The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  Every now and then, to be fair, the presiding judge would remember to interrupt him, mildly calling him to order, and he, for his part, always showed himself ready to let go of the bars of the cage, which he kept gripping hold of while he spoke, to desist from giving fiery looks toward the public space at the end of the court, and to sit back down on the bench alongside the other accused. But these concessions of his lasted a very short time. At the first phrase from the public prosecutor that displeased him, or at any witness’s testimony that he considered “erroneous” or at the slightest murmur from the public, or, most of all, at the tiniest hint made about his active participation in the shooting on the night of December 15, 1943, he would once more spring to his feet, wildly grab hold of the bars of the cage, and again raise his heavy, grating voice, the voice of an old commander, which the loudspeakers outside broadcast in a wide arc across the city.

  “Let’s see the witnesses!” he yelled like a madman. “Let’s see who has the guts to say such a thing to my face!”

  Yet he suddenly fell silent when he saw Pino Barilari in person, making his way through the crowd, holding with one hand the arm of his wife, with the other a big, knotty, rubber-tipped walking stick; his legs in baggy, seroual breeches were thin as twigs and moved in a strange lateral sweep with the effort of walking.

  From that moment on, as though hypnotized, he neither moved nor took his eyes off the chemist, for whom, as well as for his wife, Nino Bottecchiari, never absent from the courtroom, hurriedly found a space in the section reserved for the witnesses—it had been him, besides, who had suggested in a letter to the court that the paralysed man be called as a witness. Sciagura actually did move, but only very slowly, to keep smoothing down his iron-grey hair with his right hand. At the same time, he was thinking—you could see it in his face—he didn’t stop thinking for a moment.

  At last it was Pino Barilari’s turn to take the stand.

  Still supported by his wife, he came forward and was duly sworn in, though he was barely audible.

  But in the second before he answered the presiding judge’s question and pronounced with almost pedantic clarity the brief phrase “I was sleeping,” which like a pin bursting a balloon filled with air had shrivelled to nothing the huge tension that held the entire court—the silence was absolute, no one breathed and even his wife leaned anxiously forward to scrutinize his face—in that second, quite a few observers distinctly saw Sciagura give Pino Barilari a rapid, propitiating look. And a wink of shared understanding, an almost imperceptible wink.

  5.

  FOR THE last word to be said on this question, some further years had to pass. In the meantime everyone found a way of resuming their life. Pino Barilari began to pass the most part of his days sitting in front of his usual window once more, but he’d become embittered and ironic, with field glasses always within reach, and implacable in fulfilling the role he seemed to have assigned himself: of forever surveying the passers-by on that stretch of sidewalk below. And all the other, old habitués together with the next generation of youths (Sciagura, of course, included, since his trial had resulted in a full acquittal) had returned to share out between them the tables and chairs of the cafe beneath him.

  In 1948, just after the elections of April 18, Anna Barilari left her husband’s house and at once began proceedings to obtain a legal separation. People assumed that she would return to live with her family in Marshal Repetto’s house. But they were mistaken.

  Instead she went to live alone in a little apartment at the end of the Corso Giovecca, near the Prospettiva Arch: two windows, encased in bulging ironwork that directly overlooked the sidewalk. And although she was now almost thirty years old, and, shapely though she still was, seemed even older, she once again began going for bike rides as she had as a girl, when she had attracted droves of school companions, and there were many in Ferrara who still remembered such things well.

  Enrolled in the Drawing Academy in Via Romei, she wore low-necked pullovers which displayed her imposing bust, her long, mustard-blonde hair thrown back behind her, and used more make-up than ever. She probably aspired to the look of the Existentialist young women of Paris and Rome. In reality, she was on the game, and no joke!—as those who should know attested, if their account was true—that she frequented the restaurants and cheap eating places of San Romano on Mondays with the evident aim of picking up a client among those who came to Ferrara for market day.

  She would sometimes disappear, though, for periods that varied from one to as much as three weeks. When she popped up again it wasn’t rare that she’d be accompanied by a woman, befriended who knows where, with whom, sometimes for a whole month, she’d be seen walking arm in arm up and down the streets, awakening ever-replenished ripples of interest round about. Who on earth was that brunette with the malicious eyes who was now with Anna? was asked everywhere. Was she by chance from Bologna? Or from Rome? And that other one there with the blue eyes, and the pale, refined features, the heelless and almost, it seemed, soleless shoes, was she from Florence or, if not, from abroad?

