by André Aciman
“Take care as she is under surveillance!” the honorable Bottecchiari had said, lowering his voice to a whisper. He was referring to the police, the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo.** But yet again, when considered more closely, things turned out to be different from what they seemed.
“Let’s go and talk in the dining room,” murmured the old schoolteacher once she had ushered Bruno into the hallway and shut the door.
She preceded him on tiptoe down a dark, narrow, damp corridor. Following her in the same manner, trying not to make any noise and at the same time watching her move with all the stealth she could muster, he found it easy to guess why. Clelia Trotti was under surveillance mainly at home. Signora Codecà and her husband (the former a full-time elementary-school teacher, the latter cashier for the Agricola Bank, the stronghold of the city’s landowning middle class) were Clelia Trotti’s true jailors. And OVRA? OVRA knew perfectly well what it was doing. Assigning the “cautioned” sixty-year-old to the domestic control of this worthy couple, persons clearly possessing too much good sense to put up with their unwelcome guest of a relative receiving suspect visitors, the organization merely needed to appear every now and then. In the meantime, it could, very tranquilly, doze off.
They entered the small, ground-floor dining room. Bruno looked around. So it was here, he said to himself, that Clelia Trotti spent most of her days, talking herself hoarse giving lessons to the infants and children of the neighborhood! So this was her prison!
The furniture in pale wood was cheap, but not without ridiculous pretensions. The faded green woolen cloth, stained with ink, which covered the table in the center, the Murano-style glass chandelier suspended from the ceiling, the accountant’s diploma inscribed to the head of the house, Evaristo Codecà, in ruled lines and in florid gothic script, that hung in its glory among wretched pictures of seascapes and mountain landscapes, the huge dark shape of a grandfather clock in the corner, with a dry, resonant, menacing tick-tock, even the ray of sunlight which—from the solitary window, the custodian of a little huddle of potted plants—penetrated the room, revealing on the opposite side in the center of a small, bare wickerwork sofa, a horse’s head painted in oils on the hempen cover of a fat cushion; and there, at last, on the other side of the table, smiling, it was true, but with an apologetic look, as if asking for a bit of indulgence, sat the old revolutionary who had seen Anna Kuliscioff and Andrea Costa with her own eyes, who had argued about Socialism with Filippo Turati, who played a by-no-means-secondary part in the famous Red Week of the Romagna in 1914, now reduced to speaking in muffled tones, raising her eyes now and then to the ceiling to signal that her sister or brother-in-law might at any moment come down from upstairs to surprise and interrupt them. Or else she remained silent, with her open hand half-raised and the forefinger of her other hand at her lips (the pendulum clock chimed hoarsely during one of these silences, and at the same time a low clucking of hens could be heard from the garden), like a schoolgirl scared of being caught out . . . In that place like the depths of a well, in that sort of vulnerable den, everything spoke to Bruno of boredom, of apathy, of long years of stingy, inglorious segregation and oblivion. He couldn’t, at a certain point, avoid asking himself, Was it then really worth the trouble to struggle through life in a way so different from how, for example, the honorable Bottecchiari had behaved, if time, which weakens and overturns everything, had extended its fell, corrupting hand on all alike? Clelia Trotti had never bowed her neck, had always preserved her soul in all its purity. On the contrary, the honorable Bottecchiari, although he never accepted the Fascist Party card, had fully involved himself in society in his maturer years. Without anyone complaining about or being scandalized by it, he had blithely become part of the administrative council of the Agricola Bank. So, considering the outcome, which of the two had made the right choices in life? And what had he come for, involving himself so late in the day, if not precisely for that: to realize that the better world, the just and decent society of which Clelia Trotti represented the living proof and the relic, would never return? He watched her, the pathetic, persecuted anti-Fascist, the pitiful prisoner, and was unable to detach his eyes from the dark furrow, clearly visible, which, just under her white hair gathered in a bun at her nape, ran all around her thin wrinkled neck.
