in his time surpass everyone else. He waited, glued to the same spot to keep looking at the boy until a bell announced that the second half of the concert was about to begin. Even then, instead of returning to his seat he stood there to see where the young prodigy was sitting. He was hoping in the empty seat near his own. But the boy, who had been given a free ticket, had no seat and remained standing with his glance fixed on the vision he alone was seeing. It was as if Ondříček and the concert hardly existed for him. Then for a second, just one second, feeling that he was being stared at, and stared at intensely, he turned his head toward Ernesto. But it was (or seemed) as though he didn’t see him. (We say “or seemed” because in reality, he knew very well that he was being watched, and watched by an admirer.)

  “That’s clear,” thought Ernesto, “one look and he dislikes me.” Since the boy wasn’t moving, Ernesto went back to his seat in the third row. But he returned there a different person, more changed in two minutes than in ten years of his life. It took a great deal of effort not to turn his head every few minutes to look at the marvelous boy. He was afraid he would be noticed. (No one was paying any attention to him or to the boy.) Strange and complex feelings were tumbling about in his soul, leaving him with a longing and sadness he had never felt before. Chief among them was envy. Not an evil kind of envy that wants to take something away solely for the pleasure of the taking but one born of desire, as passionate as it was futile, to be like its object. There was no doubt in Ernesto’s mind that the boy was a born violinist driven by an irresistible calling (which everyone in his family joyfully accepted), who had begun taking lessons when he was five or six, and who would soon experience extraordinary triumphs. (As great as Kubelík’s if not greater.) I bet his teacher doesn’t have to tune his violin before every lesson, after all these years. (And here Ernesto laughed to himself, though bitterly.) Maybe he was in his last or next-to-last year in some important far-off conservatory studying with a famous old violinist with long hair, too—all white—whose pride and hope he was, and who had told him that he no longer had anything to teach him. So he’s just back here in Trieste for a vacation, to make his beloved parents happy. Maybe he doesn’t even want to think about his wonderful future for a few hours and wants to have fun—go down to the shore because he likes it, like any kid his age. (But in his heart, he’d know that if he’d brought his violin—probably a Stradivarius from a secret admirer—the moment he pulled his bow across a string, he would enthrall everyone on the beach.) Look at how he’s dressed, Ernesto went on tormenting himself. His parents love him so much that they keep him looking like a kid. They still don’t let him wear long pants. (He wore the short ones grudgingly because long pants were more expensive.) They must really take special care of him, keep him close, as close to them as possible, knowing they’d have him so briefly. (Of course his parents loved him, especially his mother, but they were fed up with his airs and pretenses. They both, but especially his father, wanted him to cut his hair sooner rather than later, and to get himself a job in an orchestra the first moment he could so they wouldn’t have to support him.) Ernesto’s . . . let’s call them envious thoughts were followed by others of a different kind. “This kid would never have to confess to his mother what I confessed today,” he reproached himself. “All you have to do is look at him to know that he’d never let himself do such things with women or with men.” (Had he been a friend of his, Ernesto would have known that finding himself alone and unobserved in the countryside he had done it, as ancient shepherds did, with a she-goat, and furthermore, had boasted about it.) “He wouldn’t even consider me worth talking too,” Ernesto thought. “Who knows how much he would revile me, if. . . .” (Meanwhile he was reviling himself plenty on his own.) But along with this self-disparagement (which occurs in adolescent lovers even under normal circumstances), he also felt a desire to know the boy, and to be admired by him as much as he admired him. But admired for what? Well then, given that that wasn’t very possible, he could at least impress his admiration on the boy—live near him, with him, for him, and help him (as if he needed any help!). That is, he’d become “his best friend.” But at the word “friend” Ernesto knew that his heart was wounded, wounded for the first time by beauty and that he had assigned a meaning to the word beyond anything it had in ordinary usage. The insight only increased his misery.

  In the meantime Ondříček was performing the last piece on his program. The last before the many obligatory encores, without which the concert would be considered a failure. He played Paganini’s Perpetual Motion. It was that piece, not Bach’s Chaconne, which was, as the expression goes, his “warhorse.” It was said that no one played it better than he. Ernesto hardly heard it. He rose before it was over to be sure to catch one more glimpse of the wonderful boy whom he could not become but would be content to own. “If I see him,” he thought, “I’ll ask him if he plays the violin too, and if he enjoyed Ondříček’s playing tonight. After all,” he thought, to give himself courage, “he’s just a kid like me, only a little younger.” And acting on one of his famous inspirations (from above—or perhaps from the depths), he would really have stopped him, but couldn’t find him. Either he’d left, or having gotten tired of standing, he’d sat down somewhere. Ernesto (whose brain never entertained the notion that such a boy could have been standing during the entire concert because he couldn’t afford a seat) couldn’t find him anywhere, seated or standing. It was as if his enchanting and tormenting vision had suddenly evaporated. What happened was that the boy had already unhappily left the concert hall. He lived far off on a hillside, and not having money for the tram, hoped to spare himself recriminations of getting home late. His mother, like Ernesto’s, had still not given him house keys, so when he went out evenings either she waited up for him or made his sister wait up. The girl, a year younger than he, looked exactly like him, and the boy was jealously attached to her to the point—child villain!—he would have liked to hit her (as if she’d let him do it!) when he thought she had been too flirtatious with one of his friends. (He had a number of them—all, like himself, “geniuses,” all destined to revolutionize the world in one field of another, and all more or less in love with his sister, Luigia.)

