The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  Yet it was Fadigati himself, with his unimpeachable behavior, who fostered around himself such a general spirit of tolerance.

  After all, what could be said about him of any weight or concreteness? In contrast to what one might rightly expect to hear on such topics as that of Maria Grillanzoni, to pick a name out of the hat, a lady in her seventies from our finest aristocracy, whose impetuous acts of seduction, perpetrated among the boys from the chemists’ or butchers’ who came round to her house in the morning, were tales frequently on the lips of everyone (and now and then the city would learn something new about her, to laugh about and, of course, to deplore)—in contrast to this, Fadigati’s erotic life gave every guarantee that it would always remain within the precise demarcations of the seemly.

  Of this his many friends and admirers declared themselves more than sure. In the cinemas, it’s true—they were forced to concede—he would position himself not too far away from the groups of soldiers, which was the apparent basis for an insinuation regarding his presumed “weakness” for the military. All the same it was equally true that never—they would energetically resume—had the poor man been seen to approach them beyond a given limit, never had he been seen to accompany one of them into the street, nor, even less, had a young lancer from the Pinerola Cavalry, with the high busby fallen over his eyes, and the heavy, noisy sabre under his arm, ever been noticed at a suspicious hour slipping over the threshold of the doctor’s house. His face was still there, for sure: pudgy, but grey, and its features drawn by a secret and continuous anxiety. It was uniquely his face that reminded one that he was searching. As for finding (how and where), who was in a position to speak with any certain knowledge of the case?

  From time to time, though, even of this one would hear rumors. As the years passed, with the very same almost reluctant slowness with which, rising from the muddy depths of certain stagnant pools, the odd bubble of air comes to the surface and silently bursts on reaching it, in just such a way, every now and then, names would be named, particular persons and circumstances indicated.

  In 1935, or thereabouts, I can clearly recall that Fadigati’s name was often linked to a certain Manservigi, a traffic policeman with blue unwavering eyes, who, when he was not solemnly directing the bicycles and cars at the crossroads of Corso Roma and Corso Giovecca, we boys sometimes were surprised to come across at Montagnone, where, rendered almost unrecognizable by his plain, civilian clothes, with a toothpick in his mouth, he would join our interminable soccer games, often extended beyond dusk. Later, around 1936, one heard stories about another: a doorkeeper at the Town Hall, a certain Trapolini, a sweet and mellifluous character, married and weighed down with children, whose Catholic zeal and passion for the opera were renowned in the city. Still later, during the first months of the Spanish Civil War, to this frugal list of Fadigati’s “friends” was also added the name of an ex-soccer player who had played for SPAL.* Dark-skinned, now overweight, short of breath, with greyed temples, it was indeed Baùsi himself, Olao Baùsi, who in the decade between 1920 and 1930 had been—who could fail to remember?—an idol of Ferrara’s sporting youth, and who in the space of only a few years had been reduced to living by any desperate means at his disposal.

  So, no soldiers. Nothing enacted in public, even as regards the maneuvers of an initial approach; never anything scandalous. Some relationships of a carefully clandestine kind with middle-aged men who were not that well off, who were socially subordinate. In short, his associations were with discreet individuals, or at least with those somehow persuaded to be so.

  Around three, four o’clock in the morning, filtering through the shutters of Dr. Fadigati’s flat, there was always a small glow of light. In the silence of the alley, interrupted only by the raucous wheeze of the owls that nested far up there along the Duomo’s dizzying, barely visible entablature, there would fly faint tatters of celestial music, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner: Wagner most of all, perhaps because Wagnerian music was the most apt to evoke a certain atmosphere. The idea that the traffic policeman Manservigi, or the doorkeeper Trapolini, or the ex-soccer player Baùsi should at that very moment be guests of the doctor was unlikely, except as a passing joke, to cross the mind of the last night-walker, on his way at that hour down Via Gorgadello.

  4.

