by André Aciman
It is not inconceivable that one of these mornings, while we were walking under the endless arches of Via Independenza, lofty and dark as the nave of a church, stopping every now and then in front of a sports shop window, or at a newspaper kiosk, or perhaps mixed up within a group of people who, drawn hypnotically to the oxyhydrogen flame, crowded together in silence around a crew of workers intent on adjusting a tram rail—it’s not at all inconceivable that on one of those late-winter mornings, when any pretext could serve to postpone the moment of being shut inside a lecture hall, Dr. Fadigati, who for some time had been behind us, suddenly came up alongside us: perhaps alongside Nino Bottechiari and Bianca Sgarbi who, a little apart but as usual heedless of being noticed, kept up their ceaseless wrangling and bickering.
Constantly hovering around us, Fadigati had been following us step by step. We were well aware of it. Grinning, nudging each other, we had even pointed it out.
All of a sudden, there he was alongside Nino and Bianca, clearing his throat.
He could be heard speaking with that neutral, impersonal tone of voice which he always adopted when approaching people from whom he was unsure what reception to expect.
“Be good now!” he had cautioned them: and even in this case it was more as if he were talking mainly to the air, rather than to anyone in particular.
But then, directing a shy, hesitant glance, and yet at the same time complicit, peevishly complicit and supportive, toward Bianca:
“And, young woman, you should try to behave yourself too,” he added, “be a bit more compliant. It’s something expected of women, don’t you know?”
He was joking, it was only meant as a joke. Bianca burst out laughing. Even Nino laughed. Chatting away about this and that, we had thus arrived all together at Piazza del Nettuno. But that wasn’t all. Before going our separate ways we necessarily had to accept his offer of a coffee.
In short we became friends: however it happened, from that time on, that is, from the end of April 1937, in the two or three carriages in which we used to barricade ourselves—framed by the window the countryside rushed past, already green, cool and luminous—on Tuesday and Friday mornings there was always a place also for Dr. Fadigati.
6.
HE HAD decided to take the university teaching degree—he said—for this reason, “and no other”: that he could then travel to Bologna twice a week. But now that he had discovered some traveling companions, those twice-weekly journeys no longer seemed to weigh on him.
He sat quietly in his place, and would take only a minor part in our daily discussions, which ranged from sports to politics, from literature and art to philosophy, and sometimes touched on affairs of the heart, or even on relationships that were “exclusively sexual.” He would let fall a remark every now and then, looking at us from his seat with a paternal and indulgent eye. To many of us he was, in a certain way, a friend of the family: our parents had been visiting his clinic in Via Gorgadello for near-on twenty years. It was also of them that he would be thinking, watching us.
Did he know that we knew? Perhaps not. Perhaps on this question he still deceived himself. In the poised manner, however, in the polite and troubled reserve that he arduously maintained, it was only too easy to read the steady resolve to behave as if nothing about himself had ever been discovered in the city. For us, above all for us, he had to remain the Dr. Fadigati of old, when as children we saw, half hidden behind the circular head mirror, his large face lean over our own. If anyone in the world existed before whom he had to maintain a proper front, it was us.
Besides, seen from close up, his face did not appear greatly altered. Those ten or twelve years that now distanced us from the age of tonsillitis, of middle-ear infections, of adenoidal growths, had not left on him any more than the slightest traces. His temples had turned grey—that was the difference. But that was all. Perhaps a little fatter, a little more baggy, his cheeks were suffused with the same earthen color as before. The skin, with pronounced pores, had the same thick, shiny quality, and always gave the same impression of leather, of well-cured leather. No, in this respect, we were the ones who, by comparison, were much more markedly altered: we who slyly, absurdly (while he, perhaps, took out of his overcoat pocket a copy of the Corriere della Sera and quietly and sweetly began to read it in his corner), went in search across that familiar face for the proof, the signs—I was about to say the visible stains—of his vice, of his sin.
