by André Aciman
What the devil did it matter, for example, they would reason, that personally he issued from a less-than-mediocre family, son as he was of that inept fellow Salomone Corcos, that forgettable and undistinguished little merchant who had never done a thing in his life apart from begetting children into the world (he had a good dozen of them!) and ending up as a useless weight on the shoulders of Elia, the last of the series? And the wife he had chosen as well, a goy and, to make it worse, of low extraction (devoted, though, a capable housekeeper, a harder worker you couldn’t easily find, or even ever find, and also an incomparable cook), why should she be considered, as many continued to consider her, a kind of lead weight around his feet? No, no. If he, prudent and circumspect as he’d always been, had decided at a certain point to indulge himself in the luxury of a mésalliance, rather than having been merely constrained to make amends for a mistake made during one solitary night shift spent in the company of an exuberant girl (to end up in front of the magistrate on this account had never been considered absolutely remiss in Ferrara!), mightn’t it be that he had known exactly what he was doing? However it had actually come about, what was important was that he, despite all his eccentricities and oddities—including that of refusing after a certain date to make any contributions toward a bank established by the Italian School Synagogue, affirming that his conscience did not permit him to pretend to a faith in which he didn’t believe (except that, regarding circumcision, he was prepared to lend his full support to that small operation and even once to declare openly in the Temple that he wasn’t against the “custom,” corresponding evidently to hygienic norms also known in ancient times, and therefore, not unwisely, included within the religion)—what was important in the end was that he, to all intents and purposes, when it came down to brass tacks, continued to conform to the general rules.
And in this respect, in 1902, when little Ruben, only eight years old, died of meningitis, had it not perhaps been for everyone a delightful and consoling confirmation that on that occasion it was actually he, Elia, in contrast to his usual indifference to all things religious, who insisted that his second-born should be interred beside his grandfather Salomone with the most orthodox rites? The goyish wife, no: every now and then she had tried to rebel. Not only had she followed step by step the funeral from Via della Ghiara to the cemetery, but afterward, when the gravediggers had finished filling in the grave, she had thrown herself with open arms on the mound of fresh earth, to the dismay especially of Dr. Carpi, interrupted in the midst of his prayers, and had started crying that she didn’t want to leave her baby, her pòvar putòn,‡ there. Well, of course a mother’s always a mother. But what was she, Gemma, thinking? That a Corcos, rather than in the Jewish cemetery at the end of Via Montebello, so intimate, tidy, green and well-tended as it was, should be buried outside the walls, in the endless graveyard of the Charterhouse, where you could spend a whole day just trying to find a gravestone again? And, going back to that fit of weeping, Gemma was surely entitled to that. But her relatives, who arrived in large numbers for the occasion, they and the great horde of friends and acquaintances they dragged along with them, all unaware of the requirement to cover their heads—what made them display such desperation? And that other woman? Who on earth was that odd little woman with a black shawl around her head and that spinsterish air who, helped by Elia and by Jacopo (already so like his father, the boy: dark-haired, pale-faced, refined . . .), was trying in every way possible to lift Gemma up, but she, Gemma, shook her head and refused to get to her feet?
“Ausilia Brondi? Ah yes, her sister.”
Bumping into Ausilia by chance arriving at the door of Via della Ghiara, there was always one of Elia’s relatives ready to repeat this phrase. Cowed, Ausilia gathered her shawl around her throat. And at the click which the lock made, opened from the upper floors by a hand-pulled lever, she would hurriedly give way.
She stepped aside, the aged girl, lowering her eyes. How she would have preferred at that moment to return to her own house, her own family! But no: she too ended up going in, gently closing the big door, queuing up on the staircase in a huddled group with the others, who were busy chatting away to each other: she moved according to an instinct that, for at least forty years, had always been stronger than any will she had to resist it, to fight against it.
5.
THEY WOULD all find themselves together again on the first-floor landing, in front of another closed door. Even here, before someone came to open it, there was always something of a wait.
Finally, they would all be inside. And yet, remaining again behind—the visiting Jewish relatives had immediately gone directly ahead toward the kitchen—it often happened that Ausilia lingered on her own to roam round the rooms of the whole house, including at times those of the second and top floor, avoiding in her wanderings, apart from the storeroom for wood and the pantry on the ground floor, only the grey, half-empty and slightly scary granary under the roof. She would go through room after room, surveying one by one, with a strange kind of envious love, the innumerable familiar objects which cluttered them, the shelves overflowing with books and the notepads scattered everywhere, even in the passageways and in cabinets and cupboards, the ill-assorted furniture, the tables large and small, with the odd, complicated study lamps, the old canvases, nearly all in a parlous state, hung on the walls beside framed and glazed family and hospital photographs, and so on. In the meantime she kept repeating to herself, not without bitterness, that between them, the Brondis, and that tribe, so proud and reserved, who usually treated her as they did, it wasn’t possible to reach a real agreement or understanding of any kind that wasn’t merely superficial.
Even before seeing him again, she imagined the face of her brother-in-law.
