by André Aciman
Summer was approaching. Around the brown, back-lit mass of the apse of Sant’Andrea the bats wheeled, with ever more piercing squeaks. And gradually, as time passed, the image of Gemma’s suitor was embellished with fresh details: a splendid, swallowtail blue jacket, gleaming silver spectacles, a fat gold watch which he once, at the point of leaving, drew from his waistcoat pocket, and then, as later additions, a white silk cravat, an ivory-handled cane and a manner, what a manner . . . One evening, and this caused Ausilia to draw back in surprise, the couple, rather than appearing down in the street, had appeared above, among the trees on the city walls almost at the height of the window: it might prompt the suspicion that Gemma and the man had been stretched out till then in the thick grass of a meadow to hold and kiss each other—or even worse! Another evening, again on the verge of saying goodbye and leaving, he, besides lifting his cap, had bowed down ceremoniously, perhaps he’d even kissed her hand. His intentions were only too clear! Ausilia, at once awestruck and scandalized, concluded her account of these recent events. Was it possible, though, that Gemma was unaware of the risk she was running? Was it possible she didn’t understand that a gentleman like that . . .? But then who was this gentleman, what was he called?
Of the thirty-year-old Dr. Elia Corcos there is no extant portrait. The only one, conserved by Signora Gemma Corcos, during her lifetime, in a small chest of drawers which many years after her death was sold along with other of her belongings to an antiques dealer in Via Mazzini, would be traceable by cutting out a small head from a group photograph, which she, still a girl, a tiny out-of-focus oval among the many, had taken home from the hospital and then hidden in her lingerie drawer. So, just supposing for the sake of pure conjecture that while exploring the insides of a dusty, worm-eaten piece of furniture extracted from the depths of some storeroom it were possible to recover this photograph (a typical keepsake: with ten or so doctors in white coats seated in a semicircle at the front, and behind, standing, to make a background and as it were a crown, some thirty nurses in grey uniforms), it wouldn’t be at all unlikely that, carefully observing the gaunt, hungry and very pale face of Elia Corcos at thirty, one might manage to figure out precisely enough the amazement of Ausilia Brondi to begin with, and very soon after of her mother, when their wide-eyed gaze finally fell on the reality so very different from the one which, little by little, they had built up in their fertile imaginings. “Huh, just one of those little half-starved doctors from the hospital!” they exclaimed together, galled and disappointed. A nothing, a nobody. Seeing as Gemma hadn’t done so, it should be their job to inform the family. Would her father and brothers any longer, from then on, allow Gemma to leave the house? Never mind! So that an affair of this kind be brought to a stop, all of them would gladly have renounced the few coppers she brought home from the Sant’Anna.
Between saying and doing, between the intention and the action, however, there remained the usual shortfall. The truth was that as soon as she returned home (each time, walking along the vegetable garden’s narrow path, between the small green gate and the flower bed, had a calming effect on her), Ausilia hurried as usual up to her bedroom and, having replaced the photograph in Gemma’s drawer, took up her customary stance at the window.
The thrill of spying and reporting, of conjectures and deductions, the secret delights of fantasy, undermining the severe, intransigent resolution just now formulated, had always deferred it to an undefined future, but as it happened just at the end of that same day all these intentions and prevarications were brought to a sudden halt before the weight of facts.
The enamoured couple were proceeding along the little road without showing any awareness of having arrived at the place where, after glancing up at the blinds from behind which Ausilia was observing them, they would promptly go their separate ways. Gemma was at a slight remove from the doctor, who, though walking at the same pace as her, was separated from her by the bicycle. They were not speaking. But there was something in the stiffness of their carriage, the stubborn way they both kept their gaze fixed on the ground, which conferred a weight and a particular solemnity on their silence. In addition, now they had advanced a bit farther, it seemed to Ausilia that her sister’s cheeks were streaked with tears.
By this stage they were beneath the window, in front of the doorway. Ausilia suddenly felt herself short of breath. “What now?” she whispered, pressing a hand to her breast. What did their sudden gaze into each other’s eyes mean? And why did they remain separated by the bicycle without saying a word?
