by André Aciman
Lida stared at him, astonished. She didn’t understand.
“Why all this fret just now?” she asked him. “Why had he changed so much?”
He paused a little before replying. He stared at her with desperation in his eyes, then said slowly: “I’m like one of those horses that collapse at the finish line.”
He then spoke of marriage, of what marriage meant to him. He said that he considered it the supreme aim of his life, so that only after they were married—not before!—he might perhaps have the courage to ask for Divine Providence to protect them. It was true, he admitted, nodding gravely. Up till now, he had had no rush. But, on the other hand, how could he have pushed things forward, feeling as he did that he couldn’t count on his own strength?
Lida heard him out. She still didn’t understand. Yet it was enough for her to raise her eyes once more, and she suddenly realized: Oreste was still afraid of losing her! Stretching across the table, she placed her hand on his hands, more tightly clenched than ever in their characteristic convulsion. And a moment later, for the first time, she found herself in his arms.
The years that followed, arduous, calm, largely happy, were marked by no momentous events. Even the winters, Oreste would say—though he was to die quite soon, in the spring of 1938—even the winters seemed to have finally become more settled.
It’s true that every year, toward the end of autumn, he still loved to stand before the window, with the air of a meteorologist. But, of this one could be sure, he did this not because of any doubts about the truth of his predictions, of the now stable, or almost stable good weather, but rather the better to savor the intimate pleasure procured for him by the ownership of a new, modern house equipped with everything necessary for a comfortable life of modest luxury, including an excellent central heating boiler.
It was evident that the future no longer worried him in any way. After the marriage, Lida had immediately adapted herself to his devout habits, and began regularly to frequent the not-far-off church of San Benedetto, just within the city walls. The thin girl eaten away by anxiety, of those years when he had begun to visit a certain room in Via Salinguerra, had now become a beautiful wife, calm, serene, more than a bit chubby. What else could he desire from then on? What could be better?
Sometimes they joked together about this topic of Lida’s beauty.
More inclined to believe it than she tried to appear, she would pull a face.
“Me, beautiful?”
“To say the least!” he would reply, smiling, while, with an expression of pride, he gazed into her eyes.
And yet—he would continue, serious once more—there was absolutely no reason to be surprised by that. This new beauty of hers, so right and timely, so much that of a wife, for which in the end it didn’t seem presumptuous on his part to assign himself some portion of the credit, arrived on cue to demonstrate, had there been any such need, that the Good Lord had not only approved their union, but had taken pleasure in it.
9.
“HE WAS happy,” Lida sometimes told herself.
And yet, as soon as she happened to frame these words in her mind, an echo would break in on her to deform and distort them. Flecked with doubt, with painful rancor, the words would change into a question to which no one, herself least of all, would be able to reply other than in the negative.
Poor Oreste. He, too, had not been happy. No. In truth something had always been missing for him as well. Sufficient proof was the tender, more than paternal care that for years, for all the years of their marriage, he had lavished upon Ireneo.
When Ireneo had left the seminary with the intermediate diploma in his pocket, Oreste had immediately taken him on, in the workshop, and had installed him at his own little bench between the trimming machines and the glass door. He had wanted to teach him the trade. And some late afternoons, at dusk, when Lida would cross half of the city to reach the binding shop in Via Salinguerra—later, all three of them would return up the Corso Giovecca or Via Mazzini, but each time passing by in front of the Caffè della Borsa, right in the center—it seemed to her as though she could still see him as he brooded behind the big bench with his eyes shining with affectionate zeal over that apprentice, who was so sad, so mute, and yet so ready to be distracted by the least thing happening in the square outside. It seemed to her that she could still see him, still hear him: with that vigorous torso of his, out of keeping with his short legs, that loomed up from the stool on the other side of the bench, with his big, hard hands, oddly become more delicate since his marriage vows (he could never be parted from his wedding ring—not even in 1935 at the time of the sanctions!‡ ), with his strong, chirpy, piercing voice . . . Oh, how hard he must have struggled so that she, Lida, remained unaware of his desire for a son! How he must have secretly tormented himself, almost as though to punish the desire itself, to smother it within him: at a certain point he had even pressed for Ireneo to assume his surname!
And yet, despite everything, Lida thought, Oreste never gave up hope. For her to be sure of this she only needed to remember the look he gave her every time she entered the workshop: a questioning but calm look, full of unbending faith.
If not now, his look said, then soon, very soon, she would come to him with the great news. She would give him a son, without doubt, a son that was really his, of his blood, and thus different physically and in character from the son she had before marrying him, who, although he had given him his own surname, although he was instructing him in his own trade with all the enthusiasm he was capable of, had nevertheless never wanted to call him anything but uncle: “Uncle Oreste.”
A son that was really his—Lida pursued the thought—that was what was missing for him, that was the only shadow that had disturbed the serenity of their married life.
Regarding that golden age of which, in February 1929, he had predicted the return, he evidently awaited nothing so eagerly as to hear her declare: “I’m pregnant.”