  “Who could he be?” Wondering, Ernesto desperately searched the hall feeling that if he lost him that particular evening he would never see him again. “He’s so good-looking! Sure of himself, and proud. Maybe too proud. Where could this wonderful strange kid come from? Who could he be?” He didn’t realize that he already knew him, had been powerfully envious of him four years earlier while stretched across his brass bed in another happier, less eventful summer. That
wonderful boy—whatever his name was in Trieste—was the Baghdad (or was it Basra?) baker’s son, the boy who was delighted by the offer of one, even two icy sweets, but refusing the gifter’s caresses, staved him off by a gesture: “Stay where you are. Be content to look at me and serve me.”

  One evening Ernesto and Ilio were walking down the delightful Scorcola hillside toward the sea. Although it was late in the day, they wanted to go swimming.

  A tall young woman with a haughty demeanor was climbing towards them. She wasn’t truly “beautiful.” Her straw-colored hair was combed up into a pyramid that made her seem even taller. Her eyes were an indefinable color and somewhat crossed. She wasn’t truly “beautiful.” She was “something else.” The two boys looked at her and then at each other.

  “She appeal to you?” Ilio asked in dialect.

  Ernesto, then reading Virgil for the first time and enchanted by it, answered partly in Italian, partly in dialect, “She’s the Trojan War.” But he spoke too loudly.

  The woman with the regal deportment didn’t hear clearly, didn’t understand the praise, and turned away indignantly. “Lousy kids,” she muttered under her breath.

  Ilio, as the reader will have immediately understood, was the boy Ernesto had seen and then lost at the Ondříček concert. Lost, but found the very next day. They crossed paths on the steps of their violin teacher’s studio. The man had recently begun teaching them both.

  At first, they pretended not to notice each other. But Ernesto’s heart was beating so rapidly and strongly that he couldn’t resist. He climbed a few steps, then turned to look back and saw that the boy, too, had turned. He had just finished his hour’s lesson (he took three a week) and was leaving in time for the next student—Ernesto. They looked at each other in silence, then as though driven by some force beyond their control, approached each other. They could have been two puppies, who instead of wagging their tails were smiling at each other.

  “What’s your name?” Ernest spoke first, using the familiar tu.

  The young god, who was wearing long pants that day (he alternated them with short ones to make them last longer), seemed more like a normal human (in that he didn’t demonstrate any of the real or presumed haughtiness of the previous evening), and Ernesto liked him even more. He answered with his surname, which we believe is of no possible interest to the reader.

  “And your first name?”

  “Emilio. But everyone calls me Ilio. What’s yours?” The boy addressed him as lei.

  The formal term displeased Ernesto. It underlined the difference in their ages, which although real, was not great.

  “My name’s Ernesto. Ernesto. Why did you use lei to me? How old are you?”

  “Fifteen and a half.”

  “I was just seventeen. So if it’s okay with you, we can call each other by our first names and use tu.”

  “Great,” Ilio answered smiling. “If I used lei to you,” and here he slipped back and used the term again, “excuse me. If I spoke that way to you” (and now he used tu) “it’s only because we never met before. You studying violin too?” And he nodded toward the instrument case, which both of them were holding as if they were elegant little suitcases. (It was clear that he liked Ernesto, but that he too was somewhat uneasy.)

  “How long have you been taking lessons?” Ernesto asked evasively.

  “Not long, really. I began when I was thirteen. That’s late, isn’t it?”

  And at this, his nose began to twitch. He wrinkled it up in way that looked inimitable to Ernesto. It was a tic, at the moment beyond his control. However, at school he would do it in return for a pen, or better still for an “immy.”

  Only momentarily impressed, Ernesto resumed. “I began at fifteen,” he said. “But you’ve got to be very good.”

  “What makes you think so?” Ilio was hoping the teacher had said something to Ernesto. No matter how pleased the teacher was with him—all he asked of Ilio was to commit himself more seriously and methodically to study—he never said anything good or bad about his students. Further, he was quite ill and knew he didn’t have much longer to live.

  “I just know,” Ernesto answered, without committing himself. “What position are you studying?”

  “Seventh,” the boy answered with feigned indifference.

  “See? You are good. Do you want to be a concert violinist?”