In the big kitchen, where the copper pots and pans reflected back flames from the walls, and where, from his annual summer trips to Baden-Baden or to Vichy in the retinue of the Duchess Costabili, Elia would return every autumn with such an intense and imperious desire for peace and reflection—there, in a few minutes, he would appear to her again, seated as always at the desk placed under the window farthest from the entrance, perhaps just as he lifted his gaze from his books to look out beyond the vegetable garden, beyond the garden wall, which divided it from the city walls, beyond the walls themselves and to focus finally, smiling vaguely beneath his moustache, on the great golden clouds which filled the skies toward Bologna. Even just to imagine him, Elia, was enough for her to know once and for all that in the big kitchen filled with maids, with nurses from the Sant’Anna Hospital or from his clinic, with various Jewish relatives, with babies and children always shouting, often playing wildly and unrestrainedly, when not even Gemma, although his wife and the woman of the house, had ever managed to penetrate the invisible wall behind which Elia withdrew from everything that surrounded him, she the unmarried sister-in-law would never be able to occupy anything but a place apart, a little, very subsidiary and subordinate space. Her mother had been right to have always refused to enter that house! And her father and brothers, who, when they came there to chop wood, never wanted to go upstairs, so much so that at a certain point food and drink had to be taken down to them in the wood store—weren’t they, too, right to avoid any intimacy and confidence?
And yet there had been one who was utterly different from the rest of Elia’s relatives—a conviction that the years only strengthened in Ausilia’s mind.
The person in question was Elia’s father, poor Signor Salomone.
Having been married three times, he had twelve children, and though already very old indeed, and a widower for the third time when Elia got married, and very attached to the rented apartment in Via Vittoria where he had lived for more than half a century, regardless of all this, he had finally agreed to follow his beloved son, the doctor, to the house in Via della Ghiara, just in time, as it happened, to die at almost a hundred years of age.
To give an idea of this personage, let’s suppose him out walking. Should he
perchance meet a woman whom he knew, it made no difference whether she was wearing the hat of a lady or a proletarian shawl, he would immediately, in a sign of respect, salted with a refined admiration if it was worth the effort, draw back completely against the wall or step down from the sidewalk. However religious and devoutly practicing he was (oh yes, marrying as he did, Elia must have dealt him, at least at first, a heavy blow), he would never speak of religion at home, neither in his own nor in other people’s homes. He would speak only in his own particular dialect, similar to Ferrarese, but full of the Hebrew words which were common in the vicinity of Via Mazzini, but that was all. And the fact was that in his mouth even those Hebrew words had nothing strange or mysterious about them. Who knows how, but even they took on the coloration of his continual optimism, his bountiful character.
When asked the time, he would draw from his waistcoat pocket a little silver wind-up watch, which at his death would be passed on to Jacopo, his first-born grandson, and, before checking the hour, raise it to his ear with a beatific expression. And often, even if no one had asked him (he was undoubtedly the meekest man, though at the same time a great patriot) he would tell of the distant time when Ferrara was still part of Austria and, in the main square, the white-uniformed soldiers were guarding the Archbishop’s Palace with fixed bayonets at the ready. People looked at these soldiers with scorn, with hatred. He too—he admitted—being at that time, before 1860, still quite young, did the same. And yet, thinking back—he would add—they were hardly to blame, those poor lads, mainly Czechs and Croats put there like stakes to prop up the vineyard of the cardinal-legate. Soldiers must do as they’re told, after all. Orders are orders.
Even more frequently, however, he would recall Giuseppe Garibaldi, who, he had no difficulty in admitting, had been the sun, the idol of his youth: he dwelt most of all on the general’s voice, strong and melodious like the finest of tenors, and such as to rouse the blood, which, one starry night in June of 1863, he, Salomone Corcos, lost in a crowd of enthusiasts, had heard, lift from the balcony of the Palazzo Costabili, where the hero of two worlds had been a guest for the whole week.
He had gone there with Elia when he was a small child, he used to recount, holding him in his arms for the entire duration of his speech, so that the youngest of his children—too young to remember another miraculous night only a few years earlier, when the gates of the Ghetto had been beaten down by the fury of the people—should from that time on preserve indelibly in his memory the image of the red-shirted, blond-haired Man who had created Italy. Garibaldi! He, Salomone, was carrying a not inconsiderable weight of family responsibilities, something like twelve children. And yet he felt that one word from the general—he always spoke haltingly in saying such things but reaching this point in the story he was almost short of breath—would have been enough, had it been necessary, for him to have followed him to the ends of the earth. The ends of the earth, and that’s for sure!—he would repeat with shining eyes. Whoever had heard Giuseppe Garibaldi speaking to the people would have done the same.