  IN 1936, some twenty-two years ago, the local Ferrara–Bologna train, which left every morning from Ferrara a few minutes before seven, covered the line’s forty-five kilometers in no less than an hour and twenty minutes.

  When things ran smoothly, the train reached its destination around eight fifteen. But more often than not, even if it sped along the straight line after Corticella, the train entered the broad curve of the approach to Bologna Station some ten or fifteen minutes late (and if it had to stop for the entry lights there, the delay could easily extend to thirty minutes). These were no longer the times of old Ciano, that’s for sure, when, on arriving, certain trains could expect to find the Minister of Transport in person, entirely absorbed in the quaint and solemn activity of measuring out the station with impatient strides and of grumblingly checking the hour on the face of the stationmaster’s big fob watch which he was forever fishing out of his waistcoat pocket. It was true, however, that the six-fifty Ferrara—Bologna express train always, in actual fact, took its own sweet time. It seemed to ignore the Government, to be utterly unconcerned about its boast of having forced even the State railways to observe a rigid respect for the timetable. And, on the other hand, who paid any attention to this or was in the least concerned about it? Half carpeted with grass and roofless, Platform 16, reserved for the train, was the furthermost in the station and bordered the countryside beyond Porta Galliera. It had the air of being completely forgotten.

  Usually the train comprised only six carriages: five third class and one second.

  Not without a shiver, I remember the December mornings of the Padano, the dark mornings of the years in which, as students at Bologna University, we had to wake up with alarm clocks. From the tram, which rattled along at a breakneck speed in the direction of the Customs barrier of Viale Cavour, we would hear the repeated whistle of the train, far off and out of sight. It seemed as though it was warning us “Hurry up! I’m leaving!” Or even “There’s no point rushing, boys and girls, I’m as good as gone!” It was generally only the first-year students, male and female, who urged the conductor to speed things up. All the rest of us, including Eraldo Deliliers, who had enrolled that very year for Political Sciences but who already behaved with the lordly nonchalance of a veteran, well knew that the six-fifty express train would never have left without us. The tram would finally stop in front of the station; we’d leap out and in a few moments board the train, which would be puffing white jets of steam from every pore, or else be standing calmly at the platform as expected. As for Deliliers, he always arrived last, dawdling along and yawning. And, in the event that he had dozed off, as often happened, we would have to drag him off the tram.

  One could say that the third-class wagons were dedicated entirely to us. Apart from the odd commercial traveler, the occasional, down-at-heel variety-show company who had spent the night in the station, and whose dancers, during the journey, we would sometimes try to befriend, no one else ever left from Ferrara at that hour.

  Yet it would be wrong to assume from this that the six-fifty train would always reach Bologna with only half of its seats filled!

  In the course of its lazy progress from the thick darkness of Ferrara to the light of Bologna mornings—often intense and dazzling, on the hill of San Luca white with snow, and with the churches’ verdigris cupolas standing out almost in relief against the red sea of roofs and towers—the train gradually gathered more and more passengers from the small and the even smaller stations scattered along the line.

  They were girls and boys from middle school; elementary schoolteachers of both sexes; smallholders, sharecroppers, various cattle- and sheep-sellers, distinguishable by their ample cloaks, their felt caps drawn
down over their noses, with toothpicks or Tuscan cigars fixed between their lips: country folk, from regions closer to the city, who spoke a coarse version of the Bolognese dialect. To fend off any contact with them we would barricade ourselves into two or three connecting carriages. The onslaught of “peasants” began at Poggio Renatico, a kilometer before the left bank of the Reno; was renewed at Galliera, a little beyond the iron bridge, and again at San Giorgio di Piano, San Pietro in Casale, Castelmaggiore and at Corticella. When the train arrived in Bologna, from the doors that opened with an almost explosive violence, a small tumultuous crowd of some hundreds would flow out on to Platform 16.

  That left the one and only second-class carriage: which, at least until a certain time, until, to be specific, the winter of 1936/7, never disgorged a single soul.