Then, as if in response, the doctor picked up the Triumph by the saddle and handlebars, turned it round and quickly leaned it against the grassy slope of the city wall on the other side of the road. He stood for a moment there before it, with his back turned and bent over, giving the impression that he was in rapt examination of its chain, or perhaps a pedal. At last, straightening up, he slowly retraced his steps.
Gemma had not moved. With her back to the doorframe, she waited.
The other made a strange gesture: just as though—Ausilia thought—he was combing his moustache.
They kissed for a long time. Again and again.
After which, the doctor once more crossed the road and, having collected the bicycle, wheeled it behind him—time had passed: even in the darkness at the start of the scene it was hard to discern his movements—then he followed Gemma, who had already entered, inside the house.
3.
BROUGHT INTO the small dining room and given a seat just in front of the head of the family, who, at his entrance, had raised his eyes from a game of patience and had kept gazing at him with half-open mouth, the doctor began by introducing himself. His name, surname, his parents, his profession, even his address . . . it was a catalogue of personal data of the most official kind: a long stream which, perhaps, had it not been accompanied by the extraordinary, somehow paralyzing courtesy of his manner, or even without the tension which had suddenly gripped the room, might have appeared irksome, pedantic and in its specificity at the very least gratuitous and extravagant.
Elia Corcos—the four males of the house, who until that moment had no clue even about his existence, were in the meantime thinking—what the hell kind of a name is that? His doctor’s frockcoat; the white silk tie; the black cap with large raised rim which, placed on his tightly pressed knees, stood just proud of the table edge (and everything a bit worn, a touch faded, as though it had been bought secondhand); his eloquence peppered every now and then with brief phrases or single words in dialect, which he pronounced almost shyly, as though he were picking them up with tweezers; his face itself, which seemed fashioned out of a special substance, finer and more fragile than the usual material: however modest his family origins may have been, even if now he was living alone as a bachelor, or whatever his present financial circumstances, everything about him, they were only too aware, spoke of his belonging to a different class, the class of gentlemen, and therefore different, fundamentally alien.
Compared to this fact, every other consideration, including that he wasn’t a Catholic but Jewish, or rather an “Israelite” as he himself termed it, occupied for the moment a very subsidiary position. Apart from the usual, everlasting sense of inferiority, of respect above all created by a timidity as regards speech which always afflicted the country folk, irrespective of whether or not they lived within the city walls, in whatever relations they had with the middle classes, his presence to begin with provoked no special response at all. But what response could it have been expected to provoke at that particular time? The sun of renown, or rather that of an unwearying, affectionate admiration, quite close to fetishistic idolization, which for three entire generations of Ferraresi from all social classes would accompany Elia Corcos throughout his long life—so much so as to make of him a kind of institution, a municipal symbol—the dawning of that sun, which coincided with the dawn of a new century, was still too distant to be observed in the vast sky above the city.
And likewise:
“A great doctor!” would be another accolade, but only to be heard some ten years later, and not before.
Or even some decades later, from witnesses to the flourishing old age of Elia Corcos:
“A genius, gentlemen! A man who if Ferrara had not at that time been Ferrara, but Bologna . . .”
According to the latter, those forever unsatisfied characters, lamenting among other things, the modern decline of Ferrara, always praising and bewailing the distant Renaissance splendors of the house of d’Este, the determining cause of the inadequate (because merely provincial) fortune of Corcos’ medical career was a specific historical event that occurred toward the end of the last century.
