The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  Suddenly faces that had, until then, expressed doubt and uncertainty, became bitterly questioning, lit up with malice. And what if the camouflage and self-exhibition of Geo, so insistent, and so irritating, had had a precise political intention? What if—and here they winked—with the passing of time he’d become a Commie?

  That evening at the dance club, as soon as he came in, he began to show photographs of the members of his family who had died in Germany to left and right, reaching such a stage of petulance that he was trying to stop the boys and girls from moving off by grabbing hold of their clothes, and they, in that moment, as the radio had suddenly started madly up again, had to brush him off so as to get back onto the dance floor. These were not inventions at all, a great many of the most reliable people had been witnesses to the fact. So what else had Geo been referring to with those gestures of his, with those demented antics, with that bizarre and macabre pantomime, seasoned with his saccharine grins and half-imploring, half-menacing looks, unless it was that he and Nino Bottecchiari, having finally reached an agreement about the house in Via Campofranco, were now in alliance and total agreement about everything else, which is to say politics, which is to say Communism? But then, if he had accepted the role of useful idiot, wasn’t it more than justified that the Friends of America Club, which in all the chaos and enthusiasm of the immediate post-war period had thought it opportune to enroll Geo as one of their board members, had later, with due care, decided to cross him off the list? Let’s be clear: it’s likely that no one would have dreamed of chucking him out, if he hadn’t first of all wanted the scandal, and the moderate sanctions against him that followed. No, this was far from being nonsense! The proof could be seen that other famous night in February 1947—when he showed up at the door of the club dressed as a beggar and with his head shaved like a convict: truly reduced to a human wreck—that’s the word—the spitting image of the famous tramp, Tugnòn da la Ca’ di Dio—there, in the vestibule full of coats and furs, he had started to bawl that they should let him through, since whoever was enrolled and had paid their fees had the right to frequent the club how and when they wanted. Expelling someone is always unpleasant. Of course it is. Besides, wasn’t it true quite a while before that—to be exact, from the previous autumn—the board of directors of the Friends of America Club had voted unanimously to return as soon as possible to their old title of the Unione Club, once again reducing the enrolled membership to the aristocratic families of the Costabilis, the Del Sales, the Maffeis, the Scroffas, the Scoccas, etc., as well as the more select members of the bourgeoisie—Catholic, but in certain exceptional cases, also Jewish, drawn from the liberal professions and landowners? Like a swollen river that had broken its banks and hugely flooded the surrounding countryside, the world now needed to return to its original margins: that was the point. This explained, among other things, why even old Maria, Maria Ludargnani, who during the same winter had reopened her house of assignation in Via Arianuova—in just a few weeks, it became clear that this was the only, in some way public, place where it was still possible to gather and meet together without political or even apolitical opinion continually leaping out to poison all relations, and the evenings spent there, mainly chatting or playing gin rummy with the girls, were a reminder of the blessed times before the great upheaval—why even she had thought it necessary, that other time Geo had come to knock on her door, to tell him roundly and clearly, Nix, to go away, and in the end declaring in dialect, after making very sure with her eye to the spyhole that he’d been swallowed up again by the mist: “Agh mancava sol ach gnéss déntar anch clucalà!”†† In conclusion: if no one had dreamed that Maria Ludargnani, prohibiting Geo’s entry to her “house,” had defrauded him of some right, then one had to admit that the Unione Club had acted toward him in a manner that was most proper, astute and responsible. And then just think about it! If you can’t exclude whomever you want from your own house, where is freedom, what sense is there in talking about democracy?