What kind of help, he thought, continuing to stare at that poor, ill-washed neck, could he expect from Clelia Trotti, from Rovigatti, and from that humble circle of their friends of whose existence no one could even be sure? For goodness’ sake! To extract himself from that grotesque conversation he would have to get up and go from there as soon as possible, and perhaps from that point on to listen a bit more attentively to what his father never tired of advising him. That might be a good idea. Why not just for once pay attention to what his father said? Since last September, his father had lost no opportunity to tell him to take himself off to Eretz, as he was in the habit of saying, or to the United States, or South America. He was still young, his father would insistently say, his whole life was before him. He should emigrate, put down roots abroad. There was still a chance. Italy would certainly not enter the war before the following summer. And no one would refuse him entry, carrying the passport of a persecuted Jew. . . .
“Be patient, I beg you,” Clelia Trotti whispered in the meantime, “but in this house I’m merely a guest. My sister and brother-in-law—” she added, her blue eyes staring into Bruno’s, showing once more the joy of confiding, the certainty of not being mistaken in having trusted him—“my sister and brother-in-law, since I returned from internal exile, and so for quite a few years, have taken me in, and have no other thought—” here she shook her head and laughed—“but to stop me committing any further folly.”
She twisted her lips.
“They keep me under surveillance—” her gaze suddenly serious, almost severe—“and poke their noses into everything I do, believe me it’s worse than being a baby. I understand. For people who don’t think as we do . . . who have a political viewpoint utterly different from ours . . . good people, you know, two hearts of gold . . . I understand that behaving the way they unfortunately do toward me might seem the right thing to do. They claim they do it for my own good. Perhaps so. But how annoying it is!”
“Is your sister the one who always comes to open the door?”
“Yes, it’s my sister, but why?” replied the schoolmistress in alarm. “Does that mean . . . ? Oh, you poor thing!” she exclaimed, joining her small bony hands together, her right hand’s index and middle fingers stained with nicotine. “Who knows how many times Giovanna has forced you to make the trip to no avail!”
“One day she’d say one thing, the next another. They were excuses, I could easily see. But I could only suppose you were aware of that. And now . . .”
“Oh, you poor thing!” repeated Clelia Trotti. “And there I was talking about what was right! No. Within certain limits I can understand it, but this is going much too far. They will hear from me.”
She remained silent for some seconds, as though meditating on the seriousness of the judgement that had been imposed on her and the measures she would have to take to assert her rights. And yet, at the same time, you could see she was thinking of something else. Something that, despite herself, gave her some pleasure.
“Listen. How did you come by my address? It can’t have been that easy for you to procure it, I imagine.”
“A couple of months ago, I had the idea of going to ask for it from the lawyer Bottecchiari,” Bruno replied, looking elsewhere.
And since Signora Trotti didn’t inquire any further, he added: “Bottecchiari is an old friend of the family. I was counting on him knowing where to direct me. But he didn’t know, or didn’t want to tell me, anything very clear. He advised me to call in on Cesare Rovigatti, you know, the shoemaker who has his workshop near here in Piazza Santa Maria in Vado. Luckily I knew him very well, and . . .”
“Our little Cesare, yes, ind
eed. Very dear to us. But I don’t understand how . . . He himself could easily have spoken to me about you! Don’t you see? For one reason or another there’s no one who doesn’t feel compelled to act in the oddest way toward me. And they don’t understand that, with this system, gradually making everything a desert around me, it’s as if they’re taking away the air I breathe. Better to be in prison, then!”
There was fatigue, disgust and deep bitterness in the tone with which she pronounced these words. Bruno looked her in the face. But her intensely blue eyes, steady and dry under her grey, knitted eyebrows, were full of hope, as though she doubted everything and everybody except him.
Suddenly the door opened. Someone looked in. It was Signora Codecà.