Around 1890, an obscure Bologna deputy, a Socialist, by “nefariously” blackmailing Crispi, the great Francesco Crispi, had contrived that the most important northern railway terminus was sited not at Ferrara, but at Bologna. All Bologna’s prosperity, all its successive and persisting wealth hinged on that fatal decision, yet the more odious because it had been achieved by the swindle of a Socialist, but for that no whit less advantageous and effective for Bologna, which, thanks to this, became in a trice the major city of Emilia Romagna. So then, like so many of his fellow citizens, like so many equally distinguished gentlemen, guilty of nothing but having been born and brought up in Ferrara, Elia Corcos had only been an innocent victim of political shenanigans. He, too, along with innumerable of his fellow citizens worthy of a better fate, just when he was ready to take flight—Power, Glory, Happiness, and so on: oh, the great eternal words, held back in the throat by fierce pride, but still valid in the imagination, to light up prodigious skies behind the four towers of the Castle that rise in the city center and give the city’s first greeting to whoever enters from the countryside, gloriously bright . . . he too, just when everything was at its most promising, had had to renounce, withdraw, surrender. Around the same time he had taken a wife. And his marriage, at the age of thirty, to a working-class girl, undoubtedly gifted with many excellent qualities, though who knows if she even completed the fourth form at middle school, had sealed his defeat and self-sacrifice.
This, then, many decades later, would have been the train of thought of many Ferraresi whose temples had begun to grey between the two wars of this century regarding Elia Corcos and the strange, not to say baffling, marriage of his youth. Having ranged so widely, even evoking the name of Francesco Crispi, these thoughts always led to the same conclusion: that Signora Gemma, the deceased wife of Elia Corcos, had not understood, that Gemma Corcos, née Brondi, had not, poor thing, really been the right choice. But was it fair, or useful, to hold her to account in such an unfeeling manner? For a good while she lived alone at the end of Via Borso, at the Charterhouse. And yet had she not been the only person in Ferrara who had ever penetrated the barrier of the solemn, ironical hat raisings which Elia Corcos, especially in the spring, before dinner, strolling along the Corso Giovecca, would habitually dispense to right and left: a barrier of courtesy which had quickly and inevitably blocked any reflex of curiosity, any tentative investigation. And leaving aside once and for all Ferrara and its progressive decline after the Unification, that very evening of 1888—that far-off summer evening—in the course of which Elia Corcos had asked for her hand and been accepted as her fiancé, who, if not her, was seated in that small, dark, rustic dining room of the Brondi house between him, Corcos, and her father, at an equal distance from both of them? That place which she occupied was the perfect one to catch the very instant in which, leaning suddenly out of the shadow, the face of the guest had entered, drained, into the circle of light.
Everywhere around was shadow. In the center the tablecloth shone immaculately.
No, no one was better placed than Gemma Corcos, née Brondi, to appreciate the time required for that sacrifice to be made. The time required by Elia to state the actual reason for his presence—Gemma would recall this to the end of her days—was no more than would be needed to accomplish a brief series of movements: to bend his back, lean his head forward, offer to the light his pale face, a lot paler even than it usually was, as though all the blood in his veins and arteries had suddenly been sucked back into his heart.
What that face declared—the words that tumbled from his mouth didn’t count, didn’t have the least importance—was: “Why am I here to ask, as just a moment ago I did ask, that old drunkard for the hand of his daughter the nurse? For what possible motive, in God’s name, am I ruining my life by my own hand? Just to make up for a pregnancy? And, to boot, not even one that’s ‘confirmed?’”
And then: “I still have a choice, should I want it. Changing my mind, I could still leave this place, defy the whole lot of them—father, mother, brother—and never be seen again. As I could, also, should I choose to, play along, from henceforth accept the modest life of a provincial general practitioner, and yet, with the advantage in this case, that when the girl soon accompanies me to the door on to the street, I could start insinuating that she was responsible for everything, that it was they who in a certain sense forced me into this marriage.”
And then again: “At this crossroads, the one road rough, hard and uncertain, the other smooth, easy, nice and comfortable, one can’t, in all justice, really waver about which to take!”
And finally, while beneath his moustache his lips made a series of lateral tics, clearly sardonic: “Would you really call it smooth, that road I’m heading down? Nice and comfortable, seriously? Just try it yourself!”
4.
THEY WERE married. At first they lodged with his father, Salomone Corcos, the old grain merchant, and there, in Via Vittoria, in the heart of what until not that long before had been the Ghetto, Jacopo was very soon to be born, and then Ruben. Half a dozen years or so would have to pass before the home in Via della Ghiara would be acquired: “magna, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed parta meo”† as Elia, whose temples had in the meantime become slightly flecked with white, was wont to say, half seriously, half facetiously.