It was equally evident, though, that death, taking him by surprise, had prevented the possibility of this hope turning into despair.
* The Carso was part of the Italian Front in the First World War, on mountainous terrain in what is now Slovenia; the terrible conditions were equivalent to the hardships of the trenches on the Western Front.
† A hill in southeast Ferrara made from the rubble left over from the construction of the city walls that became a public garden.
‡ In October 1935, in response to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, the League of Nations began to impose limited sanctions on Italy.
The Stroll before Dinner
1.
EVEN today, rummaging through some small second-hand stores in Ferrara, it’s not unlikely that you could turn up postcards almost a hundred years old. They show views that are yellowed, stained, sometimes, to tell the truth, barely decipherable . . . One of the many shows Corso Giovecca, the main city thoroughfare, as it was then, in the second half of the nineteenth century. To the right and in shadow, in the wings, looms the buttress of the City Theater, while the light, typical of a golden springtime dusk of the Emilia Romagna, congregates entirely on the left-hand side of the image. There the houses are low, having for the most part only a single floor, with their roofs covered with thick russet tiles, and below them some little shops, a grocer’s store, the entrance to a coal merchant’s, a horsemeat butcher and so on: all of which were razed to the ground when, in 1930, the eighth year of the Fascist Era, almost opposite the City Theater, the decision was made to build the enormous structure of the General Insurance in white Roman travertine.
The postcard has been adapted from a photograph. As such it reveals, and not inaccurately, the look of the Corso Giovecca around the turn of the twentieth century—a kind of wide carriageway amid the rather shapeless surroundings, with its rough cobbles, more fitting for a large village of Lower Romagna than of a provincial capital, divided in the middle by the fine parallel lines of the tram rails—but it also reveals just as clearly how life w
as going on along the entire street in that moment when the photographer pressed the button. The street thus captured extends from the corner of the City Theater and the Gran Cafe Zampori beneath it, to the right, a few yards away from where the tripod had been set up, as far down there as the distant, pink sunlit facade of the Prospettiva Arch at the very end.
In the foreground the image seems crammed with detail. One can see the boy from the barber shop peeping from the threshold and picking his teeth; a dog sniffing the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the horsemeat butcher’s; a schoolboy running across the street from left to right, just managing to avoid ending up under the wheels of a calèche; a middle-aged gentleman, in frockcoat and bowler hat, who, with lifted arm, pulls back the curtain which shields the interior of the Cafe Zampori from any excessive intrusion of light; a splendid coach and four which is moving forward at a fast trot to attack the so-called Castle ascent. Except that as soon as one begins to search, perhaps half-closing one’s eyes, the slender central space of the postcard which corresponds to the furthest part of the Corso Giovecca, everything then becomes confused, things and people merge together in a kind of luminous dusty haze, all of which would help explain why a girl of around twenty years of age, at that very moment walking quickly along the left-hand sidewalk, having arrived at not more than a hundred meters from the Prospettiva Arch, would have been unable to transmit as far as to us contemporary spectators the least visible sign of her existence.
We should declare right away that the girl was no beauty. Her face was more or less that of many others, neither beautiful nor ugly: rendered, if that’s possible, even more average and insignificant by the fact that in those days the use of lipstick, rouge and powder was not generally acceptable among the working classes. Dark-brown eyes in which the beams of youth only rarely shone, and then almost stealthily, with a frightened, melancholic expression, not that different from the sweet, patient look in the gaze of some domestic animals; chestnut-brown hair that, drawn back at the nape, laid bare rather too much of the bulging, bulky, peasant forehead; a squat, busty torso, belted by a black velvet ribbon, that ended in a slender, not to say graceful neck . . . in a fashionable street such as Corso Giovecca, and during, moreover, that especially animated and bustling hour which, in Ferrara, no less today than at that time, has always preceded the intimate evening ritual of supper, it’s fair to suppose that even to a less indifferent eye than the photographic lens, the passing by of a girl like this might easily be overlooked.
It now remains to establish what thoughts, on a May evening some seventy years ago, might have been entertained by a girl like this, a trainee nurse of less than three months standing at the City Hospital of Ferrara.
Yet turning back to examine in that same postcard, this time with a slightly warmer sense of real involvement, the general look of Corso Giovecca at that moment of the day and of its history, paying attention to the combined effect of joy, of hopefulness, produced in the very foreground by that blackish spur of the City Theater, so like a dauntless prow that advances toward freedom and the future, it’s hard to dispose of the impression that some tinge of the naive fantasy of a girl—of that and no other girl—heading home after many hours of no doubt uncongenial work, will somehow be ingrained within the image we have before us.
At the end of a whole day spent in the sad wards of the former convent, where, soon after 1860, the Sant’Anna Hospital had found temporary and inadequate lodging, it was, one could deduce, with real eagerness that Gemma Brondi abandoned herself to her adolescent dreams and imaginings. She would be walking, one might say, without seeing. So much so that, approaching the Prospettiva, when, as was her habit each evening, she mechanically raised her eyes to the three arches of the architectural obstruction, a phrase that was whispered in her ear at that exact moment (“Good evening, Signorina” or something of the kind) found her unready and defenceless, only able to blush and then go pale, and to look around timidly in search of escape.