With Gemma he had always been gentle, kind and most attentive. And likewise in his relations with her, Ausilia, how affable he had been on every occasion, how courteous! For example: it often happened that, meeting her about the house, he would ask her about the price of vegetables, how much were the peas and the lettuce selling for, how much the potatoes, the beans and so on. But he did this, it was clear, above all to indicate to her that he had the greatest respect and consideration for her family, her family of vegetable farmers. “You are Ausilia, Gemma’s sister,” he might well have begun by saying. And he seemed quite pleased enough to have been able to figure it out on his own—since for some while his head, he explained, tapping his forehead with a finger and smiling, had been a bit faulty now and then.
But there was something of him, apart from his white curls shiny as silk, and his characteristically big nose, which she recalled in a special way. And that was the smell that wafted from his clothes.
A vague mixture of citrus fruits, of old grain and hay, it had the same smell which she had always noticed when she flicked through the ancient, indecipherable pages of some little books of Jewish rites that he brought with him to the house in Via della Ghiara, for their “eventual” distribution among the guests for the two suppers that followed Passover. They were illustrated by blueish, slightly faded engravings which showed, according to what one could read in the Italian printed beneath each of them, the Ten Plagues of Egypt, Moses before Pharaoh, the Passage through the Red Sea, the Rain of Manna, Moses on the Peak of Sinai speaking with the Eternal, the Adoration of the Golden Calf: and so on up until the Revelation to Joshua of the Promised Land. Elia’s frockcoat never smelled of anything but ether and carbolic acid. The clothes and the entire person of Salomone Corcos, by contrast, exhaled a perfume that, for all its different accents, reminded her of incense.
Placed in a chest of drawers in the so-called “good” room, a big shadowy place overlooking Via della Ghiara where no one ever set foot, the ritual Passover books had impregnated not just the furniture but the whole atmosphere with this perfume. Whenever she, Ausilia, went to shut herself up in there, remaining, seated in the darkness, to think over her own concerns for hours on end sometimes (she had continued to use this room as a kind of hiding place even after the death of Gemma when, in 1926, she had come to live with Elia and Jacopo as housekeeper, and even after both of them were deported to Germany in the autumn of 1943 . . .), she would always have the feeling that poor Signor Salomone was there too, within the four walls, present in flesh and blood. Just exactly as if, still in this world and silently breathing, he was seated beside her.
6.
LOVE WAS something different, Ausilia reflected—no one knew that better than her.
It was something cruel, atrocious, to be spied on from a distance, or to be dreamed of beneath lowered eyelids.
In fact, the secret feeling that from the very start had kept her bound to Elia, strong enough to force her for her whole life to be continuously, fatally, indispensably present, had certainly never given rise to the least joy. No, truly it hadn’t, if every time she entered the big kitchen of the house in Via della Ghiara where, near the window in the corner, he would linger over his studies until suppertime (he would study and seemed to notice nothing, and yet nothing really worth the trouble of being noticed would ever escape his intensely black, piercing, investigating eyes . . .), she felt a need to avoid that calm gaze which for a moment, at her entrance, had detached itself from a book, and the need quickly to summon, as if to defend her, the good and kind image of Salomone Corcos.
The gaze of Elia! Nothing could really escape it. And yet at the same time he seemed hardly to see anything . . .
That famous night on which he became engaged to Gemma (it happened in 1888, in August), and having returned very late, he passed his father’s bedroom on tiptoe, he stopped there for a moment, wondering whether to go in. Extract the tooth and be rid of the pain, he thought to himself. Perhaps it was best to tell his father everything straight away.
He was about to lower the door handle when from the other side he was taken aback by his father’s voice.
“Good Lord, where on earth have you been?” he cried out. “You know I haven’t been able to get a wink of sleep?”
These words of his father, and especially the keening tone of his voice, made him change his mind. Having climbed up to his own room, a little room which looked out over the roofs, the first thing he did was to open the window and lean out. Realizing it was already dawn (not a murmur from within the house, the city asleep at his feet, and down there one of the four towers of the Castle touched at its very tip by a fleck of pink light), he suddenly decided not only to forgo any sleep but without further delay to start studying.
Science—he then said to himself. Wasn’t Science his real calling?
It would be he, several decades later as Ausilia recalled, who told her all this, unprompted, at the e
nd of one of the usual suppers that the two of them would take in the kitchen.
He was in front of her, the other side of the table, his face fully lit by the lamp above. While he spoke, grinning slightly beneath his big, brilliantly white moustache, he seemed to be watching her.
But did he actually see her? Truly see her?
It was—poor Gemma—certainly a very odd expression that he had in his eyes at that moment! It was as if, from the morning following the evening on which he’d promised her sister to marry her, as if from then on he had looked at things and at people in just that way: from above and, in some way, from beyond time.
* Ferrarese dialect word for the formidable peasant housewives of the neighboring countryside. Plural form: arzdóre.
† “parva, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non sordida, parta meo, sed tamen aere domus”: “Small, but adapted to my needs, subject to none, by no means miserable and bought with my own money” is the motto above the door of the house of the poet Ludovico Ariosto in Ferrara. Corcos has curtailed the quotation and has ironically substituted “magna” (large) for “parva” (small).
‡ Ferrarese dialect: “Poor little boy.”