To arrive there from the Brondi house, after you had got beyond the little alley on top of the city walls and hadn’t taken any shortcuts, would require a brisk walk of at least a half hour. You’d begin by leaving behind the Borgo San Giorgio, huddled around the big eponymous church with its brown bell tower. You’d continue by hugging the long, blind and monotonous wall of the mental asylum. At length, on the left, at the farthest extreme of the boundless plain, after the blue, wavy line of the Bologna hills begins to become visible, if you turn your head toward the city, your gaze will immediately be drawn to a grey facade, down there, laced about with Virginia creeper, the green blinds closed to protect the occupants from any intrusion of noise: a facade turned toward the south and so exposed to even the most minimal variation of light, with its blanchings and darkenings, its sudden reddenings and alterations, which very much suggested something living, something human.
If one looked at it, the house, from high up there on the city walls, one would have thought it a kind of farmhouse, with its fine flowerbed separated from the adjacent vegetable garden by a hedge, and with the vegetable garden that, full of fruit trees and divided by a thin central path, descended way down there to the sturdy surrounding wall. And there was certainly no danger of being intimidated while approaching from this side! thought Gemma’s father and brothers, who, on those afternoons when they came to chop wood, never failed to take the path along the wall. While, from up there, communicating by shouts and crude, brazen whistles, they never failed to feel, however confusedly, and without having ever said as much, as though between the look which the building itself from the second-floor windows and the dormer windows above gently levelled at the fields, and that look which a still youthful woman with her bust framed in the first floor’s wide-open window directed at them in the distance, through the already darkening air, a relationship of some kind existed, a secret similarity and affinity. She lifted an arm to greet them, and waved with festive insistence. They were welcome! she seem
ed to be saying. They should come in! Good Lord, didn’t they realize that the little gate at the foot of the wall, which allowed entry to the house also from the back, had been left ajar till darkness fell, just so that they could, if they wanted to, pass freely through?
From the opposite side of the house, the front, one would have no idea of all this.
It seemed like a dignified little construction of bare redbrick. And each time it seemed incredible to Elia’s relatives, when they came to visit, that the countryside whose existence Via della Ghiara, with its reserved and tranquil but still markedly urban aspect, almost made one forget, actually began no more than some fifty or so meters away, only just beyond the final veil of those mainly middle-class, though in some cases even aristocratic, facades, among which, without being harmed by the comparison, was to be found also that of Dr. Corcos.
Corcos, Josz, Cohen, Lattes or Tabet, whichever family it was, none of them, kith or kin, seemed at all intimidated by the brass rectangular plaque on which was inscribed: dr. elia corcos doctor & surgeon. When properly polished, it stood out on the street door with its fine, black, capital letters. And even if in their time they had severely criticized Elia for having taken a goy as a wife, and following that had also disapproved of his leaving the Ghetto quarter where he was born to establish himself in such a remote area of the city, this nevertheless, it should be added, was always with a secret sense of satisfaction that the main entrance should be so consecrated to him, Elia, and by extension to themselves. The look of the house, the quiet secluded nature of the district, likewise, even in its contrast to the medieval alleyways from which they’d come, was enough to reassure them. It showed that Elia, after all, had not changed, had remained one of their blood and upbringing: finally, unquestionably a Corcos.
This last fact having been firmly established, and since at this point it was clear that when he’d converted he’d hardly even considered it—what’s more, with his growing success as a doctor in both the city and the province, he conferred distinction on his shared origins, and his kin sooner or later would enjoy the benefits—at little more than forty years old, apart from being head of the Sant’Anna Hospital, he had become personal physician to the Duchess Costabili, by far the most chic and influential woman of Ferrara, leaving aside that after the premature death of her consort he was perhaps something more than just a personal physician to the duchess . . . So for everything else he could be excused, justified and, in certain particular cases, even applauded.