“Good evening, Signorina,” the voice had whispered. “Allow me to accompany you.”
The phrase had been this or, as already said, something very similar. Speaking thus, and engaging Gemma Brondi in a conversation that forced her to avoid the black and penetrating eyes of her interlocutor, was a sturdy young man of around thirty years of age, dressed in dark clothes, gripping the handlebars of a heavy Triumph bicycle: a young man with a thin face on which gleamed silver-rimmed spectacles, and a moustache, no less black than his eyes, that drooped around his mouth.
But at this point, traveling at speed along the track which these two young people are about to walk, let us betake ourselves a little way from the Prospettiva on Corso Giovecca, and more particularly inside the big, rustic dwelling where the Brondis, a country family, have lived within the city since time immemorial. The house rises in the shelter of the city walls, separated from them only by virtue of the little dusty street that runs along that stretch of the walls. It is already almost night. In the ground-floor rooms, whose windows look back toward the open space of the vegetable gardens, they have just now turned on the lights.
2.
THE ONLY person in the house who had taken any notice right from the start of Dr. Corcos, Dr. Elia Corcos, was Ausilia, the elder sister.
Every evening, there she was again.
After having laid the little dining room’s round table, and then, after going into the kitchen and lighting the stove under the pot and the frying pan, as soon as the voices of her father and brothers, who were still working in the vegetable garden in the dark and were now about to come in, began to be more distinctly audible, just at that moment Ausilia vanished, only to reappear later, when the others were about to finish their meal.
Where exactly Ausilia had gone to hide, her mother had almost immediately figured out. But why should she feel any need to speak of it? Seated, in the manner of an arzdóra,* with the kitchen door at her back, she only allowed herself an inner smile at the image of her eldest daughter leaning on her elbows at the window of the room she shared with her sister, with Gemma, and perhaps unburdening herself of a loud sigh. As regards old Brondi and his three sons, they, bent over their plates, kept on eating with their customary appetite. The novelty of these regular, recurrent disappearances of Ausilia at suppertime seemed not to hold any interest for them. Why should we bother about that?—their aspect seemed to be saying. After a short while, Ausilia, like the capricious spinster she was well on her way to becoming, would reappear of her own accord, whenever it suited her.
Having come down the internal stairs without making the least sound, Ausilia at last presented herself at the doorway of the dining room, light-footed as a ghost. Her mother was the only one to raise her head. Was this whole affair dragging on? she was silently asking, with the rapid look she threw toward the shadows, where, waiting to approach and be seated, Ausilia usually hovered for a moment. Nor was Ausilia’s response ever slow in coming. In acute expectation of the subsequent entry of Gemma, always a bit ruffled and out of breath, Dolores Brondi would receive the information that she sought and that had been weighing on her. No doubt about that, Ausilia would assure her, by her imperceptible shrug of assent. The affair was certainly dragging on, and was showing no signs at all of ending.
Some words passed between mother and daughter about a month later while, as the sun had nearly set, they went to Vespers as usual at the nearby church of Sant’Andrea.
To reach Via Campo Sabbionario where the church was more quickly, they tended to take the path behind the house that led straight across the garden till it reached a small green gate down at the end, situated exactly halfway along the surrounding wall. Who knows? Perhaps it was the narrowness of the path that encouraged them to share these initial confidences, the first exchange of observations and opinions . . . The fact is that, only after the broken, almost fearful sorties of an opening dialogue between the two women, conducted almost at a running pace, without the confidence even to look each other in the face,
concerning the looks of Gemma’s “crush”—who, judging by the very pale face and the black moustache that drooped around a carefully shaven chin, could only be a gentleman—only after that was Ausilia allowed to go home, a good twenty minutes before the service’s concluding “Amen.” Her eyes fixed on the altar, Dolores Brondi sensed her getting up, barely displacing the straw seat at her side. True enough—she reckoned, when left alone and gnawed at by a secret envy—it was unlikely the two of them would be able to discuss their new discoveries with the required leisure before the following evening. Soon, anyway, when the thought of Ausilia stationed at her window-observatory had induced her to prolong her conversation with some women of the neighborhood at the small gate to the vegetable garden a moment or two longer than necessary, if a male voice behind her had shouted from afar, “And so, are we going to eat?” (till then that had never happened, but it might!), she would have turned back to the house without any hurry, displaying the cold, hostile expression of someone prepared to assert their rights whatever it cost. Make no mistake about that. She and Ausilia never went out. Never went out, except at the end of the day, and only so as to finish it in a sanctified manner. Who could complain about that? They’d better come armed! If that had happened, supper would have been eaten accompanied by the silence of the tomb. And then, once Gemma had also come back in and she too had finished eating, everyone to bed.