“Who’s there?” had asked the familiar, hateful voice before the salt-and-pepper head-of-hair poked in to investigate.
The diffident gaze of Signora Codecà fell on Bruno.
“Ah,” she said coldly, “I didn’t know you had a visitor.”
“But it’s a friend! It’s Signor Lattes . . .” Clelia Trotti hurried to explain, agitated. “Bruno Lattes!”
“Pleasure to meet you!” said Signora Codecà, without taking a step forward. “At last you’ve found her, eh?” she added in a sour tone in Bruno’s direction without actually looking at him.
She drew back a little.
From the dark of the corridor a little eight- or nine-year-old child came forward with a frightened look. Three white horizontal lines were drawn across the front of his black smock.
“Go on in,” Signora Codecà encouraged him.
And then, turning to her sister: “Don’t worry, I’ll accompany Signor Lattes out.”
When they had once again assumed their familiar positions, with her massive person blocking the door and Bruno looking up at her from the cobbled street, Signora Codecà spoke again.
“I’m not sure if my sister remembered to tell you, but after tomorrow at the latest, Clelia will really have to go away. On a trip, a rather long one. How long? I don’t know for sure, perhaps several weeks . . . perhaps several months . . . so for the moment it’s useless for you to pay any more visits. Try to understand. You’d be doing us a favor, Signor Lattes, if you’d be considerate about this. I’m saying this also for your own sake . . .”
She stressed these last words with a plaintive, pleading look. Then, as she drew back and slowly shut the door in Bruno’s face, she added in a whisper: “We’re under surveillance, you understand?”
That very night, returning home as usual, very late, and without even having phoned around eight o’clock to tell them not to expect him for supper—he’d spent the evening first at the cinema and then seated by the billiards table in a bar outside Porta Reno—Bruno was taken by surprise in the street by the snow.
To start with it was a sifting of tiny flakes milling lightly around the streetlamps. But shortly after, in Via Madama, as he tried to fit his key into the front door, the flakes had already become so thick and heavy that in no time his face was drenched.
He kept on fumbling with the key, and in doing so, as the castle clock had begun to toll the hours, he tried to count them. One, two, three, four. Four o’clock: very late indeed, but for all that he had little hope his father would have given up waiting and switched off the light—he would only turn it off after he heard him groping past his bedroom door on tiptoe, and his father would let him understand, by coughing and grumbling, that he had stayed awake and worried till that late hour. On the other hand, all the better. Perhaps this night he could be exempted from the tired, stupid saga of tiptoeing along the dark corridor. If his father was still not asleep, fine. He would turn the main light on and resolutely enter his bedroom. He already knew what his father would speak to him about.
And yet, when he found himself in the large entrance hall, at the end of which, across the dividing wall, he could see the dark garden plants, he became aware of a faint light filtering round the door of the ground-floor room that served him as a study. He drew close. Slowly, he opened the door. His father was there, seated in the armchair next to the table. Wrapped in a woolen blanket, he slept with his head inclined against his shoulder.
He stepped noiselessly into the room, and leaned against the wall beside the door.
He’d never come home, he reflected, as late as this. That was perhaps why at a certain point his father had decided to get up from bed and go downstairs, like this, in his nightshirt and slippers. Who could say? It might have been that he’d thought to take the opportunity of a thorough discussion with him about emigrating to Palestine or America, a topic which every time his father had broached it, he’d responded to coldly or even rudely. If he waited for him down in the study, his father had perhaps told himself, the two of them would be able to talk, or even quarrel, for as long as they wanted. Their voices wouldn’t have woken anyone.
He moved on tiptoe, grimacing. And he was about to touch the sleeper’s left hand, resting as though dead over the Il Resto di Carlino,†† the newspaper open and unfolded over his knees—his right hand, on which his forehead was resting, was instinctively placed to shield his half-closed eyelids from the light of the table lamp—when a sudden pang of sorrow interrupted his gesture midway.