  On the same evening there was no shortage of men willing to trek to the end of the Corso Giovecca to check up on these facts. Having reached the apartment occupied by Signora Barilari, they would discreetly tap on the windowpanes in winter so they could be let in, in summer simply to have a chat through the window from the sidewalk. So, in that vicinity, at some midnights in July or August it wasn’t unusual to come across three or four men standing in a group, flirting with Anna or whatever friend she might have with her.

  These were usually men between thirty and forty, not a few of whom had a wife and children. They had known Anna since she was a girl, and some of them had even been at school with her. As a result, later, around one or two in the morning, when they reappeared at the Caffè della Borsa and, hot and tired, with the sleeves of their linen jackets rolled up, slumped into the chairs, they would talk and tell stories chiefly about her until it was time to turn in.

  She wasn’t a straightforward character, Anna! they’d sigh.

  It may well have been to do with the fact that until very recently she had been a respectable housewife, or else because they were ill-equipped to fathom certain mysteries of the female mind: the truth was that they never knew what tone to adopt. You could be talking away to her from the sidewalk and she’d suddenly slam the window in your face, and then a minute later open it again if, instead of shrugging and cursing her, you’d stayed and knocked on the window again and whistled. But it was the same old tune if you went inside. Afterward, for example, it was never clear whether or not you ought to insist on her taking the thousand lire. And the long sentimental preludes you had to put up with? And the unease her continuous, endless, tireless chatter induced? While she was still getting dressed again, she’d resume talking about herself, about Pino Barilari, about the years spent with her husband in the apartment above the pharmacy, the reasons why she got married and those which had led to her legal separation. She and her husband, her husband and her: she spoke of nothing else. After he’d been struck down by paralysis, she explained, she’d begun to cheat on him with this or that person, because he was a sort of child, a sick child, or else a kind of old man, while she was a normal woman. The chaos of the war, with the sirens, the bombardments, every kind of fear, had certainly contributed, later, to bringing things to a head. And yet she’d always loved him, as if he were a younger brother. If she’d cheated on him, she’d done so on the quiet, taking every possible precaution. And not even that often.

  It was very late when they’d mull over these conversations with Anna. Corso Roma would be so empty and silent that their voices resounded as if in a hall. Nothing else was audible, save the odd train whistle in the distance and, at every quarter hour, the chimes released into the air from the Castle clock in front.

  There was a night, however, toward the end of August 1950, when one of these men related something new.

  A little earlier, he began to tell in a low t
one, he had been at Anna’s house with two friends they had in common, so-and-so and such-and-such. That evening she’d been especially irritating. So much so that, bored that she was once again rehearsing the same old stuff, he’d interrupted her.

  “A fine way to show you love your husband!” he’d cut in, laughing. “You loved him and then went with anyone you felt like. Give it a rest—you’ve always been nothing but trouble!”

  All hell broke loose.

  “Filthy shameless cowards! Pigs!” she began yelling. “Get the hell out of my house!”

  She’d turned into a wild beast. Then the other girl, who was from Modena, she too started shouting as if she were having her throat cut. But soon enough, when apologies had been offered, both of them calmed down. And this, more or less, was what he heard soon after from Anna.

  She had always loved Pino, she started saying again in her usual, tearful tone, and, in fact, for quite a few years they had come to a perfect agreement.

  From the time that he could no longer walk, he spent his days in front of the dining room window, solving one by one all the games in Puzzles Weekly and other magazines of that sort, for which he had a passion. He had nothing else to do—which explains why, with all those hours of practice, he’d achieved an extraordinary skill in that sort of pastime. So, sometimes, to show her how good he was, he would drag himself on his crutches to the little spiral staircase that linked to the back workroom, and from up there, leaning out over the trapdoor, he would start calling her so impatiently and insistently that she had to close the till immediately, rush upstairs and wait for him, eyes shining with pleasure, to explain how he had solved the puzzle. It was she who had to give him the long series of injections which he needed because of his illness, she who put him to bed every night before nine o’clock. What did it matter if they no longer slept together? Even before his illness he hadn’t been that keen to sleep together; it made her think, actually, that he was glad to go back to sleeping alone in the little room he’d had as a boy. No, two people could sleep together all the time and not love each other at all.

  However, starting from the night of December 15, 1943, everything had suddenly changed between them.

  When the shooting was over she had rushed outside. Having run the length of the Corso Giovecca, it was only at the corner of Corso Roma that she stopped for a moment to get her breath back. And while she paused under an arch of the City Theater’s portico, just there, piled up along the sidewalk opposite the pharmacy, she had suddenly seen the dead bodies.