With time, however, he gained confidence with us, and began to speak a little more. After a brief spring, the summer arrived almost precipitantly. Even early in the morning it was hot. Outside, the green of the Bologna countryside had become darker, richer. In the fields bordered by rows of mulberry trees, the hemp was already high, the wheat growing golden.
“I feel like I’m a student again,” Fadigati often repeated, gazing out through the train window. “I feel like I’ve gone back in time to when I too used to travel each day between Venice and Padua . . .”
That was all before the war—he told us—between 1910 and 1915.
He studied Medicine at Padua, and for two years had made the daily shuttle between the two cities: just as we were doing between Ferrara and Bologna. Though from the third year on, his parents, unceasingly anxious about his heart, had insisted that he set himself up in Padua, in a rented room. And so: in the three years that followed (having graduated with the “great” Michele Arslan and got a First) he pursued a far more sedentary life than before. He spent only two days a week with his family: Saturday and Sunday. At that time Venice was certainly not a lively city on Sundays, above all during the winter. But Padua, with its lugubrious black arches, forever redolent of a peculiar odor of boiled beef! . . . Returning to Padua by train, every Sunday evening, cost him a huge effort—he had to steel himself in preparation.
“We can only imagine, Doctor, what a nerd you must have been!” Bianca once exclaimed. So ingrained was her habit, she even tried flirting with Fadigati.
He did not reply, only smiled graciously at her.
“These days you have soccer games, the movies, all kinds of healthy activities,” he said. “You know what the mainstay of Sundays was for the youth of my generation? The dance hall!”
He twisted his mouth, as though he had conjured up an abomination. He added that in his case, at least in Venice, he had a home, his father and mother, above all his mother: in short, the “heart’s sacred affections.”
How he had adored her—he sighed—his poor mother!
Intelligent, cultured, beautiful, pious: she was the sum of all virtues. One morning, even, and his eyes grew watery with the emotion, he brought out from his wallet a photograph which he passed around the circle of hands. It was a small faded oval, portraying a middle-aged woman in nineteenth-century dress: of a gentle expression, certainly, but generally rather undistinguished.
Vittorio Molon was the only one of us whose family was not from Ferrara. Landowners in Fratti Polesine, the Molons had moved from the far side of the River Po only five or six years ago. And one could hear it: Vittorio, especially when speaking in Italian, retained a strong Veneto cadence.
One day Fadigati asked him if his family (using the polite plural “you” form) were by chance from Padua.
“I’m asking,” he explained, “because when I was living in Padua, I was lodging with a widow who was called Molon, Elsa Molon. This lady’s small house was in Via Francesco, close by the university, and gave on to a big vegetable garden behind. What a life I had there! In Padua I had no relatives, no friends, not even school friends.”
After which, apparently wandering from the subject (but it was the only time he allowed us a glimpse of his ample literary culture: as though, also in this respect, he had imposed a strict rule of discretion), he began to speak of a short story—by he couldn’t remember which English or American nineteenth-century writer—set, this was the point, in Padua toward the end of the seventeenth century.
“The main character of the short story,�
� he said, “was a student, a student as lonely as I was thirty years ago. Like me, he lived in a rented room which looked out on an enormous vegetable garden, full of poisonous trees—”
“Poisonous?!” Bianca interrupted him, widening her bright blue eyes.
“Yes, poisonous,” he nodded. “But the garden on which my window opened,” he went on, “wasn’t at all poisonous: don’t worry, Signorina. It was a very standard vegetable garden, tended to perfection by a family of farmers, the Scagnellatos, who lived in a decrepit little house leaning against the apse of the church of San Francesco. Many a time, with a book in my hand, I’d go down there for a stroll; especially during the afternoons in late July, with exams looming. The Scagnellatos, who often invited me for supper, were the only Paduan family with whom I became friends. They had two sons: two good-looking boys, so lively and open, so . . . They worked among the plants and sown grain until they were lost to sight. At that hour they generally watered the plants. Ah, the good smell of manure!”
