The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  It was Clelia Trotti, it had to be her.

  Continuing to explain things to the pupils and to ask them questions, in his mind’s eye he saw her waiting in the adjoining vestibule. She was reading the big tablets full of the names of benefactors affixed to the walls between the washed-out doors of the classrooms; she was contemplating, one by one, the varnished clay busts of Victor Emmanuel II, of Umberto I and of Victor Emmanuel III, placed in the niches of the wall around the Victory Dispatch.‡‡ Every now and then she went to look out of the two big windows opposite, both of them thrown open wide . . .

  At last, the bell rang. Pouring out of the classrooms into the hallway, the children rushed headlong down the big central staircase. When Bruno, too, had gone out into the now deserted hallway, spotting the little woman in hat and grey suit down there, standing still, with her back to him looking at Diaz’s proclamation, for some moments he was disconcerted. He was hoping that, hearing his steps, she would turn round with a start, and smile at him with that kind smile of hers, as though close to tears, to look him in the face with her blue eyes flashing the same ironic, sad and generous expression they had when he had first told her his name. Only then would he truly recognize her.

  “It’s been many years since I read the Dispatch of the 4th of November 1918!” said Clelia Trotti, even before she shook his hand, signaling with her chin toward the tablet. “I needed to come all the way here to do that!”

  They faced each other by the big window that overlooked the inner courtyard garden, with its stricken little trees in the spring sunlight crowded with chirping sparrows, and they rested their elbows on the iron rail.

  “What a lovely time of the year, isn’t it?” the schoolmistress said, looking out toward the red vista of roofs that opened before them, beyond the garden walls.

  “It is indeed.”

  He observed her from the corner of his eye. She had taken care to spruce herself up, and applied powder as far down as her neck.

  “You feel yourself coming alive again,” she continued, half-closing her eyes against the glare.

  And then, after a pause, but still with a sense of inner joy: “How right we were though, we Socialists—to tell the truth, it wasn’t just a few of us, at that stage, who thought otherwise—to hear our death knell in the bells rung for the Italian victory of 1918! ‘The valleys, they had invaded, with confidence and pride . . .’ Already concealed within those words is the Fascist movement, the arrogant rhetoric of these last twenty years.”

  Suddenly, emerging out of the stagnant depths of his own bitterness, Bruno felt a violent impulse to hurt her, to do harm to her.

  “Why fool yourself?” he interrupted. “Why maintain the deception? As you know, in Ferrara all of us Jews, or nearly all of us, were nothing other than bourgeoisie—I say were, since now, perhaps all for the better, we no longer belong to any class, we make up a social group apart, as in medieval times. We were nearly all of us retail traders or wholesale merchants, professionals of various stripes, landowners, and therefore, as you have taught me, nearly all Fascists. Of necessity. You have no idea how many of us even today have remained fervent patriots!”

  “You mean nationalists?” Clelia Trotti gently corrected him.

  “Call them what you like. My father, for example, went to fight on the Carso as a volunteer. In 1919, returning from the front, he chanced on a march of workers, who, seeing him in officer’s uniform, literally covered him with spit. Today, obviously, he isn’t a Fascist any longer, despite the fact that it was actually his Fascist Party card of 1922 that earned us some exemptions. Now he only thinks about the Palestinian fatherland. And yet, I wouldn’t swear that General Diaz’s sentences, which continue to make such an impression on the imaginations of most of my—what should I call them?—my co-religionists, have entirely stopped having an impact on the imagination of those who share your political faith!”

  “What you say seems to me very understandable,” Clelia Trotti calmly replied. “You explain it very well.”

  She didn’t seem in the least disappointed, but perhaps, once again, somewhat saddened.

  She sighed.

  “The First World War has been a great disaster,” she said. “How many mistakes even we made! Nonetheless, you seem to me too pessimistic. Fair enough: in general terms, you’re right. Why not take yourself into account, though? You’re different, you’re not like the others, and your example is more than enough to show that every rule has its exception. And you’re young, you have your whole life before you. For the young like you who have grown up under Fascism, there is a great deal for you to do!”