  “Sure, I want to,” answered Ilio, as though he’d said, I want to get a soda. “But my parents don’t want me to. They want me to get into an orchestra next year. I don’t like the idea. I’m afraid it’ll ruin my playing.”

  “Don’t you go to school?” Ernesto inquired.

  “No more! I quit after third year at the Royal” (a technical school) “to concentrate on the violin. Even before that I played a little just on my own, without a teacher. My father is a painter. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”

  “Lots of times.” Ernesto didn’t have to lie. Ilio’s father was a well-respected genre painter, who exhibited his small canvases in an elegant stationery shop (still in existence) where they sold well. He was mentioned in newspapers from time to time. But his daily life was becoming ever-more difficult.

  Selling his small canvases and giving art lessons now had to support not merely himself but his wife and three children. (Ilio had two sisters. The youngest, Luigia, the one the boy wanted to beat up out of jealousy, though he’d say to preserve family honor, was the father’s favorite.) Ilio despised his father because in his view, he was using art cynically in order to make a living. And further, because he refused to acknowledge the boy’s calling to become a concert artist and send him—God knows how he could afford it—to a famous foreign conservatory. The boy despised him, but disliked it if anyone else spoke badly about him. So he was pleased that Ernesto had at least acknowledged knowing his name.

  “So,” Ernesto suddenly asked, “do you want to be friends?”

  Perhaps surprised by the inquiry, the boy blushed and was silent for a moment.

  “Sure,” he finally said, and as he had the previous evening at Ondříček’s concert, he once again smiled as if he were seeing angels. But this time Ernesto took that smile as meant only for him.

  “I’d really like to hear you play,” he said.

  “Sure, why not?” Ilio replied. “I’m learning a Chopin nocturne arranged for violin on my own.” (In contrast to Ernesto, Ilio was a romantic.) “Eckhardt” (their teacher) “doesn’t want me doing it. He only wants me to practice scales and exercises—at the most, a couple of Bach things. But that’s so boring. I expect I’ll know the Chopin better and from memory in about a week. So then I’ll set it up with my mother and invite you over.”

  “In the meantime,” said Ernesto, who could hardly wait to see Ilio again, “how about our getting together on Sunday. Can you do it?”

  “Let me think,” said Ilio, who knew he had absolutely nothing else to do, but for reasons he himself didn’t understand, felt like giving Ernesto a hard time. “Okay,” he finally said, “ I can make it.”

  “Then we’re set for Sunday,” Ernesto said hurriedly, as if he feared the boy would change his mind. “Would you rather go to Barcola or Sant’Andrea?”

  This was a crucial issue. Barcola, after its name was changed from San Bortolo, had become a much frequented section of Trieste’s seacoast. In contrast, Sant’Andrea was a lonely stretch where hardly anyone ever went. When Ernesto wanted to formulate an opinion about someone, to know if the person would be congenial to conversation, he inevitably asked that question. (He hadn’t asked the man, because he never wanted to go walking with him.) If the person preferred Barcola, it was all over and for good. If not, they could try walking together. It goes without saying that the triangular-faced apprentice would have chosen Barcola. Ernesto awaited the answer anxiously.

  “I’d much rather go to Sant’Andrea,” said Ilio, who had no idea how much depended on his choice. “I don’t like Barcola at all. Too many people there on Sunday.”

 
With Ilio’s answer—with everything about the day—Ernesto felt in seventh heaven. The boy’s proximity seemed to be emanating a sweet warmth. He would never be without it again. But the teacher was waiting for him. And an inner voice was warning that it wouldn’t do to reveal how excited he felt at this first encounter. He arranged a place to meet Ilio immediately after lunch on Sunday (never did his uncle’s weekly florin seem so felicitous—he’d be able to offer his friend a soda, pastries, anything he might want), and turning to say goodbye, added a reminder not to forget their appointment. Ilio promised happily.

  Two boys on the steps leading to their violin teacher’s home, chatting away about their studies and shaking hands as they part, would have seemed an ordinary occurrence to anyone who saw them. However, because of the particular constellation under which the scene unfolded, and its far-reaching consequences, it was (all other consideration aside) a rare event—the kind that can only occur once, if that, in any one century, in any one place.

  ON TRANSLATING ERNESTO

  IT IS A difficult decision for any translator to omit an element in a translation. It was particularly difficult for me in the case of Umberto Saba, whose prose I’ve translated in the past and for whom I have a particular affection, not to translate the dialect of his beloved Trieste into a comparable dialect in English. This candid, almost innocent work on homosexuality reflects what I love about Saba: his openness, his lucid style, his parenthetical mind, his unique acceptance of people’s foibles and failings (irascible and irritating as he was in his personal relationships). Ernesto is not much known to the world. It was never issued in North America. I wanted my translation to be as close as possible to what I thought were Saba’s intentions for it.