The air of the carriage was grey with the smoke from our Nazionali. But he breathed it deep into his lungs, half closing his eyes behind the lenses of his spectacles and widening the nostrils of his plump nose.
There followed a somewhat prolonged and oppressive silence. Deliliers opened his eyes and yawned loudly.
“Good—the smell of manure?” Bianca said in the meantime with a small nervous laugh. “What an idea!”
Leaning forward, Deliliers let fall on Fadigati a sidelong glance full of disdain.
“Give the manure a rest, Doctor,” he sneered, “and instead tell us about those two boys in the vegetable garden who you liked so much—what you all got up to together.”
Fadigati winced. As if he’d been suddenly given a mighty slap, his large brown face twisted itself beneath our eyes into a look of pain.
“Eh . . .? What’s that . . .?” he stammered.
Disgusted, Deliliers stood up. Opening up a route past our legs, he reached the corridor.
“Playing the peasant as ever!” Bianca huffed, touching one of her knees.
She threw a look of disapproval at Deliliers, standing in exile in the corridor, beyond the glass door. And then, turning again to Fadigati:
“Why not finish telling us about that short story?” she proposed in a kindly manner.
He didn’t want to, however much Bianca insisted. He claimed that he couldn’t properly remember the plot. And besides—he concluded, with a hint of afflicted gallantry, which sounded especially forced—why would she want to hear a story which ended, he could assure her, so badly?
A tiny unguarded moment had cost him very dear. From then on, you can imagine, he feared ridicule more than ever.
7.
HE WAS happy, in the end, with the least thing, or so it seemed. He wanted no more than to stay there, in our third-class compartment, with the air of an old man silently warming his hands in front of a big fire.
At Bologna, for example, no sooner had we made our way out on to the big square in front of the station than he would get into a taxi and be away. After the first couple of times when he accompanied us to the university, there was never an occasion when we found it tricky to lose him. He was well aware, because we had told him, of the small, cheap restaurants where around one o’clock he could have found us again: the Stella del Nord, in Strada Maggiore, or Gigino’s, at the foot of the two towers, or the Gallina Faraona, in San Vitale. This, however, never happened. One afternoon, entering an establishment to play boccette,‡ we noticed him seated alone, with a coffee and a glass of water in front of him, immersed in a newspaper. He was undoubtedly aware of us. Yet he pretended not to be, and even, after a minute or so, called over the waiter with a sign, paid, and discreetly slipped out.
In short, he was never intrusive or burdensome.
And yet, little by little, despite the fact that big as he was he would huddle up so much on the carriage’s wooden bench that he occupied less than an eighth part of it, little by little, without meaning to, almost all of us began to show him scant respect.
To be honest, it was he who once again made a mistake: when one morning, while the train waited at San Pietro in Casale, he suddenly wanted to get off to buy us the usual sandwiches and biscuits at the station bar. “It’s my turn,” he’d declared, and there had been no way to stop him.
So from the train we watched him clumsily crossing the rails. We were willing to bet that he would forget how many sandwiches to buy, and how many packets of biscuits. And yet he had most carefully verified this point: with the outcome that we leaned out of the window shouting and grinning without restraint, like drunken conscripts, to give him the most contradictory orders, and that he, more and more confused and out of breath as the minutes passed, barely managed to bundle himself back on to the train before it departed.
I’ll have more to say later about Deliliers, who never addressed a word to Fadigati, but tormented him whenever the occasion was offered with transparent hints and brutal innuendos. And even Nino Bottecchiari, whose tonsils he had taken out when Nino was a child, and the only one of us he addressed with the “tu” form, even he began to treat him coldly. And Fadigati? It was odd to observe him, and even painful: the more Nino and Deliliers heaped on their incivilities, the more he exerted himself in the vain attempt to be likeable. To win one kind word, a nod of agreement, an amused smile from those two, he would have done practically anything.