  The train guards, a fixed quartet who would travel on the express trains between Ferrara and Bologna five or six times a day, had established in that carriage a card school every morning to play scopa and tresette. For our part, we were so accustomed to the fact that this second-class carriage was reserved for the train master, the ticket controller, the brakesman and the non-commissioned officer of the railway militia—however winking and friendly all four of them were, they could be very inflexible in preventing any illegal traveling in the wrong class, especially if they sniffed out GUF students† —that it seemed natural to us to see it function as a kind of after-hours railwayman’s leisure club. So at first, when Dr. Fadigati started to travel to Bologna twice a week, and always bought a second-class ticket, we took no notice nor were even aware of him.

  This state of affairs, however, lasted only a short while.

  I close my eyes. I see once more the wide, asphalted avenue of Viale Cavour completely deserted from the Castle to the Customs barrier, with its street lamps arranged in a long vista some fifty meters from each other, all still lit. The conductor, Aldrovandi, of whom inside the tram one can discern nothing but his bristling hunchback, pushes the decrepit vehicle to its limits. But a little before the tram arrives at the barrier, swooping down from behind us, with the characteristic stifled rustling that the engine of the Lancia makes, once again the car, the taxi, overtakes us. It is a green Astura, always the same one. Every Tuesday and Friday it overtakes us more or less at the same point on the Viale Cavour. It’s so fast that when, with our tram scarily pitching from side to side in the final sprint, we break into the station square, not only has it already set down its passenger—a chubby gentleman with a white-bordered homburg hat, gold-rimmed spectacles and a fur-collared overcoat—but it has turned round and is heading off in the opposite direction to ours, toward the city center.

  Which of us, I wonder, was the first to direct our general curiosity toward the gentleman in the taxi: the gentleman rather than the taxi itself? It’s true that in the tram, with his curly blond hair flowing over the wooden back of the seat, Deliliers was usually asleep. And yet I’m inclined to think it was actually him, one morning about halfway through February 1937, while various hands, always a few more than were necessary, reached out through the door to pull him into the train, I’d swear it was actually Deliliers who announced that the second-class carriage had found in the guy in the Astura a permanent and paid-up passenger, and that he was no other than Dr. Fadigati.

  “Fadigati? Who’s that?” asked one of the girls with a bewildered air. Bianca Sgarbi, to be precise, the older of the two Sgarbi sisters. (The other, Attilia, three years younger and still at the liceo, at this point, the beginning of 1937, I had yet to meet.)

  Her question was received with peals of laughter. Deliliers had sat down and was lighting a Nazionale cigarette. He had the habit of lighting them where the brand mark was, as careful as could be never to miss.

  At that time Bianca Sgarbi, who with the utmost reluctance was doing her third year in the Literature Department, was almost engaged to Nino Bottecchiari, the nephew of the Socialist ex-deputy. Although they went out together, they didn’t get on that well. By nature exuberant, and yet at the same time with an almost premonitory sense of the far from bright future awaiting the young of our generation—the poor girl would become the widow of an Air Force officer shot down over Malta in 1942, with two sons to bring up, and would end up in Rome, a part-time employee of the Ministry of Aeronautics—Bianca bridled at anything that tied her down, and kept herself amused by making eyes at anyone she felt at ease with, more or less drifting from one flirtation to another.

  “May one ask who that is?” she softly insisted, leaning toward Deliliers, who was seated in front of her.

  Huddled up beside the latter in the corner seat next to the door, the unfortunate Nino suffered in silence.

  “Oh, just an old queer,” Dililiers calmly declared after a pause, lifting his head and staring straight into the eyes of our companion Bianca.

  5.

  FOR QUITE some time, during the whole journey, he kept apart in his second-class carriage.