He retracted his arm and took a step backward.
But instead of turning and leaving, he halted to look at his father’s scrawny, frail temples, more cartilage than bone, and his white, feathery, weightless hair, in its lightness and whiteness so similar to Clelia Trotti’s. How many more years would his father live? And Clelia Trotti? Would the two of them live long enough to witness the conclusion of the tragedy that was convulsing the world?
Although finished and near to death, both of them in the end were still dreaming their dreams. From her prison in Via Fondo Banchetto, Clelia Trotti was dreaming that the rebirth of Italian socialism would occur thanks to the infusion of youthful blood into the Party’s old, decrepit veins. From the Ghetto of Via Madama, where with morose delectation he had holed up—the beloved, irreplaceable Merchants’ Club had naturally expelled him, so now he stayed at home reading the newspapers and listening to Radio London—the lawyer Lattes dreamed of the “brilliant career” which was bound to await his little son in America or in Eretz. But he, Bruno, the little son, what would he do? Stay or go? His Papa was mistaken about the power of discrimination: the police headquarters would never issue him with a passport. And since the war, now only just begun, would last who knows how long, since the trap now sprung had rendered any escape impossible, since the only road now was obviously the one that would lead everyone, without exclusion, toward a future without hope, it was better to join in voluntarily, if only for compassion and humility, in the desperate hobbies, the wretched, miserable delusions of onanistic prisoners that were shared by his fellow travelers.
Still on tiptoe, he went toward the window.
After having half-closed one of the two shutters, he looked out through the steamed-up panes between the slats. The snow continued to fall. After some hours it would be piled high, would have extended its oppressive hush over the whole city, a prison and a ghetto for everyone.
4.
IN THE end, Signora Codecà had her way. She asked that her house should not become a den of conspirators. And, finally, she had revealed herself, had thrown her hand down on the table, all the cards of an undoubtedly zealous jailor, and yet not treacherous, only fearful.
Whatever she said or thought, in all probability OVRA had completely forgotten about 36, Via Fondo Banchetto. For a long time, no policeman had shown up at dusk to check whether the “cautioned” Trotti, Clelia, was to be found at her prescribed and proper domicile. Yet it was better not to contradict Signora Codecà. Better to let her play the role of a strict and incorruptible spy which she herself had assumed. Never to lose sight of her subversive sister, who, after her spell of internal exile, had been sentenced to ten supplementary years of enforced residence with a daily obligation to be indoors by dusk and to report
every week at the police station to sign in the special register of the “cautioned”; to rush to the door at every loud ring, without ever forgetting to wear the Fascist badge in full view on top of the black smock of a teacher in regular employment—even Signora Codecà had the right to a small raft of illusions, an element of play, necessary to anyone who wants to survive! And Clelia Trotti? Did she truly want to be visited? To leave the house with a furtive air, peep out through the upstairs shutters, to rapidly turn the corner into Via Coperta—if there was something that gave her pleasure, surely it must be this? Sooner or later it would be she herself who would make an appearance.
One morning, about two months later, while he was teaching in a classroom of the Jewish School in Via Vignatagliata, Bruno saw the janitoress’ head peeping gingerly round the door.
“May I?”
“What is it?”
“There’s a lady outside who wants to see you.”
Scuffing her slippers on the brickwork floor and prompting the usual hum of mirth, the janitoress came toward the teacher’s desk.
“What should I tell her?” she asked worriedly.
Of an indeterminable age, short, round, with two oily, shining strips of raven hair which descended from the top of her head to frame a sleepy-looking, sheepish face, she was one of the least ancient of those recruited from the hospice for the old in Via Vittoria by the engineer Cohen when, in October 1938, it was necessary to find space on the second floor of the kindergarten for the older children expelled from the state middle schools.
“Tell her to wait for the bell to go off,” Bruno replied, so irritably that the pupils suddenly went quiet. “How many times must I tell you not to disturb me during lessons?”