With Nino, who was by unanimous agreement considered the intellectual of the group, and had taken part the year before in the Venice Culture and Arts Littoriali§ —he came fifth in Fascist Doctrine, and second overall in Cinema Studies—Fadigati tried to broach topics of discussion which would give our companion a chance to shine: on cinema, as you would expect, and even on politics, although on this subject, as he often told us, he himself was far from being an expert.
But he was defeated in this—his aim always went astray.
He would begin talking about the cinema (about which he was very knowledgeable: besides, for years he’d been spending his evenings in cinemas!), and Nino would set about him with hysterical cries, as though not even conceding him the right to speak about it, as though to hear him declare, for example, that the old farces of Ridolini were “wonderful”—even if Nino himself had more than once judged them “fundamental”—was provocation enough to make him radically change his “position” on this question.
Put to flight on this matter, Fadigati would then try his luck with politics. The Spanish Civil War was by now about to end with victory for Franco and Fascism. One morning, having scanned the first page of the Corriere della Sera, evidently confident he would not be saying anything that might give offence to Nino or to any of us, absolutely sure, on the contrary, to find us all in agreement, Fadigati expressed what was then not in the least an outlandish view, that the triumph of “our legionaries” should be considered a great cause of celebration. And instead, all of a sudden, the most unexpected scene erupted. As though galvanized by an electric current, and raising his voice so much that Bianca, at a certain point, thought it best to put her hand over his mouth, Nino began to bawl that “perhaps” it was a disaster, the opposite of a triumph, that “perhaps it was the beginning of the end” and that he, the doctor, should be ashamed at his age to be so “irresponsible.”
“I’m sorry, my dear boy . . . you see . . . if I may say . . .” Fadigati kept repeating, white as a sheet. Utterly lost beneath the raging of this storm, he just could not understand. His eyes skittered round as if in search of an explanation. But even we were too disconcerted to pay attention to him—especially me, who, the year before, in the course of our usual arguments had been accused by Nino himself—a follower of Gentile, and a passionate advocate for the ethical State—of being infected by “Crocean skepticism”¶ . . . And, by the end of it all, the doctor’s round eyes were directed at the floor, shining damply beneath the lenses of his spectacles—or were they filled with a bitter satisfaction, with a childish,
inexplicable, blind joy?
On another occasion we were all talking about sports.
If on questions of culture, Nino Bottecchiari was considered our resident expert, Deliliers indisputably held sway on all questions about sports. Ferrarese only on his mother’s side—born in Imperia, I believe, or Ventimiglia, his father had been killed in 1918 on the Grappa, at the head of an Arditi company—like Vittorio Molon, he too had only studied at Ferrara for the upper-middle school, that is, for the four years at the liceo scientifico. Whatever other purpose they had served, those four years had been enough to elevate Eraldo into a princely local hero. In 1935 he had won the regional schoolboys’ boxing championships, middle weight, and apart from that he was an extraordinarily handsome boy, six foot tall, and with a face and body like a Greek statue. Already, at not yet twenty years of age, he had won three or four famous victories. A girl, who was a friend of his at school, had killed herself for love of him the same year he had won the title in the Emilian Championships. All of a sudden he had stopped even looking at her, and then she, the poor girl, ran and threw herself into the river Po. It was clear that, in university circles as well, Eraldo Deliliers was more than loved—he was idolized. When we dressed we imitated his clothes, which his mother brushed, took the stains out of, and tirelessly ironed. To stand next to him on Sunday mornings, at the Caffè della Borsa, leaning against a column at the entrance and looking at the legs of passing women, was considered a special privilege.
So, on one of those train journeys, toward the end of March, we were discussing sports with Deliliers. After athletics we ended up talking about boxing. He always kept his distance from everyone, Deliliers. But that day he was unusually open. He said that studying didn’t suit him, that he needed too much money “to live,” and so, if he succeeded in a certain little coup that he was planning, he hoped to devote himself entirely to the “noble art.”
“What, as a professional?” Fadigati had dared to ask.