  Hearing Clelia Trotti using the very same phrases as his father, Bruno raised his head. He had again turned to look out of the window. The future she saw was down there, where the last houses in Ferrara, their roofs a dark rusty color, gave way in the direction of the sea to the blue-green of the endless countryside.

  A few months later Fascist Italy also decided to enter the war.

  “At last!” Clelia Trotti exclaimed, joyful and breathless, that very evening of June 10, as she entered the study in Via Madama.

  “At last!” she repeated, as she dropped into the armchair.

  She leaned her neck back on the green velvet headrest and closed her eyes. It wasn’t the first time that, making the most of the darkness and defying all prohibitions, she had come to visit Bruno. And yet the intensity of excitement which these clandestine visits gave her from the first showed no signs of diminishing.

  When her breathing had returned to normal, she immediately said that Fascism, with that mad gesture of declaring war, had signed its own death warrant. She was sure of it, she affirmed, and began to explain with extraordinary heat and passion why she was so sure of her prediction.

  Bruno stared at her in silence.

  Her good faith was unquestionable, he thought, no one had the right to doubt it. And yet why not admit it? Wasn’t the look that shone in her eyes, above all, the certainty—now that leaving Italy had become truly impossible—that he would no longer be able to dodge the task that she had assigned him in her heart of hearts, nor slip out of her hands, as up until yesterday she had feared he might? Undoubtedly there was something of that. Even though, from the expression her mouth had already taken on, tender but at the same time skeptical, it was more than evident that she first of all—she who might be his mother!—would forbid any comparison to be made between the boy before her and Mauro Bottecchiari, the companion of her youth, whom Italy’s entry into the war in long-ago 1915 had offered the political pretext of his being rid of her.

  In the early stages, their meetings in his downstairs study were on a fairly frequent basis. Everything was done lightly, of course, as a game, the kind of game prisoners might play, steeped in bitterness and in the absence of everyday consolations, and Bruno took some pleasure from it, even from that air of erotic subterfuge which inevitably hovered over their meetings—always occurring after supper; every now and then she would be late, and he would be reading a book or preparing a lesson while he waited—and especially from her light, complicit knock on the blinds outside, which would startle him.

  As soon as she came in, Clelia Trotti would sit herself down in the armchair. But sometimes, without even taking off her grey cotton gloves—despite the heat that soaked her forehead with sweat, she would never take off her hat—she would at once get up again and go toward one of the four glass-fronted bookcases symmetrically disposed along the lower part of the study’s walls, and remain there with her nose against the glass. Her unwillingness to open the bookcase doors showed a kind of tact. She confined herself to peering through the glass and reading the titles of the books with the help of an eyeglass she would draw from her big black leather bag.

  “Why not take some away with you?” Bruno, from behind a table heaped with papers, would encourage her. “I’d gladly loan you any of them.”

  She shook her head. With all the lessons she had to give, she wouldn’t have time to
read them.

  “Besides, I’m so behind the times in all cultural matters,” she confided to him one evening, “that to get up to date would require an effort beyond me. For example, I’ve always wanted to read a book by Benedetto Croce;§§ I’m not sure, maybe one of his less abstruse works, one of his historical studies. Year after year, I’ve put off doing so, a little because I imagine the fear it would cause my sister Giovanna, poor thing, should she find that sort of stuff in the house, and also a little because of reservations . . . to do with socialism. Decades have passed, and here we are, and it no longer seems worth the trouble. When I was a girl, I had a passion for philosophy. In those days it was all Comte, Spencer, Ardigò and Haeckel with his Monism.”

  She smiled.

  Then, with a tinge of shyness in her eyes: “You, though, are bound to know the works of Croce well, isn’t that so?”

  It was a reference to what Bruno himself, though he immediately regretted it, had once been unable to stop himself from saying: that he wasn’t a Socialist and in all probability never would be.