  She remembered every detail of the scene as if it were still before her eyes. She could see Corso Roma utterly empty under the full moon, the snow, hardened into ice, scattered like a kind of brilliant dust over everything, the air so bright and clear you could read the hour on the Castle clock—exactly twenty-one minutes past four—and finally the corpses, which from where she was looking seemed like so many bundles of rags, and yet they were human bodies, she understood that at once. Without being aware of what she was doing, she moved away from under the theater portico, stepping out into the open toward the bodies.

  It was when she was halfway there, by now in full light, and five or six meters away from the nearest heap of the dead, that the thought of Pino had crossed her mind. So she turned. And Pino was up there, motionless behind the panes of the dining room window, a barely visible shadow that was watching her.

  They remained like that, staring, for some moments, he from the dark of the room, she from the street; and her not knowing what she should do.

  Finally she decided, and entered the house.

  While she climbed up the spiral staircase, she tried to think what would be the best thing to tell him. It wouldn’t have been too hard for her to invent some nonsense, to act in such a way that Pino believed it. He was a child, and she, in the end, was his mother.

  And yet on that occasion, Pino didn’t let her invent any bullshit excuse. When she came into the dining room, he was no longer there. Instead he was in his little room, in bed, with his face turned to the wall and the covers drawn up to his ears; and to judge from the way he was breathing you would have thought him asleep. Waking him up, it’s true, would have been the right thing to do! But what if he really were asleep, and what if all she had seen from the street, just before, had been a hallucination?

  Full of doubt she had gently closed the door and had gone back to her own room, where she threw herself on the bed. She thought that in a very few hours, if not from Pino’s mouth, at least from her own face, the truth would be known. And yet that wasn’t to be. Not a word from him, not a look that would help her understand. Not that morning, nor ever after.

  Why all of this, why? If he’d been awake, why had he never admitted it? Was he afraid? But of whom exactly, of what? As far as the appearance of their relationship went, nothing had changed. Except from that time on, obsessed with his field glasses, he would pass the days surveying the sidewalk opposite and without ever again calling her upstairs as he once did, to show her how brilliantly he’d solved his puzzles and crosswords.

  He would snigger and mutter to himself. Had he gone mad? That was a possibility, considering the disease he had. But on the other hand, how could she keep living with him without, little by little, going mad herself?

  * See footnote on p. 64.

  † See the footnote about this organization on p. 78.

  ‡ The Porrettana railway line runs from Pistoia to Rome, over 300 kilometers.

  § See footnote on p. 64.

  ¶ Pietro Badoglio, who led the Italian military campaign in Abyssinia and defeated the Ethiopian troops with mustard gas, was proclaimed prime minister of Italy in September 1943 and signed an armistice with the Allies. After the German invasion restored Mussolini, he was dismissed in early June 1944.

  # For information about this political party, see the footnote on p. 95.

  ** See footnote on p. 68.

  : II :

  The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles

  1.

  TIME has begun to thin them out, and yet it would be wrong to claim that only a few people in Ferrara still remember Dr. Fadigati. Oh yes, Athos Fadigati—they would recall—the ENT specialist who had a clinic and his own house in Via Gorgadello, a short walk from Piazza delle Erbe, and who ended up so badly, poor man, so tragically. It was he who, when he left his native Venice as a young man, and came to settle in our city, had seemed destined to follow the most regular, the most uneventful, and for that reason, the most enviable of careers . . .

  It was in 1919, just after the other war. Because of my age, I who write this can only offer a rather vague and confused picture of that period. The town-center cafes spilled over with officers in uniform; lorries bedecked with flags continually passed by along Corso Giovecca and Corso Roma (today rechristened Martiri della Libertà); on the scaffolding covering the facade of the Palazzo delle Assicurazioni Generali, then undergoing reconstruction, in front of the north face of the Castle, a huge, scarlet advertising banner had been unfurled, inviting the friends and enemies of Socialism to come together to drink aperitif lenin; scuffles broke out almost every day between farm workers and extremist laborers on the one side and ex-combatants on the other . . . This climate of fever, of political agitation, of general distraction, which colored the early infancy of all those who would become adults some twenty years later, somehow worked in favor of the Venetian Fadigati. In a city such as ours, where after the war the youth from good families were more reluctant than anywhere else to enter the liberal professions, it’s easy to understand how he could have put down roots almost unnoticed. The fact is that in 1925, when the fever began to abate even among ourselves, and Fascism, organizing itself into a large national party, was able to offer advantageous positions to all late-comers, Athos Fadigati was already solidly grounded in Ferrara, the owner of a magnificent private clinic, and moreover director of the ENT department of the big, new Sant’Anna Hospital.