  Only in 1948, after the April 18 elections, after the local ANPI section was forced to transfer to the three rooms in the ex-Fascist HQ in Viale Cavour—and with this the belated proof was given that the rumor of “adhesion” to the Communist Party of the Via Campofranco house’s owner was pure fantasy—only in the summer of that year did Geo Josz finally decide to abandon the game. Exactly like a character in a novel, he disappeared without warning, without leaving the slightest trace behind. At once some said he had emigrated to Palestine in the wake of Dr. Herzen, others claimed he’d gone to South America, yet others to some undefined “country beyond the Iron Curtain,” and others still that he had drowned himself in the Po, throwing himself at night from the height of the iron bridge of Pontelagoscuro which had been recently reconstructed.

  This topic continued to crop up for the next few months: at the Caffè della Borsa, at the Doro, in Maria Ludargnani’s house of assignation, everywhere, to some extent. Daniele Josz was offered on more than one occasion the opportunity to hold a public enquiry. The lawyer Geremia Tabet also intervened to represent questions concerning the inheritance of his nephew. In the meantime: “What a madman!” was heard again and again.

  They would shake their heads benignly, tighten their lips in silence, raise their eyes to the heavens.

  “If he’d only had a bit of patience!” they’d add, sighing, and they were now, once again, sincere, once again sincerely regretful on his behalf.

  Then they would say that as time heals everything in this world, thanks to which Ferrara itself was rising from the ruins the same as it had once been, so time would in the end have brought some peace even to him, would have helped him return to a normal life, in short, to reestablish him within the city. And yet instead the opposite had happened. He had preferred to go away. Disappear. Even to kill himself. To play the tragic hero. Exactly at this point when, renting out the big house on Via Campofranco and giving the right boost to his father’s firm, he would have been able to live very comfortably, like a gentleman, and to consider among other things making a new family for himself. But no, let’s be honest: they really had treated him with more than enough patience. The episode with Count Scocca, without even cataloguing the rest, should in the end be enough to reveal that, to demonstrate what kind of an eccentric he was, what sort of living enigma had landed among them . . .

  6.

  AN ENIGMA, that’s what it was.

  And yet, in the absence of any more certain clues, if we consider that sense of the absurd, and simultaneously that feeling of revelatory truth, which any encounter can have just as dusk is falling, the episode with Count Scocca shouldn’t have seemed so enigmatic, shouldn’t have been anything that could not have been understood by a heart that felt a little solidarity.

  It’s true that daylight is boredom, a hard sleep for the spirit, “tedious mirth,” as the Poet says. But in the end let the hour of dusk arrive, the hour equally woven of shadow and light of a peaceful dusk in May, and then note how the things and people that before had appeared utterly normal and indifferent can suddenly show themselves as they truly are: it can happen all at once—and then it is as though you’ve been struck by lightning—that they speak for the first time of themselves and of you.

  “What am I doing here with this person? Who is this person?” And I, replying to his questions, playing along with him, who on earth am I?

  Two slaps, after some moments of mute bewilderment, had been the thunderous reply to the insistent, albeit polite questions of Lionello Scocca. But to those questions there might well have been the alternate reply of a furious, inhuman cry—so loud that the whole city, as much of it as still remained standing beyond the deceptively intact scene of Via Mazzini, and as far off as the distant, breached walls, would have heard it with horror.

  * A mass demonstration in October 1922 that brought Mussolini to power. Italo Balbo was an Italian Blackshirt leader in Ferrara and one of the main organizers of the march.

  † The Germans restored Mu
ssolini to power in northern and central Italy in September 1943, and set up a puppet state, the Social Republic, in Salò on Lake Garda that lasted until May 1945.

  ‡ Ferrarese dialect for “mice,” but here referring to the Fascist-appointed squads of armed teenagers who patrolled the streets of Ferrara in the latter stages of the war.

  § Eleven Ferraresi citizens were shot at dawn by Blackshirts near the Estense Castle on November 15, 1943. Bassani here, and in “A Night in ’43,” mistakenly but consistently places the massacre a month later, on December 15.

  ¶ The Committee for National Liberation was formed in September 1943 in opposition to Italian Fascism and the German occupation.