  Yet stronger than any grief, any regret that she was not at a level to be able to teach him anything, she was undoubtedly consoled by the belief that this itself was as it should be: that he wasn’t a Socialist, yes, but something other, something new. Socialists of the old school would not know how to confront the future, the years that were awaiting Italy and the world beyond the war that had just begun, years which would only be reached after having paid who knows what reckoning of blood and tears. “We lot are over the hill, a bunch of dinosaurs,” she used to say. It was as though she were attesting that tomorrow, in their stead, there would be a need for the young like him, Bruno, who would be Socialists without being such. Only thus would it be possible, when the moment arrived, for the Communists to be given a hard time, even though they were “giants,” for they too, especially in their “methods,” now belonged in the past.

  Toward the end of September, OVRA unexpectedly reappeared on the scene.

  One day, toward dusk, an agent of the political wing in plain clothes came to ask if Signora Trotti was “at her domicile.” Winded, Signora Codecà replied that she was at home. But the woman’s agitated state must have made the official suspicious, and he wouldn’t go away without having assured himself with his own eyes, albeit with a profusion of apologies, that everything was in order. One could no longer be sure. Fearing that this sudden awakening of the police signaled a harsher policy of control toward the “cautioned,” Clelia Trotti decided to renounce her nocturnal escapades for some time after. Bruno and she had to see each other in the daytime, as it were by chance, avoiding, naturally, any further visits to the study in Via Madama.

  So every now and then, even if not with the same frequency as before, and arranging their appointments by way of Rovigatti—who, being jealously possessive of Trotti, was ill-disposed to help—they began to meet in Piazza della Certosa. From his perspective, Rovigatti wasn’t mistaken, Bruno could see that. What had they to say to each other or to do together, he and Clelia Trotti, that was worth the risk? It wasn’t as though the two of them saw each other, as Rovigatti insinuated, just to talk about Radio London or Colonel Stevens.¶¶ Certainly not for that. But in the present, tense situation, was it really worth provoking the police?

  He tried to pass on the shoemaker’s comments to the schoolmistress, attempting also to offer bland justifications for them. In vain. Every time he returned to the topic, she shrugged her shoulders with annoyance.

  “What a bore he is!” she sighed.

  “Poor little Cesare!” she laughed one evening, and never before had she seemed so youthful. “He acts like that because he’s very fond of me. You know when it was we first got to know each other?”

  “Before the First World War, I imagine.”

  “Oh, much earlier than that! From back in elementary school. We both lived in Vicolo del Gregorio.”

  “So you came to know Bottecchiari much later.”

  “Much later,” she replied drily.

  And she gave him a look with a hint of irony, and seemed more youthful than ever.

  In the bright late afternoons of September the huge field in front of the church of San Cristoforo was crowded, as it always was when the weather was fine, with children, nursemaids and young couples. Bruno Lattes and Clelia Trotti would speak, sitting close to each other at the edge of the churchyard for the most part, but sometimes on the grass, in the margin of shadow that grew slowly at the southern limit of the portico with the descent of the sun, on the side of Via Borso.

  “It’s lovely here, don’t you think?” said Trotti, her eyes turned toward the square. “It doesn’t at all seem as if we’re in a graveyard.”

  “I’ve never understood,” she said on one occasion, “why the dead are kept segregated from us, as is our custom, so that if you want to visit them you have to get permission, as you would for a prison visit. Napoleon was undoubtedly a great man as he imposed on Europe, as well as on Italy, via our Cisalpine Republic, the democratic and social triumphs of the Revolution. But as far as his famous edict on cemeteries goes, I remain of the same opinion as the poet of Of Sepulchres.## You believe me? I’d like them to bury me right here outside, in this lovely field, with all this noise of life going on around, even if that would cost me eternal excommunication.”

  She started laughing.