  Taking it in turns, profiting from stops the train made at San Giorgio di Piano or San Pietro in Casale, one of our group would leap out with the task of buying something to eat from the bar of the small station: wrapped rolls filled with freshly sliced salami, almond-studded chocolate that tasted of soap, half-moldy Osvego biscuits. Turning to look at the stationary train, and then walking past carriage after carriage, at a certain point we could distinguish Dr. Fadigati, who, from behind the thick glass of his compartment, would be watching people crossing the tracks and hurrying back toward the third-class carriages. Judging by his expression of heartfelt envy, the looks of regret with which he followed the small rustic crowd, so unappealing to us, he seemed nothing less than a recluse: a political prisoner under guard, being transferred to Ponza and the Tremiti to stay there for who knows how long. Two or three carriages farther on, behind equally thick glass, one could make out the guard and his three friends. Unperturbed, they continued with their card game—thick as thieves, they kept on arguing, laughing and gesticulating.

  However, soon enough, as we might have predicted, we would begin to see the doctor stroll about in the third-class carriages.

  The communicating door was locked. The first few times, to have it opened (he himself would later explain) he always had to seek out the guard.

  He would put his head into the gambling-den compartment.

  “Do excuse me,” he asked, “but might I please move into the third-class section?”

  It annoyed them, he could see. Proceeding along the corridor with the key in his hand and with the gait of a jailer, the guard made a show of muttering and sighing. At a certain point Fadigati decided to arrange things on his own. He waited for the first stop, the one at Poggio Renatico. The express train remained there for three to five minutes. There was easily time to get off and enter the next carriage.

  All the same, I’m absolutely sure it was not on the train that the first contacts between us were established. My impression remains that it happened at Bologna, on the street, even if, as will be seen before long, I could not be sure on exactly which street. (Perhaps at that time I was away from my studies, and was informed about the occasion later by others? Or else, so many years afterward, it’s my own failure to distinguish, to remember with any exactitude?)

  It could well be that it happened as we were leaving the station, or waiting for the Mascarella tram. Ten or so of us altogether, taking up most of the tram platform one came to just before the rank for taxis and coaches. The sun was shining on the heaps of dirty snow that at regular intervals punctuated the huge square. The sky above was of an intense blue, vibrant with light.

  And suddenly Fadigati, who had arrived last of all, just a moment before, and was also waiting for the tram on the same platform, to start up a conversation, found nothing more inspired than some observation upon the “splendid day, almost springlike,” not to mention a remark on the Mascarella tram being “so comfortable that it would probably be easier going by foot.” Generic phrases, said in a low voice not to any on
e of us, but to all of us en masse and to no one in particular: as if he did not know us, or rather did not wish to risk admitting that he knew us, even by sight. But in the end, it was enough that one of us, embarrassed by the hesitancy and the nervous smile with which he had accompanied his vague remarks about the season and the tram, should have replied with a minimum of civility, calling him “Doctor.” Then the truth was out: that he knew all of us well, by Christian name and surname, regardless of the fact that in such a short time we had become teenagers. He knew exactly whose sons and daughters we were. And how could he not, how could he have forgotten, to be sure, since from infancy “to the age when all children of good families have to struggle with sore throats and earache”—he laughed—he had seen all of us, some more often, some less, pass through his clinic?

  Frequently, however, instead of taking the tram and speeding off straight to the university in Via Zamboni, we preferred to go by foot under the arches of Via Independenza until we reached the center. Only rarely would Deliliers be among us. As soon as we were outside the station, he would cut loose on his own, and generally until the morning of the day after no one would see him again: not in the university, nor in the little restaurants, nor anywhere at all. Scattered in twos and threes along the sidewalk, the rest of us could always be found together. There was Nino Bottecchiari, who was studying law, but who, often enough, because of Bianca Sgarbi, could be found hanging about in the corridors and lecture rooms of the Literature Faculty, sitting through the most indigestible classes: from Latin grammar to librarianship. There was Bianca herself, in a blue beret and short rabbit-fur coat, now arm in arm with one or another boy: almost never with Nino, and then only to argue. There were Sergio Pavani, Otello Forti, Giovannino Piazza, Enrico Sangiuliano, Vittorio Molon: students either of Agriculture or of Medicine, of Economics or Commerce. And finally there was me, apart from Bianca the only other student of Literature.