  # ANPI (the National Association of Italian anti-Fascists) was a partisan organization formed in 1944.

  ** OVRA (the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism) was a Fascist organization involved in surveillance.

  †† In Ferrarese dialect: “Just what we need— for that one there to be in here!”

  The Final Years of Clelia Trotti

  1.

  TO call the vast, architectonic complex of Ferrara’s Municipal Cemetery beautiful, so beautiful as even to be consolatory, there’d be the risk, even among us, of provoking the usual sniggers, the superstitious gestures to fend off the evil eye always at the ready in Italy to greet any speech that refers to death without deploring it. All the same, once you arrive at the end of Via Borso d’Este, a perfectly straight little road, with the marble-cutting workshops huddled at the start and the florists at the end, and entirely overwhelmed by the thick foliage of the two big private parks on either side, the unexpected vista of Piazza della Certosa and of the adjacent cemetery, gives an undeniably joyful, almost festive impression.

  To have an idea of what Piazza della Certosa is like, one should think of an open, nearly empty meadow, scattered as it is in the distance with some occasional funerary monuments for illustrious nineteenth-century lay-persons: a kind of parade ground. To the right, the rugged, unfinished facade of the church of San Cristoforo, and, curving in a wide semicircle until it reaches the city walls, a red, early-sixteenth-century portico on which, some afternoons, the sun beats down to magnificent effect; to the left, small, semi-rustic houses, the low boundary walls of the big vegetable gardens, and orchards of which even now, in this most northerly zone of the city, there is an abundance—only houses and low walls which, in contrast to those on the opposite side, do not offer the least obstacle to the long rays of afternoon or evening sunlight. In the space between these boundaries, there’s very little that speaks of death. Even the two pairs of terracotta angels right at the top of the portico, awaiting the signal from heaven to blow into the elongated bronze trumpets they’ve already put to their lips, have nothing about them that could really be considered threatening. They swell their red cheeks, impatient to blow, eager to play: the baroque artist must surely have found the likeness for the faces of these four robust-looking lads in the surrounding Ferrarese countryside.

  It may be because of the dreamy sweetness of the place, and also, it should be said, its almost perfect and perpetual solitude, but the fact is that Piazza della Certosa has always been the favorite site for lovers’ trysts. Where would you go in Ferrara, even today, when you want to talk to someone a little away from the world? The first choice is Piazza della Certosa. There, should things proceed as might be hoped, it would be only too easy to move on later to the nearby city walls, where you can find as many places as you like away from the prying eyes of nursemaids that are so vigilant in the piazza around the hour of dusk. And if, on the contrary, the idyll doesn’t proceed, it would be just as easy and, at the same time, without any risk of being compromised, to return from there together toward the city center. This is a custom that has been established of old, a kind of ritual, probably as ancient as Ferrara itself. It was in force before the war, as it is today and will be tomorrow. True, the bell tower of San Cristoforo, docked halfway up by an English grenade in April 1945 and remaining thus, a sort of bloody stump, is there to declare that any guarantee of permanence is illusory, and therefore that the message of hope that the sunlit porticoes with their reddened heat seem to express is only a lie, a trick, a beautiful deception. Just as the bell tower of San Cristoforo has ceased to exist, without doubt, sooner or later, even the agile procession of arches that stretch like two arms up toward the light will cease to exist, to lull and delude the souls of those who contemplate it. Even this will come to an end sooner or later. As will everything. But in the meanwhile, only a few steps from the thousands and thousands of citizens who lie in row after row of the cemetery sited behind, on the vast grassy expanse scattered here and there with funerary steles and memorial stones, life’s peaceful, indifferent bustle goes on unperturbed, refusing to throw in the towel, to give up the ghost; what prophesy would seem more destined to be erased, to remain unheard in the excited atmosphere of the nearing dusk, than one which promises an inevitable, final nothingness?