  “It’s only a dream, I know,” she quickly added, “a pious desire that won’t ever come true. Apart from some years in prison, some others in internal exile and now this invigilated freedom, what have I done in my life that’s so important to deserve a tomb among the illustrious figures of our city, even the heretical ones? To be sure, I haven’t even been beaten up. The Fascists were more refined with me. When I was leaving the Umberto I elementary school in Via Bersaglieri del Po in 1922, they confined themselves to making me drink a half ounce of cod-liver oil and covering my face with soot. And so what! If it hadn’t been for the children who were standing there watching, and many of them crying from fear, it wouldn’t have upset me that much, I can assure you. There was hardly call to come in a group of twenty or thirty, with cudgels, daggers, skulls on their berets, to subdue a woman on her own. A nice show of force! While I was swallowing my portion of cod-liver oil, I knew that the Blackshirts would have achieved nothing by it except to heap general disapproval on themselves.”

  But what she always preferred to talk about was her past as a prisoner and internal exile.

  “Prison gives you a real schooling,” she said on another evening, lighting a Macedonia cigarette with the lit stub of the last (a vice, she explained, that—to illustrate the point—she’d picked up in prison), “at least that’s so if it doesn’t go on too long and that it doesn’t break the will or weaken the moral fiber. As regards my own experience, I’m grateful to fate that I wasn’t spared the test. Solitude, concentration, having no company but our own . . . these are worth learning. And to know oneself, to struggle with one’s own tendencies and to emerge from that sometimes victorious, can only happen within the four walls of a cell. When I got out of prison in 1930, I left my number 36 (you see the coincidence?—the same number as my sister’s house) with real sadness, as if I were leaving behind a part of myself. Each wall, each corner, every tiny thing carried a trace of suffering. The truth is that the places where you have wept, where you’ve suffered, where you’ve had to find the many inner resources to keep hoping and resisting, are the ones you grow fondest of. Take yourself, for example. You could have left, like so many of your co-religionists, and after what you’ve had to put up with, you’d have had every right. But you made a different choice. You preferred to stay here, to struggle and suffer. And now this country, this city where you were born, where you grew up and became a man, has become doubly yours. You will never, ever abandon it.”

  She would always end like this. Having started, as usual, by telling a story about herself and her own life, she would soon steer the talk toward Bruno and wh
at she thought he should be doing in the immediate future.

  On his behalf for quite some time she had been preparing useful contacts with the city’s principal anti-Fascists, she would say, and so, for this very reason, she’d already entrusted Rovigatti with the task of preparing the ground for his imminent visits.

  The first people he should approach were undoubtedly the Socialists. But he should take care. Not the notary Licci, a distinctly sour and cantankerous “maximalist”—better leave him to stew in his own juices until he himself decided to shake off his grumpiness and seek out his old friends. Bruno needed to see first of all the lawyers, Baruffaldi, Polenghi and Tamagnini, all three of them Reformists eager to act, and after, returning to the topic of Bottecchiari, to try to link up with his nephew Nino, who for some six or seven months had been taken on as an assistant in his uncle’s office. He was without doubt a very bright and able young man, considering that he’d been able to make an impression even on the Gruppi Universitari Fascisti, where he’d been assigned very important roles in the last two years. She urged Bruno to get in contact with him soon, to avert the possibility that one day or another he’d be lured by some new “totalitarian siren.”

  But then, after the Socialists, he needed to get to know the Repubblicani-storici, such as the dentist Canella, the tailor Squarcia, the chemist Riccoboni. These, too, had of late shown unambiguous signs of wanting to shift, of being ready, because of the shared aims of the struggle, to forget their everlasting rancor and anti-Socialist prejudices.

  As for the Catholics, their circle, in this respect similar to the Communist one, remained something of a self-contained world which would be hard to enter. All the same, the lawyer Galassi-Tarabini, he at least, was a remarkably open-minded type. Already in close contact with both Count Gròsoli and Don Sturzo, opposed by the Fascist clerics since Pius XI exalted Mussolini to the point of calling him the Man of Providence—yes, he was a person of real integrity, not to be overlooked in any way. And the same could be said of the engineer Sears, a liberal, leaning to the right, but still good-hearted, and of Dr. Herzen, a committed Zionist, agreed, but perhaps recruitable to the cause of Italian anti-Fascism, especially if he were to be approached by a fellow Jew.