  The atmosphere of general, almost sporting excitement immediately provoked in Piazza della Certosa by a funeral cortège too different from the usual to pass unobserved, a cortège that one autumn afternoon in 1946 emerged from Via Borso with a big band at its head, couldn’t but immediately attract the attention of the habitués of the place—mainly nursemaids, children and enamoured couples, inducing the first, seated on the grass beside prams, to raise bewildered eyes from the newspaper or their sewing, the second to stop running after or playing with balls and the last to release their clasped hands and quickly draw back from each other.

  The autumn of 1946. The war now over. And yet the first impression, observing the funeral which in that moment was making its entry into Piazza della Certosa, was to have been transported back to May or June of the previous year, to the fiery period of the Liberation. With a sudden leap of the heart and the blood, it was like once again being called on to witness one of those then typical and frequent examinations of the collective conscience by which an old, guilty society desperately tries to renew itself. No sooner had one noticed the thicket of red flags which followed the coffin, and the scores of placards inscribed with an assortment of slogans: ETERNAL GLORY TO CLELIA TROTTI or ALL HONOR TO CLELIA TROTTI, SOCIALIST MARTYR or VIVA CLELIA TROTTI HEROIC EXAMPLE TO THE WORKING CLASS etc., and the bearded partisans who carried them aloft, and above all the absence in front of the carriage of priests and clergymen, than one’s gaze hurried ahead to where the procession was making its way: a grave, that is, dug in the portion of the cemetery exactly in front of the main entrance to the church of San Cristoforo where, apart from an English protestant who had died from malaria in 1917, no one had been buried for more than fifty years.

  And yet, returning to the funeral cortège, the head of which was by now only tens of meters from the humble, secular grave which was waiting open—another crowd in the meantime was unceasingly pouring out from Via Borso—even a slightly trained eye would quickly be aware, from innumerable details, how deceptive was that initial impression of a magical return to the atmosphere of 1945.

  Let’s take, for example, the band. It’s worth specifying that it proceeded in front of, but was detached from, the carriage, and played Chopin’s funeral march in slow time. The brand-new uniforms worn by the band members, one of the boasts of the Communist administration only recently installed in the municipality, would undoubtedly have enchanted a foreigner, an uninformed newcomer, but not someone who, underneath the large caps with shiny visors in the style of the American police, was able to trace one by one the good-natured and dejected features of the Orfeonica’s* old zealots, dispersed who knows where, poor devils, at the time of the shootings and ambushes that followed the break-up of the Front and the popular uprising. But the punctilious staging, so alien to the genial chaos typical of revolutions, was if possible even more evident in the compact formation of some fifteen arzdóre† from the Po delta who, carrying in pairs great wreaths of carnations and roses, surrounded t
he funeral carriage on all sides like a guard of honor.

  To see the earthy faces, deeply marked with fatigue, of these mature female heads of the family, all roughly the same age as Clelia Trotti, would be enough to be able to guess where they had come from and how they had arrived. Gathered together at Ferrara from the furthest villages of the Adriatic coast, at midday in the city they will certainly have found someone to offer them the refreshment of pastasciutta, a slice of roast beef and a quart of wine, but not the chance of a much-needed rest. The same bureaucratic mind that had provided a table adorned with red paper flags had then inflexibly decided that after the meal these ancient female farm laborers should clean themselves as best they could from their dusty journey and then put on, over their everyday clothes, a strange kind of tunic: red, naturally, and peppered with lots of tiny black hammers and sickles. Thus clad, they now appeared as it had been decreed that they should—almost like priestesses of socialism. But their heavy, bewildered steps, the wild stares which they cast about, gave them away only too clearly. It made one think that the laborious odyssey which, from the start of the day, they had already undertaken was sadly very far from being over. Shedding those tunics some hours later, then getting back into the same three or four cars that had transported them into the city, they would finally be restored to their impoverished dwellings only late at night. And who knows if before letting them depart anyone might remember to sit them down for a second around the table adorned with flags?